The Pnictogen Wing

I read shit like this and then wonder where the fuck are the mysterious assassins when the world needs them so much

Guys like this should be terrified to step outdoors, not making big fucking speeches and presentations

Unfortunately, I instantly recognized the origin of the Blue/Red/Gray "tribe" thing and it's Slate Star Codex.

(Summary of all ten million words: liberals say they're tolerant because they tolerate gays and foreigners, but they don't tolerate Republicans, so who's the intolerant ones now? But with so many ponderous little parables about obvious things that the post becomes Thoughtful And Measured through sheer length.)

(In fairness, the post ends with "The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary" and concluding that self-criticism within the Gray Tribe is what he really wants. In unfairness, that is not what the preceding hundred billion words were driving towards.)

One of the many annoying things about the rationalist/techbro complex is that they absolutely refuse to check if anyone has ever had an idea before them, even if the idea is literally just "what if oppression... was political??? 🤯🤯🤯"

The whole techbro mindset seems to be organized around a painstakingly safeguarded premise of complete intellectual originality that can't ever be questioned, because it's a mortal sin to make a techbro doubt himself, and it leads to the present situation: a myriad elite geeks who all believe in roughly the same authoritarian and bigoted things, but who each imagines that they've arrived at their beliefs through a wholly original and independent process of empirical discovery (i.e. stringing together scraps and fragments of Dark Intellectual discourse and bits of Joe Rogan shows and other such material.) ~Chara

It's been a sort of long-term project of ours—which we rarely put any significant time into, by the way—to desensitize ourselves to "rationalist" cowflop of the Less Wrong / Slate Star Codex / "dark intellectual" sort. We feel strongly that the only way to defeat this stuff is to meet it head-on. Surely the core issue with all of this stuff is that—despite all the pretensions of rationality and superior intellect that pervade the "dark intellectual" movement—it can't actually withstand rational scrutiny, and that's a major reason it's been deliberately obfuscated and shrouded in cultish secrecy.

The intellectual abuses on display are so flagrantly and boldly asserted, though, that I don't know if it's even possible to fight them. What exactly do you do, for example, with that "extropian" nonsense? It seems like arrant nonsense on the face of it—pure "scientism", i.e. treating scientific concepts like they had some esoteric metaphysical meaning. Entropy bad, Extropy good, with the added benefit that "extropy" is such a shapeless and insubstantial concept that it can mean anything to the believer. I joked about Kyubey the other day, because Kyubey has a line of sales bullshit about saving the Universe from entropy, even though destroying Earth in order to harvest some energy must surely count as an increase in entropy—well, I don't have any doubt whatever that the typical "extropian" would agree with Kyubey's assertion, and claim with a straight face that trashing Earth in exchange for some energy is somehow good Extropian praxis. "Earth = chaos and entropy, Musk Mars colony = order and civilization", more or less. How do you argue with crap like that?

The post-modern theorists must surely be way way ahead of me on this topic—this business of how insular groups develop their own private intellectual culture that looks absurd to an outsider but makes perfect sense to them, which they think of as comprehensive and consistent with Science™ and consensus reality. Perhaps I've got some reading to do. ~Chara

I've written in praise of irrationality before; most of the decisions we make in a routine life are purely irrational ones, decisions based on feelings and whims and intuitions, and that's true even of the people who act like they're Mister Spock at all times, even when they're doing something like (say) pitching their seventeen hundredth screaming fit about "The Last Jedi".

that commonplace occurrence brings me to my biggest beef with "rationalism", one that I feel now that I can articulate concisely: it makes lying, especially to oneself, a lead-pipe cinch. the method is so simple. imagine, for example, the following scenario: person A and B are walking down the street, and every so often person A explodes into violent rage at every mailbox they see, kicking and screaming at them, and finally person B objects:

B: why are you raging out and smashing up all the mailboxes you see?
A: no I'm not.
B: yes you are! I have seen it happen three times now!
A: oh yeah? well can you PROVE that your accusation is correct? check and mate!

or, if person A is at least willing to acknowledge the bare minimum reality about their actions, they can pretend to have a Good Reason™: "I'm smashing mailboxes because of ethics in journalism," let's say. and again, if person B objects, out comes "oh yeah, well PROVE that this isn't the fault of unethical journalism" and hey presto, the mailbox-smashing A has completely changed the subject to something other than their own actions, something that can be construed as the Real Problem™ and much more serious and demanding of discussion than a trivial matter of some smashed mailboxes.

the central fallacy of this "rationalism" is that all actions must be seen as "rational" and motivated by exactly one intellectual "reason"—and conversely, a "rational" being has every right to ignore, and regard as meaningless, any actions of others that they can successfully assert are "irrational". the "rationalist" always acts on reason, everyone else is a stochastic mind-virus zombie acting irrationally, and that's "self-evident" because [insert requisite eugenicist blather here]. the whole game is deceitful from start to finish and yet it's the sort of deceit that the "rational" person desperately wants to believe is true, and so they refuse to see it as deceit.

they have faith in their infallible rationality. chew on that paradox a while.

~Chara of Pnictogen

A while ago (piecemeal) I came to the realization that there was something fundamentally sensible about astrology, especially from the standpoint of peoples who hadn't yet developed technological methods of keeping time. When the motions of celestial bodies were all the clockwork you had, of course you kept a meticulous watch on every observable detail of the heavens—looking for patterns and bases for predictions, the same way that scientists do when they're applying numerical analysis to any body of data collected over a span of time. Astrology began with empiricism; there's no other way it could have coalesced but through accumulated observations of what was actually going on up in the sky.

I believe that what I've just written there is perfectly sensible and logical—yet there's an entire community out there of "rationalist" and "skeptical" people, folks who assert their superior adherence to the methods of reason and science, who would take one look at that paragraph and say that I was speaking pure gibberish and obviously I had some missing brain cells &c. The mere appearance of the word "astrology" would have the same force as "thoughtcrime" or "oldthink" or some other 1984-style crime against discourse; the minds of the rationalists would simply refuse to treat with it, except in ridicule.

At best, you get attempts at "debunking" astrology that work largely by making false assumptions about the forces at work.