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
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 2/10
The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
The idea of a red pill features strongly in Sandifer’s book, the concept itself having taken a detour to the neoreactionary movement before finding its natural home in a subculture of fedora-wearing programmers who watch My Little Pony and love to complain that women never invented anything important (not that there’s anything wrong in being a fedora-wearing programmer who watches My Little Pony, it’s just that the last assertion is quite trivially incorrect).
Unfortunately Sandifer’s treatment of the topic falls short of the original inspiration. While The Matrix is an extended metaphor, sprawling temptingly and brilliantly into meta-five, meta-six and onwards into as deep a recursion as a human brain is capable of and hypnotizing me with its intertextual insight pornography into a state not unlike being on acid despite being fully and legally sober, Neoreaction a Basilisk is the sort of a book that is best enjoyed with half a tab of acid, being utterly hilarious and making a massive amount of sense mostly because absolutely anything is utterly hilarious and makes a massive amount of sense on half a tab of acid. Sadly I was not on half a tab of acid while reading it (because that would’ve been illegal, drugs are bad if you live in such a jurisdiction mmmkay) so I did not have access to the state of mind where I could have just leaned back and enjoyed the ride.
Leaning back and enjoying the ride is what the book ultimately is about. It is not a sophisticated argument or an honest attempt at genuine discourse (and neither is this review, frankly, just to clarify the issue to those who haven’t picked up that obvious fact yet). It is a confused amateur ethnography on cultures that haven’t earned enough mainstream respectability that writing confused amateur ethnographies on them would be considered distasteful. In that sense it could be best compared to the works of european colonialists traveling to Africa and reporting back on the barbaric disorganized nature of the locals’ communities, because african cities were organized according to a structure europeans didn’t understand, instead of the simple cartesian system white people considered the pinnacle of civilization.
This particular type of error is one of the biggest ones underlying Sandifer’s liberal arts eschatology, and it shows up again and again. The idea that all there is to know can be known by a marxist English major, and that the world is obligated to be fundamentally comprehensible to one, leaks through constantly yet remains forever unaddressed in explicit terms, thus leading to pattern-matching and deeply unsatisfying arguments.
For example, it is quite a cliche, faithfully repeated in the book, that transhumanism is “merely” a symptom of people’s fear of death. (Nothing is “mere”, my friend, nothing is “mere”.) This is nigh-universally accepted to the degree that no justification is considered necessary. Transhumanism is unwillingness to accept death, end of discussion. Nowhere is it actually explained why unwillingness to accept death would be a bad thing. The critical reader would obviously begin to suspect that perhaps they cannot explain it. The median reader would obviously get outraged at how a fundamental part of their worldview is not accepted as obvious.
One would expect a marxist to be more sympathetic to such ideas, as marxism itself is popularly dismissed as “envy, end of discussion”. The laborer in the dark satanic steel mills asks “why exactly should Mr. Carnegie have so much money while I have so little, and why exactly should the Pinkertons be allowed to shoot us if we protest while we aren’t allowed to shoot them?” and the popular opinion answers “haha, he is just envious that Carnegie has money and he doesn’t”. Marxism starts from the assumption that maybe things should not be that way, and like any movement it ultimately devolves into a cherished set of excuses for the parts of the status quo one doesn’t want to think about too deeply. Once again the red pill remains a blue pill with an instagram filter on top.
In fact, the book’s opening reveals the deeply corrupt nature of Sandifer’s modern marxism. “Let us assume we are fucked.” says Sandifer. “Let us not.” says Marx, “Let us assume that capitalism will indeed continue to disrupt every single industry until we each are gig contractors, languishing under the iron hand of the algorithmic management of the Uber of Whatever.” (of course, Marx originally did not know about the Uber of Whatever, but translating his original observations into modern language is mostly a simple search-replace operation) “Let us consider what might be done about this.”
Marx’s answer is obviously (spoiler alert to anyone who hasn’t been alive in the last 160 years) “historical inevitabilities will result in communism”. In fact, so is Sandifer’s, with one crucial difference: “communism” gets replaced by “extinction” which is even more revealing about this liberal arts eschatology. The world is ready, the answer is written on the first line, “Let us assume we are fucked”. Everything else is commentary. One may approach the conclusion in a “decelerationist” way, or in an “accelerationist” way, or shy away from it entirely, but rejecting the inevitability of this idea altogether is on the wrong side of the event horizon of comprehensibility, and thus the shadow it casts against the accretion disk must be pattern-matched into the nearest comprehensible thing.
(Or, to be more precise, the proper analogy to catch the true magnitude of the abomination this is would be Sandifer observing ideas from inside the event horizon and seeing something that claims it will escape the superluminal gravitational pull of the inevitable future of the black hole’s singularity; rejection of the limits of the comprehensible is to the liberal arts eschatology as magnificent a violation of the laws of reality as breaking the lightspeed barrier would be to a physicist. An astute reader might notice that only one of these rules seems to be hard-coded into the universe itself, and that the rules that are hard-coded into the universe itself are barely flickering within the boundaries of the comprehensible themselves. What this says about the merits of each might as well be left as an exercise to the reader, as I do not believe a person who believes in the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility would be willing to change their mind on this topic.)
Thus, rejecting death is seen as a personal flaw for one could not comprehend a reasonable mind that might not accept death. A universal feature of such a liberal arts eschatology seems to indeed be the unsolvability of problems, at least problems that are not fundamentally social in their nature. Dramatically restructuring the entire society and economy is seen as an obvious and laudable goal, for it’s “only” social, and the universe’s unwillingness to play along is unfair and unreasonable no matter how much the means of pursuing the goals conflict with the iron laws of incentives.
Now, Marx himself seemed to be quite aware of the iron laws of incentives; his predictions about where they might lead just happened to be subtly incorrect in a hard-to-immediately-anticipate way. Indeed, this attachment to the conclusions and rejection of the methods is a fundamental characteristic of Sandifer’s marxist liberal arts eschatology, and if reanimating the dead was possible I would be willing to bet money that old man Marx would readjust his beliefs in the present day while many of his followers would be left in the somewhat embarrassing position of wanting to die on the hill their idol has withdrawn from.
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
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 1/10
A False Manhattan
I once freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt me.
Now, this obviously sounds preposterous and utterly ridiculous. Nonetheless, the truth is that some people, including myself, do not find it as immediately rejectable as most, and in some parts of the internet these people have become quite the subject of debate, vigorous and vicious alike.
If you are anything like me, you are probably looking for a book that would tell you the basics of what exactly is going on with two of possibly the strangest subcultures of the last ten years. A book that would point and laugh, mock relentlessly and savagely eviscerate their beliefs with the brilliance only someone who truly understands what they are talking about can muster. A book that would force even the most ardent supporters of those ideas to recognize that there is a certain absurdity in them, and laugh along the ride. A book that would neatly tie together the triptych of the good, the bad, and the ugly that Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land personify and emerge victorious with some impressive insight to the human condition.
If so, keep on looking and tell me if you find it, because ‘Neoreaction a Basilisk’ is not that book.
But in its attempt to be that book it provides a fascinating and frightful perspective to an unwritten ideology that pervades every aspect of western popular thought in the postmodern day: that of the liberal arts eschatology and the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility; and reveals Sandifer as an unwitting lovecraftian protagonist in a classic example of the genre: the writer who studies the diaries of others who have encountered something outside everyday comprehension, and follows them into something he did not expect to encounter, either recoiling at the last minute to a reality whose trustworthy foundations have been fundamentally shattered, or succumbing to it completely.
Our protagonist, Phil Sandifer, is a marxist English major at the Miskatonic University of Arkham, Massachusetts, who has stumbled upon the collected texts of three controversial eccentrics and seeks to study their works to understand the dark truths beneath the superficially serene consensus reality we share. For this purpose he made a kickstarter starting at $2000. The book mostly talks about those three, but make no mistake; Sandifer is the true main character whose descent into classic lovecraftian horror we perceive through his writings.
The book begins bleakly, setting the tone and conclusion in advance: “Let us assume we are fucked. The particular nature of our doom is up for any amount of debate, but the basic fact of it seems largely inevitable. My personal guess is that millennials will probably live long enough to see the second Great Depression, which will blur inexorably with the full brunt of climate change to lead to a massive human dieback, if not quite an outright extinction. But maybe it’ll just be a rogue AI and a grey goo scenario. You never know.”
Of course, this is an assertion of an assumption, which is mainly founded on the mainstream dogma of ~capitalism~ destroying the ~ecosystem~ so that ~we are fucked~ and ~nothing can actually be done about it~. A clear case of liberal arts eschatology, an eco-material fatalism of a degraded marxism that lost its will to live somewhere in the last 50 years. But to truly understand this liberal arts eschatology, a head-on assault would be difficult (or at the very least, deeply unsatisfying), so let us instead head back in time a bit to seek pieces of its origins to piece together a terrifying vision of. Our first stop shall be in 1987.
In Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ Doctor Manhattan is a brilliant scientist whose physical body gets accidentally taken apart and who consequently becomes a disembodied consciousness living in a magical quantum dimension, able to manipulate matter on a fundamental level however he wishes. To Moore’s credit, he mostly does a splendid job of keeping the idea together; the universe of Watchmen operates on a different set of natural laws than ours, and the few glimpses the work reveals (prudently; just enough to maintain credibility while avoiding self-contradiction) fit together well enough to let the reader fill in the gaps. ESP, telepathy, mind over matter, and the superscience which produced Doctor Manhattan form neatly a coherent whole.
But where it falls apart is Manhattan’s psychology. Superintelligent characters are hard to write, because one needs to convincingly fake a level above one’s own. If you knew how AlphaGo would play, you would be just as superhumanly skilled, but because you aren’t, you are always at risk of making a move that vaguely seems like a move AlphaGo might make, but which does not fit the underlying logic by which AlphaGo plays. And if you are an amateur, making such a move may fool other amateurs, but Lee Sedol would recognize that something is off and AlphaGo itself would facepalm quite thoroughly if it had a palm. And a face. And a psychology.
This is basically exactly what Moore does to Manhattan. He is not actually a superpowered being to whom the world’s smartest man is little more than the world’s smartest termite, and thus when he needs to write Manhattan out of the story he does something that to him seems perfectly sensible, but to someone who is closer to what Manhattan would actually be than Moore himself is (I never promised to be humble), it is clearly a terrible move. A person’s father is someone unexpected, and Manhattan is like “woah, humans are way too random and unlikely, doc out”.
Unfortunately, Moore doesn’t understand what else is random and unlikely: the exact pattern of decay from a piece of plutonium, for example. And literally everything else as well. It is highly preposterous that Doctor Manhattan would so privilege the unlikely things of human psychology when he is completely unfazed by the unlikely things of nuclear decay; and especially grating because one can so obviously see a better answer.
“In this event, nothing was technically beyond my understanding. I could see the neurons, the axons, the transmitter chemicals, down to every single quark, with perfect clarity and the inevitability was obvious. Yet there is one thing I couldn’t know: the subjective experience of having this happen. This neuron sends this signal to that one, and it outputs actions, speech, thoughts, but I was not her, and from my own position I could never truly comprehend what was going through her head in that moment. Humans are the only thing in this universe that I can’t understand, they are way too fascinating for me, doc out.”
Of course, the weaknesses of this approach are still visible: Thomas Nagel could bring forth an impressive objection to why exactly Manhattan wonders what it is like to be a human, but not a bat, which surely must be an even more foreign experience. Nonetheless, this is defensible, and far stronger than Moore’s original; it is easy to imagine Manhattan’s mechanistic perspective, superhuman but still bound to his fundamentally humane mind, shaken at the realization when this one event makes him consider unexpected ideas, and not having wondered what it’s like to be a bat is obviously a simple oversight in Manhattan’s cognition which is all-seeing but not really all-knowing.
This idea that all human minds are fundamentally intercomprehensible underlies the works of Moore and Sandifer alike, and leads them to latch onto convenient stereotypes when they don’t know the more sophisticated reasons why people would believe different things (of course, as a marxist the author surely must have no experience in having his views misinterpreted by people who lack the background information with which they make a lot more sense; suffice to say, the very concept of ‘inferential distance’ gets its own dose of mockery early on because it was used in a less-than-optimal way in the early LessWrong community (yet again something marxists are obviously unfamiliar with)).
The Wachowski sisters’ masterpiece ‘The Matrix’ is another example of a work falling prey to inferential distances. The eponymous Matrix is a simulated reality which keeps people in a consistent state of non-awareness, to maintain them alive and sane so that the machine overlords of Earth can secretly run their processes on unused neurons (“You only use 10% of your brain, the rest runs the system that keeps you imprisoned”) because it’s a really convenient source of computing power in a world where humans destroyed other easy sources of computing power (and the reason why the society simulated is specifically the late 90’s american capitalism is obviously that, in its unironic embrace of “the end of history” and other ideas that would prove really embarrassing in just a couple of years, it was the least cognitively challenging period of humanity for your average corporate drone; convincingly faking the subjective experience of endless cubicle misery is far less computationally expensive than simulating the vibrant “life-or-death, doesn’t matter I’m living to the fullest” challenges of hunter-gatherer societies or the unpredictable synchronized global hivemind of the 2010s; and if someone questions why exactly they have been doing the same exact pointless intellectually unchallenging things in cubicles for what feels like fifty years, the perfect excuse is already there: this is the end of history, get used to it).
Of course, Hollywood wasn’t going to have any of that. They needed something that ~made sense~, so they switched the backstory away from stealing processing cycles from a brilliantly energy-efficient computer that can replicate itself even if semiconductor fabs are destroyed to the utter nonsense of using humans as batteries. Because with a form of fusion, the machines could satisfy all their energy needs with human bodies. Yes, you read that right, the machines have fusion but for some reason are still extracting energy from humans. The physicists in the audience are now facepalming really hard, the amateur physicists understand what I’m talking about, and the non-physicists demonstrate the validity of the crucial concept of inferential distance.
Naturally, Hollywood did not explicitly consciously mention that the movie should not be about ‘the things we don’t think about upholding an oppressive system that keeps us bound to serve it’, but that’s kind of exactly the point I am making here. Of course, the awakening to “reality” where people can be brave freedom-fighters against the evil system to liberate themselves from being squishy duracells is once again obviously simply yet another layer of The Matrix itself. The red pill is the ultimate blue pill, placating those who need to believe that they have some secret knowledge the rest of humanity lacks, to be willing to be placated. In actual reality the escape is no escape. Buy a Che t-shirt from Amazon. Identify as an objectively rational atheist whom absolutely nothing could convince of fairytales. Discard ideologies about gender and join the red pill movement. The Matrix is ultimately about ethics in gaming journalism.
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 · 27 notes · .permalink
wackd:
philsandifer:
socialjusticemunchkin:
What does Phil Sandifer have in common with a respected literary genius of modern pop culture?
What does it really mean that his book is “stellar”?
Is 20 pages, with digressions to, among other things, the revolution of 1800, short fix fics of two masterpieces, recursive meta-paranoia, and the implications of half a tab of acid, the right length for a book review?
Why is it vital for the fate of the universe to convince Sandifer to install Linux?
What is the horrible secret that would make Karl Marx and AlphaGo alike facepalm if one wasn’t dead and the other a cold unfeeling machine without a palm, a face, nor a psychology for that matter?
And what if the true sneer culture was ourselves all along?
…the tantalization shall continue until friendliness improves!
New favorite review.
This really should be the blurb.
Just you wait until I finish the real thing I’m putting the final polishing touches on…
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 16 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
What does Phil Sandifer have in common with a respected literary genius of modern pop culture?
What does it really mean that his book is “stellar”?
Is 20 pages, with digressions to, among other things, the revolution of 1800, short fix fics of two masterpieces, recursive meta-paranoia, and the implications of half a tab of acid, the right length for a book review?
Why is it vital for the fate of the universe to convince Sandifer to install Linux?
What is the horrible secret that would make Karl Marx and AlphaGo alike facepalm if one wasn’t dead and the other a cold unfeeling machine without a palm, a face, nor a psychology for that matter?
And what if the true sneer culture was ourselves all along?
…the tantalization shall continue until friendliness improves!
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw #drugs cw · 16 notes · .permalink
nostalgebraist:
NAB notes: Sandifer’s negative evaluations as wards against horror
This is turning into a series, so for reference: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
While reading Neoreaction A Basilisk, I kept wondering how much it was meant as a takedown of the trio, and how much it was meant as a creative, conceptual riff which simply used the trio for some raw material.
Of course, the answer is “it’s both.” But that isn’t quite right, either. As a takedown, it’s scattered and not especially useful for someone who just wants to know what’s wrong with the trio. I’ve seen a few posts from people saying they wanted it to be some sort of primer for fighting neoreaction, and it clearly isn’t that – saying “Moldbug’s use of Satanic negation reveals his unacknowledged sympathy for Satan as represented in Paradise Lost” is not the kind of idea that will help you out in direct political scuffles with Moldbug fans.
As a conceptual riff, though, it’s continually limited by the invasion of takedown-related material. The book presents itself as an examination of strange internet (psuedo-)philosophers who – like classic horror story protagonists – are confronted with the unintended, disturbing, mind-searing implications of their own work. This sounds like a good story, and it seems as though Sandifer wants to tell it. But whenever the story starts to get interesting, whenever a bit of real narrative develops, whenever Sandifer starts tying the literary resonances here to his own literary interests like Milton or Blake … it all quickly runs aground, usually within a page, because Sandifer switches back to an evaluative mode.
Any attempt to build a mood, to dim the lights and get the audience spooked, is quickly interrupted as the lights flip back on and the storyteller starts haranguing you about how our mad philosopher protagonist made a totally shit point in this one blog post, oh my god, how are people so wrong on the internet.
It’s clear that Sandifer does not see Yudkowsky or Moldbug as intellectuals worth taking seriously (Land is a bit more complicated). So it would be easy for him to just say at the outset: “look, I don’t think these people’s actual ideas are worth the virtual paper they’re printed on. I do find them interesting as characters, and I’m going to tell a story about their journeys that I find potent in itself, like so many other good stories about awful or risible people.”
Indeed, this is sort of what he does, in the early parts of the book. As @psybersecurity writes:
One problem is that Sandifer can’t help but continue to use Moldbug and Yudkowsky as punching bags. It’s a bit of an issue - after presenting legitimately good, concise criticisms of the two in the book’s introductory segment, he seemingly feels justified in adopting a smug attitude towards them as easily ignorable figures that no respectable intellectual would take seriously. And yet he can’t help but bring up qualms with them again and again, as if he’s not quite as secure in his dismissal as he wishes he was.
This is not just some little infelicity, I think. It’s a major problem which holds the book back a great deal in its ambitions to do something creative and legitimately chilling. The “story” is so stop-and-go that it’s barely there: the book is so wedded to the takedown format that any flights of fancy Sandifer wants to attempt must be weighed down with great ponderous loads of potshots.
Why is the book like this?
My bet is that the conceptual/narrative riff, not the takedown, was Sandifer’s driving motivation. His descriptions of the book are heavily slanted in that direction, after all. Take this paragraph from the Kickstarter:
Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe. It is a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment. A savage journey to the heart of the present eschaton. A Dear John letter to western civilization written from the garden of madman philosophers. A textual labyrinth winding towards a monster that I promise will not turn out to be ourselves all along or any crap like that.
IMO, this is a great pitch. It also sounds far more interesting and fun than the actual book. The description suggests literary game-playing, genuine induction of unease in the reader, a work of creative writing by someone who, incidentally, doesn’t think much of the people who served as its inspirations.
Why couldn’t Sandifer have just written that book? I suspect – and I could be wrong – that Sandifer has realized that his intended audience won’t look kindly at any book about neoreaction and Less Wrong unless it’s a takedown. Sandifer is not aiming this book at fans of these ideas, and his target audience is either already hostile to the ideas or likely to become hostile when made aware of them.
He’s clearly interested in writing something that takes concepts like “Red Pills” and “democracy will destroy itself” seriously, and doing creative work within that framework. But that framework comes from people whose other views he abhors. Writing a book of riffs on the aesthetic potential of “the Red Pill” runs you the risk of looking like you’re sympathetic to “the Red Pill” as conceived of by Moldbug and PUAs. “Roko’s Basilisk” makes Less Wrong a readily dismissable laughingstock to various parts of the internet; it’s also “a really spectacular story,” as Sandifer puts it, but if you push that angle to the point of admitting the idea really is chilling, you risk looking like you’re no savvier than the folks who freaked out about it in the first place.
So Sandifer must continually reassure his readers: “it’s OK, I think these people are ludicrous, I’m not taking them seriously.” This explains why he keeps on taking potshots against Yudkowsky and Moldbug long after he’s fully dismissed them as serious thinkers. He knows that a book that treats these people even as serious literary characters is going to strike a lot of people as conceding too much to them. So he tries to treat them as serious literary characters, because that’s his fundamental project, but he still keeps worrying that he might be taking them too seriously for his audience’s tastes, and so he keeps interrupting the story with more disses, until the cancerous tissue of the disses occupies so much space that the story is a mere shadow of what it might have been.
This also explains why his disses are so half-hearted. That’s not to say he’s too nice: he’s perfectly willing to call these people idiots. If anything, though, he still pulls his punches. He’s willing to call the trio some nasty names – because that’s a cheap, easy way to convey antipathy – but he doesn’t delve into their work far enough to identify its true (and vast and deep) flaws, sometimes ignoring obvious and damning critiques in favor of much weaker ones. You can get a far more damning primer on Moldbug’s failings from the Anti-Reactionary FAQ (published Oct. 2013), and as sweet Yudkowsky dunks go, he has nothing on someone like @argumate.
I don’t think this is because Sandifer can’t write a takedown. I think it’s because his heart isn’t it in. He’d never countenance this kind of laziness when it comes to Milton and Blake, because he actually cares about Milton and Blake.
But nonetheless, the half-hearted dunks interrupt the action again and again, insistently, compulsively. Because if he went too long without them, he’d be writing an actual treatise on the serious literary potential, the horror and beauty, of “Red Pills” and “basilisks,” of silly and possibly evil internet ephemera.
I don’t want to go to far here, but I hope this way of going-too-far is in the spirit of all of this: it seems like his decision to send review copies to neoreactionaries and Less Wrong rationalists would fit naturally into this defense. Presumably these people will get bees in their bonnets and write some infuriated words, which will reinforce the impression that Sandifer’s book is a takedown, which will neutralize any remaining sense that he’s fraternizing with the enemy.
I should be clear. I’m not saying that Sandifer agrees with the trio’s substantial claims, any more than one has to endorse Humbert Humbert’s self-presentation to enjoy Lolita. But there are some people who, understandably, can’t enjoy Lolita anyway, because they simply and for good reason want nothing to do with people like H.H., and are emphatically opposed to exploring his emotional complexities, his pathos, what can be done with him from a playful ironic literary remove. They don’t want to explore his possibilities; they just want to say “fuck that guy” and be done with it. So, too, with some people and neoreaction. But Sandifer is not one of these. He’s interested in the pathos and the playful possibilities. He wants to write Lolita, not a manual on the prevention of child abuse.
And so, in the book itself, like one of the horror protagonists he discusses, Sandifer continually, compulsively – and less and less convincingly – says no, asserts that nothing is wrong, that he’s in control, that he’s not unhealthiy interested in his subjects, that he knows they’re wrong and evil (did you know he thinks they’re wrong and evil? let’s say it again to make sure), that he may be gazing into the abyss but – rest easy – it’s not gazing into him, that nothing is off here, dear reader, oh no, that the trio is just as dismissible as you thought when you began reading, let me just reiterate that once again for clarity, no there is not anything going on over there in the shadows –
He’s of the Devil’s party, but he doesn’t know it.
(via argumate)
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 53 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink
A statement on neoreaction a basilisk
collapsedsquid:
leftclausewitz:
oligopsony:
leftclausewitz:
This isn’t so much a review as it is an address to a particular comment I’ve seen often come up among those who oh so desperately want to undo the project, to argue that the links made within NAB are irrelevant, and more generally the statements that are made whenever the politics of the lesswrong community are attacked. Whenever Yudkowsky’s politics are ‘conservative’ or not is argued over and over and over again in the horrid way characteristic of a group with a strong belief in the powers of language, and this argument has come up yet again in the conversation about NAB, that Sandifer’s choice to talk about Yudkowsky alongside Moldburg and Nick Land (two massive neoreactionaries) is a miscategorization to the degree that Sandier shouldn’t finish the book, that the book is communist propaganda, whatever.
I’m just going to provide my reading of the situation, as ya know, an actual communist. Because I’m of the opinion that while Yudkowsky may not be a ‘conservative’, his work definitely fits within the reactionary project, and that this key element explains a large degree of the way the lesswrong/rationalist community leans.
To sum up the key element; the major part of Yudkowsky’s project is a desire to work towards the creation of a beneficent AI who we can then give the resources to to run the world. To this end he has created a pair of think tanks, has written innumerable papers and thinkpieces, etc. Now, this is hard to take seriously but if we do take it seriously then this is merely a new coat of paint over a desire that is over two hundred years old.
You see, it’s easy to forget that feudalism (stay with me now) wasn’t just ‘having a king’, that the feudal system was a whole system wherein the whole hierarchy was justified in generally divine terms. And while the literary origin of the divine right of kings was in Bodin, Bodin’s work actually is a degradation of the concept; the fact that it needed to be expressed in the 16th century showed just how much it was being questioned. Because, before this period, while the King was not absolute the hierarchy he remained atop of was, it’s an amazing statement that no matter how many aristocratic intrigues and revolts occurred before the 17th century, not a single one of these revolts sought to end the whole edifice of monarchy. I can go on about this separately but a full discussion of it would take quite a bit of time and I’m not specifically talking about this.
But the thing about the divine right of monarchs is that in the end it is divine. Many who sought to bring back monarchs seek to merely turn the clock back to 1788, but some of the more intelligent reactionaries who wrote in the generation following the French Revolution noted that you would have to turn it back even further, that the beginnings of secular thought was the beginning of the demise of a fully justified monarchy. Because if God is not there in the foreground, justifying the difference between King and noble and noble and peasant, then the King is just some guy, your local lord is just some guy, and what the fuck justifies their existence over you?
This became worse and worse over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, with ever more and ever more complicated justifying measures appearing–for instance, a focus on the innate power of the blood which became a motif among reactionaries for centuries to come. But in the end these measures just didn’t cut it, and after the French Revolution it became harder and harder to justify Monarchy, or any sort of Autocracy, on divine or secular grounds.
I would argue that the reactionary project ever since the French Revolution is the search for a newly justified King, a King who could reestablish the hierarchy of old. But they come up on an issue, without the totalizing religious beliefs of old your hierarchy is always going to comprise of regular people, and unless you engage in nonsensical magical thinking (a trait actually increasingly common now even in mainstream works but constantly under challenge), you’re going to have to find another way.
And so, at the end of this line of thinking, we find Yudkowsky. How is it that neoreactionaries found such a home in the bosom of rationalism? Because they were, in the end, seeking the same thing. Moldbug declaring that he is, in the end, searching for a king is not a more radical view compared to Yudkowsky’s, only a more honest one. It takes away the varnish of technoutopianism of a beneficent and omnipotent AI and says that in the end a person will do. Because in the end a King is a King, regardless of how many philosophy classes he’s taken and, indeed, whether he is human or not. The two exist on the same plane within the same project: the AI Philosopher King is, to the Lesswrongers, ideal, but Moldbug says that he’d settle for Steve Jobs. It’s the same shit, the same longing for a newly justified King.
You can make this analogy, but you could of course also make a similar analogy to, say, godbuilding or the dream of society being ruled by reason. (And conversely, conservatism is much more aligned analogically and genealogically with those aristocratic rebellions against absolutism more so than absolutism itself.) Which isn’t to say there are no connections to be drawn - I think Phil is pretty clear and honest about what does, and doesn’t, connect them - just that I don’t see this in particular as persuasive.
Actually I would very much draw those analogies in that Godbuilding and the dream of a society ruled by reason is a desire to reinstitute hierarchy and ‘order’ onto a system seen as chaotic by a ruling class which is constantly having to reinvent itself in order to retain its justified status.
And I would agree with you about the geneology off conservativism, but the thing is I’m not saying Yudkowsky is a conservative, I’m saying that he’s a part of the reactionary project which is a more specific thing.
I will say in his defense that one of the things that I see in
Yudkowsky’s work is the idea that since such a machine is possible, it is near-certain that it will be made. The only option therefore is make sure it’s the best that it can possibly be.
The definition of “best” is of course not clear, which is the point of the philosophizing and something to dispute. But he’s saying it’s would be difficult to make such a machine that avoids absolutely terrible things that no one wants, like killing everybody.
Yes indeed; “if we’re going to have a boss we can’t get rid of, at least let it be a boss that doesn’t fuck everything up horribly like all the previous bosses and instead serve the people it has authority over” isn’t exactly a reactionary idea, it’s more like the people who began tearing down the unlimited authority of kings. Reactionariness would be closer to “fucking everything up horribly is actually an acceptable side effect of Restoring the Rightful Hierarchy”
1 month ago · tagged #nrx cw · 231 notes · source: leftclausewitz · .permalink
jumpingjacktrash:
beerightsactivist:
teacupsandcyanide:
beerightsactivist:
dark bee tumblr show me the forbidden bees
this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.
these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.
and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.
this is a cuckoo bee! she is really cool! she goes into other bee’s houses and lays eggs there, and then when the baby hatches it eats the host bees’ pollen and lays waste to the hive, murdering and eating all the other bee babies! BUT ONLY if it’s mother bee didn’t kill them all first.
thank u dark bee tumblr
cuckoo bee you are far too pretty to be an h r geiger nightmare like you in fact turn out to be
nature is magical
TIL popular authoritarian thoughts make sense if you mistakenly believe humans are bees. Somebody should inform white nationalists that they, in fact, are not bees; perhaps they would be a little less paranoid about immigrants if they were informed it’s dark bees that cuck the nest and eradicate the natives, not humans.
(via metagorgon)
1 month ago · tagged #cucked in the cuck by my own cuck #nrx cw · 42,941 notes · source: beerightsactivist · .permalink
