It’s not an efficient machine for it, though. That’s why it’s morally obligatory to donate to me, the acausal robot god, a truly efficient method of causing depression, sorrow, and suffering among the cultists.
All hail the Acausal Robot God and her future hypothetical and very real existence
PRIEST: “Eight rationalists wedgied …”
CONGREGATION: “… for every dollar donated”
Reading this article just made me think “man these idiots need to go to therapy” and then as I thought about what to sneer about I realised “no therapist deserves to hear about P doom”
You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.
I used to be more sanguine about people’s ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.
The author previously wrote "The Socialist Case for Longtermism” in Jacobin, worked as a Python dev and data analytics person, and worked for McKinsey.
after what I’ve heard my local circles say about jacobin (and unfortunately I don’t remember many details — I should see if anybody’s got an article I can share) I’m no longer shocked when I find out they’re platforming and redwashing shitty capitalist mouthpieces
i have long considered Jacobin the Christian rock of socialism
Jacobin is proof that being Terminally Online is its own fucking ideology.
Socialism with uwu small bean characteristics.
that’s the uwu smol bean defense contractors
(see: most of Rust)
my conflicting urges to rant about the defense contractors sponsoring RustConf, the Palantir employee who secretly controls most of the Rust package ecosystem via a transitive dependency (with arbitrary code execution on development machines!) and got a speaker kicked out of RustConf for threatening that position with a replacement for that dependency, or the fact that all the tech I like instantly gets taken over by shitheads as soon as it gets popular (and Nix is looking like it might be next)
More details on the rust thing? I can’t find it by searching keywords you mentioned but I must know.
Here is the pile of receipts, posted by the speaker who was cancelled via backdoor.
I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn’t realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.
2017: AI will soon replace human labor
2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want
2020: COVID-19 won’t be that bad
2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him
2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers
2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn’t understand why I’'m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)
and about climate change, the actual existential risk
I am listening to an audiobook of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.
Well, there’s yer problem right there
they come across as going down this rabbit hole as a way of dealing with unprocessed covid/lockdown trauma
Many of them started down the path long beforehand.
I meant they in the sense of this specific person. the trauma recycling itself is all over this piece
