Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Not wanting the Basilisk eternal torture dungeon to happen isn’t an empathy thing, they just think that a sufficiently high fidelity simulation of you would be literally you, because otherwise brain uploads aren’t life extension, it’s basically transhumanist cope.
Yud expands on it in some place or other, along the lines that the gap in consciousness between the biological and digital instance isn’t that different from the gap created by anesthesia or a night’s sleep, it’s just on the space axis instead of the time axis, or something like that.
And since he also likes the many world interpretations it turns out you also share a soul with yourselves in parallel dimensions; this is why the zizians are so eager to throw down, since getting killed in one dimension lets supradimensional entities know you mean business.
Early 21st century anthropology is going to be such a ridiculous field of study.
Clearly you do not have low self-esteem. But yes that is the weak point of this whole thing, and why it is a dumb conspiracy theory. (Im mismatching the longtermist ‘future simulated people are important’ utilitarian extremism with the ‘simulated yous are yous’ extreme weirdness).
The problems with yuds argument is that all these simulations will quickly diverge and no longer are the real ‘you’ see twins for a strawman example. The copies should then be ran in exactly the same situations and then wtf is the point. When I slam my toe into a piece of furniture I dont morn all the many world mes who also did just break a toe again. It just weird, but due to the immortality cope it makes sense for insiders.
I’d say if there’s a weak part in your admittedly tongue-in-cheek theory it’s requiring Roko to have had a broader scope plan instead of a really catchy brainfart, not the part about making the basilisk thing out to be smarter/nobler than it is.
Reframing the infohazard aspect as an empathy filter definitely has legs in terms of building a narrative.