Also: I guess this is a spoiler?
::: spoiler spoiler
Upon seeing "Eliza" for the third time, I wondered if it was a reference to "My Fair Lady." Well, it was, once removed.
:::
Tangent to the whole thing: digging through the archives is referred to as “spelunking” in the article. I’ve heard people referring to reading and interpreting legacy code as “archaeology”. What other fun metaphors do we have for looking through old stuff?
While the sound of bitconnect guy saying “Bitconneeeeect!!” is etched firmly in my mind I did read the title and mentally heard it in the similar but different cadence of ozzy osbourne shouting “Crazy Traaaaaain!!!” at the start of the song “Crazy Train”
Y'all have nailed how I felt reading this. You have this fellow who has constructed a cognitive process to self-harm at every juncture. Whenever there is an opportunity to believe in something that could bring them joy or closure etc., they head in the opposite direction because of some tenet they think is "correct" or "obvious" even though said tenet usually has a paper-thin justification. Davis is haunted by an Imp of the perverse; that imp is named Yudkowsky.
IMO, we don't want to poke the hornet's nest of Davis defending Murray, lest we get another 20k word sequence that we have to slog through to sneer at.
A standout, self-contained example of the general badness of this post is this anecdote (CW: transphobia/misgendering):
A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like some male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"
It is genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived in the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult (on Earth, and not just dath ilan) should understand—
It was a compliment! That receptionist was almost certainly thinking of someone like David Bowie or Eddie Izzard, rather than being hateful. The author should have graciously accepted the compliment and done something to pass better next time.[15] The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's hostile stereotype of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified man and snapping out of it.
It is baffling that they choose to speculate about/rationalise the offending comment to cast aspersions on the protagonist and “trans culture” as a whole.
Epistemic status: I have made it through this swamp. I did not read the footnotes. I glossed over the comments. Also as far as I can tell I am a cishet male, which is probably relevant to mention in reviewing this.
So here is where I am at. This post fractal sucks. Davis clearly doesn’t identify with the gender essentialist notion of male, but they also want to hold onto the idea of a biological sex binary. It sucks. I don’t think this is a unique situation- there are plenty of stories about trans kids in conservative/religious households. This particular conservative religion is the robot cult. The oppressive parents are the ghost of 2007!Yud and Scoot.
It also has "MBTI is pseudoscience, you should take this online Big 5 quiz instead" energy