@blakestacey wrote:
I think there even is a case to be made about how Frank Herbert is the anti-L. Ron Hubbard, using sci-fi literature as an efficient outlet for his psychedelics/mysticism/ecology/psychosexuality obsession oscilliation and actually leaving a descent literary legacy instead of starting a cult or several, but this post is already running so long it’s starting to need an editor.
I would read that essay.
While I agree with @Amoeba_Girl that not turning into a cult leader and pivoting to full time grifting like L. Ron Hubbard isn’t an awfully high bar to clear, it still an interesting parallel, as basically everywhere LRH zigged, FH zagged, despite having ample opportunity, or arguably more, due to actually being a renowned writer.
Some specifics are that Dune has the various human specialization schools that were meant fill the void in a space faring society where computer science is haram, especially the mentats, which leads to a lot of techniques being partially described or implied in a way that they are just begging to be converted into a dianetics type get-smart-quick handbook. This is the ‘tech’ Amoeba_Girl is talking about and it is definitely a thing.
Additionally he had a huge mysticism itch that he tried to scratch at every opportunity, but instead of going the way of the enlightened master who drops just enough wisdom to keep the followers following and the premium members paying, you have the here’s how you should broadly expect this shit to work in case it works of Godmakers to complement Dune’s beyond cynical approach to religion, mysticism and secret societies, no strings attached.
Also despite being subsumed by the more obvious spice-is-oil allegory, cautioning that psychedelics have diminishing returns when treated as a cultural cornerstone for a group is also in there.
Also where LRH dabbled in sex magic and rat-style group homes FH appears to have been Tolkien levels of wife guy, the last Dune book had a really touching afterword about his wife’s death and he himself died very shortly thereafter.
This leads to my next point about total loving commitment playing a huge role in how things shake out in Dune, featuring as the main reason for stuff like going against the breeding program to conceive Paul, breaking the Suk conditioning to betray the Atreides, the (presciently predicted and made inescapable) death of Chani that breaks Muad’Dib, and the ultimate fall of the god emperor, love is presented as both an anchoring character trait as well as a huge confounding factor against long term planning. Even the straightforwardly evil antagonist faction in the last two Dune books largely runs on the perversion and weaponisation of the concept.
I’d argue that this odd true love based individualism is the core subtext of what I would consider FH’s extremely anti-cult messaging, and in general there is enough demystification of cult dynamics and elements that I could see FH’s writings working as inoculation against cult vulnerability instead of fomenting it.
To say nothing of Dune’s pervading message that outsourcing your free will is the most terrible no-good outcome and even being the deity of your own religion comes at a price no sane man should be willing to pay.
Dune stuff
In continuation of the recent dune stuff stubsack subthread [https://awful.systems/post/8508904/11653589] so anyone interested doesn’t need to go spelunking in the hundreds of posts superthread that’s already halfway out of the main page. Apologies for being late in replying.
Rationalists looking for ways to ruin elections for good
From the rationalists are a net negative for society dept: Scott Alexander’s latest (that I’m not linking) is all about how you should be using the slop machine to tell you who to vote for. He’s even so kind as to share his prompt: > I’ll be voting in the June 2026 California primary. I’m a centrist liberal abundance YIMBY whose favorite political writers are Kelsey Piper, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. I’m wary of government overreach, but I’m not a doctrinaire libertarian and want to help people when we can figure ways to do it that work. I’m going to ask you about each race on my ballot, and I’d like for you to list the various candidates’ bios, policies, endorsements, your read on the most important differences between them, and your advice for me as I try to make my choice. Pretending hallucinations and training data bias aren’t a thing must be making some people’s lives so much easier. While we’re at it, let’s also magical think away any possible dire consequences of giving the handful of ultrawealthy unwell weirdos behind LLMs as a service even more direct political influence. Also the prompt sample itself is just showoffy1 nonsense, isn’t it? Even if LLMs were as overcompetent as they’re being hyped there’s no way all that stuff can be deterministically parsed into a concrete set of values that you can check against whatever the LLM digs up from the internet, combined with all the close-enoughs hardcoded in its training data, there’s just enormous room for the chatbot to answer whatever the hell it wants. 1. That’s me trying not to overuse the term “virtue signalling”, but it seems clear siskind is using the prompt to set a sort of partly line for his (outer circle / not completely eugenics pilled) followers. That’s probably also the point of including so much chatbot attributed political slop in the article, ostensibly as data points.
New member of the rationalist axis of evil just dropped
tl;dr: Tech youtuber who got way into studying the negative health effects of infrasound produced by data centers (to the point of his research being cited a bunch in relevant court cases) gets a voluminous substack hit piece published on his work by “an independent writer and researcher funded by a grant from Coefficient Giving to explore topics in AI and other areas” > So after some sniffing around, I realize I’m being brigaded by someone deep in the Effective Altruism community. The author is, quite literally, paid by rotational-wealth NPO to write this very article among many others. I know what you’re thinking, and I know how this sounds. The battle cry of the pseudoscientist is poisoning the well of criticism. > > But please do browse his bibliography. > > Andy lives in a parallel universe where datacenters don’t waste water, AI artwork is without victims, and using ChatGPT doesn’t harm the environment. This is one of the many takes that perfectly align with the board, contributors, and partners with Coefficient Giving, formally called Open Philanthropy, but changed after its close association with Sam Bankman-Fried was causing some well-earned skepticism. Quite the coincidence that this comes out right around the time Kelsey Piper decided to get busy “debunking” Ed Zitron. There’s already a follow up [https://www.bennjordan.com/blog/infragate-pt2] about the same people getting busy debunking a recent neuroscience paper on adverse infrasound effect bsky. old sneer club thread [https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1szo5hq/the_altruists_have_arrived_ea_attacks_benn_jordan/]
Storytime with Rationalist Rabbi Scott Alexander
This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It’s a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that’s God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually “logically necessary”. He calls the whole thing “The Hour I First Believed”. I think it’s notable for being a bit of a treasure trove of rationalist weird accepted truths, such as: - All copies of a consciousness share a self, because consciousness is like an equation apparently: > But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the same single stream of conscious experience on two different physical substrates. Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it’s not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away, and also what makes the basilisk torturing you possible. - And it’s corollary, Simulation Capture: >This means that an AI can actually “capture” you, piece by piece, into its simulation. First your consciousness is just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real-world copy and a million simulated copies. Then the AI makes the simulated copies slightly different, and 99.9999% of you is in the simulation. which is a kind of nuts I hadn’t happened upon before. There’s also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.
Pentagon labels Anthropic a supply-chain risk, strikes deal with OpenAI whose president Greg Brockman is a Trump mega-donor.
🍌🍌🍌
Apparently Anthropic may be about to be on the receiving end of some major banana republic shit from the Trump admin
Peter Thiel Antichrist lecture: We asked guests what the hell it is
[https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/1addbcac-b40a-4269-ae6a-0817f17782b5.png] # The guests: > [Dick Gay], who had flown in for the event from Los Angeles and said he was one of the investors of Sperm Racing (which is an actual thing wherein men compete to see whose sperm is “fastest” under a microscope), said he attended the University of Austin, or UATX, an “anti-woke” college reportedly partially funded by Thiel, and built his career around the principles outlined in Thiel’s book “Zero to One.” > Attendee Justin Park said he just wanted to pitch Thiel on putting a 7.5-foot cross on the moon. > [Unnamed], who was in his 30s, said he wasn’t a Thiel fan until last year, when he became a Trump supporter after seeing the president survive an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I misunderstood [Thiel],” he said. “I used to watch CNN and think he’s a Nazi.” Now, he said, he understands the billionaire is talking about something bigger. # The Speech: Apparently it was both repetitive and mostly a rehash of what he’s said in other media. # Yud is the Antichrist confirmed: > One attendee recalled that Thiel’s discussion of the Antichrist was more about a scenario than an individual. Thiel’s Antichrist scenario is one in which a unified government suppresses technology to impose order, or armageddon, wherein AI takes over and ushers in the end of the world.
Albania appoints AI bot as minister to tackle corruption
Supposedly government contracts will now be awarded according to what the bot says. Government (fourth term for the current prime minister) didn’t elaborate on what’s going on with human oversight. This is a promotion for Diella the bot, who was originally the chatbot helping to navigate the e-Albania digital government platform.
