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)
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality doesn't need to make sense. It exists in much the same way as an ultracheap mass printing of the Christian Bible: it's a sacred text so sacred that nobody needs to read it. "In here resides all Truth™," the true believer says of the Bible (no matter how corrupt and degraded the text itself) or of Yudkowsky's solitary creative achievement.
(not much more)
I'll let you in on a little secret: I wrote this thread partly by way of deciding whether I want to bother with reading, or even with skimming, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I will occasionally nerve myself to read intellectually twisted writing to see what it's actually like and reassure myself that yes, my inferences about it are correct. Right now I'm just...spouting off. I haven't actually seen the damn thing.
(cont'd)
So would it be worth my while? Would it be educational? Do I have some obscure duty to read Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality because I've tangled with its author a bit on Twitter?
Arguably Yudkowsky merits that much baseline respect in such a situation: while I argue that it's not necessary to read a book if you know enough outside information to dissuade you, I shouldn't have any reason to fear Yudkowsky's text.
(cont'd)
Maybe I've talked myself into having a peep. Not sure yet. I hope the fediverse will forgive me for using it as a sounding-board. It's a heck of a lot more rewarding than "debate" with Joe Rogan or Lex Fridman.
(Gawd just what is it with Lex Fridman. Has he taken human life or something?? He's spectacularly creepy even for a right-wing creep.)
~Chara of Pnictogen
@mxchara If you do read HPMOR, read chapters 1-30 then start again at chapter 100. you'll miss a few things, but mostly you'll miss 70 chapters of complete shit.
worse books have been published by real authors. it's better than atlas shrugged.
it won't really educate you as to yudkowsky's crazy though. it will allude to it, but it's not the secret.
if you go back and read ch 31-99, it will not really elucidate what is not present in the rest, it will just make you think "what a fucked up weirdo who did a fic with not one but *two* Mary Sues"
perhaps the sequences will do that, one million words of blog posts over three years. but that's where all the crazy that HPMOR is an allusion to actually lives.
i read through the sequences three times because i dunno i had too much time on my hands. I can definitely say that to read yudkowsky is not to be convinced.
if you do wish to set about this tedious abyss dive, read the original blog posts and the *comments*, which often take apart yud's dumb shit. you will need to show the heavily downvoted comments because the cultists have dutifully attempted to obscure them.
before reading either i suggest Neoreaction A Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer, which is actually enjoyable and written by a nice person, who will introduce you to all this much better than the primary texts. and i'm not just saying that because my name is in the first sentence.
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
@mxchara @davidgerard @chx @leon_p_smith @haihappen @passenger one name that doesn’t come up nearly often enough, and who lent his academic authority to yarvin et al, is nick land. if you really want to dig into the philosophical cult that birthed a lot of this garbage land is the place to start imo.
@emenel @mxchara @davidgerard @chx @haihappen @passenger Yeah, I've heard his name repeatedly come up lately, but I personally don't know anything about him.
@leon_p_smith @mxchara @davidgerard @chx @haihappen @passenger the “founder” of neoreaction/dark enlightenment/accelerationism … used to run the CCRU at Warwick university.
@leon_p_smith @mxchara @davidgerard @chx @haihappen @passenger land is dangerous because, unlike these other bafoons, he’s an actual philosopher. he was a delueze scholar that took the ideas of rhizomatic systems of control and mixed it with lovecraftian-occultism and psychedelics and came to the conclusion that humanity needs to accelerate itself off a cliff in order to reach the next phase of existence. (paraphrasing of course).
@leon_p_smith @mxchara @davidgerard @chx @haihappen @passenger and he is the one who brought these ideas to thiel, yarvin, etc in the 90’s. they’re essentially land’s acolytes.
@emenel @leon_p_smith @mxchara @chx @haihappen @passenger not convinced yarvin had read a word of land until land wote "Dark Enlightenment", unless there's a smoking gun i'm unaware of
@davidgerard @leon_p_smith @mxchara @chx @haihappen @passenger i don’t know when yarvin would have first read land or encountered those ideas … but land was very early on the theory-blogger scene (like most of the ccru)…
@emenel @leon_p_smith @mxchara @chx @haihappen @passenger right, but you seemed to be claiming a causal link with "he is the one who brought these ideas to thiel, yarvin, etc in the 90’s. they’re essentially land’s acolytes."
yarvin got his ideas from existing fascist soup as far as I can tell, as did thiel and sacks..
@davidgerard @leon_p_smith @mxchara @chx @haihappen @passenger yeah, i guess i’m doing some conjecture. land was already well published by the time they all started writing about this stuff on their own. and land was already connected to the tech industry in a few ways. his ideas were there… and imo they laid the foundation that turned the fascist soup into nrx.
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