blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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That post can also be found in the archive of old!sneerclub.

Nitter links: tweet, beginning of thread. The original source appears to be Michael Lewis' new book Going Infinite.

When I was an undergrad at MIT, I knew (not terribly well) the people who invited him to "debate" Time Cube there. He came to a low-key student party; someone tried to teach him the game of go because, you know, squares. The whole thing seemed funny at first and then vaguely mean-spirited and exploitative, so I blew off the "debate" itself. What sticks with me most after all these years are the vibes. He was genuinely happy to be there, a little perplexed and stand-offish among all the college kids... and on some level beneath that, wounded and angry.

Of the odd people in our orbit, Gene Ray was much less genial than Love 22, the street entertainer/numerologist from Key West who showed up for baseball games and who delighted in showing off his passport, which gave his legal name as "LOVE XXII". The Roman numerals meant that he was royalty in Europe, he'd say.

Buh-bye now.

Having met Gene "the Time Cube guy" Ray and found him to be a simmering cauldron of rage just waiting to boil over, that's oddly fitting.

such tears, very rain

It's a real term, meaning "influenced by multiple genes", but who knows what weird baggage SSC have around it.

I was a teenager in the '90s; I don't need to watch a movie for that. :-P

Eh, it is what it is; computers were a mistake, etc. Thanks for the suggestion anyway (and maybe it works for other people, which is better than nothing).

Apropos:

Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

Confession time: I have to this day not seen the entirety of The Social Network. As a friend of mine said back when it was new, "The only question is which asshole will end up with all the money. If I cared about that, I'd read the business section."

Hmm. Tried that just now, and it's still broken.

The apparent world-historical inversion, whereby the smart kids were also the rich and most powerful ones, was celebrated on iconic blogs and mailing lists such as Slate Star Codex and LessWrong (where users self-reported implausibly high IQ scores)

snerk

The IQ fetishists like to think they are living in a near future where they — the pure creative information workers imagined in the 1990s — have been elevated through their high intelligence and innate ability. They were not simply in the right place at the right time, bobbing along in a sea of liquidity in an era of zero interest rates. They were, like the staff at the Apple Store, geniuses.

also snerk

Much appreciated. This isn't the first time that archive.ph has gone all GOTO 10 about clicking squares, but I don't know what the cause might be.

The archive site just keeps throwing CAPTCHAs at me, so I can't read it. Please provide more information about what this is supposed to be, thanks and happy weekend

"variables" lol

unparalleled rhetorical sophistication

"Epistemic status:" is such a pompous thing to say that it is automatically a head start on a joke setup. Possible completions include but are not limited to the following:

• I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue
• Jackin' at the speed of light (sung to the tune of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now")
• Yippie ki yay, Mister Falcon

I think of myself as playing the role of a wise old mentor who has had lots of experience, telling stories to the young adventurers, trying to toughen them up, somewhat similar to how Prof Quirrell[8] toughens up the students in HPMOR through teaching them Defense Against the Dark Arts

[8] Note that during our conversation, Emerson brought up HPMOR and the Quirrell similarity, not me.

epistemic status: jesus fucking christ, what is your major malfunction?!

I made the mistake of assuming that my experience with LSD would be the same as anybody else's. Prior to that, I'd known that if you all drink whisky, you all get drunk, you all feel dizzy and you all start slipping around. So I presumed, mistakenly, that everybody who took LSD was a most enlightened being. And then I started finding that there were people who were just as stupid as they'd been before, or people who hadn't really got any enlightenment except a lot of colours and lights and an Alice in Wonderland type of experience.

— George Harrison, quoted on page 179 of the Beatles Anthology

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make Barbie.