Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
How long have you been around rationalist-adjacent spaces?
I found Scott in 2013 or 2014, possibly via LJ. I remember discussing "Universal Love Said the Cactus Person" with a friend IRL who brought it up and he previously had never mentioned reading SSC. Somewhere in there I found /r/SSC because in 2016 I saw a notice for a meetup taking place 5 minutes away from my house and didn't go because I found many people active in /r/SSC off-putting. I stopped paying close attention to Scott after the 2017 Kolmogorov entry. I remember /r/theMotte being created and then /r/SneerClub with the latter being distilled perfection of what I didn't like about so many /r/SSC posters to start with plus reddit overall. I guess that's about where I stopped paying close attention because it was only much later that I became aware of this site starting separately to escape reddit, the TW/schism hullaballo, and some other subsequent happenings.
Because I have a strong memory that works in strange ways, it's a bizarre feeling to recognize a few user names from ancient /r/SSC days (Zorba, Hlynka, gattsuru, etc.), or look into /r/SSC now and see a few users I dislike still plugging away, and realize I've been paying attention (or at least mildly aware) of their written output for a decade.
I think 2013 is a fair shout in my case, that was probably when I was in high school and accidentally stumbled onto LW or SSC. Can't recall which one came first, but the other must have followed shortly thereafter.
I imagine my initial encounter with The Motte would have been after 2015, since I don't seem to recall engaging in the Culture War threads on the SSC subreddit. I'm confident that I was a regular participant by 2017 when I was a few years into med school.
The greatest melancholy I feel is when I see the upvote or comment counts in the old CWR threads: you can tell we had a lot more people around. To this day, I'm not sure if the migration off of Reddit was entirely warranted, or if we could have managed to avoid the gaze of the Reddit Admins till the political climate changed. While the Motte is definitely in a healthy state, and the fears that we'd collapse to an unsustainably low population didn't materialize, Reddit did make it easier. We had plenty of people stumble across us following a link, or by checking someone's profile.
I once thought about whether writing original articles might be a way to attract a better audience, the way many organically found econlib and ssc, like I did.
Reddit will only swim leftwards, there are fewer "based" people there, you don't want excessive sneerclub attention.
As for how bad it is, Gina Carano got fired by Disney for normie boomer cuckservative posting, she recently settled with Disney as Musk was happy to foot the bill, every single post about it there is actively hostile.
I'm afraid, if we go back, people will paint a target, or at least the self censorship will neuter quite a bit of what we do.
I feel that the rationalist ideas are played out, we have gone through the bulk of the rat ideas, the vision for me is something new that goes beyond what we already have.
And props to zorba, my last week's comment about the internet being concentrated forgot to include reddit, having your own platform makes you sovereign, it's worth the troubles.
Fwiw, the slatestarcodex reddit is terrible now, it's full of bad ai takes, I think we did the right thing.
Hang on, are we using the same forum? themotte.org?
Yep, most ai takes on ssc are straight up bad and I'm willing to take a bet on llms crashing the markets or fizzling out hard.
Language models aren't going to lead to agi, asi, whatever they wish to describe it with. I go there and see smart people steeped in religious reverence, the sort mullahs have for Allah.
Scotts piece was terrible and the initial hullabaloo on AI takeoff was hilariously bad. My personal take is that we will never achieve it, and taking bets that cost nearly a trillion is not smart.
Finance barons are looked at as evil people who would fuck over the average Joe during a recession to get bailed out, what happens if techies do it?
Attaching random percentages to things and asking for studies for every thing stops being helpful after a while. Rationalists will deeply regret their ai takes.
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