[api]

One of the crazy things about these files is: it’s clear that the root motivation for a huge number of these guys is just to get with very young girls (and sometimes boys).

Nothing sophisticated. Nothing inspired. Just what the most atavistic parts of the brain stem want.

They were billionaires and high ranking academics and politicians. They could have done so many things but that’s where a huge portion of their energy went. It was clearly one of the most important things to them.

Makes me think of the paperclip maximizers idea. We are paperclip maximizers. This is how a paperclip maximizer would behave. They could extend health and life and explore the universe, but paperclips. Must make paperclips.

I also get the impression that the reason a lot of these guys are attracted to authoritarian right wing ideology, neo-monarchism, etc. is the same. It’s because it would let them have little girls without pesky enlightenment notions like rights or woke nonsense about equality getting in the way.

Gotta make paperclips. Burn the world to make paperclips.

[foldr]

Reminds me of the possibly-apocryphal-but-not-entirely-off-the-money story about Bertrand Russell’s response to an American questioner who asked him why he had given up philosophy: "because I discovered that I preferred fucking".

[SauntSolaire]

Ah yes, Noam Chomsky, the famous right wing authoritarian.

[api]

That's the thing though. Paperclips transcend ideology.

That and I'm not sure what Chomsky actually advocated. He was a tireless critic of American and Western imperial ambitions, but what would he replace them with? I get the impression it'd be some kind of authoritarian command economy socialism, which anyone with half a brain knows will turn into a totalitarian system where the ones running it are "more equal" than everyone else. These days, knowing what I know now, I wonder if he's always just been a Russian asset or useful idiot.

I've never been a Chomsky fan anyway. His criticisms are sometimes valid but it's easy to criticize. It's orders of magnitude harder to propose better alternatives. Being a witty and incisive critic is easy compared to fixing.

LLMs have also indirectly proven a lot of his linguistic theories wrong. We didn't crack natural language with NLP and grammars. We cracked it by loosely imitating biology.

[Gud]

Noam Chomsky was a self proclaimed syndicalist.