I suspect some of the resistance to transhumanism by conservatives, Objectivists and secular humanists derives from “Not Invented Here” thinking: The “wrong” sorts of people from outside their respective tribes came up with this idea, instead of the ones who already held high status in them. Ironically many of Alcor’s early participants shared conservatives’ belief in limited government, admired Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and agreed with the basic principles of the philosophical materialism underlying secular humanism.
So, my impression from ~4 years ago was that SMOC was mediocre on ~3 different empirical tests, and competitors, like MOND, were great on one test but terrible on the other two, and this is why SMOC is the majority viewpoint. But that was years ago, and things may have changed significantly since then; are there any cosmologists in the audience who can comment on if progress in MOND has overcome any of the hurdles it faced before?
I find it fascinating that men who claim to have become skillful as PUA’s, like Roosh, Heartiste and Vox Day, have come around to seeing the wisdom of patriarchal social conservatism. After exploring the dysfunctional world of female sexual freedom, they realize that our allegedly unenlightened forefathers had good reasons for keeping women under male authority.
they realize that our allegedly unenlightened forefathers had good reasons for keeping women under male authority
Yeah, these reasons boil down to MOAR POWAH TO ME!
I mean, it’s a blatantly obvious power play—they just want to have the power and women to not have the power. It is a valid instrumental reason :-/ the only thing it doesn’t have much to do with “wisdom” or what’s usually called “good reasons”.
I find it fascinating that men who claim to have become skillful as PUA’s, like Roosh, Heartiste and Vox Day, have come around to seeing the wisdom of patriarchal social conservatism.
I find it fascinating that you find this fascinating. Going from “women are mentally immature (as demonstrated by my ability to trivially manipulate them)” to “women should be treated like mentally immature” seems rather straightforward. I don’t know about the other two, but Heartiste is extremely arrogant towards women, so it is no surprise that he has such opinion.
However, to prove the wisdom of patriarchy, it is not enough to prove that women are immature; you also have to prove that men are (more) mature. Where is this proof? The fact that Heartiste does not have similar stories about men is an evidence about his sexual orientation, not about wisdom of the average man.
Just to play devil’s advocate, if women really are so trivial to manipulate, and yet most men can’t realize it and instead suffer most of their lives, that would prove that most men are pretty stupid, too. Let’s hypothesize that 90% of men and 90% of women are extremely stupid. How does this prove that keeping women under male authority is better (for the society in general) than e.g. a regime where feminists (of the strawman kind) would have all the power and make all the rules?
I find it fascinating that men who claim to have become skillful as PUA’s, like Roosh, Heartiste and Vox Day, have come around to seeing the wisdom of patriarchal social conservatism.
OTOH, men like Mark Manson (the former Entropy) have taken the exactly opposite route, so that’s probably not significant.
Roosh, Heartiste and Vox Day have come around to seeing the wisdom of patriarchal social conservatism.
These folks are not representative of pickup, though. Many people involved in pickup are quite apolitical, and others could even be described as left-wing, at least in a very broad sense drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations.
Short Online Texts Thread
Everything is heritable:
“The contribution of de novo coding mutations to autism spectrum disorder”, Iossifov et al 2014 (media: 1, 2; discussion; excerpts)
“Cloning Cows From Steaks (and Other Ways of Building Better Cattle)”
Politics/religion:
“Whither the Blank Slate? A Report on the Reception of Evolutionary Biological Ideas among Sociological Theorists”, Horowitz et al 2014 (media; excerpts)
“Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt”
“The Micro-sociology of Violent Confrontations”
“Aum Shinrikyo and a Panic About Manga and Anime”, Gardner 2008 (excerpts)
“A Few Bad Men: Why America doesn’t really have a terrorism problem”
“Bottom of the Barrel: Today’s terrorists aren’t “sophisticated.” They’re stupider than ever.”
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
“What’s to know about the credibility of empirical economics?”, Ioannidis & Doucouliagos 2013 (excerpts)
“The Ironic Effect of Significant Results on the Credibility of Multiple-Study Articles”, Schimmack 2012 (excerpts)
“Bayesian data analysis”, Kruschke 2010 (excerpts)
“What Teachers Should Know about the Bootstrap: Resampling in the Undergraduate Statistics Curriculum”, Hesterberg 2014 (nice comprehensible discussion of various kinds of bootstraps and resampling which helps put together everything I’d learned piecemeal)
“The harm done by tests of significance”, Hauer 2004 (how p-values increase traffic fatalities)
“The Mind of a Con Man”: Stapel
Stein’s paradox
“Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Unpaired Socks of Karl Broman” (demonstration of ABC)
“A Vast Graveyard of Undead Theories: Publication Bias and Psychological Science’s Aversion to the Null”
“Unreliable neuroscience? Why power matters: Small studies with low power undermine the reliability of science and new evidence suggests that low power is the norm in neuroscience”
Psychology/biology:
“Is Psychometric g a Myth?”
“Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help”, Gottfredson 2005 (excerpts)
“Who Rises to the Top? Early Indicators”, Kell et al 2013 (excerpts; does IQ cease to matter past 130? No.)
“Life Paths and Accomplishments of Mathematically Precocious Males and Females Four Decades Later”, Lubinski et al 2014 (graphs)
“Annals of psychometry: IQs of eminent scientists”
“Studies Highlight [Futility] of Early Education”
“Don’t Know? Or Don’t Care?: Predicting Educational Attainment Using Survey Item Response Rates and Coding Speed Tests as Measures of Conscientiousness”, Hitt & Trivitt 2013 (excerpts)
“Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science”, Duarte et al 2014 (excerpts)
“Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar: The synthetic drugs being invented, refined, and produced today-and often shipped in from China-would have blown Timothy Leary’s mind. Who knows what they’re doing to the brains of users.”
Technology:
Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331”; For Ars, three crackers have at 16,000+ hashed passcodes-with 90% success.
“Crypto Rebels: It’s the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers. At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century”
N-body choreographies
“How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 ‘moon rocket’ engine back to life”
“A history of the Amiga, part 8: The demo scene”
Reimplementing “git clone” in Haskell from the bottom up
Economics:
“Of Frightened Horses and Autonomous Vehicles: Tort Law and its Assimilation of Innovations”, Graham 2012 (excerpts)
“The death of peak oil”
Survivorship bias in equity returns
disability, immigration, globalization, and technological unemployment:
“Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America”
Murray’s Coming Apart
Autor on disability
“Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets”
“The Effect of Intelligence on Job Performance is Intuitive”
“Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature”, Borjas 2013
Philosophy:
“Bayesian Informal Logic and Fallacy”, Korb 2003; “Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence”
“Privileging the Question”
“Be Specific” (if you make an abstract claim, can you give at least 3 specific examples? if not, maybe you need to think about it more)
“Taking Charity Seriously: Toby Ord talk on charity effectiveness”
Misc:
Taikyoku shogi
“Try To Praise The Mutilated World”, Adam Zagajewski
“Morning Song of Senlin”, Conrad Aiken
“When Dickens met Dostoevsky”
Gerontologist Stephen Coles, M.D. Ph.D., went into cryo at Alcor, after going to a hospice nearby to “clock out,” as Mike Perry says:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/tephen-coles-1941-2014
Eric S. Raymond on his relationship to LessWrong and the rationalist community (Including some friendly criticism).
An article about cryonics and Alcor which interviews Max More:
The Art of Not Dying
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/the-art-of-not-dying-or-being-frozen-until-you-can-come-back
Wesley J. Smith, a conservative bioethicist, criticizes transhumanism as a new religious movement here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/393646/give-me-new-time-transhumanism-wesley-j-smith
I suspect some of the resistance to transhumanism by conservatives, Objectivists and secular humanists derives from “Not Invented Here” thinking: The “wrong” sorts of people from outside their respective tribes came up with this idea, instead of the ones who already held high status in them. Ironically many of Alcor’s early participants shared conservatives’ belief in limited government, admired Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and agreed with the basic principles of the philosophical materialism underlying secular humanism.
For example:
Many Are Cold But Few Are Frozen
http://www.cryocare.org/index.cgi?subdir=&url=humanist.html
How Ayn Rand Didn’t Get Frozen
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/HowAynRandDidntGetFrozen.html
Slate on killer robots.
Astrophysics:
The failure of the standard model of cosmology by Pavel Kroupa - strong support for MOND physics and no dark matter.
So, my impression from ~4 years ago was that SMOC was mediocre on ~3 different empirical tests, and competitors, like MOND, were great on one test but terrible on the other two, and this is why SMOC is the majority viewpoint. But that was years ago, and things may have changed significantly since then; are there any cosmologists in the audience who can comment on if progress in MOND has overcome any of the hurdles it faced before?
IIRC, the biggest problem for SMOC is the reheating after inflation, while MOND cosmology have trouble with everything else.
The PUA blogger Roosh Valizadeh explains his:
Cultural Collapse Theory: The 7 Steps That Lead To A Complete Culture Decline
http://www.returnofkings.com/49185/cultural-collapse-theory-the-7-steps-that-lead-to-a-complete-culture-decline
Apparently a French talkshow host has found readers for his similar analysis of the situation in France:
French Curtains
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/french-curtains_820204.html?nopager=1#
I find it fascinating that men who claim to have become skillful as PUA’s, like Roosh, Heartiste and Vox Day, have come around to seeing the wisdom of patriarchal social conservatism. After exploring the dysfunctional world of female sexual freedom, they realize that our allegedly unenlightened forefathers had good reasons for keeping women under male authority.
Yeah, these reasons boil down to MOAR POWAH TO ME!
I mean, it’s a blatantly obvious power play—they just want to have the power and women to not have the power. It is a valid instrumental reason :-/ the only thing it doesn’t have much to do with “wisdom” or what’s usually called “good reasons”.
I find it fascinating that you find this fascinating. Going from “women are mentally immature (as demonstrated by my ability to trivially manipulate them)” to “women should be treated like mentally immature” seems rather straightforward. I don’t know about the other two, but Heartiste is extremely arrogant towards women, so it is no surprise that he has such opinion.
However, to prove the wisdom of patriarchy, it is not enough to prove that women are immature; you also have to prove that men are (more) mature. Where is this proof? The fact that Heartiste does not have similar stories about men is an evidence about his sexual orientation, not about wisdom of the average man.
Just to play devil’s advocate, if women really are so trivial to manipulate, and yet most men can’t realize it and instead suffer most of their lives, that would prove that most men are pretty stupid, too. Let’s hypothesize that 90% of men and 90% of women are extremely stupid. How does this prove that keeping women under male authority is better (for the society in general) than e.g. a regime where feminists (of the strawman kind) would have all the power and make all the rules?
OTOH, men like Mark Manson (the former Entropy) have taken the exactly opposite route, so that’s probably not significant.
Hasn’t Ted Beale (“Vox Day”) been an extreme patriarchal social conservative since for ever?
Neither Roosh, from the tone of his earlier “Bang X” guides, strikes me as particularly progressive.
These folks are not representative of pickup, though. Many people involved in pickup are quite apolitical, and others could even be described as left-wing, at least in a very broad sense drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations.