This part of the first comment got an audible guffaw out of me:
I think that there's been a failure to inhabit the least convenient possible world°, and the general distribution over possible outcomes, and correspondingly attempt to move to the pareto-frontier of outcomes assuming that distribution.
Unintentional self-parody of the highest order.
My attention span is not what it used to be, and I couldn't force myself to get to the end of this. A summary or TLDR (on the part of the original author) would have been helpful.
What is it with rationalists and their inability to write with concision? Is there a gene for bloviation that also predisposes them to the cult? Or are they all just mimicking Yud's irritating style?
Is it wrong to hope they manage to realize one of these libertarian paradise fantasies? I'd really love to see how quickly it devolves into a Mad Max Thunderdome situation.
What's it like to be so good at PR?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then Yud is witless.
That reminds me. If the world is about to FOOM into a kill-all-humans doomscape, why is he wasting time worrying about seed oils?
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.
Random blue check spouts disinformation about "seed oils" on the internet. Same random blue check runs a company selling "safe" alternatives to seed oils. Yud spreads this huckster's disinformation further. In the process he reveals his autodidactically-obtained expertise in biology:
Are you eating animals, especially non-cows? Pigs and chickens inherit linoleic acid from their feed. (Cows reprocess it more.)
Yes, Yud, because that's how it works. People directly "inherit" organic molecules totally unmetabolized from the animals they eat.
I don't know why Yud is fat, but armchair sciencing probably isn't going to fix it.
This is good:
Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.
Also this:
If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.
And:
If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.
Now that his alter ego has been exposed, Hanania is falling back on the "stupid things I said my youth" chestnut. Here's a good response to that.
His brain has not been washed, as they say. It has been dry cleaned.
I wonder if he's ever applied this advice to himself. Because one could argue that trauma was a significant factor in his obsession with transhumanism and the singularity.
When Yud's younger brother died tragically at age 19, it clearly traumatized him. In this case, X was "the death of my little brother". From this he learned Y: to be angry and fearful of death ("You do not make peace with Death!"). His fascination with the singularity can be seen in this light as a wish to cheat death, while his more recent AI doomerism is the singularity's fatalistic counterpart: an eschatological distortion and acceleration of the reality that death comes for us all.