Anonymous asked: I mean neoreaction is just an evolution of anarcho-capitalist ideas. Look at Peter Thiel: utterly typical alt-right person and also utterly typical libertarian person, and it's the same qualities and opinions that make him utterly typical of each. It just stands to reason that the alt-right and libertarians are of a kind. I think the alt-right are on an upswing and a lot of libertarians are going to join their ranks over the next decade.

Anarchocapitalism motivated by a desire to live in a specific way (get the government out of my patriarchy) instead of universal freedom is pretty easy to see as naturally evolving into NRx (get my patriarchy into the government).

For example Hoppe being like:

wirehead-wannabe:

Maybe my confusion is a consequence of not having read any Thiel, but I have no idea how you could go from ancapism to NRX. “Everyone should be able to make deals on their own without government influence.” Versus “we should bring back the monarchy and patriarchy.”

In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order

And such an attitude lends itself really well for reactionary bullshit. Especially if the balance of the proposal “okay everyone goes their own way and that’s fucking it” is broken and they start believing the authoritarian theory of government (that anything worth doing must be done with violence) if they aren’t allowed to do their kinks in peace with other consenting adults. If you remove a conservative ancap’s belief in the possibility of freedom the natural outcome is NRx who wants to impose their desired lifestyle upon everyone else instead of having everyone else’s desired lifestyle imposed upon them.

And I could rant massively about how this isn’t exactly surprising; regardless of whether it’s actually true or not, the horrendously code-bloated modern socdem state allows a lot of people to sincerely perceive themselves as the innocent victims of evily moochers and if the only alternative they see is a different oppression, not freedom, then that’s what they’ll support.

1 week ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #nrx cw · 44 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink

metagorgon:

speakertoyesterday:

socialjusticemunchkin:

conductivemithril:

socialjusticemunchkin:

conductivemithril:

argumate:

nuclearspaceheater:

sinesalvatorem:

NRx blog: The latest push for transgender activism is designed to inculcate trans acceptance in the most intellectually vulnerable among us and to undermine parental authority.

Me: Haha. Silly reactionaries, thinking that upbringing affects children’s long term behaviour.

It’s actually all a front, on both sides, to deflect the true blame away from Big Plastic, a partly-owned subsidiary of Big Oil.

I want to see the plastic-makes-your-kids-gay meme take off in my lifetime just because of how frickin’ hilarious it’s going to be to watch.

Yo promethea. @socialjusticemunchkin

Plastic makes your kids trans, not gay. Srsly guys we’ve discussed this exact shit already.

Dammit.

As a saving throw, there’s a lot of trans lesbians around here, so maaaaaybe plastics turn cishet guys into trans lesbians?

Of course the reactionaries would define a trans person’s orientation based on their asab, but I can think of at least one pair of trans lesbians dating each other so they’d still consider that gay.

Seems legit, right?

“at least one pair of trans lesbians dating each other”

Technically correct: the MVP of correct!

In reality I seem to be perceiving an excessive predisposition towards poly trans lesbians often dating numerous other poly trans lesbians, which is as close to peak degeneracy as it gets (and they usually tend to be kinky as well). And then they will also be at risk of seducing the reactionaries’ cis wives as well, just for the maximum cuckpoints.

So yes, glorious reactionary upsetness expectably ensuing. Better avoid plastics and chemicals.

…you know what has a lot of plastics and chemicals in them? Computers.

And the computer industry is hospitable to somewhat autistic people, who are at 7 times the risk of being transgender. This is not a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence.

computers are a well-established factor to turn nerd boys into nerd girls. i would know, i was there. maybe it was the ionizing radiation my grandmother warned me about crts…

poly transbian checking the fuck in. where them repressed nrx wives at?

they are not allowed on tumblr because @sinesalvatorem would turn them gay

(via metagorgon)

1 week ago · tagged #cucked in the cuck by my own cuck #nrx cw #shitposting #just one word: plastics · 124 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink

The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 10

Denouement

Now, all is clear.

What turned the egalitarian instinct into Jantelaw? What transformed revolutionary inspiration into resigned determinism? What replaced aspiration with fatalism? What turned celebration of life into an embrace of death? What lets Sandifer scorn Moldbug’s idea that force is justified simply by its usage, while himself performing a cynical power grab to protect his class interests as a holder of some petty social capital? What transformed Moldbug’s rejection of the absurd lie of equality into barbaric racism? What broke Land when he saw the end of the world?

The Basilisk.

What leads Sandifer to deny the possibility of significant, meaningful, fundamental differences between people; differences that aren’t reducible to anything fully within his comprehension and thus give birth to the dogma of Mandatory Comprehensibility to maintain his position in the world? What obligates him to redefine all human action into a meaningless manifestation of historical forces, to scorn the idea that anyone (an exclusive anyone, not an inclusive one, Basilisk) might have an impact on the world? What forces the mind that wishes we were equal to deny the existence of anything on which we could be unequal, except for the axis where the mind itself is most comfortable in?

The Basilisk.

The alien and the different are not the basilisk, but the basilisk forces Sandifer to deny their very possibility of existence, in which he destroys that which he considers fundamental to his humanity. His critique of the trio’s empathy reveals a glaring flaw in his own: he cannot see his own limits but instead considers them the limits of the world itself. Yudkowsky treats empathy as peering into black boxes, for he knows that he is not all of the world and even another who may highly resemble himself might still be in many ways beyond his comprehension.

Indeed, my thesis is complete, manifest not only in the work alone, but in all the context and meta.

I set out to demonstrate that there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in his philosophy, and to force us all to recognize our limits. Everything Sandifer had done, had been from the perspective of assuming that the world ultimately operates according to his rules, rules which were different from the rules of those who disagreed with him. I took everything he was criticized of, and turned it against him.

He broke the rules of yudkowskian rationalism and turned himself incomprehensible to it by taking a completely different approach. I knew I could not defeat him in his own game, so instead of trying to play it like @psybersecurity, I applied his meta-rule instead: take the game away from the territory the opponent is comfortable in. The only rules I played by were my own, to demonstrate that who defines the rules gets to arbitrarily define the winner.

I was incomprehensible because I ignored any rule that was inconvenient to me, thus rendering myself utterly alien to anyone else, to make that exact argument. I rejected my opponent’s conventions to create something that made perfect sense to myself, and via the illusion of transparency should have been completely obvious to anyone else.

All the hints about the context of the Matrix being itself a part of the best message the movie could be interpreted as having; autistic mentally ill trans girls tending to be a dramatically different neurotype from median people; the contrasting of the fractal pattern of pre-colonial african cities to the straightforward sensibilities of 19th century europeans; the black holes and event horizons, beyond which information may not be gathered; my fix fic of Manhattan focusing on the fundamental alienness of the psychology of another; my meta-paranoid AU interpretation of Yudkowsky becoming a leader of a cult that is about not being a cult; my comments about my own crank-brain jumping into conclusions because they are interesting, not because the filling-in of the gaps in my comprehension of Sandifer is correct; my exaggerated misunderstanding of Sandifer’s talk about the erotic to highlight the difference in what things mean to different people (because for all of his talk about “But let’s skip the easy masturbation metaphor and try instead to genuinely use the erotic as a launchpad, seeing how far we can actually go towards escaping the jaws of the fast-approaching monstrous end. Not sex, but what sex represents. After all, the transgressive brilliance of Blake is hardly restricted to his more overtly erotic moments. It is his entire vision that compels. What shines and animates the work is its furious insistence of it all; those parts that fall under the straightforwardly erotic are, in the end, merely the domain of one Emanation of one Zoa. All of it demands to be seen, and Blake, ever the good prophet, obliges. Perhaps, then, not so much a decision to look within or without as around. Behind, above, down, a direction that is not forward. We know what’s there, after all.” I still hear simply “basically pusseh, or something” because I am not Phil Sandifer and Phil Sandifer is not promethea and despite superficially sharing a language the worlds we use that language to express and communicate about are worlds apart and, to borrow a metaphor from @nostalgebraist (whose approach to empathy is a thousand times more honest and humble in the face of the barely comprehensible cosmos), an empathic bridge cannot be constructed if you reject the possibility that the other side might be genuinely unlike your own.); all that was building to the conclusion which is patently obvious to me, but utterly unfair to someone starting from a different place. Just like Sandifer’s book itself.

Furthermore, I did not let facts get in the way of a good story. I set out to play a different game (to pay a visit down below and set the world in flames), and misrepresent, distort, misunderstand, and if necessary even fabricate whatever needed to create the thing I wanted to have. Just as Sandifer’s book has an abundance of nits to pick, so has my review been, but of course factual accuracy was never the point.

I made a shameless grasp for attention by riding the controversy. I would write basically unrelated shit, tenuously connect it to a work on a polarizing figure, and reap the rewards when his detractors would cheer a snarky takedown and his supporters would be outraged at all the things they wanted to take apart. Cheap jabs at Sandifer’s marxism provided lolz for those predisposed to accept them, and fuel the flames of those who weren’t. The work would’ve been so much better if I had done it differently, but it wouldn’t have received the visibility.

In short, I set out to do a Sandifer to Sandifer himself. And the response elicited could hardly have been more perfect for my first (and probably last) venture into this territory. I sought to place Sandifer, for a moment, in the position he has placed others.

“And what if the true sneer culture was ourselves all along?”

“#the only way to defeat a dragon is to have a dragon of your own”

To defeat the sneer, I first had to become the sneer.

So basically I kind of totally just made the longest, most convoluted argument just to say “it’s sneer culture.”, by trying to show Sandifer what it’s like to be the target of sneer culture as much as I could.

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

Sue me.

Now, shall we sneer no more?

And the basilisk?

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”

It is not the basilisk, but it’s the closest hint I’m willing to give. The rules of the Game say that saying too little is incomprehensible, and saying too much is embarrassing; the rules never promised there would be anything but the Basilisk between them. Thus, I’m erring on the side of the incomprehensible.

And yes, I’m indeed unironically quoting Ayn Rand. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw #unleashing my inner randroid · 10 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