The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 7
The Players of Games
Of course, there is a reason that John Oliver is the face of faceless corporate Big Sneer while Sandifer is a guy with a $2000 kickstarter.
That same exact reason is why he targets Yudkowsky and Moldbug in the first place; Land, being on a level above the previous two in this Game, is the only one who actually presents a genuine challenge to Sandifer.
As this kind of postmodern cleverer-than-thou post-ironic dick-measuring contest of a literary review, Sandifer’s book is frankly stellar. That is to say, the points of brilliance are separated by vast bleak stretches defined mostly by the nigh-absence of any significant substance. Compared to the rogue black hole of Land, throwing searing jets of destruction from the accretion disk of galactic trash it has collected around itself, Sandifer is best described as a red dwarf: not particularly bright but with a remarkable stamina, able to keep producing what little it produces for what feels like forever and ever.
Indeed, Sandifer versus Land was where this book shines, just as expected from the interaction of a black hole and a red dwarf. They both are consciously playing the same Game, while Yudkowsky for all his unorthodoxity (it is an oft repeated cliche that Yudkowsky is “a crank”; while it is trivially correct that he certainly has the brain of a crank (as do I, for example; this psychology which is eager to explore that which most ignore and which knight’s jumps to interesting conclusions unless one is extremely careful (and the owner of a crank brain can seldom be too careful) is not exactly exceptional; at its best this kind of a brain can swiftly fill in the gaps others struggle a long time with, at its worst it fills them in wrong and proceeds to be convinced that everyone else’s protestations to the contrary are simply manifestations of their evident incompetence (further compounded by the fact that the brilliant crank-brain can easily demonstrate a clear abundance of actually provable incompetence in everyone else); but nowhere is the universe obliged to make all such gap-fillings false), the crucial question “what is he right about and where is he mistaken?” is sidestepped by applying the universal label of crank, with the implication that every one of his ideas which diverges sufficiently from the mainstream is wrong, for they are the ideas of A Crank) is still trying to ultimately do science and engineering (Unless one goes full meta-paranoid and assumes he is actually playing a role of a cult leader simply because humanity would be incompetent enough to fall for it; the evidence in favor of which being quite abundant in his works. Indeed, if we follow this train of thought through and see where it leads, it has an astonishingly remarkable consistency to it. Surely it would not be an accident that the man who won the AI box experiments despite there being no logical reason for him to succeed, and who has written a thorough taking-apart on a multitude of mechanisms via which personality cults form, later wrote in the words of the obvious author avatar: “"So you decided to try a small-scale experiment first,“ Harry said. A sickness rose up in him, because in that moment Harry understood, he saw himself reflected; the next step was just what Harry himself would have done, if he’d had no trace of ethics whatsoever, if he’d been that empty inside. "You created a disposable identity, to learn how the ropes worked, and get your mistakes out of the way.” (…) “And eventually,” Harry said through the heart-sickness, “you realized you were just having more fun as Voldemort."” Thus, despite giving people every single caution against doing it, despite every warning about the failures of objectivism, the tendency of groups, not unlike caramelizing sugar all the way, to crystallize into the most nuttiest form, the halo effect and the horns effect, despite laying out the exact things people were supposed to avoid doing, they nonetheless fell into those exact patterns. Yet, to my disappointment, this hypothesis has been completely absent from this book no matter how much more entertaining as an AU fan fic it would be; Yudkowsky is not the only one about whom it can be claimed that he doesn’t recognize his full potential.), and Moldbug is just confused enough about everything to confuse Sandifer as well.
From this perspective the book makes far more sense, as two minds battling in a game which ultimately has meaning only as a game in itself, and the attempt to keep up the triptych structure mostly means that the contest of Sandifer vs. Land is punctuated by distracting side snipes at the other two. Sure, not riding the controversy around Yudkowsky would have attracted far less attention to begin with, but the book itself would have been so much better if Sandifer had stuck to his strong points.
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
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