NIck Bostrom is a looney, okay?

[ericbarbour]

He's the philosopher who, in 2003, put out the serious idea that we live in a giant computer simulation. (Before that it was kicked around by science fiction writers like Philip Dick, but only their fans took it seriously.)

Unquestionably Bostrom is a smart fellow, but there are some things I'd like to take great exception to. He's doing something similar to what the alien-civilization fans/nerds tried to do: with ZERO evidence and ZERO hard information, they tried to estimate the number of alien intelligences in the universe. (If you want proof that Wikipedia is run by hopeless nerds, consider that Drake equation is 62k bytes long with 77 references. Fermi paradox is 78k bytes with 118 references. Both are IMO nothing but "entertainment items". Find PROOF before you start writing equations.)

People make jokes about the "simulation hypothesis".

But "transhumanist-extropians" believe it fully. It made Bostrom a "cult celebrity in fringe circles". It's so damn popular that serious scientists have been debating it.

(Bostrom was one of the founders of Humanity Plus, the leading transhumanist organization. Along with David Pearce, whose Wiki article was recently revised and shortened by SlimVirgin of all people. He, too, was loved on WP.)

WP connection: If you want to see what Wikipedians think, it's easy. Go thru the edit history of Nick Bostrom. You will find a litany of insiders who fell hard for "transhumanism" fiddling with it. Nuts like Gwern Branwyn, Loremaster (one of their leading deluded "extropians" and political nut-cases) and of course David Gerard, watching the article carefully for "criticism". The article was greatly expanded in 2014 by Gabbe, one of Wikipedia's oldest editors and a bigshot on Swedish WP. (And also the administrator who protected that corporal-punishment freak Alarics for years.)

Also look at Simulation hypothesis. It was short, until another article was dumped into it in 2014. It had a criticism section that somebody completely removed last year. Therefore this subject is evidently "above criticism".

You see? Anyone with crackpot ideas can find Nerd-Joy and then Wiki-Luv. But only if they are "extropian-approved". And I have to seriously wonder how many nerds (and Wiki nerds) have daydreams about being "The ONE".

[Soham321]

.

[ericbarbour]

From a 2014 Wikipediocracy thread which I started:

"And this reminds me of one of the most crank-ish transhumanists I've ever run across: Eliezer Yudkowsky.....

"Yes, kids, that's right; Yudkowsky runs LessWrong, a forum where Singulatarians hang out, and rave at each other incoherently. Yes, despite knowing very little about what they're talking about, these nuts believe that someday a giant all-powerful artificial intelligence will create simulations of all of us, and torture the simulations. I defy anyone to copy one of those threads and explain it to the rest of us."

"One of LessWrong's more prominent users: David Gerard."
"Principal author of RW's LessWrong article: David Gerard."
"Principal author of RW's "Roko's Basilisk" article: David Gerard."

Gerard was also the creator of and a heavy editor of Wikipedia's LessWrong article.

[Strelnikov]

ericbarbour:
He's the philosopher who, in 2003, put out the serious idea that we live in a giant computer simulation. (Before that it was kicked around by science fiction writers like Philip Dick, but only their fans took it seriously.)

Unquestionably Bostrom is a smart fellow, but there are some things I'd like to take great exception to. He's doing something similar to what the alien-civilization fans/nerds tried to do: with ZERO evidence and ZERO hard information, they tried to estimate the number of alien intelligences in the universe. (If you want proof that Wikipedia is run by hopeless nerds, consider that Drake equation is 62k bytes long with 77 references. Fermi paradox is 78k bytes with 118 references. Both are IMO nothing but "entertainment items". Find PROOF before you start writing equations.)

Find PROOF before you start writing equations.

Do you realize how hard that is, seeing as we stilll have no proof of alien signals hitting this planet? Both the Drake Equation and Fermi's Paradox have a number of unwritten subtexts (the Drake Equation can be read to be anti-nuclear weapons; the Fermi Paradox was there to shut down the "UFOs are alien spacecraft" belief long before the Condon Committee dumped their Report on the nation in 1968).

....with ZERO evidence and ZERO hard information, they tried to estimate the number of alien intelligences in the universe....

You would have really hated Astrobiology in college; besides being a refresher class on astronomy and cosmology and biology, they go into endless details why "life as we know it" is very hard to replicate Elsewhere. They were really big on trying to find alien microbe fossils on Mars or the Moons of Jupiter (it has 67+ orbiting bodies) while being lazily anti-UFO (the guy who runs SETI wrote the textbook and he loathes being lumped in with UFO buffs....even though neither SETI nor MUFON have the "smoking gun" proof of their wildest hopes*).

* SETI's dream is that of Carl Sagan (who was interested in UFOs before the subject was "shot down scientifically" in 1968), who was hoping that any space aliens we would run across (or would run across us) would be more advanced than humans and would act as galactic "elder brothers" leading us to getting better at space travel....a far cry from Stephen Hawking's fears that any space civilization would see our lack of technical prowess to their level as a chance to enslave/destroy all humans and then mine the planet to a ruin (it's like he has been reading Church of the SubGenius books on "X-day", where the saucer people take away all the paid-up "Bobbies" and leave the "Pinks" to their fate, where alien Hellbots from another, nastier, civilization literally eat the planet.)

[ericbarbour]

SETI's dream is that of Carl Sagan (who was interested in UFOs before the subject was "shot down scientifically" in 1968), who was hoping that any space aliens we would run across (or would run across us) would be more advanced than humans and would act as galactic "elder brothers" leading us to getting better at space travel....a far cry from Stephen Hawking's fears that any space civilization would see our lack of technical prowess to their level as a chance to enslave/destroy all humans and then mine the planet to a ruin (it's like he has been reading Church of the SubGenius books on "X-day", where the saucer people take away all the paid-up "Bobbies" and leave the "Pinks" to their fate, where alien Hellbots from another, nastier, civilization literally eat the planet.)

When the SubGeniuses are mocking a philosophy or idea, you just know there's something very wrong with it.

Do you realize how hard that is, seeing as we stilll have no proof of alien signals hitting this planet? Both the Drake Equation and Fermi's Paradox have a number of unwritten subtexts (the Drake Equation can be read to be anti-nuclear weapons; the Fermi Paradox was there to shut down the "UFOs are alien spacecraft" belief long before the Condon Committee dumped their Report on the nation in 1968).

It really bothers me, when something that has hidden subtexts like this, becomes "popular at face value".

[Strelnikov]

From a 2014 Wikipediocracy thread which I started:

"And this reminds me of one of the most crank-ish transhumanists I've ever run across: Eliezer Yudkowsky.....

"Yes, kids, that's right; Yudkowsky runs LessWrong, a forum where Singulatarians hang out, and rave at each other incoherently. Yes, despite knowing very little about what they're talking about, these nuts believe that someday a giant all-powerful artificial intelligence will create simulations of all of us, and torture the simulations. I defy anyone to copy one of those threads and explain it to the rest of us."

"One of LessWrong's more prominent users: David Gerard."
"Principal author of RW's LessWrong article: David Gerard."
"Principal author of RW's "Roko's Basilisk" article: David Gerard."

Gerard was also the creator of and a heavy editor of Wikipedia's LessWrong article.

Found at random:

....Such detestation of the natural world, amounting to biophobia, is one of the hallmarks of libertarians and alt-Right alike. Today’s British libertarians coalesced in the 1990s around the Revolutionary Communist Party and its magazine Living Marxism (LM), with human domination of nature their soap-box theme. Environmentalists were public enemy number one. Far-Right anti-environmentalists such as Ron Arnold, of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in the US, were given a platform to rant: ‘This is a war zone,’ he wrote. ‘Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement.’ Meanwhile Delingpole, a climate-change denialist, recently described environmentalists as ‘scum-sucking slime creatures’ and ‘mutant slugs’ in a Breitbart article celebrating Trump’s US presidential victory, urging: ‘smite them, salt them, and crush them underfoot’. Libertarians disdain sustainability and object to environmental protection laws. Their contempt for the green movement was evident in the UK libertarian Martin Durkin’s infamously deceitful prime-time TV series Against Nature (1997), made by his company Kugelblitz, the name of Nazi-manufactured weaponry.

That Durkin’s title echoed Joris-Karl Huysmans’s iconic Decadent novel Against Nature (1884) is telling. Huysmans’s book reads like a libertarian tract, in wanting to seek freedom from the unbearable restraints of nature. ‘Nature,’ he writes, ‘has had her day … After all, what platitudinous limitations she imposes … what petty-minded restrictions … the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artifice.’ Artifice was valued by the Decadent movement, while the natural world, so beloved of the Romantics (and, interestingly, the Nazis), was loathed. Libertarians and the alt-Right also adulate artifice. Yiannopoulos cites the LessWrong.com blog set up by artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky: ‘LessWrong urged its community members to think like machines rather than humans. Contributors were encouraged to strip away… concern for other people’s feelings, and any other inhibitors to rational thought.’ Mere human nature has had its day. (Bolding mine.)

That was from "Fire, Hatred, and Speed!", an article in Aeon by Jay Griffiths; she took a lot of flak from the commenters, and this was written before Milo imploded.

[AndrewForson]

Looking into the seasteading scam for another thread, I came across The Transhumanist Wager by Zoltan Istvan. Istvan's Three Laws of Transhumanism are:

1. A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else.
2. A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law.
3. A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

'Nuff said, really.

[ericbarbour]

Yiannopoulos cites the LessWrong.com blog set up by artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky: ‘LessWrong urged its community members to think like machines rather than humans. Contributors were encouraged to strip away… concern for other people’s feelings, and any other inhibitors to rational thought.’ Mere human nature has had its day. (Bolding mine.)

That is exactly why I find Gerard, and his cranky friends at LessWrong, to be so comical. Are they leftists or libertarians? Does it change with the phase of the moon, like werewolves? (Mebbe he's a werewolf and not a vampire lol?) What "political beliefs" do they have other than total incoherence with "transhumanism" thrown on top as icing?

Looking into the seasteading scam for another thread, I came across The Transhumanist Wager by Zoltan Istvan.

Who is another crank Wikipedia loves. Oh btw, he's got his very own SPA army on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... sdaysagain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... sworld2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... oneonearth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... /SamHiggle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... bertwells3
Pretty good candidates for Gerard sockpuppetry.

Various Wikipedia libertarians, Doncram, and Gerard have all taken turns mucking with Istvan's article. Of course.