• CinnasVerses@awful.systems
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      23 days ago

      There are whole families of confidence games which rely on convincing the mark that he is about to cheat a third party.

      I think the same pattern is why the subculture keeps spawning scams and gurus. Yud teaches in HPMOR that intelligence is the ability to predict the future and manipulate people and the best person is the most intelligent, so if you want to be his disciple, you try to find someone you can manipulate. The idea that you could work together with your community to shut down that pattern of behaviour and expel repeat offenders is alien to them, and most of them have trouble with the idea of being honest about what you want.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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        23 days ago

        This makes so much sense, and also explains why siskind’s readers are fine with him being openly disingenuous sorry I meant amenable to straussian readings.

        • CinnasVerses@awful.systems
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          23 days ago

          I think it got started with Yud and Salamon thinking “I’m not sure about race and IQ, but this community lets us recruit people to fight Skynet,” Siskind thinking “I’m not sure if Skynet is a danger but this community will let me spread the Truth about Black people,” and Bostrom and MacAskill thinking “bednet EA is a bit lame but it will let us recruit people to conquer Death together.” Then the people really interested in Ivermectin or COVID origins arrived and wanted to spread those ideas while slinging Rationalist jargon. And like El Sandifer predicted, most of them were not able to share their favourite brainworm without being infected by the others which were being passed around.

          • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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            22 days ago

            most of them were not able to share their favourite brainworm without being infected by the others which were being passed around

            The good old cultic milieu.