swlabr @ swlabr @awful.systems

Only Bayes Can Judge Me

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2 yr. ago

So the code red is over now, I guess?!?!

(who ordered the code red.gif)

This is offensively stupid lol

Hey while we’re here, I propose two more letters:

S, standing for “stochastic parrot ignorance,”

C, standing for “Chinese room does not constitute thought,”

Now we can have ASS LICE

Can confirm. This was like if the pope walked into an r/atheism meetup and showed his texts saying "dw bro, I'll just move you to a different diocese, btw this totally isn't about the allegations wink wink"

I believe he was trying to explain why it looked like MIRI had paid money out to an alleged sexual abuser. The analogy was constructed something like this:

1. A and B work at a company C
2. A has conflict with B.
3. C decides to fire B.
4. unrelated to 1, 2, or 3, B has a wife D, who dies in mysterious circumstances, leading A to strongly believe that B killed D.
5. The police, E, perform an investigation and decide not to pursue a case against B
6. C pays out B's severance, unrelated to 2, 4, or 5.

Don't blame me or how I remembered this if this doesn't make sense.

Alright, I've read the GMS post now. Unfortunately, because I am only coming to it now, ten years after it was first published, and through the framing of a Post-Mortem, whatever charm it may have had over me in its time is not apparent.

TL;DR: Chapman’s Grand Unified Theory of Subcultures (GUTS, if you will) is the socialism of geeks, ig.

Some thoughts:

1. No examples. If you're going to present to me a GUTS, show me some evidence.
2. Post proposes a "lifecycle", i.e., a description of a subculture's life from birth to death. He defines/describes birth intuitively. He says death is when the "cool"/cultural capital runs out, and that this is caused by popularity. Sure, except the meaning/value of cultural capital changes over time, especially for any cultural capital produced by a subculture. Initially, the "cool" is worthless outside the subculture; once the subculture gains popularity, the value soars. The contention here is that the cultural bubble eventually pops, tanking cultural capital. Now, the post doesn't adequately delineate between the loss of "cool" inside and outside the subculture, but I think it's safe to say the author thinks the "cool" simultaneously evaporates inside and outside of the subculture. I don't think this is true. Plenty of subcultures experiences booms and busts and live to die another day. This sometimes happens because the subculture doesn't care about the outside world.
3. So basically, this post is an economics-flavoured look at subculture evolution. Specifically, it is a liberal critique, and therefore incomplete. It's fine to bring up different ideas of capital. It's also fine to point out that subcultures can suffer from cultural colonialism, both in an abstract sense and the real sense (e.g. licensing, IP, funko pops etc). Where liberalism falls short is when it suggests that the solution to problems caused by colonialism is to learn to be capitalist/colonialist in turn. It's not, evidenced by fucking world history, unless you choose to ignore this fact and continue to be liberal.

I can see why this sort of narrative might appeal to the rats/incel-coded people. OP has kind of said it all, I think. To add to this, rats love to invent patterns/tropes and pattern match, especially if this means they can pile on assumptions to the thing at hand. Think: sneer clubs, conflict theorists, other names for enemies of the rat community. Yes, the irony that I am doing that here to the rats is not lost on me. At least I'm not putting a name to it! (Pattern Matchers? Regexes?!?!?)

Obviously, I think a better version of this post would entail:

1. Explicit acknowledgement of the role of capitalism and colonialist tendencies in corrupting subcultures, and noting that the solution to this is not "subcultures with capitalist characteristics" but explicit anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism.
2. A flowchart or state transition table that describes all the ways a subculture can evolve. Death is only one possible fate for a subculture; plenty live on in different ways. There is no GUTS, at least in terms of a straight-line narrative of how a subculture lives and dies.
3. Examples.

An example to illustrate some of my points (nb I have not thought this out, so it might blow up in my face upon further analysis): Internet piracy. I'd say it's a subculture that, by its nature, is anti-capitalist and is thriving to this day. It requires an ultimately commercial framework to exist (i.e. the internet), but unless they shut the whole thing down, this is a non-issue. You can't really sociopathically co-opt the cultural capital here- if you sell the shovels, hey, now you're part of the subculture too, and those shovels better dig good.

And finally, RE: the Buddhism. Chapman is apparently an adherent of Vajrayana Buddhism, as opposed to a white-washed/westernised Consensus Buddhism. My upbringing had a Buddhist-influenced backdrop, but I personally never got into Buddhism itself in any appreciable form. That is to say, I couldn't tell you what Vajrayana Buddhism is myself. That said, I am very familiar with the author's conception of consensus Buddhism. I will use that term in this thread. I'll admit that whenever I encounter a Buddhist in the West, I assume they are a consensus Buddhist. It's a yellow flag for me, in the same way that knowing that someone is into crystals or the zodiac is- it's not necessarily bad, just different. Not the point. There is a red-flag version of Buddhism to me, and that's basically any white person who says they are Buddhist but isn't a consensus Buddhist. Usually, when I encounter this kind of person, it's some insane, hypercapitalist type with messed-up morality/rationality. So that's kind of what I went in thinking, and it coloured how I read this.

David Chapman? The guy that ended John Lennon’s career? (jk, looking into this)

stay with meeeeeeeee~~~🎶

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:

1. detach from reality by pretending you are a character in a story as a coping mechanism.
2. assume no personal responsibility or agency.
3. don't go insane, i.e. make sure you try and fulfil society's expectations of what sanity is.

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:

1. Talking to friends
2. Finding places to talk about the world going to shit.
3. Participating in community, online or irl.
4. Basically just finding spaces where stupid shit gets dunked on.
5. Leftist meme pages

I mean, is that so fucking hard to say?

❌: Ender Wiggin
✅: End Wiggin'

The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes.

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.

Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.

Not going mad as the world ends is also a trope, you fuck!

This sense -- which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life -- is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.

We now have a canon mental age for Yud of drumroll nine.

Just decide to be sane

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.

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~

“I like to dissociate completely! Wait, what was the question?”

After finding out about her here, I’ve been watching a lot of Angela Collier videos lately. Here’s the most recent one which talks about our life extending friends.

E: just expressing my general appreciation for her vids. Things that I like:

• low frequency of cuts/her speech isn’t broken up into 5 second clips
• lack of kowtowing to algorithmic suggestion
• subtle, dry humour

Which I’m now realising is somewhat counter to current trends in content, which might be contributing to why I like these.

Yeah i don’t get it. Like, my local sushi place started using sawdust as filler in their cooked tuna. I just don’t order the tuna. Plus, sawdust has a neutral taste and has fibre in it. I am very smart btw

Hey, urbit was good when it wasn’t conceptualised yet

I clicked as I was curious as to what markers of AI use would appear. I immediately realised the problem: if it is written with AI then I wouldn’t want to read it, and thus wouldn’t be able to tell. Luckily the author’s profile cops to being “AI assisted”, which could mean a lot of things that just boil down to “slop forward”.

Whoop whoop

Bayesian Clown Posse

Yud’s whole project is a pipeline intended to create zizians, if you believe that Yud is serious about his alignment beliefs. If he isn’t serious then it’s just an unfortunate consequence that he is not trying to address in any meaningful way.