promethea.incorporated

brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?

argumate:

The reaction (ha!) to Neoreaction a Basilisk from the local rationalist(-adjacent) community has been narrowly focused on these core issues:

1. Is this book accusing Yudkowsky of being neoreactionary?

2. No really, is it? I mean why else would it group him with Moldbug?

3. That fuckin’ Basilisk story, that was totally misinterpreted.

Having read it, I think it’s helpful to understand that this book is not attempting to be the annotated history of Internet politics circa 2k10, and the claims that it does make in service of its overall trajectory are modest and reasonable.

It is also worth remembering that not every work of literature is a textbook intended to be interpreted as a sequence of logical propositions. A community that sees value in communicating information in the form of fanfiction, poetry, and jokes should be well aware of this.

Finally the book does not just discuss Yudkowsky, Moldbug, and Land, but also the Matrix, Hannibal, and the works of Milton and Blake, among other things. Tying these topics together in no way implies that Yudkowsky is neoreactionary, any more than it implies that Nick Land is one of the Wachowski siblings or that Moldbug is a good writer.

That fucking basilisk story was totally misrepresented though.

Sure, it is entertaining to say “freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him” and I always enjoy such entertainment, but I enjoy it as cheap self-decrepating humor while many others seem to actually take it as argumentation and that is a bad thing. The basilisk was a security hole in the software of some human brains that needed investigating and patching so that it would not present a potential issue later.

I’m no stranger to seemingly unintuitive ideas that are trivial to mock despite being actually way more serious and thus anything that smells like an attempt to avoid addressing such things by pointing out how superficially ridiculous they appear puts The One Which Watches The Watchers into Defcon 3. I don’t think I should need to point out that “haha basilisk lol look at these fucking bayesians” is exactly the same kind of argument as “haha look at this scrawny dude who thinks he can be a lesbian just by popping some magic pills and wearing skirts lolnope”.

1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #cissexism cw #transmisogyny cw · 122 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

  1. hpgross reblogged this from nostalgebraist
  2. thathopeyetlives reblogged this from veronicastraszh and added:
    Yeah like I am unimpressed with excerpts and with philsandifer et al but there’s no reason to no-platform in either...
  3. wirehead-wannabe reblogged this from waystatus and added:
    No, I said “if it’s not trying to insult rationalists OR BE A HISTORY OF RATIONALISM, then what is it?” Because those...
  4. inferentialdistance reblogged this from waystatus and added:
    What is your problem with historians?
  5. shlevy reblogged this from waystatus and added:
    Just so there’s no irony or ambiguity: The vast majority of the time, when RDD evaluates something done by a...
  6. waystatus reblogged this from shlevy and added:
    Ironically, not only are you doing the exact thing you’re accusing RDD of doing, you’re also doing the exact thing...
  7. cromulentenough reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    Most likely not going to read the book because i’m not hugely interested, but i must say, if i let books with obnoxious...
  8. jbeshir reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    I guess. I don’t have a lot of patience for people who deliberately troll in their summaries/titles, and more or less...
  9. veronicastraszh reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    I preferred the other title idea, “an Eternal Golden Cuckball.”
  10. argumate posted this