eliezer “how am i supposed to sympathize with a character unless i know their power level” yudkowsky
God I’d forgotten just how bad this was
sequences, day 1: i forgot how tortuous that fucking sheep analogy is
I honestly never got the point of that one
“Ebxb’f onfvyvfx” really lesswrong
ROT13’d for real life spoilers
Five Years and One Week of Less Wrong →
[content warning: will be boring for non-LWers] I. Last week was the fifth birthday of Less Wrong. I thought I remembered it was started March 11, but it seems to have been more like March 5. I was…My boyfriend wrote a thing about LW. In terms of “sheer number of ideas that I am surprised other people don’t know,” Less Wrong is right up there with sex-positivity. (Also: LW ideas personally helped me stop having panic attacks over efficient charity, figure out that I was trans with less fuss than almost any trans person I know, and also understand Judith Butler! I imagine that those things are not actually issues for most of my followers. Oh well.)
(I don’t actually have time to read this now but it looks like it will be relevant to some of my followers’ interests)
???
this seems like such an obvious Poe that it has to be true
…or maybe that’s the point and it is a Poe after all
There’s a review here, a listing at the theatre’s website here (yes, it apparently really was part of something called “The Pretentious Festival”), and EY’s reaction on a mailing list here
(via pluspluspangolin)
Incidentally, in all seriousness, if you find my endless potshots at Eliezer Yudkowsky to be
- annoying
- mean-spirited
- creepy
then TBH I kind of agree. I have this problem where I find “mocking things or ‘ironically’ enjoying them” to be much more robust to mood or energy fluctuations than either “enjoying things in the straightforward way” or “getting anything done.” There are large stretches of time in my life when I feel like my options are “be a generic hater-from-the-internet” or “stare at the wall,” and if the former is preferable to the latter, that doesn’t mean it’s a good type of behavior in a more general sense. Especially when performed repetitively, with inevitably diminishing returns
(Even if I have the energy to, say, read something I actually think is good, I’ll find myself not wanting to do it because I don’t want to “taint” it with my bad mood and my decreased capacity for joy. I’m not sure whether this attitude is ultimately helpful or harmful)
tinaun asked: yud himself seems like something out of bad fanfiction
It’s funny — one of the lessons I feel like I learn more and more as I get older is that not all real people are “believable characters”
Fiction recommendations: Have you seen BBC’s Sherlock? Imagine that he’s Lord Voldemort, John Watson is Harry Potter, and the two of them meet after time stops just before a nuclear war starts. That’s How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Lord Voldemort, by cheryl bites. And another word to the ever-growing MLP Loops, which contains by far the best confrontation I’ve ever seen between Fluttershy and 40K’s God-Emperor of Humankind, and is now up to 69 chapters and 638K words.
Remember what I said about Eliezer Yudkowsky giving the worst fanfic recs
he seems like the kind of guy to have a preoccupation with hypothetical Power Levels
i’m laughing really hard because this guy is a self-styled intellectual and his tastes are blatant trash
i mean i like some really awful fanfics too but at least i admit most of them are porn i can’t get anywhere else, y’know?
unsurprisingly the lw section _loves_ shinji meets warhammer 40k; it’s really amazing. iirc once someone said in the reviews to hpmor that it was bad + improperly fannish & that he had bad taste and he wrote a bemused response that was essentially “but fandom is ~low status~ and it just doesn’t make sense to have conformance rules about low status behavior!! how weird you fandom people are”jesus christ, i’d say the man is a literal trash golem, except to call him that is an insult to trash and golems