/lit/ - Literature

Big Yud can't be refuted.

Ironically, Ted's manifesto.

Unironically, Taleb's Incerto.

>>15233213
These guys are pretty much right about everything.
Their nuanced understanding of all forms of philosophy is commendable and their genuine desire to understand things is unmatched in the modern world.

>>15233213

He looks so Jewish I feel like interest is being charged on my bank account just looking at him

>>15233213
Ah yes, the metabolic disprivileged man

>>15233213
>the people of Catalonia are propriety of Spain
Based or cringe take?
http://archive.is/lL76R

>>15233292
>The Catalan population is the property of the government of Spain.
wtf

>>15233213
Depends if you wanna go into idealism or not

>>15233213
the bible

>>15233292
Based. Any people with a history of supporting anarchism should be made the literal property of the state for as long as they exist.

>>15233213
>Book that UNEQUIVOCALLY BTFO's Technocratic Rationalists? I seriously need this, these people are living rent free in my mind and it's driving me nuts!
None, this group is the only one that has become so detached from ideology and fall into constant critical analysis of the field they research that they had thought of any objection by themselves and responded to it, this makes their work really polished, they sound pedantic, but in reality are really humble, just that they had reached a well formed conclusion.

We all should be like them, we don't the humility to accept our ignorance and keep studying, discarding ad infinitum.

If you use LessWrong soon you will discover they can change opinion easily when you respond well informed.

>>15233213
Treatise on the Frailty of Human Reason by Pierre Daniel Huet.

Augusto Del Noce is final-boss-tier against scientistic, rationalistic ideologies (positivism, Marxism). Horkheimer is also pretty good from a more leftist perspective.

>>15233213
There is a current of thought that appears to be carrying many technophiles out of the realm of science and into that of science fiction. For convenience, let's refer to those who ride this current as "the techies." The current runs through several channels; not all techies think alike. What they have in common is that they take highly speculative ideas about the future of technology as near certainties, and on that basis predict the arrival within the next few decades of a kind of technological utopia. Some of the techies' fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that " [w]ithin a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe." The writing of Kevin Kelly, another techie, is often so vague as to border on the meaningless, but he seems to say much the same thing that Kurzweil does about human conquest of the universe: "The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium... " "The technium" is Kelly's name for the technological world-system that humans have created here on Earth.

Most versions of the technological utopia include immortality (at least for techies) among their other marvels. The immortality to which the techies believe themselves destined is conceived in any one of three forms:

(i) the indefinite preservation of the living human body as it exists today;
(ii) the merging of humans with machines and the indefinite survival of the resulting man-machine hybrids;
(iii) the "uploading" of minds from human brains into robots or computers, after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the machines.

>>15233213
Teds manifesto, Heidegger, and this guy >>15233262

Thats literally it. Its been refuted many times, but its still going to happen because you have no social power, so get used to it

>>15233213
Of course, if the technological world-system is going to collapse in the not-too-distant future, as we've argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we're wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies' dream of an unlimited life-span is still illusory. We need not doubt that it will be technically feasible in the future to keep a human body, or a man-machine hybrid, alive indefinitely. It is seriously to be doubted that it will ever be feasible to "upload" a human brain into electronic form with sufficient accuracy so that the uploaded entity can reasonably be regarded as a functioning duplicate of the original brain. Nevertheless, we will assume in what follows that each of the solutions (i), (ii), and (iii) will become technically feasible at some time within the next several decades.

It is an index of the techies' self-deception that they habitually assume that anything they consider desirable will actually be done when it becomes technically feasible. Of course, there are lots of wonderful things that already are and for a long time have been technically feasible, but don't get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: "How easily men could make things much better than they are-if they only all tried together!" But people never do "all try together," because the principle of natural selection guarantees that self-prop systems will act mainly for their own survival and propagation in competition with other self-prop systems, and will not sacrifice competitive advantages for the achievement of philanthropic goals.

Everything Dosto. Specially Crime and Punishment.

>>15233213
Because immortality, as the techies conceive it, will be technically feasible, the techies take it for granted that some system to which they belong can and will keep them alive indefinitely, or provide them with what they need to keep themselves alive. Today it would no doubt be technically feasible to provide everyone in the world with everything that he or she needs in the way of food, clothing, shelter, protection from violence, and what by present standards is considered adequate medical care-if only all of the world's more important self-propagating systems would devote themselves unreservedly to that task. But that never happens, because the self-prop systems are occupied primarily with the endless struggle for power and therefore act philanthropically only when it is to their advantage to do so. That's why billions of people in the world today suffer from malnutrition, or are exposed to violence, or lack what is considered adequate medical care.

In view of all this, it is patently absurd to suppose that the technological world-system is ever going to provide seven billion human beings with everything they need to stay alive indefinitely. If the projected immortality were possible at all, it could only be for some tiny subset of the seven billion-an elite minority. Some techies acknowledge this. One has to suspect that a great many more recognize it but refrain from acknowledging it openly, for it is obviously imprudent to tell the public that immortality will be for an elite minority only and that ordinary people will be left out.

>>15233213
The techies of course assume that they themselves will be included in the elite minority that supposedly will be kept alive indefinitely. What they find convenient to overlook is that self-prop systems, in the long run, will take care of human beings-even members of the elite-only to the extent that it is to the systems' advantage to take care of them. When they are no longer useful to the dominant self-prop systems, humans-elite or not-will be eliminated. In order to survive, humans not only will have to be useful; they will have to be more useful in relation to the cost of maintaining them-in other words, they will have to provide a better cost-versus-benefit balance than any non-human substitutes. This is a tall order, for humans are far more costly to maintain than machines are.

It will be answered that many self-prop systems-governments, corporations, labor unions, etc.-do take care of numerous individuals who are utterly useless to them: old people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, even criminals serving life sentences. But this is only because the systems in question still need the services of the majority of people in order to function. Humans have been endowed by evolution with feelings of compassion, because hunting-and-gathering bands thrive best when their members show consideration for one another and help one another. As long as self-prop systems still need people, it would be to the systems' disadvantage to offend the compassionate feelings of the useful majority through ruthless treatment of the useless minority. More important than compassion, however, is the self-interest of human individuals: People would bitterly resent any system to which they belonged if they believed that when they grew old, or if they became disabled, they would be thrown on the trash-heap.

>>15233213
But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence. When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them-if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.

Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to require human intelligence. Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world's dominant self-prop systems are already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe, pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other unproductive persons are being substantially reduced; at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing; and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

>>15233213
It's important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the "Turing test"), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-prop systems. So, even without going as far as the techies themselves do in assuming intelligence on the part of future machines, we still have to conclude that humans will become obsolete. Immortality in the form (i)-the indefinite preservation of the human body as it exits today-is highly improbable.

The techies of course will argue that even if the human body and brain as we know them become obsolete, immortality in the form (ii) can still be achieved: Man-machine hybrids will permanently retain their usefulness, because by linking themselves with ever-more-powerful machines human beings (or what is left of them) will be able to remain competitive with pure machines.

>>15233213
But man-machine hybrids will retain a biological component derived from human beings only as long as the human-derived biological component remains useful. When purely artificial components become available that provide a better cost-versus-benefit balance than human-derived biological components do, the latter will be discarded and the man-machine hybrids will lose their human aspect to become wholly artificial. Even if the human-derived biological components are retained they will be purged, step by step, of the human qualities that detract from their usefulness. The self-prop systems to which the man-machine hybrids belong will have no need for such human weaknesses as love, compassion, ethical feelings, esthetic appreciation, or desire for freedom. Human emotions in general will get in the way of the self-prop systems' utilization of the man-machine hybrids, so if the latter are to remain competitive they will have to be altered to remove their human emotions and replace these with other motivating forces. In short, even in the unlikely event that some biological remnants of the human race are preserved in the form of man-machine hybrids, these will be transformed into something totally alien to human beings as we know them today.

The same applies to the hypothesized survival of human minds in "uploaded" form inside machines. The uploaded minds will not be tolerated indefinitely unless they remain useful (that is, more useful than any substitutes not derived from human beings), and in order to remain useful they will have to be transformed until they no longer have anything in common with the human minds that exist today.

>>15233213
Some techies may consider this acceptable. But their dream of immortality is illusory nonetheless. Competition for survival among entities derived from human beings (whether man-machine hybrids, purely artificial entities evolved from such hybrids, or human minds uploaded into machines), as well as competition between human-derived entities and those machines or other entities that are not derived from human beings, will lead to the elimination of all but some minute percentage of all the entities involved. This has nothing to do with any specific traits of human beings or of their machines; it is a general principle of evolution through natural selection. Look at biological evolution: Of all the species that have ever existed on Earth, only some tiny percentage have direct descendants that are still alive today. On the basis of this principle alone, and even discounting everything else we've said in this chapter, the chances that any given techie will survive indefinitely are minute.

>>15233213
The techies may answer that even if almost all biological species are eliminated eventually, many species survive for thousands or millions of years, so maybe techies too can survive for thousands or millions of years. But when large, rapid changes occur in the environment of biological species, both the rate of appearance of new species and the rate of extinction of existing species are greatly increased. Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive; consequently, changes come more and more rapidly, everything happens faster and faster, competition among self-prop systems becomes more and more intense, and as the process gathers speed the losers in the struggle for survival will be eliminated ever more quickly. So, on the basis of the techies' own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it's safe to say that the life-expectancies of human-derived entities, such as man-machine hybrids and human minds uploaded into machines, will actually be quite short. The seven-hundred year or thousand-year life-span to which some techies aspire is nothing but a pipe-dream.

>>15233213
Singularity University, which we discussed in Part VI of Chapter One of this book, purportedly was created to help technophiles "guide research" and "shape the advances" so that technology would "improve society." We pointed out that Singularity University served in practice to promote the interests of technology-orientated businessmen, and we expressed doubt that the majority of technophiles fully believed in the drivel about "shaping the advances" to "improve society." It does seem, however, that the techies -the subset of the technophiles that we specified at the beginning of this Part V of the present chapter-are entirely sincere in their belief that organizations like Singularity University will help them to "shape the advances" of technology and keep the technological society on the road to a utopian future. A utopian future will have to exclude the competitive processes that would deprive the techies of their thousand-year life-span. But we showed in Chapter One that the development of our society can never be subject to rational control: The techies won't be able to "shape the advances" of technology, guide the course of technological progress, or exclude the intense competition that will eliminate nearly all techies in short order.

>>15233213
In view of everything we've said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies' vision of the future is based on pure speculation and is unsupported by evidence, one has to ask how they can believe in that vision. Some techies, e.g. , Kurzweil, do concede a slight degree of uncertainty as to whether their expectations for the future will be realized, but this seems to be no more than a sop that they throw to the skeptics, something they have to concede in order to avoid making themselves too obviously ridiculous in the eyes of rational people. Despite their pro forma admission of uncertainty, it's clear that most techies confidently expect to live for many centuries, if not forever, in a world that will be in some vaguely defined sense a utopia. Thus Kurzweil states flatly: "We will be able to live as long as we want... ." He adds no qualifiers-no "probably," no "if things turn out as expected." His whole book reveals a man intoxicated with a vision of the future in which, as an immortal machine, he will participate in the conquest of the universe. In fact, Kurzweil and other techies are living in a fantasy world.

>>15233213
The techies' belief-system can best be explained as a religious phenomenon, to which we may give the name "Technianity." It's true that Technianity at this point is not strictly speaking a religion, because it has not yet developed anything resembling a uniform body of doctrine; the techies' beliefs are widely varied. In this respect Technianity probably resembles the inceptive stages of many other religions. Nevertheless, Technianity already has the earmarks of an apocalyptic and millenarian cult: In most versions it anticipates a cataclysmic event, the Singularity, which is the point at which technological progress is supposed to become so rapid as to resemble an explosion. This is analogous to the Judgment Day of Christian mythology or the Revolution of Marxist mythology. The cataclysmic event is supposed to be followed by the arrival of techno-utopia (analogous to the Kingdom of God or the Worker's Paradise). Technianity has a favored minority-the Elect-consisting of the techies (equivalent to the True Believers of Christianity or the Proletariat of the Marxists). The Elect of Technianity, like that of Christianity, is destined to Eternal Life; though this element is missing from Marxism.

Historically, millenarian cults have tended to emerge at "times of great social change or crisis." This suggests that the techies' beliefs reflect not a genuine confidence in technology, but rather their own anxieties about the future of the technological society-anxieties from which they try to escape by creating a quasi-religious myth.

>>15233223
Redpill me on Incerto

>>15233213
There's nothing you can do about it. Trads have no power politically or socially. Neoliberal technocracy with Nordic handouts is the future and you need to get over it.

>>15235693
The human mind has a difficult time truly understanding probability and randomness. Have a genius risk analyst and trader (A fund he consults with who uses his strategy made a 4,122% return off the coronavirus crash) explain how they truly work. They're must read books for traders to help them avoid getting fucked by rare events, but its about probability and randomness and contains history, philosophy, and his own realizations over his life.

>>15235979
What makes you think that the Neoliberal order will last?

>>15235688
>Technianity
Is this really the best name you could come up with?

>>15236962
Because the people who control the military and international finance believe in it.

>>15233213
>>15235628
Fuck off Alex from Fitch and Madison Publishers. You're a loser.

>>15237293
The relationship between base and superstructure just isn’t that straightforward, my dude.

>>15237347
Fuck off marxist

>>15235329

Proof that being a yid enables you to be a charlatan and get somewhere in life.

>>15237373
Not a Marxist, my dude.

>>15237407
>Base and superstructure
>Not Marxism
Yeah okay bud fuck off back to where you came from

>>15237373
name a more iconic duo than jews and male-pattern baldness in your 20s

>>15237427
I’m going to help you out. Marx believed that what people think (superstructure) is totally a product of the material relations (base). By saying that the interests of the elites will dictate the superstructure, you were agreeing with Marx. I said that was an oversimplification. You are accusing me of being a Marxist, while yourself saying things that are closer to what Marx believed.

>>15233269
lmao

*puts biblecucks on suicide watch*

>>15237488
You and dubs? Marxists and trying to convince you they're not Marxists?

>>15237518
I'm not that guy you fucking pseud I'm the guy that wants to genocide all you Marxist cucks. If you're using Marxist theory to make a point that makes you a Marxist. Cuck.

>>15237573
> obsessed with killing people who say the bad words
So far everyone who has tried to talk to me ITT is more Marxist than I am.

>>15237311
If this is his doing, he is an extremely based man and I would like to shake his hand. You, however are a faggot.

>>15237528
1) You can't fairly judge a book based on a translation, especially a dubious and shitty translation like the one he provided
2) He obviously hasn't read Pslams, Ecclestiastes, Proverbs, any of the Epistles, or most importantly the gospels. All of them make Shakespeare look like an illiterate retard in comparison.

Shakespeare is unironically midwit mental masturbation perpetuated to erode Christian morals and spread filth into the masses.

>>15237750
*Ecclesiastes

:^)

Peat is a good antidote to popsci faggots

Eliminative materialism is completely correct, but you can easily mock Yikeskikesky by pointing out the constant *technical* absurdities and fake science he peddles for attention.

>>15233213
>Book that UNEQUIVOCALLY BTFO's Technocratic Rationalists? I seriously need this, these people are living rent free in my mind and it's driving me nuts!
You are not going to beat them using well reasoned arguments anymore than you are going to beat any other religious cultists. Just pretend rationality is just another buzzword. It used to mean optimal behavior, but it is just another thing that has been hijacked for syphoning donations from gullible idiots.

The actual arguments against pseudo-rationalism is not something you argue, they are something you act out in the form of contribution towards AI development.

I find it ironic that people are quoting Ted, when rationalism is just another cult that has sprung up to put the brakes on technological development. The only thing that differentiates it is that it produces memes that target a somewhat higher IQ base. People have a real difficulty extrapolating when letting a certain belief take room makes will make them somebody's bitch.

>>15238608

So basically, technocratic rationalism is exactly what renders Less Wrong hasidic cum-stained tissue paper

>>15237528
>Some noname dubious translation
>not the KJV
>Thinks he BTFO'ed Christianity
The absolute state of these *rational* frauds

>>15235979
>Nordic handouts

your optimism is comforting but I sincerely doubt that there will be such kindness in the neolib technocrat future we're currently hurdling towards

>>15237068

I prefer techslam.

>>15238949
there'll be UBI that will be enough for you to pay for essentials, Netflix, and a few funko pops every month but no more

>>15236310
How does Incerto BTFO the technophiles though?