3d ago

Epistemic certainty on Gaza at critical low, pride of ignorance higher than ever!

The rats would love to have a coherent position on the Palestinian genocide but there's just no one from the polycule that's written about it in their nerd blogs so they're all going to have to continue rejecting all evidence.

After being admonished by Paul Graham for baselessly questioning the veracity of a Palestinian child saying goodbye to their dying father, Yud writes

Why do you believe that any of this is true? Serious question. I haven't been able to find any blog with two serious nerds fighting it out, each side says the other side's stuff is all fake, and each side has compelling instances of other-side stuff being fake.

Aella too finds this all very confusing due to the low IQ of everyone with an opinion

I do really wish someone smart and good at critical thinking would sit down and invest a lot of research into which claims by both sides are accurate and which are propaganda. This would be so good for the world

Nathan Young is also Spartacus, and none of your mean taunts to "open a newspaper" will change that

I respect Eliezer’s public confusion here. I too am confused and struggling to find good sources to understand Gaza.
Nor does people yelling at me make me believe them more.

The important thing is that they are actually very open minded and unbiased and will figure this all out someday when the mass graves are exhumed.

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Look, I am shockingly uninformed about the current conflict in the Middle East - mostly b/c I got sucked into Ukraine-watching and then Oct 7 + Trump II basically killed any motivation to learn more depressing things. But then I'm just a nobody, while Yud aspires to change world leaders' minds about AI so it doesn't kill us all[1]. And the Arab/Israel conflict is one of the longest-running in our world, it hinges on important stuff like national self-determination, how to treat civilians in war, how limited natural resources can lead to conflicts - all the kind of stuff you might want your robot god to be "aligned" about, in whatever direction.
It's ok to say you can't be bothered about Gaza, or not having the energy to learn more. But then people might just not be interested in reading about your ideas on how LLMs will destroy the world.
[1] latest outburst here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kgb58RL88YChkkBNf/the-problem
- It's very telling that Yud doesn't have an opinion on Gaza, considering Israel is literally using Palantir's AI to target and kill people. Seems like something he should be against, doesn't it? Like it just maybe goes against his entire reason for being.
I do really wish someone smart and good at critical thinking would sit down and invest a lot of research into which claims by both sides are accurate and which are propaganda. This would be so good for the world
I feel like the fucking memestock people are actually more honest when they say "I'm just a smoothbrained ape, can someone with a few more wrinkles validate my preexisting beliefs?"
I'm reminded of the thing that happens to people learning the history of the American Civil War. First, you learn that it was about slavery and emancipation. Then you dig into the reeds and start finding a lot of contemporary evidence that actually there were bigger issues of state's rights or regional versus federal power or whatever at play. And then you keep getting deeper into the reeds and realize that all those other issues and factors were either contributing factors to why slavery was such an important and central issue at the time or were fallout from the decades of fighting about slavery in the legal and legislative systems.
Also you learn about how the existence of stage 2 owes a lot to antebellum revisionism as the men who lost tried to convince themselves and the world that their cause had been for something more than racism and exploitation, even as they supported domestic terror organizations that worked to retrench that same system of racism and exploitation without explicitly being allowed to fucking own human beings.
Like, there's a lot of motivated reasoning required to get to the point of "actually it's all very complicated" and not think past that into "because they're trying to make a smokescreen around a genocide".
Jesus fucking christ. Fuck Yud. It's on sight. I'm gonna empirically find out what his jaw is made of; current hypothesis: sugar glass. At this point, at his age, and at the amount of time he spends in the communities he does, this should only be interpreted as full support of genocide. Pretending not to have formed an opinion here is some real ghoulish shit.
Don't you realize the situation is just far too complicated? If someone as big brained as he can't figure it out, what hope do mere lawmakers and politicians have? Somebody else even bigger brained and with more time needs to do it for him, he just doesn't have the time to think about it. And, it's not like he's in a position to change the president's mind! Best to let some fastidious neutral observers, perhaps a Sherlock Holmes, go in after everything's said and done to figure out what really went down.
And don't you know there's a colossal tidal wave coming to envelope the earth? Those dastardly wizards are drawing down the moon to get its cheese! The starvation of a few people is just too small compared to total annihilation. But maybe publishing some pamphlets will get those wizards to stop. Maybe he can convince some heads of state that these wizards are dangerous. It's only rational to use your comparative advantage to do the most good after all.
- Don’t worry. Now that I’ve dug up their graves, it’s only a matter of time before I have cloned both Feynman and von Neumann, implanted them with wombs and gotten them to mutually mpreg each other. I estimate that once I’ve done about 10 levels of selective breeding, we’ll have figured out what is happening in gaza.
  
  That's good news! Mpreg rpf must rank almost as high on Big Yud's evidence scale as serious nerd out-fighting blogs, so we'll soon be able to move forwards with an official decision thanks to your efforts.
The most well documented genocide while it is happening. First livestreamed genocide. If you can't see this genocide happening, then you could never see a genocide until afterwards.
Of course they can't figure out what is going on, using their own eyes is not in the interest of the oligarchs they serve.
Nor does people yelling at me make me believe them more.
GET OFF THE TRACKS A TROLLEY IS COMING!
"No need to yell, im actually going to believe you less if you shout, isn't there some blog that talks about trolleys coming on this specific track?"
And like a good scientist Yud will go gather evidence first hand. /s
Nathan Young is also Spartacus, and none of your mean taunts to “open a newspaper” will change that
Dollar Store Jordan Peterson-lookin dweeb

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