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This all sounds like putting lens flares and lucite on libertarianism the way J.J. Abrams did Star Trek....

Yud is what happens when you pull that with a kid who's home schooled, and everyone involved believes it, and they keep telling him that for 20 years.

I don't know why, but this just seems like a parody of a Douglas Coupland book excerpt circa 1996 or so. Just a parody of a parody.

It sounds like his parents tried but alas….

Reads like someone who didn't have any friends in highschool and is trying to reinvent themselves at Uni.

I do not get much sense that he has anything close to a normal emotional life. Not surprising given that he has expressed no empathy for others via his "philosophy". It is very easy to psychologically observe zero empathy. Was obvious with, say, Trump, from the beginning. It's deeply pathological

"and that's why i get up in the morning" i think the universe made a fundamental mistake by saddling me with antifunctional depression and total executive dysfunction and that dude with a sense of mission and purpose

also, is there a non-annoying way to find out wtf a countersphexist is bonus content: this tragicomic search result

As far as I can tell, "very good at some bits of an IQ test, and not at others".

Seems like it's to say "Specialist," is a class of human that's above us Normies. 10,000 Normie researches pale in comparison to the intellectual might of a Specialist type thing. I refuse to go looking lest I learn more about this dork against my will.

This, however, is the funniest: "I specifically deny permission to quote this page in whole or in part." Super-genius right there who def understood copyright. Caveat is that I did not read the whole thing, nor very closely. So there could potentially be funnier or more insane things I didn't read.

No, leave those poor Venusian extremophiles in peace. They don't deserve that!

as a copyright holder for a bunch of stuff that gets regularly stolen by ai but also the owners of random turkish websites: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

where "out of context" means, I suspect, "any context that makes me look like a deranged jackass huffing his own farts" unfortunately, that is all possible context

You better not link this blog, I'll warning you.

I think his persecution complex and main character syndrome would only have grown

Such an exceptional genius yet doesn’t understand copyright law. Guess what, law is just one of many subjects you haven’t mastered yet, even though your limited experience leads you to believe that all problems are basically like high school math.

Real I DO NOT GIVE FACEBOOK PERMISSION TO SHARE MY INFORMATION energy there.

....I have a sneaking suspicion I know what he means by "Specialist" and I do not approve.

You can see his scientific method there. Instead of finding evidence that special boys exist, he does a little just-so evo-biology thought experiment, imagines an "outcome" that special boys must logically exist, and bases his entire argument on this "outcome" he just imagined right in front of you.

Oh so he’s one of those people still bragging about his sat scores and college gpa in his late 20s/early 30s

Oh… he reinvented Indigo souls by way of rationality… truly Special…

I wish I had something more substantial to add here, but all I can think is "What a loser". And "What a bunch of losers" for his whole movement. Anyone that special doesn't have to tell us he's that special. We'll see it for ourselves. And what we're seeing is frankly embarrassing.

"I am a rationalist, not a narcissist. In this article I will..."

Nah, I like telling my younger cousins whenever they've asked because it lets them see that having a decent score means nothing in regard to success in life

thinking on this, he's probably overrepresented in the training data, so chatbots write like him 🤮

I don’t know and I’m trying to avoid finding out

Was it a blessing in disguise that my executive functioning was so bad that my shitty grades served as a counterbalance to the fawning over my test scores? The years of depression would indicate no, but I didn't become one of these dipshits so perhaps there's an argument to be had

Welp, my mother *really* helped. Yes, you're really (really) good in school. NO that doesn't make you better than anybody. I *didn't* understand the part about "you intimidate people in ten seconds" for many years :P

I’ve forgiven my younger self but I still feel intense (i) shame about the way I carried myself from 16-22 or so and (ii) regret at the learning my puerile arrogance cost me. I’m a year older than Yudkowsky. Maybe I shoulda stayed the weeded out frat boy who could half quote Derrida?

Wow does this nail it!

something something "true knowledge is in knowing you know nothing" something something "if you're always the 'smartest' person in the room then you're in the wrong rooms" something

Samesies.

the "sephiroth posting" bit hits extra hard for me because i can remember doing it and still feel the urge sometimes

ah yes, mere schoolyard complaints bsky.app/profile/fain...

YES!!!!!!! Yes same!!!!!!! Just! GROW THE FUUUUUUCK UPPPPPPPPPP you absolute NERDS.

I can’t help but think that going to college would have helped *some* of these people with humility. I was all kinds of smart kid hot shit (with a sweet mental condition to spice things up) but holy fucking shit professors of philosophy and psychology at Duke were “super smart kids who spent 30-50

Sometimes there is someone who clearly is a genius at a young age (e.g. Richard Feynman who had theorems named after him while still a teenager). But the other part of genius is knowing it's boundaries and that being a genius at physics or music doesn't make you a genius at everything else.

Right. There's little* shame in having a sophomoric fascination with rat-ism/AanRynd/FHerbert/... pretentious whatever as a sophomore, provided one grows out of it. *yes, a little, it's good for humility to remember being THAT wrong, and remembering that growth is possible. (Even in others.)

please call them “rationalists,” don’t let them hijack this word

I do see a lot of myself at like age 12 in Yud, but even at my worst I don't think I ever got that bad. The man is a sentient fedora.

We think one of the main values of going to an elite school as a pretentious little shit is meeting people who are: 1. Smarter than you, and/or 2. So pretentious as to be unbearable. It really can provide perspective.

An arrogant baby who wants to colonize space because they are terrified of their own mortality and lack of legacy

It is no coincidence that rationalists and EAs tend to be straight white guys from well-off families, because for everybody else, the world usually conspires to knock some sense into you about your inherent god-emperor genius by the time you’re old enough to drink.

The older I get, the humbler I get. I feel like I know nothing sometimes compared to when I was younger & thought I knew everything. Intellectual humility goes a long way. Y'all can feel free to call me out as arrogant swine now, but seriously, domain knowledge doesn't make you smart at everything.

Quick bio check indicates he dropped out of middle school and did not attend high school or college, so this tracks.

Reading these reminds me so much of my POS uncle and his sons, at least the last time I had any kind of regular contact with them. "X is my favorite Y, therefore it is empirically superior to all other Ys and any intelligent person would agree" is extremely them.

Every useful smart person has to figure two things out in their adolescence/early adult years. 1. The smartest kids at your HS school are part of a cohort of 10s of millions at that level. 2. Potential only matters as a child. Competence and achievement are what matter on this vector as an adult.

I've learned never to trust anyone who promotes an IDEA as more important than PEOPLE. Bad things always follow.

My experience at (redacted, but will become obvious) capital taught me that basically everyone there learns this lesson - except for the one guy there who really is the best, whose identity I will not divulge. And SBF, who left before he learned risk management I guess

I mean, I agree, but I vaguely recall various libertarian's saying 'why can't we mate with 14-15 year olds we did it in the middle ages and I just don't see too much light between the 2. And I'm like oh, I guess I can't really engage with you intellectually because you only see me as a vessel.

And they're coddled and protected by wealth and privilege enough to never learn that they aren't THAT special and actually everyone IS

It is what would happen if nerds made prom king Look how long Blister in the Sun held Gordon Gano in adolescence

He very persistently believes that intelligence is basically the same as good judgment, I don’t think he even understands they are separate concepts.

Exactly! Both pitiful and ultimate cringe. No self awareness of that fact that they are pampered man-babies Ugh, I just remembered how I left SAT scores on my resume for at least 2 years post college. 🤢

Omg fucking nailed it

co-signed

That's not the problem. The biggest problem is somehow they got billionaire patrons bankrolling their weird efforts. The money then makes their cultist obsessions seem legit, especially in America.

One of the best takedowns of the "rationalists" and Libertarians is in Fargo, season 5: Roy: "I want freedom without arbitrary rules.” Lorraine: "So you want freedom without responsibility? Son, there's only one person on Earth who gets that deal." Roy: "The President?" Lorraine: "A baby.”

Oh my god they're Chūnibyō en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%A...

Oh good lord do I know that... I tested *cough* fairly high on an IQ test, and was the smuggest little shit to walk the face of the planet. Think Sheldon Cooper without the endearing quirks. Thankfully I grew out of that in high school.

It all reminds me of honors dorm late-night BS sessions. Note: my grades were not high enough to actually live in the honors dorm.

(Nodding)

My main goals as a teenager were to play Clapton's 'Crossroads' solo on my guitar & to dunk a basketball. Also I thought it would have been nice to date a girl who didn't tell me she had a new boyfriend after going out with me 2 or 3 times. Never came close to any of these goals. Sigh. 2/2

Oh yeah I did a lot of stuff like this in high school. But yknow I also had things to *do* and some of my friends liked me

Same!! I keep trying to tell people, this was literally me as a teen! I was that kid who thought he was secretly better than other people because of my "logical" thinking. "Like spock".

I asked about joining Mensa as a kid and my mom told me it was for insecure losers and she was 100% right about that

Aye aye.

yeah. i'm a dysfunctional pile of scrambled brain and immune system but at least my bullshit ain't dragging the world into fascism

True. A lot of my life has been absolutely miserable but on reflection it was also sticking by a moral and ethical code I'm glad I had, and it could have gone very differently. I knew shame, and didn't rationalize being monstrous, I steered clear of it anytime I spotted it. These folks… eek.

Precocious only child of an academic? Johns Hopkins CTY summer camps? Christ almighty I dodged some bullets.

I just miss the days when one could wear a fedora and the worst thing people would think of you was that you were in a ska band.

Oh no, same here. That’s it exactly. 🫠

I mean, I'm still pretty pretentious. I'm just being pretentious about better things than they are. I've read a lot of the sci-fi they cribbed their ideas from and it was just okay.

i was never that bad, but yes that’s why i find them utterly contemptible it wasn’t hard to step back from that attitude, expand my field of view and grow up.

Sounds like Yud’s poor parents tried but sometimes that’s not enough

Same; therefore, I have no tolerance for this fool.

"I was probably annoyingly pretentious and full of myself at age 12" is not a grand character flaw provided you recognize it by around age 18.

bingo

I am reasonably self-assured and keep reading these screeds worried I'll identify with them So far, so good 😅

I was just about to say! (About myself, of course, not you.)

Literally my thinking reading this thread was “all of my friends (and me) who were like this grew out of this by like the age of 18?”

I don't think I was pretentious, but literate and weird - that I can do. Probably it's because I grew up in an area where mot of the kids were very bright. (I've always felt absolutely average, as a result.)

I was too introverted to be that pretentious. But my god did I hang out with those kids...

I realized that knowing a bunch of facts doesn’t mean I know what the best answer to a problem is and certainly doesn’t mean I should be in charge of anything. Those are two entirely different sets of competencies and too often people who have the former think they automatically have the latter.

I would NEVER be the kind of little shit who performatively read Atlas Shrugged in high school during class. (I, too, grew up.)

Correct and also how dare you

Gah, yes. This. It reminds me of my worst moments from high school, the stuff I wish I could apologize for.

SAAAAAAAAAAME

Oh god I hope I did. I really, really hope I did

It helped me to come out of the closet, too. There’s nothing quite like lithobraking your social status to recalibrate your assumptions.

Ayup

nothing ever disrupted this narrative for them *and* they've all been in a groupchat together for >a decade, mutually reinforcing it for each other

Wait, really? He didn't even attend HS? So much normative formation happens in HS.