Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Na Ga Ha Pen

Asked in the Moot (by someone in on the joke) to offer up an Ode to the techno-transcendental preoccupations of superlative futurologists, I provided as my contribution the Atrios-inspired subject line. I leave to the specificities of context the question whether the best musical accompaniment to my Ode be a yawn, a giggle, or a fart.

3 comments:

jimf said...

> Asked. . . to offer up an Ode to the techno-transcendental
> preoccupations of superlative futurologists, I provided as my contribution
> [something that sounds like one of Edina Monsoon's chants].
> I leave to the specificities of context the question whether the
> best musical accompaniment to my Ode be a yawn, a giggle, or a fart.

Bubble, what do you make of this?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Talk:Roko%27s_basilisk
--------------------------
. . .

Seriously, with insane shit like this, the best case scenario is
that they are cynically running a scam. The worst case scenario
is that they are actually that crazy. I can't wrap my head around
just how harmful is this shit. To recap on the bits that combine
particularly badly: There's the doomsday that other people [the
"irrational" bulk of humanity, who haven't imbibed Eliezer's
"Sequences"] will bring, and which needs to be prevented.
There's dead babies currency idea
[invented by Scott Siskind, a.k.a. "Yvain" on LessWrong
http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html ].
There's 8 lives [saved] per dollar [contributed to SIAI/SI/MIRI]
'estimate', made off a podium at a conference, defended on forum
by at least 2 other inner circle people, later very weasely
semi refuted by one in a conversation that had been deleted since.
There's basilisk and Yudkowsky only knows what crazy basilisk related
shit he is alluding at (probably something that's even more stupid).
There's evaluation of different methods of stopping corporations,
complete with "shooting company executives will work" [*]. There's
multiverse which allows you to rationalize some seriously crazy shit
(original Basilisk relied on M[any]W[orlds]I[nterpretation of Quantum Mechanics]).
Then there's real world meetups with recital of quotes from effing
H.P.Lovecraft in the candlelight, and the quote was about how we are
protected from horrors by limits of our understanding, to boot!
(Coincidence or working up an audience for later introducing the most
impressible ones to some Basilisk-related shit?) . There's teaching
people that their reasoning is flawed (biases shit), which is literally
thought reform (Flawed it might be, it is not nearly as flawed as
giving money to crackpots or losing sleep over the basilisk).
There's idiosyncratic terminology and neologisms. There's slogans
like "raising the sanity waterline".
-- Dmytry, 19 February 2013

Oh, I like "raising the sanity waterline" . . .
-- David Gerard, 19 February 2013

"Raising the sanity waterline" is a mindless slogan of precisely the
kind you find in cults, that's why i mentioned it. Tell anyone that some
group uses it as slogan, if they have any sense they think its creepy
(and don't join up. . .).
-- Dmytry, 20 February 2013
--------------------------

[*]
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Talk:LessWrong
--------------------------
[S]omeone started a thread with question if it would be ethically meritorious
to off tobacco executives, as tobacco is a product that kills most people.
The Yudkowsky chimed in, basically saying that a: makes them look bad and
b: if the crime is bad it's bad and if the crime is good talking about it
on the effing internet is still bad. . .
Something else: apparently they had someone who talked about getting
life insurance with singularity institute as beneficiary (edit: correction,
'best charity' not SI), and killing themselves, and someone actually
almost got inspired but got tentatively talked out of that. . .
-- Dmytry, 26 December 2012
====

jimf said...

Can you digg it?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/User_talk:Baloney_Detection
---------------------------
Relax, Max

Not everybody is as against LW as you are. That's okay.
Personally, I agree. They're nothing but self-glorified
science-fiction writers. But there's no need to get up in
everyone's business about it. And please, try to keep it
down to a minimum of pages.
--"Shut up, Brx." 18 July 2012
====


I agree that I might have gotten an unhealthy obsession by LW
as of late. But it really bugs me when certain people can't
see the obvious crankery that is LW. I guess it is because LW is
more subtle about it and you have to digg a little, they are
not openly wooish like Chopra. If these people had been young
in the 60s and the 70s they would likely have been Randroids.
Rand held "reason" (her version of it, at least) in high regard
and praised science, yet if you digg a little deeper, she was
a complete crackpot.
--Baloney Detection 19 July 2012
====

;->

jimf said...

Charlie Stross has discovered Roko's Basilisk:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/

> . . .as one observer unkindly put it, "the transhumanists
> want to be Scientology when they grow up"

Who could that have been? ;->

"Oh wow, I could get a whole damn NOVEL out of this idea. . ."
https://twitter.com/cstross/status/305031426213027841

Of course, this means we're all going to Hell.

;->