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Notes -
So, I was thinking about a brief exchange I had a little while ago with @gattsuru, as well as an earlier thread on the arrest of the guy who started the Palisades fire (plus perhaps some other comments here and there about how mass shooters and such tend to have poor target selection, as is entirely understandable with their being of generally unsound mind), I find myself asking: setting aside very-low-probability scenarios, how much damage could a reasonably-competent solitary actor — “a lone man with a grudge against the world,” to quote @Edawayac_Tosscount — pull off in a single “attack”?
Most terroristic violence is memetic in nature. The popularity of various attacks goes up and down acting as trends. The same goes for lone wolf attacks.
Sometimes exceptional actors (such as OBL) come up with a novel threat.
It's still pretty wise not to give anyone ideas, and if you read the forum long enough (and pay attention) you'll see people mention something or not mention specific examples. Anybody with a brain should be able to look at the history of mass shootings and be able to come up with something (thankfully the people who do these things generally don't). With some creativity you should be able to look at some wide categories like physical infrastructure and cyber security and come up with some ways, some of which a single person could implement. Mass general economic disruption with or without loss of life would be even easier.
Even scarier is the fact that state actors have plenty of ways to grossly impact the health of the planet (the most obvious and famous is nuking the shit out of stuff), and at least one way could be theoretically implemented right now by a big enough PI at any of the major research labs.*
I wouldn't recommend thinking about it over much and I don't want that juju out in the world, but an asshole wrote a whole SF book trilogy about similar problems so maybe someone notices and snaps and we all die.
Lone man with a grudge has plenty of options. Let's not make them clear.
*slow moving death of all life on earth that wouldn't be solvable with current technology but maybe we'd be able to fix it with enough motivation.
I agree with you on the wider thrust, but there is also Nick Land's point about "Dr. Gno" - something along the lines of "with every x years' advance in technology, the IQ required to destroy the world drops by a point". And when you crawl high up enough along the bell curve, you'll find someone who'll do it.
IMO the actual bottleneck is not intelligence but time preference. Someone who can get in the frame of mind to cause the mass death of innocents - unless they're some true sociopath, like Bin Laden, or an academic virologist - wants to do it now, ASAP, let me kill/die now so I don't have to spend any more time like this. Most mass shooters could have 10xed their kill count if they were rationalist killmaxxers, but at that point, thankfullyish, too much of the mind has snapped off into little fragments.
Ugh, I've heard about this before but had forgotten about it. Thank you for the reminder haha.
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