what too much digital circus, slopaganda, and warhammer 40k memes makes to your brain. at first you go "for the emperor!" when you notice, you are making part of jehova's witness for nerds

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[–] 8 points 8 hours ago* (4 children)

I don't think OOP means Rationalism (philosophy), but rather the Rationalist movement. Y'know that one with Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong forum.

They are the Jehovah's Witness of AI lol.

In any case, you are still correct since these guys certainly do the fallacy you described.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (3 children)

    Thanks for letting me know. I've not heard of these thing before... so I looked them up briefly and stopped reading once I encountered that this was used as a recruiting tool and written by Yudowsky:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

    I don't think I got smarter here. Might have lost a few brain cells. I was going to ask if this is an empericist/positivist group but that might be giving them too much credit, it looks like reactionary book club (even that might be too much credit) with the focus here being AI? They claim to stand for "AI safety" but I am very much getting "environmentalism without class struggle" vibes.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 hours ago

    If you spend more than 5 minutes on Less Wrong's discussion boards, you'll see them reinvent Nietzche and Marx. Not from first principles, mind you, but because they watched Fight Club and The Matrix, memory holed two of the most influential movies of 1999, and then got high on their own farts enough to think they thought of dialectical materialism all on their own. They won't call it that, but that won't stop them from asking the forum why no one has thought of it before.

    I am once again asking STEM majors to pay attention in their humanities courses.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 child)

    No problem.

    I wouldn't even grant this label to them. It's full reactionary accelerationism without care for the environment. Look who funds the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (led by Yudkowsky):

    https://intelligence.org/transparency/

    • An anonymous Ethereum cryptocurrency investor in 2018 and 2021.
    • Open Philanthropy, a joint initiative with the philanthropic foundation Good Ventures.
    • Vitalik Buterin, the inventor and co-founder of Ethereum.
    • The Thiel Foundation, a private foundation funded by Paypal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
    • A different anonymous Ethereum cryptocurrency investor in 2017.
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