Eliezer Schlomo Yudkowsky / LessWrong

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my ex fiancée was a black woman and we A/B tested this tone thing by posting replies I'd think of under her name. You don't even need me to finish this story — you know how it turned out, lol. She coined a term for this called "formality blanket", i.e. people who enforce formality because it's comfortable.
Maybe I'm autistic then, because I don't know how this turned out. These people seem to complain about everyone on the planet who doesn't share all of their beliefs - do they get more, or less angry when it's a black person? Or is it the fact that she was a "taken" woman, vs. an "available" prostitute like Aella? I've read all your posts and still can't understand what these "rationalists" are so worked up about.
 
do they get more, or less angry when it's a black person?
He says they get defensively formal. Which is rational, because a black woman in such a place is almost certainly a troll (she in fact was in this case). Just FYI, according to the survey there's ~2x more Finns reading SSC than black people. There's about 5M Finns in Finland, compared to over 40M black people in the US alone.
 
I don't think this has been posted here and it's too hilarious not to. Yuddo can read HTML but not CSS:
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....Can he code? He mentions Python once in awhile but it doesn't seem like something he uses much.

Something I've noticed about Schlomo here is that he writes and talks like he learned everything off of Wikipedia, which I think he admits to. Either way, I read him calling himself as an autodidact that way. My work brings me in contact with statisticians and data scientists all the time, and none of them talk about Bayes Theorem the way these guys do, let alone suck it off the way LW does.

This type of thing seems pretty common with "rationalists". If they were good at explaining and communicating, they'd be teachers, authors, or professors. Like, mathematical or philosophical logic are formal systems of reasoning meant as a way to discuss certain issues/problems, not a way to live your entire life. As it stands, the rationalists are mostly just "ideas guys" who happen to have created definitions of intelligence and value that put their useless asses at the top of the pecking order.

Another example of this type of guy, though he's not a lolcow, is Jaron Lanier. Just another "self educated" guy who hasn't done any real work in computing or the internet (and hell, I'll count management there, because managers still have to talk to the code monkeys) but makes all these sweeping statements on how he knows how the future computers and the internet will play out, that are meant to amaze people without any technical background themselves.
 
Maybe. Or maybe not. I'm skeptical, because the only time I witnessed "X community has rape problem" headline about people I know personally, it was entirely false.

At a conference some lady cheated on her husband, accidentally with a guy who knew the husband, but didn't know it was his wife. When shit hit the fan, she cried rape. She also managed to recruit additional accusers, whose stories turned out to be physically impossible (requiring bilocation of multiple persons).
For what it’s worth and only tangentially I have experienced something similar in my immediate social circle, with women having sex they shouldn’t have had, shifting the blame, then getting caught up in their own lies and having to double down on it until this whole thing somehow spirals into a rape allegation with the help of coping boyfriends or drama hungry besties
 
Something I've noticed about Schlomo here is that he writes and talks like he learned everything off of Wikipedia, which I think he admits to. Either way, I read him calling himself as an autodidact that way. My work brings me in contact with statisticians and data scientists all the time, and none of them talk about Bayes Theorem the way these guys do, let alone suck it off the way LW does.

This type of thing seems pretty common with "rationalists". If they were good at explaining and communicating, they'd be teachers, authors, or professors. Like, mathematical or philosophical logic are formal systems of reasoning meant as a way to discuss certain issues/problems, not a way to live your entire life. As it stands, the rationalists are mostly just "ideas guys" who happen to have created definitions of intelligence and value that put their useless asses at the top of the pecking order.

Another example of this type of guy, though he's not a lolcow, is Jaron Lanier. Just another "self educated" guy who hasn't done any real work in computing or the internet (and hell, I'll count management there, because managers still have to talk to the code monkeys) but makes all these sweeping statements on how he knows how the future computers and the internet will play out, that are meant to amaze people without any technical background themselves.
There has to be a name for these people, they're all over the internet constantly acting like they're experts on a topic they just found out exists and never mentioned before in their life. (We've all seen this, think of how they were virology experts suddenly as COVID spread and then Ukraine and foreign policy experts immediately last year.) They've spawned another class of idiot that basically just Googles or hits Wikipedia and only reads the first sentence they see and uses that as the entire basis of their "autodidact" knowledge. None of them actually appreciate learning as a process or want to learn anything.

I don't think Dunning-Kruger is a good enough description of them. (And one I've noticed on Twitter increasingly gets thrown out immediately by these very types of people.) It also doesn't explain how other people seem immune to these people constantly being wrong, only how they're personally immune.
 
They've spawned another class of idiot that basically just Googles or hits Wikipedia and only reads the first sentence they see and uses that as the entire basis of their "autodidact" knowledge.
Anyone who does that should consult our "Dumb Shit On Wikipedia" thread.

Ignore my low-effort shitpost of an OP on that thread, because I actually think the content is increasingly important, as people continue to accept absolute nonsense like that as reality. I should really improve it.

It's an embarrassment considering how monstrous wikipedia actually is in its influence, despite being an absolute joke.

I definitely trust the 1968 Encylcopaedia Britannica on paper on a shelf next to me more than anything on Wikipedo.
 
Something I've noticed about Schlomo here is that he writes and talks like he learned everything off of Wikipedia, which I think he admits to. Either way, I read him calling himself as an autodidact that way. My work brings me in contact with statisticians and data scientists all the time, and none of them talk about Bayes Theorem the way these guys do, let alone suck it off the way LW does.

This type of thing seems pretty common with "rationalists". If they were good at explaining and communicating, they'd be teachers, authors, or professors. Like, mathematical or philosophical logic are formal systems of reasoning meant as a way to discuss certain issues/problems, not a way to live your entire life. As it stands, the rationalists are mostly just "ideas guys" who happen to have created definitions of intelligence and value that put their useless asses at the top of the pecking order.

Another example of this type of guy, though he's not a lolcow, is Jaron Lanier. Just another "self educated" guy who hasn't done any real work in computing or the internet (and hell, I'll count management there, because managers still have to talk to the code monkeys) but makes all these sweeping statements on how he knows how the future computers and the internet will play out, that are meant to amaze people without any technical background themselves.
Lanier keeps getting so fucking fat. He can't even walk. But of course, the (((tribe))) have to stir up shit and be noisy.


This fat fucking disgusting kike faggot knows absolutely nothing yet keeps bleating. At least other jews are dumb enough to eat that shit up, sucking each others dicks about how only a fellow disgusting jew has its demon fingers in some modern trend.

(Not totally on topic but worth mentioning)
 
Presupposing that your actions don't affect the afterlife is more like Calvinism than nihilism though isn't it? The idea that your destiny after death is preordained and nothing you do in life will change it.
Yes but also if there is nothing, then your actions don't affect it. Just like my actions have no effect on the world's unicorn population.
That's kind of my point. If you "choose" to believe in a deity it should be because you sincerely believe that, not in some kind of bogus wager in hopes of advantage. And you don't really choose in any event. You either have had experiences that lead you to such a belief or you don't, and pretending otherwise is game-playing.
I've yet to ever meet anyone who ever actually started belief based upon the wager. It's generally deployed more as a defense, especially against some of the more assholeish atheist types. Indeed as long as the religion is a positive influence on a person's life - what's the point of trying to evangelize them into nihilism?
Kiwifarms (and Encyclopedia Dramatica) gets a mention in Scott's latest post (archive):
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For pete's sake, Scott. Know what they used to call the Kiwi Farms before the internet? GOSSIP RAGS! Aka magazines and newspapers!

Before that - you'd never live down your worst moments as anyone with a close friend or a couple of family members can attest to. I can agree that maybe there should theoretically be some way to let things in the past go socially but you're going against a lot of years of evolution there, bud.
I can't read or write CSS either, I have to google "how to vertically center a div" every time. I'm not into memorizing phonebooks.
You don't have to memorize the full vocabulary of it (we do have google and reference books for a reason) but how can you understand HTML and not figure out CSS? It's like the second simplest language. Even just glancing at a sample should clue a person into the syntax.
(Not criticizing you, @Polish Businessman, but Eliezer)
It sounds like a degenerate sex cult using wokeshit to justify the abhorrent behavior of its members.
Every cult eventually devolves into a sex cult.
 
You don't have to memorize the full vocabulary of it (we do have google and reference books for a reason) but how can you understand HTML and not figure out CSS? It's like the second simplest language. Even just glancing at a sample should clue a person into the syntax.
(Not criticizing you, @Polish Businessman, but Eliezer)
Knowing the syntax isn't understanding. CSS has simple syntax, but how it works is extremely complex, full of gotchas and can't be derived from any simple general rule. Compared to that, HTML works in a pretty obvious way. My point is that it's hard to remember things that don't make a coherent whole and are pretty much random.

For the same reason JS is a bad language - it does stuff that makes sense only when you know the internals of the interpreter (like the behavior of this keyword or difference between normal and arrow functions wrt to inheritance of ES6 classes).
 
He used to co-author a LISP variant, 20 years ago, which used html tags instead of parenthesis or something. That was the extent of his coding career AFAIK.
LISP is about the easiest language to implement because your source code is literally the same as your abstract syntax tree and there's only a few forms/keywords to implement. There's plenty of tutorials on writing a lisp in X language and it's a pretty frequent semester project in upper division programming language theory or compiler design classes. I mean in the abstract it's impressive, but if that's all he did and it was literal decades ago then you know he can't tell his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to computing.

I admit my annoyance with LISPs clouds my judgement there (I really don't like the homoiconicity of most of the major LISPs, and it's something I need to get over to become the best programmer I can be) but "authored an entire damn LISP that no one used" is way less impressive on a CV than even "made a 5 line PR to CPython that got merged in."

Nassim Taleb has a phrase for guys who are sort of the opposite of ESY, which is "Intellectual Yet Idiot." IYIs would be guys who have credentials but no real world experience. Big Yud pontificates on shit that only makes sense in his own dumbass definitions of computing and logic and all, that no one in the real world or in academia really agrees with or thinks about much.
 
I enjoyed some of Scott's writing in the past, but the AI cult shit is wacky. So many words to basically say "yeah I never studied the slightest bit of philosophy or even bothered doing deep dives on the Stanford Encyclopedia" what with all their assertions about personal identity over time and the nature of the mind.

Good ol' A.J. has the best take on their variety of transhumanism:
 
I've yet to ever meet anyone who ever actually started belief based upon the wager. It's generally deployed more as a defense, especially against some of the more assholeish atheist types. Indeed as long as the religion is a positive influence on a person's life - what's the point of trying to evangelize them into nihilism?
I think you're operating under a false dichotomy here. Both in that there's more than one religion out there and "why should I join yours" is a valid response, but lacking belief in a deity isn't automatically a nihilistic stance.
 
Finally got an account so I could share some links with you folks.


TLDR: demon summoning cult antics and sexual abuse of minors at scale.

scott is taking loads at the rational shindigs - he's not asexual

(also the sexual assault at vibecamp got hushed up quick - there's quite a lot of sexual assault stuff behind the scenes)
 
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Damn it, why is everything a satanic cult nowadays?

Ok, I'm willing to believe MIRI is a cult, just based on my own experiences. But this is quite a serious accusation. Is there evidence for this @Voskhod ?

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Damn it, why is everything a satanic cult nowadays?

Ok, I'm willing to believe MIRI is a cult, just based on my own experiences. But this is quite a serious accusation. Is there evidence for this @Voskhod ?

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The Grognar thing actually let me figure out who Liz is. Beyond that - well those Facebook screencaps are kinda damning. I went to one of the bigger anti-uh, rationalist people out there on twitter and apparently this is the tip of the iceberg. However between community omerta and expensive lawyers on retainer, apparently nothing can be done,

edit: brent is still scared the rest of the group will murder him.
 
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