ray kurzweil's 'the singularity is near' & any other technological singularity-related books you might care about

i'm not really familiar w/ "neoreactionaries" but i think the urbit stuff is very clear. not sure if it's explicitly ideologically complicit, but it surely doesn't need to be exclusively so?

very cool, not clear*

the urbit stuff is nonsense. this is a professional expert opinion.

it is carefully constructed, internally consistent, nonsense.

a physicist receives pages of scrawled calculations from a kook. they're on vacation and read the pages, for kicks. the pages contain formulae which make sense. but the formulae don't describe anything, they just aren't mathematically false. tile patterns in ancient mosques are mentioned, and formulae given for them. these are valid formulae, and pretty drawings of tiles. chaos is mentioned, and the mandelbrot formula is also given correctly, two ways. but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. the physicist shakes his head and thinks "this kook, under other circumstances, could maybe have been an engineer, or even a physicist. they can see elements of beauty, and they can perform some of the procedures that physicists perform correctly. but they cannot understand the purpose in what we do."

that is urbit.

feel like that could apply to chunks of his mencius moldbug stuff as well.

lol sterl

'Haskell fans' <--- battle of the interested parties!!

obviously we need to encourage impartial grant funding and science journalism about this disagreement so that unfettered exploration can lead to the truth

oh, wow

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/

http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-review-of-her-by-ray-kurzweil

do we have a thread for dark enlightenment stuff or is this the one?

http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis

ha i just posted that to the right wingery thread

i've been posting about these guys for years!

imo these guys are beyond right wingery. they're like 25% really interesting, legitimately controversial ideas and then like 75% capital worship, racist, legit insanity. but that 25%... (reweigh those percentages as u see fit...)

lol i just realized that they remind me a little of zizek

they'd be thrilled to hear it

maybe i'll start a dark enlightenment thread on 77 so that if i ever do compliment their work they won't have the potential enjoyment of reading it

25% really interesting, legitimately controversial ideas

i'm curious what you're thinking of here

i have a taste for extremity and subcultures with their own lingo, so i find some of this stuff grimly fascinating if not compulsively readable. but it's 100% nasty rage, really

tbh i've only read very little so far so i'd want some more time before trying to make a complete case. what immediately resonated for me tho was a kind of challenging of democracy from this kinda pov of its inherent weakness and inability to adequately represent its own voters' interests. it reminded me of zizek's idea that dictatorships can be more responsive to popular needs than democracy bc democracy has this inherent steam valve in elections where ppl get to feel like they're changing things so nothing has to change. dictators can't be voted out so if they don't respond to popular needs they will be facing a violent challenge to their rule. obv this isn't an idea that i wholeheartedly embrace (it sounded a lot better pre-civil war Syria when you had these notable examples of dictators failing to respond to the needs of their people and immediately collapsing, and also i think we've seen in iran + turkey country that ostensibly have this zizekian steam valve in elections but there is still a threat of revolution). but i do think there are weaknesses in democracy that this kind of thinking intelligently gets at - and it's kinda a shock. also i like the sci-fi futurism elements too, which is why i posted the link here - bc for me it crosses over w/ singularity thinking + these utopian/dystopian technological futures that i find very compelling.

well, keep reading i guess

their problem with democracy is the opposite of zizek's problem with it, i'll say

I keep bumping into the dark enlightenment crowd while reading around the place lately – they seem to snap into place with that Houllebecq, Ligotti, Lovecraft literary anti-humanist thing, Nick Land's name seems in the air again lately, & there's sort of overlap too with Nick Bostrom & The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford (via… lesswrong I think - Eliezer Yudkowsky contributes a couple of chapters here.

Aesthetically, I can get parts of it (the pessimistic bits, at least), there's a monstrous uncaring mathematical universe thing there that's always good for a cheap frisson; intellectually, i got the impression that even their purported masterminds are a bit thin on the Enlightenment and 17th/18th century (but I should read more – not now, because I am at work, but I do mean to get to it); practically, it's angry ageing white men. Fuck em.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/magazine/can-the-nervous-system-be-hacked.html

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/margaret-atwood-new-work-unseen-century-future-library

atwood obviously very optimistic about a potential future for humanity

Is there any vaguely futuristic bit of nonsense Atwood WON'T lend her name to? That awful remote control signing pen, that shitty serialised ebooks for morons site she co-wrote a serialised zombie novel for, that other serialised novel she wrote for the bungled Byliner site...

everything related to the singularity is so fucking stupid.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time.html

this is the stupidest thing to come out of it. these people think they've invented pascal's wager and are lying awake at night. this is a very well-funded "research" community.

ok cool we'll let banaka torture you then

I've never heard of Roko's Basilisk but I get the feeling this Slate writer is making a hash of it. It doesn't seem to have a lot to do with Newcomb's Paradox.

Like,

Now, Roko’s Basilisk is only dangerous if you believe all of the above preconditions and commit to making the two-box deal with the Basilisk.

Why is it necessary to make the "two box" deal? I thought the point was, choose "Box A: Devote your life to helping create Roko's Basilisk" or RB when it comes about will punish you forever. It's just a version of Pascal's Wager, there's no paradox.

aren't they saying that the thing is, from the future, conspiring to be created by "blackmailing" programmers with a threat of torture? how would this happen? if it already exists in the future why would it need to manipulate the past in order to exist? if it doesn't yet exist who is doing the blackmailing?

I don't think Auerbach is wrong exactly, but it's a bit of a gappy walkthrough. The rational wiki (i know) fills in some bits:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk
the 'simulation of you = you' is one crucial & batty point.

also discussed a little here:
rationalism AI cultist creeps
relatedly -
Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

@Men's Swinging You have to have already bought into the "simulation argument", which says that if the physics of our universe allow for an eventual future in which there are AIs capable of running detailed simulations of large chunks of the universe, then it's actually quite likely that what we're living in is not the "real" universe, but one of those simulations.

If the Basilisk awakens a hundred years from now, it can review the history of everyone who was involved in either helping or hindering its awakening, and create simulated minds that "perfectly" mimic those of people who are alive today. And then, having programmed those minds into functional equivalents of those who opposed it, it can plunge them into simulated Hells.

It's kind of loopy, just, not quite as loopy as it sounds. :-)

what is the overlap between these singularity people and the people featured in the baffler article mordy linked upthread? both groups seem rather eschatological: the singularity folks literally so, but the neo-reactionaries in the sense of fantasizing a world in which the ties between the individual and society are forever severed. this at a time when we have a failing ecosystem and other pressing problems that require collective action.

also the idea of the singularity, impractical as it is seeing how crude AI is currently, is fucking scary. who would want that?

99% of the basilisk ppl have read i have no mouth but i must scream

At the top levels Thiel's a link - I think he funds (funded?) Yudkowsky's AI institute.

Idk about overlap between the lower levels - but this rationalwiki makes it sound like yes, the dark enlightenment racist monarchists did spring from lesswrong
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement
(Idk about background of rationalwiki btw, phone posting can't source check now)

big harper's article relevant to this thread

but this rationalwiki makes it sound like yes, the dark enlightenment racist monarchists did spring from lesswrong

i don't think this is true, the big erm "foundational" people of the DE/neo-reactionary scene were sui generis & largely distinct from your rationalist types, let alone LW singly(with some exceptions; clearly the people who founded the "more right" blog were playing off it/reacting against it)

mordy is that the harper's article scott alexander reprinted at length on his blog a few months ago?

it did sound familiar as I was reading it

Strictly speaking, anyone who stans for racist monarchy is invariably someone who believes that racist monarchy would result in more power, wealth and sex for themselves. The only noticeable good they are getting out of this 'movement' is the ego-gratification normally associated with cliques of adolescents telling each other they are smarter and cooler than the other kids.

"strictly speaking" no one holds any ideological beliefs that aren't in some way self-serving so i don't see why you'd focus on a particular group's hypocrisies except to highlight your own right-on politics

xp goole - i don't know, i don't think i read that alexander piece.

i don't see why you'd focus on a particular group's hypocrisies except to highlight your own right-on politics

My point was not that racist monarchists are hypocrites. afaics, they are not. They seem fairly forthright in their belief that they are smarter than the other kids and would be the first in line for positions of power when their racist monarchist revolution occurs.

My point was that despite their presumed superior intelligence they seem incapable of making a sound analysis of probable outcomes and are patently engaged with hopeless pathetic delusions -- which is so grossly at odds with their self-image as Clear Thinking Master Intelligences that they are not hypocrites, but fools.

feel like their should be some kind of counter/pushback to these people - a MoreWrong debunking site, say

it wouldn't help

yeah tough to pierce the veil of self-righteousness/indignation I suppose

I just wanted to make the MoreWrong joek anyway

"strictly speaking" no one holds any ideological beliefs that aren't in some way self-serving so i don't see why you'd focus on a particular group's hypocrisies except to highlight your own right-on politics

― Mordy, Monday, January 26, 2015 1:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

trenchant social etc

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2013-10/enhanced/webdr06/29/15/anigif_enhanced-buzz-25832-1383073275-16.gif

"strictly speaking" no one holds any ideological beliefs that aren't in some way self-serving so i don't see why you'd focus on a particular group's hypocrisies except to highlight your own right-on politics

it's just silly. these guys have some cool ideas and some stupid ideas. what makes them interesting are the cool ideas, not that they are yet another group that doesn't fit ilx politics.

what are these "cool ideas"? it all reads terribly misshapen to me.