ChatGPT, please summarize in bullet points.
This is the start of modern illiteracy.
No, just a way to say "tl;dr" which also somehow manages to be offensively classist.
They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
51–60 of 65 posts
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#52> They found some crew members [for a rationalist boat], including one, Dan Powell, who had nautical experience from a stint in the US navy. On 20 July, they set out from Alaska. It went mostly without incident, though one crew member who found Ziz’s assertiveness off-putting debarked early. What is it with cults and boats? L Ron Hubbard did this, too (albeit for different stated reasons). > The Coast Guard declared…
It's because of the implication
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is, that when Charles Dickens came out, people also blamed him on lowering the literacy rate. Called something different back then. But maybe, it's not population wide. More people were reading Dickens, so rate of reading in population was increasing. But the elites that thought everything should be in Greek/Latin, thought everyone reading Dickens was a downgrade. Every generation argument. Weren't Egyptian…
Outside of classical studies, papish notions regarding Greek and Latin were decidedly unpopular in Church of England era Britain (for obvious reasons!). The real argument against Dickens at the time was more to do with his habit of serialising his novels in cheap newspapers. This then rendered his subject matter of choice - social commentary, fiscal egalitarianism, and empathy for the poor - a little too accessible f…
ah.
I did not know that. Good point. His subject matter put a negative spin on the 'elite's, and so naturally they criticized him.
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do. That's what these guys figured. But if we're being rational and realistic, all it accomplishes is getting your group killed or imprisoned.
Depend if you chose the right target, pretty clearly they didn't.
They had issues with so many different groups and causes they may as well have been raging against society as a whole. A dozen or so kooks resorting to violence against the world will only ever end with their demise. They thought themselves rational but were in fact totally insane to think their course of action was anything other than elaborate suicide.
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such sentiments have been expressed so many times that I have lost track of all of the times variations on them have been expressed. I think it started with Socrates who claimed the written word would damage human recall. When nobody believed him and he became popular because of the written word, people inverted “literacy is bad” into “literacy is good”. In more recent times, I believe radio and TV were said to be th…
Maybe Socrates was correct? I certainly think Google has damaged my memory, or maybe just age, hard to say.
Probably so. Socrates witnessed the end of the Athenian Golden Age during his lifetime.
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#56For a group that applies rationalism, they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts. The article could have done more to condemn this group and line of thinking. Also the part of the story on Curtis Lind is both sad and impressive, that old man was built of true grit: "As he bent to look, something hit him on the head and he blacked out. When he woke up, at least three of the Zizians were…
Thats some Tarantino Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood story arc right there.
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#57The cult elements of isolation (boat/van life), alienation from self (trans, split brain), false moral superiority (vegan), demands for purity in action (vegan), sense of false higher purpose (AI basilisk), false possession of method for empowerment (rationalism) are there. The hatred of landlords et al (anarchism) and use of drugs (psychedelic, others?) seems to be my guess for the violence part. Lots of highly expl…
I think about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manson_Family but I know a lot of people use psychedelic drugs and don't resort to violence. With the hyperbolic rhetoric about false threats, I'm surprised we haven't seen more violence from "rationalists"; if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do.
Manson was a biker gang affiliate and lifelong criminal. The Zizians appear to be mostly middle class kids, not street dealers pimps and wanna be thugs.
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#58Y'know, I'm totally happy for people to (very, very clearly) use my series "[Extropia's Children](https://aiascendant.com/p/extropias-children)" as a basis for their own work - which has been happening a lot lately - but some kind of citation would have been nice. Sheesh.
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#59For a group that applies rationalism, they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts. The article could have done more to condemn this group and line of thinking. Also the part of the story on Curtis Lind is both sad and impressive, that old man was built of true grit: "As he bent to look, something hit him on the head and he blacked out. When he woke up, at least three of the Zizians were…
> For a group that applies rationalism, they appear to have ended up committing very horrible and irrational acts.
Yes, also ironic how they were, per the article, very intrigued by the concept that ideas themselves could be like viruses but were unaware of how they seemed to be heavily impacted by that very thing, many times over.
Re: They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well if we're being rational about it - how confident are we in the accuracy of that assessment, how likely is our attack to succeed, and how likely is our attack to have a positive impact? Worse, what is the probability that our attack instead has a negative impact?
Is it even rational to assume one is rational? Of course I think I am, but I also think basically nobody else is. Yet I'm sure they think the are, and similarly doubt I am. So is the issue that I'm a snowflake and everybody else is wrong, or is the issue that rationality does not really exist (though that does not mean it's not worth striving towards)? It seems only rational to doubt ones rationality.
> Is it even rational to assume one is rational?
Depending on your definition. But taken literally, no, obviously not.
Regardless of your skill level, would you ever assume that you were playing a perfect (in the information theoretic sense) game of chess?
Whether chess or real life, all of us merely make the best choices we can given our skill and the information available to us. That includes imperfectly modeling the other agents in the world around us. In that sense, "being rational" means something like "deliberately analyzing the situation" and "more rational" means something like "a superior approach to analysis".