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Ritalin comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's standard preacher approach. Incendiary accusations to destroy everything you take for granted, then, when you're in tears and directionless, a promise of salvation if you follow their way.
Come to think of it, that's a pattern EY has used extensively as well... "Here's proof that religion is insane and most people are predictably and systematically stupid, including yourself. Now believe in the Singularity, general self-improving artificial intelligence, cryogeny, space expansionism, and libertarianism!"
Eliezer doesn't really push libertarianism.
The hilarious thing about this is that Eliezer isn't even very hardcore about libertarianism, and most LWers on the surveys assign very low probability to cryonics actually working, including those who've actually signed up. The Preacher's Way works, whether or not you actually intend it to do so!
(Which is why it's epistemically polite simply not to speak that way at all.)
(And besides which, the human condition is an entirely valid concern that we ought to be moving from the realms of myth and religion to the realm of rationality. It is to my great and lifelong dismay that one signals intelligence, education, enlightenment, and general rationality by loudly dismissing all questions of value, feeling, or the human condition.)
Are you joking, or do you really think that total open borders doesn't count as hardcore libertarianism?
Not joking at all. Total open borders, by the usual tribal-allegiance measure of political positioning, is a hardcore liberal (in the Democrats-and-blue-tribe sense) position. Most actually-existing libertarians are xenophobes.
Of course, if the Libertarian Party has actually put open borders in its election platforms, then tell me and I'll update.
But no, he's not hardcore libertarian, in the sense of anarcho-capitalist or deontological proprietarian. All utilitarian libertarians are non-hardcore.
Also, I do recall him once self-labeling as "small-l libertarian", which very much implies non-hardcoreism.
Their platform says, "Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders." They have some elaboration here.
Thank you, and now I know.
I do not think this is true. I think it just implies non-affiliation with the Libertarian Party. Many hardcore libertarians reject the Libertarian Party.
Weird, I thought that link would lead to Straw Nihilist.
Good point. Straw Vulcan is rationality-signaling for STEM majors, and Straw Nihilist is the same for humanities majors.
You should care about people in alternate universes. (Am I getting this right?)
Also, it's at least somewhat plausible that you're living in a simulation.
Well, we've never caught Nature glitching or bugging or even simplifying its calculations, and absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That we're living in a simulation is about as plausible as the Abrahamic narrative, about as falsifiable, and about as proven.
How would we recognize "simplified" calculations? If the "next level up" laws of physics differ from ours, their idea of what is cheap or expensive to compute might also differ.
Even if the upper physics was sufficiently similar to ours to share some characteristics (e.g. the need for large computations to be parallelized and the expense of parallel communication), and our laws of physics were simplified in a way to accommodate those characteristics (e.g. with a limit to the speed of information propagation), would we recognize that simplification as such, or would we just call it another law of physics and insist that we've never seen it simplified?
Um, how would you tell? Wouldn't glitches or simplified calculations appear as just additional laws of nature.
I think of glitches as being small breaks in the laws of nature.
I'm inclined to think that people (especially modern skeptical people) would find ways to paper over small glitches.
While I can't assign a reliable probability to the hypothesis "you're living in a simulation", I attach roughly zero decision-theoretic significance to the possibility. Meaning: since there's nothing I can do to affect this, I can safely go on with my life without giving it much thought beyond the usual philosophical ponderings I do whenever I'm in a contemplative mood.
This doesn't seem too implausible. I have no trouble believing that religion is false ("insane" is an incendiary term that I do not believe should be invoked in a non-clinical context due to triggering most people's "mind-killed" modes), as well as believing that people are predictably and systematically irrational (same deal with "stupid"). Are you arguing against this?
I have not seen Eliezer ever advocate for his personal views on these topics outside of posts dedicated specifically to said topics. Most posts in the Sequences just talk about basic techniques for rationality, without ever mentioning any of the stuff you've listed. Indeed, the two major prongs of his worldview--rationality and transhumanism--seem to be largely (almost entirely) detached from each other. I'm having a hard time seeing this "preacher approach" you're talking about in Eliezer's writings.
Most emphatically not. I'm very glad to have discovered that, and I'm grateful for EY's impassioned preaching, that made it seem immediately, crucially, urgently relevant. By comparison, when I read books like Think Fast and Slow, or watch shows like Crash Course Psychology or Earthlings 101. I feel like I'm just collecting a bunch of interesting, quaint. and curious trivia that aren't much of a factor in how I think of myself, the world, and my place in it. (And don't get me started on new Cosmos. NDG doesn't preach, he lectures. Carl Sagan at least used to wonder )