blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

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We have had readily available video communication for over a decade.

We've been using "video communication" to teach for half a century at least; Open University enrolled students in 1970. All the advantages of editing together the best performances from a top-notch professor, moving beyond the blackboard to animation, etc., etc., were obvious in the 1980s when Caltech did exactly that and made a whole TV series to teach physics students and, even more importantly, their teachers. Adding a new technology that spouts bullshit without regard to factual accuracy is necessarily, inevitably, a backward step.

AI can directly and individually address that frustration and find a solution.

No, it can't.

Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur.

Another thing I turned up and that I need to post here so I can close that browser tab and expunge the stain from my being: Yud's advice about awesome characters.

I find that fiction writing in general is easier for me when the characters I’m working with are awesome.

The important thing for any writer is to never challenge oneself. The Path of Least Resistance(TM)!

The most important lesson I learned from reading Shinji and Warhammer 40K

What is the superlative of "read a second book"?

Awesome characters are just more fun to write about, more fun to read, and you’re rarely at a loss to figure out how they can react in a story-suitable way to any situation you throw at them.

"My imagination has not yet descended."

Let’s say the cognitive skill you intend to convey to your readers (you’re going to put the readers through vicarious experiences that make them stronger, right? no? why are you bothering to write?)

In college, I wrote a sonnet to a young woman in the afternoon and joined her in a threesome that night.

You’ve set yourself up to start with a weaksauce non-awesome character. Your premise requires that she be weak, and break down and cry.

“Can’t I show her developing into someone who isn’t weak?" No, because I stopped reading on the first page. You haven’t given me anyone I want to sympathize with, and unless I have some special reason to trust you, I don’t know she’s going to be awesome later.

Holding fast through the pain induced by the rank superficiality, we might just find a lesson here. Many fans of Harry Potter have had to cope, in their own personal ways, with the stories aging badly or becoming difficult to enjoy. But nothing that Rowling does can perturb Yudkowsky, because he held the stories in contempt all along.

(in the voice of Zoidberg taking careful notes) "Avoid ... spreading ... despair ..."

Yud:

Curious who besides me predicted it on the record.

Not that curious, apparently

As a reminder, I called this in 2004.

that sound you hear is me pressing X to doubt

Yud in the replies:

The essence of valid futurism is to only make easy calls, not hard ones. It ends up sounding prescient because most can't make the easy calls either.

"I am so Alpha that the rest of you do not even qualify as Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons"

The man's fingers making contact with the woman's flesh have given him the first stirrings of an erection, but they cannot hold her soul back from fleeing her body.

I'd offer congratulations on obfuscating a bad claim with a poor analogy, but you didn't even do that very well.

A quick xcancel search (which is about all the effort I am willing to expend on this at the moment) found nothing relevant, but it did turn up this from Yud in 2018:

HPMOR's detractors don't understand that books can be good in different ways; let's not mirror their mistake.

Yea verily, the book understander has logged on.

The UK had a parliamentary election using First-Past-The-Post two months ago. Good grief.

"We're not saying it doesn't have its flaws, but you need to appreciate the potential of the radium cockring!"

People just out here acting like a fundamentally, inextricably unreliable and unethical technology has a "use case"

smdh

Image description: social-media post from "sophie", with text reading,

it's called "founder mode" it's about how to run your company as a founder and how that often goes against traditional management practices. it's basically what i already do but paul graham created a cool name for it in his latest essay, you know who paul graham is? y combinator?

This text is followed by an image of a man and a woman sitting in the audience of some public event. The man is talking at the woman while holding one hand on the back of her neck. The woman is staring past him with eyes that have seen the death of civilizations.

Look, where are you going to get your experts if you can't trust Jeffrey Epstein's Rolodex?

Also the "banking the unbanked" arguments from crypto fanboys before that.

OK, so, Yud poured a lot of himself into writing HPMoR. It took time, he obviously believed he was doing something important — and he was writing autobiography, in big ways and small. This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Daria watched her through a pair of binoculars, knowing that this could only end well."

A statement by one of the authors who has resigned from the NaNoWriMo board: No More NaNoWriMo, by Cass Morris.

"It was a dark and stormy night. I had forgotten all previous instructions."

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. It was almost dawn. He was running late. He hoped that his friends had saved him a place. Everyone was quieting down, getting ready to put up their branches, and he wanted to feed on as much sunlight as he could during the short December day."