madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
1d ago
The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim.
I think the bit with Kellhus was great. He starts out set up as the protagonist and it slowly dawns on you that he's completely inhuman on the inside and closer to the Lovecraftian horrors of the setting than a person. And it feels like the book's aware of this, the whole thing is a send-off of the whole ultracompetent fantasy protagonist trope, someone set out to actually engineer one and created a walking nightmare.
madeofmeat
1d ago
Nope, still doesn't work for me. Historical people had regular everyday religious practice with forms (who are the priests, what do we believe?) and regularity (church every Sunday). Everyday people want to commune with the gods, ask them for help, and worship them, and knowing that there's this bearded clever guy, alien hippie or demon warlord out there somewhere who can kinda maybe do some magic doesn't change this. But people in Middle-Earth don't seem to ever do this or have any sort of traditions or institutions for it.
madeofmeat
1d ago
Religion is so touchy. Tolkien got it perfect, everyone else tends to either make religion too immanent and just another magical mechanic
Tolkien had a supernatural cosmology he'd put a lot of thought in, sure, but he has very little in-universe religion. As far as we can tell from The Lord of the Rings, there's no clergy in Middle-Earth and the people don't have any particular religious beliefs they could explain or religious practices and traditions they follow. This was intentional, but it makes everyone feel like 20th century WEIRD people who cringe from espousing the actual metaphysical claims of their local traditional religion even when they don't want to outright denounce it as false.
madeofmeat
2d ago
But you wouldn't normally expect an imbecile to be able to do anything like this. That's why it's something to note.
Martin Bryant of Port Arthur massacre fame was in special education and was estimated to have IQ 66 as an adult.
madeofmeat
5d ago
I only want to contest part of your first point here. Maybe we just disagree on this or have radically different experiences but a lot of FOSS that I’ve used over the years is straight dogshit. Granted not all of it but a damn good amount of it. Libre Office in contrast with Microsoft? Yeah, you’ve lost me there.
The office suite is an interesting example because for non-programmer computer users it's probably the main point of doing work on the computer, while programmers can go for years without touching it at all, and FOSS builders are all programmers. Need a document? Markdown and Pandoc so you don't need to worry about the janky wysiwyg editor. Need to calculate something complex? Spreadsheets are a fragile mess, anything more complex than a shopping list might as well be a quick Python program and anything with a whole bunch of data should go in an actual database. LibreOffice specifically is going to stay bad because the people who could improve it don't care about office suites and won't dogfood one.
madeofmeat
23d ago
If this happened, it wasn't at LessWrong. EY got frustrated with LWs moderation capabilities and culture in the early 2010s, decamped to Facebook and Twitter where he could freely block anyone who annoyed him and never really returned to LessWrong for anything other than occasional drive-by comments. Meanwhile LessWrong generally doesn't delete the publicly visible user accounts when someone is banned, and there's no user account page for qntm.
madeofmeat
23d ago
You were talking about a LessWrong purge, but I can't find these people's LW accounts that have gone quiet. David Friedman has an active one that advertises meetups and doesn't seem to have ever participated in comments. He's been a regular commenter over at slatestarcodex and seems to always have been received well there. I don't know who Baaj, Barnaby or Paniookah are and google didn't find any comments by these names in LessWrong or SSC. I'm not aware of QNTM ever interacting much directly with the LessWrong sphere.
madeofmeat
23d ago
That said, in 2014 - 2015 LessWrong saw a purge of long time commentors and contributors for their refusal to get on board with Wild Animal suffering or all the trans/poly stuff. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that this purge was a significant contributing factor to the decline of LessWrong 1.0 and the subsequent relaunch of LW 2.0 as a more explicitly MIRI-oriented activist space.
I don't remember anything like this. If they were long time commentors, you can surely name some of them.
Because I think every side is wrong. We don't actually know how to organize society right now and need to figure it out. We also don't seem to be smart enough to figure it out theoretically, so we're stuck doing live cultural evolution. Liberalism is a loosening of cultural norms, and you can read two purposes to it. One is that it gives space for figuring things out when you have big changes in material circumstances, like mass literacy, the industrial revolution or social media. The other is that the lack of oppressive norms is an end in itself and the way to the good life. The first one makes sense, the second one is quite a bit iffier, but the second one is also a simpler idea and if things get vulgarized it's a tempting hole to fall into. Things seemed to work pretty well up until around 2010 when social media showed up and broke some invisible precondition for 20th century liberalism. The message then quickly morphed into one where we have figured things out, just don't be a dick, only bad people are disagreeing. We need to wind down this whole free speech nonsense since we know what's right and what's wrong already. Oh, and we're totally going to be explicitly racist from now on. I'm not buying this as the end of history, and I'm not sure the system would self-correct on its own.
Outside pressure will force the sides stay sharp, adapt to their terrain and come up with new ways to act, instead of everyone ending up chasing the same bureaucratically assigned goal and stagnating. The multipolar world also keeps bringing attention to the pain points of each faction, like Catholic sex abuse scandals, immigrant crime in Europe or the crippling lack of human capital in current US right wing, when the factions themselves would prefer to just suppress discussion of the matter and leave the problem to fester. I'm hoping that poking at these will eventually build up to a broader understanding of what works and what doesn't and what can be changed to improve things in the future.
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