/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

> 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.

 >>/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.

 >>/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.

 >>/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.

 >>/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.

>  knows history
Not that much, unfortunately.

>  romanticizes traditional life, against drugs etc.
Nope. Nope nope nope.

>  would rope without internet
Hard to tell.

>  idealist, perfectionist
Yes definitiely.

>  something fundamental absent, passionate about fonts, jack of all trades
I feel personally attacked.

>  read nietzsche
Disappointing.

>  no friends
Never. I have to stay happy.

I already know most of this shit.

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

 >>/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.

 >>/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.

 >>/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

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

 >>/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.

 >>/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.

Shouldn't everyone take masculinizing chemicals these days?

 >>/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.

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> 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.

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.

I think there are a lot of areas that are harder and more interesting than how much toothpaste you have left, but aren't ruined beyond tractability by bad incentives.

It's not easy, but it's not homogenously hard. Only give up on the really hard stuff.

 >>/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.

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

 >>/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'."

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

 >>/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.

 >>/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.

 >>/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?

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

 >>/6303/
Yes

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".

 >>/6303/
I had brain uploading in mind.

 >>/6193/
Who is ask-gpt?

 >>/6229/
Blog with a bot that automatically takes GPT-2 prompts.
https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/