New diet villain just dropped. Believe or disbelieve this specific one, "fat" or even "polyunsaturated fat" increasingly looks like a failure as a natural category. Only finer-grained concepts like "linoleic acid" are useful for carving reality at the joints.
A lot of rationalism is just an intense fear of death. Simulation hypothesis? Means that maybe you can live forever if you’re lucky. Superintelligence? Means that your robot god might grant you immortality someday.
Cryogenics? Means that there’s some microscopic chance that even if you pass away you could be revived in the future at some point. Long terminism? Nothing besides maybe someday possibly making me immortal could possibly matter.
I mean don’t get me wrong I’d give a lot for immortality, but I try to uhh… stay grounded in reality.
@sailor_sega_saturn@cstross I”m not sure that those things are “Rationalism”. Rationalism is about reason above religious belief, not substituting one god with another…
don’t worry, folk like Yudkowsky have already taken care of substituting one god with another under rationalism’s name in an attempt to grift atheists who miss the comfort of an afterlife to look forward to
you can thank him by donating a tithe of all your money to effective altruism or whichever “AI alignment” org will save you from the Basilisk these days
cows have nanoassemblers
That reminds me. If the world is about to FOOM into a kill-all-humans doomscape, why is he wasting time worrying about seed oils?
A lot of rationalism is just an intense fear of death. Simulation hypothesis? Means that maybe you can live forever if you’re lucky. Superintelligence? Means that your robot god might grant you immortality someday. Cryogenics? Means that there’s some microscopic chance that even if you pass away you could be revived in the future at some point. Long terminism? Nothing besides maybe someday possibly making me immortal could possibly matter.
I mean don’t get me wrong I’d give a lot for immortality, but I try to uhh… stay grounded in reality.
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@sailor_sega_saturn @cstross I”m not sure that those things are “Rationalism”. Rationalism is about reason above religious belief, not substituting one god with another…
don’t worry, folk like Yudkowsky have already taken care of substituting one god with another under rationalism’s name in an attempt to grift atheists who miss the comfort of an afterlife to look forward to
you can thank him by donating a tithe of all your money to effective altruism or whichever “AI alignment” org will save you from the Basilisk these days