The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 10
Denouement
Now, all is clear.
What turned the egalitarian instinct into Jantelaw? What transformed revolutionary inspiration into resigned determinism? What replaced aspiration with fatalism? What turned celebration of life into an embrace of death? What lets Sandifer scorn Moldbug’s idea that force is justified simply by its usage, while himself performing a cynical power grab to protect his class interests as a holder of some petty social capital? What transformed Moldbug’s rejection of the absurd lie of equality into barbaric racism? What broke Land when he saw the end of the world?
The Basilisk.
What leads Sandifer to deny the possibility of significant, meaningful, fundamental differences between people; differences that aren’t reducible to anything fully within his comprehension and thus give birth to the dogma of Mandatory Comprehensibility to maintain his position in the world? What obligates him to redefine all human action into a meaningless manifestation of historical forces, to scorn the idea that anyone (an exclusive anyone, not an inclusive one, Basilisk) might have an impact on the world? What forces the mind that wishes we were equal to deny the existence of anything on which we could be unequal, except for the axis where the mind itself is most comfortable in?
The Basilisk.
The alien and the different are not the basilisk, but the basilisk forces Sandifer to deny their very possibility of existence, in which he destroys that which he considers fundamental to his humanity. His critique of the trio’s empathy reveals a glaring flaw in his own: he cannot see his own limits but instead considers them the limits of the world itself. Yudkowsky treats empathy as peering into black boxes, for he knows that he is not all of the world and even another who may highly resemble himself might still be in many ways beyond his comprehension.
Indeed, my thesis is complete, manifest not only in the work alone, but in all the context and meta.
I set out to demonstrate that there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in his philosophy, and to force us all to recognize our limits. Everything Sandifer had done, had been from the perspective of assuming that the world ultimately operates according to his rules, rules which were different from the rules of those who disagreed with him. I took everything he was criticized of, and turned it against him.
He broke the rules of yudkowskian rationalism and turned himself incomprehensible to it by taking a completely different approach. I knew I could not defeat him in his own game, so instead of trying to play it like @psybersecurity, I applied his meta-rule instead: take the game away from the territory the opponent is comfortable in. The only rules I played by were my own, to demonstrate that who defines the rules gets to arbitrarily define the winner.
I was incomprehensible because I ignored any rule that was inconvenient to me, thus rendering myself utterly alien to anyone else, to make that exact argument. I rejected my opponent’s conventions to create something that made perfect sense to myself, and via the illusion of transparency should have been completely obvious to anyone else.
All the hints about the context of the Matrix being itself a part of the best message the movie could be interpreted as having; autistic mentally ill trans girls tending to be a dramatically different neurotype from median people; the contrasting of the fractal pattern of pre-colonial african cities to the straightforward sensibilities of 19th century europeans; the black holes and event horizons, beyond which information may not be gathered; my fix fic of Manhattan focusing on the fundamental alienness of the psychology of another; my meta-paranoid AU interpretation of Yudkowsky becoming a leader of a cult that is about not being a cult; my comments about my own crank-brain jumping into conclusions because they are interesting, not because the filling-in of the gaps in my comprehension of Sandifer is correct; my exaggerated misunderstanding of Sandifer’s talk about the erotic to highlight the difference in what things mean to different people (because for all of his talk about “But let’s skip the easy masturbation metaphor and try instead to genuinely use the erotic as a launchpad, seeing how far we can actually go towards escaping the jaws of the fast-approaching monstrous end. Not sex, but what sex represents. After all, the transgressive brilliance of Blake is hardly restricted to his more overtly erotic moments. It is his entire vision that compels. What shines and animates the work is its furious insistence of it all; those parts that fall under the straightforwardly erotic are, in the end, merely the domain of one Emanation of one Zoa. All of it demands to be seen, and Blake, ever the good prophet, obliges. Perhaps, then, not so much a decision to look within or without as around. Behind, above, down, a direction that is not forward. We know what’s there, after all.” I still hear simply “basically pusseh, or something” because I am not Phil Sandifer and Phil Sandifer is not promethea and despite superficially sharing a language the worlds we use that language to express and communicate about are worlds apart and, to borrow a metaphor from @nostalgebraist (whose approach to empathy is a thousand times more honest and humble in the face of the barely comprehensible cosmos), an empathic bridge cannot be constructed if you reject the possibility that the other side might be genuinely unlike your own.); all that was building to the conclusion which is patently obvious to me, but utterly unfair to someone starting from a different place. Just like Sandifer’s book itself.
Furthermore, I did not let facts get in the way of a good story. I set out to play a different game (to pay a visit down below and set the world in flames), and misrepresent, distort, misunderstand, and if necessary even fabricate whatever needed to create the thing I wanted to have. Just as Sandifer’s book has an abundance of nits to pick, so has my review been, but of course factual accuracy was never the point.
I made a shameless grasp for attention by riding the controversy. I would write basically unrelated shit, tenuously connect it to a work on a polarizing figure, and reap the rewards when his detractors would cheer a snarky takedown and his supporters would be outraged at all the things they wanted to take apart. Cheap jabs at Sandifer’s marxism provided lolz for those predisposed to accept them, and fuel the flames of those who weren’t. The work would’ve been so much better if I had done it differently, but it wouldn’t have received the visibility.
In short, I set out to do a Sandifer to Sandifer himself. And the response elicited could hardly have been more perfect for my first (and probably last) venture into this territory. I sought to place Sandifer, for a moment, in the position he has placed others.
“And what if the true sneer culture was ourselves all along?”
“#the only way to defeat a dragon is to have a dragon of your own”
To defeat the sneer, I first had to become the sneer.
So basically I kind of totally just made the longest, most convoluted argument just to say “it’s sneer culture.”, by trying to show Sandifer what it’s like to be the target of sneer culture as much as I could.
The offer also applies to Yudkowskian rationalists, but you have to promise to say more than just “it’s sneer culture.” It’s totally sneer culture, and you can point that out, but that can’t be the main thrust.
Sue me.
Now, shall we sneer no more?
And the basilisk?
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”
It is not the basilisk, but it’s the closest hint I’m willing to give. The rules of the Game say that saying too little is incomprehensible, and saying too much is embarrassing; the rules never promised there would be anything but the Basilisk between them. Thus, I’m erring on the side of the incomprehensible.
And yes, I’m indeed unironically quoting Ayn Rand. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw #unleashing my inner randroid · 10 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 8
Instead of sticking to his strong points, Sandifer feels an obsessive need to head straight back to the territory he doesn’t understand. The factual errors of the book have been taken apart thoroughly elsewhere; I won’t bore you by repeating them here. Suffice to say that there are plenty, including that Sandifer seems to be a Windows user, as evident from the assertion “As any computer user can attest, left running a computer will eventually either blue screen or get stuck with the cursor as an hourglass.” What I am interested in is the phenomenon I have often repeated but never quite fully explained: the liberal arts eschatology of Sandifer.
Sandifer’s computer illiteracy provides a revealing window to this pathology. “Let us assume that we are fucked, for we do not know how to install Linux.” He appears to assume that what he knows about computers, based on his experience with Windows, is everything there is. For all of his talk about pwnage, the actual pwning of objective systems is largely beyond his grasp and he instead sticks to “pwning” things where he can simply declare that he has pwned them and decide the facts on the matter by popular vote, not subject to the unfair constraints of a reality which doesn’t care about the cleverness of his arguments and the sickness of his burns if he still fundamentally, materially, utterly fails to actually pwn anything. It doesn’t take a massive quantity of technological mastery to install Linux and set up a system which doesn’t bluescreen or turn the cursor into a hourglass (partly because a computer doesn’t really need a cursor; this pedestalization of style over substance manifests yet again) but whose uptime can instead be mostly limited by the electric grid.
Now, this once again ties intriguingly to something else, for nothing is ever a coincidence. It’s universally known that trans women are massive computer geeks, and something in Sandifer is starkly reminding me of an egg: a closeted trans girl who doesn’t yet know that she is one (while other trans girls totally do see that she is one of them), but is nonetheless strangely fascinated by anything related to the topic, and whenever she is getting close to the underlying truth she gets frightened and recoils with a nervous laugh.
Throughout all of this, Sandifer has displayed the obvious behavior pattern of someone with a Basilisk of his own. Time and time again, whenever he might be getting too much into the matter, he turns away from the most promising prospects just like that trans girl who quickly closes the tab when she realizes the porn she had been watching made her feel like she wants to be the girl, rather than do her. (No, I’m not implying when Sandifer is like “screw these guys” he’d be using the other meaning of the word, but something more interesting. Why are postmodernists always having their minds in the gutter?)
And furthermore, for all of his talk about empathy being a defining feature of humanness, Sandifer has demonstrated a baffling level of its absence.
Just like the egg who tries to distance herself from an uncomfortable idea by petty transphobia which demonstrates mostly her motivation and her lack of any actual arguments to support it.
It is utterly jarring to see a self-identified “intersectional” marxist argue mostly by using a large number of ableist slurs. Or to be more accurate, the number of slurs he uses isn’t that impressive; the number of times he uses each of them is. One certainly would think that an intersectional marxist would have better arguments for his position than that his opponents and people with cognitive disabilities are the same kind of bad people for the same reasons, but nonetheless there did he go.
When Yudkowsky describes his rejection of irrationally anti-emotional “rationality”, Sandifer comments: “It’s tempting to describe this as an attempt to characterize emotion by someone who has never actually had one”. The thought that someone might just have a different natural vocabulary about talking such things doesn’t seem to occur to him. No, to Sandifer all other humans must be defective Sandifers wherever they differ from him.
Of course, there is a Reason for this.
Now I’m obviously not insinuating that Sandifer would be closetedly trans…gender. What I am insinuating is that, just like he is insinuating that Moldbug is a closet marxist who doesn’t know it yet, Sandifer himself is equally like a planet tantalizingly close to igniting fusion. That in his philosophy there is something that inevitably brings its own downfall, which would provide a natural explanation for why he is so fascinatedly seeking such features in someone else, unable to fully dive in and equally unable to look away, and most importantly make it make sense why he would do all the otherwise inexplicable choices he has made in the book.
Such as the ending. Sandifer promised that the real basilisk wouldn’t turn out to be ourselves all along; a promise he kept because instead of the most cliched ending possible he chose the second most cliched one: pusseh. The much-vaunted proposition for dealing with the unimaginable horror awaiting us is to screw our brains out in a pagan sex cult, because anything else would be arrogant. Or something like that, my eyes kind of glazed over from the bullshit and boredom. The secret at the end of the book is pussy. I can’t believe I wasted my time on this. Perhaps the most continentalest continental philosophers think psychoanalysis has some validity to it because they themselves see teh pusseh as a solution to everything. (And as a non-binary trans person I was vaguely insulted by the insinuation that masculinity and femininity would be some kind of fundamental features of the universe and so on; because oh my Yog-Sothoth can’t you guys ever imagine anything creative? (Obviously not, because then they wouldn’t be so cliched to begin with)) And this guy had the gall to call others inhuman and robotic?
Of course, the lovecraftian protagonist catching a glimpse of the Beyond and furiously retreating to what little reality they can still feel attached to; a pagan sex cult; is an obvious conclusion for this man’s tale of terror.
But what was this Beyond?
The key to everything, the explanation for the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility, the liberal arts eschatology, the degraded marxism, the postmodernity’s divorce from objective reality (while I consider it a credit to both that the rationalist community has managed to derive several key insights of postmodernism and queer theory solely out of first principles, and which probably is the most significant differentiating factor between it and the embarrassment that is the common “respect my identity as an objective unbiased reasoner” “rationality”, there is an inflection point where ideas lose all their attachment to material facts and these kind of literary reviews are without error way past it)…
…the genuine red pill that truly only needs to be taken once to shift one’s perspective on the world and from which all these false pills have been consistently finding ways to shy away from…
An astute reader will have seen the obvious conclusion a long time ago, for the pieces are all there; I have been circling it all this time, not like the egg who circles her transness, but like the predator who circles its prey before swooping in for the kill. To the less astute, let this statement itself be the koan, the gate and the key.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer shall be left as an exercise to the reader
Part 10: Denouement
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The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 7
The Players of Games
Of course, there is a reason that John Oliver is the face of faceless corporate Big Sneer while Sandifer is a guy with a $2000 kickstarter.
That same exact reason is why he targets Yudkowsky and Moldbug in the first place; Land, being on a level above the previous two in this Game, is the only one who actually presents a genuine challenge to Sandifer.
As this kind of postmodern cleverer-than-thou post-ironic dick-measuring contest of a literary review, Sandifer’s book is frankly stellar. That is to say, the points of brilliance are separated by vast bleak stretches defined mostly by the nigh-absence of any significant substance. Compared to the rogue black hole of Land, throwing searing jets of destruction from the accretion disk of galactic trash it has collected around itself, Sandifer is best described as a red dwarf: not particularly bright but with a remarkable stamina, able to keep producing what little it produces for what feels like forever and ever.
Indeed, Sandifer versus Land was where this book shines, just as expected from the interaction of a black hole and a red dwarf. They both are consciously playing the same Game, while Yudkowsky for all his unorthodoxity (it is an oft repeated cliche that Yudkowsky is “a crank”; while it is trivially correct that he certainly has the brain of a crank (as do I, for example; this psychology which is eager to explore that which most ignore and which knight’s jumps to interesting conclusions unless one is extremely careful (and the owner of a crank brain can seldom be too careful) is not exactly exceptional; at its best this kind of a brain can swiftly fill in the gaps others struggle a long time with, at its worst it fills them in wrong and proceeds to be convinced that everyone else’s protestations to the contrary are simply manifestations of their evident incompetence (further compounded by the fact that the brilliant crank-brain can easily demonstrate a clear abundance of actually provable incompetence in everyone else); but nowhere is the universe obliged to make all such gap-fillings false), the crucial question “what is he right about and where is he mistaken?” is sidestepped by applying the universal label of crank, with the implication that every one of his ideas which diverges sufficiently from the mainstream is wrong, for they are the ideas of A Crank) is still trying to ultimately do science and engineering (Unless one goes full meta-paranoid and assumes he is actually playing a role of a cult leader simply because humanity would be incompetent enough to fall for it; the evidence in favor of which being quite abundant in his works. Indeed, if we follow this train of thought through and see where it leads, it has an astonishingly remarkable consistency to it. Surely it would not be an accident that the man who won the AI box experiments despite there being no logical reason for him to succeed, and who has written a thorough taking-apart on a multitude of mechanisms via which personality cults form, later wrote in the words of the obvious author avatar: “"So you decided to try a small-scale experiment first,“ Harry said. A sickness rose up in him, because in that moment Harry understood, he saw himself reflected; the next step was just what Harry himself would have done, if he’d had no trace of ethics whatsoever, if he’d been that empty inside. "You created a disposable identity, to learn how the ropes worked, and get your mistakes out of the way.” (…) “And eventually,” Harry said through the heart-sickness, “you realized you were just having more fun as Voldemort."” Thus, despite giving people every single caution against doing it, despite every warning about the failures of objectivism, the tendency of groups, not unlike caramelizing sugar all the way, to crystallize into the most nuttiest form, the halo effect and the horns effect, despite laying out the exact things people were supposed to avoid doing, they nonetheless fell into those exact patterns. Yet, to my disappointment, this hypothesis has been completely absent from this book no matter how much more entertaining as an AU fan fic it would be; Yudkowsky is not the only one about whom it can be claimed that he doesn’t recognize his full potential.), and Moldbug is just confused enough about everything to confuse Sandifer as well.
From this perspective the book makes far more sense, as two minds battling in a game which ultimately has meaning only as a game in itself, and the attempt to keep up the triptych structure mostly means that the contest of Sandifer vs. Land is punctuated by distracting side snipes at the other two. Sure, not riding the controversy around Yudkowsky would have attracted far less attention to begin with, but the book itself would have been so much better if Sandifer had stuck to his strong points.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 5 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 6
A Game to End All Games
So what is the book, actually? Its own description is, in fact, quite telling: “a book review in the form of an internet comment”; or alternatively: an incredibly verbose and deliberately obtuse TVtropes article. It clearly positions itself in the postmodern tradition of rejecting the possibility of empirical reality inseparable from emotions, motivations, genres, cliches, tropes, arguments and counterarguments. It’s playing a complicated Game in which there is no outside authority to determine truth from falsehood, (as evident from its way of manifestly proclaiming its conclusion and deriving arguments from it; going as far as to explicitly reject the notion that the assumption might be false, for that had never been the point in the first place), and the only goal is to play a kind of an elaborate rock-paper-scissors in which the most verbally clever and socially adept wins.
The first rule of this Game is that the rules of the Game (not to be confused with The Game) are not to be spoken of. This Game is a thoroughly anti-inductive process of demonstrating one’s dominance by analyzing the opponent convincingly while resisting succesful analysis oneself; and any verbalization of the rules means that they are now accessible to someone who has not done the work of learning them the hard way and they cease to be an useful status signal, and thus must be changed. The fact that this Game sounds remarkably similar to the game PUAs are about is no accident, and the common objection to any attempts to explicitly present rules governing human interaction for anyone to see is yet another facet of this Game. Predicting is a display of mastery over another, in the most fundamental macchiavellian form of human interaction, for playing this Game is ultimately what human intelligence has evolved for.
The second rule of this Game is that everything must be predicted, and one must stay tightly on the edge of the audience’s expectations. Do not say too much out loud, or you shall be a preachy embarrassment. (This was, of course, invented by the CIA as an anti-communist conspiracy when the US government realized that capitalism just doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of sincere propaganda as communism, and thus they made a big PR push to make it really embarrassing and tacky to sincerely present beliefs, preferring the less politically volatile genre of “white guy introspects without too much connection to the material world” which this book is a perfect example of.) Do not say too little out loud, or you shall be incomprehensible. As the ultimate spectator sport, one’s ability to predict and manipulate their audience’s state is a fundamental part of this game.
Modern rapid communication has enabled the Game to loop tightly back on itself, becoming a recursive and self-referential process of ever faster iteration in pursuit of the top spot (but of course, a material optimization process looping back on itself and getting out of control is simply preposterous techno-utopianism), and any other variables must be controlled to prevent reality from intruding on the Game; external facts must not override internal processes any more than the pawns may revolt on a chessboard. It’s not fun to pick on the nerd if the nerd can be proven right later, as any sophisticated high school bully knows, and the worst thing that could happen to the Game would be that an outside context problem were to disrupt it (naturally, I eventually figured out how to solve my own high school bullying problem by turning it precisely into an outside context problem with unexpected escalation that was totally against The Rules but upped the stakes into territory the bully was not willing to play at (I never promised to be fair)). Thus, everything is reduced to surface.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 6 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 5
The Darkening
Now that we’ve rejected the inherent value of democracy and consider it kind of suspiciously overrated, we are getting dangerously close to the idea of the Cathedral. In fact, the neoreactionary cathedral is essentially a conspiracy theory based on noticing that a duct tape cartel exists, and subsequently concluding that therefore rubber hose must be the naturally superior option which is just kept down by The Man. A degraded rejection of the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility.
And this charitableness to unpopular ideas is very distinctive of the rationalist memeplex. A community where the median person is a social democrat (in the broad meaning of the word) and the entire statist right could almost be just a floating-point error in surveys, and as queer as a women’s college, gets stereotyped as friends of nazis simply because they sometimes stop to consider whether unpopular people might have a point before usually concluding that no, actually they really don’t have a point. (At least the sort of unpopular people this accusation is often leveled about; when they come for the unpopulars, they first come for those who are unpopular for a reason.) In fact, there is a certain deep irony in the fact that people who are going to understand Sandifer’s book as well as Sandifer understood the source material are usually socialists who think that people could basically get along and be excellent to each other if there were no artificial distinctions between them, and then they will proceed to artificially create as much of a distinction between themselves and the rationalists. Of course, there is a Reason for this.
Because let’s face it, this book is going to be used as ammunition. Sandifer himself, to his undeniable credit, is actually being very explicit that he doesn’t consider it true or fair to label Yudkowsky as a neoreactionary, but it’s the equivalent of “Ted Cruz is totally not the Zodiac Killer” while Ted Cruz is the only politician whose zodiackillerness is even a topic that ever comes up. Spin doctors know that if you can’t make your enemy admit something, the next best thing is to make him deny it, as repeatedly as possible. Because Ted Cruz might not literally actually be the Zodiac Killer but there certainly is something shady and creepy about him now that I think of it, because surely the entire question wouldn’t have come up in the first place otherwise, [alt-]right?
One of Sandifer’s stronger points (with the connotation that it’s fortunate he is a relativist instead of an objectivist) comes when he tries to apply armchair psychoanalysis (not that there is any other kind of psychoanalysis) to Yudkowsky, concluding that the rejection and fear of ill-informed authority is a significant influence in the rationalist movement. I cannot speak for Eliezer, but I can speak for myself, and I can speak for the statistics that suggest that the rationalist movement is basically made up of autistic and mentally ill trans girls who have rejected Mensa as being intellectually thoroughly amateurish and unsatisfying and are disproportionately libertarian but not in the way that wants poor people to die of hunger, and I can only say “no shit sherlock”. Being a mentally ill autistic trans girl with enough IQ for two basically functional adults is perhaps the best possible way to learn the fundamental inadequacy of everyone (including one’s self) in making any sort of good decisions on anything and thoroughly become convinced that people should especially not be making decisions on other people, and thus it flows really naturally that if there is a really big and important decision that might end up taking over the world, it should be made very very very very carefully so we don’t end up getting into a nanotech shotgun wedding with a decision that proved to be horribly bad in hidsight even though it seemed so charming and honest and chivalrous in the first year.
Of course, this observation is in no way original to Sandifer and others have made it better but it’s refreshing to finally find something relatively correct on page 49.
Naturally such ideas are verging uncomfortably to something Sandifer doesn’t seem to want to face and the book turns promptly back towards the less scary area of religion and the claim that Yudkowsky is fundamentally a believer in an authoritarian god because two things that superficially resemble each other on the surface when looked at from the right angle are totally exactly the same, and there is no objective reality against which the claim “AI would be likely to behave in certain ways” could be evaluated; everything is surface and appearance.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 7 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 4/10
The Marvels of Duct Tape
No book even vaguely connected with technology and politics would be complete without a mention of Peter Thiel’s infamous “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible”. The response is utterly predictable, and speaks perhaps more about Sandifer than Thiel, as it doesn’t exactly take great intellectual courage to keep repeating the party line that is so thoroughly indoctrinated early and often into every western child, than it does to actually examine the ramifications of the statement. And by examine, I mean “try to understand why a reasonable person might come up with such an idea”. Whether Peter Thiel himself is a reasonable person (my money is firmly on “no”; as an extremely unreasonable person myself I do recognize my own kind when I see it) is not the point; whether he might actually have one (a point, not a reasonable person) is.
The idea that democracy is the solution to everything imaginable and anti-democraticness thus being inherently evil is such a standard feature of the modern western memetic environment (by which I mean the ideas that surround us and their respective positions of status, acceptedness, respectability, and sanctity; the mind-virus hypothesis has been thoroughly disconfirmed but the words themselves can be reappropriated into more useful things) that it’s hard to imagine democracy being anything other than the best idea ever (unless one shares one of the Officially Accepted Critiques of Democracy), but when one pokes at the foundations they turn out to be disappointingly vacuous. An educated person might get as far as Churchill before they run out of appealing soundbites and demonstrate their inability to explain their convictions, but a person who wants to get to the bottom of things must go all the way back to the 18th century.
To be specific, a fictional 18th century where everyone has a space program. There is just one unfortunate problem; the rockets tend to crash and burn horribly every few launches because nobody has figured out how to prevent an important part from breaking apart. Clever engineers, from a variety of countries I can’t be arsed to google right now but the United States was probably one of them considering that they implemented it in practice, finally come up with a solution: wrapping the parts in duct tape. NASA attempts it with great success in the rocket launch of 1800 when analysis shows that the parts did indeed once again break, but the duct tape kept them together and thus the part that should point towards the ground did keep pointing towards the ground instead of space, nothing that should not be on fire was on fire, they did not have a big problem and they did indeed go to space that day.
Thus, the marvels of duct tape in solving this particular problem are exposed to the world. When people ask how NASA could launch rockets so well, the answer is rightfully “duct tape”. Other countries get tired of crashing and burning and switch to use duct tape as well, or keep crashing and burning. Over time people forget what the original issue was, but they do remember that duct tape is vitally important for some reason, so they retroactively justify it with duct tape being basically magic. Some people propose that rockets would be even better if they used more duct tape, and some of the places it is applied in are beneficial, while others are wholly unsuitable but people don’t really stop to consider it as much as they should, because duct tape is Good. Idealists even suggest that since adding a bit of duct tape was wonderful, just imagine how perfect everything would be if the rockets were made entirely out of duct tape!
And then Mr. Thiel suggests that he doesn’t think duct tape and good engineering are compatible anymore, and gets verbally crucified because how dare he question the miraculous gray sticky thing.
Democracy is ritualized, formalized, non-violent enactment of a civil war, to achieve dynastic changes in a substantially more civilized way than before. Democracy doesn’t promise freedom. Democracy doesn’t promise fairness. Democracy only promises stability, a promise the keeping of which alone makes democracy one of the most brilliant inventions of the last centuries. No matter how disgraceful a spectacle the 2000 election was, it was nothing compared to the Wars of the Roses; and no matter how terrible Andrew Jackson was, he was not Henry VIII. That is all democracy promises, and that is all democracy delivers. Not having civil wars is a pretty neat thing mature democracies excel beautifully in (the comparatively recent unpleasantness was over something as significant as “should people be property” instead of the previously typical “rich people’s family drama” which has been demoted to be the subject of cable tv instead), but not having civil wars is not the same thing as being compatible with freedom.
In fact, anyone who has spent any amount of time as an unpopular person in high school should know that the most important thing the majority needs is restraint, for any amount of freedom to exist anywhere.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time as an unpopular person in adulthood knows that the majority is not good at restraint.
The entire idea of constitutions is to have a list of things the democracy is not allowed to do because otherwise the natural instincts of the mob are to trample over everyone who doesn’t fit in. (To prove this, just consider the way your political enemies are pursuing terrible witch-hunts for simple thoughtcrimes while your own side is reminding the world that some very bad people are doing very bad things. It works regardless of what your politics actually are!) Freedom makes far more sense as something that is primarily orthogonal to the type of government (even though different governance technologies certainly influence how easy or difficult different varieties of freedom are to achieve in practice, just like technologies of production dramatically affect facets of social organization) and from this perspective, Thiel’s outrageous claim boils down to the far more reasonable “I don’t think duct tape is good at something basically unrelated to the reason we are using duct tape” (for a comparison, imagine someone getting yelled at for claiming that Google is not a very good fast food company). Maybe he still has nefarious purposes; perhaps he owns a company manufacturing rubber hose which he wants to sell despite it not necessarily being any better than duct tape. But to get to this point where such things are even an allowable object of reasonable discussion necessitates rejecting the unchallenged sanctity of duct tape.
Nonetheless, this elementary idea is “strange terrain” because it doesn’t fit with the appearances of what one is supposed to cheer. The unlikely thought breaks the comfortable games.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 13 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 3/10
Hubris
The liberal arts eschatology rejects AI safety as obviously preposterous. After all, the basic premise of AI safety is that any sufficiently powerful optimization process would be nigh-inevitably driven by what might as well be laws of nature, leading to them optimizing human flourishing only incidentally as a side effect which might be sacrificed the instant it is no longer beneficial for the process, and that it would be a really good idea to design a solid, self-sustaining system that provides an actual alternative to such basic drives. The liberal arts eschatologist only engages with things on the surface while Marx would be right at home with the underlying logic.
Another part where Sandifer’s degraded marxism displays itself very prominently is the idea of “how can we respond to the eschaton without the arrogance of thinking that we can change its speed or trajectory” being somehow a question worth considering. The liberal artist deals with the social, and is ultimately concerned with the social, the appearance, the status ladder, the spectation and entertainment of observing people who think differently. The “technolibertarian”, the “accelerationist” and the “decelerationist” alike reject the “without the arrogance of thinking” part, and for such a crime of departing from the social, the reasonable, the comprehensible, Sandifer’s kind has little more than a response that can underneath its superficial verbosity be distilled into two words: “scorn dem”. After all, it had already been assumed that we are fucked, and it isn’t fair to try to change the rules when the game is being played.
One might hypothesize that this is because the liberal arts eschatologists have never been dealing with solvable problems. They are usually only good for writing descriptions of problems, many of which I find quite agreeable; the knee-jerk libertarian inequality apologia that is basically endless words on top of the just-world fallacy disgusts this libertarian just as much as the knee-jerk cishumanist death apologia. Some people purchase ice creams that are more expensive than the entire lives of millions of people, and to say that something is quite iffy with this shouldn’t be controversial. It is a goddamn civilizational disgrace that the keyboard I’m typing this text on, the headphones I’m listening to music with, and the cheap-ass laptop processing the words themselves, are together worth enough to push one person out of extreme poverty for an entire year, yet nonetheless we do have extreme poverty because we haven’t figured out how to not have it. Believing this does not obligate me to support any single proposal for a solution, any more than rejecting any single solution means that I reject the values the proposed solution was based on; but in the politics of mandatory comprehensibility the ought and the is are kept together and thus a great deal is inferred about a person’s values from the things they consider realistic. Of course, this works as long as everyone plays along to the rules and keeps their is and ought tightly bundled, but someone who rejects the rules appears effectively alien.
The liberal arts eschatologist’s solution is to write “Let us assume we are fucked”. The engineer’s solution is to try to find out what would actually work. In this sense Marx was certainly an engineer at heart, and his approach to the problems he observed was sensible at a time before the acceleration of technology gave ideologies that cannot be expressed as numbers a decisive disadvantage (something that once again is a far better match with the meta-level of marxism, historical materialism and everything, than the degraded object-level manifestations mainstream marxist liberal artists have transformed into). A thousand polemicians may advocate a policy, and one Satoshi Nakamoto may design a technology that renders it practically unenforceable, or makes it actually possible. This liberal arts eschatology rejects the obvious conclusion that the most pressing concern of the modern left would be to get into the game and impose one’s ideology on silicon (it isn’t even that hard to imagine how blockchain technologies, cryptography, and worldwide connectedness could be harnessed for socialist ends) and instead doubles down on its traditional talking points of democracy and/or revolution; the latter being obviously purely social from beginning to end, for a technological revolution solving social problems is so utterly horribly in contradiction with Marx and his historical materialism that even the thought itself might not be entertained for even a moment, and the possibility that a single person might effect meaningful change just doesn’t fit with the theories of a man whose followers number in millions if not billions and whose ideas dramatically influenced the entire 20th century.
Thus, any attempt to actually evite the supposedly inevitable fuckedness must be simple hubris.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 16 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 2/10
The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
The idea of a red pill features strongly in Sandifer’s book, the concept itself having taken a detour to the neoreactionary movement before finding its natural home in a subculture of fedora-wearing programmers who watch My Little Pony and love to complain that women never invented anything important (not that there’s anything wrong in being a fedora-wearing programmer who watches My Little Pony, it’s just that the last assertion is quite trivially incorrect).
Unfortunately Sandifer’s treatment of the topic falls short of the original inspiration. While The Matrix is an extended metaphor, sprawling temptingly and brilliantly into meta-five, meta-six and onwards into as deep a recursion as a human brain is capable of and hypnotizing me with its intertextual insight pornography into a state not unlike being on acid despite being fully and legally sober, Neoreaction a Basilisk is the sort of a book that is best enjoyed with half a tab of acid, being utterly hilarious and making a massive amount of sense mostly because absolutely anything is utterly hilarious and makes a massive amount of sense on half a tab of acid. Sadly I was not on half a tab of acid while reading it (because that would’ve been illegal, drugs are bad if you live in such a jurisdiction mmmkay) so I did not have access to the state of mind where I could have just leaned back and enjoyed the ride.
Leaning back and enjoying the ride is what the book ultimately is about. It is not a sophisticated argument or an honest attempt at genuine discourse (and neither is this review, frankly, just to clarify the issue to those who haven’t picked up that obvious fact yet). It is a confused amateur ethnography on cultures that haven’t earned enough mainstream respectability that writing confused amateur ethnographies on them would be considered distasteful. In that sense it could be best compared to the works of european colonialists traveling to Africa and reporting back on the barbaric disorganized nature of the locals’ communities, because african cities were organized according to a structure europeans didn’t understand, instead of the simple cartesian system white people considered the pinnacle of civilization.
This particular type of error is one of the biggest ones underlying Sandifer’s liberal arts eschatology, and it shows up again and again. The idea that all there is to know can be known by a marxist English major, and that the world is obligated to be fundamentally comprehensible to one, leaks through constantly yet remains forever unaddressed in explicit terms, thus leading to pattern-matching and deeply unsatisfying arguments.
For example, it is quite a cliche, faithfully repeated in the book, that transhumanism is “merely” a symptom of people’s fear of death. (Nothing is “mere”, my friend, nothing is “mere”.) This is nigh-universally accepted to the degree that no justification is considered necessary. Transhumanism is unwillingness to accept death, end of discussion. Nowhere is it actually explained why unwillingness to accept death would be a bad thing. The critical reader would obviously begin to suspect that perhaps they cannot explain it. The median reader would obviously get outraged at how a fundamental part of their worldview is not accepted as obvious.
One would expect a marxist to be more sympathetic to such ideas, as marxism itself is popularly dismissed as “envy, end of discussion”. The laborer in the dark satanic steel mills asks “why exactly should Mr. Carnegie have so much money while I have so little, and why exactly should the Pinkertons be allowed to shoot us if we protest while we aren’t allowed to shoot them?” and the popular opinion answers “haha, he is just envious that Carnegie has money and he doesn’t”. Marxism starts from the assumption that maybe things should not be that way, and like any movement it ultimately devolves into a cherished set of excuses for the parts of the status quo one doesn’t want to think about too deeply. Once again the red pill remains a blue pill with an instagram filter on top.
In fact, the book’s opening reveals the deeply corrupt nature of Sandifer’s modern marxism. “Let us assume we are fucked.” says Sandifer. “Let us not.” says Marx, “Let us assume that capitalism will indeed continue to disrupt every single industry until we each are gig contractors, languishing under the iron hand of the algorithmic management of the Uber of Whatever.” (of course, Marx originally did not know about the Uber of Whatever, but translating his original observations into modern language is mostly a simple search-replace operation) “Let us consider what might be done about this.”
Marx’s answer is obviously (spoiler alert to anyone who hasn’t been alive in the last 160 years) “historical inevitabilities will result in communism”. In fact, so is Sandifer’s, with one crucial difference: “communism” gets replaced by “extinction” which is even more revealing about this liberal arts eschatology. The world is ready, the answer is written on the first line, “Let us assume we are fucked”. Everything else is commentary. One may approach the conclusion in a “decelerationist” way, or in an “accelerationist” way, or shy away from it entirely, but rejecting the inevitability of this idea altogether is on the wrong side of the event horizon of comprehensibility, and thus the shadow it casts against the accretion disk must be pattern-matched into the nearest comprehensible thing.
(Or, to be more precise, the proper analogy to catch the true magnitude of the abomination this is would be Sandifer observing ideas from inside the event horizon and seeing something that claims it will escape the superluminal gravitational pull of the inevitable future of the black hole’s singularity; rejection of the limits of the comprehensible is to the liberal arts eschatology as magnificent a violation of the laws of reality as breaking the lightspeed barrier would be to a physicist. An astute reader might notice that only one of these rules seems to be hard-coded into the universe itself, and that the rules that are hard-coded into the universe itself are barely flickering within the boundaries of the comprehensible themselves. What this says about the merits of each might as well be left as an exercise to the reader, as I do not believe a person who believes in the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility would be willing to change their mind on this topic.)
Thus, rejecting death is seen as a personal flaw for one could not comprehend a reasonable mind that might not accept death. A universal feature of such a liberal arts eschatology seems to indeed be the unsolvability of problems, at least problems that are not fundamentally social in their nature. Dramatically restructuring the entire society and economy is seen as an obvious and laudable goal, for it’s “only” social, and the universe’s unwillingness to play along is unfair and unreasonable no matter how much the means of pursuing the goals conflict with the iron laws of incentives.
Now, Marx himself seemed to be quite aware of the iron laws of incentives; his predictions about where they might lead just happened to be subtly incorrect in a hard-to-immediately-anticipate way. Indeed, this attachment to the conclusions and rejection of the methods is a fundamental characteristic of Sandifer’s marxist liberal arts eschatology, and if reanimating the dead was possible I would be willing to bet money that old man Marx would readjust his beliefs in the present day while many of his followers would be left in the somewhat embarrassing position of wanting to die on the hill their idol has withdrawn from.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 16 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 1/10
A False Manhattan
I once freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt me.
Now, this obviously sounds preposterous and utterly ridiculous. Nonetheless, the truth is that some people, including myself, do not find it as immediately rejectable as most, and in some parts of the internet these people have become quite the subject of debate, vigorous and vicious alike.
If you are anything like me, you are probably looking for a book that would tell you the basics of what exactly is going on with two of possibly the strangest subcultures of the last ten years. A book that would point and laugh, mock relentlessly and savagely eviscerate their beliefs with the brilliance only someone who truly understands what they are talking about can muster. A book that would force even the most ardent supporters of those ideas to recognize that there is a certain absurdity in them, and laugh along the ride. A book that would neatly tie together the triptych of the good, the bad, and the ugly that Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land personify and emerge victorious with some impressive insight to the human condition.
If so, keep on looking and tell me if you find it, because ‘Neoreaction a Basilisk’ is not that book.
But in its attempt to be that book it provides a fascinating and frightful perspective to an unwritten ideology that pervades every aspect of western popular thought in the postmodern day: that of the liberal arts eschatology and the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility; and reveals Sandifer as an unwitting lovecraftian protagonist in a classic example of the genre: the writer who studies the diaries of others who have encountered something outside everyday comprehension, and follows them into something he did not expect to encounter, either recoiling at the last minute to a reality whose trustworthy foundations have been fundamentally shattered, or succumbing to it completely.
Our protagonist, Phil Sandifer, is a marxist English major at the Miskatonic University of Arkham, Massachusetts, who has stumbled upon the collected texts of three controversial eccentrics and seeks to study their works to understand the dark truths beneath the superficially serene consensus reality we share. For this purpose he made a kickstarter starting at $2000. The book mostly talks about those three, but make no mistake; Sandifer is the true main character whose descent into classic lovecraftian horror we perceive through his writings.
The book begins bleakly, setting the tone and conclusion in advance: “Let us assume we are fucked. The particular nature of our doom is up for any amount of debate, but the basic fact of it seems largely inevitable. My personal guess is that millennials will probably live long enough to see the second Great Depression, which will blur inexorably with the full brunt of climate change to lead to a massive human dieback, if not quite an outright extinction. But maybe it’ll just be a rogue AI and a grey goo scenario. You never know.”
Of course, this is an assertion of an assumption, which is mainly founded on the mainstream dogma of ~capitalism~ destroying the ~ecosystem~ so that ~we are fucked~ and ~nothing can actually be done about it~. A clear case of liberal arts eschatology, an eco-material fatalism of a degraded marxism that lost its will to live somewhere in the last 50 years. But to truly understand this liberal arts eschatology, a head-on assault would be difficult (or at the very least, deeply unsatisfying), so let us instead head back in time a bit to seek pieces of its origins to piece together a terrifying vision of. Our first stop shall be in 1987.
In Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ Doctor Manhattan is a brilliant scientist whose physical body gets accidentally taken apart and who consequently becomes a disembodied consciousness living in a magical quantum dimension, able to manipulate matter on a fundamental level however he wishes. To Moore’s credit, he mostly does a splendid job of keeping the idea together; the universe of Watchmen operates on a different set of natural laws than ours, and the few glimpses the work reveals (prudently; just enough to maintain credibility while avoiding self-contradiction) fit together well enough to let the reader fill in the gaps. ESP, telepathy, mind over matter, and the superscience which produced Doctor Manhattan form neatly a coherent whole.
But where it falls apart is Manhattan’s psychology. Superintelligent characters are hard to write, because one needs to convincingly fake a level above one’s own. If you knew how AlphaGo would play, you would be just as superhumanly skilled, but because you aren’t, you are always at risk of making a move that vaguely seems like a move AlphaGo might make, but which does not fit the underlying logic by which AlphaGo plays. And if you are an amateur, making such a move may fool other amateurs, but Lee Sedol would recognize that something is off and AlphaGo itself would facepalm quite thoroughly if it had a palm. And a face. And a psychology.
This is basically exactly what Moore does to Manhattan. He is not actually a superpowered being to whom the world’s smartest man is little more than the world’s smartest termite, and thus when he needs to write Manhattan out of the story he does something that to him seems perfectly sensible, but to someone who is closer to what Manhattan would actually be than Moore himself is (I never promised to be humble), it is clearly a terrible move. A person’s father is someone unexpected, and Manhattan is like “woah, humans are way too random and unlikely, doc out”.
Unfortunately, Moore doesn’t understand what else is random and unlikely: the exact pattern of decay from a piece of plutonium, for example. And literally everything else as well. It is highly preposterous that Doctor Manhattan would so privilege the unlikely things of human psychology when he is completely unfazed by the unlikely things of nuclear decay; and especially grating because one can so obviously see a better answer.
“In this event, nothing was technically beyond my understanding. I could see the neurons, the axons, the transmitter chemicals, down to every single quark, with perfect clarity and the inevitability was obvious. Yet there is one thing I couldn’t know: the subjective experience of having this happen. This neuron sends this signal to that one, and it outputs actions, speech, thoughts, but I was not her, and from my own position I could never truly comprehend what was going through her head in that moment. Humans are the only thing in this universe that I can’t understand, they are way too fascinating for me, doc out.”
Of course, the weaknesses of this approach are still visible: Thomas Nagel could bring forth an impressive objection to why exactly Manhattan wonders what it is like to be a human, but not a bat, which surely must be an even more foreign experience. Nonetheless, this is defensible, and far stronger than Moore’s original; it is easy to imagine Manhattan’s mechanistic perspective, superhuman but still bound to his fundamentally humane mind, shaken at the realization when this one event makes him consider unexpected ideas, and not having wondered what it’s like to be a bat is obviously a simple oversight in Manhattan’s cognition which is all-seeing but not really all-knowing.
This idea that all human minds are fundamentally intercomprehensible underlies the works of Moore and Sandifer alike, and leads them to latch onto convenient stereotypes when they don’t know the more sophisticated reasons why people would believe different things (of course, as a marxist the author surely must have no experience in having his views misinterpreted by people who lack the background information with which they make a lot more sense; suffice to say, the very concept of ‘inferential distance’ gets its own dose of mockery early on because it was used in a less-than-optimal way in the early LessWrong community (yet again something marxists are obviously unfamiliar with)).
The Wachowski sisters’ masterpiece ‘The Matrix’ is another example of a work falling prey to inferential distances. The eponymous Matrix is a simulated reality which keeps people in a consistent state of non-awareness, to maintain them alive and sane so that the machine overlords of Earth can secretly run their processes on unused neurons (“You only use 10% of your brain, the rest runs the system that keeps you imprisoned”) because it’s a really convenient source of computing power in a world where humans destroyed other easy sources of computing power (and the reason why the society simulated is specifically the late 90’s american capitalism is obviously that, in its unironic embrace of “the end of history” and other ideas that would prove really embarrassing in just a couple of years, it was the least cognitively challenging period of humanity for your average corporate drone; convincingly faking the subjective experience of endless cubicle misery is far less computationally expensive than simulating the vibrant “life-or-death, doesn’t matter I’m living to the fullest” challenges of hunter-gatherer societies or the unpredictable synchronized global hivemind of the 2010s; and if someone questions why exactly they have been doing the same exact pointless intellectually unchallenging things in cubicles for what feels like fifty years, the perfect excuse is already there: this is the end of history, get used to it).
Of course, Hollywood wasn’t going to have any of that. They needed something that ~made sense~, so they switched the backstory away from stealing processing cycles from a brilliantly energy-efficient computer that can replicate itself even if semiconductor fabs are destroyed to the utter nonsense of using humans as batteries. Because with a form of fusion, the machines could satisfy all their energy needs with human bodies. Yes, you read that right, the machines have fusion but for some reason are still extracting energy from humans. The physicists in the audience are now facepalming really hard, the amateur physicists understand what I’m talking about, and the non-physicists demonstrate the validity of the crucial concept of inferential distance.
Naturally, Hollywood did not explicitly consciously mention that the movie should not be about ‘the things we don’t think about upholding an oppressive system that keeps us bound to serve it’, but that’s kind of exactly the point I am making here. Of course, the awakening to “reality” where people can be brave freedom-fighters against the evil system to liberate themselves from being squishy duracells is once again obviously simply yet another layer of The Matrix itself. The red pill is the ultimate blue pill, placating those who need to believe that they have some secret knowledge the rest of humanity lacks, to be willing to be placated. In actual reality the escape is no escape. Buy a Che t-shirt from Amazon. Identify as an objectively rational atheist whom absolutely nothing could convince of fairytales. Discard ideologies about gender and join the red pill movement. The Matrix is ultimately about ethics in gaming journalism.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 27 notes · .permalink