+]
+
+The old vision was nine men and a brain in a box in a basement. (He didn't say _men_.)
+
+Subject: "I give up, I think" 28 January 2013
+> You know, I'm starting to suspect I should just "assume" (choose actions conditional on the hypothesis that) that our species is "already" dead, and we're "mostly" just here because Friendly AI is humanly impossible and we're living in an unFriendly AI's ancestor simulation and/or some form of the anthropic doomsday argument goes through. This, because the only other alternatives I can think of right now are (A) arbitrarily rejecting some part of the "superintelligence is plausible and human values are arbitrary" thesis even though there seem to be extremely strong arguments for it, or (B) embracing a style of thought that caused me an unsustainable amount of emotional distress the other day: specifically, I lost most of a night's sleep being mildly terrified of "near-miss attempted Friendly AIs" that pay attention to humans but aren't actually nice, wondering under what conditions it would be appropriate to commit suicide in advance of being captured by one. Of course, the mere fact that I can't contemplate a hypothesis while remaining emotionally stable shouldn't make it less likely to be true out there in the real world, but in this kind of circumstance, one really must consider the outside view, which insists: "When a human with a history of mental illness invents a seemingly plausible argument in favor of suicide, it is far more likely that they've made a disastrous mistake somewhere, then that committing suicide is actually the right thing to do."
+
+
+[TODO—
+
+The human era wasn't going to last forever. Turing saw it in 1951. ("It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. [...] At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control[.]") _George Eliot_ [saw it in _1880_](http://www.online-literature.com/george_eliot/theophrastus-such/17/). ("Am I already in the shadow of the coming race? And will the creatures who are to transcend and supercede us be steely organisms, giving off the effluvia of the laboratory and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?")
+
+ * I've believed since Kurzweil that technology will remake the world sometime in the 21th century; it's just "the machines won't replace us, because we'll be them" doesn't seem credible
+
+list of lethalities
+
+ * I agree that it would be nice if Earth had a plan; it would be nice if people figured out the stuff Yudkowsky did earlier;
+
+Isaac Asimov wrote about robots in his fiction, and even the problem of alignment (in the form of his Three Laws of Robotics), and yet he still portrayed a future Galactic Empire populated by humans, which seems very silly.
+
+/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
+
+]
+
+> Similarly, a rationalist isn't just somebody who respects the Truth.
+> All too many people respect the Truth.
+> [...]
+> A rationalist is somebody who respects the _processes of finding truth_.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms
+
+> Why is school like a boner?
+> It’s long and hard unless you're Asian.
+
+Robert Heinlein
+> “What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”
+https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/38764-what-are-the-facts-again-and-again-and-again
+
+
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms":
+ "content": "at this point, I actually am just starting to hate trans women by default (the visible kind, not the androphilic early-transitioning kind); the \"indulging a mental illness that makes them want to become women\" model is waaaaay more accurate than the standard story, and the people who actually transition are incentivized/selected for self-delusion, which is really unfair to the people who aren't delusional about it",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ "sender_name":
+ "timestamp_ms": [Sat Jan 21 10:06:17 PST 2017]
+ "content": "I'm afraid to even think that in the privacy of my own head, but I agree with you that is way more reasonable",
+ "type": "Generic"
+
+"but the ideological environment is such that a Harvard biologist/psychologist is afraid to notice blatantly obvious things in the privacy of her own thoughts, that's a really scary situation to be in (insofar as we want society's decisionmakers to be able to notice things so that they can make decisions)",
+
+In October 2016, I messaged an alumna of my App Academy class of November 2013 (back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted), effectively asking to consult her expertise on feminism. "Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
+
+if [...] wrote her own 10,600 draft Document explaining why she thought [...] is actually a girl, that would be really interesting!—but rather that no one else seemed _interested in having a theory_, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824 re "malinformation"
+> If we don't have the concept of an attack performed by selectively reporting true information - or, less pleasantly, an attack on the predictable misinferences of people we think less rational than ourselves - the only socially acceptable counter is to say the info is false.
+
+Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017
+https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160
+https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528
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