KingOfTheBailey
No bio...
User ID: 1089
Less about rationality concepts themselves and more about my perception of the community. A feeling like watching my intellectual heroes not just stumble, but faceplant: first, a sense of enthusiasm and a sort of pride that there were people (dare I say, "my people"?) looking to transcend their flaws and start looking seriously at the hardest, most important problem in history — how to align a superintelligence. HMPOR is one of the most engaging works I've ever read; despite EY's often odd prose and the weirdness of the characters, it rewards close reading and sets out both a vision and a warning. And with the sequences (not just EY's, but other writers as well), you get a pretty inspiring offer: learn all this stuff, it will teach you how to win, and then deploy that to win the most important problem in history. Then dismay and disappointment as I learned that even these hardened epistemic defenses were no match for Berkeley, that rationalists ended up more interested in polyamorous group houses than solving the most important problem in history, and only slightly less vulnerable to the woke mind virus than the average normie. @zackmdavis' writing on the trans question takes a long time to get to the point, but it's an important one: there is a reality, and even the most ingroup members of what's meant to be the most reality-connected community threw out all of their epistemic standards just to let their friends claim an alternate sex. This seems to me to mean that even if we succeed at AI-don't-kill-everyone, any AGIs/ASIs we do get will be unacceptably decoupled from reality on at least the woke and trans questions, and anything connected to those. Since if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy, solving the "AI-don't-kill-everyone" problem becomes harder if you don't even allow yourself to see reality while you're solving it.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Last time I tried, I couldn't dodge the "provide a phone number or another email" bit. Will have to try on a VPN.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Some follow-ups, now that I've had the chance to read some of the books. Much of "The Problem of Susan" seems to collapse if its author had read more of the series, instead of considering that final scene in isolation. This locks your counter-analysis into working from scraps, when there's stuff about Susan's attitude in the other books. Even in Prince Caspian, Susan starts to turn away from Aslan and deny what she sees:
"But I've been far worse than you know. I really believed it was him— [Aslan], I mean — yesterday. When he warned us not to go down to the fir wood. And I really believed it was him tonight, when you woke us up. I mean, deep down inside. Or I could have, if I'd let myself. But I just wanted to get out of the woods and — and — oh, I don't know. And what ever am I to say to him?"
At the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's something which looks like the first signs of the invitation-chasing Susan you've been discussing:
It would have cost too much money to take the other three all to America, and Susan had gone. Grown-ups thought her the pretty one of the family and she was no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age) and Mother said she "would get far more out of a trip to America than the youngsters".
At the end of your post, you write:
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back.
But at the end of Prince Caspian, Peter tells Edmund and Lucy that it's probably his last time in Narnia: "At least, from what he said, I'm pretty sure he means you to get back some day. But not Su and me. He says we're getting too old." I'm still working through the books so I don't know if that's the last word on the matter, or whether "too old" means something other than chronological age.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
deporting some relatively small number of non-citizen foreigners
There's a "Zero to One" sort of effect here, though: once you have a legal mechanism in place to effect something like this, expanding the program looks like a small tweak to an accepted policy instead of a radical shift.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
Your example is a wholesale, cohesive reimagining of a setting. That's really common with Shakespeare's stuff, as opposed to WotC using a dartboard to decide what characters to swap.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
Ursula's character is also deliberately modeled on a drag queen and very interested in corrupting young Ariel. I am surprised that I haven't seen anti-groomer culture warriors run with this.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a sci-fi masterpiece hiding inside Civilization 2.5 IN SPACE and some pretty clunky UI. But it is well worth the price of admission, especially now there are fan patches. When a 2000s video game can make a Christian fundamentalist into a sympathetic character, you know it's doing something right.
From the mouth of one of the game's seven leaders:
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
— Commissioner Pravin Lal, “U.N. Declaration of Rights”
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
That's hilarious, imagine spamming ham radio with queer propoganda!
This is exactly what the linked twitter post is pointing at: thinking it not just funny, but hilarious, to have another political tribe turn up and run roughshod over existing members and culture. I imagine that you don't really see the existing members as "people" if you think it's that funny. Potential further reading: Status 451 on Social Gentrification.
I've been in all-male workplaces where talking about sex and sex acts was commonplace (there were porno magazines in the break room).
Me too, but not to that level. And yes, it's just as inappropriate and I don't like it.
It seems like what you're describing is the same thing my trans friends are describing with regard to Harry Potter content? Am I wrong there?
No, I see important differences:
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It's an explicit attempt to take over and change norms of a group and amp up the sexual content therein. A topic ban doesn't fix that.
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Video game streamers are expected to talk about the latest video game. People are expected to avoid movie forums if they're trying to see the latest blockbuster without spoilers. They don't get to demand the entire internet censors itself for their sensibilities. Same principle here.
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It is Not Allowed to push back against trans anything, and saying "please stop turning this technical discussion space into your transition support group" reliably gets one accused of being hateful or phobic.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
On the "starting a club" side, this "make it a Thing" post/link-to-tweet-thread seems relevant: https://cimmerianmists.substack.com/p/on-reading-the-classics
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
It may not have been a general puritanical thing, and my memory is fuzzy when it comes to the precise ordering of 201x socjus scandals, but it could well have been the accidental prototype that people picked up and ran with. Scott wrote his meditations on livejournal in ~2012, and the elevator incident became the type specimen of "If you ask her out, what's the worst that can happen? She says no?".
And despite being warned about the dangers of superweapon-builders, here we are. Confined to an obscure internet forum because it turns out that superweapons are pretty powerful.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
That gets you "nobody can see my vote", but you can still be coerced into showing your vote. There are clever algorithms using homomorphic encryption which allow votes to be tallied without revealing who voted for whom, and let you verify that your vote was counted without revealing what it was. But you still need someone to implement it in a system which selects lowest-bid contracts, and to convince the voting public that your magic math system cannot be cheated.
People need to understand a voting system to believe in it (see: 2020), and so I'd much rather a heavy clampdown on postal voting, and a return to hand-counting everywhere. Other first world nations can do this, so why can't we?
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I think it comes from Handwaving Freakoutery, and I think this is the first post on that topic: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/memespace-egregores-and-google-maps
Not sure when it took off around here.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
KingOfTheBailey
19d ago
Once you realize that most people lack intellectual standards or believe in the principles they claim each week, you can go looking for the people who actually do.
KingOfTheBailey
24d ago
Don't listen to the feminists. You are not a monster for being attracted to women, It is okay for men to like women, it's okay to court women you're interested in, sex is not something men take from women but rather something men and women can share. Don't have such a stick up your ass about proper behavior. Instead, enjoy flirting with the cute girl at the supermarket, or at college, or...
Maybe then I wouldn't have missed the signals. Maybe then I wouldn't have been too scared to say something. Maybe then I wouldn't have waited for an imagined thing with the girl back home who wasn't that interested. Maybe then I wouldn't be the last one left as all my friends paired off and started families.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
The Time Magazine Piece about the coordination after the 2020 election makes me think this is false, and that there is a lot of coordination.
KingOfTheBailey
2mo ago
Is this Cultist Simulator but for Castaway?
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
Enshittification originally meant when a platform linking two sides of a market (e.g., Uber) screws over both sides as it desperately tries to become profitable.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
I don't have any good examples. Graham and Determinate Systems seem to be trying to do this with their custom Nix installer, FlakeHub, etc. If they succeed in making a better user experience, then the default Nix experience becomes de facto controlled by a corporate entity instead of the Nix project and Foundation.
Declaring an explicitly antiwoke project will not work: it provokes a reaction and gets taken down before it becomes entrenched, and attracts witches more than contributors. Someone wanting to do something like this would hide his power level, build things that people depended upon, and make damn sure those projects don't get subverted, and work towards positions of community power and influence. I don't know how you defend against hostile forks.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Not just GoF research. After three years of misery caused by people playing God just to publish marginally more interesting papers than their peers, we now have a bunch of people racing to create a digital God, with who-knows-what outcome.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
That's a bit of an over-simplification, isn't it? Mercenaries have been a thing all through history, but it's an economic zone isn't going to inspire a volunteer army.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
On anything vaguely controversial, it is really worth reading the talk page and checking the edit history. This is one of the best and least-used things about Wikipedia: you can inspect the sausage as it's being made.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames?More options
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