/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:25:09 [Preview] No. 6309 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]

me_irl

1 post omitted.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:25:44 [Preview] No.6311 del

>the industrial revolution has been disaster
I am triggered by this single line more than I should be.
How one can came up with something like this? Yes, it lead to some discomforts, but so does life. If you value avoidance of suffering more than being competitive, what stops you from just dying? You value stuff because these drives used to give your advantage to your ancestors. The same drives lead to industrialization. And it is hardly clear that person experiences less of suffering in pre-industrial society.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:26:00 [Preview] No.6312 del

>>6311
I do not understand your argument and I think it's in bad faith.
Things like:
>Yes, it lead to some discomforts, but so does life.
>what stops you from just dying?
Regarding:
>And it is hardly clear that person experiences less of suffering in pre-industrial society.
Nobody is saying that, not even him.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:26:16 [Preview] No.6313 del

>>6312
It wasn't, maybe I failed to guess what lead to that sentiment. If I remember correctly, Ted Kaczyński's main objection to technological process was, that it makes people feel miserable.
At first I tough, that if someones values avoidance of own suffering more self preservation and increasing control over reality, logical action would be to kill yourself. Choosing not to implies you don't. Yes, I dumbed it down. I guess you can maximize for both, and he doesn't care only for own suffering. But it this case, wouldn't advanced society give more instruments to potentially purse these goals? For example instead of living in middle ages or stone age, having AI organizing for us pseudo stone age 1% better and killing potential inventors.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:29:18 [Preview] No.6324 del

>>6310
- the industrial revolution and its consequences are dope as hell
- not proficient, kinda shit actually
- almost given up on 3d women entirely, might lose the "almost"
- drugs, alcohol and premarital sex are cool, if only I had people to do them with
- jack of no trades
- "anymore"?
> thought he might not be autistic for a while
- hardly ever deal with normies besides family, NEETlyfe
- once tried to learn guitar
- no longer studying anything, I don't want to think about how well I'll live when my unsustainable circumstances unsustain.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:38:32 [Preview] No.6358 del

>>6309

> Industrial revolution bad
Nah, but Kaczynsky makes some good points.

> waits for singularity, idealist, cared about politics
Yup.

> proficient in a couple of languages
I see your languages and raise a conlang.

> gave up on love and romance
…

> still waiting for his virgin waifu, pop culture references
Not really.

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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 10:46:17 [Preview] No. 6184 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]

Postmodernism for Rationalists - good read

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 10:46:51 [Preview] No.6186 del

I already know most of this shit.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 10:47:57 [Preview] No.6189 del

>Vast majority of Christians today read Bible allegorically / metaphorically
Is this actually true?

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 10:48:13 [Preview] No.6190 del

>>6189

lolnope. vast majority of christians today (or, really, ever) actually never read the bible ever.

but what small parts of it they know about, they interpret allegorically/metaphorically, yes. for a vast majority of them and a vast majority of the content.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 10:50:40 [Preview] No.6199 del

>>6189
My guess is that the majority of Christians see verses in passing or hear them at church – mostly whatever is most compatible with 21st century ethical dogma – and take them at face value.
On the rare occasion that a passage conflicts with said dogma it is rationalised away or, yes, interpreted metaphorically.
From an apologetics standpoint, some sections are metaphorical, some are not, and the difference is usually clear. Fx: New atheists often like to believe that they've shunted Christians into a corner on Genesis. In reality, metaphorical interpretation was the accepted view for millennia. That is, before Pr*testants turned up.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:35:19 [Preview] No.6346 del

>>6190
>implying it's not a collection of different books with different genres
>implying allegory isn't an ancient writing technique
>implying Christianity is only the Bible
>implying readership doesn't vary among denominations
>implying worship and tradition aren't complementary components of Christianity as manifest in the body of the Church
>implying any rationalist knows anything about Christianity beyond TV stereotypes, r/atheism and their Israel-loving Evangelical boomer parents

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:30:11 [Preview] No. 6327 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]

Why is Ozy such a bitch?

Why is Scott such a cuck?

4 posts omitted.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:32:55 [Preview] No.6337 del

>>6336
They take testosterone, but stopped during the pregnancy and breastfeeding for safety reasons.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:33:27 [Preview] No.6339 del

>>6337
How does she know how long she needs to be off HRT for to make pregnancy and breastfeeding safe for her child? There's no way there's much research on this.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:33:43 [Preview] No.6340 del

>>6339
There's a decent amount of research on it because there are also cis women with conditions that make them produce an unusual amount of androgen and testosterone. It's a common reason for recurrent miscarriages.
The (main?) issue seems to be direct exposure to testosterone, not secondary effects, so I doubt there's a long interval.
They gave birth to a healthy baby and eventually weaned him and the baby is still healthy, so it seems fine.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:33:59 [Preview] No.6341 del

Shouldn't everyone take masculinizing chemicals these days?

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:34:15 [Preview] No.6342 del

>>6340
Are these conditions really the same as HRT though?

Did she even plan the conception long enough ahead to get off testosterone a safe interval beforehand?

>They gave birth to a healthy baby and eventually weaned him and the baby is still healthy, so it seems fine.
The only things I've seen on his health are Ozy's predictions he'll inherit every condition she has, that's from her blog before he was even born.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:29:35 [Preview] No. 6325 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]

Do you feel the "Collapse of the West" sentiment, le decadent anons?

Steven Pinker praises Our World In Data and tells us it's the best time to be alive. In the meantime, highly developed countries have skyrocketing depression and anxiety rates, addictive technologies make people miserable and socially isolated, sense of meaning is being replaced with jaded nihilism, tribes are more tribal, and genders hate each other. This is not necessarily contradictory: the world may be improving as a whole, but individual experiences of Westerners may get worse.

Having said this, I still think I'm missing something important to understand the complexity of the problem and adjust my expectations. Enlighten me.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:29:54 [Preview] No.6326 del

>tribes are more tribal
Are they?
My smallish country used to have three or four almost explicitly enumerated tribes: protestant, catholic, socialist and (classical) liberal.
There's a neat table on Wikipedia. Each tribe had its own political parties, its own broadcasting services, its own unions, and so on. My grandpa was considered weird for going to a protestant barber despite being catholic.
They're gone now. The rough shapes remain, but I wouldn't have known it was anywhere near this intense without anecdotes from family and history lessons.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation)
The US is not the same. Maybe tribes are getting more tribal there. But that might very well be contingent, orthogonal to anything happening to "the West" in general.

Possibly you're overfitting to the US and/or the internet.

breaking up with epistemic rationality Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:22:18 [Preview] No. 6299 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]

Beyond easily verifiable things, like how much toothpaste I have left or how fast objects fall, why should I even bother believing anything? The outside view is that there are people smarter than me that believe every ideology under the Sun, many mutually exclusive, and can effectively and in good faith support their beliefs. I can't possibly agree with them all, and even if I were somehow able to evaluate every argument completely impartially, I doubt I would be able to determine which are true.

I have a worldview, and my beliefs feel real and true from the inside. But this was equally true when I believed in Catholicism and when I believed in the necessity of communism. Since age 17, at any point in my life, I would consider the two-year-prior version of myself cringe and {wrong}pilled. If I look at the path my beliefs have followed, it looks more like a random walk through some high-dimensional political compass than me converging on the truth. How am I supposed to take myself seriously?

The content of most "worldview" type beliefs seems largely irrelevant to my Gnon-given purpose of replication. They're there both to keep my conscious mind invested in an ultimately meaningless existence, and to help me credibly signal allegiance to the proper groups. It feels like I choose what I believe, but it's exactly as illusory as free will, and for the same reason. I know that my subconscious is pulling my strings, rewarding paths of thought that it deems useful and punishing those that risk my social standing. I can feel the flow of dopamine when I fit new evidence to my worldview. I can feel it cut off when I spend too long evaluating the outgroup's beliefs for truth content.

What am I to do? My monkey brain is probably better at winning social games than my analytical mind, so I think I should just stop resisting its guidance with this autistic desire to believe what's actually true. I guess this is giving up on the idea of epistemic rationality, but, like, at least I'm doing it on purpose.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:22:36 [Preview] No.6300 del

You don't need to throw out all of epistemics. You need to be wary of ideology. Wrong ideological opinions are caused less by an impaired ability to find the truth than by bad incentives.

Even if communism is fundamentally correct, being communister and less willing to accept conventional economics than the next guy marks you as a more reliable ally to the cause.

Even if climate change is real and catastrophically dangerous, being more alarmist than the next guy will get you more attention.

Even if Python is the best general-purpose programming language today, playing down its performance problems suggests you're better at writing fast Python code.

Even if the rationalist approach to epistemics is correct and useful, overusing terms like "Chesterton's fence" and "planning fallacy" makes you sound rationalister.

So what do you do? Well, you may have to ignore some of the most heavily politicized areas of knowledge. But keep in mind that they seem more important than they really are, because they're politicized. They're overrepresented. They make up a smaller share of interesting uncertain knowledge than you'd intuitively think.

Giving into social incentives for these areas is ok. You're going to do it whether you resist or not, and maybe doing it deliberately even makes it easier to occasionally be aware that you're biased.

If you want to get accurate knowledge, try topics that aren't very politicized, and try to find people who are primarily rewarded for accurate predictions.

Prediction markets are alright to trust. A lot of scientific research is fine, or can at least be expected to be closer to correctness than your baseline. A lot of it isn't, but if useful, verifiable, true predictions are normal in the sub-area then it seems good.

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Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:28:46 [Preview] No.6322 del

>>6300
>Even if Python is the best general-purpose programming language today, playing down its performance problems suggests you're better at writing fast Python code.
I don't think this is how signalling works among programmers. Downplaying Python's performance problems tells me that you probably haven't used other languages enough and are defending Python either out of ignorance or to save face. A good signal is more like "Python is slow as shit, but we make it work". There, now I'm programmerer than you.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:29:02 [Preview] No.6323 del

>>6322
That's fair.
Most of my experience with programming language performance arguments is from /tech/, which is low-quality and not representative.

Fanged Noumena Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 04:29:02 [Preview] No. 5155 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]

What did he meant by this?

15 posts and 6 images omitted.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:06:35 [Preview] No.6254 del

>>5160
>>5159
>>5165
This Nick Land reader is some good shit to get started. Imo what is missing is a short, objective rundown on his creation periods and how the selected works fit into it. (Think a timeline with stuff like "Published X", "Started Xenosystems".)

Also, preferably for each chapter or section a few links for further reading. eg. "Relating to this is his post 'title' at 'url'."

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:06:51 [Preview] No.6255 del

>>6254
Not bad ideas. The timeline is easy, but the further reading would a bit of a PITA to compile…

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:07:08 [Preview] No.6256 del

>>6255
I am not so sure about that. All what's needed is to sit down with a few people who're into Nick Land (preferably different kinds of Land fans) and ask them for which other articles they'd recommend. Generally speaking that is more of a bonus, and a rough timeline is more important to add context. Nick Land is not Nick Land, especially comparing philosophy Nick Land to NRx Land.

How do people here feel about the "On Land" chapter? I mostly neglected it so far. Generally it could be interesting to read some takes on Nick Land by different writers who were influenced by him.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:07:56 [Preview] No.6259 del

>>6256
>All what's needed is to sit down with a few people who're into Nick Land (preferably different kinds of Land fans) and ask them for which other articles they'd recommend.

You go ahead and do that, post the results here, and I'll add them to the second edition.

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:28:14 [Preview] No.6320 del

>>6259
I am currently working my way through some texts, and while I am reading Land here and there, I don't think I can currently afford the time to gather a list of articles I would truly be happy with. I might try to keep notes on the side.

Also, currently looking into printing a copy or two of Land's text (or texts by other people) at a local printing shop. I was considering to print Phyl-Undhu (which I did not read yet) as a small booklet, as well as maybe a few other texts. (Not necessarily written by Land, some thinkpieces from blogs which I'd have to compile into a book first.)

Also, which font does the Nick Land reader use?

Human speciation: if and when Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:20:18 [Preview] No. 6293 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]

When, if ever, will biotechnology or some kind of a natural occurrence split the human species? Let's see what /ratanon/ predicts. Poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/17946009.

If it happened, would it be a good thing or a bad thing according to your beliefs?

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:23:27 [Preview] No.6303 del

OP and everyone who's voted so far: do you understand the timescale over which speciation happens

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:23:43 [Preview] No.6304 del

>>6303
Yes

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:23:59 [Preview] No.6305 del

If you push biotech to the point of speciation, then you better make sure that anyone you'd like to have children with has the exact same modifications you do.
That gives a strong pressure to avoid speciation, and I'm not sure which desirable changes would even make speciation necessary.
I can only see it happen in the case of fully isolated populations over a period way longer than the options in the poll.
Four separate options for a period under a century and only one for >500 years is ridiculous, especially if you're explicitly mentioning the possiblity of a "natural occurrence".

Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:24:15 [Preview] No.6306 del

>>6303
I had brain uploading in mind.

Human speciation: if and when Anonymous 08/13/2019 (Tue) 11:19:52 [Preview] No. 6292 [Reply] [Last 50 Posts]

When, if ever, will biotechnology or some kind of a natural occurrence split the human species? Let's see what /ratanon/ predicts. Poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/17946009.

If it happened, would it be a good thing or a bad thing according to your beliefs?