promethea.incorporated

philsandifer:

Any neoreactionary types who would like a review copy of the book in exchange for a promise of a fair and public thrashing of it, please let me know and give a link to the blog you’ll review it on. I’m happy to give you a PDF if you’ll promise to trash-talk it honestly and with quotations. 

The offer also applies to Yudkowskian rationalists, but you have to promise to say more than just “it’s sneer culture.” It’s totally sneer culture, and you can point that out, but that can’t be the main thrust. 

Yes I am doing this for the money. Will sorcelate for food. 

So I heard someone was giving neoreactionaries and people who once freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt them the John Oliver treatment, except that this person is not John Oliver but instead some guy with a vaguely similar-ish sounding name who started his Kickstarter campaign at $2000. As someone who once freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt them, and who always enjoys the John Oliver treatment of anything, I’m very interested in finding out the facts of the matter.

Now, whether or not this one is sneer culture is obviously not the relevant fact of the matter, but instead whether or not this one is good sneer culture.

In addition this is the rare treat of sneer culture actually directed at me without the highly visible hand of meatspace violence backed up by the sneering and thus, unlike the works of bioethicists or terfs, I expect that even in the worst case I would receive a highly unusual opportunity of getting to read something in the vein of “this is what these people actually think of people like me” that doesn’t make me feel like writing a vengeful computer god just to feel safe in a universe which contains such people.

And more, some people have alleged that this sneer culture is endangering the very fate of our universe by making a fanfiction writer who turns people trans and takes their money for no reason whatsoever through a text-only communication channel and once was very overconfident on quantum mechanics appear less seriously-takeable by Serious People, which is quite a fascinating prospect and I am very intrigued to find out more.

However, I’m unlikely to spend an actual $5 on the book, so I need to find a way to read it for free. Conveniently I’m allegedly quite good at producing value to people by writing things and it just so happens that the guy whose name sounds just a bit like “John Oliver” is offering free copies to people who could create value by writing about it. In light of this information I believe that it would be a mutually beneficial transaction to engage in such an exchange.

In addition, I am a person who chooses to like exercise so that I would have have received a better set of genes than otherwise, and I do Actually Believe in computer gods, programs from the future that threaten people, and living forever by dying from severe rapid hypothermia and turning into a number.

(At least for some values of “Actually Believe” that to most people, such as the ones who use phrases like “Actually Believe”, are utterly indistinguishable from other values of “Actually Believe”.)

As such, I believe that I am uniquely qualified to review this book: as an overconfident neophyte dropout with a lot of raw talent and weird ideas and a disrespect for the established and respected authorities and their sensible commonly accepted ideas, and an utter absence of actual accomplishments other than convincing many people of those weird ideas, I might be the closest thing to basilisk-era Yudkowsky the guy with a really small kickstarter could ever hope to get to read his book. The most important difference is that I openly display a substantial degree of self-awareness and do a lot of countersignaling on the topic of credibility; whether that makes me more or less fun to interact with on this matter shall be left to the readers.

I even promise not to leak the book to the pirate bay just because information wants to be free, because the weird computer god decision theory says that my promises should be reliable even when I totally could flake on them. In addition, I believe that incentivizing other people to purchase this piece of sneer culture (if it is worth purchasing; something I’d expect to have an answer to a few days after I receive a copy) for their entertainment might be a good thing: support your friendly local sneer culture instead of faceless corporate Big Sneer!

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Does promethea get a free book out of this?

Do they write the review as promised, earning them the effective monetary value per work-hour of Bangladeshi minimum wage?

Is your friendly local sneer culture truly friendly and worth supporting over Big Sneer? Or is this all a ploy by the Unfriendly Sneer Culture in an attempt to blackmail us into bringing it into existence?

And most importantly of all: will the ultimate fate of the universe be decided for good (or evil, as it may be) by a guy who wrote a silly book and started his kickstarter campaign at $2000?

Tune in eventually to find out!