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This is another great, approachable explainer on “the rationalist wackos who have managed to take over much of the AI industry, and who now have tons of money and political power.” www.iankduncan.com/personal/202...

the rationalists secular solstice doom holiday is just the funniest shit ever, I’m sorry but omg www.interfaithamerica.org/article/at-b...

bless your hearts

the Eliezer Yudkowsky superhero origin story is truly so intensely dorky as to defy all attempts at parody. you could not waterboard any of this out of me web.archive.org/web/20010309...

here we find Eliezer Yudkowsky engaging in the classic 90s and 2000s genre of “insecure straight guy getting really defensive about liking Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

“Yes, I like Buffy, but not for the stupid reasons you plebeian ignoramuses do,” he says, while wearing a fedora and khaki cargo shorts (did Yud ever go through a Hawaiian shirt phase?)

Reading this makes me feel really bad for Eliezer Yudkowsky’s parents tbh

While I am no psychologist or psychiatrist, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s account of his own life does read exactly like the writing of every other reasonably articulate person with a severe personality disorder:

Here is Eliezer Yudkowsky explaining (like a very normal person who absolutely does not have some kind of acute personality disorder) why, on the basis of his childhood test scores, he is a special genius uniquely qualified to change the world: web.archive.org/web/20010309...

like I suspect many of you on This Website, I think a core reason why I find Eliezer Yudkowsky and his rationalist and effective altruist satellites so intensely annoying is because I had a VERY similar “being a super weird, pretentious, hyper-literate kid” experience - I just, you know, grew up.

I used to be pretty active in the super-high-IQ societies and Yudkowsky's whole schtick looks goddamn familiar to me. They tend to collect people whose particular aptitude in convergent cognitive tasks allows them to overlook and explain away their fulminant and driving emotional imbalances.

Heh, I was a member for some time and yeah, if you're smart but secure and have other ways to connect to people you can get along with it's not going to be very useful to you. And it's even truer for the societies with higher score requirements.