[2018]
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@xgranade @aud @mcc @jplebreton @emaytch and it's worth remembering that this radical position, that observation of reality is irrelevant and unimportant, is the thing that today's rationalist movement is actually named for. it's not actually about the practice of science, though we think many of its adherents don't fully appreciate that.
@ireneista @aud @mcc @jplebreton @emaytch Yep. It's radical and also *deeply* reactionary. Notably, it's also a huge break from even the reactionary forms of New Atheism. At one point, Sam Harris of all people was arguing that empiricism was necessary to ethics, not just philosophy. Now the whole reactionary movement seems to have left even that behind.
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@ireneista @emaytch @mcc It's the exact same fallacy as Pascal's Wager. Once you assign infinite cost or reward to a decision, any "empirical" or "rational" framework applied to that loss function absolutely shits the bed. The resolution, of course, is "why in the hell do you think that's a possible outcome? what is your basis for that belief?"
@xgranade @ireneista @emaytch @mcc ...but then you try to apply it to something like intercepting killer asteroids and they suddenly get all "well, let's be reasonable and practical." It's all just different forms of confirmation bias.
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@xgranade @aud @mcc @jplebreton @emaytch (the thread is about effective altruism but in practice there's heavy overlap in those communities)
@ireneista @aud @mcc @jplebreton @emaytch Yeah, absolutely. I disagree about some of the specifics, but "TESCREAL" as a term to point to the intersection of all of those related but distinct philosophical schools is useful nonetheless.
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@xgranade @ireneista @emaytch @mcc ...but then you try to apply it to something like intercepting killer asteroids and they suddenly get all "well, let's be reasonable and practical." It's all just different forms of confirmation bias.
@TomF @ireneista @emaytch @mcc I love how in e/acc and xrisk language, climate change is not "existential," only these pretend billion-year-future things.
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Robert Anton Wilson, 1979: Any false premise, sufficiently extended, provides a reasonable approximation of insanity
2025: Any false premise, sufficiently extended, turns out to be an already-existing thread on something called "lesswrong dot com" and it turns out a cofounder of Paypal has already given it 10 million dollars
Quotes from Jeff Miller @jmeowmeow in a followers-only discussion I wanted to foreground:
"Runaway inflation in the philosophical flattery economy."
"As wealth and power is narrowly concentrated, the reward of flattery as a practice increases. If there's competition for flattery work as verbally charming people lose other opportunities for subsistence, there's motivation to go bigger and bigger."
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@TomF @ireneista @emaytch @mcc I love how in e/acc and xrisk language, climate change is not "existential," only these pretend billion-year-future things.
@xgranade @TomF @ireneista @emaytch There's this idea from indigenous philosophy (the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, I think? i found about it from uh, a cleaning products company) that you should do all things while considering its impact on people seven generations from now. I think that's a really good rule actually. That's a really reasonable timespan. I don't know if people exist in 10^10 years. I'm certain people exist in 7 generations, or at least, what we do now decides whether they exist.
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@xgranade @TomF @ireneista @emaytch There's this idea from indigenous philosophy (the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, I think? i found about it from uh, a cleaning products company) that you should do all things while considering its impact on people seven generations from now. I think that's a really good rule actually. That's a really reasonable timespan. I don't know if people exist in 10^10 years. I'm certain people exist in 7 generations, or at least, what we do now decides whether they exist.
@xgranade @TomF @ireneista @emaytch Notably, seven generations turns out to be right in the sweet spot for "work to hold back greenhouse emissions now results in benefits then".
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@ireneista @emaytch @mcc It's the exact same fallacy as Pascal's Wager. Once you assign infinite cost or reward to a decision, any "empirical" or "rational" framework applied to that loss function absolutely shits the bed. The resolution, of course, is "why in the hell do you think that's a possible outcome? what is your basis for that belief?"
@xgranade @ireneista @emaytch @mcc as i like to say, i wouldn't say there's such a thing as reading too much science fiction…but there is such a thing as not reading enough stuff that isn't science fiction
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@xgranade @ireneista @emaytch @mcc as i like to say, i wouldn't say there's such a thing as reading too much science fiction…but there is such a thing as not reading enough stuff that isn't science fiction
@nev @ireneista @emaytch @mcc Or at least, forgetting the "fiction" part of "science fiction." Fiction is a wonderful thing, but you still need critical reading skills!
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@mcc I once saw an EA person do a presentation and their shiny formula for the expected value of the future of humanity included terms for the star density both in the milky way as well as in the local virgo supercluster as a whole.
Absolute clown show of a movement.
@lambdatotoro @mcc the fun thing is that they aren't even doing THAT right. As an example (and shameless plug) some time ago I did some back of the napkin calculations to check what energy requirements world be like if we didn't stop pushing for “growth at all costs”. Billions of years? Turns out that at current growth rates we'd exhaust the entire Milky Way in a couple thousand years even if we could convert it to energy at 100% efficiency.
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@natevw @emaytch so there's a "soft problematic" version of EA where they get really really focused on dollars that go directly to services and this winds up over-funding things that accidentally game that number and de-funding important community work which due to the structural nature of its work means a slightly higher percentage gets spent on facilities or outreach
your city gets a lot of mosquito nets but no arts funding, in blunt terms
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@Bastacosi sei la mia titolista preferita, meglio del Manifesto 😄
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@comandante_virgola
Questa "foresta" non ha capito di cosa si tratti 😂
Buongiorno Andrea 😘
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Fûgassa e gianchettû binomio perfetto 🤗
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La Corte dei Conti viventi.
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"I've found a lovely community of people. I get my parasocial fix without being inundated by cryptogrifters shilling shitcoins, nor by thought-leaders posting inflammatory takes for clout. There are no disingenuous politicians and remarkably few celebrities trying to sell me their bathwater. There's no advertising. There's a great API for bots.
"But, just to be contrary, let's list some of the bad points about it."
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Io stamattina ho finito il primo panettone 😁
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update più a freddo dopo qualche ora di gioco...
Ninzò.
Resta un bel giochino mordi e fuggi, ma ammetto che mi aspettavo qualcosina di più e più ci penso più mi mette voglia di tornare su Vampire Survivors che in qualche modo è straordinariamente più appagante e fresco, nella sua immediatezza caciarona
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@chatcontrol Phew, glad that they backed down. Sure, it may pop up again and big corpos can scan stuff. But I'm really glad that mandatory scanning won't be enforced.
I say that, for now, let's celebrate!
