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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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So today I learned there are people who call themselves superforcasters®. Neat!
The superforecasters® have had a melding of the minds and determined that covid-19 was 75% likely to not be a lab leak. Nifty! This is useless to me!
Looking at the website of these people with good enough judgement to call themselves "Good Judgement", you can learn that 100% of superforecasters® agree that there will be less than 100 deaths from H5N1 this year. I don't know much about H5N1 but I guess that makes sense given that it's been around since 1996 and would need a mutation to be contagious among humans.
I found one of the superforecaster®-trainee discussion topics where they reveal some of the secrets to their (super)forecasting(®)-trainee instincts
Riveting!
Let's go next to find out how to give up our individuality and become a certified superforecaster® hive brain.
Fans of certain shonen anime may recognize this technique as Kodoku -- a deadly poison created by putting a bunch of insects in a jar until only one remains:
"But what's the catch Saturn"? I can hear you say. "Surely this is somehow a grift nerds find or a way to fleece money out of governments".
Nonono you've got the completely wrong idea. Good Judgement offers a 100$ Superforecasting Fundamentals course out of the goodness of their heart I'm sure! I mean after all if they spread Superforecasting to the world then their Hari-Seldon-Esque hivemind would lose it's competitive edge so they must not be profit motivated.
Anyway if you work for the UK they want to hear from you:
Maybe they have superforecasted the fall of the british empire.
And to end this, because I can never resist web design sneer.
Dear programmers: if you apply the CSS
word-break: break-all;to the string "Privacy Policy" it may end up rendered as "Pr[newline]ivacy Policy" which unfortunately looks pretty unprofessional :(lmao this is one of my all time favorite grifts. I've never understood why it isn't more popular among us connoisseurs. it's so baldfaced to say "statistically, someone probably has oracular powers, and thanks to science, here they are. you need only pay us a small incense and rites fee to access them"
Isn’t it weird these people came out of internet atheism of all things and go right into this stuff?
It’s really gotta be emphasised that these guys didn’t come out of internet atheism and frankly I would really like to know where that idea came from. It’s a completely different thing which, arguably, predates internet atheism (if we read “internet atheism” as beginning in the early 2000s - but we could obviously push back that date much earlier). These guys are more or less out of Silicon Valley, Emile P Torres has coined the term “TESCREALS” (modified to “TREACLES”) for - and I had to google this even though I know all the names independently - “Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism”.
It’s a confluence of futurism cults which primarily emerged online (even on the early internet), but also in airport books by e.g. Ray Kurzweil in the 90s, and has gradually made its away into the wider culture, with EA and longtermism the now most successful outgrowths of its spores in the academy.
Whereas internet atheism kind of bottoms out in 1990s polemics against religion - nominally Christianity, but ultimately fuelled by the end of the Cold War and the West’s hunger for a new enemy (hey look over there, it’s some brown people with a weird religion) - the TREACLES “cluster of ideologies” (I prefer “genealogy”, because this is ultimately about a political genealogy) has deep roots in the weirdest end of libertarian economics/philosophy and rabid anti-communism. And therefore the Cold War (and even pre-Cold War) need for a capitalist political religion. OK the last part is my opinion, but (a) I think it stands up, and (b) it explains the clearly deeply felt need for a techno-religion which justifies the most insane shit as long as there’s money in it.
Yeah, I hung out a lot in Internet skeptic/atheist circles during the 2005-10 era, and as far as I can recall, the overlap with LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, etc., was pretty much nil. This was how that world treated Ray Kurzweil.
I read
and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.
Turns out he's aware of them since at least 2016:
Are these people for real?
More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork
FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don't have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.
PZ is aware and thinks they're bozos. As a biologist, he was particularly pointed about cryonics.
Technoloons is a good word, going to have to remember that
I wonder if the existence of RationalWiki contributes to the confusion. Even though it's unrelated to and critical towards TREACLES, the name can cause confusion.