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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
One of my kids is a huge Gravity Falls fan and has recently acquired The Book of Bill. For some reason, Bill's anecdote about silly straws reminded me of the grok discourse:
FUN FACT: When you use a silly straw to murder someone, it becomes a serious straw!
I wonder how soon we’re going to hit the “we have team $foo building that internally since we can’t use $serviceX for that (externally hosted has security issues)” phase of corporate fafo
why am I thinking of this? oh, no reason. just pondering the cyclic nature of history I guess you could say.
OT: whats the best way to explain rationalism et all to complete normal people with no connection to tech?
It's a little bit like a tiny version of the Mormons if Joseph Smith had read the collected works of Isaac Asimov instead of the Bible and also his name was Yud.
Or to go with less of a sneer, the Rationalist/TESCREAL/Californian Ideology is a loose grouping of fringe beliefs rooted in old-school science/tech fetishism with a lot of science fiction overlays and libertarian/reactionary politics that effectively define "let ultrawealthy tech capitalists do whatever they want" as the only reasonable choice and make it a moral imperative.
Personally I might try explaining some of the foundational stuff before going into the big R. Scientism, utilitarianism would be my starting points.
Techish (I would use the word techbro here, but that needs an explantion even) people who want to make their fictional science fiction utopia real, but got so scared of their own science fiction ideas going wrong and killing everybody they started a cult around rationality, sort of a Vulcans fan club. They have a pattern where they think they and their methods are smarter and better than actual experts.
When trying to do their own research with an open mind, but they left their minds so open that all kinds of sexists and racists crawled in. Who are welcomed as long as they are verbose enough.
And to close it off, Musk is a fan.
Not a sneer, but a deeply cursed dream from a friend:
ABSOLUTELY CURSED
Today in finding statistical association in text data is not the same as reading
Your name appeared in a lot of articles about terrible crimes. You know who else's name appears in those articles?
take that froztbyte!
oh noes my throne