#rationalistic

[random-xpressions]

Decisions taken past midnight tend to be more soulful, they've a touch of tenderness to it, a touch of care and deep consideration, whether it be to oneself or in regards to others. Decisions taken during the day tend to be more rationalistic, more practical, more pragmatic. Somehow sunlight has a direct connection with our minds sharpening, making one clearly see the pros and cons, whatever be the subject. As such, this observation has led me to a simple practice: i keep all my worldly decisions to be made during the day whether it be in terms of my trade, my finances etc. But I prolong my decisions related to other worldly and this includes especially the interpersonal relationships for latter part of night. The soul is more at calm, more open to clemency and forgiveness. Hence the decisions would be far more loving in its essence...

Random Xpressions

[sabakos]

Recent discourse reminds me of that cult indoctrination trick that's often used to weed out more difficult marks early on, where they tell you all that you aren't allowed to eat rice on Tuesdays and then if you protest they go "wow SOMEBODY likes rice a little much huh" as if you're the fucking weirdo who cares too much about how much rice is consumed between Monday and Wednesday instead of them.

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.

And if instead you do decide to push back further, after your abrupt departure from the group ("You're seriously leaving us over RICE?!? Seriously?") and subsequent ostracism, you can then be used as a demonstration to the others who were more pliable, of how the outgroup is full of people like you who are obsessed with violating the No-Tuesday-Rice rule to the point where they'll abandon all their friends, who cared so much for them, so it clearly isn't an arbitrary restriction, you're the kind of monster these rules are intended to protect them from, thus all the other wise and esoteric precepts of the charismatic leader are implied to be equally justified.

[pageofheartdj]

There is something about this dynamic and I want more XD

[centrally-unplanned]

Very much enjoyed Tracing Woodgrain's foray into the internet life of jilted ex-rationalist and Wikipedia editor David Gerard. It is of course "on brand" for me - the social history of the internet, as a place of communities and individual lives lived, is one of my own passion projects, and this slots neatly into that domain in more ways than one. At the object-level it is of course about one such specific community & person; but more broadly it is an entry into the "death of the internet-as-alternate-reality" genre; the 1990's & 2000's internet as a place separate from and perhaps superior to the analog world, that died away in the face of the internet's normalization and the cruel hand of the real.

Here that broad story is made specific; early Wikipedia very much was "better than the real", the ethos of the early rationalist community did seem to a lot of people like "Yeah, this is a new way of thinking! We are gonna become better people this way!" - and it wasn't total bullshit, logical fallacies are real enough. And the decline is equally specific: the Rationalist project was never going to Escape Politics because it was composed of human beings, Wikipedia was low-hanging fruit that became a job of grubby maintenance, the suicide of hackivist Aaron Swartz was a wake-up call that the internet was not, in any way, exempt from the reach of the powers-that-be. TW's allusion to Gamergate was particularly amusing for me, as while it wasn't prominent in Gerard's life it was truly the death knell for the illusion of the internet as a unified culture.

But anyway, the meat of the essay is also just extremely amusing; someone spending over a decade on a hate crusade using rules-lawyering spoiling tactics for the most petty stakes (unflattering wikipedia articles & other press). The internet is built by weirdos, and that is going to be a mixed bag! It is beautiful to see someone's soul laid bare like this.

It can be tempting to get involved in the object-level topics - how important was Lesswrong in the growth of Neoreaction, one of the topics of Gerard's fixations? It was certainly, obviously not born there, never had any numbers on the site, and soon left it to grow elsewhere. But on the flip side, for a few crucial years Lesswrong was one of the biggest sites that hosted any level of discussion around it, and exposed other people to it as a concept. This is common for user-generated content platforms; they aggregate people who find commonalities and then splinter off. Lesswrong's vaunted "politics is the mindkiller" masked a strong aversion to a lot of what would become left social justice, and it was a place for those people to meet. I don't think neoreaction deserves any mention on Lesswrong's wikipedia page, beyond maybe a footnote. But Lesswrong deserves a place on Neoreaction's wikipedia page. There are very interesting arguments to explore here.

You must, however, ignore that temptation, because Gerard explored fucking none of that. No curiosity, no context, just endless appeals to "Reliable Source!" and other wikipedia rules to freeze the wikipedia entries into maximally unflattering shapes. Any individual edit is perhaps defensible; in their totality they are damning. My "favourite" is that on the Slate Star Codex wikipedia page, he inserted and fought a half-dozen times to include a link to an academic publication Scott Alexander wrote, that no one ever read and was never discussed on SSC beyond a passing mention, solely because it had his real name on it. He was just doxxing him because he knew it would piss Scott off, and anyone pointing that out was told "Springer Press is RS, read the rules please :)". It is levels of petty I can't imagine motivating me for a decade, it is honestly impressive!

He was eventually banned from editing the page as some other just-as-senior wikipedia editor finally noticed and realized, no, the guy who openly calls Scott a neo-nazi is not an "unbiased source" for editing this page wtf is wrong with you all. I think you could come away from this article thinking Wikipedia is ~broken~ or w/e, but you shouldn't - how hard Gerard had to work to do something as small as he did is a testament to the strength of the platform. No one thinks it is perfect of course, but nothing ever will be - and in particular getting motivated contributors now that the sex appeal has faded is a very hard problem. The best solution sometimes is just noticing the abusers over time.

Though wikipedia should loosen up its sourcing standards a bit. I get why it is the way it is, but still, come on.

[anghraine]

ngl I always find it wild to see Star Wars stuff that's like "if you think about it in terms of realistic statistics/science then..." about almost any aspect of it.

I mean, what about the Star Wars films gives the impression that this universe abides by realistic statistics, or realistic anything else? SW is broadly a fantasy epic projected onto an IMAX screen with a space background painted on it. Yeah, the planets and moons in the films almost always have improbably limited biomes and two major locations max, because narratively these locations are usually just fantasy city-states with space aesthetics.

Starships travel at the speed of plot and we simply jump past the amount of time that presumably is passing, and sort of imply the passage of that time through shifts in the character dynamics. But this passage of time cannot be analyzed with any kind of consistency because the only logic governing it is the pace of the story.

Just how long did it take the Empire to send a full contingent of forces to Dantooine, search the entire planet, find the Rebel base, and then report back to Tarkin between one scene and another? No one says and no one appears to care. How long did it take Han and Leia to reach Bespin and what exactly went on between them while Luke was, in the same time frame, going through a protracted training over multiple days at an absolute minimum? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How do giant space worms survive inside asteroids that somehow have an Earth-approximate gravitational field and I guess an atmosphere? Shhhh don't think about it. The point of the sequence is not "how does the giant space worm subsist off this random asteroid and how does it breathe and how does gravity work in this context, seriously" but that the giant worm sequence is fucking sick.

There's probably some after the fact EU justification invented by people who had nothing to do with the original writing of the space worm (or perhaps there are several mutually incompatible explanations) and I am profoundly disinterested in them. Nothing could make this even slightly realistic and it was never intended to be. Star Wars sings space shanties at scientific/mathematical realism as it sails past on a completely different ship going in the exact opposite direction.

And I do mean "sails" because while astronomy might tell us that space is unfamiliar and wild on a level we as Earthbound lifeforms can barely comprehend, Star Wars understands that space is basically an ocean, yet with stars and cool but survivable planets in it, or sometimes it's air but combined with a super cool space background so you can have early 20th century aerial combat that would make no sense in actual space conditions and doesn't need to.

"If you consider relativity, then just running the Empire would be..." General relativity does not govern the galaxy far, far away. Space magic does. I'm not sure there are even time zones.

[zvaigzdelasas]

The opposite of conspiracy theories isn't "rational thinking" its just "coincidence theories"

[noisytenant]

okay. basically. i have a sexual skill that i have been complimented on. my skill has caused people to reevaluate if they like [the involved act], and made people interested when they weren't previously.

but i have very limited evidence to support the compliments. for all i know, it's just a matter of compatibility, and i don't have any particularly special skill. just in the right place at the right time.

and i would like to know the truth, obviously for my ego, but more importantly because if i have a special skill, then it could really change things for people. if i can convert 1 or 2 skeptics into believers, what could it mean to change the hearts and minds of tens? hundreds? i'm genuinely passionate about the pleasurable opportunities afforded by [sex act] and it makes me sad to think there are people who don't like it simply because they had a partner who was bad at it.

so basically, i need to get a bunch of people together so they can experience [sex act] until we have determined the nature of the skill. i need experiments. so i may hone my techniques. so i may amass an army

[dw-flagler]

something that always bothered me about the worm fanfic scene is that they always try to cram everyone together. There's always the scene where taylor meets lisa in a coffee shop or whatever. I get it, it's a fanfic, you can't just make up a character for her to meet.

But one of the things i always liked about worm was that it stayed away from the comic trope of making everyone connected. Like, if Worm was a comic book, Armsmaster would be her teacher, She'd end up being friends with Kid Win, Cherie would attend Winslow, Annette would end up being still alive and a secret agent for Cauldron but with amnesia or something, over-the-top soap opera shit, right?

What I always liked was that in Worm, Taylor's just some girl. She only knows one hero out of costume, and it's the girl who ruined her life. Her dad's just the head of hiring for the union. Her mom was just a college professor. If you asked the mayor about Danny Hebert, he'd say "who?" A lot of fanfics have him be like seinfeldian rivals with the mayor, but like he just writes petitions. If you asked Lustrum about Annette Hebert, she'd have no clue who you're talking about, because Annette was just like a member of her organization.

What I'm trying to stress, is that in superhero comics, everything's connected. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone's a super genius, or met at The Science Expo, or their dad was a famous crime fighter. Comics have all these sorts of big dramatic irony reveals. In comic books, there is never a character who's just some guy.

This sort of thing is great for making everything feel connected, and it's good for keeping out extraneous exposition.

But Worm doesn't do that. It's all just like. They're just regular ass people. Of course they don't know each other. They live in a city with 300 thousand people, none of them would have ever met each other if it weren't for capeshit.

And, I mean, it does remove a lot of the potential for shenanigans but it really does a lot to make everything feel more real.

There's also something there about capeshit being a metaphor for shared trauma where like these people would not know each-other were it not for shared trauma.

The undersiders, the great team, the bestest friend team, they don't meet if not for capeshit. They have no connection to eachother outside this. These are kids who would have never met, they would never have come within 20 degrees of separation were it not for the fact they have powers. This is integral to worm's worldbuilding. It's maybe the closest you ever get to a positive aspect of gaining powers, and yet for so many capes there is no undersiders, just the fighting and loneliness and eventual violent death.

[max1461]

It would actually be more efficient if we wrote in boustrophedon

llɒ ƨɘγɘ ɿuo ɘvom oɟ ϱnivɒ⑁ ʇo ɘmiɟ ɘ⑁ɟ ƨu ɘvɒƨ bluow ɟi ɘƨuɒɔɘd

the way back to the left before starting each new line. Imagine how

qu bɘbbɒ ɘɿɘw ƨϱnivɒƨ ɘƨo⑁ɟ llɒ nɘ⑁w ɘvɒƨ bluoɔ ɘw ɘmiɟ ⑁ɔum

[il3x]

Genuinely the fans who are like "ohhhh worm is so cool ohhh power and escalation" BAFFLE me. Especially when they're hardcore Who Would Win numerical power rankers. Like

>S-class citywide threat >this next villain ups the power level so much!!! >look inside >S-class citywide threat

I think it's a case of being blinded by the finale. You blow up ONE multiverse...

[cpericardium]

Confession: in my teenage rationalist phase Luminosity shaped my worldview more than HPMOR

[kaiasky]

i think if i was gonna rationality post, my neorationality corrective to the immortal science of bayesianism-kahnemanianism it would be that one should qualify one's beliefs on a two-spectrum axis, the standard credence (as determined by the odds you would accept in a bet with an atemporal all-knowing demon, as is the fashion), and the importance, as determined by the amount of utility an atemporal all-knowing demon (as is the fashion) would have to give you in exchange for magically changing your credence of that belief.

mostly i would do this so people would go around posting like, "epistemic confidence in this claim: 80% or a large pepperoni pizza"

[longsightmyth]

are we really out here trying to say the rationalist cult leader's bad wizard book fic is any better than the bad wizard books

is this a take put before mine eye in this the year 2024

[anticbrvtalist]

Giuseppe Terragni - House for an artist, Milan 1933

[bibliolithid]

Outside of all its other problems, I think Competent Elites also drastically undersells how much being able to throw money at problems improves people's physical and mental health. Even outside of other factors, very highly paid people are going to come off as smarter, healthier, happier, and "more alive"

[mitigatedchaos]

Concept:

Instead of a conventional government that covers its ass when making stuff up through "misinformation" censorship and aligned press...

A "rationalist" government that covers its ass by assigning everything probability values and describing everything as tentative, preliminary, experimental.

"When we told you to stand 6 feet apart to reduce the risk to reduce the risk of Covid exposure, that was just a preliminary estimate. We estimated only a 35% probability that was within 1 ft of the correct distance to reduce the spread by 10% or more. That policy was enforced, of course, but we never told you it was perfect. With the termination of the policy, as was conditional on below-expected returns to disease prevention, you will now be refunded the enforcement fines you paid during the enforcement period."

"Will we be paid interest for the time our money was tied up in fines?"

"No."