tsimionescu

3 ms·

1.
by tsimionescu 5d ago
This is not a good explanation, because you could just as well say "I have cat and two dogs". The fact remains that "a cat", "cat", and "the cat" (and "one cat") all have separate meanings;
2.
by tsimionescu 5d ago
Articles and quantifiers are different parts of speech in most grammars. Articles are specifically different in having no independent meaning, more similar to prepositions than to adjectives (which some is classified as in its use as a qu
3.
by tsimionescu 6d ago
I think it's much more likely this story was spread by native English speakers who learned German as a second language in school. It has all the hallmarks of a teacher's pedantry to me. That said, blunders do occasionally happen e
4.
by tsimionescu 6d ago
No, some is not an indefinite article, it is a quantifier word, just like "few" or "many". This is most easily visible in the fact that you can say "A: How many pears should I buy? B: Just buy some." - which wo
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by tsimionescu 7d ago
The claim is not that there is some victim here. The claim is that these people, in spite of their claims of simply rationally following the evidence wherever it leads, have become trapped in the idea that AI doom is imminent and the only s
6.
by tsimionescu 7d ago
Papal infallibility, at least as it is today, is basically equivalent to the SC having the final word on law in the USA. It simply means that all of the church agrees to recognize his word as final in matters of faith. Not at all uncommon.
7.
by tsimionescu 8d ago
> There is substantial doubt, I don't think the article did accuse them of being any of those things. The article says: > Rationalism as a whole is a religious movement. Not everyone takes marching orders. The core people who mos
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by tsimionescu 8d ago
No, he's not. Just look at the life of an average Catholic person and the life of an average Scientologist, or better yet, the life of an average Jonestown resident before the suicide, and see the obvious differences. Note also how lit
9.
by tsimionescu 8d ago
Are you claiming that for essentially anyone in, say, Dublin, announcing that they are now an atheist would lead to their family cutting all ties to them? Or are you just saying that family members would generally declare their deep sadness
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by tsimionescu 8d ago
I don't like most religions, personally. But there is a significant difference between a regular religious community, that has its own shared beliefs but doesn't completely exclude those who don't share them (e.g. by forbid
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by tsimionescu 8d ago
Falun Gong is a cult that claims following its tenets can cure any disease, so you don't need doctors (and that high level Falun Gong members are so perfectly healthy that they are hunted by CCP members for their perfect organs). The
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by tsimionescu 8d ago
No, it doesn't define "a cult" as that. It defines the word "cult" to also mean that, in certain contexts. Specifically, when you say "the cult of Britney Spears" or "the cult of Kim Jong Un",
13.
by tsimionescu 8d ago
It's not even about immorality. The problem is not so much the sex, it's the cult part. If a good deal of the people working in AI safety in the biggest AI lands are actually a cult, that has deep implications about what AIs are
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
As I said, I'm certain there are specific parts of Catholicism that do exhibit cult-like behaviors. That doesn't mean the Pope is a cult leader in the same way as Reverend Jones was.
15.
by tsimionescu 9d ago
The currently most upvoted comment is a much bigger article containing vritulaly the same claims, and naming some names. It spefically Mentions Eliezer Yudkowsky as living in shared housing with others. It also mentions that Dario Amodei an
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
Then I don't understand your complaint. The article author is very explicitly using definition 1. It is explicitly accusing the community built by Yudkowsky of presenting signs of being "a group (such as an organization or relig
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
The title is senstaionalist. The actual content of the article refers to a specific community, including Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aella, and others.
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
I suspect the misunderstanding might be around the precise meaning of the word "kink" then. I think in one common understanding of the word, that I assume the OP was using, having a taboo fantasy that you merely roleplay with a pa
19.
by tsimionescu 9d ago
No worries, and sorry for assuming you knew about it. Here is a Forbes article that goes over what is currently known: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/04/08/what-we... Of course, none
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
Religious people, not cultists. How many Scientologists, Falun Gong members, etc are there in Congress?
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
The article presents widely how the people it describes all live in communal housing, engage in harmful psychological practices, have a shared belief in the imminence of the Apocalypse, etc.
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
I have no idea how trustworthy this study is - but it claims that 62% of women had such a fantasy at least once. How is that not in line with what the OP said about it being "surprisingly common"?
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
Bringing up known Epstein associate Bill Gates, whose own wife divorced him because of this association, in this context seems very weird.
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
No, a cult is any closed-off fanatical group that is deemed harmful to its members and sometimes to outsiders as well. The group who launched a sarin gas attack in Tokyo's metro, Aum Shinrikyo, was a cult. The Jonestown group was a cul
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
Cult quite explicitly means the latter, and is what the article is explicitly accusing the core of this community being (that is, not everyone reading LessWrong, but specifically the actual people living in the communes). No one calls the C
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
No, just the ones that are part of this specific community described in the blog post.
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by tsimionescu 9d ago
No one is claiming that all poly people have some ties to the AI community. They make a claim about a specific community in San Francisco, that is tied together by a mix of AI doomerism and sexual relations. And it's not at all surpris
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by tsimionescu 10d ago
Do you know what the "General" in "Artificial General Intelligence" means? It specifically means that the AGI adapts to novel domains that it hasn't been trained on - its training generalizes to real world problem
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by tsimionescu 15d ago
Car infrastructure is typically a huge part of the costs of any city. Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves. If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year. Anyway
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by tsimionescu 16d ago
Note that every time a company comes up with a choice between a smaller phone and a larger phone (up to some limit when you get into phablet territory), the larger phone sells in much, much higher numbers. Apple themselves tried the Mini, i

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