mttheww asked: I really like the writing style of your posts. it's somewhat formal but in a completely intelligible way
Thank you! They are written in the style it’s easiest for me to write in, so I’m glad it works for you.
mttheww asked: I don't know how rare this is but I have actually never believed in santa claus (my parents never claimed he existed)
I don’t know how rare that is either. It was pretty rare in my area, as I remember happily discussing Santa with fellow believers at school, with no heretics in sight.
It has occurred to me that if I ever have children, “are we going to tell them this weird lie about the Presents Man or are we instead going to (potentially) turn them into a playground heretic” is something me and my co-child-raiser are actually going to have to discuss, which is pretty weird
mttheww asked: I'm having fun reading yudkowsky although he comes across a bit pompous sometimes
also he seems given to stating stuff I don’t think he can prove as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world (eg implying that human beings are the only animals who are aware of their own mental processes)
He is a fun writer! The bad parts of his writing are when the stuff he can’t prove is most of the content, or at least most of its foundation.
(Or HPMOR which is its own brand of terrible. Though I guess HPMOR emphasizes something that is also a problem in his other writing, which is a fixation on becoming powerful and manipulating people, and this strange idea that fairly obvious self-improvement ideas, referred to as “rationality techniques,” can let you do this.)
todbrowning replied to your post: anonymous said:Yeah. You’re kind …
tbh you are probably one of the least assholish people on tumblr
kadathinthecoldwaste replied to your post: bartlebyshop reblogged your post:Yeah….
I think you’ve gotten grumpier in the last few years, but “asshole” is a term I generally apply to people considerably more thoughtless than you. We’ve had our disagreements, but I’ve never thought of you as thoughtless.
Thank you both! (I meant to respond to these comments earlier but never had time.)
Joe, I think you’re right about the grumpiness. I think of it as a good thing: for a lot of my late teens, and to some extent my early twenties, I had a unnecessary lack of intellectual self-confidence. I mean, I was still aggressive and even arrogant sometimes in arguments, but internally I was always very unsure of any of my beliefs and the aggressiveness was a mask for insecurity (“please just admit you’re wrong about this, because I’m worried that I’m the one that’s wrong, because I'm always worried about that”). As I’ve grown more confident, I’ve grown more able to say “that’s just bullshit” about certain opinions, and that can come off as grumpiness (or a sort of world-weariness). I think, in a overall sense, it represents progress.
Also, I guess I want to explain what I’m trying to do with the “#i’m an asshole” tag, since every time I use it people reassure me that I’m not an asshole, which is appreciated, but shows that I’m not really communicating well. The idea behind the tag is that it’s for posts that I consider unusually catty or critical of people’s personalities (as opposed to what they say).
I think I try to be pretty nice and polite on here in general, and even when I disagree with what someone is saying, I try to criticize the statement and not the person. But then there are times, occasionally, when I just want to talk about how a specific person drives me up the wall – not any one specific thing they’ve said, but the broader patterns in their behavior, their personality. And I want some way to single out these posts and kind of chide myself for making them whenever I do – some way to say “I feel kind of bad every time I do this, and sometimes I let myself do it, but I really want to try not to do it very often.”
So I tried to do that by inventing this self-deprecating tag, "#i’m an asshole", for these posts. As though, after saying what I say in the post, I’m saying “jeez, I’m really a raging asshole sometimes, aren’t I? I should make sure to keep that in check.” Of course the tag is not sending that message very clearly, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect. So maybe I should change it to something like “#i’m an asshole sometimes and i want to try to not be one very often”. Except something less grammatically awkward. I’m open to suggestions.
todbrowning replied to your post “Well I can definitely say this is the first time I’ve gotten an email…”
but how many 1s
None, but the exclamation marks were followed (with no intervening space) by “Omg :(”
mttheww asked: what would you say is the best way for someone who doesn't give a fuck about, say, cryogenics or singularity--or transhumanism in general, really--to read lw and get something useful out of it? or is stuff like that not really that big a part of lw anyway? (I've never read lw before and pretty much all I know about it is what I've gleaned from tumblr)
Stuff like that is not a huge part of it.
The core material of Less Wrong is “The Sequences,” a giant set of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that range from fundamental (arguably pretty trivial) philosophical arguments to polemical expositions of quantum mechanics to “fun theory” (attempts to speculate about how to make a transhuman-ish future enjoyable and not boring) to weird aphoristic advice about self-improvement and “becoming a better rationalist” that often ends up sounding either like Yoda or a wise mentor character in a shonen anime.
It’s a massively mixed bag and which parts of it, if any, will be useful or interesting to you depend on your preferences.
A few starting points: “37 ways words can be wrong” (and links therein) is kind of a hub for the fundamental philosophy stuff, which I generally find pretty agreeable and sensible, though you may or may not find it useful. And the Quantum Physics Sequence is a cool, unconventional way of explaining quantum physics, written from an adamant “many-world interpretation” perspective. It’s a controversial sequence because actual physicists are divided on whether the many-world interpretation is correct or not, but if you’re not a physicist I think it can give you a nice alternative perspective to the stuff you’ve probably heard about particles and waves and uncertainty. (Just don’t take it too seriously.)
todbrowning replied to your post: The idea is that people you know or re…
dude are you on ello? add me if you want I’m todbrowning there
Nope, I was just reading an article about it. It doesn’t really sound appealing to me at the moment – I don’t think I need another social network and the “like Facebook but idealistic” pitch seems pretty sketchy because they’ll need to make money somehow
mttheww asked: hope you feel better soon bro
Thanks. Actually, I started feeling better pretty much immediately once I realized I had been getting sick (flulike symptoms) and had been unusually tired and worn out and incompetent as a result, which I was then beating myself up about. Now, having realized what is going on, I am mentally well (if physically somewhat unwell).
mttheww asked: btw I don't think I told you but I am currently following you on twitter! I'm @prdctidea
I like your twitter and have followed it!
todbrowning replied to your post: Wow that Rodney Caston post really tap…
even in 2002 I never understood the appeal of megatokyo (to be fair I never really read it)
You weren’t missing much. Initially it was like a worse version of that era’s Penny Arcade (which I didn’t know about at the time), with the additional selling point of Looking Like Anime. It was never that funny but it was the only thing of its kind I knew of. When it stopped trying to be funny, the plot became incomprehensible to me and I stopped reading, IIRC