Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The Great Leader himself, on how he avoids going insane during the onging End of the World because among other things that’s not what an intelligent character would do in a story, but you might not be capable of that.
I forgot to mention it last week, but this is Scott Adams shit. The stuff which made him declare that Trump would win in a landslide in 2016 due to movie rules. Iirc he also claimed he was right on that, despite Trump not winning in a landslide, the sort of goalpost moving bs which he judges others harshly for (despite in the other situations it not applying)
So up next, Yud will claim some pro AI people want him dead and after that Yud will try to convince people he can bring people to orgasm by words alone. I mean those are the ‘adamslike’ genre tropes now.
tl;dr i don’t actually believe the world is going to end but more importantly i’m Ender Wiggin
❌: Ender Wiggin
✅: End Wiggin’
deleted by creator
It’s very meta for Yud to write a story all about how the story isn’t all about himself.
One part in particular pissed me off for being blatantly the opposite of reality
Eliezer literally has multiple sequence about his foolish youth where he nearly destroyed the world trying to jump straight to inventing AI instead of figuring out “AI Friendliness” first!
Nah, you learned nothing from what you did wrong and your sequence posts were the very sort of self aggrandizing bullshit you’re mocking here.
Eliezer’s “AGI concerns to work on” was making a plan for him, personally, to lead a small team, which would solve meta-ethics and figure out how to implement these meta-ethics in a perfectly reliable way in an AI that didn’t exist yet (that a theoretical approach didn’t exist for yet, that an inkling of how to make traction on a theoretical approach for didn’t exist yet). The very plan Eliezer came up with was self aggrandizing bullshit that made everything about Eliezer.
Nobody is above tropes. Tropes are just patterns you see in narratives. Everything you can describe is a trope. To say you are above tropes means you don’t live and exist.
Not going mad as the world ends is also a trope, you fuck!
We now have a canon mental age for Yud of drumroll nine.
That isn’t how it works, idiot. You can’t “decide to be sane”, that’s like having a private language.
Anyway, just to make the subtext of my other comments into text. Acting like you are a character in a story is a dissociative delusion and counter to reality. It is definitively not sane. Insane, if you will.
To say you are above tropes is actually a trope
Followup:
Look, the world is fucked. All kinds of paradigms we’ve been taught have been broken left and right. The world has ended many times over in this regard. In place of anything interesting or helpful to address this, Yud’s encoded a giant turd into a blog post. How to stay sane? Just stay sane, bro. Easy to say if the only thing threatening your worldview is a made-up robodemon that will never exist.
Here’s Yud’s actually-quite-easy-to-understand suggestions:
All of these are terrible. In general, you want to stay grounded in reality, be aware of the agency you have in the world, and don’t feel pressured to performatively participate in society, especially if that means doing arbitrary rituals to prove that you are “sane”.
Here are my thoughts on “how to stay sane” and “how to cope”:
It’s entirely reasonable to crash out. I don’t want anyone to go insane, but fucking look at all this shit. Datacenters are boiling the oceans. Liberalism is starting its endgame into fascism. All the fucking genocides! Dissociating is acceptable and expected as an emotional response. All of this has been happening in (modern) human history to a degree where crashing out has been reasonable. Yet, many people have been able to “stay sane” in the face of this. If you see someone who appears to be sane, either they’re fucked in the head, or they have some perspective or have built up some level of resilience. Whether or not those things can be helpful to someone else is not deterministic. If you are someone who has “stayed sane”, please remember to show some empathy and some awareness that it’s fine if someone is miserable, because again, everything is fucked.
Putting the above together, I accept basically any reaction to the state of the world. It’s reasonable to go either way, and you shouldn’t feel bad either way. “Sanity” has different meanings depending on where you look. I think there’s a common, unspoken definition that basically boils down to “a sane person is someone who can productively participate in society.” This is not a standard you always need to hold yourself to. I think it’s helpful to introspect and, uh, “extrospect”, here. Like, figure out what you think it means to be sane, what you want it to mean, and what you want. And bounce these ideas off of someone else, because that usually helps.
I think there is another common definition of sanity that might just be “mentally healthy”. To that end, things that have helped me, aside from therapy, that aren’t particularly insightful or unique:
I mean, is that so fucking hard to say?
they really thonk that people work just like chatbots, are they
Its the most obvious explanation for their behaviour I can think of.
Joke’s on him, Know-Nothing Know-It-All is also a trope.
@swlabr @BioMan
To paraphrase Garth Marenghi, “I know writers who use tropes and they’re all cowards”
Screaming at the void towards Chuunibyou (wiki) Eliezer: YOU ARE NOT A NOVEL CHARACTER, THINKING OF WHAT BENEFITS THE NOVELIST vs THE CHARACTER HAS NO BEARING ON REAL LIFE.
Sorry for yelling.
Minor notes:
It’s quite petty of Yud to be so passive-aggressive towards his employee insisted he at least try to discuss coping. Name dropping him not once but twice (although that is also likely to just be poor editing)
Yud, when journalists ask you “How are you coping?”, they don’t expect you to be “going mad facing apocalypse”, that is YOUR poor imagination as a writer/empathetic person. They expect you to be answering how you are managing your emotions and your stress, or bar that give a message of hope or of some desperation, they are trying to engage with you as real human being, not as a novel character.
Alternatively it’s also a question to gauge how full of shit you may be. (By gauging how emotionally invested you are)
Emotional turmoil and how characters cope, or fail to cope makes excellent literature! That all you can think of is “going mad”, reflects only your poor imagination as both a writer and a reader.
This is only true if they actually accept the premise of what you are trying to sell them.
That is deeply Ironic, coming from someone who makes choice based on him being the main character of a novel.
If you are truly doing this, I would say that means you are expecting insanity wayyyyy to much. (also psychobabble)
In which Yud goes in depth, and self-aggrandizing nonsensical detail about a very mundane trick about getting out of bed in the morning.
When I read HPMOR, which was years ago before I knew who tf Yud was and I thought Harry was intentionally written as a deeply flawed character and not a fucking self-insert, my favourite part was Hermione’s death. Harry then goes into grief that he is unable to cope with, disassociating to such an insane degree he stops viewing most other people as thinking and acting individuals. He quite literally goes insane as his world - his friend and his illusion of being the smartest and always in control of the situation - ended.
Of course now in hindsight I know this is just me inventing a much better character and story, and Yud is full of shit, but I find it funny that he inadvertently wrote a character behave insanely and probably thought he’s actually a turborational guy completely in control of his own feelings.
I feel like this is a really common experience with both HPMoR and HP itself, and explains a large part of the positive reputation they enjoy(ed).
I think the way he reads the question is telling on himself. He knows he is sort of doing a half-assed response to the impending apocalypse (going on a podcast tour, making even lower-quality lesswrong posts, making unworkable policy proposals, and continuing to follow the lib-centrist deep down inside himself and rejecting violence or even direct action against the AI companies that are hurling us towards an apocalypse). He knows a character from one of his stories would have a much cooler response, but it might end up getting him labeled a terrorist and sent to prison or whatever, so instead he rationalizes his current set of actions. This is in fact insane by rationalist standards, so when a journalist asks him a harmless question it sends him down a long trail of rationalizations that include failing to empathize with the journalist and understand the question.
does EY fail to get that interview isn’t for him, but for audience? if he wants to sway anyone, then he’d need to adjust what he talks about and how, otherwise it just turns into a circlejerk
Yud seems to have the same conception of insanity that Lovecraft did, where you learn too much and end up gibbering in a heap on the floor and needing to be fed through a tube in an asylum or whatever. Even beyond the absurdity of pretending that your authorial intent has some kind of ability to manifest reality as long as you don’t let yourself be the subject (this is what no postmodernism does to a person), the actual fear of “going mad” seems fundamentally disconnected from any real sense of failing to handle the stress of being famously certain that the end times are indeed upon us. I guess prophets of doom aren’t really known for being stable or immune to narcissistic flights of fancy.
Having a SAN stat act like an INT (IQ) stat is very on brand for rationalists (except ofc the INT stat is immutable duh)
I think he actually is failing to handle the stress he has inflicted on himself, and that’s why his latest few lesswrong posts hadreally stilted poor parables about Chess and about alien robots visiting earth that were much worse than classic sequences parables. And why he has basically given up trying to think of anything new and instead keeps playing the greatest lesswrong hits on repeat, as if that would convince anyone that isn’t already convinced.
“How do you keep yourself from going insane?”
“I tell myself I’m a character from a book who comes to life and is also a robot!” (Hubert Farnsworth giggle)
“I like to dissociate completely! Wait, what was the question?”
ユッドちゃん！
はい〜
なにがすき？
パワーハラスメント、よりもデルル~
Hitting the konbini in the wee hours for strong zeros, lolicon mags and pawahara ice cream
stay with meeeeeeeee~~~🎶
~~In the dead of night, knocking on the door~~
Also discussed in last week’s Stubsack.