Is noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz/ by a LWer?

I read the curated blog, not the discussion forum so much. You got rumbled by google analytics, which showed me a lot of traffic coming from here. I'm actually going to the July rationality minicamp, so if any people in this thread are going to, they can distill the best of this thread for what I assume are forthcoming fights.

This is interesting in what it suggests for the future.

Romney is a conservative mormon, for example.

Beck's rant proposing that the political left is aligned with a nebulous big-government/big-business anti-technological movement may be mostly rhetorical hot air, but it did make me wonder . ..

Well before AGI is super-intelligent, weaker AGI and stronger narrow AI will likely lead to a hugely disruptive socio-economic disruption. This isn't being discussed much (outside of perhaps a lone blog and book or two).

Actually, this transition is already under way. The current slow-burn economic crisis is likely just the beginning. Crisis has a way of sparking political change. What will the masses do when most people have real economic value that is well below subsistence?

Yes, but fanfic of what? I'd hate to learn I was living in a Lovecraft pastiche... or worse, a Lifetime Original Movie.

The first glance, as usual, reveals interesting things about one's perception:

Moldbuggery: Bias is bad, real fucking bad. The current systems don't encourage rationality all that much either. Only a cognitive elite can ever become debased enough to run things

That's honestly how I read it at first. Ha.

BTW Konkvistador belongs in better company (nothing against the others); I've come to admire him a little bit and think he's much wiser than other fans of Moldbug.

Oh, and speaking of good company... "pure cynicism about how things are combined with an idealism of how to act" - that sounds like the ethics that Philip K. Dick tenatively proposes in his Exegesis; shit's fucked, blind semi-conscious evil rules the world, but there's a Super-Value to being kind and human even in the face of Armageddon.

No, I'm referring to the fact that before the Trinity test lots of people greatly underestimated what the yield would be. Someone must surely have said "it will be a little bigger than our conventional bombs".

Am I severely mistaken or is this a heuristically good way to think about Will in your own opinion?

I like the way you put it. :)

Your overall point is well taken, but you're interpreting "century" to mean "last hundred years". The way I'd interpret the word, this is a candidate for understatement of the last century. And the winner was probably somewhere near the Trinity test...

If I were to join any phyg, it'd be the Dominicans. SingInst might be my second choice, but you can't join them, you can only join the Rationalist Conspiracy these days. And I've already left SingInst's Journeyman circle or whatever, there's no going back after that. But I'm damn glad I was a Visiting Fellow for two years.

This should apply to pretty much everyone anyways.

People differ in the extent that their expertise can be trusted. Accordingly, the degree to which 'this should apply' varies - and to place more or less trust in the word of another than warranted is both an epistemic and instrumental error.

Issues like anthropic reasoning and decision theory are very easy to get confused on and make subtle errors.

For this reason if I disagree with Vladimir_Nesov (in that direction, not the reverse) I will triple check his reasoning to see if there is something I missed, and perhaps compare with other sources. If I disagree with something Will says on this kind of subject I am (and should be) more likely to just assume he is wrong and move along. Will is less credible.