Net Negative
sinceriously.fyi

It even has drug induced brainwashing and coercive sex slavery, and it sees its inner circles (and the sufficiently devout) as gods in the making. This is full Thetan tear lunacy, but because totemic magic words like "SCIENCE" and "LOGIC" are slapped all over the outer walls, it hasn't gotten the same scrutiny.

  • determinism2 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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?

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      You're not the only one confused by all of this. Maybe this link will help. It's someone trying to ponder the madness just like you were.

      https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/s6m3gr/im_reading_the_net_negative_post_for_the_first/

    • determinism2 [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It's creepy men that no longer have anyone around to tell them "no."

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think it's a lot like Scientology in that just being involved in it does some :brainworms: and lasting damage. Ever been to ex-Mormon communities? Very similarly, the :brainworms: often persist even if they disavow associations in the present.

      I think the author of what I linked was already into "adjusting your priors" solipsism and Bayesian woo, but their visit to Big Yud's Wild Ride did further damage.

      • EthicalHumanMeat [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, it made me think of Scientologists who leave the cult but still believe in Scientology.

    • Mardoniush [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.