Goodguy
15hr ago
I think most of them just indulge this as a thought experiment. They wouldn't actually choose 10 shrimp over one toddler if forced to make the choice in real life.
Also, they don't think of their moral position as morally valuing humans less, they view it as valuing humans the same as before, while correcting the previously incorrectly low appraisal of the moral value of shrimp.
An argument can be made that since resources are limited, morally valuing shrimp more amounts to the same thing as morally valuing humans less. However, I think that the intent matters. The EA people by and large don't seem to intend to be misanthropic. I don't even detect subconscious misanthropy from them, at least not any more than the average person has. To me, their seeming lack of the normal pro-human stance seems to be genuinely motivated by taking logical arguments to their conclusions and by unusually high degrees of empathy for beings like shrimp, not by bitterness against humanity.
That said, I don't know any people like this in "real life". So I'm just going by the impressions I get from reading a small amount of online content.
Goodguy
1d ago
Ah. Lol. Nice catch.
Both flaunting and flouting works, for different examples of the group in question.
Goodguy
1d ago
Thanks for the advice!
I didn't know that rye bread was often also dyed to darken the color. That doesn't really bother me assuming it's safe. It's the trying to pass mostly wheat bread off as rye that I find annoying.
I wish RFK Jr. didn't act so crazy and/or seem so crazy to people, it was nice to see the left and right getting united on the issue of food safety.
The misanthropy. To me they don't seem more misanthropic than the average person.
The doomerism. To me they seem on average to actually be more optimistic than the average person.
The heretical nature and flaunting (Edit: or flouting) of social norms and laws is somewhat true, but I don't see that as a necessarily bad thing. It really depends on the context.
The sex pest characterization. They don't seem to engage in being sex pests any more frequently than people in the general population.
And I say this as someone who is often critical of them.
Goodguy
1d ago
there’s no reason to believe that they voted for Trump because of his stance on rapists
True. But clearly some of them did.
I got annoyed by your absolutist terms: "women do not seem to care about them, and they don't care about preventing that crime".
In any case, I shouldn't have gotten triggered.
Goodguy
1d ago
Three minutes of searching would make it clear that Jesus and his apostles were, shockingly, not regularly running a train on Mary Magdalene. The word "consort" is doing an enormous amount of rhetorical work.
My understanding is that in the gospels, there is not even any clear reason to consider her a prostitute.
I don't understand how you read Scott's message and took it as something other than a joke.
It's obvious to me that Scott is not trying to actually depict Yudkowsky as Jesus.
Even if somehow he was trying to depict Yudkowsky as Jesus, it wouldn't be a positive depiction, since Scott is saying that both men ran/are running an apocalyptic cult.
Admittedly, I'm not the target audience, but it seems like arguing for "AI safety" you don't actually know how to secure via tools you absolutely can't be trusted to wield probably would be easier if you weren't also having to explain Aella and Slutcon and reverse-gangbang-bribery tactics and the Cow Question to generic normies at the same time.
I don't think the vast majority of generic normies know anything the rationalist community. There have been a few mainstream media "exposes" of it in the last few years, but I imagine that only a very small fraction of generic normies ever read them.
From what I can tell, these AI safety good/bad, rationalism good/bad debates are mostly happening in certain social media spheres, Twitter being maybe the biggest one.
The kind of people who read Tweets about AI safety and rationalism are not normies. They are largely political junkies, political militants of various stripes, AI nerds, rationalists, anti-rationalists, engagement baiters trying to get their bait in, and so on. Normies, they are not.
The broader population is, I think, more immediately worried about AI taking our jobs than about the Skynet scenario. To me, the AI discourse seems to be more or less separated into two parts:
The first is happening in the small world of the rationalist community, tech elites, people who spend 8 hours a day on Twitter, and so on.
The second, larger one is happening out among "the normies" - it's the steadily mounting political discourse about AI's threat to jobs, it's the data center arguments, it's Bernie Sanders jumping in to have his say, etc.
I would guess that for the most part, the people who are paying attention to the second part of the AI discourse aren't paying close attention to the first. They don't know who Aella is. And even if they did, after all it's 2026, how much are people really scandalized by sex parties? Out of all the various "weird" things about the rationalist communities, the sex parties are one of the better seeming things. They're having sex! To me the sex seems vastly more appealing than the group living or the 660,000 word Harry Potter fan fiction.
I say "one of the better seeming things". That said, the CNC stuff and the gangbangs are definitely still somewhat shocking to normies. But probably not as much as some would assume. Or am I just projecting my comfort with kinkiness on the masses?
I do find the Aella discourse amusing. It's funny to observe left-wing critics of her trying to navigate the narrow road between being sex positive, on the one hand, and depicting Aella's sex activities as somehow bad, on the other. And it's funny to observe right-wing critics of her trying to navigate the narrow road between the fact that most of them would actually love to attend wild sex parties with hot chicks, on the one hand, and depicting Aella's sex activities as somehow bad, on the other.
My understanding of Yudkowski's legacy to date is that he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult, a number of normal cults with a serious record of abuse toward their participants, one of the largest financial frauds ever committed
To really judge this fairly you'd have to compare the rates of cult, murder cult, and financial fraud initiation in the Yudkowsky circle against the equivalent rates in other communities of similar size. You'd also have to figure out how responsible Yudkowsky actually is for the bad things.
And I say this as someone who isn't even a Yudkowsky fan! I find him a bit weird and culty. But he's not Charles Manson or Jim Jones.
and the initiation of the exact sort of AI race he set out to avoid
I don't see how he had anything to do with that. The AI race was going to start one way or another as soon as someone invented the technology.
Young men would claim in private conversations and anonymously on the internet that Jordan Peterson had saved their life, that his perspective was reasonable and important, and it was bad to cancel him.
But when leftists turned up to block his lectures or disrupt his events, these "supporters" were nowhere to be found. Presumably they got scared of the mob and turned around.
That was probably some part of it. I suspect, however, that maybe a bigger reason is that they just didn't give enough of a shit to show up. There are so many easier and more fun things to do with one's day than traveling somewhere to support some online guy who helped you improve your life.
Having some money in a bank account doesn't give me status.
No, but the fact that you made that money yourself through trading rather than having inherited it, that does absolutely give you status. From what I've observed from watching other people interact, people are very impressed by that kind of ability. I dunno, maybe the older generations would be more impressed by running a real estate management company. But millennials and younger, I think absolutely are more impressed by making 7 figures sitting in a room trading. Doing that is much closer to our financial dream than running a real estate company is. We grew up with computers after all, the idea of sitting alone in a room on a computer making large amounts of money, with no boss, sounds awesome to us.
Goodguy
1d ago
If you make 7 figures without a job, you can have status the moment you want to go get it. It just takes going into social situations and allowing people to become aware of how you make money.
Goodguy
1d ago
You'd think that this is rye bread, right?
Apparently not. According to AI, and I see little reason to doubt it on this one, it's actually made largely from refined wheat (husk, bran, and germ stripped away), with small amounts of rye added, and artificially dyed dark using malt extract from barley.
What sort of "traditional recipe" (as the front of the bag reads) this could be, I have no idea. Apparently such language is almost entirely unregulated.
I could have read the ingredients list and did some research long before but I mean fuck, is it too much to ask that when a bag of bread says that it's rye bread, it's actually going to be rye bread? Without you having to do research?
I'm not much for capital punishment but this kind of stuff kind of makes me dream about guillotines.
I don't know about other countries, but it seems that in the US you have to research every single item of food if you want to make sure that it's actually even remotely close to what it initially seems to be when you see it on the shelves.
I'm not even sure if this would have been feasible for the average person before AI.
Goodguy
2d ago
There are a lot of violent rapists, but women do not seem to care about them, and they don’t care about preventing that crime. They don’t advocate for harsher sentences and they don’t want to prevent the rape-inclined from migrating here.
Not sure how I'm supposed to want to read on when your comment starts with this.
46% of women voted for Trump in 2024.
A third of AfD's voters are women.
In recent elections, the LePen/Bardella National Rally party has been getting about equal support from men and women.
Let's say hypothetically that that is Trump's strategy. I understand how Venezuela fits into this strategy. I don't understand how Iran does.
I don't imagine that Iran is going to change who they sell their oil to after the war unless there is a regime change, and maybe not even if there is one.
The US can physically prevent Iran from shipping oil out if it wants, but it could have done so before the war as well, if it had wanted to. That doesn't require a full-scale bombing campaign.
And I think there are probably easier and more effective ways for the US to put pressure on the Gulf States than to play some game of "we'll bomb Iran hard enough to make them bomb you but not hard enough to prevent them from blowing up your oil infrastructure sometimes, so you should do what we say".
On another note, I feel bad for Iranian liberals. Part of me wants to say that if Trump was going to start the war at all, he should have had the balls to launch a ground invasion. Now the Iranian liberals are stuck in kind of the worst of both worlds. Their oppressive government is still in charge, and is extra paranoid and incentivized to crush dissent. Plus their country has been getting bombed.
Goodguy
4d ago
I've been in arguments on this website with many who argued exactly that. There are lots more on twitter and throughout the mainstream media.
Yes, when it comes to people arguing that Iran could militarily (as opposed to politically) defeat the US in a war, I classify those in the unastute or biased category. Or engagement bait. Twitter is mostly made up of engagement bait, as far as I can tell.
Unastute doesn't mean unintelligent. But some people aren't really aware of the enormous difference in military power between the two countries.
My argument has been that they are wrong because Trump winning in Iran gives Trump more power to renegotiate global trade (which is exactly how he's reindustrializing the American heartland).
What's the mechanism by which winning in Iran would give Trump more power to renegotiate global trade?
I don't think that many astute geopolitical commenters who weren't blinded by some form of domestic politics bias ever thought that Iran could defeat the US in a war. That's like predicting that a five year old could beat a grown man in a fistfight. Outlast, maybe (and only if, as has so far been the case, the US lacks the political will to launch a ground invasion). Defeat, no. Of course, there are plenty of unastute geopolitical commenters, and there are plenty of people who are blinded by domestic politics bias.
I personally have never argued that Iran had any serious chance of defeating the US in a war.
However, that does not necessarily make the war a good idea for the American people. That's a separate matter.
For me personally, in the sense of my own personal self-interest, I'm not sure whether the war has been good, bad, or neither.
I have probably indirectly been affected by the higher oil prices, but I'm not sure to what extent. I imagine probably badly, but I haven't done the research to find out for sure.
Crude oil prices remain, for now at least, about 1.5 times what they were before the war. It's about the same for retail gasoline and diesel prices in the US. Whatever is going on in the Strait of Hormuz right now, it hasn't translated into lower prices so far at least. I do not think this is because Iranian exports are being blockaded. Iran's share of total world oil and oil products production was not even close to high enough before the war to explain the current high global prices.
I think that the chance of Iran ever using nuclear weapons against the US even if it builds them is so low that it's not something I have ever worried about. In my opinion, the Iranian leadership acts much more like a typical rationally self-interested government than like the "suicidal fanatics who would use a nuke the second they got it" that some consider them. So I'm not significantly more worried about them nuking me, even if they got nukes and delivery systems, than I am about Russia or China nuking me. Which is to say, almost not at all. I believe that almost certainly mutually-assured destruction would hold with Iran. So whatever damage the war has done to Iran's nuclear program, I don't see it as a significant win for myself.
Ironically, I think that Trump supporters might actually have the most to complain about. The war has done significant damage to the populist movement that coalesced around Trump 11 years ago:
- It has sharpened the split between its pro-Israel and anti-Israel factions.
- It has meant Trump using a large part of his political capital and attention the last year on things that have nothing to do with the populist movement's goals, or at least for many people don't seem to have anything to do with those goals.
- It has, rightly or wrongly, made Trump look like yet another neocon-ish President who starts a war in the Middle East for obscure reasons that have little or nothing to do with the interests of the average American.
- It has helped the Democrats politically, thus increasing the chance that they soon take enough power to undo much of what Trump has done in domestic politics.
Goodguy
6d ago
She might be into it, or maybe she's making the best of a bad situation. But this doesn't mean that women have no incentive to avoid making false rape accusations, as the person I responded to believes.
Obviously, women also have incentives to make false rape accusations.
But they don't lack incentives to not make false rape accusations.
Goodguy
6d ago
True. Or more precisely, "violent, possibly organized, non-State actor that is not on the speaker's side". Because people almost never call their own allies terrorists.
Whoever they are, I am annoyed that many news articles are calling them terrorists.
To me, terrorism means attacking civilian targets because of political motives. Attacking a military base is just an attack, not terrorism. It has more in common with using a fighter jet to blow up a tank than it has in common with, say, deliberately blowing up a music concert.
The word "terrorism" has been politicized to mean something like "an asymmetric attack done by the bad people". Maybe even worse, maybe it's been politicized to mean something like "an attack done by the bad people".
Whether there was a rape or not, there is actually substantial incentive for her to lean into the former. Legal cases are unpleasant. Victory is uncertain. Becoming a nationally known culture war figure who is alternately valorized and defamed by people online is something that many people would want to avoid. Being famous for having been raped is something that many people would want to avoid.
Was she raped? I have no idea. I'd have to look at the details and even then possibly there is no way to come to a convincing conclusion. But I don't think the incentives are as one-sided as you believe.
I think you're probably underestimating how much non-feminists are responsible for culture in which consensual gangbangs are permissible, and overestimating how much feminists are responsible for it.
I am technically a feminist, by some definitions, because I think women should have equal legal rights to men. But that's probably not what you mean by "feminist". I am guessing that I am not a feminist in your sense of the word.
I am nearly 100% in favor of culture being permissive of consensual gangbangs.
Why? For selfish reasons: I like wild sex. And for philosophical reasons: I like liberty.
The sexual revolution was caused by many factors of which feminism is only one. Certainly there were many men who supported it out of selfish or philosophical motives, and were not really part of the feminist movement in any substantial way.
Online atheism would not be absent just because New Atheism was absent. Online atheism long predated New Atheism. Online atheism was always going to be a thing because the people who formed the core of the early Internet -- people who tended to be socially liberal, distrustful of government, and interested in questioning what they saw as dogmas -- had a high proportion of atheists.
I am annoyed, though not surprised, by articles calling it a terrorist plot.
You can call it many things, but attacking a military base that is used by a country that is fighting a war against your chosen political side is certainly not terrorism. I mean, it would be terrorism if for example you hijacked civilian airliners to attack it. But nothing like that seems to be the case here. Calling it terrorism is propaganda, ignorance of the word's meaning, or both.
Emotional derangement can be very magnetic. Many people who interacted with Hitler up close said that he had mesmerizing, hypnotic eyes.
The big eyes also helped with her sex appeal.
Sex appeal plus magnetic eyes plus deep voice plus "autistic genius" personality is a great combination for a woman in her 20s wanting to be taken seriously by people who have a lot of money.
Goodguy
7d ago
A24 is mainly famous for making eerie movies / horror movies. And Elizabeth Holmes comes off as creepy to many people anyway. So it's not surprising that everyone involved would lean into a "horror" tone here, with the disturbing music and close-ups. It's the best path to making money on this movie.
Where's that quote from?
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