yes really, that’s literally the title of the post. (archive copy, older archive copy) LessWrong goes full Motte.
this was originally a LW front-page post, and was demoted to personal blog when it proved unpopular. it peaked at +10, dropped to -6 and is +17 right now.
but if anyone tries to make out this isn’t a normative rationalist: this guy, Michael “Valentine” Smith, is a cofounder of CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality), a LessWrong offshoot that started being about how to do rational thinking … and finally admitted it was about “AI Risk”
this post is the Rationalist brain boys, the same guys who did FTX and Effective Altruism, going full IQ-Anon wondering how the market could fail so badly as not to care what weird disaster assholes think. this is the real Basilisk.
when they’re not spending charity money on buying themselves castles, this is what concerns the modern rationalist
several commenters answered “uh, the customers.” and tried to explain the concept of markets to OP, and how corporations like selling stuff to normal people and not just to barely-crypto-fash. they were duly downvoted to -20 by valiant culture warriors who weren’t putting up with that sort of SJW nonsense.
comment by author, who thinks “hard woke” is not only a thing, but a thing that profit-making corporations do so as not to make a profit: “For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t describe myself as leaning right.” lol ok dude
right-wingers really don’t believe in, or even understand, capitalism or markets at all. they believe in hierarchy. that’s what’s offended this dipshit.
now, you might think LessWrong Rationalists, Slate Star Codex readers, etc. tend towards behaving functionally indistinguishably from Nazis, but that’s only because they work so hard at learning from their neoreactionary comrades to reach that stage
why say in 10,000 words what you can say in 14
Wokism is a conspiracy by Big Kitchenware to sell more woks
Even fucking Donald Trump as said that “woke” doesn’t mean anything. You’d think a bunch of “rationalists” would bother to define the term before complaining about it.
“Oh, you know the ones”
MediaCorp: “In the interests of increasing our company valuation, we will make our business decisions as far right as legally acceptable, as any profit-seeking company is wont to do. Unrelatedly, inside our economic framework, we don’t care about the actors and writers since we can replace them with robots. They can starve to death after they lose their homes.”
LW: crickets chirping
MediaCorp: “We will continue to have token representation in our media to remain palatable to statistically significant market segments”
LW: “Where’s the economic incentive? DAE silent majority???”
I am told lesswrong is centrist and does not hate queer people, women, minorities, the poor so idk. Will wait for some quality dunks tho.
Maybe movies like Barbie or whatever sell. Who can question the inscrutable prophetic minds of movie executives?
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Yeah, I know so many um… “skeptics” that just take what they say at face value and I find it so ridiculous. It does deserve a proper write up at some point
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`I don’t know what you mean by “centrist,”’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t-- till I tell you. I meant “anywhere between Trotsky and Ron DeSantis!”’
`But “centrist” doesn’t mean “anywhere between Trotsky and Ron DeSantis!”’ Alice objected.
When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’
Let us list some of the specific concrete examples of wokeism in this blog post and comments. For fun.
- a gay kiss in the background of a scene in Star Wars
- The movie Knives Out
- What James Damore got fired from Google for pushing back against (if you don’t remember this; he has pushing back against the idea that women make for just as good programmers as men do)
- Suing twitter for firing a significantly higher percentage of women than men during layoffs
- The episode The Star Spangled Man from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier where Sam Wilson gets profiled by police.
- Talking about ones membership of a protected group all the time
- Leaving / Disinvesting from Twitter after Elon Musk purchased it.
- Disney releasing a new Black Princess
- Corporate training that trains people to discriminate against majorities instead of minorities
OK that’s probably enough…
Also it was a close race, but the award for “most WTF comment” is a tie between:
A policeman stops a black man, who complains about racial profiling, and then the policeman finds evidence of a crime, and says something like “police go where the crime is”?
and
please understand that the reason my mental netcode detected your behavior as agentic still seems to have been justified at the time.
my mental netcode
That not only sounds like robot LARP but a gamer attempting to talk like a programmer. I haven’t heard the word “netcode” used outside of video games context and even taking it as a metaphor for an aspect of human decision making, it shouldn’t be responsible for determining the agency of someone’s behavior.
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Affirmative.
In retrospect, maybe it’s kind of a pity that Silicon Valley as a collective didn’t struggle this much with an adequate answer to “what are customers :S”, because it might have stopped some of the biggest bullshit that came from them.
Startups don’t really need customers, and startups are where it’s at for the SV / HN / LW crowd.
@dgerard So many conspiracies whenever there’s a massive box office for Barbie / Twilight / Fast & Furious or any movie that features people who aren’t them doing things they don’t care about. It can’t possibly be that Disney makes a lot of multiracial femme girlboss pinksplosion movies because they’ve spent half a century perfecting the market segmentation money-printing formula; it must be a conspiracy of woke employees & cancel culture.
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