The whole concept of “race science” is an attempt to smuggle long-discredited ideas from the skull measurement people back into respectable discourse, and it should be opposed as such. Calling it pseudoscience is better, but it’s even better to just call it straight-up racism.
Or: Nazis don’t even deserve the respect we give to cold fusion cranks, free energy grifters, and homeopaths. Their projects and arguments are even less worth acknowledging.
In a world where technofascism stalks the halls of power like a fedora-wearing xenomorph it is good to see a reminder of the original context of these discussions: making Yudkowsky and friends feel important without ever actually doing anything important.
Alex Avila really is out here fully being the postmodern neomarxist Jordan Peterson warned you about and I am so goddamn here for it.
Yeah. I think the nerd archetype fits more neatly into a framework about toxic masculinity reproducing itself even as it necessarily excludes large swathes of men. Like, for all that the stereotypical nerd is fat or neurodivergent or otherwise in some category beyond white dude, that’s not what gets them bullied. (Also let’s not forget that the nerd’s archenemy who does the bullying is also usually a white man) It’s their failure to perform hegemonic masculinity appropriately. George McFly vs Biff Tannen could be contrasted to Carlton Banks vs Will Smith. In a lot of the older pre-gamergate lore nerddom was broadly considered a kinder and more welcoming group, at least in part for this reason, and given how many fat, neurodivergent, nonwhite, nonmale, and nonstraight people identified as nerds over the years I don’t think that was inaccurate.
Rather, I think two things happened that led to nerds going the way they did. Firstly they grew up and the problem of not performing masculinity correctly shifted from being on the football field to being in the boardroom and the bank account. A lot of computer and math nerds went to college and turned into tech and finance bros. Even those who didn’t go into one of those fields started aging into the most profitable phase of their careers. You can see the fantasy of it become more common as the new millennium ticked along, with the narrative shifting from “showing the world we’re right” to “buying their employer and forcing them to lick our boots clean”. Along with this (arguably because of it), most of the rallying symbols of nerddom - comic books, anime, science fiction, fantasy, space, etc. - became the mainstream titans of culture. If the core of nerddom was a failure to appropriately participate in hegemonic masculinity and the resulting loss of social status, that loss of social status was no longer really happening. In many ways the rising diversity among nerds directly contributed to this since having women in the demographic meant it was no longer as toxic to your chances to ever get a date. Being a nerd no longer inherently meant rejecting that vision of masculinity.
But the fallout of these changes was a rift between those who rejected hegemonic masculinity and those who had merely been rejected by hegemonic masculinity. And this rift was easily exploited and magnified by fascists who linked the criticisms of nerdy past times from the former group to the latter’s anxiety about losing their newfound social capital. You can find echoes of this in the discourse about “nice guys”, particularly in the hand-wringing kind of reactions we saw from the Sneerable Scotts Aaronson and Siskind. And all those nonstraight nonwhite nonmales who were still on the outs with the broader culture of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and patriarchy found that they didn’t actually need the “nerd” identity as strongly as the increasingly reactionary straight white dude contingent. And that basically abandoned it to the fascists.
Well found.
Also I love that the conversation almost certainly started with a comment about how everyone assumes they’d be the in the king’s court the cast majority of people would have been some variant of peasant farmer for the vast majority of history. But somehow he still would have totally been the Chief Rabbi, given the most beautiful woman, and generally be a king. I wasn’t there obviously but either he missed the point or they all missed the point. Even when talking specifically about how you can’t choose the circumstances of your birth or their consequences he still can’t imagine himself not being the king.
Longer read than I had realized but worth every word. Very well done.
In other words, we may eventually reach a sort of wealth singularity, a point when the wealth of a few grows so exponentially that it basically reaches the point of infinity.
I actually question whether or not this has already happened. The wealthy already have access to enough money that they don’t actually need to sell assets - to give anything up - in order to get credit. Just taking away Elon’s money doesn’t make him stop being Elon. It doesn’t take away his connections, his charisma, his loyal follower base, etc. Even if he did get taken down in court any financial consequence wouldn’t actually hurt his power base nearly as much as the reputational shift (see also Orange Man). Their net worth may not be literally infinite, but I can’t think of any additional power or prestige they could command if it was.
It’s also kind of weird to see Atlas Shrugged on the list. Not because it’s not dystopian because the only thing it’s missing from its libertarian hellscape is realistic consequences in the form of bear attacks. But unlike the others the society isn’t expressly said to be awful by the narrative. Or, for Scholtzenizen, by reality.
Your bonus points link is even dumber than you’re suggesting. The first half of the tweet:
I don’t want to live in the world of “Camp Of The Saints”.
I don’t want to live in the world of “Atlas Shrugged”.
I don’t want to live in the world of “The GULag Archipelago”.
I don’t want to live in the world of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.
I don’t want to live in the “Brave New World”.
I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune
I don’t want bad things! I want good-ish things!
Also I’ve never read Ringworld or Hyperion but the other two stories span literal millennia and show wildly different societies over that period. Hell, showcasing that development is the entire first set of Foundation stories. Just… You can absolutely tell this sonofabitch doesn’t actually read.
I mean you could make an actual evo psych argument about the importance of being able to model the behavior of other people in order to function in a social world. But I think part of the problem is also in the language at this point. Like, anthropomorphizing computers has always been part of how we interact with them. Churning through an algorithm means it’s “thinking”, an unexpected shutdown means it “died”, when it sends signals through a network interface it’s “talking” and so on. But these GenAI chatbots (chatbots in general, really, but it’s gotten worse as their ability to imitate conversation has improved) are too easy to assign actual agency and personhood to, and it would be really useful to have a similarly convenient way of talking about what they do and how they do it without that baggage.
I mean I think the whole AI consciousness emerged from science fiction writers who wanted to interrogate the economic and social consequences of totally dehumanizing labor, similar to R.U.R. and Metropolis. The concept had sufficient legs that it got used to explore things like “what does it mean to be human?” in a whole bunch of stories. Some were pretty good (Bicentennial Man, Aasimov 1976) and others much less so (Bicentennial Man, Columbus 1999). I think the TESCREAL crowd had a lot of overlap with the kind of people who created, expanded, and utilized the narrative device and experimented with related technologies in computer science and robotics, but saying they originated it gives them far too much credit.
All I know is that I didn’t do anything to make those mushrooms grow in a circle like that and the sweetbread I left there in the morning was completely gone by lunchtime and that evening all my family’s shoes got fixed up.
I recommend it because we know some of these LLM-based services still rely on the efforts of A Guy Instead to make up for the nonexistence and incoherence of AGI. If you’re an asshole to the frontend there’s a nonzero chance that a human person is still going to have to deal with it.
Also I have learned an appropriate level of respect and fear for the part of my brain that, half-asleep, answers the phone with “hello this is YourNet with $CompanyName Support.” I’m not taking chances around unthinkingly answering an email with “alright you shitty robot. Don’t lie to me or I’ll barbecue this old commodore 64 that was probably your great uncle or whatever”
if it has morals its hard to tell how much of it is illusory and token prediction!
It’s generally best to assume 100% is illusory and pareidolia. These systems are incredibly effective at mirroring whatever you project onto it back at you.
New rule: you’re not allowed to tell people to shut up and look at the numbers unless you’re actually good at math.
If I have the right read of his personality (based, I must admit, solely on his public work) I would guess that it’s the narcissism of assuming that anything that disagrees with his preferred sequence of events (that is to say, the singularity happening in his lifetime and with him playing a key role) is necessarily incorrect.
If that’s true then how has he maintained whatever passes for his career in Sci-fi whining these days?
I feel like I’ve learned a lot about world cultures from forum threads and YouTube videos unpacking and debating translation errors in anime and games, and I’m not sure if this says more about my media diet or the world at large.
Back in my edgy atheist era I found the ontological argument in apologetics to be compelling, though not terribly convincing. And here I thought they would content themselves reinventing Pascal’s wager. Now let me see if I can find one of those copypasta about the best conceivable plate of nachos.
I’m even more appalled at the description they’re using, because that is categorically not what happened here. Buncha finance bros convinced themselves they were doing the right thing by stealing money to live like lords in the fuckin’ Bahamas is more like it.
Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.
You’re not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don’t take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.
However, the whole “good times breed weak men” meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It’s rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it’s also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.