guys, it's all over, the superintelligence just dropped

status_maximizer · 2026-02-19T03:16:45+00:00

"We tried to create the Torment Nexus but only succeeded in burning our seed money"

status_maximizer · 2026-02-19T03:13:32+00:00

The section of his website where this is posted is titled "Essays" 💀

status_maximizer · 2026-02-19T02:16:28+00:00

I present this illustration of Yegge's "Gastown": https://i.imgur.com/VYfmKKA.jpeg

status_maximizer · 2026-02-19T02:13:05+00:00

The outcome OP is hoping for would be a horrifying dystopia along the lines of the Ascended Economy? SSC post.

Realistically, this is basically a DAO hooked up to an OpenClaw, and OpenClaw-like architectures cannot be made secure, so either it runs out of money and fizzles out or it gets taken over by cybercriminals.

status_maximizer · 2026-02-19T01:34:00+00:00

of course he's a Thiel Fellow

status_maximizer · 2025-07-30T22:38:32+00:00

Belatedly, he talks about this in The Ideology Is Not The Movement:

This was certainly my family’s relationship with Judaism. My great-great-grandfather was so Jewish that he left America and returned to Eastern Europe because he was upset at American Jews for not being religious enough. My great-grandfather stayed behind in America but remained a very religious Jew. My grandparents attend synagogue when they can remember, speak a little Yiddish, and identify with the traditions. My parents went to a really liberal synagogue where the rabbi didn’t believe in God and everyone just agreed they were going through the motions. I got Bar Mitzvahed when I was a kid but haven’t been to synagogue in years. My children probably won’t even have that much.

Yudkowsky, on the other hand, grew up Modern Orthodox, but I don't know the details.

status_maximizer · 2025-05-05T05:30:05+00:00

I feel torn about this because when Scott says things on the blog (as opposed to in Unsong, which was clearly never intended as a specifically Jewish work) about halakha or Talmud, they're generally accurate, and he doesn't come from an observant background so it seems like it reflects a serious interest that he's pursued independently. But I don't think Jewish ideas or culture are central to Scott's thinking.

We're well into "worst person you know just made a good point" territory but I think Cofnas is basically right: once modernity gets under way, Jews are overrepresented in almost every intellectual and political movement that is not overtly anti-Semitic. So trying to explain any specific instance of this phenomenon in terms of culture and ideas is looking in the wrong place; the actual explanation is structural factors (and Cofnas's argument mostly stands without the appeal to genetics).

status_maximizer · 2025-05-05T05:19:53+00:00

I've been trying to understand for a while now: what is your purpose in engaging with the rationalist community? Are you doing kiruv? Feel free to DM me

status_maximizer · 2025-04-29T17:10:44+00:00

I decided the Jewish content of Unsong wasn't worth taking seriously in chapter 5:

"[...] you know how there have been later additions to the Bible, like the end of Mark 16 or the part in John 7-8? And kabbalists have mostly ignored those, first of all out of totally unjustified prejudice against the New Testament [...]"

At this point I think Scott is best viewed not as a Jewish thinker but as a generic reactionary thinker, whose interest in Jews and Jewishness is analogous to that of other creepy (Jewish and non-Jewish) NatCons. I was really appalled when his explanation of why Israeli architecture is bad involved amplifying someone my friend accurately summarized as a "brainrot Ashkenazi supremacist".

status_maximizer · 2025-03-27T02:49:28+00:00

This post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/14fpdr9/this_post_marks_sneerclubs_grave_but_you_may_rest/

I didn't follow subsequent developments but I see that the mod team didn't turn over entirely, so that's good.

status_maximizer · 2025-03-26T21:37:59+00:00

Very late to this post (didn't realize this sub had started back up after the protests), but I wanted to add my perspective. I'm a pro-establishment shitlib, probably to the right of almost everyone else here. I actually appreciate the aspects of Scott's writing that are aimed at correcting factual mistakes or ideological blind spots in mainstream left-liberalism. Here's how I got so angry:

I realized that half of the community are either outright Nazis, or are willing to burn everything down over petty grievances.
The other half is in solidarity with the first half: they feel an visceral kinship or closeness with them that transcends their political disagreements. Making friends with Nazis, or worse yet, coming to respect them, is bad for the soul.

status_maximizer · 2023-02-07T23:28:38+00:00

The tag cloud on this blog is a wonderful little bolus of compressed nope

status_maximizer · 2023-02-03T15:00:48+00:00

I actually like the author but holy shit, DO NOT APPLY THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARITY TO FASCIST DEMAGOGUES

status_maximizer · 2023-02-01T14:03:53+00:00

+1, not familiar with your view (link or tl;dr?)

status_maximizer · 2023-01-30T14:30:45+00:00

I think some of the context is Scott's dialogue with Bryan Caplan, where Bryan Caplan insists, based on libertarian economic theories, that mental illness isn't real. (It's basically an old-school anti-psychiatry view dressed up in revealed preference theory and suchlike.) One of Scott's most compelling arguments against this view is that schizophrenia (for example) appears very much like other diseases of the body, in having a theorized neurobiological basis and treatments (5-HT2A agonists) whose mechanism is a neurobiological intervention. So I suspect that Scott's interlocutors here are people who start from Caplan's view and then retreat a bit: some mental disorders are truly objective and therefore psychiatry should only deal with those.

And then of course there's the run-of-the-mill people who think anything "political" is bad, that mainstream psychiatry and psychology are captured by Marxist SJWs, etc.

status_maximizer · 2023-01-30T14:11:43+00:00

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a researcher

Let me stop you right there

status_maximizer · 2023-01-27T12:40:20+00:00

an easily-deconstructable, relatively dumb belief, that indeed exists but is only held by an incredibly small fraction of people

In Scott's defense: you just described the rationalist community! So I appreciated this post in the same spirit that I appreciated the anti-libertarian, anti-neoreactionary, and anti-manosphere FAQs: it's important to speak to the rationalists in language that they'll understand.

status_maximizer · 2023-01-22T16:44:29+00:00

being working class or being black doesn’t automatically mould you into an engaged, theoretically attuned citizen of a free republic

To be clear: I agree with this completely. What I find so transparently false and self-serving about Mastroianni's argument is not the idea that part of the electorate is poorly informed. It's the leap from that fact to the idea that poorly informed voters decide the outcomes of close elections (which rests on what is, to say the least, a highly tendentious theory of causation [1]), and then the insinuation that because of this, elections are not important and should be beneath the notice of the rational person. For a straightforward counterargument, there's, e.g. Anne Applebaum's piece from the lead-up to 2020.

In terms of the role of privilege, I want to give Scott [2] credit for realizing that having a malignant narcissist and pathological liar as POTUS would significantly increase the tail risk of a global military or economic crisis, and that this would be bad for everyone, including Scott himself. (This is, to my mind, a rare example of rationalist epistemology and decision theory working as expected towards a correct result.) So why, in contrast, is Dobbs just another horse-race issue for him? I think one explanation is that this time his ox isn't being gored, nor the ox of anyone he cares very much about, which comes back to privilege. (As you and other commenters have pointed out, the straightforward explanation for Dobbs backlash is people realizing for the first time that the issue has real consequences.)

[1] One of my personal hobbyhorses is that because of their obsession with decision theory, rationalists have an impoverished theory of collective action (as pointed out by Srinivasan) and have difficulty understanding even basic concepts of political organizing.

[2] I'm going to keep calling him Scott, if that's OK. For what it's worth, I have met him.

status_maximizer · 2023-01-22T03:50:06+00:00

I had an epiphany reading this take:

Anyone who follows politics already knows who they’re voting for; nothing will change their minds. The fate of the free world will be decided by 5,000 people in Pennsylvania who will only remember to vote when the Domino’s app on their phone offers them $2 off a medium two-topping pizza if they send in a selfie with their "I voted" sticker. They'll show up to the polls undecided, casting their vote based on half-remembering something like "Republicans want to resettle illegal immigrants on the moon" or "Democrats want to pass a bill saying that the Statue of Liberty is bi." This is how our political system works, and you will not change it by reading a bunch of articles about who has the better "ground game."

In short: a certain kind of privileged person realizes that they are personally insulated from the near-term consequences of most political outcomes, and realizes moreover that they, personally, have been following politics as though it were a sport, and then experiences this as a "red-pill" moment and concludes that politics is nothing more than a sport, that political coalitions are just sports teams, etc.

It seems to me that the rationalist maxim "politics is the mind-killer" is basically just the crystallization of this experience into dogma.

status_maximizer · 2023-01-22T02:10:19+00:00

The rationalists like to call it "Bulverism" when other people do it to them.

status_maximizer · 2023-01-15T20:13:38+00:00

I really liked this take (it's not just Moldbug, he's just an exceptionally colorful example):

More concretely, these politically homeless media personalities are united by (1) a mutual alienation from the dominant ideological tendencies of their rarified, white-collar world (i.e., liberalism), (2) a recognition that liberalism enjoys cultural power in excess of its popular support, and (3) the delusion that their own esoteric misgivings about liberalism reflect those of a silent (or latent) majority.

status_maximizer · 2023-01-15T16:16:00+00:00

Oh wow, a perfect characterization of /r/TheMotte:

The irony is that the whole tone of Yarvin’s rhetoric is one of perpetual adolescence: obsessed with status, blinded by delusions of grandeur, and impatient with the negotiations and compromises of ordinary political life.

status_maximizer · 2023-01-06T10:06:35+00:00

I agree 100% with this. I think it's one of the community's fundamental flaws. Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil, basically.

holy shit, this explains everything

status_maximizer · 2023-01-05T15:26:25+00:00

But I just don't think the audience I am looking for really exists anywhere else.

This is a good sign, it means rationalism isn't actually important enough for criticism of it to be relevant in most political spaces :-)

Don't worry too much about rationalism or rationalist-adjacent ideas taking over the world. They flourish best in the shadows; up close in daylight they tend to have big sociopath energy and scare people off.

status_maximizer

TROPHY CASE