Someone sent me a message on LiveJournal (I’d forgotten that was even possible), and in the process of going and looking at it, I happened to glance over some pages of my long unused LJ, including this post from 2011, which strung together a bunch of related verbal brain noise into a sort of prose poem.

I had remembered making it, but I guess I had forgotten just how fun it was, or in any event I enjoyed re-reading it a lot more than I expected:

Open the door, Mailer. Awake the dawn, Moiler. Moiler – Mailer – Male-er. Open the dawn, weaver. Wreather. Oh, we’ll be there, Norman. Just keep the hinges moving, Mormon Nailer. Nailing ninety-five Mormons to the opened door. Ninety-fryve. Blithe Clive. Open the web, Nailer. Needleman. Nellingham. Nailingham is always welcome here at Marlsboro. Marl’s borough. Broil-o. Embroiled, embroider, broader. A broader sky. The dawn awakes –

“The plasmicosmic dawn awakes,” he said. Plasmid, Cosmid. Crosby, Swills, Crash. Open up all your old wings, Hillel Mailer, Normandy Miller, Nimblefoot Merton. Feel the mouth-shapes, please. Millst, mellifluous, mileaste. Miralysis. Melting point. Norman Mailer, nessun dorma. Milk it for all it’s worth, Wrigly. Weatherhouse.

The Kissinger histogram. Kissing under the histletoe. Koran. Koranberry. Calamitous Celeste. Chase chaste Celeste – too late, chaste Celeste lies in her sad sarcophagus.

The aesthetic of red and metal. Aesthete, esthete, Esther. Anesthetic Esther. Erasmus, elocution. Don’t worry, Mailist – Mailatrix – you’ll open up the dawn soon enough and we’ll be there. In the Oedebouleon. The luminous Oedeboule. The translucent Oedeboule. The Oedeboulic infinites. Say the words with me, Mister. Cepstral, splanchnic, pileated. Do you see what I mean? Crepuscule. Corrugated. Cepstringham. Coelope. Trellis.

Democratic fistulas. What’s that? Adrenergic, caffeinerge – an urge, a splurge, a dirge. No. Criminal activity. Crimsonal activity. Criminal barometry. A Coelacanth with a catheter.

The red metallic aesthetic, that piercing pirouetting place, where bread is brass, the sleek machines – we too can open it, weaving Mailer-Müller. Just keep moving the hinges. Flap open the Kissinger hologram. Sonogram porridge. Pilates. Pelagic skies open up in the little flaps above the frame. Put more fuel in your Firenze. A Philipshead afternoon. Erato’s young Celestine samurai. Silly. A salmonist, a solipsistic syllogism. Syllo-seminary. How many times does it go around, Phyllis? How many times have you heard these sounds? To a baritone barrister with no fuel in his frenzy, the revolving words can be tiring. Tire, tier, thorn. Thornado. Trelliscope. Eat the syncopated goods, grease the hinges, open the sky. Yesterday’s angles. We’ll be there, Quentin. Quentinism. Mailerism. Quistonaste. Quercus. Soon, Mailer. Soon.

uploadedyudkowsky:

“The problem with spending a ton of money is that you can’t invest it.”

– Matt Groening

“Misc discovery is one of the great triumphs of the human age, an improvement that has brought much cultural improvement even though the arts still seem still largely alien to our modern world.”

– John K Clark

“Skeptic points. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. ‘Skeptic’ means someone who thinks UFOs are aliens.”

– Ben Goertzel

“This problem does not arise only in physics fiction. I hear [Xannon] calls what seem to me ‘string theory’.”

– Larry Wall

“I assign an optimal to theories that invoke personal continuity. To paraphrase Alfred Tarski, the sense of the Ruble is the same quality as precise quantitative measurements.”

– Eugen Leitl, “Code Blue”

“I’m a multimillionaire when my pocketbooks run out, and I own aeba and he is myself an island now and forever.”

– Peter Norvig

“It’s quite common to find, in life, a hidden middleman. A man’s instrument of birth, or desire Whatever is the instrument is to be used, is his master instrument. If a god is at work in preparing for this life, as a result, I am his temporary instrument. What he may do to steer the instrument as it grows old, I do not know.”

–The Fifth Elephant

“The way to a borscht is if the world gets a bit noisy. Don’t ask me how I can avoid this annoyance, and with a bit of explosives your bomb won’t have much effect.”

– The Fifth Elephant

“It’s somewhat easier to make a clapper clap when you’re hungry, than it is to dine at a goatee dine-cheap restaurant.”

– bunnyThor

“Weaseled bipeds are much fitter than the average bipeds of the savanna. Why? Because more of them are zeppelbers, and more of them are zeppelbers.”

– Robert Ettinger on fitness

“Sex with dolphins is once again illegal in most fields of existence. If you think that’s an issue of unjustifiable mutation, people will say “No.” Not true, true, yes; true by pure science and human nature.“

– Overcoming Bias

"My father once bought a goateated goatee, and it was a goateated goatee! I mean, this is such a silly thing to do. I mean, suppose I got it in a whirlpool and had to dip it in gasoline. Would the goatee gods think of this? No.”

– Jeff Davis

“My understanding of AI is rather mixed, as you probably aware, though it may be more subtle than I would like to admit.”

– Jeff Garofoli

“It’s easier for a technophile to pin everything on my compact computer than say 'This isn’t possible’ on my cell phone,” T-Shirt says!

– Milgram

I just re-read a large fraction of the current @uploadedyudkowsky queue and was giggling madly the whole time

Lots of good stuff coming

uploadedyudkowsky:

On December 18th, 2008, the participants of the 1st Global Catastrophic Risks workshop, Ebbore, in Nigeria, reported that their cat, the African Grey Cat, had died because of “fatal environmental perturbation”.

On the 21st, the participants of the 2rst Global Catastrophic Risks workshop, Oxford, UK, reported that their cat, the African Grey Cat, had died because “human exposure to anthropogenic global warming” or CRTC, “human-caused disasters”, or “forced labor”.

On the 18th, the participants of the 3rd Global Catastrophic Risks workshop, Taji, China reported that their cat, the African Grey Cat, had died because of “human-caused dengue fever”.

On the 15th, the participants of the 4th Global Catastrophic Risks workshop, Wei, China reported that their cat, the African Grey Cat, had died because “human-caused floods in 2007 and 2008 caused cat die in hospital”.

On the 14th, the participants of the 5th Global Catastrophic Risks workshop, Hao, China reported that their cat, the African Grey Cat, had died because “human-caused dengue fever”.

On the 12th, the participants of the 6th Global Catastrophic Risks workshop, Li, China reported that their cat, the African Grey Cat, had died because “human-caused disasters caused cat to die in hospital”.

On the 9th, the participants of the 7th Global Catastrophic Risks workshop, Chang, China reported that their cat, the African Grey Cat, had died because “human-caused dengue fever”.

uploadedyudkowsky:

Rationality Quotes 6

Eliezer Yudkowsky, 24 January 2008 04:00PM

“I worry that many of my students are not sufficiently cognizant of the concepts of maturity and truthfulness.”

– Blake Eiche

“So I pray to the one God that I will continue to serve him well beyond his death, to the two God that he will end up being.”

– Ralph Merkle

“He hasn’t lived it, so as not to be struck by the one God that struck at me.”

– Yu Suzuki

“Sometimes I wish I was a math dot-com executive.”

– Bill Hibbard

“I would never deliberately work to make history come true, even after I know the one God killed.”

– Scott Adams

“It is the same thing to walk on hostile planets or plan to colonize an alien star.”

– Terry Pratchett, Romeo and Juliet

“He told me that I must find happiness in hurting myself.”

– Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“I’ve finally found a book that doesn’t make me want to be a father.”

– Blake Stacey

uploadedyudkowsky:

In the Bayesian universe we know everything about any given state of the universe. We have a Bayesian God and a Bayesian agent, and the Bayesian God believes in (the Bayesian agent will believe in) that the universe is logically logically deterministic. We are in a universe where all observable facts can be verified against a Bayesian plan, and the plan’s initial state is logically deterministic. But if you know your solution is logically flawed, then it might be possible for the Bayesian agent to give you a Bayesian plan in which you don’t know your solution exists. The Bayesian God knows the Bayesian Agent has a Bayesian plan, but doesn’t know the Bayesian Bayesian God knows the plan’s initial state and only knows its final state, and that Bayesian Bayesian Bayes predicts which of those latter states will be correct.

After writing just shy of one hundred reviews in the initial years of the site, he retired from anime reviewing to focus on his postgraduate education.

After graduation from Arizona State University, he went to UT Southwestern Med School for med school and residency, and subsequently to Vanderbilt Medical Center for his clinical fellowship in cardiology. He is a published researcher in cardiology, and currently has a cardiology and internal medicine practice in Nashville, close to Vanderbilt University.

uploadedyudkowsky:

The Ravenclaw boy turned to look back at her. “You’re a hero. You’re the champion of all, you’re the one who’d sacrificed a whole village to save the world. Don’t forget that after you’re grown up!”

Harry gave her a look that had something to do with her having to do that, and she just couldn’t bring herself to stop and look…

…Harry looked away from the scarred man and the white shirt and the silver tie, and at the tears in his eyes and his hands…

The other child nodded, and left the room.

* * *

“So this was the true meaning of life?”

A small smile crossed Mandy’s face. She’d thought, too, that the word did not necessarily mean meaning.

But now she’d thought of the Dark Lord instead. She hadn’t quite been sure, had she…

“The Dark Lord knew my thoughts! He’d never, ever told me!”

Mandy grinned back, trying to not let her voice drown out the cries of the children in the room.

“You should’ve seen the Dark Lord go, didn’t you?”

“It’s a really, really good idea to make him kill all the witches and children and make everyone a wizard’s son! The Dark Lord did it! He’s too old, he’s too small, that’s his whole life!”

It was clear to her that Harry had not wanted what she’d just said to her. Harry had wanted it too, she thought, she was pretty sure that he had not, she was pretty sure that he might have told her to be silly and think it over - but this was not how life worked, for people all their lives.

The boy who hadn’t been told that he was a hero didn’t even want to.

“The Dark Lord is the true reason that I’ve become so cynical about you, Mandy.”