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HN is being … surprisingly on point with this one. Choice quotes:
“However, reading this article about all these people at their “Galt’s Gultch”, I thought — “oh, I guess he’s a rhinoceros now” ” — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317651
“It’s very telling that some of them went full “false modesty” by naming sites like “LessWrong”, when you just know they actually mean “MoreRight” ” — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44319387
“I feel like I’m witnessing something that Adam Curtis would cover in the last part of The Century of Self, in real time.” — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317313
etc etc.
As Adam Becker shows in his book, EAs started out being reasonable “give to charity as much as you can, and research which charities do the most good” but have gotten into absurdities like “it is more important to fund rockets than help starving people or prevent malaria because maybe an asteroid will hit the Earth, killing everyone, starving or not”.
I haven’t read Becker’s book and probably won’t spend the time to do so. But if this is an accurate summary, it’s a bad sign for that book, because plenty of them were bonkers all along.
(Becker’s previous book, about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, irritated me. It recapitulated earlier pop-science books while introducing historical and technical errors, like getting the basic description of the EPR thought-experiment wrong, and butchering the biography of Grete Hermann while acting self-righteous about sexist men overlooking her accomplishments. See previous rant.)
They’re members of a religion which says that if you do math in your head the right way you’ll be correct about everything, and so they think they’re correct about everything.
They also secondarily believe everyone has an IQ which is their DBZ power level; they believe anything they see that has math in it, and IQ is math, so they believe anything they see about IQ. So if you avoid trying to find out your own IQ you can just believe it’s really high and then you’re good.
Unfortunately this lead them to the conclusion that computers have more IQ than them and so would automatically win any intellectual DBZ laser beam fight against them / enslave them / take over the world.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flagged
s/o to one of the comments basically saying that Scott is the Simone de Beauvoir of rationalism
It’s probably been discussed a shit-ton already, but boy does this guy not get why he’s a chud. Consider these two quotes, heavily edited for brevity:
I’m […] a liberal Zionist, […] etc. ([an identity] well-enough represented at LessOnline […]).
and:
The closest to right-wing politics that I witnessed at LessOnline was [moderate politics].
Of course, one shouldn’t expect s11n.blog to understand the fascist, let alone right-wing, nature of liberalism or Zionism. That is simply how fascists are.
“You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”
And then everybody clapped.
(This is extra funny because he lost friends over the gaza genocide debate when his leftwing (and Jewish) friend told him ‘well we do have power over them’ re the protesting students, to which he has a good Rationalist replied with ‘FUCK YOU’. He himself describes the situation slightly differently, but he has shown he doesn’t always have the best ability to understand others in these kinds of emotional moment, and he cannot fathom he might be wrong (and that is how you end up stealing from the tip jar)).
E: And so much references to ‘the sneerers’ and our arguments again, he promised he would stop reading our shit because it is unhealthy for him. But looking at the arguments, I’m happy to see that he has indeed not read our stuff. The I in TESCREAL/TREACLES(*) stands for Incel.
Also, while the Rationalists are not incels, what does the name of your blog stand for Scott? (E: wanted to edit in a link but can’t find the explainer page, wonder if he read it again and went ‘wow yeah I get why people think that isn’t great’ and deleted it (I did find this congrats on being consistently wrong)).
*: still think these are dumb abbreviations, but not letting that get in the way of a dumb joke.
My Grand Unified Theory of Scott Aaronson is that he doesn’t have a theory of mind. On subjects far less incendiary than Zionism, he simply fails to recognize that people who share his background or interests can think differently than he does.
“I’m a rationalist because they let me put “quantum computer scientist (not physicist) who’s always right (despite the suffering of fools)” on my nametag”
So what does the name of his blog stand for?
The name of his blog was a reference that he thinks he was born in the wrong time, because in Shtetls people of his clear high intelligence would be assigned a wife (and get high social status).
Here is Sneerclub talking about it a while back. Dec 2022 is apparently 2 years ago for reddit.
E: Do note I can’t recall where he wrote about this, so I might be misremembering, or taking what we said in hyperbole about it for the real thing.
E2: unrelated to the blog name, I did think of incels/untitled/this kind of stuff like the troubles of lonely nerds/NDs not getting dating and going to the wrong places when I read the last part of this question Dr NerdLove answered, the ‘to be perfectly blunt’ part. And just how common the ‘you can’t be mad at me now’ thing is.
This appears to be the explainer: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=476 , also referenced here: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5769
Edit: bonus cursed findings: https://web.archive.org/web/20071006184928/http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=260
why do we, as a society, provide food stamps for the hungry but not sex stamps for the celibate?
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.
this is low hanging fruit but: yeah absolutely rancid takes on the middle east from scootson. who would have thought he would produce such nuance-free, fascist opinions about geopolitics?
Ah right yes, thanks.
““I would’ve been the chief rabbi of my shtetl,” I said. “All day long, I’d debate questions like how much restitution you’d have to pay if your ox gored your neighbor’s sheep. And for this, I’d get an arranged marriage with the most beautiful girl in town.””
