Try again.
intendMoreover, he might legitimately regret not having tried the diplomatic route now that he's discovered that Zauriel is actually a pretty reasonable fellow. If it turns out the theft WASN'T necessary and he could have achieved his ends in a manner that even the SI thinks is a more moral manner, that would be something to legitimately repent of.
Y'know, just like it's possible to enjoy Ender's Game without being a homophobic mormon, it is also possible to enjoy a fantasy story that came from Lesswrong without agreeing with its ideology.Wait.. this sounds vaguely familiar now, was this one of those "thoughful" pieces of crap written by the idiots over at LessWrong?
Please for the love of God tell me there hasn't been a multipage off topic circle jerk about something that vacuous cult of Yudkowsky tries to pretend is deep and meaningful.
It's a Yud classic. Just mentally join the Sneer Club and move on, or the basilisk'll eat you.Please for the love of God tell me there hasn't been a multipage off topic circle jerk about something that vacuous cult of Yudkowsky tries to pretend is deep and meaningful.
Thank you, corrected.Try again.
This, exactly. For the most part you can consider LessWrong to be like another religion -- they have some odd ideas that they can be surprisingly devout about, but I wouldn't judge a LWer any worse than I'd judge a Christian or Muslim, and they'll react just as poorly as them if you snub them.
The thing is, most of the stuff on LessWrong is actually pretty good. The problem is, it's also all pretty obvious to anyone who stops to try to work through the thought processes, so it's only the more fantastical stuff that captures the public attention. If you disregard acausal trade and the implications thereof... LW has good points.
I wouldn't really call them a religion so much as a particularly preachy fandom, to be honest. They're about as harmless as Bronies.
Napier (The man, not the Joker), might have been part of the colonial establishment and his views on other things might not be so good, but when it comes to cultural relativism ... Well Less Wrong are quite Wrong with how they go on with this specific story. Now, while with aliens, diplomacy and negotiation is better than forcing our morals on people. But sometimes to keep to your personal morals, you have to fight for them. Another alien race might see us as monsters, and we might see another alien race as monsters ...
To me it just sounds like he made his decision on how he was going to think about it and then worked backward from there. Because this is just jumping from assumption to assumption and then going "Well it could be like this, we don't know teehee." rather than a honest belief that was thought through. So just self deception for the sake of having some excuse when confronted about it.
Their cosmology includes nigh-omnipotent beings that can respond to heartfelt resolutions and that demand offerings from believers. They believe in the existence of an afterlife. They preach a morality centered around their discovered ideals, with objective right and wrong. They may not revere any deities as worthy of worship, but that's not a requirement -- Zen Buddhism doesn't either, and nobody denies that's a religion.
I just started couching it all in the vein of what Coyote said in Gunnerkrigg Court which boiled down to: if enough humans believe in a story, that story will become true. If that story is about how a deity created the universe then that happened, just like how all the other gods created the universe and everything in it. So, at this point, if it counts as a world religion then the accepted interpretation is the current reality. That's why the Greek Pantheon exists alongside the Norse, Mayan, and Abrahamic religions. Falls apart a bit with the Abrahamics but whatever, this story as its being told is the sole reality we have to care about at this point. IF Zoat says it is, then it is and vice-versa. At this point in this story I'm assuming there's at least enough of a framework of a plan that most anything not immediately redacted works well enough internally to ping pong in that framework.
I haven't actually read much LessWrong, so this isn't a rhetorical question: They believe in objective right and wrong, nigh-omnipotent beings (if you mean superintelligences, they don't exist currently), and an afterlife?
Ah, I don't think that MLP:FiM makes explicit mention of any afterlife. There was a pony dressed as a Christian priest in one scene, but that was a funeral and I don't remember any explicit reference to religion. I'm not even really sure how much regular ponies share Twilight's friendship fixation, and I don't remember anypony but Twilight preaching it.
Yudkowsky is one of the proponents of worrying about artificial intelligence and the singularity and works for a nonprofit organization devoted to trying to figure out how to program AIs to have human-like ethics so that, if/when self-improving artificial intelligence is developed, it doesn't turn the planet into a giant computer to run itself on or anything like that. He's also really into cryonics and occasionally posts on his blog about how you should consider signing up too.
I'm not 100% sure that's true. They have a clear emphasis on defining one's utility function and they recognize that different agents have different utility functions. That sounds like cultural relativism to me. They just aren't absolute cultural relativists -- they believe in a small, relatively well-defined set of absolute ideals, and while situational things might mean the local optimum doesn't align with those ideals, they have disdain for peoples who don't think it's even worth trying.
At which point he should tell them both to fuck off because she isn't his mother and just because she is his favored deity doesn't mean she is the boss of him.
