Caught the bit on lesswrong and figured you guys might like.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
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    1 year ago

    The apparent world-historical inversion, whereby the smart kids were also the rich and most powerful ones, was celebrated on iconic blogs and mailing lists such as Slate Star Codex and LessWrong (where users self-reported implausibly high IQ scores)

    snerk

    The IQ fetishists like to think they are living in a near future where they — the pure creative information workers imagined in the 1990s — have been elevated through their high intelligence and innate ability. They were not simply in the right place at the right time, bobbing along in a sea of liquidity in an era of zero interest rates. They were, like the staff at the Apple Store, geniuses.

    also snerk

        • self@awful.systemsM
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          1 year ago

          so many! sometimes the first tell that you’re reading techfash bullshit is when they lead in with the worst take you’ve ever heard about a work of sci-fi you’ve enjoyed. I firmly blame these fuckers for making cyberpunk boring as fuck, turning singularity fiction into a religion, and ruining post-scarcity sci-fi, all by way of stubbornly refusing to understand any of the work they’ll never stop trying to claim as their own

          • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
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            1 year ago

            Apropos:

            Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

            Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

            “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

            And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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          1 year ago

          neoreactionaries and lesswrongers are animu nerds to a man, and the answer to “what the arsing fuck??” is always anime

    • datarama@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Completely aside, “Torment Nexus” would be an awesome name for a thrash metal band.

      Having revealed my taste in music, I’m not in a position to claim high-brow cultural credentials - but even I can see that our would-be tech overlords are a bunch of culturally illiterate goons. Sam Altman complaining that Oppenheimer “missed the mark” on being inspirational to a generation of would-be scientists in the way the Social Network was to a generation of would-be startup founders was perhaps the tech take to end all tech takes.

      • self@awful.systemsM
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        1 year ago

        Characters: Agent Smith, OC Culture Mind, OC Culture Ship, Neo, OC GSV

        oh I can already tell this is going to be a ride

  • hrrrngh@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    I feel like the article ends pretty suddenly, but maybe that’s just because I can already imagine the next 30 pages of explaining TESCREAL bullshittery in my head

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
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    1 year ago

    The archive site just keeps throwing CAPTCHAs at me, so I can’t read it. Please provide more information about what this is supposed to be, thanks and happy weekend

  • Facebones@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    It doesn’t matter who it is, what faction, what job -

    Basically everybody wants to be an autocrat now.