• scruiser@awful.systems
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    11 months ago

    The thing that gets me the most about this is they can’t imagine that Eliezer might genuinely be in favor of inclusive language, and thus his use of people’s preferred pronouns must be a deliberate calculated political correctness move and thus in violation of the norms espoused by the sequences (which the author takes as a given the Eliezer has never broken before, and thus violating his own sequences is some sort of massive and unique problem).

    To save you all having to read the rant…

    —which would have been the end of the story, except that, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, “A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning”, in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language in a way that suggested that people were philosophically confused if they disputed that men could be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.

    Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.

    Caliphate officials (Eliezer, Scott, Anna) and loyalists (Steven) were patronizingly consoling me

    One of the top replies does call this like it is…

    A meaningful meta-level reply, such as “dude, relax, and get some psychological help” will probably get me classified as an enemy, and will be interpreted as further evidence about how sick and corrupt is the mainstream-rationalist society.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      11 months ago

      Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.

      ahaha, this was a joke inside the subculture, which Scott A even posted about - because Scott was posting a lot on Slate Star Codex and Eliezer wasn’t really posting much at that time.

      • scruiser@awful.systems
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        11 months ago

        Right, its a joke, in the sense that the phrase “Caliph” started its usage in a non-serious fashion that got a chuckle, but the way Zack uses it, it really doesn’t feel like a joke. It feels like the author genuinely wants Eliezer to act as the central source of authority and truth among the rationalists and thus Eliezer must not endorse the heresy of inclusive language or else it will mean their holy prophet has contradicted the holy scripture causing a paradox.

          • corbin@awful.systems
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            11 months ago

            My “I am not a prophet, do not follow me, this is not a religion” shirt sure does get a lot of questions.

            • mountainriver@awful.systems
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              11 months ago

              I am late to sneer culture. I read HPMOR back in the day and even visited LW and then forgot about it. EA (mosquito) was on my radar but since philanthropy is anyway a bandaid on societal problems I hadn’t bothered. Until FTX crashed. I already knew crypto was a scam, but a scam that wraps itself in bad philosophy is more interesting.

              After a lot of old Twitter threads and Tumblr posts it finally clicked: They made the Harry Potter fanfic guy their prophet!

              Which is so stupid that it fits perfectly into our timeline.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      11 months ago

      The false dichotomy between “material/biology/physics-based” and “metaphysical i.e. fake” is everywhere in everything lesswrong outputs yet it never fails to annoy me. Sometimes I wish I could take these people aside and bully some sense into them, but due to their nazi leanings maybe being selfdestructively wrong and stupid is a fitting punishment.