Amoeba_Girl

I think there even is a case to be made about how Frank Herbert is the anti-L. Ron Hubbard

Ah yeah they absolutely are two branches off the same tree! I've heard the tree is called Alfred Korzybski but I'm not super familiar myself. But yeah I was thinking the other day about how Dune is replete with "tech" in the Scientologist sense. I feel like "not becoming a cult leader" is a pretty low bar, but their parallel evolution is a pretty fascinating case study.

Also as far as Dune discourse is concerned, there is one thing no one talks about that is very important to me, and it is that in Children of Dune Frank Herbert implicitly acknowledges that Irulan is an acronym of "urinal".

“The fact that I remember the expression and you’ve never even heard it before should give you pause,” Ghanima said. “It was an old expression of scorn when you Bene Gesserit were young. But if that doesn’t chasten you, ask yourself what your royal parents could’ve been thinking of when they named you Irulan? Or is it Ruinal?”

In spite of her training, Irulan flushed. “You’re trying to goad me, Ghanima.”

IRULAN FLUSHED!!!!!!!! I love it. I wish Herbert had allowed himself to be this silly more often. Imagine a world where Dune had been more like Whipping Star!

The worst aspects of FH I’m aware of are that he was a shitty fucking parent and hated Iron Maiden, unambiguously evil seems stretching it, unless you were his son.

Also a speech writer for various Republicans, a Reagan fan obviously and a big boring libertarian muh freedom from ~~taxes~~ government tyranny. His main edge over Ayn Rand is the weird evopsych ecofascist stuff.

To be clear that is exactly why I find the analogy suspect lol, and at the same a tic of this particular milieu so I don’t believe it’s deliberate. Just god lesswrongers sure are weird about stuff.

No, the golden path isn't a utopia! It's the necessary breaking of eggs to make the survival of humanity omelet. It's sort of a more twisted version of Asimov's Foundation carried entirely in the mind of a being with perfect knowledge of causality. The details of the plot don't necessarily map neatly, but the aesthetics, the fantasy, the torture-versus-dust-specksness of it is what the rationalists are all about. (Another wrinkle is that in Dune I believe [haven't read beyond godemperor] ultimately the solution is to create a being that escapes prophecy, a neat little transcendent conjuration. Solving alignment doesn't quite have the same oomph but it is also essentially a magic trick you can do if your freethinking and selfreliance stats are high enough. Also remember Rat!Harry's patronus is a Human! Benevolent AI should be seen as the liberated, transcendent form of the human mind.)

Have you read the Dosadi Experiment? It's a very strange book and a good way to get a high dose of Herbert's obsessions from a new perspective.

To be clear I love Dune, and I find Herbert fascinating because his ideas always find themselves in tension and are often baffling and muddled enough to provoke entertaining discussion. But the more you scratch the more unambiguously evil he is.

the 4000 years of necessary tragedy and sacrifice, aka the golden path, is also remarkably similar to the rationalists' teleology! specifically the longtermist stuff! i.e. it's okay to sacrifice lives today to ensure humanity's survival.

i think herbert's feelings about breeding programs are ... complicated. he never presents it as ethical but he does seem fascinated by the concept and he's very very into the idea of forging supermen from extreme environmental pressure. like "comes up several times per book" levels of fascinated.

considering how much their philosophy aligns with the plot of dune, i'm afraid you may be right

A second vibecoded Aella website has hit the building

https://www.knockrup.com/

there's a lot of ladies i know without guys, but who want kids. and i go 'would you accept some rich guy paying u a ton of money to just have his kid as a single parent' and they're like 'idk man prob not' and im like 'waht if it was 5m' and they're all magically like 'oh yeah i would do it'

so i made a directory for this, but i am trying to find ladies who would actually like to list themselves with their moonshot baby-funding goal. if u know anybody who wouldn't mind making a profile pls let me know, i wanna publicize the directory but need enough seeded ladies first

This is so gratuitous, and so irrelevant to the actual demographics of Israel (most Israeli are neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, which shouldn't be a surprise if you're vaguely aware of geography) that I have to wonder if this is meant as some sort of weird antisemitic dog whistle. Probably he couldn't even say himself.

In any case, typical ignorance of Israel stans (and many critics sadly) who love to think of it as a white country.

Foundational values are a political technology that lossily compresses ideology into something more memetic.

Listen, we already know you're a racist, you don't have to work so hard to make us hate you!

"when you control for applicant qualifications discounted for affirmative action, there is no net racial discrimination in the ___ sector"

I'm not sure I understand this right (which I imagine is the purpose of his phrasing), but is this basically saying "if you assume black people are less competent, there is no racial discrimination"?

i know i'm not the target audience but my god the drudgery of organising ethicalseeming orgies, and consensual rape parties in particular, makes me feel many feelings. something sisyphean but the boulder is made out of gender roles and power dynamics and the slope is made of ... libido? the rationalists might well be the people i trust the least in the world to deal with it.

imo one should treat others as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end

that is to say, ugh! rationalists talk about your relation to other people without making it about consumption challenge

Our concern is not with the defensive intent. It's that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.

... you think? aw shucks i only wanted to hurt bots

Big syringe