Discussion
Because the concept makes no sense, the book Suicidal Empathy, whoever really wrote it (I very much doubt that Gad Saad had much to do with it, besides hashing out a general outline with a ghostwriter or an #LLM) cannot possibly make sense.
But it doesn't need to. The title is the memetic thing, the all-in-one diagnosis of the leftists' sicknesses as Musk and Saad imagine them.
(cont'd)
I also read the Sequences, back in the day.
I think the smartest thing that was said about them, and about the Less Wrong sphere in general, is that they are about rationality in the same way that Star Trek is about space travel. Yes, Star Trek often references space travel, and the people who like space travel often like Star Trek, but you cannot become any better at space travel by reading Star Trek.
@passenger @davidgerard oh I like that analogy, not the least because it seems to describe so much else about the techbro elite, like their specific obsession with bringing outdated sci-fi tropes to pass
@mxchara @passenger i did do a summary of the actual point of the sequences.
literally the point of rationality was to teach you to reason like Yudkowsky and want what Yudkowsky wants
which is to live forever as an emulation running on the mind of the superintelligent AI god
seriously
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/17/ai-doomsday-and-ai-heaven-live-forever-in-ai-god/
@davidgerard @mxchara @passenger ah yes. "AGI serves the same psychological function as religion: it promises transcendence, meaning, purpose. It offers Silicon Valley a secular rapture where we upload our consciousness and defeat death." https://fluxus.io/article/alchemy-2-electric-boogaloo this article very good where it refutes AGI and bad where it argues LLMs as a byproduct is good.
@chx @davidgerard @passenger I suggest that there must surely exist broad areas of overlap with evangelical Christianity. I myself have seen evidence of a certain...meeting of minds on this issue, in which the fears of atheists and nonbelievers are pacified by the notion that Christianity has been a civilizing force and the guardians of Western wisdom. And the cults are all swapping memetic tricks from each other...
@chx @davidgerard @passenger there might truly be people who would swear up and down that they were "biblical Christians" who have also persuaded themselves that God literally speaks through a machine; there's churches who think LLM "AI" is a godsend, a way to renew faith.
@mxchara @chx @passenger a remarkable proportion of rationalists are ex-evangelicals (notable example Aella) or ex-mormons who are sure they're atheists now
@davidgerard @mxchara @chx @passenger I have only the outside view to the whole "faith" thing, but it appears to me that certain religious doctrines the type of "[things] are wrong and [deity] will punish you for them" foster later atheists the type of "there is nobody to punish me, so I can do what I want".
Not exclusively, but those people have a certain proverbial smell to them that stinks of egotism bordering wishful apotheosis.
@haihappen @davidgerard @mxchara @chx @passenger
I grew up as a non-fundamentalist, non-evangelical Christian. But I was certainly exposed to many fundamentalist and/or evangelical Christians. There's a couple different ways that can break, many of them unhealthy.
I'd say a more common (and more subtle) way that ex-evangelicals carry their indoctrination is that they then become for lack of better terms, "evangelical atheists", who believe that anybody who believes in some kind of god or higher power is morally inferior.
I've never particularly liked or respected Bill Maher, or Sam Harris and the rest of the "new atheists", for some reason I just instantly identified all of them as deeply problematic allies at best, and generally deserving of serious side-eye. I feel like my initial judgement has been largely vindicated over the years.
On the other hand, I do believe in a higher power, and I do have an immense amount of respect for atheists like Hemant Mehta, Rebecca Watson, Drew McCoy, Owen Morgan, Jared Huffman, and Greg Graffin. I would feel genuinely bad if any of those turned out to secretly be immoral, rotten people underneath their public persona.
@leon_p_smith @davidgerard @mxchara @chx @passenger that's part of what I was grasping for: the indoctrination that cements certain patterns of thought that stay even if the pov changes.
The feeling of moral superiority might be root of the "evangelical christians" as well as the "I am my own god" kinda-sociopathic dipshit atheists and also "AI doomsdayers" maxhine god worshippers.
@haihappen @davidgerard @mxchara @chx @passenger
The ideological connection between AI tech fascism and evangelical Christianity is... not something that I really anticipated, but also not that surprising in retrospect, especially considering I've long been aware of how nasty Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin are. I know I've seen references to plenty of media discussing this new connection, but I've not dove deep into the abyss to understand it myself.
I was aware of Curtis Yarvin under his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug very early on (circa 2008) due to my interest in functional programming languages like Scheme and Haskell. I thought his opinions on tech issues were incredibly shallow and often nonsensical, and the rest of his writing brought full five-alarm-fire signals in my mind immediately, but the man hides his worst takes under an immense quantity of other words, so I never really went diving into that abyss to find anything I felt was concretely actionable.
(I later started to learn about the depth of that five-alarm-fire during GamerGate, when there was a major controversy over Yarvin's invitation to speak at a (then-respected) functional programming conference... and others already had many of his worst takes indexed by that point... but I had no idea how much worse it was going to get.)
@leon_p_smith @haihappen @davidgerard @mxchara @passenger Curtis Yarvin, ah yes. See the matchstick in https://percontra.net/issues/31/poetry/one-sentence-about-tyranny/
@chx @leon_p_smith @haihappen @davidgerard @passenger Yes. Exactly. Excellent poem (I've bookmarked it) and if I might amplify the specific point: why did Yarvin's shitty ideas simply fester in the tech community for decades? The answers to that question pertain at least in part (in my opinion) to a self-deceitful "free speech" culture engendered by the unwillingness of a lot of abused children now grown up to submit to any emotional or moral restraints.
We're seeing so much internalized abuse on display and it's ghastly.
@mxchara @chx @leon_p_smith @haihappen @passenger but mostly Thielbux. A *lot* of Thielbux.
@davidgerard @chx @leon_p_smith @haihappen @passenger oh gawd...yeah he (and a pack of other CEOs and big-ticket capitalists) must be digging up every intellectual crank they can find. Yarvin (going by what I've seen of him on Twitter) has startlingly little to offer; there's right-wing figures of comparable gravitas who are far more successful at seeming like they know deep intellectual secrets. But I'd guess it matters a lot, in this sphere, that Yarvin got started back in the 1990s. He's practically an elder statesman of tech, like Bill Gates! =D
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