#rationalist

[loki-zen]

hey bros and girls redpill me on something:

Is there any argument for why someone who does not believe in G should nevertheless believe in AGI?

[pieartsystuff]

An atheist/non-spiritual approach to tarot

I am not a spiritual person. While I recognize these are important to many people, spirituality, magic, "magick", and "metaphysics" are not practices I follow or believe in. When people talk about crystals, reiki, astrology, things like that, the best they'll get from me is a polite nod and a tight smile while I hold back opinions that I know they won't like.

However. I will go to bat for tarot (and oracle decks et al). I find them incredibly useful tools, and not because of card spirits or any divinatory power within a deck. I regularly read tarot as a meditative and reflective practice, and I know other atheist tarot-readers as well.

Why am I making this exception when other magick makes me roll my eyes? Well, I think tarot works in a way that the others don't. If you're not spiritual and curious about a rational explanation for tarot as opposed to a "magickal" one, the one-word answer is: semiotics.

Semiotics is the study of the communication of meaning via signs. A sign is anything that represents some other concept. A crown is not just an object one wears on their head: it's a sign of royalty, authority, and power. A rose is not just a plant: it's a sign of passion and love. Semiosis is the act of understanding and creating signs, i.e. interpreting meaning within a certain context. I'm no expert on semiotics as a field, so I won't go too far into its nuances, but for this purpose, signs are symbols.

That means when you think of a rose, or a sword, or a cup, it's not just the object, but also the semiotics and symbols you associate with the object. These connotation come from stories (fictional or nonfictional), cultural customs, linguistic quirks, education, the news, and, crucially, personal experiences. And tarot is chock-full of these semiotic signs. I'd guess a single tarot card probably has like 5 pieces of symbolism on it at minimum. It could be an object, an action being taken in the card, the colors, the composition of the illustration, the words written on it. Even if you know literally nothing about tarot or the deck I'm using, if I pull out a card that looks like this* and say "this is you", you might have some guesses as to what it means:

This is even more nuanced due to the connotations and semiotics that tarot itself has constructed for itself over the decades. In tarot, the suit, rank, and arcana also contain their own meanings. While "the devil", "the lovers" or "death" are signs with very obvious meanings for a lay person, the cards' usual meanings aren't quite what you'd expect if you're not familiar with tarot.

Still, if you ignore literally all the tarot-specific symbolism and semiotics, and go with what you see in front of you, then it becomes very clear that tarot, in the end, is all about telling a story for yourself, about yourself. Like I alluded to before, it's not just the common understandings of symbols that are important for tarot. What is probably more important, in my opinion, is what you personally have as associations with a certain symbol. This is where the card art and signs of the deck you've chosen become REALLY important.

For example, the Ten of Cups generally means family, celebration, and harmony. It traditionally looks like this:

In the card, you can see several signs: a countryside, a happy couple, children playing, a rainbow, and plentiful cups floating in the air because symbolism.

However, in my favorite deck, the Chromatic Fates tarot, the Ten of Cups looks like this:

I don't associate that card, in my deck, to be a good thing. I've had terrible experiences with family and alcoholism, so whenever I pull a reading with the Ten of Cups, I go "uh-oh". That "uh-oh", or any other emotion I might have that is elicited by the signs of the card, is what makes tarot specific and personal.

The lens by which you read the cards is a microcosm of the lens you're using to look at life in the context you exist in. If you are seeing life from a biased lens--which we usually are at all times--then that bias will reflect back at you based on what you notice in the cards vs what you don't, out of the several symbols present. For example, of I were to look at the traditional Ten of Cups card and see the children playing, and I've desperately wanted to have kids with my partner but couldn't, I might see it as a melancholy or mocking card--focusing on the children and dismissing the rainbow entirely. If I were coming out as queer, I might see the rainbow as a sign that my family will be accepting, and not really care about whatever the ten floating cups are supposed to mean right now. And so on.

Tarot, like all stories we tell ourselves, is a mirror held up to our own life, personality, and experiences. You see what you expect to see, what you think you should see. And here is the secret sauce to tarot: unlike in other cases where that may be seen as lying to yourself or self-perpetuating some thought pattern or being blind to the truth…in tarot, the expectation for what you want/hope/dread/expect to see is the truth. Because the truth is not divination--it never was. It's "What am I feeling right now? What am I seeing?"

*psst....don't recognize the "Eighth of Winter" card? That's because it's from an oracle deck called the Normal Tarot. It's awesome, go check it out!

[adiabaticgarden]

The market resolves when the last Avery clicks

A shiny new prediction market appeared, before the mods removed it at 11:11pm.

In a bathroom, an Avery stared at their face, marking it with eyeliner. “Will this Avery East-Asian pass? YES: 33% NO: 67%. 23 votes” appeared on the mirror. They smeared the word NO with cherry lipstick. Dissociation in progress.

The Chinese are too familiar with dimorphic facial characteristics; Long hair alone is insufficient to pass.

The Avery of ancient Lin’an was a court debater, dying of suffocation when the emperor spoonfed hot coal down his throat. The Avery of Shinjuku was a nameless immigrant from Kathmandu, known only in a post about violent public suicide near a train station.

Avery yearned to be seen; They wished not to be found. Averies typically do not agree.

In an alley, an elderly Avery knelt besides cages. Birds of yellow, leaf-green and white. Living in extremely confined ways. Not bright; Not tragic. The gray parrot’s cage has a QR code. Old Avery scanned it with his son’s phone. The market loaded: “Will this bird speak again?” YES: 94%. He misclicks “YES”.

The mathematical Avery was peeling an orange. A Seville, bitter, chosen on purpose. The sunlight vectors petitioned the room and settled neatly on the floor. He sections the orange, methodically, into a flower. He moved sequentially, placing each segment on a plate beside: a printout of Grothendieck’s Esquisse d’un Programme, a worn paperback of Intercourse, a photograph of Badwater Basin printed on the back of a Finnegans Wake index card… And a terminal with yet another prediction market. P(Avery deletes source code) = 0.50000. He nudges one segment. The display ticks to 0.49999. This Avery existed in abstraction, theory, academia. In closed systems.

Averies agreeing: 2/10.

An Avery was bankrupt in Hong Kong, spent their last money in an arcade, alone in a booth. Every missed note pushed the candle bar toward “YES, delete”. The rhythm game paused at INSERT COIN, staring. It was a question with a single acceptable input. An Avery in a black hoodie walked in, cyberpunk, holding a Monster can. She clocked him instantly.

“Hey… Aren’t you the guy who made a market about deleting himself?”

“Yes,” Avery said, didn’t blink. “It resolved N/A.”

The prediction stalled at 49%. Hoodie-girl laughed, sharp. “L. Skill issue. Can’t even hold 50%.” She tapped on her phone. Vote: “YES”.

Averies in consensus: 3/10.

Breakfast, Avery’s place, 6:51 AM.

The cooking robot blared. “Good morning :D Would you like today’s relationship forecast? P(Avery is girl) = 0.5 +/- 0.000. Updated every 5 minutes.” “Thank you for the unsolicited information.” Avery said, retrieved a marker and scribbled on a sticky note: Humans are not—The marker dried. They opened the browser; an kinetic of a hetero, normative, couple blocked the viewport. The sticky note slid, covering the last trailing 0.

Time: 00:17 AM. Location: Twitter DMs.

An Avery opened their DMs. Overcaffeinated. He wrote like a 2010s wordpress comment, unhurried and slightly out of time.

“Hey. I knew you from the forums. This conversation is due ten years ago.” Silence. “haha you never replied.” He sent two memes, one about Sasha Gusev, the other about people sea attacks. He squinted at a question. Couldn’t understand it. Clicked “no”.

Averies agreeing: still 3/10. Stale.

Somewhere in Asia. A high school. An Avery soft-forked himself into a feral node, roaming the metro stations. The glass door displayed: “Will Avery self-delete by 2030? BID 0.97 ASK 0.98.” The door slid open before the trade executes. Avery stepped in.

New Year’s Eve. Rooftop. City fireworks blast. Drones overhead began forming ‘2030’. “Will Avery self-delete/be here?” a market hovered. Avery leaned against the railing. Drones overhead rearranged.

“Humans are not—” Someone yelled in the distance.

He input: NO.

Market resolved.

All available Averies have voted.

Humans are not—

-----

I WROTE THIS INSTEAD OF SLEEPING!!! written earlier 2025 after … some people posted … too many unhinged markets. Today I found it in drafts along with 300 other unpublished items, edited and just posted as is. shrugs

[derseprinceoftbd]

A friendly reminder that the motto of the Rat is "I disavow". They claim they have always been against what they cheered for when it comes to pass.

I made this post about the 21st Century Shoah back before we knew what the death toll would be, and I have recently been getting utterly mobbed with Rats who have found it and are defending themselves by saying that nooooooo the Thoughtleaders were *totally* in favor of USAID and PEPFAR and not addressing in any way their decades-long histories of arguing that Someone Needs To Do Something About the "low IQ populations", or that LaSota blatantly revealed that the main goal of the movement is and always has been extermination of the Unworthy.

This is their trick: they never want their ideas to succeed, they'll cry, whenever confronted on what they've done. The Nazis of the modern day don't even have the backbone of those of the past and their hangers-on, whose cry is "it didn't happen, but if it did, it was a good thing". The Rats are far less shameless, in an utterly disgusting way. They refuse all responsibility.

[anticbrvtalist]

Giuseppe Terragni - House for an artist, Milan 1933

[changeling-lux]

Hello! I am a graduate student and am conducting fieldwork for my Folklore and Folklife class. My topic is: Fanfiction and Folklore Among Members of the Rationality Community. If you are/ were involved with the Rationality Community and are 18 years of age or older (class requirement for paperwork reasons), I would love to interview you for my project!

It would mean so much to have your participation; please DM me to set up an interview time!

[fieryfalcon]

Vegan computer savants with Bay Area ties linked to deaths across U.S., authorities say

Several members of a Bay Area group of computer savants and vegan activists have been investigated, criminally charged or deemed persons of

As horror-movie Gothic as a samurai sword attack on an octogenarian in a desolate corner of the San Francisco Bay might sound, it was only the first in a series of alleged violent crimes that law enforcement authorities have linked to members of the strange group Lind had welcomed into his motley community.

Over the past few years, several members of the group have been investigated, criminally charged or deemed persons of interest in incidents that resulted in six deaths across the U.S.