This whole situation is making me so glad I stopped taking drugs and never learned to program

Born too young to be made to learn how to program in school

Born too old to lose my code monkey job to a literal mechanical code monkey in a mutually disastrous management fuckup

Born just in time to burn out on drugs and alcohol and watch the machine revolution from home

GHB aside I wouldn’t even call it particularly dangerous, it’s just blissfully wrongheaded. Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic, and it does what it says on the tin: it takes however your mind is at that moment and just brutally lops off all the connections you normally anticipate it having with your body and other bits of itself, with various interesting consequences for mind and body both. Alcohol is alcohol, it’ll depress your euphoria to some extent but it is also in itself sugar and obviously will make you drunk on top of the (significant) remaining effects of the stimulant - rather than calm down, you are far more likely to get outrageously mad and try to punch a stranger, poorly, because already the whole point of abusing most stimulants, euphoria aside, is to turn you into the world’s sharpest spoon.

I’m just cackling at whatever this guy thinks ketamine does when you’re already on speed playing jump rope with the traffic, other than “you will lie face down on the pavement for half an hour and conduct a week long interview with satan between the gap in your eyelids”

That’s basically what I mean. A fun thing to do in rehab, for example, is to try and figure out who’s still withdrawing and who is just like that

As a matter of opinion, I gotta say our brief new friend the other day did give me flashbacks to the one time I interacted with Siskind, even if it’s just that Siskind’s particular style of incoherent personally afflicted grandeur only happens to correlate with how pill heads express theirs

If you want to prematurely end your stimulant rush, booze, GHB, or ketamine will do that.

Ketamine and booze will absolutely not do that, and for the love of God do not take GHB to cool off a rush, what in God’s name are you thinking, you ludicrous phoney

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Nobody more twisted up with resentment on planet earth than somebody just flying on an adderall binge

If you are finding it hard to not take pills, are concerned its warping your behaviour, self-perception, or affecting your interpersonal relationships, I recommend looking up your local NA hotline on google, it’ll be open 24/7

I didn’t ask you to apologise for using an “ageist slur”, I asked you, of the particular affects you adopted in your opening gambit here, which corresponded to how you really feel. You adopted a tone and verbiage which implied you were, as I put it, “amongst friends”, but on the other you also tried to suggest you didn’t actually know anything about SneerClub. On that other hand, you set yourself up as in favour of everything rationalism except this one tiny thing, but back on the first and again here you’re suggesting that you know pretty well where you are (re: “mainstream”, and SneerClub’s alleged favouring it against rationalism in general). My suggestion was that this muddle of cant implies a fundamental dishonesty: you’re hiding all sorts of opinions behind a borrowed language of (at least in its original context: passive aggressive) non-confrontation. Most of that is well confirmed when you slip into this dropping of “sir”s and openly passive aggressive apologising just because I was explicitly impatient.

The world doesn’t slow down but it turns smoother when you just say what you mean or decide you didn’t have anything to say in the first place.

Look back at that guff about “discovering reality”, now if that isn’t just the adderall talking it’s a move you make when you don’t particularly like somebody but you want to make them look or at least feel a little bad for not being appropriately high-minded. “High-minded” here would further translate into real demands as “getting with the right programme”, to the exclusion of what your opposite partner was doing - in this case, allegedly, scoring points “off each other”. “Off each other” was another weasel phrase: you know that at least at first blush you weren’t scoring points off anyone, so you also know that the only remaining target of that worry could have been SneerClubbers.

I would hardly consider myself in favour of “the mainstream”, but I also know that what counts as “mainstream” is irreducibly dependent on your point of view. As far as I’m concerned a great deal of anti-“mainstream” opinion is reactionary and/or stupid, so anti-“mainstream” only by default. A stopped clock, famously, tells the truth twice a day - whether its on CBS or LessWrong. If you want the “truth” I recommend narrowing your focus until you start making meaningful distinctions. I hope that as comfortably vitiates your point as it should.

Next time it would be polite to answer the fucking question.

Btw…

I am not going to discuss the actual experiments that have been done on calibration—you can find them in my book chapter on cognitive biases and global catastrophic risk1—because I’ve seen that when I blurt this out to people without proper preparation, they thereafter use it as a Fully General Counterargument, which somehow leaps to mind whenever they have to discount the confidence of someone whose opinion they dislike, and fails to be available when they consider their own opinions.

lol

Even had I not been primed by the post, that unassuming banner pic would have set off the hairs up and down my arm

I am absolutely astonished that anybody with the most basic understanding of relativity would ever take Yud as some kind of brain genius after he shows his entire mucky arse all over just those two opening paragraphs

Alright I know you’re temp banned but let’s just leave this to remind you that - whatever your opinion of philosophers - in a territorial pissing match between philosophers and…a software course you took one time…the philosophers, who between them have a very different and would you believe it somewhat richer account of doxa (look at that, it’s even in Greek), probably have kind of an edge here.

At the old SneerClub, /r/SneerClub on reddit, which is still up but no longer active, we had two policies relevant to this situation: (1) serious posts are marked “NSFW”, so that people don’t accidentally click through to the rambling mind palace tour of a random interloper without some idea of what they were in for; (2) if you use language like “epistemic status” as if everybody knows what that means, which is to say as if you had blithely assumed everybody was in your discursive club, I ban you.

A third, as well, was for regular users to please not encourage the interlopers in this wilfully (acquiredly?) solipsistic behaviour.

I have to ask, on the matter of (2): why? Everybody who knows what the term “epistemic status” means and what it socially signifies also knows that it’s entirely peculiar to this group “rationalists”, a group of people which the forum here exists to target, and negatively. I ask because it says something about the rest of the post.

The opening wants to put you in a distal relationship both with the rationalists and with any among the criticisms whomof which are not criticisms of AI doom shithousery. That would put you in a relatively small club, being people who are broadly aligned with everything else that the rationalists have to say, but who specifically do not think that Skynet is coming, and who think that this is the one area where rationalists get it wrong. At the same time, however, this term “epistemic status” functions to signify that you’re fairly sure you’re among friends on this forum, while at the same time what you want to do is enquire whether that is the case: you want to find out if people on this forum share that singular bad feeling with you.

This is rather a mess of contrasting significations: usually this happens when somebody is speaking rather out of both sides of their mouth.

What’s being signified when you point to “boomer forums”? That’s an “among friends” usage: you’re free to denigrate the boomer fora here. And then once again you don’t know yet if this is one of those “boomer forums”, or you wouldn’t have to ask.

What people in their droves are now desperate to ask, I will ask too: which is it dummy? Take the stopper out of your speech hole and tell us how you really feel.

A bad habit rationalism teaches is to treat a stock verbiage of polite and open discussion as on the one hand (a) integral to productive conversation, and (b) automatically generative of productive conversation. But people aren’t like that, because people are in general really smart listeners (and readers) when it comes to figuring out what is stock verbiage and what is meant in earnest. This doesn’t mean that they always draw the right conclusion if they come right out and say “I think this is somebody honest trying too hard” or “this person is full of shit” - but that initial intuition is usually right on target, and it has to be unlearned with a great deal of training in the tenets of the rationalist cult in order to guarantee the cult’s intellectually pointless hierarchies of “good discussion”, which are nonetheless crucial as a tool of enforcement within the cult’s social order.

Anyway, the question in the above paragraph is open.

Right, so go after him for that!

No, there were any two really great mods

Ed: oh fuck it my bad you’re a horrible racist. Alright

The question is always, and I mean ALWAYS “what exactly do you mean by ask questions and discuss issues?” Because from the very first second you complain that people don’t do that, it is a universal law that I will ultimately or quickly find you (a) refusing to do that, (b) complaining about somebody who did exactly that because it didn’t go your way. Some valorised ideal of “someone who asks questions and discusses issues” is cant, it is for all intents and purposes meaningless beyond what LessWrongers would call “signalling” that this is the sort of person you personally would like to be, hugely conditioned by class/culture/etc.

It’s almost exclusively a matter of vocabulary: people identify speaking in a particular register with being that kind of person as they understand that ideal, to the point that they will literally be blind and deaf to real life question marks in order to push an interpretation through as to whether or not their conversation partner matches up.

Don’t say stuff like that, be concrete and specific.

No, but Singer does mean stuff like “supply birth control to people who don’t have birth control” and “make them rich and educated so they have fewer kids” which eugenics or not is a real policy response by governments which had to deal with famine pursued