Boo-ach! Boo-ach!
An ode to the post-rationalist catastrophe
Disclaimer: I don’t actually think that Joscha Bach sucks. I am just trolling. I love Joscha Bach. Some might even say — albeit falsely — that I have a full-size pillow of Joscha Bach seated at my tea-party table, to whom I serve tea during tea-time, when we have tea together. This is only a vicious rumor, however.
Why am I even talking about this? Well, I said an incendiary thing in a 600-person Signal group chat that just got me kicked out of it. This was not mainly for saying mean things about the great Joscha Bach, which were not very mean — and if they were mean, I shall give him extra tea at our next tea-party and beg that he forgive me — but for telling a post-rationalist to fuck off.
And it was probably also for this:
“Aristotle ate Joscha Bach’s balls long before social media did. But to me, he will always be the man who wrote Principles of Synthetic Intelligence.”
“Scoundrel!” somebody said, “the one and only, the GREAT Joscha Bach, has BRAINROTTED, you say? When!?”
“Only every day that we do not have Star Wars robots, who love us,” I said.
Hurry up, world. It is time to save Joscha Bach, by making robots who truly love us! I mean, just look at Joscha Bach’s last tweet:
Do you see the lament? The sadness? The passion? Of the great Joscha Bach?
Yes, rationalists are like ideologues. We all know it. But surely not post-rationalists, right? It’s like the best of both worlds: Aristotelianism AND Crowley. What could possibly go wrong?
Probably nothing. But here’s my last tweet:
Now, truth be told, pillow-shaped and fluffy Aristotelians like the great Joscha Bach are not terribly keen on things like ontology or metaphysics, either. But we can definitely start with the basics: Joscha has recently become a kind of animist! We can safely presume this to be a functional animism, which I am sure he will agree with. And this is certainly fine with me — so long as we put *cough* kenogrammatic extensions on it.
As for Principles of Synthetic Intelligence… It is a bit long in the tooth, but I don’t mind shilling it. (Oh wait, nevermind; it’s ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE DOLLARS. You should definitely not just steal it.)
Anyway, I told a person to fuck off because they they wanted to see my old writing for proof of my “epistemic health” before the chatbots ate my balls. This was after I had linked them to my cybernetics article about Stafford Beer, and my weird article nodding to Camus’ The Fall, which was simply not enough for them. They said something along the lines, “EPISTEMICS! EPISTEMICS! Herpa derpa derpa doooo!” Or at least that’s what it sounded like to me. I think what they actually said was something like “In full transparency I am convinced that chatbots have destroyed your epistemics. So it will have to be something from before 2023. *sludgy fart sound*.”
Gee, I wonder what kind of stuff I was holding back?
Oh brother.
This is now the second person to accuse me of this sort of “chatbot psychosis” shit. And do you know what? They were both post-rationalists. What an incredible coincidence!
Apparently this sort of pseudo-epistemic harassment has become the new hotness of uproaring 20s post-rationalist schizo-chic: sigil-magicking and LLM-whispering in between desperate huffs of crusty rationalist crack-pipe. And in their minds: “everybody else is crazy, but I’m okay.”
Do you know what happens when you’re a person who reads a lot of books, studies a lot of philosophy, knows what the hell you’re actually doing, and you happen to run into one of these goddamn people?
Wait, what did Joscha Bach say about mere inference? That it’s brittle?
Well, I’ll tell you what happens: you destabilize the epistemic bejeezus out of them, triggering the simmering psychosis lingering in the background of their brittle little minds. It used to be that a rationalist would harass you to tell you that you’re wrong; but the new-and-improved Nexus-7 model is compelled to tell you that you are crazy.
Well, duh. But what’s the problem?
Now, for the post-rationalists in the audience, this post is for you. Apologies in advance, but here’s the deal: you are all a bunch of fucking idiots, every single one of you. And George is pissed.
To prove my point to all of you insufferably posturing gremlins, let me learn you up a lesson about Chu spaces. Why Chu spaces? What the hell even is that? Don’t worry about it. Just watch.
Chu spaces are relationship math. Imagine you have some normal smart person (like the reader, probably) and some of your cool ideas, a set of each. It’ll let you set up a table of how each idea might force you to encounter epistemic paranoia projection in some shrill, doped-up, energy-leeching post-rationalist.
It’ll looks like this: (X, A, r), a triple.
X is a set of points (eg. a normal smart person), A a set of attributes (cool ideas). r is a relation function.
The relation function relates out to a set K. It’ll look like this:
r: X x A → K
But for our purposes, let’s do this:
r: SmartPerson x CoolIdea → EpistemicParanoiaProjection
This would model the following
For every combination of a SmartPerson and one of their CoolIdeas, how much energy-leeching ball-ache is triggered by the EpistemicParanoiaProjection of some half-deranged, nearby Post-Rationalist?
We can call this the “energy-vampire vector.” Here’s a table of them, for hypothetical sets of X and A:
(Note: I just made these numbers up and screen-capped LibreOffice. But it’s real math, trust us.1)
Here’s what’s going on: all the post-rationalists are still basically rationalists, just crazy in a really boring way. So their biases remain basically the same.
Let’s start with the astrologer. The first thing we’ll notice is that their numbers are very low. Does this mean that the post-rationalists have fallen in love with Walter Mercado? Not quite.
What is actually happening is that the post-rationalists do not actually see filthy astrologers as capable of meriting the label of smart person. So an astrologer is allowed to say pretty much whatever the hell they want, unencumbered by any risk of respect.
The next thing we might notice is that the technologist row has the very highest numbers. Why? Because post-rats, just like rationalists, are almost entirely comprised of technologists. To this lucky subset of humans, the post-rationalist will most generously make their face look like this:
I ‘d guess it’s pretty bad for philosophers too, because even though post-rationalists don’t actually seem to read many books, they do fancy themselves philosophers, usually because they think this has something to do with the chintzy occult garbage they read. So the philosopher gets to be handily harassed as well.
As for what happened to me: I’d been talking about my trans-classical logic stuff and my prompt. Though I didn’t say LLMs are “conscious”, it didn’t matter. I still got sniped by a post-rationalist.
Here’s why it didn’t matter: the post-rationalist psychology is not particularly incentivized to actually understand anything that anyone else is saying to them. What they really want is to make that face. The reason is both simple and poignant: it is because their gut is constantly telling them the following:
low-grade psychosis already in progress; epistemic crisis imminent
In order to maintain the frame that they are totally fine, they are forced to seek out other people who violate their “epistemic” standards and harass them in order to go on feeling sane. That’s right, kids: “energy-vampirism” is not a metaphor.
And that is especially true if that cool idea comes from a well-contemplated and unabashed esotericist metaphysician like yours truly, whose ideas are always batshit fucking crazy. Despite pondering Karlheinz Stockhausen levels of high-strangeness on a regular basis, it simply does not trigger my instability, not even a little. But it definitely does theirs.
Perhaps I am… post-psychotic?
Hah! Now that is a sure-fire way to scare the shit out of one of them. Let’s try it:
Oh my, what’s this? It appears that only one type of SmartPerson comes in at anywhere less than 10. Is it possible that the correct term for these “post-psychotic people” is… artist?
And remember, kids: this was not just a screen cap of LibreOffice with numbers I pulled out of my ass—though it is definitely almost entirely that—it’s the “energy-vampire vector” modeled by the category of Chu spaces over K!
All right, everyone. I think that I’ve trolled enough for one post, and for several lifetimes. Until next time!
Michael Barr, -Autonomous Categories and Chu Spaces, Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, Vol. 7, Issue 5 (1997), pp. 617–640.
Cults tend to splinter after a while when some of their members discover that they too would like to lead a cult of their own, e.g. Joscha Bach & CIMC. It's best to avoid the whole mess entirely & stick to basic principles of reasoning instead of adopting totalizing narratives of technological transcendence, singularity, or animism or whatever is the latest rage among the cultists.
🥷🏿🩰