endecision asked: non-stop, say no to this?
non-stop: talk about something you’re talented at, or even just something you can do very quickly and efficiently
Optimizing, seeing opportunities and possibilities and exploring ideas to their most exploitable conclusions.
In practice this turns out most commonly to mean that when I have an audience (one or more people) I am familiar with, or can predict enough, to know their predispositions; in a sufficiently non-prejudiced state of mind; and a suitable channel of communication, I can convince them of quite unexpected things by playing around with the style of what I’m saying while keeping the substance fundamentally the same.
Another, strongly related, thing is that I have quite decent metacognition I’ve cultivated over the years to gain awareness of and access into the deeper parts of my brain. While it’ll always be a work in progress, I’m able to do the same kind of things to myself and self-modify in some pretty promising ways. I’ve tied my sense of self-worth not into any object-level feature but into the highest meta, of seeing promethea as a terrible kludge of deterministic mechanisms and intertwined levers that I should, and most importantly am allowed to, mechanistically manipulate in ways that work without being tied to counterproductive value judgements about them. I can be biased and irrational, I can do political posturing to save face while figuring out sneaky ways to turn things around, I can fail again and again and again and sometimes be even too exhausted to bother trying to improve, and it’s perfectly okay and doesn’t reflect badly on me because that’s what everyone deep down is and I’m already better than most if I at least admit it. On the most fundamental level my utility function is simply playing with the cards it was dealt the best it can to maximize expected value and in practice this turns out to be ultimately pretty well.
say no to this: what’s your biggest guilty pleasure?
Guilt is a counterproductive feeling, one to be optimized away. I suppose this could refer to things I enjoy but might not want to admit out loud for status or political reasons, or to things I enjoy and spend a lot of time doing but would rather self-modify away from or at the very least hack into a more synergistically exploitable form that simultaneously furthens my other goals.
I obviously can’t say publicly what the first things would be because so many people don’t understand these things and giving away such information could hurt me, if I have such things. Of course, even admitting to having such things could be a mistake as well because things can be deduced from even the existence of such information. For game-theoretical reasons the only right way to deal with such things publicly is by making the information content as close to zero as possible. These things might be something that would make group A laugh at me, or they might be something that would make group B scorn me, or they would seriously compromise my credibility with group C, or maybe I don’t actually have such things but think that even ambitious people should be allowed to be unique human beings, beautiful with their warts and all, instead of having to sanitize their entire existence into the flawed and phony perfection of ideological purity and thus am helping such people by placing myself in the same reference class out of solidarity even if I myself might not actually have such flaws. Nobody can know, and I am definitely not telling. The only winning move is not to play. Checkmate, status gamists everywhere.
The second one is easy to answer: pointless political debates with people who are Wrong On The Internet, especially social democrats (a curious combination of the narcissism of small differences and actual fundamental disagreements on deeper facts and values; pretty much exactly the finnish equivalent of silicon valley technoliber(al)tarians yelling at SWPL liberals) and other statists and paternalists and people who say they are egalitarians but whose actions hurt those who are already being hurt by so many other things as well. No matter how little I could actually change things by debating the same things endlessly with people I know are never going to change. That one I’m hacking into aiding in my ambitions as networking with interesting people, gaining PR points and cultivating an image and establishing a personal brand sorry I seriously can’t say that one with a straight face how on earth do people come up with this stuff it’s so hilarious is anyone ever actually serious when they say such things haha wow.
4 months ago · 3 notes · .permalink
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