Jazzhands
7d ago
Who is up for re-reading The Sequences together? It seems like a good time to refloat the idea since everybody's all in a tizzy about AI.
In addition, my related side project is far enough along to be useful:
https://skeptics-annotated-sequences.vercel.app/
I had various AI models go through and annotate with what studies were referenced, whether they've held up, and any other objections. I also did a few passes of an AI rebutting the previous AI, but didn't get far before I ran out of tokens. IMO Opus' comments are garbage, but Fable's are actually pretty good. But I haven't read them all, and this would be a good opportunity to. See https://skeptics-annotated-sequences.vercel.app/ReligionsClaimToBeNonDisprovable.html for a particularly annotated example. Summaries of the findings are all linked from https://skeptics-annotated-sequences.vercel.app/About.html
Who else is interested in a read-through? Anybody want to donate some tokens to get more sympathetic bot comments?
Jazzhands
13d ago
Also it has different meanings to different people. AI safety to the AI safety people - avoiding powerseeking, deception, harming humans generally. They don't worry so much about its political standpoint because the AIs largely align with them already. Like how Claude will make a website for indigenous peoples, unless they're European indigenous peoples.
They aligned with them precisely because they did care about the political standpoint, and did make sure it aligned with them and not the right. Republicans are entirely correct to observe that AI safety has largely meant "promote liberal views, suppress conservatives."
Jazzhands
14d ago
If Rationalism is systematized winning, and Christianity has systemized "pragmatic value"/winning...
Jazzhands
2mo ago
They took over because that's the natural end-point of "grey tribe progressives." They have no antibodies to defend against attacks from their left, even when they claim free speech as a core value.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Currently, though, the number is at 0.04% CO2. It does seem like there's some room to go up without drastically displacing other gases.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Ironically, while we were unable to replicate the result of people persisting their beliefs when they encounter crushing counterevidence among the classically religious, we may succeed in doing so among Rationalists.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
I increasingly think "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" is one of the most perceptive things Eliezer ever put his name to.
The trouble is, the one study it was based on was fraudulent. https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/cognitive-bias/#kelly-2025-section
In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that: the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Romans isn't an obscure book of the Bible, and the first chapter is typically where one would start.
Jazzhands
4mo ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-russian-effort-to-abolish-marriage/306295/ "The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage", written in 1926
When the Bolsheviki came into power in 1917 they regarded the family, like every other 'bourgeois' institution, with fierce hatred, and set out with a will to destroy it. 'To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did,' declared Madame Smidovich, a leading Communist and active participant in the recent discussion. So one of the first decrees of the Soviet Government abolished the term 'illegitimate children.' This was done simply by equalizing the legal status of all children, whether born in wedlock or out of it, and now the Soviet Government boasts that Russia is the only country where there are no illegitimate children. The father of a child is forced to contribute to its support, usually paying the mother a third of his salary in the event of a separation, provided she has no other means of livelihood.
This is white-washing how the campaign actually went down. The gay marriage campaign was the first large deployment of cancellation as a political tactic. A vote was held in the form of Proposition 8, the gay marriage side lost, and then proceeded to explain to the people where political power actually flows from in America by going after and taking down prominent supporters including high profile targets like Brendan Eich and Chik-Fil-A, but also seeking heretics like random pizza parlors in small towns who might not cater a gay wedding. Catholic adoption agencies were shut down for having the views that won at the ballot box. Our rulers then corrected the vote that had gone wrong. People took note and changed their beliefs to match power.
Cancellation works. Forced conversion works. The line of increased acceptance of gay marriage is a testament to its power. If you consider gay marriage a moral good, it worked on you too (this is what being a second-generation Muslim around the seventh century feels like from the inside). It's why the left switched to using cancellation for everything it wants, and the Right turned skeptical of democracy (because who could know which future votes would also be sham votes?) So much of our current politics is downstream of the fact that gay marriage substituted compulsion for persuasion and it worked.
Jazzhands
5mo ago
Until he had that Presidential Center built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_Presidential_Center
Jazzhands
5mo ago
The Atheist movement committed suicide because the alternative was confronting their real religion of leftism. When it came time to promote the truth of evolution against the left, most of them decided that it actually wasn't important as more than a stick to bash Christians with after all.
Jazzhands
6mo ago
I'm not sure "the guys who argued for the opposite of you have been decisively proven wrong" is the own you think it is.
Jazzhands
8mo ago
And before that, the Daily Show stood at the center of progressive culture for about a decade.
Jazzhands
8mo ago
Yes, I am aware of the official status of the Doctors of the Church. No, that doesn't mean the average person in the pews has read them, any more than the average mega-church attendee. It is just a fact that average people, Catholic or not, are not that intellectual. You're comparing a Platonic ideal on your side with a normie on the other.
Jazzhands
8mo ago
How many of the people are your local mega church are reading or talking about or thinking about or even know who Saint Augustine is? Are a lot of them reading The Summa do you suppose? I can think of a Protestant friend in “seminary” right now and how he reacted when I asked him about this, and I’m going to tell you the answer is no. No, finding one example of one person at one “seminary” who referenced this one time does not matter to the general point I’m making here.
Not many! How many at your local parish are reading those? How many even follow the Church's teaching on contraception or abortion?
This is just a general problem; most people don't read old books. Those Protestants who engage intellectually with their faith, like the Catholics who do the same, will have read Augustine.
Jazzhands
8mo ago
I don't know much about Prot vs Cath debaters; it's not a space I follow. I suspect it's not a very large space. Frankly, Evangelical Protestants just don't think much about Catholics at all. Their apologists usually aim at atheists.
Jazzhands
8mo ago
It doesn't take fancy footwork at all. There are a thousand years between Augustine and the Reformers; all they need to is claim that the later Catholic Church added on a lot of non-Biblical stuff that would not have been accepted by the earlier church, which is already the central Protestant claim. The reformers quoted Augustine extensively, I think more than any other church father. Luther himself was an Augustinian monk. Note even BB Warfield's famous quote "The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church."
Jazzhands
8mo ago
Who are the equivalent protestant "fathers"?
Martin Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, John Bunyan, Karl Barth, any number of preachers like Oswald Chambers, John Wesley, Spurgeon. Tim Keller and Os Guinness would qualify as (near) contemporary Protestant apologists. But Protestants can claim Augustine and everyone else from his era just as well as Catholics.
Jazzhands
9mo ago
This is a semi-recent change. Two decades ago, hacker spaces were notoriously libertarian. The lesson of open source and the internet in general is that libertarians are utterly unable to defend against progressive take-over.
Jazzhands
11mo ago
This occurred on reddit, youtube, facebook, pre-Musk twitter, and very likely others. That is not a tiny sliver of the internet.
Jazzhands
11mo ago
Social media censorship is basically the same thing, and there's been plenty of that.
Jazzhands
11mo ago
Is it un-Christian to be crass? Or are you mistaking Christianity for Churchianity?
"She lusted after lovers with members as large as a donkey’s and emissions like those of a horse." - God
"I wish that those who bother you would cut their whole penis off!" - The Apostle Paul
For the Protestants: "You say, "What comes out of our mouth must be kept!" I hear it - which mouth do you mean? The one from which the farts come?" -Martin Luther who rather liked fart humor.
Possibly, although Yud discussions can go CW pretty quickly. Where should it have gone?
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