i think this is exactly why they had to come up with - or rather, misappropriate - the concept of coupled vs decoupled thinking. when they (especially the more, ahem, human biodiversity minded of them) fold ridiculous claims about what constitutes virtuous cognition into scientific and sophisticated sounding terminology, it makes those claims seem aligned with the broader sales pitch of rationalism
also that scott quote is excellent. i hadn’t heard that one before
if we had made the podcast series on rationalists, their importance as useful idiots for billionaires was the structure i wanted to hang the whole thing on. so this is a gratifying read. that said i think the ideas here will be familiar to many stubsack readers
The rationalist view of the world assumes, at some level, that the relevant actors are optimizing for well-understood, predictable variables and a clear understanding of what best serves their self-interest. What it cannot account for is bad faith, impulsiveness, ideological motivation untethered from evidence, random instances of force majeure, and personal whims and petty rivalries.
i will go further and say that not accounting for such things is considered virtuous in rationalist ideology
new episode of odium symposium. it’s a tribute to knowledge fight, in which we dissect an episode of nick fuentes’s show. i was nervous about how this would turn out but i think it’s actually my favorite episode yet.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/11-groyper-151852222 (links to other platforms at www.odiumsymposium.com)
just got a job in mathematical publishing. it’s work i think i’ll actually enjoy and expect to be very good at, it pays much better than any other job i’ve had previously (and they maxed out the position’s pay range, which i wasn’t expecting) and it has about a month of paid leave a year. such a relief
friend of a friend who works for meta was just ignoring the mandate to use ai. apparently this was happening enough that they’ve now implemented per character provenance tracing, and you get ranked according to how much AI is in your code
inceltology
talking about “their ontology” like it’s a mtg deck. “i’m bringing in extra racism from the sideboard”
this is a lot like my expectation. ai never goes away, it never becomes revolutionary, it just makes everything worse and supercharges scams and theft and spam and means of social and nonsocial murder forever with maybe some real but kind of marginal usecases idk
unherd is a fash publication. to me this comes across as an AI take-ified rewrite of a 1994 luttwak essay i read recently, an endorsement of a revival of italian style fascism: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-fascism-is-the-wave-of-the-future
maybe “parasitic innovation”?
need a word for the sort of tech ‘innovation’ that consists of inventing and monetizing new types of externalities which regulators aren’t willing to address. like how bird scooters aren’t a scam, but they profit off of littering sidewalk space so that ppl with disabilities can’t get around
EDIT: a similar, perhaps the same concept is innovation which functions by capturing or monopolizing resources that aren’t as yet understood to be resources. in the bird example, we don’t think of sidewalk space as a capturable resource, and yet
new episode of odium symposium. we look at rousseau’s program for using universal education to turn woman into drones
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excruciating
this is some of the most shameful groveling I’ve ever seen. what a pathetic toad
given how epstein ignores his proposal in favor of slapping him down i would be surprised if any of it came to fruition
it’s interesting, looking at all this it, that he seems to be getting dragged kicking and screaming by his audience toward the realization that the real concern here is orchestrated harassment campaigns, not misalignment
>10k words into writing a piece of fiction that has a lot to do with our good friends
there’s no real definition of the term, but dark money group usually refers a group that helps its secret funders influence elections, rather than a lobbying group
one thing that’s so funny to me about this is that of course you’re not supposed to say “we’re going to brutalize poor people so billionaires don’t have to pay more tax.” you’re supposed to say a rising tide lifts all boats, that kind of thing, and in fact there’s a pic in the article where he’s holding a sign about how a bigger pie means bigger slices or something to that effect. but as soon as he opens his mouth he just throws “we’re going to take the healthcare” out there, because he has no self awareness, no critical thinking, no understanding of what in fact he is trying to do
wrt to the first part, nick consistently outmaneuvers people who bring him onto their platforms. he’s honestly brilliant at understanding who the audience is, what frame he’s appearing in, and how to signal given those circumstances. i didn’t understand until i started prepping for this episode that nick is actually lazy and incurious in almost the exact same way alex jones is. dan and jordan notice and call out how he effortlessly establishes dominance over alex, but i think there’s a second order game going on where nick manages to appear competent and informed compared to alex, and you don’t realize that’s just an artifact of conversational skill until you hear nick on his own show.
wrt to the second part, i could not agree more and i’m very glad to hear that is a takeaway because it is absolutely something i was hoping to communicate. that’s the freudianness of it all, how these existing patterns of relations to another get played out and reenacted through the audience’s relationship to nick, and vice versa