the kindergarten/elementary school / New Atheism view of religion is “believe in big sky father, ask him personally for good stuff, get good stuff”. Religions that manage to progress out of the cult stage do have something more going on, generally a system of ethics designed to help people cope with the vagaries of life (and maybe also control their thoughts so they don’t revolt).

I think this is why Buddhism (at least the Western kind) is so popular, as it relatively focussed on “how to live” rather than “what to believe”.

“Rationality” strives to be a secular Buddhism, you have rules and precepts for how to approach life and personal interactions. It’s interesting and maybe a comment on how human brains work that they seem to have invented a great sky father from first principles too.

yeah I think the push for math results is because they know some of their big investors know enough about how hard/advanced math is and they want to impress them. Burning down an entire academic community is worth it for that

after 33 years online I can confidently say that “censorship resistance” is overwhelmingly a right-wing shibboleth

Calling someone a fascist is hardly defamation in US law, especially since basically everyone on the list are working towards a society where it’s absolutely fine to call them fascists, because they’re fascists and want to make fascism great again.

OK maybe not RMS

I guess he’s not as bad as RFK Jr so that’s something .

Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president

didn’t Nader basically throw the election to Bush II?

speaking of hype cycles I heard on the radio news this morning that some researchers have figured out how to send odors digitally, so prepare for another round of “smell-o-vision” “news”

looks like this weekly thread refuses to die, I’m gonna keep posting here

Drew DeVault has put together a handy-dandy little list of people to avoid

https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/

I mean, so too were the people making charts of how effective Zyklon B was.

Embrace the AI because it’s like the thing everyone loves in movies: xenomorphs

yeah basically

I’m convinced Stephenson is personally very right wing but also smart enough not to advertise it publicly.

Monkey paw curls

as always trawling LW’s AllPosts section is as they say in the biz a target-rich environment

wake up babe the LWers are talking about removing parts of their brains

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/puv8fRDCH9jx5yhbX/johnswentworth-s-shortform?commentId=fbKesfzHifdsZAxyf

great they made a shirt making them easier to avoid

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eq2aJt8ZqMaGhBu3r/zach-stein-perlman-s-shortform?commentId=a2xgz7bevKKHQ8BEj

here’s an update on the modified bacteria in the mouth startup, TL;DR it’s much harder than they thought it would be and is it really worth pursuing when we are all gonna be killed by Robot Satan (spoiler of course it is the grift must go on)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg4fTBEneAEqprHyk/lumina-probiotic-past-and-future

“GPS will stop people reading maps!” buddy you ain’t seen nothing yet. Technology is allowing people to get lost better, faster, and at scale.

as usual the illustrations are genius

Anyone know when and why polyamory became a Rationalist shibboleth?

not Libertarian in the organized political sense, more like steeped in the dominant California ideology

I had short odds for that entire submission being nuked but apparently there’s enough non-bad stuff there for the mods to keep it up.

Right on cue https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tEMHHpZmxK95Nvd2d/joey-yudelson-s-shortform?commentId=tpzbyui6pyh3nXgwx