On a Cult of Fools

As I've done for the past five years, I use my penultimate article of the year on some philosophical
nonsense.  There's a cult of absolute idiots who call themselves ``rationalists'', going by the name
LessWrong; from what I've gleamed, this cult traces its lineage back to ``Harry Potter'' fanfiction.

There's an amusing post written by Eliezer Schlomo Yudkowsky, the king of these idiots who wrote the
fanfiction, asking how to lose weight; he goes on to assert that eating a proper diet and exercising
aren't solutions, because he convinced himself otherwise.  It's quite a good read for a cheap laugh.

I've, however, already criticized the cults of computing, named and unnamed, and instead focus on an
idea particularly silly from them: Roko's Basilisk.  As with many newfangled ideas, it's a Christian
idea rephrased for particularly stupid atheists.  Roko's Basilisk is an artificial intelligence that
decides to torture everyone who knew of its existence and helped not to bring it about.  This is but
Pascal's wager, but using a super duper AI instead of Yahweh.  These idiots actually considered this
to be a ``cognitohazard'', an idea whose mere presence in a mind be dangerous, and banned discussion
of it for years.  The basilisk tortures people retroactively by running simulations of them, somehow
scary to ``rationalists'' who see no differences between themselves and computerized copies thereof.

This is probably related to the idea that we live in a computer simulation, totally different than a
god controlling everything, and how one ought to stupidly assume himself to be the simulation rather
than the genuine item; by this tortured thinking, one must please the atheistic god called basilisk.

There's not too terribly much to write about this idea.  It's obviously stupid to everyone who isn't
a cultist.  Pascal's wager, for the very least, has a long-established religion behind it, mysticism
working in ways that modern technology merely projected into the future can't.  This foolish idea is
a nice criticism of atheism; many religious people can see clearly how people can't seem to help but
make new gods to replace old gods, if given the chance, and they make these new gods in their image.

This cult and its artificial Satan figure make for nice examples of intelligent idiots; they're just
smart enough to convince themselves of obviously stupid beliefs and argue endlessly in their favour.
Most people clearly need religion to keep themselves in line, if the last few decades of homosexuals
and trannies were no indication alone, and these newer religions are, in every way, negative to man.

Just for fun, here's that amusing post about weight loss:

 Are there any completely reliable methods of weight loss besides mega-liposuction and adipotide?

 By "completely reliable" I mean that their theoretical and pragmatic efficacy is not subject to
 revocation by quirks of metabolic disprivilege.  So "starve yourself" doesn't work because its
 pragmatic efficacy relies on your fat cells being willing to relinquish lipids before your body
 cannibalizes muscle tissue and otherwise starts doing serious damage to itself, which your fat
 cells can just refuse to do if you're metabolically disprivileged.

 Mega-liposuction and adipotide don't care if your fat cells are malfunctioning and refusing to
 release lipids.  They just physically kill or remove fat cells.  Anything else like that, or which
 operates at a similar level of disregard for metabolic disprivilege?

 Interventions that operate orthogonally to malfunctioning fat cells or other metabolic disprivilege
 only, please.  I will delete comments suggesting diet or exercise.
 --Eliezer Schlomo Yudkowsky

It's fairly entertaining to see the stereotypical neurotic Jew playing word games to avoid hard work
and deny reality.  After convincing himself of his knowledge on some topic, and medical knowledge is
frequently disproven or updated with new understanding, he uses this clearly-incomplete knowledge to
argue against results even a fool can notice.  It reminds me of something an acquaintance once wrote
with regards to logical proof and programming, paraphrased: Try to prove that the doorknob works; it
turns regardless.  Trying to think of all things as related to mathematics and logic is clearly what
only an intelligent idiot can manage; I see someone who has forgotten that he exists, and who denies
his lying eyes.  In researching as I wrote this post, I was also reminded that these same idiots can
be convinced of men becoming women merely through surgery with artificial hormones.  It's hilarious.

The true idiot has no idea of his idiocy.
.