Go West, Weird Man: The oddballs of the MAGA movement have nothing on Silicon Valley transhumanists - by Émile Torres
What the GOP and Big Tech 'Weirdos' Have in Common
TESCREAL is a useful acronym for explaining things but I'm disappointed in how little impact it has outside of the terminally online. How can this cult turn into something that sticks to Musk, Altman, and Vance the way Scientology does to Tom Cruise? Do we need South Park to make an episode talking about the fucktillions of unborn robots in distant galaxies?
I'm torn on this too, I think Torres et consortes are dignifying these idiots way too much by highlighting their views and in some ways taking them seriosuly. It's an inadvertent form of critihype. Wholesale ridicule is the order of the day! On the other hand, before the Scientology papers reveal (god that was so long ago) the CoS was seen as weird but legitimate. When more and more people discovered Xenu, the Sea Org, and how people could be designated "unpersons", the view slwoly shifted.
I guess both serious criticism and pointing and laughing are needed.
I guess both serious criticism and pointing and laughing are needed.
quite
the fundamental requirement of a counter-argument/-movement/-whatever is that one has to show that there are some that seriously believe these things, as absurd as they may be
the mockery can still happen separately as well (and always should, imo), but for the "but why should we listen to you" dimension the former is needed too
i too wish these bozos were not important to know about, but Eliezer's there advocating air strikes on Chinese data centres in Time
I still don't know what TESCREAL actually means.
It’s detailed in the 3rd para of the linked article.
Edit it's a very nerd acronym though. It's seven different isms, each requiring paragraph-length explanations, while Scientology could be summarized as "believes an alien named Xenu implanted bad thoughts in you and you need to pay to get rid of them".
I've wondered if TREACLES might take hold better in the public consciousness.
As a fan of Sir Pterry, it makes me think of apocalypse-fearing dwarves madly digging for sweets.
Initialism for the multiple main schools of thonk from the weirdos, so-named by Gebru and Torres
he signed up with a cryonics company called Alcor, which cryogenically freezes dead bodies so that they can be resurrected at some future date, when the necessary technology becomes available
wait wait wait wait, hold up, record scratch
I thought the cryogenics thing was about being frozen while alive so that you can be woken up in the future once we know how to extend human life to like hundreds of years or so, kinda like the Walt Disney urban legend. That at least has some intuitive appeal to it. Now you're telling me it's about literal fucking resurrection? Like they want to become lich kings or something? That's somehow an order of magnitude dumber, like you're not betting on "we figure out waking people up and cure cancer sometime in the future" you're betting on "WE WILL RAISE THE DEAD AND RELISH IN THE NEW AGE OF UNDEAD MAN"
I was neutral to positive on cryonics until a friend went to sign up for it. (The one who introduced me to LessWrong.) Then I looked into it and was like "w h a t t h e"
It's actually not legal to freeze someone who's still alive, because the freezing process is decidedly lethal. They have to replace your blood to try and minimize cell damage from ice crystals and so on. Then there's the "budget" option where they just chop off your head and freeze that rather than mess with your whole body, for people with a very specific level of magitech in mind for their resurrection.
Now, there is a time in history where we got good enough at resurrection that they legally redefined death. In like the 70s they changed the definition of legally dead from having your heart stop to a cessation of brain activity because we got really good at restarting people's hearts. But it's a weirdly specific leap from "we can restart your heart" to "we can reconstruct you from just a head in a way that will have a meaningful and tangible connection to your current life", but not all the way to "we can reconstruct you ex nihilo by retracing the quantum echoes your life created in the Force or whatever".