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I’m starting to think that some writing classes would really help the EA/LR crowd.
no, no, it’s fine. the less readable they are, the better.
Ok folks, serious question. I know rats love excessively long word salad stream-of-unconsciousness essays. I understand how somehow can be so high on their own farts that they think this is an acceptable way of presenting their “thoughts”. But…
There’s no way rats actually read those longforms, right? Like, no one has enough time on their hands to read and engage with something of this length and this boring on a day-to-day basis, right? Same goes for those LessWrong posts, they must be banking on others not reading through the 10,000 words of nonsense, right?
Someone has to post the Elizabeth Sandifer essay and I guess it’s my turn:
I should note that I didn’t ghostwrite that one either
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles, isn’t HPATMOR like a million billion chapters as well?
Siskind for sure keeps his wildest quiet-part-out-loud takes until the last possible minute of his posts, when he does decide to surface them.
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles
Only in these circles could an article that AI can read to you in an hour and forty-eight minutes be clickbait for the paywalled “companion piece.”
If you are a normal, decent, well-socialized human being, you probably have not heard about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Actually explaining what this thing is will have to happen in several different stages. But I should start by telling you this re-write of the first Harry Potter book is around 660,000 words long.
The entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit, comes in at a little less than 580,000 words.
The audiobook is 67 hours long.
In my more innocent college days, there was a group of people doing a reading of it in the dorm lounge laughing their asses off. Ong I thought it was a hyper self-aware satire that was making fun of internet “umm ackshully” / iamverysmart posters. There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?
Yud, it’s not too late to say sike bro.
Even just saying it was mescaline would help it make more sense.
it’s not too late to say sike
citation needed ;p
Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species. It’s only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life! Ready to out-sit eternity. They’re indomitable.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?
By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Of course, as there is no other way to do this with posts of this length. If you want to dismantle an average SSC post you will need to explain so much more things than he already does so it blossoms into small novel territory. Any I gish nobody has the time or attention span for that.
A novel which could often be abridged by saying:
“look at this incredibly offended dork” ;)
They’re going to end up cheating and using AI to summarize rat verbiage instead of reading it. And THAT is what will piss off the future AI god.
unironically, their culture has a better use case for it than the rest of earth does. they’re not even losing informational value in the compression and nonsense-izing since there isn’t any to start with
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1811602818614133141
Just posted this banger song
I hate that you made me know this exists, but I thank the acausalrobotgod that you cannot make me listen to it.
I tried to actually put it to the tune but it only barely scans, to say nothing of how impossible to follow it is if you dont already know the story. If you’re going to express your terminally online frustration through a lousy parody song I’m going to insist that you put in the effort to do either the parody part or the song part well.
Hurt Feelings – Flight of the Conchords
oh i love the title.
a brave editor spreads the truth
uh, or not
I have never edited the LessWrong article, not sure what you’re talking about.
receipts posted
I meant I have never disruptively edited the article. (…) I’m not a power user of Wikipedia and don’t understand all your specialist terminology
Dude physically unable to take an L.
“Specialist terminology” like… the word edit?
Not sure writing an encyclopedia is a good hobby for you, bro.
OK, I just spent 10 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back clicking around Wikipedia edit histories, and it seems that LessWrongers are really unhappy about the LessWrong article saying anything about neoreactionaries. And they’re willing to say why at typical length.
aww, poor babies. if only they didn’t literally have the leading nrx thinkers as figures of note in their own community makeup! alas, difficulty: impossible
I think that might have been bad faith, but im not sure.
christ that second reply is some pure-grade uwu smolbean pretension bullshit
Apologies, I meant I have never disruptively edited the article
“what do you mean keep the music down? it’s not that loud”
I was simply trying to improve its quality
“I merely wish you to be on my level? what’s that, what level is it? it’s mine of course, what a ridiculous question”
I’m not a power user of Wikipedia and don’t understand all your specialist terminology so forgive me if I make the odd mistake or faux pas
don’t even have a sneer for this. this “oh, oops, totes didn’t mean to offend!” shit that these fuckers pull when they get caught out is so goddamn tired. facepunch material.
(it’s not even particularly “good” darvo)
Please don’t doxx me.
“goooootta make the other people responsible for my own actions! that’s the ticket!”
Lol how has that user not been banned yet. Clearly somebody with a very specific axe to grind.
And of course the Rationalists start to the things they accuse others of doing. How quickly the pretense of civility disappears.
I love the “uh, you know we can see what you’ve done” reply.
What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn’t be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.
wait sorry hold on
in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors
so what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this, if the overwhelming majority of people already agree that far-right “news” sites like the examples given are full of garbage and shouldn’t be cited?
Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others
ahhhhhhh David made fun of some rationalist you like once and in turn you’ve elevated him to the Ubermensch of Woke, didn’t you
what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this?
He’s playing to his audience, which includes a substantial number of people with lifetime subscriptions to the Unz Review, Taki’s crapazine and Mankind Quarterly.
For the rat & rat-adjacent soi-disant “communities” David is like the bogeyman. You see his name used in places like SSC to stand in for the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.
the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.
aaaaargh I wish I could draw.
Took me like five minutes of reading to realize this was neant to be a hit piece and not praise.
“This guy vets sources and forces people to cite only the reliable ones. This is instead of discussing individual articles, which would allow the same fucking bigots to waste everyone’s time with the same fucking arguments over and over and over.”
Oh, sounds like a lot of effort to keep things usable.
“Grrrrrr.”
Wait, what?
Depends, I guess. After reading (well, skimming, to be honest) it, I love David even more. <3
IKR like good job making @dgerard look like King Mob from the Invisibles in your header image.
If the article was about me I’d be making Colin Robinson feeding noises all the way through.
edit: Obligatory only 1 hour 43 minutes of reading to go then
In April 2014, Gerard created a RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism, framing the subculture as “well-off libertarians congratulating each other on what wonderful human beings they are for working rapacious [s—]weasel jobs but choosing their charities well, but never in any way questioning the system that the problems are in the context of,” “a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is superior to government action or funding,” and people who “will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely [f—]ing evil jobs because they’re so charitable.”
it’s fucking amazing how accurate this is, and almost a decade before SBF started explaining himself and never stopped
My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”
from Twitter:
lol YouTube just served me an AI voiced 1:48:28 article solely dedicated to attacking @davidgerard on Wikipedia
EDIT: and:
These were all posted 4 hours ago on a variety of sites so I assume someone has a personal grudge
lmao he’s such a silly cunt
Weird sort of censorship/oddness going on, when I go directly to the tweet you linked I can see it, but when I click on your reply I see this
Someone has recently posted this article to /r/wikipedia: https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1e0rb3p/reliable_sources_how_wikipedia_admin_david_gerard/
Not as much traction elsewhere: https://www.reddit.com/domain/tracingwoodgrains.com/
Doesn’t seem to have set HN on fire either:
The most interesting thing about the HN comment section is the link to a post about rumors that wIkipedia has its own sexual harassment scandals wherein checkusers have abused their power to see IP addresses and stalk other editors, supposedly in one case sharing a female editor’s location to her stalker. That said, this is all hearsay of hearsay. Still… oof.
It’s rdrama, they’re in another league of weird. Fun fact: TheMotte is using a fork of rdrama’s code.
they [nrx and LW] clearly are completely different groups who only party and fuck around together
“setting HN on fire” is an unfortunate phrase that one might otherwise wholly be able to get behind
damn english and its imprecision!
The site does tend to fall over if there are more than 300 comments on a post…
🎶 we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn 🎶
Yeah, wikipedia editor is weird and has long history doesn’t come as a huge shock to most people (im looking at it from the neutral side here). Doesn’t help that the format is a hugeass long blog, and Rationalist writing tends to feel very off-putting to normal people (“Feels obsessive if you need +20 pages to make a case.”). Think people would care more if this wicked editor was the head of some group which feels like a large cult, and has weirdly large influence on the tech industry, or linked to a large scam. TWG is also quite a weird guy himself. Or this part of his defense “Sure. Given that, do you endorse the choice of outlets like PinkNews and Huffington Post as reliable sources given their history of fabrication and errors, as discussed in the article?” Being against PinkNews makes you look weirdly anti-lgbt, and being against the huffington post in the current year is weird as their era of clickbait bs articles is long behind them and they actually write news.
So yeah no big surprise that when it breaks containment nothing happens and nobody really seems to care. There is a funny parrallel between TWG’s post and our sneering at LW. If you forgive me quoting Gaiman: “It it is the prerogative of the fool to say the emperor has no clothes. But in the end the emperor is still emperor and the fool is still a fool.”
E: It prob also doesn’t help TWG’s case that when people look up David they see he is an anti-cryptocurrencies person.
E2: what is interesting is that this place seems to be the best documentation of all the different arguments going on about the post. We seem to link all the various places it is talked about, none of them seem to actually point back. (And of course it was posted on r/destiny and r/kotakuinaction2 (no idea why it is nr 2 now). And remember how we joke about how Rationalists have high school traumas?
Holy fuck David, you really are living rent free in this SOB’s head.
@Starseeder @sneerclub That article is a powerful argument for professional editing.
(I do not mean that its topical content makes any such argument.)I stopped skimming but the gist seems to be “TFW ur BIG MAD that Quillette isn’t as reliable as Teen Vogue.”
brb calling the burn unit
Without fail in the comments section, we have Daniel Kokotajlo (the philosophy student turned ai safety advocate who recently got canned at OAI) making the claim that “we [ = Young Daniel and our olde friend Big Yud] are AI experts and believe that risking full scale nuclear war over data centers is actually highly rational^{tm}” :)
…anyways, what were we saying about David Gerard being a bad faith actor again?
The comments are quite a selection of typical things. ‘harassing innocent IQ researchers’ ‘the sneerclubbers are all losers who hate crypto’ etc etc. Hitting the familiar beats.
Honestly I’ve made it my life’s purpose to be a loser by the standards these people set, and succeeded beyond either of our wildest dreams
I’m just an even bigger loser than they already think irl. They can’t properly imagine the depth of my loserdom.
@Starseeder As someone with ADHD the only thing I find harder to cope with than the crazy, in-crowd bureaucracy of Wikipedia is attempting to read that mile-long polemic. Where do they find the time to write this shit?
The lesswrong Rationalist sphere people all write like this.
And I assume he gets paid via various podcasts/substack subs/a patreon. So this is prob mostly their job.Correction he has a day job as a law clerk. My bad sorry.I don’t know i had to skim it too. Its hard to see what point he’s trying to make. I can see why many of wikis choices are shit but he also seems to complain about takis magazine being removed witch just seems like a sensible choice. And he’s still up on his high horse about that conference where HBD people were invited to speak. They think “rationality” is about seeking heterodox thinkers but you don’t see anyone who believes in shit like miasma theory or any other discredited idea besides race there.
Prolix insanity is kind of a Rationalist / Rat-adjacent calling card.
I’n not joking when I say he’s probably using an LLM to write this junk. It reads like it, and he’s already perfectly comfortable with illustrating his diatribes with embarrassing midjourney slop.
@Amoeba_Girl @sneerclub Is that why it is so repetitive, wandering, and tedious?
The funny thing is: it would be either way!
