Roko's Basilisk: The apocalypse as imagined by bozos | A 20 minute dunk on Yudkowsky, Less Wrong, "Rationality", MIRI etc. (in addition to, of course, the basilisk)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUkHSPdudn4)
posted on June 18, 2021 04:50 PM by
u/VerifiedCape
114
u/nodying35 pointsat 1624056833.000000
Greater Yud talking about how he thought himself into being the most
purely self-giving person ever reminds me of that classic “I have
thought deeply about all major schools of philosophy” post but without
the charming sincerity
Man, I love Rational!Harry’s freakout about transfiguration into a
cat. Not only is it a wonderful string of physics words jammed together
into a facsimile of a scientific statement that actually lacks all
meaning, but it also illustrates how the story is broken. At that point,
Harry has already seen McGonagall levitate something with magic. He was
completely chill about it, going so far as to call it almost
anticlimactic. So, he’s already seen the conservation of energy
being violated. Think about it: levitate a bucket of water, pour it
down a turbine, hey presto free electricity. If we say that conservation
of energy is still being respected because magic could be drawing on
some hidden energy source, then a person-sized thing turning into a
cat-sized thing isn’t necessarily a problem either. The extra mass could
just be turned temporarily intangible. At the Star Trek level of
science-fictional hardness, that would be the typical move (“Captain,
half the mass of the asteroid has apparently phased into subspace”). In
a better story, this could actually illustrate the scientific method:
We’ve had centuries of experience that validates the idea that energy is
conserved, so we’re willing to call that idea a “law”. Now we’re
confronted with a phenomenon where, at first blush, conservation seems
to be violated. What do we do? We can say that the law isn’t a law, or
we can hold onto it and look for places where energy might be hiding or
leaking in. This has actually happened in the history of
physics, as anyone who has read the books that Rational!Harry was
supposedly raised on would know — it’s how the neutrino was
predicted.
But Rational!Harry has a freakout that he either has at the wrong
time or shouldn’t have at all, because neither he nor his creator
actually know science.
Now, you could play the “it’s deliberate!” card. Maybe the point is
that Harry knows less than he thinks he does. But then the construction
of the story is flawed: “unreliable narrator” and “didactic fiction”
don’t really mix. (“Pale Fire” is not a lesson in the history of Eastern
Europe.) Putting the burden of explaining science on a character whose
statements about science may or may not be accurate is a befuddling
move. Before the reader can actually learn anything, they have to sift
the character’s mistakes out from the author’s. And there’s a lot of
work in that regard: genetics, game theory, quantum
foundations, kinetic theory, anthropology… It’s educational, but not
as intended.
Chapter 2 of HPMoR, where all this goes down, is also the point where
it starts to become clear just how much Yudkowsky is in love with his
own sense of humor. Once you see how characters are being used as a
laugh track, you can’t unsee it.
The energy expended lifting objects is well within ordinary everyday reactions and changes we do all the time by walking around.
The energy fluxes indicated by multiple kilograms appearing or disappearing are of an entirely different order.
Of all the things to justifiably shit on this is not one.
Moreover, looking at the scene again, it's pretty clear that Rational!Harry's father isn't lifted by an invisible hand grabbing the scruff of his neck (which would be a neat enough trick, for sure). He just *levitates.* Rational!Harry should have had a freakout right then about the demonstration of a fifth fundamental force and/or the equivalence principle being violated.
It's bad character writing: Is Rational!Harry the type to fly off the handle and leap to hypotheses that involve changes to fundamental physical law? Well, no but also yes. It's poor pedagogy: Are we supposed to put the blame for oversimplifications and outright errors upon the character or the author? That's not a decision we should have to make, and make again, and again... And it's subverting both characterization and pedagogy in the interests of Comedy(TM).
My memory is that the first dozen or so chapters do include a bunch of references to Harry either experimenting, researching, or demanding to be told how different magic things worked. What I recall is Yud saying in an author's note or something that he dropped the idea because he realized that he didn't know how the magic system in the story worked, so there wasn't any way for Harry to figure it out.
I'm thinking of the bag that sort of understands language, the time turner, and the tea. This is one of those things where we very quickly learn the Yud doesn't understand even the flimsy rules of magic that Rowling put together, and can't think of anything better for the most part.
I believe Yud had just at that time written a post about how some super-powers are "can do a possible thing in an impossible way" like flying or being bullet proof, and other powers are "can do an impossible thing" like teleport into the internet or dance the moon bridges. And Harry's reaction here is meant to showoff that same line of thought: levitating an object by... however the object is levitated would be a "possible" thing done impossibly. Because we can make objects levitate in real life, just not with wands. But shapeshifting into a cat is an "impossible" thing. Being insubstantial is just not a thing in yud's worldview.
The start of the video says any/all. He's said in livestreams that he doesn't really care which people use, but he does get annoyed when people start correcting each other on his behalf.
That's possible. I only recently started following his weekly livestreams, where pronoun usage is asked about at least once a stream. His intro card was still saying "he/him" while he was telling people "any/all" on streams and Twitter, so it being a recent change would make sense.
A lot of this video seems to be classic “mock an idea as overly
complicated by failing to explain it properly” strawmanning.
Like, Newcomb’s paradox, which is what timeless decision theory was
in part created to address, is an actual topic of study in the field of
game theory, and is almost nothing like the summary TS gives here.
It’s the equivalent of describing the prisoner’s dilemma as “um, so
you see, there are two prisoners, and the warden doesn’t have enough
evidence to convict them, so maybe they turn on each other if they can’t
talk to each other, and that’s why smart people can’t be nice”.
seriously
there are so many legit things to mock about yud and hpmor and this guy ignores all of them in favor of "look at this nerd who thinks he's sooooo smart"
(except the sci-fi rape thing, jesus fucking christ yudkowsky why?)
the thought to slime ratio on this one was not favorable
Why would you say something so confidently instead of “I don’t know”?
There is a discord associated with this subreddit started by a few users independently a while ago, for the purposes of discussing the same things with the same people
So many breadtubers \*cough\* Vaush seem ideologically bankrupt in the way the fell over themselves trying to justify Biden and neoliberalism when previously they characterized themselves as... just not establishment democrats, which they apparently are in the end.
I’m mainly referring to vaush and during the entirety of this past election him trying to guilt people into voting for Biden, insisting we can push him left and other bullshit.
You went from breadtube is bad, to most of breadtube is bad, to gripe about vau 'why aint i allowed to fuck a horse' sh.
I mean vaush ain't great, he is basically a leftwing destiny/sargon/ben shapiro but he isnt the total of what people think is breadtube. ( if there is even something like that, everybody who gets called breadtube denies being it).
Vaush never struck me as a Biden apologist so much as a lesser-of-two-evils pragmatist when it comes to elections. But he acknowledges that voting should be part of a larger suite of tactics for making change. Do you really think Biden is indistinguishable from Trump, the man who actively tried and is still trying to subvert democracy?
I dont know any of these folks but I don't think that equates to defending neoliberalism. People on the left can come to different conclusions about what the best tactical move is towards long term progress. That doesnt mean they're centrist sell outs.
Yes, Joe “Nothing will fundamentally change” Biden. Absolutely delusional. It’s the same neoliberal hellscape policies with more tact behind them and a new coat of paint so white liberals can go back to brunch. Fuck him.
I mean there's a lot of things to be annoyed about right now in the Democratic party and I understand but Biden has been the least of my frustrations and in fact I've been pretty pleasantly surprised. His administration is staffed with plenty of fresh thinking and I just don't think it's correct to say they're same old same old neoliberals. Plenty of senators are still, sure, but also promising signs to be hopeful about. I don't think uninformed optimism is good but by the same token I don't think cynicism is constructive right now either.
Yeah everyone you don't like is orange man supporter, this is why people call you weirdos "blue MAGA". You are physically incapable of critical thinking.
Greater Yud talking about how he thought himself into being the most purely self-giving person ever reminds me of that classic “I have thought deeply about all major schools of philosophy” post but without the charming sincerity
Man, I love Rational!Harry’s freakout about transfiguration into a cat. Not only is it a wonderful string of physics words jammed together into a facsimile of a scientific statement that actually lacks all meaning, but it also illustrates how the story is broken. At that point, Harry has already seen McGonagall levitate something with magic. He was completely chill about it, going so far as to call it almost anticlimactic. So, he’s already seen the conservation of energy being violated. Think about it: levitate a bucket of water, pour it down a turbine, hey presto free electricity. If we say that conservation of energy is still being respected because magic could be drawing on some hidden energy source, then a person-sized thing turning into a cat-sized thing isn’t necessarily a problem either. The extra mass could just be turned temporarily intangible. At the Star Trek level of science-fictional hardness, that would be the typical move (“Captain, half the mass of the asteroid has apparently phased into subspace”). In a better story, this could actually illustrate the scientific method: We’ve had centuries of experience that validates the idea that energy is conserved, so we’re willing to call that idea a “law”. Now we’re confronted with a phenomenon where, at first blush, conservation seems to be violated. What do we do? We can say that the law isn’t a law, or we can hold onto it and look for places where energy might be hiding or leaking in. This has actually happened in the history of physics, as anyone who has read the books that Rational!Harry was supposedly raised on would know — it’s how the neutrino was predicted.
But Rational!Harry has a freakout that he either has at the wrong time or shouldn’t have at all, because neither he nor his creator actually know science.
Now, you could play the “it’s deliberate!” card. Maybe the point is that Harry knows less than he thinks he does. But then the construction of the story is flawed: “unreliable narrator” and “didactic fiction” don’t really mix. (“Pale Fire” is not a lesson in the history of Eastern Europe.) Putting the burden of explaining science on a character whose statements about science may or may not be accurate is a befuddling move. Before the reader can actually learn anything, they have to sift the character’s mistakes out from the author’s. And there’s a lot of work in that regard: genetics, game theory, quantum foundations, kinetic theory, anthropology… It’s educational, but not as intended.
Chapter 2 of HPMoR, where all this goes down, is also the point where it starts to become clear just how much Yudkowsky is in love with his own sense of humor. Once you see how characters are being used as a laugh track, you can’t unsee it.
Came here to post this. ThoughtSlime is an absolute gem of a human being and his videos are consistently excellent.
A lot of this video seems to be classic “mock an idea as overly complicated by failing to explain it properly” strawmanning.
Like, Newcomb’s paradox, which is what timeless decision theory was in part created to address, is an actual topic of study in the field of game theory, and is almost nothing like the summary TS gives here.
It’s the equivalent of describing the prisoner’s dilemma as “um, so you see, there are two prisoners, and the warden doesn’t have enough evidence to convict them, so maybe they turn on each other if they can’t talk to each other, and that’s why smart people can’t be nice”.
Ohhh, this is gold.
[deleted]
I mostly despise breadtube any more but thoughtslime is still good
This is so good.
Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff