this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
36 points (100.0% liked)
SneerClub
1012 readers
3 users here now
Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s a technique he uses to get you, the reader, to understand that you aren’t the person who thinks in terms of elan vital.
In one of his essays on quantum phenomena and personal identity he does it with time. He explains something like if you think time in the universe works in the sense of clock time, then you just don’t have a clue about physical reality, so when he gets to his next point it stands in contrast to the straw layman. But his readers are obviously already the sort of people who do know that, because they’re nominally smart, education-enthusiastic western(ised) nerds, even if they understand next to nothing about how this works out in real physical theory.
So the strawman doesn’t just create a favourable contrast for Yudkowsky’s argument, it constructs them as smart and different from lay people - it isn’t a one-shot effect, it builds as he starts small and piles on increasingly esoteric speculations (even if this is the first “mind = blown” blog post they’ve ever read from this weird guy).
I’ve been saying this more often lately, but LessWrong gets its readers in, by and large, at the absolute bottom rung of intellectual thought, they don’t know anything else
You have to interpret somebody getting into LessWrong as just graduating from Cracked or Newgrounds in the mid-2000s
LessWrongers don't have a sense of a "vaguely plausible normie" that is calibrated in a grounded way (by trying to teach the Intro for Non-Majors courses, trying to explain to relatives and high-school friends what you do for a living, etc.). Instead, they have a concept constructed to set them apart and above. The normie is the ideal rube, the complete inverse of the sophisticate that the LessWronger aspires to be or believes themselves to have become.