Answer on a postcard

For anybody hard of hearing at the back, the combination of a “characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination” and a “Promethean ideology” is subtext for “striding confidently towards fascism”

they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful

how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?

Adderall

you just made me extremely aware of where i was, what i was doing, and how i was feeling, when i found out that the yud had an article in Time, and I am going to sue for the whiplash of realising how short a time ago that was

I’d say “what the fuck was a 30 year old man doing on a sugar daddy site” but you answered it pretty aptly

Fun to see gwern in there presumably telling a fib. I wonder what really happened when Metz “ghosted” him? I particularly enjoyed, this time, watching whatever uppers he’s on these days kick in (or wear off?) about halfway through writing the footnote he added to that comment.

THEY HAVE A THREAD ON HIP HOP!?> LINDA HOLD MY GODDAMN CLALS

Now hold on, I don’t want to say he’s WHOLLY wrong about my people

The specific guilty element here is sacrificial war with China, which they know to be a phantasm. Just America First foreign policy in general.

To be clear: it is all movie plot threats. At the very forefront of the entire “existential threat” space is nothing but a mid-1990s VHS library. Frankly if you want to understand like 50% of what goes on in AI at this point my recommendation is just that you read John Ganz and listen to his podcast, because 90s pop and politics culture is the connective tissue of the whole fucking enterprise.

The great philosophical dialogues in English - those by Berkeley, Hume, Lakatos - are few and far between. Perhaps there is a general awareness that only these exceptional stylists could pull off the rare trick of not obviously putting words into their antagonist’s mouths, even insofar as the author clearly took the view of his protagonist. Indeed there is still, two and a half centuries later, debate about whose view in his own dialogue Hume actually took - when the rather obvious and straightforward alternative was just writing down “this is what I fucking think, alright?” that aporetic flourish was precisely what justified writing it down in dialogue form in the first place.

If you want to prematurely end your stimulant rush, booze, GHB, or ketamine will do that.

Ketamine and booze will absolutely not do that, and for the love of God do not take GHB to cool off a rush, what in God’s name are you thinking, you ludicrous phoney