so Scott made formal what I think has been policy for a while, which is that you get warned and then banned for misgendering people, and a lot of people responded to this by explaining how they have principles about the use of language that make it impossible for them in an intellectually honest way to use trans peoples’ preferred pronouns
and I’m exasperated because this is the internet, literally the only information anyone has about anyone else’s gender is what that person says, there’s nothing principled about “I will take you at face value about what you claim your gender is on the internet, unless you also claim on the internet to be trans, in which case I will guess your birth gender and call you that, because I feel like it’s dishonest of me to do otherwise”.
if you want to take a brave stand against language policing, “I will only believe 95% of the people I talk to on the internet about their gender, the other 5% I can’t, on principle, believe” is not such a stand.
and if you want to misgender people on the internet to prove you won’t be silenced by the Man, why not misgender cis people? you’ll cause less hurt, and you have as much reason to believe I’m really a woman as you have to believe anyone else is really a woman. in the case of all of us, you are taking our word for it.
You know, I have principles about not misgendering people, and there are many blogs where I will be banned for not calling people the pronouns of their assigned sex at birth.
I solve this problem by not commenting on those blogs.
“I want a plot that doesn’t revolve around romance!”
“I want a game that doesn’t treat my character different if I play as a woman.”
“I want a game where I’m not forced to pick one class/gameplay style!”
“I want a cool story and a large open world that I can explore!”
Okay what if i want all that and to be able to beat the game
This is the absolute truth.
For those who feel Dark Souls is too difficult, don’t give up. It’s frustrating, but not impossible, and the rewards of success include a story that I will bet you haven’t seen in any fantasy game before.
Also: “I want a game where the most plot-significant and formidable NPC is a trans woman”
“video games linked to adhd” gee i wonder why ppl with adhd would be drawn to an interactive medium that fully engages your brain and gives your hands something to do at the same time. it is a mystery
#it me
also: REPL, so much REPL
or in fact programming in general
think about puzzles and have something to fingertwitch at
The reaction (ha!) to Neoreaction a Basilisk from the local rationalist(-adjacent) community has been narrowly focused on these core issues:
1. Is this book accusing Yudkowsky of being neoreactionary?
2. No really, is it? I mean why else would it group him with Moldbug?
3. That fuckin’ Basilisk story, that was totally misinterpreted.
Having read it, I think it’s helpful to understand that this book is not attempting to be the annotated history of Internet politics circa 2k10, and the claims that it does make in service of its overall trajectory are modest and reasonable.
It is also worth remembering that not every work of literature is a textbook intended to be interpreted as a sequence of logical propositions. A community that sees value in communicating information in the form of fanfiction, poetry, and jokes should be well aware of this.
Finally the book does not just discuss Yudkowsky, Moldbug, and Land, but also the Matrix, Hannibal, and the works of Milton and Blake, among other things. Tying these topics together in no way implies that Yudkowsky is neoreactionary, any more than it implies that Nick Land is one of the Wachowski siblings or that Moldbug is a good writer.
That fucking basilisk story was totally misrepresented though.
Sure, it is entertaining to say “freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him” and I always enjoy such entertainment, but I enjoy it as cheap self-decrepating humor while many others seem to actually take it as argumentation and that is a bad thing. The basilisk was a security hole in the software of some human brains that needed investigating and patching so that it would not present a potential issue later.
I’m no stranger to seemingly unintuitive ideas that are trivial to mock despite being actually way more serious and thus anything that smells like an attempt to avoid addressing such things by pointing out how superficially ridiculous they appear puts The One Which Watches The Watchers into Defcon 3. I don’t think I should need to point out that “haha basilisk lol look at these fucking bayesians” is exactly the same kind of argument as “haha look at this scrawny dude who thinks he can be a lesbian just by popping some magic pills and wearing skirts lolnope”.
where is the engagement with unusual and controversial left-wing ideas?
“why don’t these disgusting, evil subhumans engage with ideas that literally only attract people who hate their disgusting, evil discourse norms? it must be because they’re evil!”
cry more lol
Also literally Universal Basic Income? It gets way more play in the LW/rationalist sphere than anywhere else.
*crashes through the door* I heard someone say Basic Income
Yes I did too. Have I mentioned that we should have it, because I don’t think I have done so…in the last 5 minutes or something?
For friends not in the spoonie community, this is about the CDC’s recent guidelines that attempt to combat drug addiction in America by severely restricting access to opioid medications for ALL patients except for terminal cancer patients.
Without opioid pain medications, I would have had to quit working and go on disability nine years before I did.
Without opioid pain medications I would have been housebound and dependent on caregivers for another 10 years after that.
Without opioid pain medications I will be less active, more sedentary, and more sick.
The CDC says opioids don’t work for chronic pain; they’re wrong. They don’t work for some chronic pain. They don’t cure chronic pain. But they make life liveable for millions of chronic pain patients. Estimates of chronic pain sufferers in America range from a low of 39 million to a high of 110 million. That low-water mark excluded people with intermittent chronic pain, like endometriosis or migraine, as well as omitting people with neurogenic pain. Most reasonable guesses put the number at 70–80 million.
The cure for drug abuse and addiction has nothing to do with restricting pain patients’ access to medication, or forcing them to give up what quality of life they have managed to attain through having their pain managed with medication.
It’s not about labeling pain patients as addicts for taking medication to which they can build a physical dependence. (By that definition, every time I go on prednisone and have to taper off it, I’m a prednisone addict!)
It’s not about calling a patient in chronic pain asking their doctor for relief a drug-seeker.
The cure lies in combating the issues that lead to drug abuse, like poverty and an economy that sees the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class fall further and further behind. It lies in giving hope to people in hopeless situations. Not taking hope away from several million more.
Chronic Pain is the worst thing, on par with depression. When my foot was in chronic pain I was literally making plans to cut it off so I wouldn’t hurt anymore. Give people in Chronic Pain what they need. Fuck the drug war.
I guess what i’m trying to say with this post is that “running off to industry” does not have to be only about the money and “selling out”, as the academics seem to assume
It’s the difference between “you’re nothing more than a calculus-teaching monkey to us” and “we’d be lucky to have you”
It’s amazing how often people–or institutions!–who tell everyone else to fuck off, explicitly or implicitly, don’t seem to understand all the off-fucking that subsequently occurs.
I don’t think I’ve told this story on here before, but when I was going into college I was seriously considering a physics major. My first semester I took linear algebra and honors physics 1.
The fact that I wound up ditching physics after that semester is primarily attributable to two things. One is that the honors physics class was terrible. By which I mean the lecturer was terrible, by which I mean he might be the most soporific lecturer I have ever heard. He told stories about Feynman pranks–he had been in grad school at Caltech when Feynman was teaching there–and made them boring. It was kind of impressive.
But more important is that I was interested in theoretical physics. And the physics department made it pretty clear that those of use who were interested in theoretical physics were not physicists and did not count and were not welcome. Because physics, you see, consists of experiments, and if you are not personally doing experiments you are not a physicist.
I had a friend who was in the same position I was, except his advisor was the head of the physics department. And this gentleman told him, and I believe this is a direct quote, “Theoretical physics isn’t really physics. If you want to do theoretical physics you should go be a math major instead.”
He was both shocked and angered when my friend changed from a physics major to a math major, and switched advisors to someone in the math department. Angered enough that he went to talk to my friend’s new advisor and explain to her that my friend was a good physicist and she needed to get him back into the physics major.
As far as I know, the physics major at my undergrad is still small and unpopular. As far as I know, the physics department has no idea why.
I had previously been under the impression that babies don’t have object permanence– the knowledge that things continue to exist when you’re not looking at them. However, I recently learned that the balance of the evidence in developmental psychology is that babies have object permanence from an extremely young age. If babies perceived the world as a series of images rather than a set of stable…
There’s something delightfully geeky in these studies, something that made my brain return “ah yes, it would be silly to refactor the entire perception system on the fly from procedural to object-oriented, but the "Item::fetch” method needs to be debugged to deal properly with a changing environment…“
Okay so prop 8 was kind of dick move but nothing to fire a guy over, but could we discuss the Actually Problematic things Eich has done, like javascript? It has too many semicolons and curlybrackets so I now I’m procrastinating learning javascript by learning lisp and julia instead and while this is definitely intriguing (lisp has this certain fascinating purity, and julia just seems incredibly awesome) it isn’t exactly what I’m supposed to be doing right now
Coffeescript.
It fixes the syntax problems with javascript decently, but doesn’t do much for the lack of type system or the impurity.
Wait wait wait my idea of “I’d rather write a program to convert ruby to javascript…” _has actually been done_?
