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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1377 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026

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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So I'm trying to get my book published, and part of that process is trying to find someone to agent my [science fiction/fantasy] book by advertising it with a query letter. If the query letter gets an agent interested, the next step is for them to request my full manuscript-- but so far, I haven't had any luck getting agents to bite. Is anyone willing to read over my query letter and give me feedback? I'd love to get advice from anyone already involved in the publishing industry, but honestly if you've ever read the inside flap of a book before deciding whether to read it you have all the experience required to give me actionable advice

(I'll send the query letter via DM if anyone expresses interest. I don't want to post it publicly because my book is hopefully going to be associated with my real name and I don't want to link it with an account that reveals my power level lol.)

If it's for a novel, I'd be happy to. Please DM me. I might even ask you to return the favour!

Absolutely! DMing now.

Might want to clarify if it’s a fictional or non-fictional book. The processes can be quite different.

Sounds like it’s fictional, given the potential of a full manuscript request instead of just a sample chapter or sample chapters.

How many agents have you tried? It’s like online dating (for men) or job-searching, radio silence is the norm. It’s entirely possible your query letter is fine.

It is fiction, will clarify in the OP. I submitted to 20 agents and got 15 form rejections. (The other 5 have been out for 100+ days so I'm not holding out hope.) I did deliberately submit to a lot of agents with high response rates, low response times, and concurrently low full request probabilities-- but surveying the querytracker statistics I still should have expected 2-3 full requests if my query was merely "average." Since I can't expect to get published unless I'm well above average, that's a pretty telling sign that I need to fix my shit.

How long do you think The Motte will continue? Will we still be here in thirty years?

30 years is a bit much. Are there any websites from 30 years ago still active? I think there's a good chance we're still here in 10 though.

Are there any websites from 30 years ago still active?

Slashdot is almost there -- granted a shadow of its former self, but I'm pretty sure I could think of more if you need me to. Maybe Zorba will be running an ad-infested MotteMediaCo into his golden years!

I still think this site has strong potential for growth that just hasn’t really been activated. You just have to create an iceberg meme titled obscure and high iq discussion sites and place it in a conspicuously high or low position, and then just post about that in whatever userbase “market” you’re interested in recruiting from. There are like a dozen such gorilla marketing things you can do to 100x the userbase in months, were this desired by the mods / community. That and making the front page more intuitive. You can even select with precision the demographic you want using keywords , going old fashion with magazine ads in top university newspapers… can even market it as a “retro” forum which would work… there’s a lot of unused opportunities tbh. A lot of intelligent people would like to participate in a forum better than Reddit and X!

growth

t. wants the site to be flooded by seven zillion witches

Do you see Scott’s own example image for these supposedly hyper-problematic witches that must be eradicated from all civil discourse? It’s three links: a program that tells you if the entertainment you buy is injected with SJW themes; a video on the frequency of economic schemes in Africa and the risk of their migration to the EU; a black serial killer who targetted only white children. What witchcraft!

The moral of the story is —

that Scott was proven wrong, horrifically so. Scott’s idea (or rather those in agreement with it) paved the way for the BLM hysteria and the largest amount of ineffectively-altruistic charitable giving ever. Were these witches allowed to discourse freely, maybe the public would have double-checked the reports on racial homicide / police stats, and maybe the leaders of Minnesota wouldn’t feel pressured hide the report on billion-dollar Somali schemes, etc. What is so wrong with these witches? They made Scott too uncomfortable? Or is he just not aware that, at the same time, the top stories on Reddit were on all inverses of this supposed witchcraft — a list of the most inclusive games, a story of a successful African immigrant family, a white serial killer who targeted only blacks — these sorts of stories were allowed to proliferate without any counterweights for years.

I digress. Undesirables are now all on x and short form video content; few now have the bandwidth to read two paragraphs.

I am referring to witches who overwhelm the moderators with low-quality posting and thereby indirectly force the moderators to increase and dilute their own ranks (assuming that the moderators are the true defining core of the community), not witches who are racist.

30? We will last 300, at least. @self_made_human will be one of the first uploads and conquer a significant portion of the lightcone, and provide us plenty of resources.

If Trump tomorrow conquers Greenland and says it is US territory - do you think that future 2028 democratic president will return it or the usg will drag their feet for the next couple of centuries on the matter?

In the meantime: https://www.barrons.com/news/greenland-denmark-ask-to-meet-rubio-f0386822

I don't really think anywhere needs more sovereignty than Alabama, so as long as it's made a state I think it's a positive thing to bring it into the union. Good first step to adding Cuba, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and every Canadian province.

Is this the antichrist Peter Thiel keeps talking about?

But you realise that this also means adding their voters and dealing with their opinions/needs, right? At least, unless America goes full-hog imperial.

"Kind of weird how the US has 196 political parties, and all their platforms are 'give us free shit and support our ethnic grudges/neuroses'. Personally, I'm voting for the Greater Serbian Nation party, I just don't like how the Sorry For Being Swedish party is handling the economy."

Yes. 2 senators each, plus a rejiggering of the house.

Basically what @Bartender_Venator said. Integrating foreign polities into your empire means more than a few extra senators hanging around the place.

Leading to a more intensive federalism at home and abroad.

We can start by integrating countries like Greenland, Canada, Singapore which are already compatible.

I see your line of thought, but federalism has only decreased in the last century of high immigration, moving towards machine politics at first (gibs for specific ethnic groups, major jobs assigned by ethnicity, corruption) and then towards straightforward centralising absolutism. I think that you would be gambling big to assume the pattern wouldn't repeat itself.

How many federal countries are there / have there been in history when the federal element had the ability to control the states but refused to do so? (So excluding e.g. the Holy Roman Empire where control just wasn't practical).

Maybe not the most relevant, but Greenland and Iceland both belonged to Denmark in 1939. Iceland, at least, had been agitating for independence for at least a decade. In 1940 after Germany occupied Denmark, the UK bloodlessly "invaded" Iceland (with a total of 750 men!), before handing it over the the then-neutral US the next year, who retained control until it declared independence in 1944 and it has remained so since. The Allies also temporarily took control of Greenland, but it was returned at the end of the war.

That would depend largely on what Denmark had to say about it, I think.

And also what the locals would say about it too. I mean, maybe Trump gets them the deal so good they don't want to go back to Denmark?

They don’t want to be part of Denmark now, they might want independence instead of being the 51st state but they wouldn’t want to be a danish territory instead.

They don’t want to be part of Denmark now

But how can Greenland make noises about independence with a straight face when its economy would collapse without the huge subsidies that Denmark sends to it? That's what confuses me about this topic. Does self-determination even make sense for a territory that is not self-sufficient?

But how can Greenland make noises about independence with a straight face when its economy would collapse without the huge subsidies that Denmark sends to it?

The same reason many people in Scotland and some in Wales want independence. The emotional allure of self-determination overrides economic concerns.

Considering the history of mistreatment at the hands of danish authorities, they may not care very much.

What does everyone think of Eliezer Yudkowsky?

I just realized this website was born from /r/TheMotte, which came from /r/slatestarcodex, which came from Scott Alexander, who came from LessWrong, which was created by Eliezer himself. He's technically a grandfather of this community.

I for one think he's more influential than he's given credit for, and I consider myself lucky to have come across his writings in my younger days.

I'd consider him a reasonably smart person and a great analytic writer (a lot of the Sequences really do what they set out to, which is to crystallize a particular useful reasoning principle into a well-delineated maxim that you can actually remind yourself of in a situation where it is helpful), unfortunately held back by high levels of narcissism, which firstly make him fail to apply the same critical reasoning he champions to core areas that pertain to his conception of his own status and secondly turn him, on a personal level, into a snake.

He may or may not be the "greatest living philosopher", as @Quantumfreakonomics said below, but this is strictly an indictment of living philosophers who are willing to own the label. I have heard better philosophy from my math olympiad buddies at age 16 during addled seminar camp all-nighters.

Timed the AI & EA stuff well but also pretty classic autist who perennially nerdsnipes himself. The first 10 or so chapters of MOR are great when it's more of a collection of skits than a clear narrative, too. Silicon Valley Nerd Culture just seems primed to randomly pump guys like him every so often who have the right idea at about the right time, but I don't think he's some great thinker and a lot of the AI alarmism hasn't aged well.

I'm not getting what the hype is about. Yes, he's (very) smart and (very) talented. There are a few smart people and a few talented people, he is one of them. But various superlatives directed at him is something that I am confused by. Then again, I am confused by great many things, so nothing really special here.

[context and geneology]

He's... hard to talk about.

The critique has long echoed the old Samuel Johnson quote about being "both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good" -- and the man has had a hatedom before 2012, so it's been echoing for a while. Most of the man's more accessible scientific writing is 'just' presenting well-established popsci into a more accessible form (sometimes without sufficient citations), while a lot of his predictive or even cutting-edge scientific analysis has to get suffixed with 'from a certain point of view' at best and 'ah yes but' at worst. If anything, that's only become more true over time: both The Golden Age Sequences and HPMoR have long relied on some of the sociology research that's be found the most wanting under the replication crisis.

Yudkowsky's been moderately open about some of this stuff, and his pro-AI, AI-is-easy, AI-is-hard, anti-AI changes have been a part of his whole story. I like that more than the people insisting they've always been right. It's still not something everyone likes, or that he can do consistently. There's never been a good retrospective on how MIRI's output was so absolutely bad on both the academic paper and popular-reader sides for so long, or the time they had an employee embezzle (tbf, not an unusual thing for new non-profits to have hit them), or yada yada.

But that's a bit of a victim of own success thing. Yudkowsky can't claim the whole replication movement anymore than he can claim the whole effective altruism one. He's at least been in the general vicinity too early to have jumped in front of the parade post-hoc, though. "Map is not the territory" and "fake answers" might have been well-known and obvious before 2008, but it wasn't until after that anyone put them together to actually poke at the core tools we thought we were using to find deep truths about reality. And these movements have been a large part of why so many of the older posts have aged so poorly, though not the only part.

((Although he's also a weird writer to have as big an impact as it seems he's had? The Sequences, fine, if good blog should change people's minds, it's a good enough blog. Why is HpMoR a more effective AI Safety program than Friendship is Optimal? Why is the Sword of Good so much more effective than a lot of more recent attempts at its take?))

... but all that's kinda side stories, at this point. Today, if you care about him, it's the AI safety stuff, not whether he guessed correctly on Kahneman vs Elisabeth Bik, or even on neural networks versus agentic AI research.

Which gets messy, because like Reading Philosophy Backwards, today, all of his demonstrated successful predictions are incredibly obvious, his failed ones ludicrous-sounding, and only the ones we can't evaluate yet relevant. Why would anyone care about the AI Box experiment when corporations or even complete randos are giving LLMs a credit card and saying have fun? (Because some extremely well-credentialed people were sure that these sort of AI would be perfectly harmless if not allowed access to the outside world, even months after the LLMs were given credit card info.) Why would anyone be surprised that an AI might disclose private or dangerous information, if not told otherwise, when we now know LLMs can and do readily do those things? (Because 'the machine will only do what we program it to do' was a serious claim for over a decade.) Who could possibly believe that an LLM couldn't improve code performance? (Uh, except all the people talking about stochaistic parrots today, and convinced that it was philosophically impossible for years before then.)

And the big unsolved questions are very important.

But in turn, that doesn't make his proposed answers better or useful. Say what you will for the ethos of singularitarity races, but at least they have something more credible than the 'you can't just tell people not to do something' guy telling people not to do something, and ultimately that's all that policies like an AI pause boil down to. The various attempts to solve morality have made some progress, despite my own expectations. It might seem like the difference between timeless decision theory and functional decision theory is just huffing fumes, but it does have some genuine benefits... and we have no way to implement them, and no way to validate or even seriously consider whether we're even looking at the most important measures. We don't know what the system they'd need to be implemented on looks like, and it's speculative (though increasingly likely) there will even be a system, and it's not clear the people building that system will be interested or even aware of the general AI safety issues.

So there's big unsolved questions that have been largely left unasked.

But in turn, that doesn't make his proposed answers better or useful.

but it does have some genuine benefits... and we have no way to implement them, and no way to validate or even seriously consider whether we're even looking at the most important measures.

Note that these are useful if you share the Yudkowskian view of neural nets. Specifically, the view that it is impossible to align a neural net smarter than you; "a technique, inventable before the Singularity, that will allow us to make neural-net ASI and not die" is a contradiction in terms. There are thus no "useful" answers, if you define "useful" as "works on neural nets".

In this paradigm, 100% of surviving worlds follow this two-point plan:

  1. Neural nets are totally and permanently abandoned until after the Singularity; they are banned in all countries (convincing everyone is hard; easier is convincing enough nuclear powers, hard enough, that the holdout countries are either occupied or obliterated).

  2. Non-doomed versions of AI research (e.g. GOFAI, uploads) continue.

The reason you need #1 is that #2 is going to take at least 50 years to hit the Singularity. The reason you need #2 is that #1 is only metastable, not actually stable; sooner or later, in a hundred years or a million, the Butlerian Jihad will break down, at which point everybody dies unless we've hit the Singularity in the meantime.

And hence, work on how to make non-neural-net AI work is necessary (if less urgent than stopping neural nets, on which point Yudkowsky is indeed currently focusing).

He is Earth's greatest living philosopher.

Edit: I challenge any of the downboaters to name a better one.

He's brilliant, but also incredibly goofy.

What does everyone think of Eliezer Yudkowsky?

Answering this question would break the rules on fedposting.

I can't possibly imagine what this guy has done to make you say this

He advocates for killing me, as a part of killing an unbounded amount of people, for the goal of preventing an unapproved by him AGI. Therefore...

My blood pressure was actually decent for the first time in years yesterday when I gave blood. It was 114/66. Usually it's like 119/71 or something. I blame the cardio, the lifting, and the dieting. Probably mostly the cardio though.

What are some changes that you've made to your life that you noticed results for?

Isn’t 119/71 just fine?

That's what some blood center employees told me, but I think it's right up against the edge of "elevated" blood pressure. So it's kind of like having a BMI of 24.9: sort of okay, but you can do better. I think lower is probably better.

I wonder whether blood donation might offer some reduction or whether that's overly simplistic.

They take a mini-physical of you before taking your blood. The number I got Saturday is being compared to those other numbers I got from previous donations. A blood pressure, pulse, and hemoglobin check every 8 weeks is nice, wouldn't you say?

Good point, it would serve as a means to monitor even though donation itself probably wouldn't have any significant effect. I've been meaning to start donating for a while, I should get my act together.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men.

I've recently started Robin Hobb's Assassins' Apprentice. I read and enjoyed The Liveship Traders ages ago so thought I'd give her earlier series a try.

I just started Ha Jin's In the Pond last night. It's been a page turner so far.

Finished Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games. Good God, I have so much to say about this one. All the same Clancyisms as Red October. Not nearly as much charm. A glacial plot where the many characters shuffle around like communist zombies until they reach their assigned stations. Hilarious, often but not always on purpose.

Thing is, this book captures a certain worldview, one where bad guys only exist because the good guys have their hands tied. I’m convinced that it offers insight into the general neocon project as well as our current iteration of populism. I wish I’d kept notes of all the passages I want to quote for the motte.

Also finished Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a very gay Victorian crime novel. An orphan thief takes part in a plot to marry and defraud a secluded heiress. I found the prose delicious and the plotting devious. High points for characterization, as well, with each member of the cast stressed and miserable for extremely different reasons. Would recommend.

Current book is O’Brien’s Master and Commander. Also very British, though sixty years earlier. Totally not gay, no sir, not in His Majesty’s navy.

Love the historical context. Love the jargon and the repartee and the bizarre economics of prize-hunting. Above all, love the personalities of these dedicated, skilled characters playing off one another as they get into life or death situations. Perhaps this is the peak of “guys hanging out” fiction.

Tom Clancy was one of my favorite authors growing up; I read all his stuff up through Rainbow Six, and I'd say it definitely shaped my worldview, first in a "this is how the world is" way as a kid and teenager, and then contrasting the backlash as reality intruded as an adult. Favorite books were Without Remorse, Clear and Present Danger, and the Sum of All Fears. Even looking back without rereading them, there's a ton of passages that look very, very different from an adult perspective than as a naive kid, and I've often thought you could use his books as a pretty good example of why the political world he portrayed has collapsed so badly since.

Yes! Yes, exactly.

Setting aside the bizarre pacing of Patriot Games, it’s still founded on Cold War principles. Clancy (by way of Jack Ryan) tries to rehabilitate these principles for use against something that isn’t a nuclear superpower. But he writes thrillers, not philosophy, and it just doesn’t come together at all.

Spoilers, obviously, for a nearly 40-year-old novel.

The terrorists are set dressing for a meandering slice-of-life novel. Jack recovers in hospital. Jack meets famous people. Jack assembles Christmas presents. Jack does insider trading. Real plot points!

Eventually he is convinced to join the intelligence community’s terrorist manhunt. This leads directly to the only real conflict in the book. Everything before and after has obvious answers. Is it okay to disarm and shoot a terrorist? Are drugs bad? What about communists? Should you be prepared to defend your family when all else fails? Easy questions. But the question which actually haunts Jack Ryan is whether it’s okay to execute captured terrorists without a public trial. Since, you know, the jury might be swayed from the right outcome.

Wait, that’s not quite right. Jack can’t decide if he should feel bad for contributing to such extrajudicial executions. Partly because he’s an unapologetic believer in democracy and individual rights, partly because one of the terrorists had tits visible from orbit.

Jack talks himself into it by reasoning that terrorists, like pirates, are hostis humani generis. When possible, they should get the usual protections, but if that keeps them from their just deserts, we shouldn’t feel too bad. They waived their rights when they tried to hide behind them; we only extend them back as a courtesy.

This is just—so—aaarrrrggggghh. It misses the whole point. And it’s easy to see the throughline to the War on Terror, the general expansion of the executive, all the way through to Trump II. Sweep the hard problems aside. Nothing is impossible if we stop holding back. Do the right thing, critics be damned. We’ll make it legal or at least shield you from any consequences.

I understand the appeal. We can just do stuff, or at least pick a guy who will totally do that stuff on your behalf. It’s easier than working out the details.

And here we are.

I just have to point out a clever joke in the title that almost no one notices. The Patriot Game is the title of a pro-Republican Northern Irish ballad that was popular during the Troubles. There are a lot of versions, but one of the most popular ones was by two Irish brothers named Liam and Tom Clancy.

The tune is mentioned most of the way through the book, but I had no idea any Clancys were involved. TIL.

The only things I remember from Patriot games were the next time I'm driving and the van in front of me' doors open and shooters pop up tap the breaks to have the weight transfer make them miss and C cups are visible via satellite.

The John Clark parts/stories are the best in my opinion.

I started that one a few years ago out of interest in Jungian archetypes but I quickly tapped out when I realised it's not about Jungian archetypes, it's about Men Who Take Turns Crying Together.

My impression is it's one of those books where any people who need it will never read it and the people who'll read it probably don't need it.

Read Project Hail Mary, by Any Weir. Some mildly interesting "Science, Fuck Yeah" scenarios, but as a whole it's entirely overrated. Barely even literature.

Mistress of Mistresses, by E.R. Eddison. Took me some getting used to because of how much it differs from The Worm Ourobouros, but I'm picking up steam right now.

Read Project Hail Mary, by Any Weir. Some mildly interesting "Science, Fuck Yeah" scenarios, but as a whole it's entirely overrated. Barely even literature.

I liked the Astrophage idea, and the implications of something like that existing. The science, the boost to technology, the effects on climate, the wars. Kinda liked the entire design of Rocky, too. The linguistic aspect sucked, though. I also enjoyed the amnesia gimmic, works really well as a story telling device, and uses the flashbacks in a good way to push the story forward. Grace being a coward was also an "interesting" twist in the end - nice idea, but made absolutely no sense considering that he never acts like a coward throughout the mission. The rest was... exactly what I would have expected of an Andy Weir story. So I wasn't disappointed, my fault for reading the book, really.

Still looking forward to the movie, but mostly because I enjoy looking at rockets lifting off. But Jesus, what made the studio people decide on putting the biggest spoiler imaginable right into the trailers? Worst example of a trailer I can think of. Catastrophically bad.

70 pages into Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a very inside-baseball take on cyberpunk/hard SF which approaches impenetrability at times, and Watts uses far too many italics for my liking, but I'm curious to see where it goes.

As much as I enjoyed the book, my feelings about Peter Watts echo my feelings about Ayn Rand. Like on on one hand I get it, on the other I can't help but think that the popular lessons taken from this story are not the lessons you should be taking from this story.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs"

Atlas Shrugged is a great book screed set of words put on paper if you suffer from very specific forms of people pleasing type behaviours. One thing I struggled with being raised by parents who were less than ideal was the feeling that my life was all for other people; I had to do what my parents wanted me to do, including giving them the money from my job; I had to accept that I deserved to be alone because I wanted a girlfriend; I had to accept that my destiny was to work 80 hours a week in a tiny shoebox to pay for other people, then die alone and unloved when I was no longer economically useful.

I'm not kidding when I say that Atlas Shrugged was one of the most useful things I ever read; the willingness to just say "no, it's okay to be selfish" was huge to me. I'm not going to say it's a masterful work of literature - but it was exactly what I needed to hear when I read it, so I will always defend it.

Her earlier novel, The Fountainhead, was what awoke me to the realization of how my codependency (that very specific people pleasing behavior) was crushing my soul. It was my first breath of fresh air in a long journey of recovery. Iron Man 1 was my second.

I've thought it's a reasonable storyline if you take it as a dystopian novel (about the Laffer curve, of all things). Still long-winded, but it makes more sense to me sitting next to 1984 and Brave New World in ways that show how society can fall apart (in this case by Big Government's effective marginal tax rates). As gets mentioned occasionally, the villains don't feel that unrealistic.

The villains were based on the Communists ruining the Russia she grew up in and escaped. They’re not unrealistic because choices that absurd and worse happened, and are happening.

I am not sure why, but for me the idea had always seemed natural. "It's ok to be selfish?" Well, duh, of course it is. I mean, I am not a psychopath, I empathize, I donate money to charity, I help others, some people even say they like me (weird, I know), but being selfish always came easy to me. Maybe that's why when I read Atlas Shrugged it wasn't a big revelation to me - maybe I was even somewhat underwhelmed. Like, if I'll be even more selfish that I already am, I will kinda be an asshole, and I don't really want to be an asshole. At least not much more of one than I already am.

That's cause you're not a crazy person, unlike me, who is verifiably insane.

So I'm going to talk a bit about my parents' style of parenting, while trying to avoid enough specifics to give away exactly who I am - so you can hopefully kind of get why it made a difference to me.

I was the oldest child of several; my parents were very clear on how little they wanted to be married or have kids (my mother, specifically, told me that having kids was the worst decision of her life, and she actively encouraged me to be kidnapped - her advice for if a stranger tried to abduct me was to go with them). An overriding theme of my childhood was that I had to earn my right to exist; I wasn't allowed to listen to music, spend time with other kids, or any number of other specifics that would certainly give me away. I was forbidden from inconveniencing them in any way (so like, I was "allowed" to go to a friend's house, but only if I could get there on my own; when I was 8 and my friend lived 30 minutes away by car, this was obviously a challenge).

With my siblings, the situation was a lot more about sacrificing for them; my parents loved to buy enough food for all but one of us to eat, and then would guilt me into giving up meals for them (my father was an extremely wealthy man, and his take-home pay was over $300k a year). They did the same with other things, like school trips or clothes or whatever else. Although I was nominally allowed to "take" any of the offers made, if I did I was told it would make my siblings suffer, or I'd be depriving the family, or whatever.

As a result of this upbringing, I was a horrible nervous wreck when I graduated from high school; I took an adult job as a programmer which I worked while I did my degree, but I felt so guilty about the amount they were paying me that I literally only cashed half my paycheques from the job, and burned the rest (for reference, they were paying me around $500 a week). I couldn't make or maintain any sort of friendships at all because I felt that everyone was tolerating my presence because I was useful, so I spent years in therapy over it - actually, for the first 3 years of therapy, I literally couldn't say a word to my therapist at all because I felt so much like I was ungrateful and deserved it.

My mental model of myself at this point was that I was someone who'd had a good upbringing, but that there was something horribly wrong with me that made me too tainted to be around other people.

So at around this age, one of the book series I was reading was Terry Goodkind's "The Sword of Truth." (Yes, yes, I know - don't judge me, I was like 18-21). One of the books in the series (called "Faith of the Fallen") follows a woman named Nicci who expressed the exact same emotions that I was - she saw herself as a bad person. The book itself was not great - but it resonated with me. I remember that this was around the sort of time that you could go online and like, talk about books with other people, so I looked up the book to see what people said - and on top of everyone criticizing it, they mentioned it was like "Atlas Shrugged" (which, from reading Atlas Shrugged, it absolutely is - like, it's literally at the fanfiction of it level). Reading that was a huge revelation for me - before, I'd felt like I had to do everything that other people wanted, because I could do it and I had to pay back my upbringing, and because I was only tolerable if I was doing everything for others.

I am not the person mentioned in all debates are bravery debates, but the same sort of thing happened to me.

told me that having kids was the worst decision of her life, and she actively encouraged me to be kidnapped - her advice for if a stranger tried to abduct me was to go with them

Wow that sucks. I mean I can get regretting having kids - it's not always easy, and stress levels can be enormous. But telling it openly to your own kid, and trying to get the kid kidnapped (and likely murdered)... that's just fucked up.

That kind of readjusts my priors a bit. Maybe I never needed to be told it's ok to be white me, but clearly there are people who are, and books that do it for them are doing a good work then. Of course, some people who are already assholes enough might read it and become excessive assholes, but I think that'd happen to them anyway, so overall the effect is still positive.

I can't see the comparison. Like, at all.

Mind, it's likely due to my odd little niche of absolutely adoring Blindsight while having an attitude of sneering disgust toward the writer himself.

Agree, I don't see much similarity. But I suffer from the same predicament - I am a big fan of Watts' writing, and no fan at all of the man. Which unfortunately happens with more than one contemporary writer. It's easier when couple of centuries has passed and you can enjoy the writings without bothering too much with how the author's personality was totally disgusting. Yeah, maybe, but the guy is dead for 150 years, so who cares.

Curious to see how that applies to this novel.

Also, Atlas Shrugged slaps.

Honest answer, It's an interesting story that raises legitimate questions about the the nature and value of consciousness. At the same time there is a certain sort of person who is going to interpret the narrative not as a thought experiment but as a blueprint and/or instruction manual because they are autistic

What about for Rand? Same thing?

I bought and started The Sun Also Rises, but I only made it about halfway through. It just doesn't seem that interesting to me, mostly ordinary-ish people doing ordinary-ish things. If there's supposed to be some great appeal to it, I just don't get it.

I've been reading The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski too. He was an Africa correspondent for Poland's state newspaper in the late 50s-early 60s. He's got a lot of stories about the adventures of travelling around Africa in that era and of the political chaos surrounding the end of colonial rule. The descriptions of how a lot of people in Africa live seem amazing to me - many of them have such completely different values than anything I've encountered, and you can see the ways in which those values shape their societies. Apparently their family and tribal ties are so strong that anyone is obligated to help anyone else in their family or tribe any time they can. As a result of which, for practical purposes, apparently nobody ever saves or accumulates anything because everything gets used up as soon as they get it. Obviously, not every single person lives like that, but it seems to be quite common.

Kapuscinski is a wonderful writer. Sadly little of the culture of obligation he describes has changed since then, though young people's access to the internet is starting to blunt it. Good for Malthusian survival, bad for capital accumulation.

Just finishing up The Wizard's Cat (The Wizard's Butler Book 2) by Nathan Lowell.

Just finished The Quantum Thief which was an amazing trilogy.

Probably about to start the Dreamblood duology.

How much of the increase in obesity is just population aging? It's not 100%, but it seems absurd to argue that it's not a major factor either.

Even if it is that’s not normal. In previous generations it wasn’t just taken as a given that old people would become enormously fat as a matter of course.

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”?

There are still many places in which one man is invested with the responsibility to avoid causing a lot of damage. Say, the guy who steers freighters through the suez or panama canals. Airline pilots. Just become that guy and fail at your job hard enough. All it takes is youth and patience and baseline learning ability and zero fucks given about the consequences for yourself. I think specifically of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 .

I think that's pretty much the most you can do with "reasonably competent solitary actor".

I'm not sure one can pull it off as a true solitary actor, but politics would be a good venue. I mean, the cumulative damage from COVID lockdowns is estimated to be over 14 trillions. Of course, you'd have to be in the right place in the right time, but doing at least billions of damage may be even easier - e.g. become a mayor of a large city and defund the police, or something like that. Or maybe just promote the idea that half of the country population is irredeemably evil and stole everything from the other half. Bonus points if you can sell that idea to both halves. Imagine how much damage that could do.

Could make the argument for a solitary founder of a popular and aggressive religion, though obviously very hard to do deliberately as a lone wolf.

The OSS published a field manual about this for WW2 resistance fighters. It mostly focuses on practical, low-level resistance and sabotage rather than grand acts though. Amusingly one of their suggestions is simply to be annoying and incompetent.

A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.

It also depends how you calculate impact. For example the idiot who tried to smuggle bombs in his shoes has probably caused hundreds of aggregate human lives to be wasted by the delay of every air passenger now having to remove their shoes, despite his attack being completely unsuccessful.

Nice try, FBI.

Not today, CIA.

Good attempt at obscurity, Department of Homeland Security.

You have a long, long history of describing yourself as:

  • Severely disabled and destitute, with a dysfunctional family and no significant social ties.
  • Terminally depressed, with little to nothing to live for and zero hope that things will improve.
  • Incredibly frustrated that people you consider on your side are not committing acts of lawless violence and terrorism against people you regard as on the other side.
  • Possessed of a profound, murderous hatred of your tribal opposites as a class, to the point of routinely mocking your allies for not murdering them already.

I personally have argued to you that it is in fact exceedingly obvious that individuals possessed of even minimal competence and resources can inflict such absurdly disproportionate harm to society that the culture war is a significant threat to our society's continued function. When I declined to provide you for specific details of how to do so, you spent some effort to call me out as a liar.

My assessment is that you resent what peace we currently enjoy and wish for nothing more than to see that peace drowned in blood. I think anyone who answers the questions you ask here is a fool.

I know we all love to fantasize about how this forum is overrun with federal agents and terrorists but come on. Let’s be real here for a minute.

Between Antifa, the John Browning Society(of which atleast one of our mods(former mod?) was a member of, once upon a time), the various upswell of various tranny terrorist groups(That whole Ziz kerfuffle), and given how some of our previous members are going heavily political and associated with LGBT, I'd say it's less than a fantasy and more hedging of the bets.

I can't say anything in regards to Federal agents, but. I mean. We have atleast one popular poster that talks off-handed about working in Washington DC in politics, iirc.

By this point, anything is possible.

A nut job on the motte, given the population prevalence of nut jobs, is not so difficult to imagine. And this guy calls himself crazy rather openly.

I'd give 50/50 about some law-enforcement-adjacent eyes here (maybe LLMs by now) but there are wackos everywhere. And a lot of recent attacks were committed by so called "lone wolves" - i.e., wackos without organizational links to any established terrorist groups. In fact, those likely have higher chances to commit an actual attack - there are more of them and feds can't watch them all.

It’s unfortunate that answering this question earnestly is so unwise. Brainstorming A) how much destruction one person, or a small team of people, could cause, and B) how best to prevent someone else from following through on those plans, would be a very fun discussion, especially in a group of smart people with diverse backgrounds. But as almost everyone else has mentioned, it would be extremely foolhardy to actually mention any concrete ideas in a forum such as this, or really, in any place where there’s a chance one of the participants might be tempted to follow through.

"Left-wing extremists" have been bombing electrical grids recently (Associated Press, Reuters). Presumably they've put more thought into this topic than the denizens of this forum have.

Given that they've caused less damage than a single particularly retarded-as-in-dropped-on-his-head arsonist, I'm not convinced that they've been optimizing for damage, whatever thought they've put in. I'm... actually a little unconvinced that they've even optimized well for disruption, but there's a lot of reasons I don't want to talk about that publicly.

Which is one half of the problem in talking about this stuff. If there are red team exercises that can up the high score from the known alternatives, it's... not a very good idea to start talking about them at length in public. The other half's that if you have reasons why a given attack shouldn't work, it's not a very good idea to talk about that at length in public, either.

Nice try, fedboy.

...seriously, this is one of those questions that the last sensible thing to do would be to put word and thought on the matter on some public forum. I give my CIA handlers enough conniption fits as-is.

I don't really like to speculate too far in that direction to avoid giving people ideas. There definitely are people on this board who have posted about at least thinking about doing such things. Hopefully nobody actually will, but who knows for sure, and there's no telling who else reads but doesn't post.

I will say though that I think firearms, at least in the hands of one or a few people, are a pretty bad way of killing large numbers of people. In a way, we're relatively fortunate that most such nutcases are still using them. Fire and explosives are much more effective at such things.

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.

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.

People say things like this, but I don't see it. Our critical infrastructure looks pretty robust and defended to me.

Absolutely not, in the U.S. a lot of our critical infrastructure is falling apart without any intervention at all.

Massive broadcast into the dark forest? Or mirror life?

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.

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".

Ugh, I've heard about this before but had forgotten about it. Thank you for the reminder haha.

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”?

Very easy for this discussion to become a Tom Clancy (ghost)writer’s room meeting, but I suspect that in this case the “best” (worst for humanity) option given current technology (e.g., we are probably not yet in the place where a lone actor can use AI and a home lab to synthesize a virus that can kill billions, because I have a strong fear that at that point it will happen) would be to spend time infiltrating some large, possibly mundane, organization and becoming a figure who has operational control over some kind of system (which might not even be a very senior role) where oversight is minimal and a bad actor could deliberately cause catastrophic damage that would either result in a huge number of casualties or result in a smaller number of (or even just one, critical) VIP casualties.

I also remember reading somewhere that nuclear submarine captains have the absolute authority to order nuclear strikes in a dead hand scenario, so maybe that.

In the US, where there's relatively extreme weather and fairly bad infrastructure, the optimal strategy would be to get yourself in charge of some kind of disaster preparedness agency, and do the sloppiest, laziest job that you possibly can in preparing for/responding to that disaster. As an example, you could refuse to respond to wildfires because of the risk to plants. The hard part of using this approach to cause mass casualties is that there will be many other people, often with better local political connections, running the exact same life strategy, and they're more fairly described as satisficing for mass casualties.

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