@SamoBurja @0nn04 Don't think so, personally. LW is in a weird place where it is nominally affiliated with a bunch of generative thinkers but none of them would really identify with it these days, not even Scott Alexander probably.
@mr_scientism Anti-capitalist thinkers presumably maintain this blindspot on purpose, acknowledging it would force them to grapple with having reinvented Fascism:
worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Readβ¦
@Aella_Girl I think a lot of people experience modernity as a kind of unhinged exhibitionism of monstrosity and ugliness. A lot of these people do in fact want to stuff things back in the closet on the principle that if they can't see the suffering it's not real.
@Aella_Girl Neoliberalism rewards the people who are extreme. It's a high variance contest dominated by the combination of extreme beauty and extreme ugliness.
blakemasters.com/post/245786838β¦
Modern capital is a freakshow. Mopers imagine 1955 wasn't, but back then they'd likely have it worse. https://t.co/QPrCrpyK5X
@yashkaf https://t.co/0EZKhkDP4s
It's early but, going to go ahead and deem this take of the night unless someone comes up with something extraordinary. x.com/vgr/status/132β¦
@MacaesBruno No matter who wins, we all lose. The closeness means anyone who ekes a win out of this is going to be considered a thief by the other side.
This but for everything is increasingly how I expect things to go. Whatever carefully coordinated good outcomes are necessary for things not to be a mess, that stuff *will not* happen and we will get the mess.
"Doesn't that mean we're all going to die?"
Naively, yes. x.com/sonyasupposedlβ¦
@PresentWitness_ @nosilverv https://t.co/nfvPffiTvU
@QiaochuYuan @goblinodds No it makes you a meme lord. Here, have a copy of my upcoming rationality book: https://t.co/CIECcL6U9g
Maybe the Libertarian party should rebrand to have members fill out their ballots to maximize the probability of gridlock. x.com/Reuters/statusβ¦
@nosilverv Isn't the canonical answer to the fat man version that pushing fat guys off bridges has costs external to the scenario that are greater than the local benefits? Who actually says 'yes' on the fat guy problem?
@nosilverv Spoiler: That feeling of wrongness is your brain trying to tell you something. It has information in it that will let you be LessWrong if you pay attention to what's inside.
@nosilverv @AlecStapp People who grew up with an epistemology have no idea how lower class people think. It is literally beyond their comprehension to conceive of thinking that broken. The truth is outside their search space.
Source: Grew up without an epistemology.
@nosilverv This is a General Problem that's shocking in others once you stop doing it. We train people that depression is meaningless, It Just Happens. Ditto burnout, et al. Feelings are often *about stuff*, most brains are not so broken that 'on the fritz' is a sane default hypothesis.
@nosilverv @AlecStapp A pattern to look for: Lower class people will talk about the official narrative being fake/etc, but they're not actually *reacting* to the 'official narrative'. That would require them to know what it is. A conspiracy theorist is an interested citizen with bad epistemics.
@nosilverv @AlecStapp When you know how the system is supposed to work you do all your political thinking with that as a backdrop. But the lower class does not understand civics and they do not think in consistent models or systems. They think in e.g. stories that are allowed to contradict each other.
@nosilverv @AlecStapp And conspiracy theories are just lower effort than real info. You think CTs want someone in control? Nonsense. They want information on a budget, and like any ruthless product targeting poor people CT is salient and hits information-density heuristics now divorced from reality.
@nosilverv e.g. I got better at dealing with 'burnout' once I realized that 'burnout' usually means "You are sinking lots of effort into tasks that are misaligned with your values, pulling the plug until you reorient."
Almost always the case, didn't know until I stopped and reevaluated.
@nosilverv Often when you have a feeling like that, you have No Idea what is wrong. But that weird tingle, sense of reluctance, etc, is your clue to stop and check if you're missing something. Go in with the hypothesis that there is a cause. Finding and intervening usually makes it better.
@nosilverv @AlecStapp Conspiracy theories are insight porn, full stop:
youtube.com/watch?v=sUIcCyβ¦
They *feel* like compressed info explaining lots of things, but they're not. If your epistemology is nonexistent though, this is way more captivating than the sparse chaos that is real geopolitical info.
@nosilverv tl;dr: Instead of asking "How do I stop feeling this way?" ask "*Why* do I feel this way?", and then really pay attention to yourself, your surroundings, what you're doing, your life trajectory, etc to look for the answer. The How will then generally make itself obvious.
@cbystarlight @nosilverv @AlecStapp Seems plausible. When I was younger I got deep into the rabbit hole, hung out on forums where CT were a regular topic of conversation.
There is a meaningful difference between the way e.g. the uber-nerd and the disenfranchised young man would engage, nerd more skeptical/musing.
@cbystarlight @nosilverv @AlecStapp Think it's also underappreciated the extent to which 'QAnon'/et al isn't new. The events I'm talking about were in 2007-ish, I got to see these guys start the Tea Party. Not fringe, also not differentiated. This kind of thing freely mixes into the right wing gossip mill.
@cbystarlight @nosilverv @AlecStapp CT is insight porn. IMO the big differentiator is taste. CT is like the cheap booze of political theory, some people are allergic for status reasons while others are wealthy and don't mind being seen with that $10 wine bottle. CT died for me after I learned to track predictions.
Biden only gets halfway closer to winning the race with each step he takes so the election can never end.
@pee_zombie Am not grillpilled, but do think anyone serious at this stage needs to accept society has failed and start prepping for a dark age/collapse.
@pee_zombie Most of what we're seeing at this point is a high-cortisol distraction from anything like real work, the ideal is to exit from it; nothing good can come from this kind of poison.
Albert Bouchard came out with ReImaginos today, an acoustic redo of Sandy Pearlman's Imaginos concept album that was botched in the 80's:
youtube.com/watch?v=dzQ7HJβ¦
Pseudiom has a good documentary on the album's history:
youtube.com/watch?v=WprUq_β¦
Pearlman was an interesting dude.
It feels less bad if you stop thinking of "consumption charity" (e.g. donating to local schools) as genuine altruism and more as local collective action. The market for genuine altruistic acts is a lot smaller. x.com/Goodtweet_man/β¦
@JoeBiden @GreatDismal Don't be ridiculous, you won by a hair thin margin. If you don't want the Democrats to lose (bigly, even) in the 2022 midterms you will be sensitive to the fact that half the country wanted the orange tyrant over you.
@michaelcurzi Korzybski said the same, one of his big things is the idea that 'unsanity' can be cured through better thinking habits.
Unfortunately schizophrenia can't be, and this led people to dismiss the idea as crankish. Back then the causes of schizophrenia weren't understood.
@michaelcurzi Bruce Kodish has a good biography of Korzybski out. You'd probably like it. There's an abridged web version, and then an exhaustingly-long but well researched paperback.
@MacaesBruno @CBS Feel like you underestimate the impact of psycho-social-cybernetic warfare. It's an old tactic to force the enemy to be on alert for extended periods to wear them out and down. Knowing the attack is not coming is a real win.
@MacaesBruno @CBS I think you're still correct that a great deal of this is imaginary, but don't discount the parts that are real. You need some reality in the scenario in order to exaggerate it.
I think it's easy to run the take "this is all imaginary" on cyberwar because it's so abstract. When you're N steps removed from the physical underpinnings of the conflict, it's much easier to distort things and point to the distortion as evidence that the threat isn't real. x.com/MacaesBruno/stβ¦
@micsolana @drethelin scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&β¦
Don't think anyone has done the study.
Can we please make the president less powerful? x.com/JohnHolbein1/sβ¦
@akarlin88 @UnzReview So where are you heading after they kick UnzReview off?
@the_aiju Legend says the philosopher Zeno, famed for his belief in determinism, beat a slave for stealing.
The slave insisted that the beating was unjust because fate had ordained he would steal.
Zeno replied that fate had ordained Zeno thrash him for it.
You could be either of them.
@vgr @sarahdoingthing Probably for the better. One of my friends claims to have stopped reading anything you write after he outlined one of your books point by point and realized everything in it was wrong.
That style of writing isn't conducive to saying true things IMO.
@vgr Pretty sure we just identify as zoomers, if we buy into that whole thing.
@michaelcurzi @kilovh @0x49fa98 Any other B people in the audience?
@michaelcurzi @kilovh @0x49fa98 Finding people in the B camp who haven't had their moral intuitions irreparably broken by it (e.g. negative utilitarianism) is difficult, hence my interest.
@yashkaf [USER WAS CANCELLED FOR THIS POST]
@pee_zombie I refused to leave the rationalists until I understood the things that made it special so well that they wouldn't be eroded if I went places where they weren't the default assumptions.
By the time I boiled it all down I noticed there wasn't a community left to leave.
@Richard_Vixen @zackmdavis "A Historical Friend is someone you became friends with in the first place because you met when you were little and stayed friends through the years, even though youβre a very weird match. "
waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/10-typβ¦
A lot of Twitter is just neo-street-preaching.
@SeanMombo Sometimes I think back to that and realize I will never get to spend my time on something so trivial without worry again.
Twitter is a successful contract between authors and readers about what to expect from their writing.
@goblinodds It's more like a challenge response system, you 'bid' on a certain amount of status and other people decide if they're gonna let you have it or not.
@goblinodds Don't bid, you don't get.
A referendum on suicide invalidates the system that proposed it.
@vgr Before a tsunami hits, the tide recedes.
@the_aiju I can't tell if the misuse of 'countersignaling' was deliberate or not, which honestly makes the tweet even better.
@MacaesBruno Accidentally repeated a sentence: "What was meant as a kind of virtual nationalism might acquire a more literal character if Trump was allowed to consolidate his power during a second term."
@EricRWeinstein The play is a tragedy and its protagonist is Man. Derailing the plot is the only way any of us survive the 21st century.
We live in a "might makes right" universe, your sense of good was defined by adaption to that principle. There is a very real sense in which good is supposed to be mighty. x.com/sonyasupposedlβ¦
Very few people apply "might makes right" the whole way through, failing to save the phenomena.
arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utiliβ¦
If you find yourself despairing that truth, love, and justice are kicking your ass because they're defying telos you've gone astray somewhere.
@SeanMombo Reminder that the alternative is to hope things never get better than this.
Strong dystopian energy in this thread. x.com/alexisohanian/β¦
Postmodernity's problems are mostly about people disrupting positive and zero sum equilibriums they have a poor position in for a temporary advantage in a new negative sum game that ultimately hurts everyone.
250bpm.com/blog:113/ x.com/robkhenderson/β¦
@robinhanson @MorlockP Here, someone whose only contribution to discourse is diffuse malaise.
@shadowcat_mst Yeah when I say "postmodernity", I just mean that as the time period we're living in. (Since, I think that's a reasonable characterization of the era that gives us Donald Trump/et al)
YMMV, but the emotional peak of 2020 for me was the end of March through May. The world stopped and things became quiet, few cars and no planes, genuine stillness in the air while I did my research. Noticed I never wanted the noise back.
The Mood: youtube.com/watch?v=6fpV2fβ¦ x.com/jmrphy/status/β¦
@ESYudkowsky choosing the name 'rationality' for his philosophy was a wide invitation for this kind of weak criticism. I wonder if like Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics, he's updated and desperately wishes he'd called it anything else.
Doubt it. x.com/nosilverv/statβ¦
@psukhopompos @dchem @nosilverv Not really. This is mostly caricature.
I really need to start a gallery of these inkblot tweets you can read as being about multiple very different things. t.co/lTD71f6HIf
@dchem @psukhopompos @nosilverv They asked "Is the joke real?" and I replied "No."
@gigafelon @mattparlmer Yes, I use one (TinyTinyRSS).
@selentelechia "They go low and we go high" means if the virus's death rate gets 10x lower you have to care 10x as much.
Crazy to think that Bob Truax knew raw materials were 2% of the cost of a rocket in the 1970's and therefore rocket size barely impacts costs but it took Elon Musk in the 2000's to execute on this.
My wallet and/or salivary glands have to suffer knowing you can buy weird marginal candies on the Internet (e.g. Amazon).
Now you have to suffer too.
@vgr Most people in one of these settings wouldn't be aware of the protagonist.
@eigenrobot youtube.com/watch?v=Gm85Odβ¦
@vgr What I was trying to imply is that most people in one of these settings don't have that either. ;)
Authorial perspective gives us the privilege of a clear logic to the setting, but the people inside the setting don't have access to that logic or it wouldn't work.
If we're going to cancel the debt I think we need to cancel some colleges as well. x.com/DamonLinker/stβ¦
@captain_mrs Give a brief sketch?
@captain_mrs My personal hypothesis is in fact that "Kegan 5" is actually just where verbalizing the paradigm outstrips the level of <something> we're not used to having to differentiate in language. Intuitively feel like any serious philosopher hits Kegan 5 fairly early and keeps going.
@captain_mrs e.g. Any programmer who actually understands programming I'd almost have to imagine hits Kegan 5 at some point; the 'stages' are reached by necessity. Don't develop a systematic mode until systems are useful, don't develop a meta-systematic mode until you're juggling systems.
@captain_mrs From an information theory view at some point trying to compress everything you're dealing with into one big map (i.e. graph) becomes impossible, trying warps in shape from the CPU limits of the human doing it.
Eventually meta-systematic becomes the path of least resistance.
Maybe after that we can discuss the myriad ways that censorship is part and parcel of basic functions like 'filtering noise' or 'enforcing state interests' and then ask how we want to implement our policies around those things?
i.e. Censorship will happen, the question is how. t.co/WlQUhVCgnZ https://t.co/Mn5VJY1ewF
Is there a good word yet for culture war linguistic invention?
Thinking similar dynamics and aims as clubs, brass knuckles, et al, but based on the embarrassing and Malthusian lives of Millennials and Zoomers.
They're very problematic. t.co/gR3QnGd3ag
@Triquetrea π https://t.co/ZtQMzsnxVQ
@Cary_Bleasdale @eigenrobot sl4.org/shocklevels.htβ¦
πIMMORTAL πSPACE πGODS πOR πBUSTπ
@ArmandDoma @paulg To reframe furtherβstartups that become successful become powerful, and that is almost always going to threaten someone else's lunch. If you don't have haters it probably means you're not doing anything important.
@eslewhere stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/11/dβ¦
I still think about the $12 cell phone made by Chinese indie devs because their electronics ecosystem lets you easily play with production quality hardware and fork designs, while prototype hardware in the West is underpowered.
bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=β¦
bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 https://t.co/Dtk0FwDtTC
Feels analogous to the scene in Asimov's *Foundation* where the decaying empire has nothing comparable to the portable shield generators worn by Foundation agents.
@SamoBurja The college debt problem is an instance of the more general problem of dealing with occupational licensing & guilds. When moats exist for so long that practitioners have plausible deniability knowing there was anything unethical about the system, how to/should we compensate them?
@IvanDenker @SamoBurja Younger, usually made by people who are stung by the traditions so they fail to take proper inspiration from them, often inadequate radical conjecture (e.g. heart of liberalism is just categorically weaker than something like transhumanist mania).
@IvanDenker @SamoBurja Notice critiques of e.g. rationalists basically always focus on 'social stuff' and the weakness of Bayesianism or whatever, very rarely on the high future shock parts; those are much stronger so people contend with them less often.
This essay is bad, but that it gets written is interesting. x.com/balajis/statusβ¦
@zackmdavis @2xminus1 @getpelican Why Pelican over Jekyll?
@zackmdavis @2xminus1 @getpelican ΡΠ»Π°Π±ΡΠΉ!
@zackmdavis @2xminus1 @getpelican Oh, not at all, I was joking. They're both pretty similar pieces of software, though I've found Pelican to be a bit less featureful when I've used it.
Zero. All philosophies contain absurdity and paradox, the question is what kind of paradox you want to be dealing with. x.com/parallaxopticsβ¦
@RobertWringhim True religion involves radical conjecture, radical truth, if it doesn't totally shift priorities it's not religion.
@wormwood_stars Dennou Coil. https://t.co/66dP889i3h
@eigenrobot @0x49fa98 @shlevy Synthesis position is that contradiction is inevitable but most people tolerate way too much contradiction.
Musk claims to have noticed raw material costs are miniscule on his own, which is an interesting case of convergent reasoning if true. x.com/jd_pressman/st⦠https://t.co/P4NDHkhjDC
Also interesting that both engineers decided to christen their ship Dragon. https://t.co/slYFhkgter
And of course both seek to make a reusable cargo rocket launched from the sea.
Actually doing this is another story, one which Musk seems to be excelling at. https://t.co/PtCIsZTGI8
@pee_zombie firstthings.com/article/2020/1β¦
@nosilverv A friend was kind enough to outline one of my draft essays for me, and that was when I learned with horror how people *actually* read my writing.
Nuance mostly just gets compressed down, afaict. e.g. A paragraph about someone likely being wrong becomes "this person is wrong".
@nosilverv And this is not a stupid person, they've worked at multiple FAANG companies bla bla bla. Their summary of my essay still read like horror to me.
@AbstractFairy @nosilverv Yeah, that one was enough for me to be like "Okay, no new essays until January 1st of 2021".
@disconcerta Rolling around in a blob of my own belly fat as I continue to eat all these consequence free lunches I'm getting.
"You have weak feeding instincts" I say to the gathered rodents, who jealously gawk at my superior physique.
"Want my pile of utility?" I purr, my basilisk eyes
@chimeracoder @whitequark There were a few weeks where you could be smarter than the CDC by punching "SARS asymptomatic spread" or something into Google Scholar.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/Pβ¦
@chimeracoder @whitequark Though, technically this study doesn't say an asymptomatic person can *spread* SARS-1, the entire concept seemed pooh-poohed too quickly by American doctors for my tastes.
Especially since they were wrong, and all.
@owenbroadcast Every so often I think about how we recreated historical fencing techniques entirely from dueling manuals. Revival is possible in this sort of situation, but it's better not to have died in the first place.
@scholasticia @owenbroadcast This is one of the several reasons it's better not to have died in the first place.
@pee_zombie @vgr Not sure this is a good idea: reducing-suffering.org/the-importanceβ¦
Do think the lack of realism about meat in climate change plans is a signal that Western governments have already decided not to do anything about it.
@achalaugustine @NickClairmont1 People can sense that, I think.
And it does make a difference.
x.com/BennettJonah/sβ¦
@adamsears @NickClairmont1 @KelseyTuoc This guy has found the underlying problem, not just with this but with everything else too. https://t.co/T6XBuLoPs4
Our society has reached stream entry. Now it will cycle through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, and 2000's until they all occur simultaneously and enlightenment is achieved.
US judiciary is its last good institution, would love to see a case analysis breaking down why US judges are so good where the rest of the country is falling apart and thoroughly corrupt. x.com/KenneyBaden/stβ¦
Rewrote my essay on alchemy and transhumanism. A story of convergent philosophical evolution, liquid gold elixirs, polyamorous rocket scientists trying to summon the antichrist, and picking up trash on the beach.
wrestlinggnon.com/extropy/2020/0β¦ https://t.co/LQNjHH2MI1
Scholar's Stage sums up the erosion of the intellectual commons:
scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/11/why-i-β¦
I feel like his analysis is missing the elephant in the room: We just spent the last four years under conditions of intense cyberwar.
A thread. 1/N
Trump has been the cyberwar presidency. He's pioneered a new form of psychic warfare that lets him constantly saber rattle in ways that people can't ignore. When you're the president people are forced to take your threats seriously, no matter how often you make them.
His position has basically let him act like a culture wars jammer, spewing noise and anxiety into every conceivable channel of communication. The last four years have been Trump Trump Trump, and all the oxygen got sucked out of the room.
As I put it to a friend, this is much better than zero days. Maybe if you hit Twitter with a really good zero day and go for maximum vandalism, you can take the site down for a few weeks.
Trump basically took Twitter down for four years, and television news, etc.
It also works much better because using a zero day to take down Twitter is parsed as naked force, people would route around it. But Trump can code his garbage as data/value, turning the Internet's curation & delivery heuristics against it to sabotage communication.
Everyone thinks about "cyberwar" in terms of breaking into datacenters and sabotaging nuclear plants, but Trump has shown that can be primitive compared to the damage you can do with memetics and insiders.
Consider the stuff we weren't discussing because Trump was shinier.
On the other side of the aisle, you have sanctioned left wing witch hunts that seem to pick people off at random. The use of pseudorandom sacrificial violence isn't a bug, it's a feature; it works just like a panopticon.
outsidertheory.com/control-societβ¦
You only need to 'sample' a certain number of targets for digital mobbing to raise the costs of speaking beyond what most actors are willing to pay. People are going underground because the commons is both eagerly serving up noise and much more dangerous than ever before.
None of this can be blamed on any one faction or institution, many things come together to create this outcome. One is the return of yellow journalism, where it's gone from oligarchy to monopolistic competition trending towards perfect competition. Malthusian agents play dirty.
Another is the changing way we handle identity on the Internet. After Eternal September people mostly used 'net with pseudonyms, you went online to become someone else. MySpace and its descendants brought the drama and local bickering of 'real life' into the digital realm.
Contrary to popular belief, real name policies do not make people act more courteous: They provide more attack surface for bullies and partisans. The normalization of putting yourself out there has been pouring gasoline on the fire, making people nastier.
youtube.com/watch?v=g-blW6β¦
Another factor is the increasing use of forums like Twitter, Tumblr, etc that actively incentivize hyperviral, easily compressed content. It turns out nuance doesn't compress well, extremism and partisanship does.
youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-β¦
Caricatures compress better than real peoples personalities, slogans and extreme simplifications of policy questions compress better than thought out papers. Hyperpenalizing length doesn't get you the same ideas but short, it selects for qualitatively different things altogether.
@mattparlmer Everyone forgets that Switzerland was the OG land of freedom.
@JimDMiller Scott is just on hiatus, he'll be back soon, with cancel hardened funding & lifestyle.
reddit.com/r/slatestarcod⦠https://t.co/SIlTSnJvKb
@pee_zombie @pervexists69 I have a mastodon server but can't find anyone worth federating with.
@pee_zombie @pervexists69 I'd rather not be running the postrat server, since I'm more "rat" than "postrat", but if there's really demand...
@EpistemicHope Vaccines are annoying in that you give them out at volume where if they have even moderate adverse side effects that can get very costly.
@michael_nielsen The part of the gospel of ramakrishna where he mimics the divine mother until he attains a sort of quasi-divinity to others is one of my favorites.
ramakrishnavivekananda.info/gospel/introduβ¦
@sonyasupposedly Rappaport's Conspirator: Lenin In Exile.
I like the way it focuses on Lenin as a character without spending too much time on moral judgment or axe grinding.
Also provides insight into the realities of organizing, most of Lenin's time seems to have been spent on drama and LARP. https://t.co/KnF9kOlZtn
@sonyasupposedly The dumb subculture drama would be familiar to anyone who is well acquainted with the Internet.
@amolitor99 @SwiftOnSecurity To my memory this is Penn and Teller's advice on magic tricks. The key to developing a successful magic trick is to put in way more effort than anyone would imagine possible to get the effect.
Anthropics imply you'll only observe timelines where a singleton uploads everyone or we all merge into the Borg. Others cease to exist once someone invents a 25 cent method to vacuum collapse the universe.
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