From a fascinating dining companion, rather than a literary source. The Gothic potential is self-evident.

“There are many ways to stress a rat — but the easiest way is to inject it with stress hormones.”

Bonus data-burst from the same expert: According to all the rigorous cognitive tests neuroscientists are currently able to apply, crows are as intelligent as chimpanzees. (Yes, it seems preposterous, which is what makes it worth mentioning. No, I haven’t done any back-up online research yet.)

Hugo de Garis on the irrelevance of cyborgs:

Let’s start with some basic assumptions. Let the grain of sand be a 1 mm cube (i.e. 10^-3 m on a side). Assume the molecules in the sand have a cubic dimension of 1 nm on a side (i.e. 10^-9 m). Let each molecule consist of 10 atoms (for the purposes of an “order of magnitude” calculation). Assume the grain of sand has been nanoteched such that each atom can switch its state usefully in a femto-second (i.e. 10^-15 of a second). Assume the computational capacity of the human brain is 10^16 bits per second (i.e. 100 billion neurons in the human brain, times 10,000, the average number of connections between neurons, times 10, the maximum number of bits per second firing rate at each interneuronal (synaptic) connection = 10^11*10^4 *10^1 = 10^16. I will now show that the nanoteched grain of sand has a total bit switching (computational) rate that is a factor of a quintillion (a million trillion) times larger than the brain’s 10^16 bits per second. How many sand molecules in the cubic mm? Answer:– a million cubed, i.e. 10^18, with each of the 10 atoms per molecule switching 10^15 times per second, so a total switching (bits per second) rate of 10^18 times 10^15 times 10^1 = 10^34. This is 10^34/10^16 = 10^18 times greater, i.e. a million trillion, or a quintillion.

OK, but that’s coarse sand …

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How can a movie this preposterously stupid also be so peculiarly awesome?

“It’s like all the things that make me human are fading away.” (140 is the key.)

Scarlett Johansson has somehow become the icon of intelligenesis catastrophe. One thing should certainly be indisputable: this one is a far superior vehicle for such cosmo-twisted blonde dehumanization fantasies than last year’s execrable schmaltz-blitz Her. (An additional data point.)

The cognitive cream of the human species is just smart enough to get an inkling of how stupid it is. That’s a start.

ADDED: Remember this?

Afraid that I absolutely have to steal this. It’s by ‘anonymous’ (of course), so I can’t credit it properly.

Wake up, get out of bed get ready to serve my lord Schlomo II.
Year is 17 A.G., recently moved to Schlomo II’s patch after being promised a bigger bread allotment than I was receiving under Chaim III
Fuck yeah, this is progress oops I mean restoration. Fuck yeah.
King’s self driving bus takes me to the palace for work
Bus takes a tunnel underground so we can enter through the servant’s entrance in the basement
On my way in notice a group of new recruits in HR taking IQ tests at a row of terminals
One of the screens starts flashing red, electronic alarm sounds “130 IQ PLEB DETECTED”
Drones swarm in and grab the goy, er guy taking the test, drag him away
Thank Gnon, can you imagine living with such imbeciles
Get ready to start work
All real work is done by superior robots
Humans receive payment by entertaining the king
Just got a huge promotion from the groveling department
Put on my crab suit
Enter the royal throne room. Schlomo II sitting on his throne
Spend the rest of the day dancing in crab suit for King Schlomo, singing hymns to Gnon
Almost at the end of shift, master of entertainment comes in and tells King its time for the final entertainment
Dis gon be good
130 IQ pleb from earlier is brought out by drones set before king
Master of Entertainment: “Sire this man is guilty of poisoning our world with his low IQ DNA”
King: “Accused, have you anything to say in your defense”
The Accused: “Sire, I may be dumb but I have always been loyal. In the year 15 B.G. I started an NRx twitter feed with Moldbug quotes and reactionary cat memes”
The whole throne room is silent waiting for the kings reply
Crab dancers, grovelers, the royal family, hangers on, royal joke duck, all silent
King: “Ha! No man of 130 IQ could truly comprehend the sacred NRx texts. You are a mere entryist. Feed him to Gnon!”
A cheer goes up, the whole room starts chanting: “Gnon Gnon Gnon Gnon”
A screen lights up on the opposite side of the room with a cold indifferent visage
A fiery pit opens before the screen
The king’s drones drag the screaming pleb into the pit and he dies an awful death
The visage drones: “This pleases Gnon. Now more crab dancing.”
Fuck. Gotta work overtime
Shift finally ends and robo-bus takes me back to my techno-hovel
Eat my bread allotment while watching The Radish Report
What a great time to be alive

Steve Sailer’s remarks on the twentieth anniversary of The Bell Curve make a strong case for his conclusion:

A decade ago, I was interviewing an expert psychometrician who had been head of testing for one of the major branches of the military. He proudly recounted that he had given Charles Murray access to the Pentagon’s National Longitudinal Study of Youth data that makes up the central spine of The Bell Curve. He had only one objection to Herrnstein and Murray’s interpretation of his numbers: they were too cautious, too nice.

That summarizes The Bell Curve’s predictions. While you’ve been lied to endlessly about how Herrnstein and Murray were bad people for writing The Bell Curve, the reality is that they weren’t cynical enough.

(Robert VerBruggen’s more cautious commentary is also surprisingly sane for a comparatively mainstream media channel.)

Note: As you can see, the new Archenemied capacities of this blog includes a tidied-up block-quote function — but it strips out the caps (going all hbdchick). Is this a tolerable format? I’d be inclined against it, but I know there’s a passionate block-quote chorus out there …

(Weekly open thread.) XS is sticking with the settled schedule, despite the risk of chaos overdose. It’s been that kind of week. Spotty coverage of 4chan craziness and failed secession in the Anglosphere heartland doesn’t begin to exhaust it.

For anybody tugging at the scorched /pol/ thread, this is an interesting — and impressively sophisticated — strand to pull at (+ some Ebola-Chan context). ++ Trolls are Kulaks — Science. Free Northener on #Gamergate (+ NIO anticipates the storm).

The regular Mitrailleuse secession round-up makes serves as a good Scottish re-dependence portal. Some now dated, but stimulating Scotland-related commentary here, here, here, and here. (Also loosely related, and highly-recommended, from Mitrailleuse.) This might also be the place to throw in some Proprietary Cities links (1, 2, 3).

Anything — however embryonic — proposing to synthesize Neoreaction and Accelerationism is bound to get a hearing here. This is the sign. From a left-slanted sensibility, but related.

Dark comedy on the civilization-morbidity front at the MacArthur Genius Grants. (Some residual seriousness still apparent.) Grants and awards are clearly a crucial zone of conflict.

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A while ago Nyan posed a series of questions about the XS rejection of (fact-value, or capability-volition) orthogonality. He sought first of all to differentiate between the possibility, feasibility, and desirability of unconstrained and unconditional intelligence explosion, before asking:

On desirability, given possibility and feasibility, it seems straightforward to me that we prefer to exert control over the direction of the future so that it is closer to the kind of thing compatible with human and posthuman glorious flourishing (eg manifest Samo’s True Emperor), rather than raw Pythia. That is, I am a human-supremacist, rather than cosmist. This seems to be the core of the disagreement, you regarding it as somehow blasphemous for us to selfishly impose direction on Pythia. Can you explain your position on this part?

If this whole conception is the cancer that’s killing the West or whatever, could you explain that in more detail than simply the statement?

(It’s worth noting, as a preliminary, that the comments of Dark Psy-Ops and Aeroguy on that thread are highly-satisfactory proxies for the XS stance.)

First, a short micro-cultural digression. The distinction between Inner- and Outer-NRx, which this blog expects to have settled upon by the end of the year, describes the shape of the stage upon which such discussions unfold (and implex). Where the upstart Inner-NRx — comparatively populist, activist, political, and orthogenic — aims primarily at the construction of a robust, easily communicable doctrinal core, with attendant ‘entryism’ anxieties, Outer-NRx is a system of creative frontiers. By far the most fertile of these are the zones of intersection with Libertarianism and Rationalism. One reason to treasure Nyan’s line of interrogation is the fidelity with which it represents deep-current concerns and presuppositions of the voices gathered about, or spun-off from, LessWrong.

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That there is a genetic contribution to IQ ‘cognitive performance’ has been theoretically obvious for as long as these concepts have existed. Now it has been empirically confirmed. The basic argument should be over now (but I’m not holding my breath).

As this type of information becomes a flood, the dike of ideologically-motivated obscurantism has — eventually — to break. Watch for the smart rats to start jumping off first.

Meta-stereotypes are not to be trusted. This is two years old, but recently tweet-linked by Justine Tunney, and well-worth recalling. The meat and potatoes:

… stereotypes are not inaccurate. There are many different ways to test for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many different types or aspects of accuracy. However, one type is quite simple — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria. If I believe 60% of adult women are over 5′ 4″ tall, and 56% voted for the Democrat in the last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult women have college degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond to the actual probabilities? One can do this sort of thing for many different types of groups.

And lots of scientists have. And you know what they found? That stereotype accuracy — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria — is one of the largest relationships in all of social psychology. The correlations of stereotypes with criteria range from .4 to over .9, and average almost .8 for cultural stereotypes (the correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria) and.5 for personal stereotypes (the correlation of one individual’s stereotypes with criteria, averaged over lots of individuals). The average effect in social psychology is about .20. Stereotypes are more valid than most social psychological hypotheses.

It’s not as if this is new, or in general outline even two years old. It’s roughly as old as human culture, in fact. Generalization is what pragmatic intelligence is for (which means it’s what intelligence in general has been kept around for). Regardless of where we find ourselves culturally right now, this is a point of common sense that simply can’t be forgotten forever.