New article about the Zizians in the NY Times. That art is way too badass for what the cult actually was.

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New article about the Zizians in the NY Times. That art is way too badass for what the cult actually was.
Robert Evans saying that Roko's Basilisk is basically atheists reinventing Calvinism is spot-on.
"Roko's Basilisk is Pascal's Wager but God is an evil robot."
I also like he points out that all of this is people whose enlightened idea of how a future super-robot will work is from Terminator and The Matrix, and both of THEM were just stealing it from Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
...Except in that story, the God-Robot was doing that for a very specific reason in the context of that story, not just because it was generally an asshole.
Who has the foresight to conceive of an advanced AI that is all-powerful, yet then they go "but it's probably going to be a giant petty bitch just like we are."
Why would it be? It's a robot. It doesn't have the same needs and wants that we do.
Do these people really perceive of "advanced intelligence" as automatically being self-righteous and inherently cruel?
That says way more about how fucked up these people are than anything about robots.
And if they think this...why are they trying to make it? Because a lot of them are programmers and they're working for AI startups. If you think there's no god now, and if we make one it will be evil, why the fuck are you working on it?
At least when people invented God thousands of years ago, they fantasized that he was fundamentally good.
Who actively tries to invent an evil supercomputer?
Again, I think that tells us everything we need to know about Silicon Valley.
...Also LLMs aren't genuine intelligence, we can barely define what that even is, but it is probably more than "math that tricks people into thinking a computer knows what it's doing because it can have a conversation with us."
You should listen to the latest Behind the Bastards series on the Zizians .
Crazy ass online subculture of Rationalists that eventually got people killed.
Started spinning out when one of the founders read a Harry Potter fanfiction that changed their life, apparently.
You don't even understand how embarrassing the whole thing is.
The Rationalists' whole thing is they believe a super intelligent AI will be made that will create HELL, LIKE ACTUAL HELL for humanity, so their mission is to ensure the AI will be good instead.
I truly just feel bad because these are not WELL people. If you unironically call yourself a Vegan Sith, I just think you should log off for a while and touch grass.
3125. No Cantos (2025 Piece)
This is "No Cantos (2025 Piece)." Activate the forest weapon.
No cantos for the war-hungry, please. And let me forget (not really) your insipid kisses on my pillow. We're in the age where a full moon will bring out the rationalists. Careful! Another dream of you walking away in a slushy parking lot wheels forth. Another you coming back as a beautiful stranger with secrets and a slice of pie. I can smell the spring on everything now. The wet trees and sound. The thrum of the insect world beating its drums of war. Eat your sugar now! Explain your confusion to someone close. I'm going to stop now—I'm sorry. All my life I've been a victim of politeness.
I really feel like Nate Silver should be more of a rationalist icon than he is.
He's an outspoken Bayesian who believes in probabilistic reasoning and does explicit calibration tests of himself. He's incredibly good at this, producing consistently well-calibrated forecasts across multiple domains. (And he's winning!)
He even exemplifies the actual primary rationalist virtue, which is pissing people off by being contrarian on the internet.
I suspect he loses points for forecasting with actual math, rather than putting a number on his intuition and muttering something about priors. Doing math in your Bayesian updates is cheating!
So I saw that ratblr was trending, and I consider myself vaguely rat-adjacent-adjacent, even if just as a lurker, so my first reaction was "Oh God what happened Now".
What happened is that tumblr is apparently very excited about pet rats today :).
hello everyone! tumblr seems like a plausible successor site for posters as twitter becomes less fun, so i'm moving part of my exodus here.
where on here do the rationalists hang out? or the zoomer transfems? or the zoomer transfem rationalists, even?