/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

Remember when /ratanon/ was good?

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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:14:49 [Preview] No. 6463 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
Attack on Titan gets good.
1 post omitted.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:16:19 [Preview] No.6468 del
In what way does it get good?


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:17:15 [Preview] No.6471 del
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>>6468
Mostly turns out to have great worldbuilding and decent character development, season 2 also fixes pacing.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:19:46 [Preview] No.6479 del
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Attack on Titan STARTED out good. It went to hell when they introduced titan shifters and undid that thing they did, and it never recovered.

I really, really want to see the nihilistic cosmic horror show I thought I was getting.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:21:34 [Preview] No.6485 del
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>>6479

SPOILERS AHEAD (Pictures are spoilers too).

How far did you watch after the first shifters?

Shifters are pretty horrifying, that girl on all fours is a brainwashed child soldier, she walks like that because her shifter is quadrupedal so she got used to it, inhereting a shifter power is done by eating the former host after being turned into a mindless "pure titan" with a spinal fluid injection, they all die 13 years afterwards. Eren became a shifter after eating his dad and has like 5 years left.

The island with the 3 walls they all think is the last bastion of humanity is actually a "penal colony" for their race (only they can turn into titans) that hasn't been wiped out yet because of an alleged dead man's switch, the mindless "pure titans" oaming outside are mostly people that got exiled and turned into titans as punishment by the rest of the world which views their race as subhuman devils (shifter soldiers help the humans outside fight the island partially because of brainwashing and partially to earn a chance for their families to become honorary humans and be granted minimal human rigths).


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:22:55 [Preview] No.6490 del
>>6485
You can spoiler images in the post options, and you can spoiler text by surrounding it by double asterisks (** on each side).
You can also delete your own post from the post menu in the top left of your post.



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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:10:25 [Preview] No. 6449 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
Suppose your life and well-being depends on earning $2 each hour you live, no matter what you do (~$1,500/month).

You can't take any illegal steps, launch a crowdfunding campaign, collect it in social benefits or UBI, sell bodily fluids, webcam, invest a large sum of money, or work - except for a short period of setting up a stream of passive income and managing it for an hour or two per week.

Whatcha gonna do, Ratanon?
3 posts omitted.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:11:31 [Preview] No.6453 del
>>6452
Can you actually get a job with that sort of pay while working just two hours per week?


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:11:47 [Preview] No.6454 del
600k in index funds is probably sufficient


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:12:03 [Preview] No.6455 del
>>6454
I feel like that's covered by "invest a large sum of money"


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:12:35 [Preview] No.6457 del
>>6449
Why the seemingly arbitrary limit of 2 hours a week?


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:21:50 [Preview] No.6486 del
Short Google.



Oh no! Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:58:52 [Preview] No. 6407 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/18/if-kim-jong-un-opened-a-kfc-would-you-eat-there/

Scott is becoming a vegetarian.

Every single one I know is a crazy, virtue-signalling weakling. Gut flora changes probably lead to mental illness, the body atrophies and they become incompatible with sane people…

What would be the most rational way to convince him against this nonsense?


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:59:41 [Preview] No.6410 del
>Every single one I know is a crazy, virtue-signalling weakling.
Scott is already like that though. I like the guy, and his signalling is likely both honest and done because he considers it prosocial, but still.

>Gut flora changes probably lead to mental illness, the body atrophies and they become incompatible with sane people…
I'd guess it's not that going vegetarian makes you a weirdo, but that you'd have to be pretty odd already to go vegetarian/vegan and stick to it.

>What would be the most rational way to convince him against this nonsense?
Farm animals have no moral value, there's no reason to care about minimizing their suffering. Good luck explaining why it's fine and important to care about human suffering after saying that though. Also good luck explaining to a 9001 IQ AI why it should care about you when you don't care about the cow that got killed to make your hamburger. Even if you don't think you'll ever meet such an AI, you'll be talking to people who believe they will, and they'll want you to prepare their argument.
Alternatively, prove that vegetarian diets have significant negative impact on health and argue that improving a person's (be it any given person or one person in particular) well-being and productivity outweighs saving some animals from being factory farmed and slaughtered.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:59:57 [Preview] No.6411 del
>every single person I know who signals compassion in this expensive way is a virtue signaller
There's an obvious explanation for this that doesn't involve gut flora


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:03:17 [Preview] No.6423 del
>>6411
Brain flora



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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 09:45:24 [Preview] No. 5995 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
Okay, which one of you fuckers did this?

[redacted]


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 09:45:42 [Preview] No.5996 del
Please don't post dox here.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:56:24 [Preview] No.6403 del
>>5996
If you fail to make a pinned thread containing a "Don't post dox" rule, you have no basis to complain when people post dox.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:57:28 [Preview] No.6404 del
>>6403
I don't expect it to be common, and I'm wary of doing something as hands-on as making a sticky that wasn't there before I took over. I'll reconsider if something like this happens again. I didn't consider the possibility of someone posting dox before it happened.
I wouldn't ban someone for not knowing about illegible rules, of course.



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Who is the best rationalist Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 00:40:54 [Preview] No. 4450 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
Scott Alexander or Eliezer Yudkowsky?
23 posts and 2 images omitted.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 05:02:32 [Preview] No.5232 del
>>4450
Obviously it's Brian Tomasik (reducing-suffering.org), John Nerst (everythingstudies.com) and of course the boy Hanson.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 05:02:48 [Preview] No.5233 del
>>4450
Gwern, obviously. His dry autism makes me horny beyond belief.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 05:04:25 [Preview] No.5239 del
>>5233
Dry autism sounds like a nice fetish, because you can just fap to #lesswrong.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 12:15:28 [Preview] No.6465 del



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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:45:13 [Preview] No. 6375 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
How can I become as good at AI science as the famous and widely cited American computer scientist, decision theorist, philosopher, mathematician, science popularizer, writer and altruist Eliezer S. Yudkowsky?
2 posts omitted.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:51:43 [Preview] No.6393 del
>>6386
>The Plan to Singularity

He really was serious about this


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:53:07 [Preview] No.6398 del
>>6386
>Flare is a proposal for a new programming language, the first annotative programming language, in which programs, data, and the program state are all represented as well-formed XML.

Lol, so late 90s/early 2000s

Too lazy to fill this out for Flare: https://famicol.in/language_checklist.html


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:53:23 [Preview] No.6399 del
>>6386
>>6398
Thankfully MIRI now accepts that type theory is the way, the truth, and the light. They even recruit from ICFP now, I met some of them there last year. How far they have come from the ignominious beginnings of "Flare"!


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:53:39 [Preview] No.6400 del
>>6398
The most obvious candidate is of course
>[ ] You have reinvented Lisp but worse
The similarities to Lisp are constantly stressed, which makes it all the much funnier to run into the sentence
>I have substantial experience in C++ but none whatsoever in LISP



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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:49:42 [Preview] No. 6387 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
I haven't been following ssc for a while but I like this sequence.
On "ASYMMETRIC WEAPONS GONE BAD" there's this:

>Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn’t provably correct enough to be worth including. I might write another post giving my evidence for it later, but it probably shouldn’t be dropped in here without justification.

Does anyone have an archive link or something ? I'm curious.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:51:10 [Preview] No.6391 del
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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:51:28 [Preview] No.6392 del
>>6391
Wow, that was better than anything that was left in the text.



Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:24:33 [Preview] No. 6307 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
>effective altruism
>tries to save 70 IQ sub-saharan Africans rather than wipe them out and use their resources to breed more high IQ whites/East Asians

It doesn't seem very effective to me
3 posts omitted.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:27:05 [Preview] No.6316 del
>>6308

I think this is inevitable. We should strive to leave as much science and tech on this planet as possible for these will probably be our only long-term legacies.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:27:21 [Preview] No.6317 del
>>6315

Neither is going to be done. Instead Africanization of the world threatens to permanently stop economic growth.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:27:37 [Preview] No.6318 del
>>6315
The average IQ in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa is in the low 70s, they are never goin to "develop." That's a standard deviation lower than the shitty parts of Latin America. They are basically a different branch of the genus homo.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:40:56 [Preview] No.6366 del
AI will advance to a degree that it can be easily controlled by the elites to reign over their homogenous africanoid worker population who subsist on insects and live in coffin apartments.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:44:33 [Preview] No.6374 del
>>6315
Or you could A C C E L E R A T E and create an omnimalevolent AI before someone else does



What about EA folks? Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:12:33 [Preview] No. 6273 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
What's your EA horror story, Ratanon?

I've read and heard countless reports on toxic power games, nepotism, lack of transparency, skyrocketing burnout rates, fake empathy, sexual misconduct allegations or exploitative practices. What's going on?

Is it because every big movement attracts Normies (occasional contributors), Nerds (seekers of meaning) and Sociopaths (malevolent influencers/leaders), but EA particularly attracts and rewards game-playing Sociopaths, as the cold utilitarian framework gets (poorly) extrapolated on organizational and interpersonal dynamics?

How does the EA culture compare to academia, freelance work or IT industry in these regards?
17 posts and 1 image omitted.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:37:44 [Preview] No.6355 del
It's possible that the number of sociopaths is going up though, I've been somewhat out of touch with EA recently


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:38:00 [Preview] No.6356 del
>>6353
Those don't necessarily contradict each other - you've got a movement with a lot of libertarians, aimed at helping poor people. People make significant personal sacrifices that are ultimately just as driven by signaling as everything else, but perhaps more visibly so because of poor social skills. And maybe people dumb it down in an attempt to be more accessible without properly tackling elitism.
But I'm not involved in any EA communities so I wouldn't really know.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:40:08 [Preview] No.6364 del
>>6353
>Personally, almost all my experiences have been good, and I'm happy the movement has proceeded the way it has.
What have you liked about it?


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:40:40 [Preview] No.6365 del
>>6348
It doesn't deserve to be popular.
Rats and adjacents by way of their rationalist outlooks absolutely suck at aesthetic, holistic and passion-driven things.

Tainted good isn't the same as untainted good. Surely you see the stratification.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:41:28 [Preview] No.6367 del
>>6365
Is this actually the case? Plenty of people who would be rat-adj today had decent to great aesthetics, like some golden age science fiction authors. At the same time even the most anti-rationality blue tribe members suffer from bad aesthetics similar to those of Bay Area rats. I am thus inclined to blame blue tribe memes for the aesthetics problem and not assume it is inherent. You can't make an awe inspiring religion substitute out of the stuff, which is why Humanism and EA are so stale.



Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:31:18 [Preview] No. 6331 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]
>There are certain people for whom it is not the right decision to donate a kidney. An incomplete list:
>…
>People who wish to save their kidney to increase the chance that family members or friends make it to the creation of a superintelligence.
6 posts omitted.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:36:56 [Preview] No.6352 del
>>6350
How bad is your memory? Could anything else has caused it?

What was the surgery?


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:38:16 [Preview] No.6357 del
>>6351
Valid methodological criticisms, however it's treated as common knowledge among the surgeons I know that every instance of general anesthesia is using up a certain resource.

>>6352
It's pretty bad. Before, I could remember pages of text verbatim (no superhuman von Neumann shit, but occasionally it worked), or retell the few minutes of conversation. Now I'm like an animal that has no ability to mark stuff as "important" and is forced to expressly repeat stuff many times (Anki helps a little), and to re-derive/reread most everything I didn't use for a few months.

It was to treat a case of testicular torsion. Pretty sure that didn't have anything to do with brain function.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:38:48 [Preview] No.6359 del
>>6357
>testicular torsion
Does that normally require general anesthesia?


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:39:20 [Preview] No.6361 del
>>6359
I don't know, anon, but quick search indicates it is. Apparently, abdominal surgery with local anesthesia is uncommon in general.


Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:39:36 [Preview] No.6362 del
>>6357
>however it's treated as common knowledge among the surgeons I know that every instance of general anesthesia is using up a certain resource.
Then it's disturbing there isn't more research on it, let alone warnings for patients.

>and to re-derive/reread most everything I didn't use for a few months.
Is that so unusual? After multiple months of not thinking about something read one time, how many people would remember it?