Diversity and inclusion is suddenly great if it involves fascists doing entryism.
the great potential of psychological change
Which is a euphemism for success in brainwashing.
Also, having dismissed the entirety of psychology and psychiatry as unscientific, they naturally landed ass first on Jung and Dion Fortune as major points of reference.
If your property is outside the solar system, you will need to either go into cryosleep or upload yourself to a computer to survive the journey.
Reminder that rationalists have developed a completely mysticalised conception of brain uploading that's very functionally similar with old timey souls, mostly so they don't need to deal with the SOMA problem of every instance of uploaded consciousness being a completely separate self-actualised entity.
Like how exactly is a digital impression of my personality being shipped to alpha centauri to inspect my holdings affect my personal experience? How is it supposed to be interchangeable with using some other made up technology that takes me there in person?
See, it works like this, no one knows what consciousness is, but it's probably a mathematical object, and if your current conscious self is the same as the conscious self that will be inhabiting your body next friday, and also if a supreme being wants to torture you after you are dead....
Another OpenAI attempt at monetization has died an ignoble death.
OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October.
Nothing in my interactions with humanities types indicates they would be in a better position to handle either the educational slopnami or a slopped out job market.
As far as educational systems go, "human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning" were always left to natural selection instead of being actively pursued. Taking a philosophy course on the history of logic and ethics isn't the same as having any.
The part about tasteless AI enthusiasts needing to be housetrained to not post slop on the forums because that's borderline antisocial was also cool.
I like how Yud's rogue data center air raid task force is gradually becoming another weird rationalist accepted truth.
There's a corresponding siskind post also called something something plan A, I skimmed until the part where the US and China take de facto control of chip infrasrtucture and distribution (saying "nationalise" is haram for free market types), basically imagine having to write a letter to the government to formally justify upgrading your computer, and that's all the AI fanfiction I can tolerate without ruining my breakfast.
Also clanker crankers appropriating the term 'Golden Path' from Dune is just distasteful.
Being each other's therapists
That's probably a euphemism for levs subjecting each other to hours long so-called debugging sessions, i.e. rationalist flavored scientology auditing.
More mundane cult stuff was also taking place, like keeping everyone constantly exhausted from continuous busywork, while also guilt-tripping them out of having free time and non-cult related interests in general. This seems to be a refrain in other witness testimonies that's absent in Laurenson's telling, unless she threw a passing mention somewhere that I didn't catch.
What it boils down is that it was an actual honest to god cult that was getting tons of EA money to develop a self help system that would turn people into Elon Musks (their go-to example for an apex human). They also came up with a stablecoin and a cryptofash magazine that are both still around, and did a lot of behind the scenes work for EA at large, like getting the ball rolling with organising EA conferences around the world.
I think the reason all these exposés are so tiresome to read is because they tend to focus on the boring cult stuff instead of the bonkers rationalist lore (like how Leverage people were trying to cast HPMOR spells on each other), or the long shadow it casts on our current cultural moment due to its deep influence in the EA/rat subculture, like how Amodei though not a member seemed to be a regular there, Grimes is a contributor to Palladium, ex-levs have launched elite coaching companies that presumably implement lev-tech and so on.
Additionally, in true rationalist fashion nobody was punished and nothing was learned, so the people responsible are still around, still getting Thiel money to do much of the same stuff with probably the same issues, just keeping a lower profile this time.
edit: this is much shorter https://www.todayintabs.com/p/over-leveraged thanks @nfultz@awful.systems
[Dick Gay], who had flown in for the event from Los Angeles and said he was one of the investors of Sperm Racing (which is an actual thing wherein men compete to see whose sperm is “fastest” under a microscope), said he attended the University of Austin, or UATX, an “anti-woke” college reportedly partially funded by Thiel, and built his career around the principles outlined in Thiel’s book “Zero to One.”
Attendee Justin Park said he just wanted to pitch Thiel on putting a 7.5-foot cross on the moon.
[Unnamed], who was in his 30s, said he wasn’t a Thiel fan until last year, when he became a Trump supporter after seeing the president survive an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I misunderstood [Thiel],” he said. “I used to watch CNN and think he’s a Nazi.” Now, he said, he understands the billionaire is talking about something bigger.
Apparently it was both repetitive and mostly a rehash of what he's said in other media.
One attendee recalled that Thiel’s discussion of the Antichrist was more about a scenario than an individual. Thiel’s Antichrist scenario is one in which a unified government suppresses technology to impose order, or armageddon, wherein AI takes over and ushers in the end of the world.
Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”
who talks like this
Enjoyed the writeup, thanks for gazing into the abyss!
This is complementary to their heterodoxy fetish, leading to fringe or outright bonkers but excruciatingly formalistic positions routinely sleight-of-handing themselves into prominence in the movement.
That's just rationalists believing that once you amass enough IQ/Mana points you unlock the mind control spell. Basically if you aren't buying what the great-men-of-history-du-jour are selling the AIs will cast domination on you for the greater good.
He is definitely a cult enabler and a huge cult beneficiary, but I don't think I've ever seen evidence he could lead shit to fuck.