this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It's a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that's God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually "logically necessary".

He calls the whole thing "The Hour I First Believed". I think it's notable for being a bit of a treasure trove of rationalist weird accepted truths, such as:

  • All copies of a consciousness share a self, because consciousness is like an equation, or something:

But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the same single stream of conscious experience on two different physical substrates.

Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it's not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away, and also what makes the basilisk torturing you possible.

  • And it's corollary, Simulation Capture:

This means that an AI can actually “capture” you, piece by piece, into its simulation. First your consciousness is just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real-world copy and a million simulated copies. Then the AI makes the simulated copies slightly different, and 99.9999% of you is in the simulation.

which is a kind of nuts I hadn't happened upon before.

There's also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.

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[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

There’s also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.

Anna Salamon talked about that obliquely after CFAR burned out in 2020.

I think CFAR's actions were far from the kind of straight-forward, sincere attempt to increase rationality, compared to what people might have hoped for from us, or compared to what a relatively untraumatized 12-year-old up-and-coming-LWer might expect to see from adults who said they were trying to save the world from AI via learning how to think...I didn't say things I believed false, but I did choose which things to say in a way that was more manipulative than I let on, and I hoarded information to have more control of people and what they could or couldn't do in the way of pulling on CFAR's plans in ways I couldn't predict, and so on.

Its the same old story as the Libertarians who tell each other they are conning the Liberals, and just have one thing in common with the facists and oligarchs. Most of these people think they are conning everyone around them and can spread their favourite crazy idea and not be infected by everyone else's.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 2 points 2 hours ago

I didn’t say things I believed false

What a peculiar and lawyer-friendly way to say "I didn't outright lie".