This is definitely one of the worst sentences I’ve ever read
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not be blackmailed by superintelligences:
But I say unto you, That whosoever thinketh in sufficient detail about superintelligences considering whether or not to blackmail them hath committed blackmail with them already in his heart.
Hello, /r/homestuck!
If you actually want to know who Eliezer Yudkowsky is, read this, and follow some of the links on that page if you’re still curious.
(RationalWiki obviously has a fairly negative opinion of him, but personally I think that is the right opinion to have, and in any case that page gets you up to speed on his various beliefs and opinions more quickly than anything else I’ve seen)
scisolaris replied to your post “Sort of a response to tumblr user slashnull’s musing on the subject: …”
im sorry that im so excited about this
to be honest, we all are
Yeah, the thing is, I can’t say he’s totally missing the point because Hussie does care about making the time travel self-consistent, but it’s also the kind of question that he’d mock a reader for asking on Formspring or Tumblr yknow
Exactly
And I think part of EY’s mindset is “would mock reader on Formspring” = “must be covering for not doing it right”
I think Hussie can play EY’s game but EY can’t play Hussie’s
Sort of a response to tumblr user slashnull’s musing on the subject:
My (comedically exaggerated) negative reaction to that Yudkowsky post was mostly about the fact that he’s reading Homestuck, not really about what he said about it. But it was kind of about what he said about it.
Here’s what I mean. I’ve been assuming for a long time that EY would eventually read Homestuck, because in a lot of ways it’s right up his alley: long, very nerdy fiction on the internet with lots of internet injokes; obsessed with time travel and self-consistency and other stuff kind of generally in the “Gödel Escher Bach” headspace; extraordinarily complicated and clever and kind of up its own fractal ass and rewarding of the kind of reader that can fully engage with something like that; etc.
And of course I’ve been sort of dreading and looking forward to this in equal measure because it’s two of my weird little pet obsessions colliding with one another, and I’m basically a weird little guy who spends most of his life rubbing his hands together gleefully about his weird little pet obsessions (though mostly not the ones that involve making fun of specific people).
But also specifically because this is such a unique and interesting collision. Because Homestuck is really up EY’s alley, and yet it also really isn’t. It’s really into self-consistency but there’s also a sort of Dionysian spirit to it, a spirit of constant change and chaos and startling the reader and nudging them in the ribs about bits of it that don’t quite make sense. Trolling, in other words. It has a harmony going on between taking itself 100% seriously and, on the other hand, acknowledging its own silliness and the very silliness of the reader’s engagement with something so silly.
That’s something I really don’t see in EY’s own writing. He can be very silly in a kind of formally boxed-in “look I am being random and silly right now” way, but the kind of fundamental light touch that Andrew Hussie has is not something he has or likes. (I know that’s kind of vague, but I don’t know how to say it any more precisely.)
His question about whether the time travel is self-consistent is exactly the kind of thing I would imagine he would ask. What makes this such an interesting collision is that Homestuck’s time travel really is self-consistent, and indeed it’s a very Yudkowskian story in a lot of ways. It’s probably the only story out there that’s as Yudkowskian as it is while also being as anti-Yudkowskian as it is.
no no no no no no NO NO NO FUCK
like this concept that stories might be told to connect to other people, or to establish a playground for themes of interest to the author, or to explore a character’s personality, or just to tell a fucking engaging narrative is so foreign to that outlook i suspect “what’s the character’s motivation for this” re: anything that’s not setting up a setpiece would be met w/ a blank stare
no it’s didactic rationality or bust. the humanities are the dross of the wheel of science. science is also, presumably, “awesome”.
but only the right kind of science, y’get me. manning a cancer ward for decades on end until someone else finds out how to cure acute lymphoblastic leukemia (research you literally single-handedly initiated despite authorities in the hospital you work at thinking you’re cruel for not letting the children die in peace) in children is probably not “awesome”.
(i mean, i think what sidney farber did was awesome. but i’m pretty sure a 40-something american pathologist of polish jewish extraction is not what big yud sees when he thinks “awesome”.)
(i’m sorry i’ve been reading about the history of cancer research and thus i am inflicting it on you guys.)
i feel like so much of the science-worship you see in the transhumanist scene is basically a triumph fixation that’s only extremely vaguely mapped onto “science” as a direct object. the actual process of scientific advancement — people spending thankless years doing work that needs to be done; terrible ideas being enshrined due to the clout of their advocates and only dwindling when they die; the edifice of scientific rationality being used to justify abuse and racism and crimes against humanity — is almost completely disconnected from “science” as a subject for their utopian visions, because they just want something plausible in the modern day to be the target of their triumphant “eureka” narrative where Problems Are Solved and Progess Is Made
the “rapture of the nerds” line is overused but damn if it’s not accurate
Now I’m having these vivid mental images of EY writing something called “The Very Low Prior Probability That Hill House Is Haunted” and I don’t think this is going to help me get back to sleep