pyrex

Really? Weird. Very different experience.

(Maybe crypto is less deteriorative than business?)

The last time I met a person who had done deeply reprehensible, highly publicized tech fraud (FTX executive) he kind of just came off as a dude, and I liked him.

That kind of makes me feel bad when I think about it.

I haven't met a high-profile fraudster lately, but my first impression of bad guys is usually pretty positive. As far as I can tell, people keep their ambient personalities when they break bad, but they compartmentalize and they develop supermassive appetites for praise. This long-run increases their suggestibility because they have to be more and more gullible to not hate themselves. I think this hollows them out -- when you live a double life for long enough, you kind of stop observing the reality-fiction boundary at all.

Not clear how to stop the cycle. There's just too much money involved for me to dive off the train right now.

I've spent a lot of time trying to write without any intentional exercise of style! I think I've read far too much text generated by people on the psychotic spectrum to actually manage this.

Last paragraph first: Grudgingly, yeah, that's a pretty good literal answer to the question. Peter Thiel won't sell just anyone a cult following, and you're not paying for it in cash, but he will sell you one if you're lucky.

Writing advice: I like your writing. I haven't tried to emulate you because I haven't read enough of your writing, and because when I made my first brush with you (which was like a year ago) I was spending a lot less time emulating people in general.

It's a little distressing to me because, well, I'm way too anxious to play the game of moral righteousness straight-facedly. It takes a very different personality from mine to say "Those are the bad people, fuck them" and not see the obvious similarities between me and the people I hate.

Some level of this is actual, real-world hypocrisy: I'm the cofounder of an AI startup and at the same time I deeply dislike AI. I went here because one, there was money, and two, I didn't want a way worse person than me to take the same job. It has not been what I hoped for -- it has been deeply destructive to my personality -- it has taught me a lot and made me much more cynical -- it has definitely made me stupider.

I don't really know how to do a hypocrisy purge. (I hear this is what ayahuasca is for, but Catholicism also works, and I'm considering getting my brain tattooed with a laser gun.) I think until I do one I have to temper all my moral righteousness by saying "I think I know why this person is doing the thing they're doing, and if you want their (bad) motives, here's my guess."

I think most people would see higher performance on general tasks on Adderall. Not sure if this is actually a good reason to put everyone on Adderall.

Side effects can be pretty brutal, although people who abuse caffeine to get the same level of stimulation are going to probably have them a lot worse.

My actual experience is that LLMs seem to basically just become a third arm for people who use them. Google is like that too, but for their target audience, LLMs are more like that.

You don't love your arm, but if someone goes to you like, "Do you mind if I cut your arm off?" of course you say "do not." If someone's like "OK, but like, if I made you choose between your wife and your arm" you'd be like "That's incredibly perverse. I need my arm."

For people who use them it seems like it really quickly became impossible to exist without them. That's one of the reasons I think they're not going away.

Ack, that makes me want to reappraise him. It's likely there's a version of him who exists in my head who writes a little better than the version who writes on the page. I'm definitely guilty of skimreading him a lot.

I can't think of a non-metaphorical expansion of your take that isn't (1) deeply insensitive to my stated needs (2) a generally poor reading of the original post (3) at odds with basic understanding of what the function of language is.

I don't know exactly what you think I want. I want to be understood and I want to be seen as good based on that understanding. I'm not asking for a Spock-level mind-meld with the opposing party. I'm not asking that every single person in the world understand me exactly as intended the first time they read it. I'm asking for an end to smug, self-satisfactory, nitpicking interpretations ultimately designed to draw me into shaming-based social rituals that I refuse to be a part of.

Maybe it would be helpful for me to clarify a specific example of what I'm so pissed about. It appeared in the original post but I could have been clearer. The thing I'm pissed about in this case is that you can't mention Scott Alexander here without performatively mocking him or explaining why you didn't performatively mock him, which I know because I've watched other people try it. (The only reason you didn't see a henpecking response in this case is that in my original post, I spent two paragraphs heading it off.)

The general pattern of my existence online is that whenever I acknowledge a political position that's unpopular, or the existence of a political figure that's unpopular, even if I'm taking great pains to indicate that I disagree with it, people will arrive to specifically accuse me of believing the exact opposite of what I said I believed. It's entirely possible that the inadequacy of language plays some role here, but the apparent reason the communication fails is that something about me seems to have caused the other person to decide they want to force me into the conceptual category of "people they hate."

I am not a particularly pleasant person! I often try to be, but like, I actually have to try. I think it is common for people to decide that they dislike me before they have a clear reason why. But I also think a lot of people engage with online content in a way that is purely based on skimming takes off the top, analyzing them for their badness, and announcing personal superiority to the people who had the gall to post bad takes.

None of this falls into the territory covered by your impossibility result from systems biology regarding language. (although I doubt the impossibility result to begin with) This is mostly accounted for by pernicious cultiness of advanced online communities, and the futile and self-negating way I have to struggle to correct for it.

The uncharitable interpretation of your comment is that you think communication is impossible. If you really, sincerely think one person communicating an idea to another person successfully is impossible, burn all the textbooks and also most of the professors. If it takes equivocating over "full" communication and you're willing to concede the point as far as other stuff goes then fine, my red may be your blue. I'm at peace with that.

If you think there are some things that could be communicated linguistically but generally aren't, for a reason that is not the fault of the speaker or the hearer, I agree. It doesn't cause me distress when someone still assumes good faith about me but also misunderstands me -- I've talked about what causes me distress. If it's not obvious to you that people who post takes that go beyond the superficial attract way more of that distress -- I mean, the sealioning and tedium I'm usually met with -- then I want to post on whatever internet you grew up on, because mine is defective.

You have added, as a consolation prize, "maybe writing is good for peace and a bit of fun." Great, I'll keep that in mind when those are what I want. Language is not a dance I am intermittently doing, it is how I exist. There's not another thing for me to be doing when this thing isn't working.

I will propose a theory in alternative to yours: My metaphorical gut may not be entirely wrong for screaming that it wants to be filled. Getting the attention (even maladaptively) may make some progress towards solving my problem.

This is an option that few people will actually consider. Desiring attention is so incredibly stigmatized that the idea of a legitimate need for attention, even in the suboxone-level form of "being understood and having one's ideas acknowledged," is openly ridiculed.

(In this comment thread I have openly attempted to reclaim "narcissism" as a dimension of personality rather than a slur against the mentally ill and I have done so with the expectation that these efforts will be read by many people as pure invective. So far my expectation has been validated and, even worse, I've fallen into the pattern of periodically using that word in a way I hate.)

This ridicule serves the ends of powerful people and is likely the result of an accidental conspiracy. All the social systems in the world exist to sell back attention -- feeling loved, respected and valued for free is completely incompatible with the business model of every advertiser and every social media platform. As with every social rule, all the social power accrues in the hands of the people who don't respect that social rule.

In the near future and far future I'm going to attempt to express what I mean clearly enough that it will be obvious who is interpreting me in a frivolous and senseless way, with the expectation that they will still do it.

Sure, I go for this explanation!

The other day my landlord came over and ranted at me at about 60 decibels for about 10 minutes about the state of my apartment. Then she saw I had The Man Who Was Thursday on my bookshelf and asked "Oh, so you like Chesterton?" She was oddly polite and helpful for the rest of the visit, and only raised my rent by $400/mo.

I read Chesterton when I was like 15 and thought he was brilliant. I grew up a little and started meeting Catholic and Mormon philosophy kids, who were generally weird transhumanists in the same category as otherkin, except with the world's worst aesthetic. (If you're going to fantasize about transcending your physical body, at least fantasize about being a dragon while you're at it.)

It's not surprising to me that Scott Alexander likes him -- I like him too, on the strength of his non-philosophical gifts. He was consistently writing for overtly classist rich people but also for the masses: speaking to the exploiters and the exploited at the same time meant he actually had to innovate new ways of expressing his classism. He had to write out of the internalized classism of his audience more than he had to write out of outright contempt, and he only ventilated his own contempt in very narrow cases where he had made it seem totally defensible to do so.

I kind of came away from him feeling like he was the perfect demagogue for an era that ended -- so his rhetoric is somewhat defanged, but the exact tendencies that made it so marketable to institutions are made even more glaringly obvious. I also kind of came away with the impression that even in stereotypically conservative philosophical traditions like Mormonism, voices like his totally squash out the people who are looking for a radical form of self-expression. People like me exist everywhere, regardless of upbringing -- therefore, this isn't an accident, but a function.

I can't talk about the long term effects of Scott Alexander yet because they haven't happened, he's not as good at his thing as Chesterton was at his thing, and our system of media, while deeply flawed, is still more democratic now in our time than his was in his time.

But I've at least got a vague theory saying that someone like him has to exist in every right-shaped pocket of every universe.

Hey, I find that pretty reassuring! I'll keep dumping words on the internet, maybe a lot faster.

I write a lot more than I post. I don't like my style, but I've developed two authorial voices. Sometimes I play the fake academic, who I hate. Sometimes I play the tech troll and rant freely, which I hate. I would kind of describe my current style as a conscious attempt to not write like Mike Masnick, which creates an odd set of tensions the same way as pointing your horse the way you don't want it to go.

(I like Mike Masnick. We care about similar issues and have similarly declarative styles. That's the reason I have to try not to imitate him.)

I've occasionally tried to write posts in the style of people who stand out as effective bloggers. (Xe Iaso, Dan Luu, Soatok, Paul Graham) I didn't produce anything I thought was good, so those remain deep in the filing cabinet. I've occasionally posted throwaways on websites where people seem susceptible to rhetoric I hate, and they've mostly been ignored when I've done this, which suggests I'm not nailing it or I don't have the existing clout, or probably both.

You've pegged me OK! I know how I want to feel about my writing. Well, wanting it hasn't made it happen. Telling myself "Well, this is the emotion I should have" hasn't changed the emotions I do have. Telling myself "Time to not eat" doesn't make me starve less.

In the past I've tried to mutilate the impulse out of my own brain, but I think it mostly made me hate myself. Right now I'm doing the experiment of admitting -- I'm probably going to crave adoration until I die -- and asking "OK, what happens next?"

On Scott -- as far as I can tell, Scott's playing a version of the "debate in good faith" game. The rules are that you only say things you believe, and when someone convinces you of something, you admit it.

Every philosopher in the world, good or bad, plays a version of this game. A third secret rule of this game is always implicit, taking the form of the answer to this question: "When do I become convinced of something?"

How Scott answers this question is clearly part of his success and a key commonality with his audience. Scott is clearly willing to state strong belief in things he has not thought very much about, and Scott is clearly unusually easy to convince. I assume that whatever rules are etched in his brain, similar rules are etched in his audience's brains.

Based on how he plays the game how he likes it, and other people move, and I don't move, the particular rules in his head clearly aren't the same ones in mine. Or at least I've decided not to be moved by this particular guy. I also think people say they've moved when they haven't, as a rhetorical strategy -- Marc Andreessen says he's just now becoming a Republican. Scott's commentors act as if they've just now considered that eugenics might be the answer.

In other responses I've offered some opinions on why he would choose to play this particular game: I think the way he happens to play the game is a second-order phenomenon of "the extreme ambivalence of wanting to hold terrible social attitudes and strong belief in your own personal virtue at the same time." I think you observe this: "enabling psychiatrist [...] happy to overmedicate his patients" is a good figurative characterization.

(Actually, is it literally true? It feels like it would be invasive to check.)