It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Conversely, people who may not look or sound like a traditional expert, but are good at making predictions

    The weird rationalist assumption that being good at predictions is a standalone skill that some people are just gifted with (see also the emphasis on superpredictors being a thing in itself that’s just clamoring to come out of the woodwork but for the lack of sufficient monetary incentive) tends to come off a lot like if an important part of the prediction market project was for rationalists to isolate the muad’dib gene.










  • Here’s a screenshot of a skeet of a screenshot of a tweet featuring an unusually shit take on WW2 by Moldbug:

    link

    transcript

    skeet by Joe Stieb: Another tweet that should have ended with the first sentence.

    Also, I guess I’m a “World War Two enjoyer”

    tweet by Curtis Yarvin: There is very very extensive evidence of the Holocaust.

    Unfortunately for WW2 enjoyers, the US and England did not go to war to stop the Holocaust. They went to war to stop the Axis plan for world conquest.

    There is no evidence of the Axis plan for world conquest.

    edit: hadn’t seen yarvin’s twitter feed before, that’s one high octane shit show.








  • Not sure if it’s a NSFW assertion, but to me the p-zombie experiment seems like the result of a discourse that went off the rails very early and very hard into angels on the head of a pin territory, this lw post notwithstanding.

    Like, as far as I can tell, imagining a perfectly cloned reality except with the phenomenon in question assumed away, is supposedly (metaphysical) evidence that the phenomenon exists, except in a separate ontology? Isn’t this basically like using reverse Occam’s razor to prove that the extra entities are actually necessary, at least as long as they somehow stay mostly in their own universe?

    Plus, the implicit assumption that consciousness can be defined as some sort of singular and uniform property you either have or don’t seems inherently dodgy and also to be at the core of the contradiction; like, is taking p-zombies too seriously a reaction specifically to a general sense of disappointment that a singular consciousness organelle is nowhere to be found?