Now that my arguments have been written down in relative isolation (because my brain expropriates others’ ideas automatically so much that I need to keep myself unaware of them to ever be able to output a single original thought; if you see me stealing one of yours, just think how many I’ve taken from others without you noticing it. nothing is original, everything is free) I can finally check the other reviews on NAB and wow it sure feels vindicating to see others making the exact same observations and claims, just in a different format that isn’t Doing the Genre.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit · 5 notes · .permalink
@philsandifer
And as for “gruesomely facile reading of Moore,” well, I did tip my hand to socialjusticemunchkin when I asked if their use of “promethea” was a Moore reference, the fact that it wasn’t and they haven’t read any Moore other than Watchmen was maybe best taken as a sign that getting into a Moore battle with me was a high-risk strategy. And sure enough, they failed to construct an accurate picture of Moore by extrapolating from one character in Watchmen, then ascribed their inaccurate picture to me, a doubly risky strategy given that Moore is my biggest single influence, so getting this one wrong is going to leave all sorts of knock-on errors.
This is kind of breaking my style, but I just want to address it explicitly: did you seriously think I was interested in actually getting into a Moore battle with you, on your territory (which I was well aware of), with your rules? That the only way you could interpret that part was your way, and thus promethea is a defective Phil Sandifer?
Because wow, this is so beautifully an example of the Mandatory Comprehensibility. I put stones on a board with a known checkers champion, after having told him that I know jack about checkers, who promptly proceeds to assume I’ve made a shitty checkers move when actually I’m building eyes for my go pattern.
Getting an accurate picture of Moore was never the point, arguing that Moore is not someone who can credibly impersonate AlphaGo to me was. I’m closer to AlphaGo than Moore himself is, and I notice that Moore played a really bad move even though he can fool amateurs. (As I said, I never promised to be humble.)
Now if you’re willing to argue that both Moore and you are closer to Doctor Manhattan than I am (Moore so that he could model him better, and you so that you could recognize a better modeling), then you are certainly welcome to present your evidence, but be aware that this kind of inhuman psychology is evidently not your territory just like Moore-litcrit is not mine.
(via philsandifer)
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw #i'm indiana jones #you're the guy swish swoshing with the sword · 64 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink
Okay guys, I’ll handhold more next week (until then I’m going to just keep posting koans and shit or maybe some other vay of Vagueblogging and Doing the Genre; but I promise that if you do your homework diligently and figure out the contents of part 9, part 10 will be up within 24 hours of the instant I’m informed of this success) but let me just tell you that if you think I’m incomprehensible, @nostalgebraist has written a way less incomprehensible explanation of the Dogma of Mandatory Comprehensibility than I ever could, because I’m not the one who owns the right hat for being Comprehensible in the way that is Mandatory: http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/144203687459/nab-notes-anti-subversiveness-miscellany-this-is
Also, keep on the good work of making my arguments for me, it saves me a lot of effort.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 3 notes · .permalink
ilzolende:
I like promethea @socialjusticemunchkin Oue’s reviews of NRx A Basilisk. I am therefore annoyed a bit by criticism of them that I see as baseless.
Anyway, some clarifications: Promethea is an enby who at I think is feminine-of-center, and if you have to use binary pronouns, “he” is not the one to use.
> In the first part, they’re pulling a standard That Guy move. (That Guy is somebody familiar to anybody who gives and most people who attend panels at anime, comic, or science fiction conventions. That Guy sits in the audience and constantly, loudly interrupts the panelists to interject their own opinions or points they feel the audience should hear. I use a gendered term for this because That Guy is almost but not quite always male.) One of That Guy’s favorite tricks is to respond to something which isn’t quite true, and which the panelist knows isn’t quite true, but usefully conveys an important concept to an audience who isn’t familiar with it (for example, Phil’s bluescreen/hourglass illustration of the halting problem), with something technically more accurate but which fails to get the point across at all. As with most things That Guy does, the primary thing it accomplishes (besides derailing) is to announce “I am a pedantic asshole” very loudly.
source
Um. Sandifer asked for reviews. He even sent promethea a review copy, which clearly means he wants a review from promethea. Therefore, they are not doing anything wrong by “interrupting” the plot with commentary. (Maybe the other thing is a problem, but explaining how the problem is a “That Guy” move when promethea is not being “That Guy” is unnecessary except to attach negative affect to them.)
original post
So let’s me get this gay: That Guy is literally making a “That Guy” move to inform the audience of his opinion that I’m a “That Guy”?
The meta is delicious.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 15 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 8
Instead of sticking to his strong points, Sandifer feels an obsessive need to head straight back to the territory he doesn’t understand. The factual errors of the book have been taken apart thoroughly elsewhere; I won’t bore you by repeating them here. Suffice to say that there are plenty, including that Sandifer seems to be a Windows user, as evident from the assertion “As any computer user can attest, left running a computer will eventually either blue screen or get stuck with the cursor as an hourglass.” What I am interested in is the phenomenon I have often repeated but never quite fully explained: the liberal arts eschatology of Sandifer.
Sandifer’s computer illiteracy provides a revealing window to this pathology. “Let us assume that we are fucked, for we do not know how to install Linux.” He appears to assume that what he knows about computers, based on his experience with Windows, is everything there is. For all of his talk about pwnage, the actual pwning of objective systems is largely beyond his grasp and he instead sticks to “pwning” things where he can simply declare that he has pwned them and decide the facts on the matter by popular vote, not subject to the unfair constraints of a reality which doesn’t care about the cleverness of his arguments and the sickness of his burns if he still fundamentally, materially, utterly fails to actually pwn anything. It doesn’t take a massive quantity of technological mastery to install Linux and set up a system which doesn’t bluescreen or turn the cursor into a hourglass (partly because a computer doesn’t really need a cursor; this pedestalization of style over substance manifests yet again) but whose uptime can instead be mostly limited by the electric grid.
Now, this once again ties intriguingly to something else, for nothing is ever a coincidence. It’s universally known that trans women are massive computer geeks, and something in Sandifer is starkly reminding me of an egg: a closeted trans girl who doesn’t yet know that she is one (while other trans girls totally do see that she is one of them), but is nonetheless strangely fascinated by anything related to the topic, and whenever she is getting close to the underlying truth she gets frightened and recoils with a nervous laugh.
Throughout all of this, Sandifer has displayed the obvious behavior pattern of someone with a Basilisk of his own. Time and time again, whenever he might be getting too much into the matter, he turns away from the most promising prospects just like that trans girl who quickly closes the tab when she realizes the porn she had been watching made her feel like she wants to be the girl, rather than do her. (No, I’m not implying when Sandifer is like “screw these guys” he’d be using the other meaning of the word, but something more interesting. Why are postmodernists always having their minds in the gutter?)
And furthermore, for all of his talk about empathy being a defining feature of humanness, Sandifer has demonstrated a baffling level of its absence.
Just like the egg who tries to distance herself from an uncomfortable idea by petty transphobia which demonstrates mostly her motivation and her lack of any actual arguments to support it.
It is utterly jarring to see a self-identified “intersectional” marxist argue mostly by using a large number of ableist slurs. Or to be more accurate, the number of slurs he uses isn’t that impressive; the number of times he uses each of them is. One certainly would think that an intersectional marxist would have better arguments for his position than that his opponents and people with cognitive disabilities are the same kind of bad people for the same reasons, but nonetheless there did he go.
When Yudkowsky describes his rejection of irrationally anti-emotional “rationality”, Sandifer comments: “It’s tempting to describe this as an attempt to characterize emotion by someone who has never actually had one”. The thought that someone might just have a different natural vocabulary about talking such things doesn’t seem to occur to him. No, to Sandifer all other humans must be defective Sandifers wherever they differ from him.
Of course, there is a Reason for this.
Now I’m obviously not insinuating that Sandifer would be closetedly trans…gender. What I am insinuating is that, just like he is insinuating that Moldbug is a closet marxist who doesn’t know it yet, Sandifer himself is equally like a planet tantalizingly close to igniting fusion. That in his philosophy there is something that inevitably brings its own downfall, which would provide a natural explanation for why he is so fascinatedly seeking such features in someone else, unable to fully dive in and equally unable to look away, and most importantly make it make sense why he would do all the otherwise inexplicable choices he has made in the book.
Such as the ending. Sandifer promised that the real basilisk wouldn’t turn out to be ourselves all along; a promise he kept because instead of the most cliched ending possible he chose the second most cliched one: pusseh. The much-vaunted proposition for dealing with the unimaginable horror awaiting us is to screw our brains out in a pagan sex cult, because anything else would be arrogant. Or something like that, my eyes kind of glazed over from the bullshit and boredom. The secret at the end of the book is pussy. I can’t believe I wasted my time on this. Perhaps the most continentalest continental philosophers think psychoanalysis has some validity to it because they themselves see teh pusseh as a solution to everything. (And as a non-binary trans person I was vaguely insulted by the insinuation that masculinity and femininity would be some kind of fundamental features of the universe and so on; because oh my Yog-Sothoth can’t you guys ever imagine anything creative? (Obviously not, because then they wouldn’t be so cliched to begin with)) And this guy had the gall to call others inhuman and robotic?
Of course, the lovecraftian protagonist catching a glimpse of the Beyond and furiously retreating to what little reality they can still feel attached to; a pagan sex cult; is an obvious conclusion for this man’s tale of terror.
But what was this Beyond?
The key to everything, the explanation for the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility, the liberal arts eschatology, the degraded marxism, the postmodernity’s divorce from objective reality (while I consider it a credit to both that the rationalist community has managed to derive several key insights of postmodernism and queer theory solely out of first principles, and which probably is the most significant differentiating factor between it and the embarrassment that is the common “respect my identity as an objective unbiased reasoner” “rationality”, there is an inflection point where ideas lose all their attachment to material facts and these kind of literary reviews are without error way past it)…
…the genuine red pill that truly only needs to be taken once to shift one’s perspective on the world and from which all these false pills have been consistently finding ways to shy away from…
An astute reader will have seen the obvious conclusion a long time ago, for the pieces are all there; I have been circling it all this time, not like the egg who circles her transness, but like the predator who circles its prey before swooping in for the kill. To the less astute, let this statement itself be the koan, the gate and the key.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
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 shall be left as an exercise to the reader
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 14 notes · .permalink
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 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
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
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 5 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 6
A Game to End All Games
So what is the book, actually? Its own description is, in fact, quite telling: “a book review in the form of an internet comment”; or alternatively: an incredibly verbose and deliberately obtuse TVtropes article. It clearly positions itself in the postmodern tradition of rejecting the possibility of empirical reality inseparable from emotions, motivations, genres, cliches, tropes, arguments and counterarguments. It’s playing a complicated Game in which there is no outside authority to determine truth from falsehood, (as evident from its way of manifestly proclaiming its conclusion and deriving arguments from it; going as far as to explicitly reject the notion that the assumption might be false, for that had never been the point in the first place), and the only goal is to play a kind of an elaborate rock-paper-scissors in which the most verbally clever and socially adept wins.
The first rule of this Game is that the rules of the Game (not to be confused with The Game) are not to be spoken of. This Game is a thoroughly anti-inductive process of demonstrating one’s dominance by analyzing the opponent convincingly while resisting succesful analysis oneself; and any verbalization of the rules means that they are now accessible to someone who has not done the work of learning them the hard way and they cease to be an useful status signal, and thus must be changed. The fact that this Game sounds remarkably similar to the game PUAs are about is no accident, and the common objection to any attempts to explicitly present rules governing human interaction for anyone to see is yet another facet of this Game. Predicting is a display of mastery over another, in the most fundamental macchiavellian form of human interaction, for playing this Game is ultimately what human intelligence has evolved for.
The second rule of this Game is that everything must be predicted, and one must stay tightly on the edge of the audience’s expectations. Do not say too much out loud, or you shall be a preachy embarrassment. (This was, of course, invented by the CIA as an anti-communist conspiracy when the US government realized that capitalism just doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of sincere propaganda as communism, and thus they made a big PR push to make it really embarrassing and tacky to sincerely present beliefs, preferring the less politically volatile genre of “white guy introspects without too much connection to the material world” which this book is a perfect example of.) Do not say too little out loud, or you shall be incomprehensible. As the ultimate spectator sport, one’s ability to predict and manipulate their audience’s state is a fundamental part of this game.
Modern rapid communication has enabled the Game to loop tightly back on itself, becoming a recursive and self-referential process of ever faster iteration in pursuit of the top spot (but of course, a material optimization process looping back on itself and getting out of control is simply preposterous techno-utopianism), and any other variables must be controlled to prevent reality from intruding on the Game; external facts must not override internal processes any more than the pawns may revolt on a chessboard. It’s not fun to pick on the nerd if the nerd can be proven right later, as any sophisticated high school bully knows, and the worst thing that could happen to the Game would be that an outside context problem were to disrupt it (naturally, I eventually figured out how to solve my own high school bullying problem by turning it precisely into an outside context problem with unexpected escalation that was totally against The Rules but upped the stakes into territory the bully was not willing to play at (I never promised to be fair)). Thus, everything is reduced to surface.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
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
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 6 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 5
The Darkening
Now that we’ve rejected the inherent value of democracy and consider it kind of suspiciously overrated, we are getting dangerously close to the idea of the Cathedral. In fact, the neoreactionary cathedral is essentially a conspiracy theory based on noticing that a duct tape cartel exists, and subsequently concluding that therefore rubber hose must be the naturally superior option which is just kept down by The Man. A degraded rejection of the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility.
And this charitableness to unpopular ideas is very distinctive of the rationalist memeplex. A community where the median person is a social democrat (in the broad meaning of the word) and the entire statist right could almost be just a floating-point error in surveys, and as queer as a women’s college, gets stereotyped as friends of nazis simply because they sometimes stop to consider whether unpopular people might have a point before usually concluding that no, actually they really don’t have a point. (At least the sort of unpopular people this accusation is often leveled about; when they come for the unpopulars, they first come for those who are unpopular for a reason.) In fact, there is a certain deep irony in the fact that people who are going to understand Sandifer’s book as well as Sandifer understood the source material are usually socialists who think that people could basically get along and be excellent to each other if there were no artificial distinctions between them, and then they will proceed to artificially create as much of a distinction between themselves and the rationalists. Of course, there is a Reason for this.
Because let’s face it, this book is going to be used as ammunition. Sandifer himself, to his undeniable credit, is actually being very explicit that he doesn’t consider it true or fair to label Yudkowsky as a neoreactionary, but it’s the equivalent of “Ted Cruz is totally not the Zodiac Killer” while Ted Cruz is the only politician whose zodiackillerness is even a topic that ever comes up. Spin doctors know that if you can’t make your enemy admit something, the next best thing is to make him deny it, as repeatedly as possible. Because Ted Cruz might not literally actually be the Zodiac Killer but there certainly is something shady and creepy about him now that I think of it, because surely the entire question wouldn’t have come up in the first place otherwise, [alt-]right?
One of Sandifer’s stronger points (with the connotation that it’s fortunate he is a relativist instead of an objectivist) comes when he tries to apply armchair psychoanalysis (not that there is any other kind of psychoanalysis) to Yudkowsky, concluding that the rejection and fear of ill-informed authority is a significant influence in the rationalist movement. I cannot speak for Eliezer, but I can speak for myself, and I can speak for the statistics that suggest that the rationalist movement is basically made up of autistic and mentally ill trans girls who have rejected Mensa as being intellectually thoroughly amateurish and unsatisfying and are disproportionately libertarian but not in the way that wants poor people to die of hunger, and I can only say “no shit sherlock”. Being a mentally ill autistic trans girl with enough IQ for two basically functional adults is perhaps the best possible way to learn the fundamental inadequacy of everyone (including one’s self) in making any sort of good decisions on anything and thoroughly become convinced that people should especially not be making decisions on other people, and thus it flows really naturally that if there is a really big and important decision that might end up taking over the world, it should be made very very very very carefully so we don’t end up getting into a nanotech shotgun wedding with a decision that proved to be horribly bad in hidsight even though it seemed so charming and honest and chivalrous in the first year.
Of course, this observation is in no way original to Sandifer and others have made it better but it’s refreshing to finally find something relatively correct on page 49.
Naturally such ideas are verging uncomfortably to something Sandifer doesn’t seem to want to face and the book turns promptly back towards the less scary area of religion and the claim that Yudkowsky is fundamentally a believer in an authoritarian god because two things that superficially resemble each other on the surface when looked at from the right angle are totally exactly the same, and there is no objective reality against which the claim “AI would be likely to behave in certain ways” could be evaluated; everything is surface and appearance.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
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
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 7 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 4/10
The Marvels of Duct Tape
No book even vaguely connected with technology and politics would be complete without a mention of Peter Thiel’s infamous “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible”. The response is utterly predictable, and speaks perhaps more about Sandifer than Thiel, as it doesn’t exactly take great intellectual courage to keep repeating the party line that is so thoroughly indoctrinated early and often into every western child, than it does to actually examine the ramifications of the statement. And by examine, I mean “try to understand why a reasonable person might come up with such an idea”. Whether Peter Thiel himself is a reasonable person (my money is firmly on “no”; as an extremely unreasonable person myself I do recognize my own kind when I see it) is not the point; whether he might actually have one (a point, not a reasonable person) is.
The idea that democracy is the solution to everything imaginable and anti-democraticness thus being inherently evil is such a standard feature of the modern western memetic environment (by which I mean the ideas that surround us and their respective positions of status, acceptedness, respectability, and sanctity; the mind-virus hypothesis has been thoroughly disconfirmed but the words themselves can be reappropriated into more useful things) that it’s hard to imagine democracy being anything other than the best idea ever (unless one shares one of the Officially Accepted Critiques of Democracy), but when one pokes at the foundations they turn out to be disappointingly vacuous. An educated person might get as far as Churchill before they run out of appealing soundbites and demonstrate their inability to explain their convictions, but a person who wants to get to the bottom of things must go all the way back to the 18th century.
To be specific, a fictional 18th century where everyone has a space program. There is just one unfortunate problem; the rockets tend to crash and burn horribly every few launches because nobody has figured out how to prevent an important part from breaking apart. Clever engineers, from a variety of countries I can’t be arsed to google right now but the United States was probably one of them considering that they implemented it in practice, finally come up with a solution: wrapping the parts in duct tape. NASA attempts it with great success in the rocket launch of 1800 when analysis shows that the parts did indeed once again break, but the duct tape kept them together and thus the part that should point towards the ground did keep pointing towards the ground instead of space, nothing that should not be on fire was on fire, they did not have a big problem and they did indeed go to space that day.
Thus, the marvels of duct tape in solving this particular problem are exposed to the world. When people ask how NASA could launch rockets so well, the answer is rightfully “duct tape”. Other countries get tired of crashing and burning and switch to use duct tape as well, or keep crashing and burning. Over time people forget what the original issue was, but they do remember that duct tape is vitally important for some reason, so they retroactively justify it with duct tape being basically magic. Some people propose that rockets would be even better if they used more duct tape, and some of the places it is applied in are beneficial, while others are wholly unsuitable but people don’t really stop to consider it as much as they should, because duct tape is Good. Idealists even suggest that since adding a bit of duct tape was wonderful, just imagine how perfect everything would be if the rockets were made entirely out of duct tape!
And then Mr. Thiel suggests that he doesn’t think duct tape and good engineering are compatible anymore, and gets verbally crucified because how dare he question the miraculous gray sticky thing.
Democracy is ritualized, formalized, non-violent enactment of a civil war, to achieve dynastic changes in a substantially more civilized way than before. Democracy doesn’t promise freedom. Democracy doesn’t promise fairness. Democracy only promises stability, a promise the keeping of which alone makes democracy one of the most brilliant inventions of the last centuries. No matter how disgraceful a spectacle the 2000 election was, it was nothing compared to the Wars of the Roses; and no matter how terrible Andrew Jackson was, he was not Henry VIII. That is all democracy promises, and that is all democracy delivers. Not having civil wars is a pretty neat thing mature democracies excel beautifully in (the comparatively recent unpleasantness was over something as significant as “should people be property” instead of the previously typical “rich people’s family drama” which has been demoted to be the subject of cable tv instead), but not having civil wars is not the same thing as being compatible with freedom.
In fact, anyone who has spent any amount of time as an unpopular person in high school should know that the most important thing the majority needs is restraint, for any amount of freedom to exist anywhere.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time as an unpopular person in adulthood knows that the majority is not good at restraint.
The entire idea of constitutions is to have a list of things the democracy is not allowed to do because otherwise the natural instincts of the mob are to trample over everyone who doesn’t fit in. (To prove this, just consider the way your political enemies are pursuing terrible witch-hunts for simple thoughtcrimes while your own side is reminding the world that some very bad people are doing very bad things. It works regardless of what your politics actually are!) Freedom makes far more sense as something that is primarily orthogonal to the type of government (even though different governance technologies certainly influence how easy or difficult different varieties of freedom are to achieve in practice, just like technologies of production dramatically affect facets of social organization) and from this perspective, Thiel’s outrageous claim boils down to the far more reasonable “I don’t think duct tape is good at something basically unrelated to the reason we are using duct tape” (for a comparison, imagine someone getting yelled at for claiming that Google is not a very good fast food company). Maybe he still has nefarious purposes; perhaps he owns a company manufacturing rubber hose which he wants to sell despite it not necessarily being any better than duct tape. But to get to this point where such things are even an allowable object of reasonable discussion necessitates rejecting the unchallenged sanctity of duct tape.
Nonetheless, this elementary idea is “strange terrain” because it doesn’t fit with the appearances of what one is supposed to cheer. The unlikely thought breaks the comfortable games.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
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
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 13 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 3/10
Hubris
The liberal arts eschatology rejects AI safety as obviously preposterous. After all, the basic premise of AI safety is that any sufficiently powerful optimization process would be nigh-inevitably driven by what might as well be laws of nature, leading to them optimizing human flourishing only incidentally as a side effect which might be sacrificed the instant it is no longer beneficial for the process, and that it would be a really good idea to design a solid, self-sustaining system that provides an actual alternative to such basic drives. The liberal arts eschatologist only engages with things on the surface while Marx would be right at home with the underlying logic.
Another part where Sandifer’s degraded marxism displays itself very prominently is the idea of “how can we respond to the eschaton without the arrogance of thinking that we can change its speed or trajectory” being somehow a question worth considering. The liberal artist deals with the social, and is ultimately concerned with the social, the appearance, the status ladder, the spectation and entertainment of observing people who think differently. The “technolibertarian”, the “accelerationist” and the “decelerationist” alike reject the “without the arrogance of thinking” part, and for such a crime of departing from the social, the reasonable, the comprehensible, Sandifer’s kind has little more than a response that can underneath its superficial verbosity be distilled into two words: “scorn dem”. After all, it had already been assumed that we are fucked, and it isn’t fair to try to change the rules when the game is being played.
One might hypothesize that this is because the liberal arts eschatologists have never been dealing with solvable problems. They are usually only good for writing descriptions of problems, many of which I find quite agreeable; the knee-jerk libertarian inequality apologia that is basically endless words on top of the just-world fallacy disgusts this libertarian just as much as the knee-jerk cishumanist death apologia. Some people purchase ice creams that are more expensive than the entire lives of millions of people, and to say that something is quite iffy with this shouldn’t be controversial. It is a goddamn civilizational disgrace that the keyboard I’m typing this text on, the headphones I’m listening to music with, and the cheap-ass laptop processing the words themselves, are together worth enough to push one person out of extreme poverty for an entire year, yet nonetheless we do have extreme poverty because we haven’t figured out how to not have it. Believing this does not obligate me to support any single proposal for a solution, any more than rejecting any single solution means that I reject the values the proposed solution was based on; but in the politics of mandatory comprehensibility the ought and the is are kept together and thus a great deal is inferred about a person’s values from the things they consider realistic. Of course, this works as long as everyone plays along to the rules and keeps their is and ought tightly bundled, but someone who rejects the rules appears effectively alien.
The liberal arts eschatologist’s solution is to write “Let us assume we are fucked”. The engineer’s solution is to try to find out what would actually work. In this sense Marx was certainly an engineer at heart, and his approach to the problems he observed was sensible at a time before the acceleration of technology gave ideologies that cannot be expressed as numbers a decisive disadvantage (something that once again is a far better match with the meta-level of marxism, historical materialism and everything, than the degraded object-level manifestations mainstream marxist liberal artists have transformed into). A thousand polemicians may advocate a policy, and one Satoshi Nakamoto may design a technology that renders it practically unenforceable, or makes it actually possible. This liberal arts eschatology rejects the obvious conclusion that the most pressing concern of the modern left would be to get into the game and impose one’s ideology on silicon (it isn’t even that hard to imagine how blockchain technologies, cryptography, and worldwide connectedness could be harnessed for socialist ends) and instead doubles down on its traditional talking points of democracy and/or revolution; the latter being obviously purely social from beginning to end, for a technological revolution solving social problems is so utterly horribly in contradiction with Marx and his historical materialism that even the thought itself might not be entertained for even a moment, and the possibility that a single person might effect meaningful change just doesn’t fit with the theories of a man whose followers number in millions if not billions and whose ideas dramatically influenced the entire 20th century.
Thus, any attempt to actually evite the supposedly inevitable fuckedness must be simple hubris.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
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
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 16 notes · .permalink