Ray Bradbury's short story "The Other Foot" was about African-Americans forming a thriving colony on Mars ahead of the Anglos, and getting to define the rules this time around...
spoiler
And they treat everyone as equals, because they're not a bunch of imperialist-brained psychopaths.
Yes, Bradbury was the most boomer of boomers. He was also a very hopeful man who could still imagine a better future. I think it's that internal conflict which made his stories interesting to read.
...Also his psych horror anthologies were pretty good
:porky-scared-flipped: :Barbarie:
:porky-happy: :Civilisation:
also check out r/sneerclub it's one of the only good subreddits (it's the dunk tank but specifically for these people)
These are people who are fascinated by their own brains, and they love love looooove writing gigantic brain dumps that make no sense, but that reinforce just how S-M-R-T they are in front of others. Thus, the "rationalist" label, as if the rest of us are irrational. They're society's best! We know because they told us so!
Vulgar, reactionary ideas that they dress up using sophisticated-sounding language to try to convince other people that they're brilliant. Real Jordan Peterson vibes.
I don't trust anyone who doesn't swear and isn't willing to piss in the street.
Honestly, from what I read, I just feel sorry for them. I don't even want to dunk on them, I just want to convince them to go fishing or something. This person has never even seen a blade of grass in their entire life, much less touched one.
Like sure they talk about weird fucked up shit but it seems like it's just because they're so detached from reality and humanity that it means nothing to them. And they mention something about being trans but choosing not to transition? Maybe that's why they've retreated so far into the disembodied world of ideas and abstraction?
r/sneerclub
I would like to state once again for the record that "Simulation Theory" is very literally just the Ontological Argument but put forth by people who think they're too smart to need to learn history or religion or religious philosophy.
My favourite thing in the world is introducing these types to Morrowind Deep Lore and watching them crack in real time from accidental exposure to theology.
The Elder Scrolls lore is so much better and more fulfilling than it has any right to be. If you told me that a bunch of philosophy and theology geeks would cleverly smuggle and entire curriculum's worth of teaching in to the backstory of a video game for Xbox I'd laugh at you.
Skooma is made from Moonsugar. Moonsugar is literally crystalized light from Tamriel's moons. Which the Khajitt occasionally visit by climbing up on each other's shoulders until they can reach the moon. This is at least as true as any other competing theory, like the theory that the Moons are the rotting body of a God after his heart was cut out and fired across the world.
Also, can you imagine the marketing department when they found out that Kirkbride et al put several hundred pages of magical philosophy in to an X-box game for 12-28 year old males>?!>!>!>!>&
I don't get the point of “Simulation Theory” (the internet one, not french philosophy). Ok, you can be convinced of this hypothesis, but what is the consequence?
Exactly. It's pure navel gazing. It's unfalsifiable and even if it is true it has no observable consequences at all!
I just feel like we're making fun of the weird nerd who sits alone at lunch after we found their diary tbh :deeper-sadness:
So... is this particular author the one who got paid a lot of money? Is this Big Yud, or is that someone totally different?
Also, I scrolled to the comments and found (from the author):
Multiple people who were involved or knew the people involved have since informed me that the statutory rape coverup did in fact happen. And furthermore, that MIRI paid out to the blackmail.
I no longer fund or consider positive MIRI and CFAR for reasons that this is part of, an infohazard very important for understanding psychology, to be revealed in an upcoming post.
It seems like they have the cult's brainworms but are also kinda calling shit out? Idk the rambling isn't super intelligible and I could be wrong, but I think you might be being overzealous against this particular person.
Edit: Apparently she protested against MIRI and CFAR handing out flyers calling them fascist TERFs who betrayed the rationalist community. Just saying.
This is all so online. I refuse to read the links.
Based on comments in this thread, this looks like people taking the most circuitous route through symbols and recursive self-annihilating 'logic' brain games just to avoid ever having to feel a genuine emotion.
All of their real problems are probably social/emotional/physiological, but it's too painful to parse any of that, so they crawl up their own arses to reinvent absurd first-year philosophy shit-talk forever.
I've never felt better about going on a walk :cat-vibing:
reinvent absurd first-year philosophy shit-talk forever.
So much of our culture is re-inventing shit that my classmates and I discussed half-seriously while stoned out of our minds at 3am in a Denny's in Scranton.
Did the author's participation in this stuff cause them to write and think in this way? It's so fucking confusing. There's a link in the intro when they state that they were planning to go to grad school. It links to this:
A move from usual psychology in the opposite direction of the views I expressed in Punching Evil. A trap where someone has most of their structure, object-level and meta, written from the perspective of reference classes that omit crucial facts about them, and they cannot update out of it because “most people who make such an update are wrong”. The reference classes are usually subtly DRM’d, designed to divest a person of their own perceptions. When I consulted average salary statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and did a present value analysis in order to decide whether to go to grad school, I had outside view disease. May result from trying to do good by taking the neutral person mental template, and the virtues they conceptualize seriously, including epistemic virtues. May also be held in bad faith by people who don’t want the stress of believing subversive things. “I can’t believe in x-risk from AI because there are no peer reviewed papers”. (A common comment before academia gave in to what we all already knew for years.) is related. Strongly driven by systems where people only care about knowledge that can be proven to the system-mind, even if the individuals who suffer from this care about other things and don’t understand yet how the system works. When I believed that I should take cis people’s opinions about what I was more seriously than my own, because they were alleging I had a mental illness preventing me from thinking clearly about it, I was falling prey to the DRM in the way frames for such references classes are set up. I got out of it via a lot of suffering, and by understanding what it meant to place expected value of consequences above maximum probability I was a good person. (“well, if I’m crazy, hopefully the mainstream can defeat me like they defeat every other crazy person. Stuff is dependent on that anyway.”) Or, more specifically, there was a large chunk of possibility space, “net positive consequences in expectation, most likely you will make things worse”, and if I could do no better than that was worth it. The unilateralist’s curse is often used in bad faith to push for someone to know who they are less.
What is this? What is happening? What did they want to study? What does it mean to update out of your new but inapposite structure, object-level, and meta?
When I think about AI Safety, I think about this guy. Is this group doing the same work? Why do they have to deconstruct reality and abuse one another? Was any of this ever about AI safety?
Yeah, it made me think of Scientologists who leave the cult but still believe in Scientology.
He's saying he didn't realise that he had personal preferences (for grad school, about being trans) that made "objective" data incorrect, but because he'd learned from "rationalism" that most people that try and use their own special circumstances to override data end up with worse outcomes he decided to ignore the fact that he was miserable and everyone was telling him he was cis when he wasn't.
Unfortunately, he got out of the issue by saying he was a special snowflake who was above the masses, and if he wasn't actually that and was fooling himself the masses would crush him because obviously society is a malthusian hell.
Just...epic level brainworms. Basically what happens when you read "Thinking Fast and Slow" and use it as a bible for every single action you take.
I think the translation is something like this:
"While it's important to ground yourself with others' perspectives and the lessons they've learned, sometimes conventional wisdom is based on what works for the majority, and it might not work if you as an individual are different, which is something you sometimes have to judge for yourself."
This is specifically in the context of realizing that she's trans. Cis people, which is to say, most people, can simply dismiss the possibility that they are trans as a silly thought experiment and move on with their lives, so she internalized that perspective and believed that the idea of herself being trans was silly and irrational, but then found that that didn't work for her and made her miserable.
What does it mean to update out of your new but inapposite structure, object-level, and meta?
Basically just trying a new approach or looking at something a different way, in a psychological context.
What did they want to study?
I think she was trying to determine what the most "rational" thing to study was, based on stuff like salary statistics and demand, without thinking about what she wanted - an approach that she recognizes as flawed, calling it, "outside view disease," aka considering only other people's perspectives.
oh man I almost got sucked into rationality/rationalism youtube in 2017. Glad the algorithm also gave me the choice of the lib->communist pipeline
edit: the fuck is this link?
And busted me out of psychological pwnage by my abusive thesis adviser.
broke: trauma
woke: psychological pwnage
