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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Ya know, all perfectly fair.

    Good choice on reddit. As much as I love a good 'ol sneer, there’s a lot of jargon and clowning to wade through. There are a lot of genuinely solid critiques of his views there, though.

    I appreciate you doing your due diligence on this, but I’m not really sure where to keep this discussion going. I still stand by my original comment’s warning. Reading Siskind is probably not going to corrupt an unassuming reader to immediately think XYZ bad thing. His writings tend to be very data heavy and nuanced, to his credit.

    Is he Hitler 2.0? No, far from it.

    But he shares a set of core assumptions with the other ideologies, and the circles between his community and the other communities have large overlap. If you start with one, it’s likely you encounter the other. If you start to think like one, it’s a small jump to start thinking like the other. (From experience).

    In my opinion, anyone encountering Siskind for the first time is well-served by an understanding of TESCREAL—which they are likely to encounter in either his posts, its comments, or linked material—, and its critiques—which should help them assess what they encounter through a critical lense.

    That’s more or less what I wanted to give caution about, which may or may not have come across correctly.

    (Not that his stuff is entirely innocent either, but beside the point)


  • I understand, a good instinct to have. Unfortunately I have read so much in such a piecemeal way I cannot really compile a specific list. But I can point you to where “evidence” can be found. I don’t expect you to read any of this, but if you want to evaluate Alexander’s views further it will help:

    • The New York Times did a piece on him that does a good job outlining Alexander’s ties to and influence on Silicone Valley. Probably the best actual piece of journalism on him.
    • There used to be a reddit community (/r/SneerClub) that would read his (mountainous, as you point out) posts and pull out errors and misteps to “sneer” at, but that’s been dead since the API revolts. The old posts are still up. Basically you had a club of people that spent years finding (cherry-picking, mind) the juicy bits for you.
    • You may find some passing reference to Alexander is one of Émile Torres’s articles or interviews on the subject of TESCREAL, but probably nothing substantial.
    • If you spend time on communites like LessWrong and the EA Forum, you will see heavy reference to and influence from Alexander’s writing among members.

    A lot of what I say comes from my experiencd spending way too much time following these socisl circles and their critics online. Unfortunately, the best way I know to see for yourself is to dive in yourself. Godspeed, if you choose to go that way.

    Edit: of course, reading his work itself is a great way , too, if you have time for that.


  • The example is pretty standard, but I feel obligated to caution people about the author (just because he’s linked to here and some unassuming people might dive in).

    Scott Alexander falls loosely under the TESCREAL umbrella of ideologies. Even in this article, he ends up concluding the only way out is to build a superintelligent AI to govern us… which is like the least productive, if not counterproductive, approach to solving the problem. He’s just another technoptimist shunting problems onto future technologies that may or may not exist.

    So, yeah, if anyone decides they want to read more of his stuff, make sure to go in informed / having read critiques of TESCREALism.



  • That kind of model is unfortunately common for university courses. I had it for my language courses, and a couple of the core maths courses.

    The online platform justifies a subscription by providing additional resources, homework grading, etc. Fair enough, honestly, if they want to charge you $15 or something reasonable. But when textbook access gets rolled into the bundle, it tends to inflate the subscription cost and also have the convenient-for-the-publisher side effect of temporary access to the text. Lose-lose, from a student perspective.

    I had a course that required we buy a license to Pearson’s service in order to submit homework. $100+ to view a pdf for a semester and submit homework through a buggy form interface. I still hold a grudge against everyone in the department for that decision.



  • Sticking two E2EE tunnels together with a plaintext middleman doesn’t result in a single E2EE tunnel.

    The reason the distinction is important is because the security profile is vastly different—a compromised server leads to a compromised message—which isn’t true for actual E2EE services like a pure Matrix link.

    Side note: the first thing you should ask of a “end-to-end encrypted” product to you is “which ‘ends’ do you mean?” I’ve seen TLS advertised as E2EE before.






  • I have seen you comment in several comment chains. Please just understand that there is risk even if by the letter of the law everything is legal. There are plenty of cases with copyright / fair use where very expensive and long lawsuits were made against parties who did nothing illegal.

    LW mods are clearly not comfortable with the risk with their current situation. Respect that, and don’t expect them to take risks beyond their comfort on your behalf. If you want someone who is willing to serve you content at that level of risk, you can create an account with one of the other communities.