BF2S Forums DAST Chat

Space Navigator?

Perfectly apt.

And Musk fans are mad on his behalf about overpriced Twitter.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

uziq wrote:

The guy on the left reminds me of the Stephen Colbert meme.

Those were two people who trolled news agencies by posing as recently fired employees of Twitter. This is Elon being le meme genius

It's trolls all the way down!

https://twitter.com/JessicaLBurbank/sta … EL0sucAv5Q

ding ding.

but elon musk is surely the figurehead of talking bullshit, making undeliverable promises, and pumping stock prices? but then you hold him up as some great success story because 'he is an engineer who has built many companies'.

and you who spends an hour or two every day on an internet forum is surely zooming ahead with self-refinement and a busy social calendar, right?

i do have a pretty busy social calendar, actually. a guest just left my place a few hours ago. does mumsy let you have sleepovers?

Are there easy Asian girls on Mars that I don't know about? Why the hell should anyone be deeply personally invested in Mars colonization when our Lord promised us all the fruits of the Earth?

My point is that we have everything we need to live a perfect society here on Earth. The fact that we don't live in a stronger loving world isn't the fault of lack of technology. And I don't really care to see wars, genocide, and poverty replicated in a bunch of other solar systems.

The "planetary escape hatch" argument doesn't contradict my point either. If we screwed up Earth so bad that we need to escape to another planet then do we really deserve to continue elsewhere?

I am not saying don't invest in this stuff. But it is low on the priority lists and something the vast majority of people have no stake in.

The obsession with space colonization by some people reminds me of religious people going nuts to make sure they have the best afterlife experience. Just a different group of people wanting to escape Earth to live in their imagined perfect society in the sky.

the details from the FTX thing are insane. possibly even implies state corruption and collusion at the very highest levels - like why the SEC gave them a total pass on frankly insane corporate governance (or lack thereof) and illegal dealings in their operation.

it’s also pretty funny that, for all the grumbling dilbert does about the deleterious effects of oksferd graduates and the way society defers to privileged humanities toffs … here we quite literally have yet another story of the deference paid and crazy overhyping of ‘young wunderkinds’ from the MIT/stanford pipeline who get treated like autistic geniuses and showered in VC cash with zero scrutiny. dilbert wants to make this a story about bankman-fried’s surname but the simple fact is that this was a bunch of eggheads living in the bahamas running a totally fantastical ponzi scheme, using all the usual tropes about ‘maverick genius’ and ‘let the MIT guys handle it’, etc.

an awful lot of instances of these people being given magazine covers, places on stages next to world leaders, top endorsements, etc … all with zero due dilligence or scrutiny. much like the oksferd blag, these people obfuscate and self-mythologise with a different grift. ‘ohhh he’s an MIT quant! he wears goofy engineer cargo shorts everywhere and drives a toyota beater! he cites trendy tech-bro Effective Altruism philosophy! he sleeps on the floor at the office! he plays league of legend during important meetings with investors! he’s such a quirky genius!!!’ how is the disregard for decency any different with this lot?

how many millions of people have been affected by these sociopaths? this is an elizabeth holmes’ theranos-scale disaster. millions of people affected. and it doesn’t have shit to do with jews, dilbert. the repeating pattern here seems to be ‘let’s leave the geniuses alone to do what they want: not for us to question them; they’re clearly the future; so what if they fly by their own guidance?’ etc etc. it’s very funny that you advertise continually for letting society be ran by a self-elected caste of STEM philosopher-kings. because it seems they can’t regulate their own human impulses any better than an equally selfish and sociopathic classicist with their cicero quotes.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-17 15:30:20)

it’s all there in this story. the totally weird obsession that nerds have with ‘hierarchy’, kook science propping up victorian worldviews. the usual ideological armature that these nerds develop to shelter their social maladaption.

also: a 4/10? that girl is a 1.5 at best. and i award anyone with 4 intact limbs the first point as a starting deposit.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-17 15:36:35)

lmao.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo … tx-crypto/

When FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a junior at MIT, he met William MacAskill, one of the founders of effective altruism, a philosophical movement that believes rationality is key to doing maximum good in the world.

remind you of anyone? ‘let us geniuses handle things, the mass of humanity are too stupid for their own good’.

For more than a decade, the EA community, as it’s known, has attracted bright young students from elite colleges like Oxford and Stanford, encouraging them to take lucrative jobs in finance and tech so they can amass wealth and donate it to efficient charities. EA’s emphasis on measurable impact has attracted billionaire tech philanthropists like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who helped finance a tightknit web of nonprofits and academic institutes to grow the movement even as its priorities shifted from helping the world’s poor to combating more theoretical risks, such as the rise of a hostile advanced artificial intelligence.
Bankman-Fried made an ideal recruit for MacAskill’s “earning-to-give” pitch. Bankman-Fried had been raised as a utilitarian — a doctrine holding that the most ethical choice is the one that does the most good for the most people — and was already interested in protesting factory farming.

During Bankman-Fried’s ascent, media portrayals invariably noted that the crypto wunderkind drove a Toyota Corolla and planned to give his billions away, even as he courted celebrities and Washington power brokers. Indeed, his proximity to EA’s brand of self-sacrificing overthinkers often helped deflect the kind of scrutiny that might otherwise greet an executive who got rich quick in an unregulated offshore industry.

deference to billionaires. let the super rich who are evidently very, very smart and so very successful, do what they want: it’s for the good of humanity! how else will colonies on mars and great engineering breakthroughs be delivered? the rhetoric of “self-sacrificing overthinkers”: where have we heard that before? i bet dilbert and bankman-fried could sit and have a conversation about factory farming and their noble commitments to not eating meat!

the whole movement sounds priceless to be honest. intellectually vapid nonsense. relying on ‘rationality’ and jules verne/h.g. wells sci-fi futurism isn’t any better than being interested in classical ideals and dusty roman poets.

Its underlying philosophy marries 18th-century utilitarianism with the more modern argument that people in rich nations should donate disposable income to help the global poor. But there’s also a big emphasis on math, borrowing from economics and decision theory to prioritize causes and measure potential improvements in quality of life.

From the beginning, however, the do-gooder group in Oxford was tied to a similar subculture in the Bay Area. The leading intellectuals of that world, like AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, wrote for an online forum called Less Wrong, which, like effective altruism, also attracted a community of young people …

uh oh. silicon valley. people talking about AI and the future of mankind. what’s that vibration i feel in the ground … a name on the wind … ?

But things began to heat up around 2015 when Elon Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute to fund an AI safety research program. Bill Gates called the program “absolutely fantastic” and said he shared Musk’s concerns about AI.

of course musk and gates were involved at somme point in this lame TED talk geek worldview. the nerd philosopher-kings themselves.

so it’s basically a cult of eggheads with a quick line to VC cash in silicon valley, who all cite whacky books about colonising space and mastering the universe with science and AI. great stuff. we should give these guys a shot at running society, with their melange of half-baked pseudo-science and 19th century utilitarianism.

Musk has called AI an “existential risk,” citing “Superintelligence,” the best-selling book by Bostrom. But there’s an asterisk on “existential”: Bostrom lays out a long-term vision for a techno-utopia, millions or billions of years in the future, where we colonize space and harness the power of the stars to upload our consciousness, evolving into some kind of “digital people.”

oh man, lmfao. i just love that these crypto frauds pulled this all off because they were presenting themselves as enlightened beings, doing all this shit for some sort of longtermist ‘charity’. speaking of which, don’t we have a long-time regular here who makes so much of their charity and how everything they do is actually for the betterment of humanity??

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-17 16:06:23)