omg she literally was born in the wrong era it’s not fair…. She deserves to have this adapted into a prestige miniseries with Nicholas galitzine and Jacob elordi… “her imitations of homosexuality were undignified” is breaking my heart 💔 like who among us has not heard that. Waow. We really are the daughters of the fujoshis you couldn’t burn
@sesquipedalian-thaumaturge thanks for the explanation
A rationalist-adjacent startup recently started to sell a genetically modified mouth bacteria that produces alcohol instead of lactic acid, so it doesn't cause cavities, and kills off the existing mouth bacteria that does. The amount of alcohol it produces is low enough not to matter for most people, but if you have a particular mutation that's more common among Asians it could increase your risk of mouth cancer.
I can, I think, explain most of the origins and connotations of the terms rationalist, transhumanist, rationalist and e/acc, but I am in a doctor's office and will not get to it til later. The current subculture basically traces its roots directly to a usenet group.
So the oldest term for this is "transhumanist", and it goes back to the 50s-60s. Broadly, they are technological enthusiasts. There is also "posthumanism" which is roughly the same thing but often with more literary criticism. The idea is to become something more than human, or that something that is more than or not quite human is how the future is going to go or should go. This can be from augmenting humans, uploading humans to computers, constructing or growing new beings that are more than entirely human, etc.
Similar in its pedigree, the term "singularity" has been around since then as a term referring not to a purely mathematical singularity, which is a point where things tend to infinity, or to a physical quantity that results in an infinity when calculated, like the density of a black hole, but to the possibility of an AI becoming infinitely intelligent (or at least: infinite on any scale we currently use) once it learns to do, essentially, AI research better and faster than humans can, leading to a chain reaction.
During the '90s there was a usenet group called Extropians, which was what they decided to call transhumanism on usenet. They were broadly into many things including cryonics (freezing yourself after you died) and nanotechnology. (AI was there too.) The term Extropian is no longer in common use. For all I know the usenet extropians group is still going, but I get the impression that it has mostly suffered from time slowly chipping away at its membership.
"Extropian" being an antonym for "entropian", ie, an extropian is against entropy and, conversely, in favor of extropy. In the 90s or later, if you ran into someone saying they were a transhumanist, a posthumanist, or an extropian, they broadly thought that the future version of humanity was going to be better than just being human and were in a hurry for it to happen.
There are two prominent alumni of the Extropians mailing list. One is Nick Bostrom, who has for the last decade or two been publishing papers and books from his seat as a faculty member at Oxford declaring many things about existential risks to humanity and that we have a moral responsibility to conquer the universe and fill it with as many humans or post-humans as possible. Half or more of his published work is stuff that was already on Extropians or on various blogs associated with that group of people. He just made it officially a work by an Oxford philosopher when he wrote his thought-piece. Bostom's school of thought is also sometimes called "longtermism".
The other prominent alumnus of Extropians is Eliezer Yudkowsky, and he is responsible for the term "rationalist". His largest contributions to popularizing it are being the de facto and/or de jure king of lesswrong.com from 2010 until about 2014 and writing a really long harry potter fanfic. (If you don't want to read a million words of prose and are prone to fixating on this kind of thing don't click that link.)
Sometime between 2000 and 2010 or so, various people tried to make "singulitarian" a thing. It did not stick. People kept calling themselves transhumanists until "rationalist" took off. Other prominent rationalists include Scott Alexander, alias SlateStarCodex, alias AstralCodexTen, who -- for my two cents -- is sometimes very insightful, but usually just really annoying and extremely prone to just-asking-questions about a lot of stuff simply to be controversial. He then acts really surprised when people get angry at him.
(Lots of Scott's fans seem to be really into eugenics. I am not sure this is entirely Scott's fault, but I am pretty sure it's at least somewhat his fault.)
It is important to note that "rationalism" doesn't mean anything. Like, if you try to extrapolate explicit views from the label alone, it will not work. The community has written, in aggregate, millions of words explaining what, exactly, they mean by "rationality" or "rationalism", including the earlier-linked fan fiction. It is like trying to figure out what zen Buddhism is like from a definition of the word "zen". The entire religion is based largely on refining and discussing their understanding of zen; criticisms of the concept have to either engage with the tradition as a whole, or ignore the concept entirely.
Probably you want to ignore it.
Anyway, Eliezer has one chief obsession which is the notion that AI is going to kill us all. (Shorthand: "paperclip us".) This is partly a reaction to and elaboration of Ray Kurzweil's utopian work in the 90s in books like "The Singularity is Near" in which he expounds the notion that AI is awesome and will make everything awesome forever. (I don't know if people still refer to "the singularity" as "the rapture of the nerds" when they want to explain it derisively, but that is effectively what Kurzeil explains a technological singularity as).
Because Eliezer's chief obsession is the notion that AI is going to paperclip us (ie, kill us all), various members of the rationalist diaspora are also obsessed with it. They have perpetually campaigned for regulations against AI research, especially the last few years. Essentially none of them have happened.
(There is an adjacent drama about the label "effective altruist", which is largely overlapping with "rationalist", and is currently disowned by all respectable charities and parties now because SBF and Elon Musk have made the term synonymous with weird grifters.)
"e/acc" is the johnny-come-lately to the scene. It is maybe a year old now? It is best understood as a heretical sect of rationalists. It stands for "effective accelerationism", and there is a manifesto or something around, but the gist is this: AI is coming, it will cause the rapture of the nerds, and everything will be awesome. AI will not kill us all, and we should not slow down, we should speed up. Everyone who thinks that AI might kill us all is being kind of a pussy.
e/acc is lead or inspired by a person using the tag Beff Jezos on twitter, who is (I think?) a physics dude who used to work at Google and who currently owns some kind of startup for making quantum machines that do computing but which are, he insists, not quantum computers. (He probably insists on this because the last five or so times a startup has claimed to be making a quantum computer it has been a complete scam, and so the label is toxic.)
There's also people calling themselves "postrationalists" and I have absolutely no idea what they think that means. I am pretty sure they are another schism in the Church of Rationalism but it is unclear if they have any specific beliefs.
The label "doomer" is sometimes used, usually derogatorily, to refer to people who are of the belief that AI may kill us all. Doomer and e/acc are direct antonyms; e/acc is basically rationalism, but opposed to the doomerism inherent in rationalism due to Eliezer's substantial contributions to the community's understanding of what they mean when they call themselves rationalists.
That's roughly who's who, and what all the tags AI nerds have on Twitter mean. Any other tag is probably something that person made up for themselves, a shitpost, or both.
I don't use their tags because I don't like being an -ist, or part of an -ism, and honestly also because I am old enough to remember when the labels were different and all these newfangled labels sound even more made up and silly than the old ones did to me.
@sesquipedalian-thaumaturge thanks for the explanation
A rationalist-adjacent startup recently started to sell a genetically modified mouth bacteria that produces alcohol instead of lactic acid, so it doesn't cause cavities, and kills off the existing mouth bacteria that does. The amount of alcohol it produces is low enough not to matter for most people, but if you have a particular mutation that's more common among Asians it could increase your risk of mouth cancer.
I can, I think, explain most of the origins and connotations of the terms rationalist, transhumanist, rationalist and e/acc, but I am in a doctor's office and will not get to it til later. The current subculture basically traces its roots directly to a usenet group.
Every time I see this I lose my marbles I love it so much. "For some reason I yelled who is in here as I was falling" is the point where my soul leaves my body. God I love.
shit i thought i had no more media to go through but I did not realize dungeon meshi was still airing weekly, normally i wait til things are done and binge them but i guess i gotta get on that weekly fix thing like a pleb
