Just read 'Meditations on Moloch'. Holy fucking shit, Scott Alexander might be one of the greatest modern thinkers

I did

Thanks

without believing something is possible then the space in your mind that would be otherwise used to fill it with possible explanations of how to get there will be closed

>one of the greatest modern thinkers
Scott Alexander couldn't find a coherent thought with both hands if he sat on it. His entire shtick is reading some pop-lit trash from the NYT bestseller list, regurgitating its main points (or, I should say, what he thinks are its main points) in language even a redditor could understand, and then coming to grand conclusions that are, as this user pointed out, pure cope, since he can't actually handle the implications of anything he reads if it doesn't fit with what he already believes. Then his commenters blow him the fuck out and the process repeats next week, with nothing learned by anyone except a bunch of autistic blog-specific terminology for phenomena that aren't new and already have names.

He also Googles himself constantly and cares about what other people think of him so much that he collects all the instances of people dunking on him and posts them, ostensibly to show that since he gets flak from all corners of the political spectrum that must somehow mean he's smarter than all of them. They're fucking hilarious:
slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/08/testimonials-for-ssc/
slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/13/more-testimonials-for-ssc/

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he just made gnon accessible to normies. he is a fairly mediocre thinker, but a high tier blogger and rhetoritician. it's basic bitch bayes cult my dude, nothing "great" about that

read goethes faust

not an argument

yes, it was an assertion

are you german or something, this sentence is weird lad. If I understand you you're saying that some part of my mind will atrophy if I dont strive for an ideal. Probably you're right, idk.

not exactly. it doesn't have to be an ideal. it can apply to anything. everyone thinks X is impossible, but the person who thinks X actually is possible is the most likely person to figure out the finer details of How it is possible. invention of the airplane and light bulb come to mind.

ah. Yeah that is very true, and I guess there is some faint possibility that a future state of good occurs. Both biological evolution and human civilization have not been the types of things that create a 'good' overall state, they are dominated by power struggles that don't care much about whether the organisms feel good. The good is just a tool to be used like the bad in the mindless process of order sustaining itself.

I suppose there might be some new kind of reality, maybe AI or something, that will work differently. you can't predict what AI would do but my guess is that it too would be run by 'power' because it's kind of a tautology, as far as we can understand the world, that which is powerful will win out, not that which is good. For power to align perfectly with the good..idk. Sounds like god.

I've heard the argument a million times before that since X hasn't been done before it can never be done. But we used to be hunter gatherers and quite a bit of new things have been done. New things continue to be done and will continue to be done.

>Literally just talks about stuff he read from Nick Land
>Doesn't even understand it completely
"Wow so profound"

The Last Psychiatrist

Lol, Scott Alexander getting called a cuck over and over

There's a large sample of idiots (remember that it's Alexander cherry-picking the critics here), but a lot of them are pretty spot-on. Here are some of my faves:

>It’s like someone tried to make fivethirtyeight as uninteresting as possible.
>Scott Alexander is the story of a functioning pattern-recognition module trapped in a progressive brain. It would make a great story of its truth-seeking brain blob could eventually break free and rewire his brain to be a born-again reactionary. Not gonna happen though. The prog morality police has a hard, thick grasp on his brain, and all his friends and pseudosexual partners are the leftiest hacks this side of Lenin; so it’s an endless futile battle to square the circle. No wonder he went into psychiatry.
>You aren’t reading it right. Scott’s ability to completely identify the problem but still, quite sincerely, ritually abase himself to it at the same time, makes him worthy of connoisseurship. It takes a once in a generation talent to write long sincere *thoughtful* screeds pointing out that baby sacrifice is lowering the birth rate and causing family trauma, though of course he fully understands and endorses that Lord Moloch must be sated with the only food acceptable unto him.
>Slate Star Codex is to cognitive dissonance what Goddard was to rocketry.
>Basically imagine a guy drinking Onions and having a flamewar about how in the future they will too be able to unfreeze his head and you’ve got a basic idea of the ideology at play here.
>it’s basically one of the hubs for autistic people really into Bayesianism, so like half the posters could either transition or become Nazis. or both idk

The entire rationalist movement is a crowd of somewhat-libertarian technocratic autists that are too smart for their own good.

SSC has one good write that kind of destroys the rest his own blog:
slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/

But he don't want to "GET OUT OF THE CAR" because he's strongly attached to his own fame and smartassness.

correct. after you read his entire archive including the livejournal and tumblr, do the LW sequences then do Meaningness.

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Berkeley fucked him up pretty bad, but his earlier writings especially are quite good, yeah. He's far better than the rationalist thing he associates himself with -- but I guess that's true of every very sharp thinker.

Those reviews are amazing:
> “Slate Star Codex is ‘Well, actually…’ personified, with a dusting of evil. But mostly it bugs me that it passes for good writing.”

> “it’s basically a fish trap for aspies. people who can’t grasp nuance or understand basic human behavior, but are nonetheless obsessed with details and complex systems will inevitably gravitate toward this kind of horseshit. ultimately it’s a bunch of STEM-inclined dudes on the autism spectrum sitting around attempting to unpack societal problems like it was all a game of fucking sim city.”

> “Slate Star Codex: if you’re a man who is involved in tech and not interested in any legitimate philosophical or sociological inquiry, we’ve got you covered”

Can confirm, I'm an ex-techie and I was drawn to his bullshit for a while because I had little time for self-development because learning framework-of-the-week took all my spare time.

Silicon Valley's Transcendentalist culture and all its ugly offsprings like AI-obsessed "Rationalists" are a very sad case of people shooting themselves in the foot with "high IQ". They are trapped in a swamp of autistic pedantry about because they believe that you can get out of suffering by the means of binary logic and some good math.

>correct. after you read his entire archive including the livejournal and tumblr, do the LW sequences then do Meaningness.

The only good thing at "Meaningness" is the geeks'n'mops article. The author also has a blog focused on his own misunderstanding of Buddhism.

How is it? Can you recc. any insightful textbooks you've read?

Just the tone of those reviews is sheer fucking faggotry and worse than any of his autism

Meh, this is BS. Alexander himself is a fucking psychiatrist - hardly an aspie stereotype you seem so quick to categorize him as.

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>psychiatrists can't be autistic
dumb frogposter
Other than Big Yud he's basically the posterboy for Rationalists, aka Bayesianism: Religious Cult Edition. One of his most famous posts is about asking DMT hallucinations to factor numbers for him to prove the existence of the supernatural, and he regularly cites such brilliant works as a Harry Potter fanfic to back up his arguments. If that's not autistic, I don't know what is.

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