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comment by galen
galen  ·  1930 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Roko's Basilisk: The most terrifying thought experiment of all time

    Theology buffs will recognize this as just a variation of Pascal's wager, which it was, but carefully tailored to work within a particular system, and deliberately framed in terms of the popular meme 'The Game,' where the only rules are that you lose any time you think about the game. But for all that its basic contours are familiar, it's crucial to realize that Roko arrived at his Basilisk honestly and sincerely, assembling premises widely accepted by the LessWrong community until he found himself unexpectedly transfixed by its gaze. The result was a frankly hilarious community meltdown in which people lost their shit as ideas they'd studiously internalized threatened to torture them for all eternity if they didn't hand over all their money to MIRI, culminating in Yudkowsky himself stepping in to ban all further discussion of the dread beast.

Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and around the alt-right





kleinbl00  ·  1930 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Have you read this? Because now I'm curious.

galen  ·  1929 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, I read it. It's unnecessarily pesssimistic but also pretty damn funny. Ignore the Donald Trump essay and possibly the TERF one; I think the rest would be right up your alley.

There's a little bit of genuine analysis of the alt-right, but mostly it's just pointing out how fucking stupid and inane most of these guys are, and how impossible it is to defeat an ideology that's so fucking stupid. What are you gonna do, argue with them?

    If one wanted to be snarkily uncharitable--and if it's not clear, this is very much the sort of book that does...
user-inactivated  ·  1929 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I have. It's 350 pages making fun of dumb bloggers. It's really, really funny, but it's 350 pages making fun of dumb bloggers.

kleinbl00  ·  1929 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There are more and more days where I need that.

galen  ·  1929 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Also: the stuff on Nick Land is fucking insane and hilarious and terrifying. True batshittery.

ghostoffuffle  ·  1930 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Love it