#bc I have this dumb naive idea I can communicate with people and help them understand things

[crow-caller]

I really do think looking at bad writing is one of the best ways to learn about writing in general, especially for beginners.

the thing is, writing in general is highly subjective- a good sentence will be good in different ways to different people, or not impress someone at all.

a bad sentence? most people can spot bad sentences easy, especially if it is presented to them as 'here's an example of a bad sentence, let's unpack why.'

bad writing can also be very funny, which I think is again often more engaging than 'here's a work of literary genius go analyze it'. Like here's some bad writing from lightlark3:

The moment it was out of Horus’s grip, his body became bones. The flesh turned to ash. He became a corpse.

it's dumb as hell, but I think could foster a solid discussion when you ask 'why? what is the author intending to say? what about it makes it feel 'clunky'? How would you write the same idea?'

[somnilogical]

they will never be as strong or as fast as i can be

copy/pasted from a convo:

<<somni: ive been exploiting being able to talk about everything vs miri/cfar cant do what i do bc if they did they would talk about how they are evil. it would all chain back.

somni: omg i can just post this to my blog because i can talk about my meta-strategy and it confers pretty much no relative advantage to miri/cfar. because 1 most of them have disassembled their agency so its like talking in front someone who works at the dmv about taking over the world and the ones that have any agency (basically just anna salamon) have to work with and coordinate via brokenness the masses that have and 2 feels secure in the way that saying ill use my soul as my weapon feels secure, like the power of this technique doesnt depend much on people not knowing im using it.>>

truth is entangled and lies contagious. justice is entangled and injustice contagious. in order to sustain their facade, miri/cfar had to chain back to lie about the principles of decision theory itself. lie about the organization structure of cfar, lie about miri's fundraiser. and so much more.

any series of reasoned claims they make will chain back to stuff thats false or injustice, because they seek to maintain a region of untruth and injustice.

so yeah, miri/cfar basically cant talk in public except in staid formalities infinitely pouring the same entropy of "these people are psychotic" "these people are infohazards" "do not read what they write" "stay the course" "everything is under control, do not panic" "i know my associates at miri/cfar, they are good people" "if you talk with these people you may become a rapist". but not actually able to manifest dynamic compute. to explain themselves they built their own personal room 101, filled with miri/cfar affiliates and formed a united front of gaslighting. deluks (author of that one rationalist blog where they worked to read and summarize all the others) talks about the kind of compute miri/cfar manifested:

<<deluks: I also updated a lot based on Bay Area safety discussion

idk if I have ever been in such a hostile environment for anyone trying to discuss making thigns safer

If you wanted to discuss how Anna et all were innocent people would happily chat with you

If you tried to discuss ideas for making things safer either you got silence

or people would be insanely hostle if you plausibly slipped up at all

or even seemed like you might have been not careful enough in how you phrased things

extremely careful -> no engagement at all//even slightly less care -> get dogpilled>>

they have picked up the optimization style of of cops, as alice maz described them:

<<the role of the cop is to defend society against the members of society. police officers are trivially cops. firefighters and paramedics, despite similar aesthetic trappings, are emphatically not. bureaucrats and prosecutors are cops, as are the worst judges, though the best are not. schoolteachers and therapists are almost always cops; this is a great crime, as they present themselves to the young and the vulnerable as their friends, only to turn on them should they violate one of their profession's many taboos. soldiers and parents need not be cops, but the former may be used as such, and the latter seem frighteningly eager to enlist. the cop is the enemy of passion and the enemy of freedom, never forget this>>

i can travel lots of places and regenerate truth and justice.

i can go to a trans support group in the bay and show them logs of what elle said and did and they can recognize the pattern of minority oppression, transmisogyny.

i can talk with uninvolved decision-theorists about why paying out to oneshot blackmail with subjunctive dependence because "In game theory, paying out to blackmail is bad, because it creates an incentive for more future blackmail." is wrong. and why exploiting your subjunctive dependence as a udt agent to not pay out is right. they cant.

--

miri/cfar have to centrally coordinate on lies or they start crashing into each other. independently generating falsehoods in isolation makes them point in all directions.

independently generating and working off of truths allows everything to point in the same direction without needing to communicate. i can write this post and then idk maybe someone im algorithmically colluding with on this writes another post and they dont come out all distorted and skew with each other. this caches out in what looks from the outside as an uncanny ability to start dynamically colluding with people and output distinct strains of philosophy based on shared precepts.

interference with yourself looks like kelsey piper trying to claim that emma and somni are starting some sort of rape cult and anna and miri/cfar trying to claim we are naive victims of ziz's cult and ▘▕▜▋ claiming emma and somni are mindhacking ziz to make her bully them and jade nameless claiming im doing this to get a job at cfar and ...

since they make up their fake coordination points independently they smash into each other. if they want to coordinate over lots of people they then have to work out which of these they want to coordinate around in a sort of market of falsehoods. and have to arrange for it to not contradict any information anything people know. but they dont know all the information everyone knows, and they wont know it even after combing through lots of blogs and reading lots of discord chats.

when they try coordinating on falsehoods like this, its hard to get a coalition together in an environment where what people know is rapidly changing because a bunch of anarchist bloggers keep posting things in a bunch of places on a non-centrally controlled schedule determined by what seems like a good idea at the time to independent agents. and having lots of conversations with so many different people in private and public they cant keep track of them all.

if they try pretending to be dumb and forming a unified gaslighting front in one area. then people will exploit the fact that this is the internet and not the evolutionary environment, take logs and post them somewhere else where everyone didnt collude to be dumb in this particular way. so while their monkey brains get a rush of endorphins from being able to successfully coordinate local humans, what feels like an entire tribe, against the blasphemer, actually they just used their adult intelligence to defeat in front of a bunch of people who dont share their political commitments but who can reason about what is true and what is just.

(of course there are many truths this doesnt work on because of large inferential distance, shared mammalian biases it takes an unusual mind to step over, and shared incentives. but the defense of most regions of injustice and untruth when you ask questions have to keep chaining to more and more absurd things until you are defending causal decision theory or start claiming 'anna salamon, the president of cfar, is not involved in cfar's hiring'. which depend on a social context committed to defending everything that protects miri/cfar and people who dont have the same conclusion-that-must-not-happen can see that its dumb.)

if miri/cfar had committed themselves to the path of expanding agency, maybe i wouldnt be posting my thoughts and meta-process on the public internet. (in the counterfactual where they committed to this path, its likely that i wouldnt be protesting. because it seems actually-hard to stay on the path and remain evil.) but as it stands, i expect this information to differentially help anarchists and do about as much good for statists as explaining updateless decision theory to someone at cfar. its just this inert structure in their brains, they cant do anything strategic with it. they intentionally shut down their ability to take ideas seriously and drive out anyone left who can, calling them crazy.

what they can do is "oh here is a list of people to target" and "see if they said anything incriminating". ive seen their attempts to coordinate enter the attractors of 'authoritarianism' (duncans dragon army, kingsleys "repent and submit to [AUTHORITY FIGURE]") and 'lets all lie in the same direction and disable general cognition to update out of this! the important part is social agreement and that everyone allows social reality to have the final veto on their beliefs. i myself do this so you know im super safe and this is super fair.' (anna and kelsey). this sort of weak coordination based on breaking people can be easily subverted by anything real.

--

if you are actually right, you can exploit useful properties of being right and let that be your asymmetric weapon. such that all that challenge you know they will know its steel. and then people who compute the outcome and expect to lose, dont fight in the first place.

if my chosen weapon were actually the size of my muscles and imposing figure compared to anna salamon as miri/cfar people "believed" (exploiting the already extant anti-transfem psychic suppression field as one of their few functioning coordination points. probably not as functional now after what i have written.), then when i fought people it would create a warp field such that then people with smaller muscles wont fight in the first place, but id be deluged by people with larger muscles. i dont want to create a warp field that summons people with lots of muscles.

if i exploit properties of my souls, of truth and justice. then i have an arsenal of techniques that are stronger if i actually want to save everyone, if im actually right, if im acting for justice. because they exploit useful differential properties of each. and the warp field in higher density summons ... people who care about saving the world, truth, and justice. in other words, a high density of potential allies.

by default i want to exploit "the difference is that im right" not "the difference is that i have larger muscles". i want differential power to push away those who are wrong and unjust and attract those who are right and just into a kind of warp hull.

there are other reasons as well.

[elliot-orion]

Character Creation Tag

The always lovely @ardawyn tagged me to do this awesome tag! I’m going to do it for Keio, because they are more fun. 

1) What was the first element of your OC that you remember considering (name, appearance, backstory, etc.?)

I think the first thing I considered was that they 1 had to be alien, but how alien? i still wanted humaonid, so I was trying to think of creatures I found cute, and seals popped up. so, seal alien. The rest came after.

2) Did you design them with any other characters/OCs from their universe in mind?

No, actually. Keio came first, then I created River as the one going on the road trip with the alien.

3) How did you choose their name?

Oh fuck this is convoluted. So i love the name Kai, always have, but its always used all the time, so I wanted this to be different, so I was playing with various short K names, and I got Kei, and I was like, nope, not alien enough, so I added an O. Which made it different for me, I guess. Idk. There was also this thing with me using the name in like 4 other half written things, because I have this habit of latching onto a name, and NEEDING to use it SOMEWHERE, so i keep reusing it until something sticks. And that’s how Keio got their name. :)

4) In developing their backstory, what elements of the world they live in played the most influential parts?

The most influential in general was the ice planet bit. That came from them being based on a seal, obviously, and it impacted a LOT about the story. However, backstory wise, the most influential bit was that I wanted them to also have lost someone, to match River. So that’s why they lost their mate!

5) Is there any significance behind their hair colour?

Keio doesn’t actually have hair, but their fur is darker on the back and lighter on their front, with dark spots also on the back. There isn’t much story signifigance to this, its just based on camoflogue on normals sea animals (looking up from below, they’d blend in with the light sky, from above, blend in with the dark deep ocean)

6) Is there any significance behind their eye colour?

Nope, they just have dark seal eyes. 

7) Is there any significance behind their height?

I really wanted Keio to be short, and River to be tall, bc I love height differences. Also, a smaller body is easier to maintain energy wise, and Ahbox aliens are really quick in water, which lends to small stature. 

8) What (if anything) do you relate to within their character/story?

Keio values family and love and community a LOT, and that’s also really important to me. They also just always want to help people and have... almost innocent, but really just... hopeful, i guess, views on the world. The world is simple to them, and I really want that.

9) Are they based off of you, in some way?

They are tiny. ;) Also, everything above. Keio just has my... kinda child like side. The wonder and excitement about the world, without my cynicalness from growing up here.

10) Did you know what the OC’s sexuality would be at the time of their creation?

I knew I wanted the Ahbox to be genderless, so I guess that means Keio is pan? since gender doesn’t matter at all to them? Idk I didn’t really think much about either of their sexualities. But River told me he was Bi later. Keio just shrugs and says “I love River.” And i guess that answers the question.

11) What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC (any form of art: Writing, drawing, edits, etc.)?

Uh... describing Keio’s personality without making them sound naive or stupid, particularly in the book. Keio is not dumb, and is not naive. They’ve been around really bad people. They just still have their wonder and belief that the world is good, but to us, that plays of as naive. Which isn’t cool. :/

12) How far past the canon events that take place in their world have you extended their story, if at all?

Oh shit i have no idea. I know that Keio stays with River on Earth, and keeps using their human form (they have this disguiser thing for stealth missions usually, but.... ah forget it) to hang out with River and his friends in college, though they spend most of their time in their ship bc of the cold. i know they keep doing their day trips together, and i think they take Ash up to space for a while at some point, because the nerd is curious. That’s it really.

13) If you had to narrow it down to 2 things that you MUST keep in mind while working with your OC, what would those things be?

They have struggles with english, not like, messing up forms of words, but they speak a very textbook version. no slang or anything, kinda thing. Also, they are innocent, but smart, and that’s important for me to keep in mind while writing.

14) What is something about your OC that can make you laugh?

Whenever they get super excited about little things, because it just makes River so happy, and its just adorable.

15) What is something about your OC that can make you cry?

The scene where Keio freaks out bc they see River’s cuts and thinks River is going to die? That. 

16) Is there some element you regret adding to your OC or their story?

Uh... no not particularly.

17) What is the most recent thing you’ve discovered about your OC?

Hmm... that they are a huge fuckin nerd. It never came up until i put Keio and Ash in the same room together, but god those two will talk for hours about space shit.

18) What is your favourite fact about your OC?

Keio is a top. (Sorry not sorry)

tagging @samplewriting @odessawrites and @aschenink !!