And That’s Before Getting Into the Whole ‘Roko’s Basilisk’ Mess
Here we see a real purpose behind lesswrong.com. Ultimately it doesn’t matter that people like Thiel or Kurzweil or Yudkowsky are pushing a crackpot idea like the singularity; what matters is that they are pushing the poisonous ideas that underlie Bayesianism. Thiel and others are funding an organisation that advances an ideological basis for their own predatory behaviour. Lesswrong and its sister sites preach a reductive concept of humanity that encourages an indifference to the world’s suffering, that sees people as isolated, calculating individuals acting in their self-interest: a concept of humanity that serves and perpetuates the scum at the top.
Stephen Bond on what’s wrong with LessWrong, with digressions into why all skepticism is neoliberalism and the rules of Fuck You, Buddy.
Gerry Canavan 
i think i’ve seen a version of that skepticism piece published elsewhere. i cannot figure out what the author means by ‘skeptics.’ i assume scientific skepticism, but it seems like a really crass use of the term–especially if dawkins et al are the exemplars of skepticism (which, if they are, it is not the usual version of scientific skepticism, since they’ve turned it into a theology)….
Lindsey
May 12, 2013 at 9:07 pm
He’s referring to an Internet club, basically, that points to a more rigorous definition for its own self-legitimation. They have conventions now.
gerrycanavan
May 12, 2013 at 9:10 pm
I’m not sure we can blame Bayes for all this. Frequentist statisticians have been making bullshit assertions based on sophistic readings of the numbers long before anyone in the field used Bayes. Read Dickens for a parody of the nineteenth century version of this phenomenon.
arg11
May 12, 2013 at 9:43 pm