Will Manifest REALLY take over the world, or will its attendees end up at Davos or Davos 2 when they eventually grow up to be as ancient Klaus Schwab?
Imagining these people in their old age, just like imagining current AI models as legacy systems, makes for a grimly hilarious pastime.
Burja has always had remarkably bad vibes, but it knocks my estimation of him completely into the basement to learn that he was so involved with a shitshow like Leverage. I suspect that daddy Peter and the Twitter/Hacker News crossover crowd is what’s propping up Palladium, but I believe we discussed it here when even the HN crowd laughed off Burja’s bro Wolf Tivy.
Is this the origin story of a new, remarkably sedentary Batman villain?
which are common in my Bay Area social context
I just went to a party in the Bay Area last night, and nobody talked like this. Perhaps she’s eliding some other, more trenchant details about her social circles?
We’ve discussed before the influence of David Chapman and his Tibetan Buddhism among TPOT, but it’s worth also noting the fairly big notoriety and footprint that San Francisco Zen Center has in the Bay Area and northern/central California more broadly. Anyone who ends up in the Bay and goes looking for “alternative” spirituality with a relatively rigorous grounding is likely to encounter some aspect of SFZC or its outreach pretty quickly. To say nothing of enduring idol Steve Jobs’ association with the practice. It might seem surprising from the outside, but given the facts on the ground, I’m not surprised that dashes of Buddhism got roped into the techbro stew.
Note, of course, that Chapman’s Tibetan lineage is something notably different from SFZC’s lineage, and that the parent institutions can’t be held totally liable for misinterpretations by lay practitioners and dilettantes. (Myself being one of the dilettantes!)
Directly comparing Scientology-speak to the beliefs and practices of the rationalists and their offshoots seems like it should be a ground-floor understanding of the whole mess, but perhaps that sort of blunt simplicity is what some folks on the margins need to avoid being sucked all the way in.
How sad that Altman’s shell corporation’s property insurance has to pay for this guy’s tedious status anxiety
“Look, Grandpa, here’s what we should invest the trust fund into!”
Who wants to join me in standing up the competing Center For Applied Rationality Techniques
Setting firm boundaries is for amateurs, haven’t you heard?
From another perspective, royalty gossip is the progenitor, and now the semi-vestigial rump, of the modern celebrity gossip industry
I think their brains have just been thoroughly microwaved by social media feedback loops. I remarked elsewhere that I’m not sure these people are or can be earnest about this (cf. the fact that the billionaires they’re celebrating are laser-focused on the tech they claim might doom the world); they’re simply too conditioned towards creating outrage content for Twitter. To me, this is more akin to LARPing “Leave Britney alone!” than it is serious political activism.
Huh. Are the remaining “classical liberals” in the wild just naturally covered in this much slime, or is it something Yud applied to himself specifically for this conversation?
it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation,
Now wait just a goddamn minute, I thought the whole schtick here was that our gracious correspondent is better than anyone else at evaluating situations that are relatively rare but nonetheless highly consequential
Didn’t really think about it until just now, but a load-bearing part of Yarvin’s work seeming erudite is him dropping in little bits of obscure trivia that may or may not have anything to do with the topic at hand
I would say that the in-group jargon is more of a retention tactic than an attraction tactic, although it can become that for people who are desperately looking for an ordered view of the world. Certainly I’ve seen it a lot in recovering Scientologists, expressing how that edifice of jargon, colloquialisms, and redefined words shaped their worldview and how they related to other people. In this case here, if you’ve been nodding along for a while and want to continue to be one of the cool guys, how could you not glomarize? Peek coolly out from beneath your fedora and neither confirm nor deny?
I will agree that the ratsphere has softer boundaries and is not particularly competently managed as a cult. As you allude to, too, there isn’t a clear induction ritual or psychological turning point, just a mass of material that you’re supposed to absorb and internalize over a necessarily lengthy stretch of time. Hence the most clearly identifiable cults are splinter groups.
I understand where he probably got the neologism “glomarize” from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer) but his willingness to beat you in the face with it until you accept it is a big part of what makes his writing style so offputting. And, uh, this level of enthusiasm for specialized jargon continues to fail to overcome the cult allegations.
Oh my god, the gacha anime-waifu horse racing phone game is real. Why did I have to find this out today, or ever. Better than 50% chance that Roko is a paypig for it
Over the last few years, I have fully gotten on board with the idea that the haunting vestige of the idea of people as property is one of the core weaknesses of American society, and the “western civilization” enthusiasts that promote its supremacy.
Of course, there are a lot of other people who have been on board with that point of view for centuries.
For some reason, this brings to mind ancient Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire websites written by children, that promised training programs for being able to shoot Dragonball Z energy beams in real life. And I can’t be sure that isn’t exactly what inspired Aella here.