

United Healthcare of all things is green though.
Bistable multivibrator
Non-state actor
Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS
United Healthcare of all things is green though.
I don’t think Yud is that hard to explain. He’s a science fiction fanboy who never let go of his adolescent delusions of grandeur. He was never successfully disabused from the notion that he’s always the smartest person in the room and he didn’t pursue high school, let alone college education to give him the expertise to recognize just how difficult his goal is. Blud thinks he’s gonna create a superhumanly intelligent machine when he struggles with basic programming tasks.
He’s kinda comparable to Elon Musk in a way. Brain uploading and superhuman AI are sort of in the same “cool sci fi tech” category as Mars colonization, brain implants and vactrain gadgetbahns. It’s easy to forget that not too many years ago the public’s perception of Musk was very different. A lot of people saw him as a cool Tony Stark figure who was finally going to give us our damn flying cars.
Yudkowsky is sometimes good at knowing just a bit more about things than his audience and making it seem like he knows a lot more than he does. The first time I started reading HPMoR I thought the author was an actual theoretical physicist or something and when the story said I could learn everything Harry knows for free on this LessWrong site I though I could learn what it means for something to be “implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian” or what that those “timeless formulations of quantum mechanics” were about. Instead it was just poorly paced essays on bog standard logical fallacies and cognitive biases explained using their weird homegrown terminology.
Also, it’s really easy to be convinced of thing when you really want to believe in it. I know personally some very smart and worldly people who have been way too impressed by ChatGPT. Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.
His fantasies of becoming immortal through having a God AI simulate his mind forever aren’t the weird part. Any imaginative 15 year old computer nerd can have those fantasies. The weird parts are that he never grew out of those fantasies and that he managed to make some rich and influential contacts while holding on to his chuunibyō delusions.
Anyone can become a cult leader through the power of buying into your own hype and infinite thielbux.
“THE REAL POLITICAL SPECTRUM”
On the left “SERVANTS OF THE AEONS”, humanoid energy beings among space nebulae. On the right “SLAVES OF THE ARCHONS”, reptilian humanoids.
The spectrum from left to right, with symbols in parentheses:
A conventional two-axis (Left/Right, Authoritarian/Libertarian) political compass chart. Authoritarian left, authoritarian right, and libertarian right all represented by a spooky profile portrait of Max Stirner smoking a cigar. Libertarian Left quadrant contains a smaller image of the diagram itself, which contains still smaller image of the diagram itself, except the libertarian left quadrant says “decentralized chomskian anarcho-molotov-cocktailism” in unreadably small type.
I feel I’ve lost enough sanity transcribing these that I’m almost ready to make a political compass chart myself.
This is only the beginning. Check these out!
Left edge of the image labeled “Progressivism”, right edge labeled “Libertarianism”.
Above: A series of points on a horizontal line, each labeled with the name of a political ideology or system and a representative picture. Rightmost two of the dots are blue, others are red. From left to right:
Below: Flags labeled with political ideologies and systems. Arrangement of flags notated as [X, Y, Flag, Label] where X represents approximate relative distance from left edge and Y represents approximate relative distance from bottom edge.
A square chart divided in quadrants and colored with a gradient, which is symmetric with respect to the origin. Each quadrant is subdivided into a 19x19 grid. Axes are labeled and the labels’ background colored as follows:
X-axis left: “Post-Modern Relativism/Religiosity” (blue), middle: “Strong Fact Based Inter-subjective Analysis” (yellow), right: ‘Pseudo-Objective “Science” Worship’ (blue).
Y-axis top: “Status Quo” (red), middle: “Swift, Pragmatic Reform for Social + Economic Justice” (yellow), bottom: “Regressive Revolutionary” (red).
Each quadrant it yellow at origin and purple near their respective outermost corners. The remaining corners are orange next to Y axis and green next to X axis.
Caption At the bottom “On all axes, to be closer to the middle is to trend towards the path to an ideal”
Labeled points by quadrant:
Top left:
Top Right:
Bottom Left:
Bottom Right:
A blue question mark shape on white background. Image titled “Matt Boyle’s Question Mark Politics”. Ideologies and political figures are marked along the curve of the question mark, starting from the "upper end of the hook and towards the dot at the bottom:
On the dot at the bottom of the question mark:
An equilateral triangle formed from four smaller congruent equilateral triangles (AKA a Triforce shape) with political ideologies written in bubble-style labels arranged as follows:
Written directly on the triangle edges without a bubble:
X-axis goes from “SOCIALISM” on the left to “CORPORATISM” on the right. Y-axis goes from “LIBERTY” at the top to “TYRANNY” at the bottom. On the Y-axis lies a thick double arrow labeled “GOVERNMENT” and colored with a gradient from white at the top arrowhead labeled “LESS” to red on the bottom arrowhead labeled “MORE”, resembling a compass needle.
Near the top left and right corners of the diagram are labels “LEFT” and “RIGHT”, respectively.
Around the arrow’s shaft is a yellow circle of curved directional arrows, each pointing along the arc towards the bottom of the circle.
Dashed lines from the top of the diagram curve around the needle and yellow circle similarly to magnetic field lines, converge back towards the center below the compass, and end in downward pointing arrowheads.
Arranged around the yellow circle in terms of clock face hour hand positions:
The left half of the X-axis is labeled “LIBERALS” above and “DEMOCRATS” on the bottom and a blue donkey symbol next to the needle. The right half is similarly labeled “CONSERVATIVES” and “REPUBLICANS” with a red elephant symbol.
Above and below the X-axis are dashed horizontal lines. The area between the dashed lines is labeled “MODERATES”. The top dashed line is labeled “Libertarianism” with arrows pointing upwards and the bottom dashed line is labeled “Secular Moralism” with arrows pointing downwards.
The top left of the moderates area is labeled “JEFFERSONIAN”, top right is “JACKSONIAN”, bottom left is “WILSONIAN” and bottom right “HAMILTONIAN”.
The field lines converging in from the left/right sides of the compass towards the bottom pass by labels “POLITICALLY CORRECT”/“PIOUSLY CORRECT”, “ECONOMIC INTERVENTIONISM”/“MILITARY INTERVENTIONISM”, “COMMUNISM”/“THEOCRACY”, respectively. They meed in the middle and pass through “COLLECTIVISM”, “FASCISM” and “TOTALITARIANISM”.
Blue circle labeled “Patriarchy” partially covering a pink circle labeled “Matriarchy”. Left side represents “Gender Atheism”, right side “Sexuality Atheism”. Yellow arrow pointing from top left to bottom right labeled “Axis of Care”. Red arrow from bottom left to top right labeled “Axis of Knowledge” The intersection of the axes of Care and Knowledge is labeled “Market Economy”.
Left of the Patriarchy circle is “Men’s Rights Movement” and to the right of the circle is “Fourth-Wave Feminism”. Left of the Matriarchy circle is “Radical Feminism” and to the right “Liberal Feminism”.
Labels connected by small black arrows are arranged on the circles like so:
Near the bottom end of the Axis of Knowledge is “Cultural Marxism”, from which an arrow points along the axis to ‘“True” Anarchy’. Slightly further along the axis, close to the overlapping edge of the blue circle is “Soft Sciences” from which arrows point in two directions. The first one points towards the arrowhead at the bottom end of Axis of Care. On the arrowhead is “Welfare State”, which leads to “Left Totalitarianism” at the tip of the arrow, then to “Marxism-Leninism” to the left and back to Welfare State.
The second path from Soft sciences is three consecutive arrows following the edge of the Patriarchy circle to “Positivist Materialism” at the tip of the Axis of Knowledge arrow, which leads to “Real Anarchy” on the arrowhead. Between Market Economy and Real Anarchy on the Axis of Knowledge is “Hard Sciences”, from which another three arrow chain along the covered edge of Matriarchy circle leads to Cultural Marxism.
Opposite to Real Anarchy, on the Patriarchy side of Axis of Care is “Theocracy”, which leads backwards on the Axis to “Right Totalitarianism”, to “Austrian School” on the right, and again through Positivist Materialism to Real Anarchy.
Transcriptions for the last two will be in follow-up reply. I’m hitting the character limit.
I know this is going to hurt millions of regular people in and outside the US, many of them through no fault of their own. Despite that I can’t help myself.
8kw is rookie numbers. That’s like a median Eliezer tweet.
Hi, I’m an unimtentional moderate centrist! I don’t have an ideology, only views! My overton window is a peephole! Kamala is a far leftist! Trump is orange! People should stop treating politics like team sports and join the non team sports tribe like me! Political correctness gone mad! Let me tell you about Chesterton’s fence! Everyone’s sheeple except my flock! Say it with me: I’m an independent thinker!
Matt Levine, qntm
I can see why these would appeal to LW crowd. One of them writes cosmic horror about monstrous alien phenomena that can’t be directly perceived preying on humanity and all life in the universe, and qntm writes wordy science fiction.
No comment on Wildbow. I’m sure Worm is excellent but I’m just not in the market for three HPMoR wordcounts of capeshit, so I don’t know what his deal is. Bummer for him to have one of his characters be the indirect namesake of a notorious murder cult.
Wow, what an honor it must be to get invited to speak with such luminaries as Scott Siskind, Jordan Lasker, Eric S. Raymond, Paul Graham, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Vitalik Buterin and Aella. Maybe if I write ten million words of high-concept genre fiction I can make the organizers think I’m also a white supremacist and/or a neoliberal vampire.
Artificial Intelligence is the future of climate resilient design in the same way that asian pseudo-medicinal ED treatments are the future of the white rhinoceros.
Wow, farriers are going crazy with these modern horseshoe designs!
Above: a single axis scatter plot. The ends of the axis are labeled “Left” and “Right”. Data points are distributed similarly to normal distribution, the center being more concentrated than the extremes. Caption: “What people think the political spectrum is vs What it actually is”.
Below: A two-dimensional scatter plot. The ends of the horizontal axis are labeled “Left” and “Right” and the vertical axis is labeled “Independent Thought” at the top and “Groupthink” at the bottom. The data points are evenly distributed inside a bell curve shape, with the peak of the hump at Independent Thought and between Left and Right, and the wide bottom of the bell spanning the whole Left-Right axis at maximum Groupthink.
Data points near the top of the bell (Independent-Center) labeled ‘“Un-intentional moderates” (from Paul Graham’s The Two Kinds of Moderate)’. [Original image uses double quotes around the term Un-intentional moderates and single quotes around the title of Paul Graham’s shitpost.]
Data points at the bottom center of the bell (Groupthink-Center) labeled “Intentional moderates”.
In the bottom corner a watermark crediting the image to “@shw1nm”.
I love the implication that being an independent thinker means agreeing with both the majority and other independent thinkers.
Why does NaNoWriMo need a nonprofit anyway? What’s next, No Nut November LLC?
It stands for Effective Altruism, which isn’t about either of those things.
Taking the “insult to life itself” to a whole another level.
I didn’t mean I expected it to be pro-crypto, just a little surprised it actually namedropped NFTs and blockchain at all.
A recent chapter of one of the official Touhou Project manga had a jab at crypto schemes. This isn’t one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
Not that you, under any circumstances, “have to hand it to” alleged convicted assaulter Shädman, but at least he drew his immature shock porn using his own mid artistic skills.
Those comments are tight, but really the problem with trying to explain any of this to laypeople isn’t exposing how wrong it is. The hard part is making any sense of it.
Like if I told you Donald Trump has connections with a cult that believes grandmothers are a species of raspberry, whose goal is turning Denmark into cheese and oh, a splinter group of theirs just murdered a police officer. That will just raise more questions than it answers. How the hell did they come to believe that? Why would anyone want that? And then I have to choose between looking like a loony conspiracy theorist, doing an impromptu lecture or just having to decide you actually probably don’t want to know.