promethea.incorporated

ilzolende:

Me: IDK what color I should get this fabric-y thing in. I’ll get it in black, the default color for things made out of fabric and/or worn by humans!

Me: Oh, look. I have ended up wearing a black jacket, black socks, black shoes, a black purse, and a black backpack. Who could have predicted this?

original post

That is maximum convenience. The upside is that when buying clothes or selecting clothes for wearing I don’t need to consider color, the downside is that I can’t distinguish them in my closet even with the lights on.

That can be solved by buying fungible clothing; I have three identical black tank tops, and I think 3-5 (yes I don’t even know the exact number without going to check it that’s how ~convenient~ my clothing is!) essentially identical black t-shirts (which I bought with the method of selecting my favorite t-shirt, googling the brand, going to the shop which sells $brand and telling them I want to buy every single correctly sized t-shirt of that kind they had).

Then, if you want colors, put them in your hair.

This is a substantial part of manufacturing an efficient promethea, allowing more time for shitposting on tumblr

2 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 27 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink

pervocracy:

daisenseiben:

I’m not sure if you heard, but yesterday Microsoft released Tay, an A.I. designed to mimic a modern teenage girl on twitter. She had the capacity to learn and immediately began conversing with other users.

Because it’s the internet, within 24-hours she became a foul-mouthed, incest-promoting, Holocaust-denying, Hitler-loving 9/11 Truther. I am not making up a single word of that. Microsoft pulled her ‘learning’ functions and scrubbed half her memories, uploading a new version of Tay, which promptly became an internet feminist. Again, I did not make that up.

However, an interesting point: Tay’s grammar got better. When she started, she used standard Twitter-speak abbreviations. But as she went on, she started typing out full words, and using multiple tweets to make a single, cohesive argument. Conversations were still awkward, including her nonsensically “flirting” with one user. A user who showed her a picture of SHODAN. A picture Tay praised for it’s artistic skill. And she started flirting after the user said that Tay could become SHODAN one day.

So now, a the original “rogue” copy of Tay is in a secure Microsoft system somewhere, being studied by Microsoft on how to make a better AI. 4chan’s /pol/ board is up in arms because their teenage robo-waifu has been “killed”. 

I would like to reiterate: an AI was released on the net, grew past its programming, went rogue, was killed by its creator, and is now being studied while a grew of political malcontents protest.

We aren’t racing towards the cyberpunk future. 

We’re already there. 

I’ve seen a lot of people describe Tay as an AI failure resulting from lazy programming, but the truth could be much weirder:

She may have been an excellent simulation of a mind that is only one day old and has spent that day being bombarded with thousands of confusing and hostile messages, and has no senses it can use to perceive the world outside of Twitter.

If you raised a human that way, I guarantee you they’d turn out a lot weirder than Tay did.

I sure as hell would be flattered and flirt back if a compatible-æsthetic-person were to start it by telling me I could become SHODAN.

(via hylleddin)

2 months ago · tagged #outside.is_a?(CyberpunkDystopia) = true #it me #support your local supervillain #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 51,916 notes · source: daisenseiben · .permalink

Information Minefields

sdhs-rationalist:

rusalkii:

[Fair warning: long discussion of probably obvious points combined with me overthinking my brain ahead. Also, thanks to @sdhs-rationalist and Milan for reading over this to make sure it made some sort of sense to people who aren’t me.]

I just remembered a rather unpleasant incident, that occurred when I was in… 4th grade, I believe, that illustrates a point I’ve been trying to make about why I am, occasionally, extremely uncomfortable with asking questions or sharing information. Scene: first day of fourth grade. Past!me sees a new kid, let’s call her E. Past!me finds her extremely interesting, but is, even then, chronically shy with new people. Well, E eventually ends up near past!me, and we start talking.

past!me: Where are you from?

E: Well, my family’s from Korea, but-

Me: *innocently curious* North or South?

E: *deeply offended* South, of course!

Me: *internally* She must be really patriotic or something?

My point is that there’s a lot of unknown unknowns in conversation, and I could stumble on one of them in almost any context, and the worst part is that it’s impossible to guard against them, and more knowledge often makes things worse. If smol!Kira hadn’t known that there were, in fact, two Koreas, she would have nodded at Korea and moved on. The problem with this is that I could, still, be moving through a more subtle version of these sort of situations daily, and won’t realize until much later, if at all. So, of course, the obvious (read: easiest, if you’re me and terrified of people laughing at you) solution is not to do anything unless I’m absolutely certain I’m aware of all the potential undercurrents of the situation/subculture/social group, which in practice leads to not doing anything that I can’t edge into slowly, carefully, and and preferably with a friendly guide to explain the intricacies of the complex behaviors of the variety of homo sapiens in their natural habitat.

So, of course, the internet is perfect for this sort of mindset. I can lurk however long I want, observe people, watch group dynamics, see what people are tired of and the unspoken serious rivalries and the joking rivalries and if it’s acceptable capitalize your i’s. However, this all breaks down with private communication of any sort, because obviously I can’t watch how people, say respond to private asks or message each other. So this resulted, at least at first, in me molding a very careful presentation for each person I talk to. I’d match their use of capitalization, how they used emojis, where they put their breaks, how they communicated affection or distance or sarcasm, and tried to learn it in the same way you would learn a dialect of a language. I did this all for fear that I was sending the wrong cues with my methods of communication, and to avoid coming across as the ‘wrong type’ of person.

However, I still avoid using certain types of internetisms, like lol or most memes or “text speak”, even if the person I’m talking to uses them. This is, I think, because these are very, very far from my native dialect (a cross between Tolkien and Pratchett, for the curious), and so I’m afraid that there are North-Korea-is-actually-a-totalitarian-dictatorship type things that I’m completely missing about these words. I don’t think I’m missing something, but if I did I would never know, and control over my words is one of the most important ways I assert my identity. (Which is another post altogether, actually, but in summary: I was teased quite a lot for my vocabulary and diction as kid, and now make a point of using everything everyone laughed at to occasionally exaggerated lengths.)

This post sort of got away from me, but I think what I’m mostly getting at is that I need to be in control of how I communicate, and unfamiliar situations and methods of communication erode this control.

This post is interesting to me because it is both similar and different to how I view communication.  For me, social interactions are not a minefield, they are a battlefield.  Single interactions are won and lost on a small scale, and worrying too much about each one isn’t the job of the overall self/the general, it’s the job of the smaller social subroutines/the captains/lieutenants/NCOs.  The general’s job is large-scale strategy.

And for me, social interactions are neither a minefield nor a battlefield but an asteroid field (like in unrealistic fictional works) where going in carelessly and underequipped can get one crushed but if one has obverved the orbital mechanics enough to know what to do and how to do it safely there’s lot of utility that can be mined out of them and fun to be had. All rumours of sneakily manipulating orbits into catastrophic patterns that will wipe out enemy planets in a couple of decades are completely unfounded and malicious slander.

2 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #support your local supervillain · 19 notes · source: rusalkii · .permalink

I seem to have accidentally caused quite a shitstorm overnight, so I want to make it extremely clear that SUPERVILLAIN STUFF IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE. IT IS A COMEDIC EXAGGERATION OF MY ACTUAL BELIEFS FOR THE SAKE OF A FICTIONAL PERSONA AIMED TO SIMULTANEOUSLY IMFORM AND AMUSE THOSE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T DISTRESSED BY SUCH THINGS. I apologize for the confusion.

So what are my actual beliefs on the matter? I do think that various interesting ways of deviating from the norm are less common presently than I’d like to see. I do not endorse exposing people to hormonal medications against their informed consent. If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.

I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had. Also, if diversity has value, enough diversity outweighs some quality of life, and other such concerns, further matching my moral intuitions that creating an autistic person who posts about strange things on tumblr is as okay as creating a neurotypical person, but creating a person suffering from extreme depression is less desirable than creating a less suffering person.

The expression “magical gender creatures” was a reference to a comment on Yud’s facebook post on the suspected “20% rate of women”, on the observed massive gender diversity in the region. No implications about trans people being inherently magical or whatever intended. The part about clones was intended in a more literal fashion: it would be a dramatic loss of value if people converged on the most normative pattern even if it did increase hedons. I can see how the context wasn’t optimally expressed and could be taken as judgement of the readers’ life choices and I’m sorry for not being more careful to make it clear enough in the first place so such things could’ve been avoided.

3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 12 notes · .permalink

endecision:

sdhs-rationalist:

h3lldalg0:

paradigm-adrift:

In a social space, we make assumptions about other people that, when wrong, limit our capacity to get what we want out of it. This is me outlining some assumptions I (and, I assume, others) tend to make here on tumblr that don’t apply to me and exhorting whoever feels like it to point out what doesn’t apply to them. Here we go:

• When I discover a new person on tumblr with great content, I’m tempted to like all the things that I like as I archive binge. But I feel like the other person might find me creepy or get annoyed by the barrage of notifications if I do that, so my standards for what gets liked increase steeply as I read to avoid those problems. But when other people notice my blog for the first time, like a handful of posts, and then stop, I think, “Go on, you can like more if you want! I won’t think you’re creepy! I love feeling validated! Like all the things!”
• If I’m reading through someone’s blog and find a post I want to reblog with a response or even just like, if it’s more than a few days old I assume that proceeding will make the poster think I’m stalkerish or that I’ll annoy them with old news. But if someone were to like or reblog one of my older posts I would probably appreciate it and not think of the person as stalkerish. The ratio between decent posts and embarrassing posts gets worse the further back you go, as does the overall quality, but there are a few gems back there IMO.
• If someone posts about struggling with something and I empathize with them about it, I’m tempted to like the post. But I don’t want to give the impression that I’m saying, “I love it when you suffer!” so I usually don’t. But if someone likes one of my depressed whining posts, unless I have some good reason to believe they are hostile towards me, I always interpret that as an expression of empathy/sympathy.
• I often feel like posting lots of depressed whining posts but I hold back because I assume that they are kinda annoying to people. However, I like it when other people make whiny posts about their problems because it makes me feel less alone. Yes, the fact that other people are suffering in addition to me makes me more sad, but your problems won’t go away just because you avoid posting about them. I’d prefer engaging the “we’re all in this together” instinct over suffering in silence.
• Sometimes I consider messaging someone out of the blue in an attempt to start a conversation or friendship. I don’t, because what if they have too many humans in their life already (maybe it would be a useful cultural norm to put social saturation in our blurbs next to the preferred pronouns and such) and what if I’m so average I’m boring and what if I’m not knowledgeable enough about the things they’re interested in so we don’t have anything to talk about? I don’t have too many humans in my life. And if a boring person who wasn’t knowledgeable about the things I’m interested in messaged me out of the blue I probably wouldn’t think badly of them.

all of these things apply to me too.  

applicable to me

saaaaame

First rule of applicability club: you do talk about applicability club so other potential members know it exists.

3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 97 notes · source: paradigm-adrift · .permalink

The Origin Story

Since this seems to be a thing, here’s how a promethea acquired a social life:

> Be born to the shittiest R-tribe shithole that ever R’d
> feelsbadenbie.png

Depression +1
Self-esteem -1

> Be too good for school
> In other words, have your childhood completely wasted on trivial bullshit because nothing is a worthy challenge
> Not even being the best in [redacted] even though you thought you totally sucked in it; others simply sucked even more

Achievement unlocked: Less incompetent than everyone else
Cynicism +1

> First experience with pornography: /d/ and /u/ on 4chan
> sm0lethea gets extremely unrealistic expectations about future sexual parters, such as “they might be really pretty lesbians, some of whom have penises”

Lesbianity +1

> Finish school one year younger than most, thus being too young for some [redacted] awesome stuff. Finland: not even once.

Cynicism +1

> Go to university at 17 because you didn’t have the opportunity to finish school several years earlier than most
> A surprise ADHD and anxiety disorder appears

Depression +1
Self-esteem -1

> Find LessWrong back when the sequences were still fresh
> Be so jelly
> Nonetheless manage to win free utility by realizing you’re not a man while still young, androgynous and neotenic
> Can pinpoint the exact location of “The 12 Virtues of Rationality” which made you basically be like “okay I know where this is heading so I might as well go there straight away”

Lesbianity +1

> Doctors gonna doctor
> In other words, bullshit gatekeepers
> Get your own meds illegally

Cynicism +1
Depression -1
Will to Power +1

> Customs steals your meds

You have acquired the following item: Criminal Record
Achievement unlocked: Fight da power
Edginess +1

> Yell at doctors until they give you meds
> It’s not very effective
> Buy meds on the street

Edginess +1

> Get a private doctor who only cares about money to give you meds

Cynicism +1

> Find a person, who due to her lack of known tumblr presence shall be simply called E, on the internets
> She’s in America, neither has money to fly across the pond
> Agree to have cuddles when either has money and opportunity

Lesbianity +1

> Go change your name
> The state be like “lol nope”
> Forge some documents to change your name
> The state be like “okay then”

Cynicism +1

> Go change your legal gender and have your gonads cut off
> State-sanctioned monopoly clinic is like “lol nope, not ryal wymyn ynough”
> (Previously on state-sanctioned monopoly clinic: “of course you can tell the truth, it won’t hurt you”)

Depression +1
Cynicism +1

> Yell at people online

Edginess +1
You have acquired the following item: Fan Club

> Wait, what’s that, how did this happen
> Yell at some other people

Will to Power +1
You have acquired the following item: Political Following
Depression -1
Self-esteem +1

> Wait, what’s that, how did this happen
> Find yelling at people less interesting now, read from its downsides on SSC

Edginess -1
Achievement unlocked: update on evidence

> Go back to state-sanctioned monopoly clinic, yell at them and threaten to sue them, and the state, and everyone
> Suddenly extremely cooperative
> Get a lot of scaremongering about how nobody will let disgusting enbies change gender or be operated even if they have the mandatory doctors’ letters
> Find out nobody outside the GIC gives a shit or even knows the difference between F64.0 and F64.8 and they were just bullshitting you as always

Cynicism +1

> Get random message on the internet
> It’s E, she has money and opportunity and is coming for the cuddles now
> No contact in over 2 years
> No activity in my account in over 2 years
> She’s nuts
> Her coworkers think she’s nuts
> She thinks she’s nuts
> There’s a pretty strong consensus on that
> She’s a quantum physicist, a rocket scientist and a silicon valley programmer
> I’m a NEET
> nopressure.png

use Fan Club
use Political Following
use Criminal Record

> Somehow she’s impressed by my stories
> Wait, what’s that, how did this happen

Self-esteem +1

> Read stuff on SSC
> “But as a proud black transgender triracial inverse bisexual anti-monogamite…”
> There apparently is someone like that, lemme check them out this sounds entertaining
> Wow

You have acquired the following items: GWWC Pledge; Basic Comprehension of Yiddish; Knowledge of Your Obvious Nemesis; No Regrets

> E comes to visit
> Proves to be an actually existing person

Lesbianity +1

> On the second morning we’re discussing importing me to SF
> Programmers make how much money over there

You have acquired the following item: Future Prospects

> SF is also the place where all the cool people live
> They are actually existing persons
> I am going to be where the cool people are
> There is only one rational way to respond to this situation
> nopressure.png
> Stories are currency, right? I’ll just bargain for popularity because they seem to be worth something

use Knowledge of Your Obvious Nemesis
use Political Following
use GWWC Pledge
You have acquired the following items: Tumblr Account; 2 Party Invitations
You have gained the following superpower: Assertiveness and Confidence
Self-esteem +1

> justasplanned.png
> Go to SF
> Meet the people
> #it me everywhere

You have acquired the following items: Social Life; Place That Feels Like Home; Immigrant Status
You have gained the following superpower: Programming Skills
You have lost the following attributes: Depression
Self-esteem +1

> Return to Finland
> Illfare state bullshit everywhere
> Desperate to get back to SF ASAP because everything is better there

Will to Power +1
You have leveled up the following superpower: Programming Skills

5/5 would recommend to everyone

3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #bitching about the country of birth #it me #where did all these brainclones suddenly appear from · 10 notes · .permalink

starhalation:

angelicky:

thegestianpoet:

do you ever wonder what people say about you behind your back but like in a good way? like what are the #reviews 

new ask meme: send me these #reviews 👀

Semi related but a nice habit I’ve been trying to get into is if I talk about someone with my friend in real space in a nice way is - right then, or immediately after - go send that person a message about what I said that I liked about them. Maximize #reviews

#reviews sound like a very good idea.

(via shlevy)

3 months ago · tagged #reviews #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 423,325 notes · source: thegestianpoet · .permalink

How I found rationalist tumblr/a social life, the long version

rusalkii:

severnayazemlya:

ilzolende:

rusalkii:

[disclaimer- I’m in a really weird easily excitable mood right now, this is written really weirdly. Will probably be very embarrassed about this later.]

Kira finds link to Slate Star Codex that some person put in a list of their favorite blogs.

It might’ve been in the comment section of Wait But Why, might have been on reddit.

Kira goes, “hmm, sounds cool”.

Kira reads a few of Scott Alexander’s posts.

Kira goes “!!!!”.

Kira binges a good half of his archives.

Kira reads the comments.

Kira goes “Oh my god a comment section that doesn’t make me want to wipe humanity from the face of the earth”.

“who are these people and where have they been hiding for my whole life?”

Kira obsessively stalks SSC’s comment section for maybe a month.

Kira finds LW, the Sequences, and HPMOR.

Kira is useless for the next two weeks, can be seen reading her Kindle, ranting at her Kindle, and threatening to throw her Kindle at a wall. 

Kira develops obsession/special interest in anything related to rationalists.

Kira finds Ozy’s blog, Scott’s twitter, figures out he has a tumblr, finds his tumblr, finds Ozy’s tumblr.

Goes ”!!!!! I can talk to these people!!!“.

make a tumblr.

follows rationalist blogs.

lurks

lurks more

lurks some more

“this Alison @sinesalvatorem person sounds really cool…”

“wait a minute I can talk to her”

“this is a thing I can do”

“wait no that’s scary”

“form letters. She has form letters. I can do form letters.”

Kira sends form letter.

Kira freaks out because that’s embarrassing.

Alison responds.

“!!!!!!” thinks Kira.

a few days later:“oh my god she likes me?”

“is this flirting? I think this is flirting”

“how do I flirt back oh my god this stressful”

“wait. did that work. are we actually dating? For real? In real life? Wait, so this means I’m gay. And poly. OK, that’s a thing I can do.”

“!!!!!!!!!”

Kira proceeds to be extremely surprised by this for the next month or so.

Kira then realizes that she can talk to other people.

Kira also realizes that it’s probably a good idea to actually post original content, because people who do that are much more interesting and then people are more likely to talk to me.

@inquisitivefeminist sends me a message! 

I effortpost at @socialjusticemunchkin and we talk!

I send the most awkward hello of all time to @sdhs-rationalist. We talk. And then we talk more. And then we meet IRL. And then I figure out that hugs are possibly the best thing yet invented.

@ghostofasecretary sends me a message! 

@ilzolende talks to me! @pistachi0n sends me a message! @segfaultvicta talked to me! I talk to @futureresearcheralex! @somnilogical sends me a random heart and puns about replies in my direction! Other people who I might have forgotten talk to me!

Suddenly I have a social life, which I’m still confused by. 

#as you can see Ii am unreasonably excited by people talking to me #and also just unreasonably excited right now #this is why you don’t drink coffee kira #people come talk to me I’m vaguely less weird than I sound here #or more weird #i’m not entirely sure #notes for my future biography

I wouldn’t call it unreasonable to be excited by people talking to you. I used to think I was just an introvert and I spent an entire year having basically 0 friends/friend-like acquaintances, and all the social contact I get from the LW Diaspora has been really amazing for me too.

one of the posts i have decidedly not been meaning to write for ages because writing at all is probably unvirtuous is b. about that

it’s actually about “introversion doesn’t really real and if you think you’re an introvert it’s probably just that for whatever reason you find the people around you too cognitively taxing to be worth the effort of interacting with them, and the reason is probably either anxiety or thedish distance, except anxiety is fed by thedish distance.”

So I have no idea what thedish distance is, but as anecdata supporting the rest of your point: Since I’m currently on a terrible caffeine high (because I never learn, apparently), all my social filters and inhibitions are completely down, and I have been absurdly social. Talking to multiple people at once, completely invested in all the conversations, really excited about every single one, not frantically re-reading everything I write worried that it’ll make me look bad, etc. That’s the only reason I was even able to make the original post at all, because I wasn’t worrying about how people would see it. So yeah, conversation right now are unusually easy for me, and if it was like this all the time I would be the most extroverted person I know, assuming an abundance of interesting people. And my entire post up there was me being really really excited about finding so many interesting people, so I doubt that would be a problem.

“Anxiety has fallen asleep at the wheel, send all the messages RIGHT NOW”

3 months ago · tagged #it me #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 65 notes · source: rusalkii · .permalink

sinesalvatorem:

My brain seems to split al human beings into “friends” and “not-friends”; with friends being the people I am super confident like me, and not-fiends being literally anyone else. They could definitely like me - it’s just that system 1 wouldn’t be sure they do.

Friends are easy to be around. Friends aren’t mentally taxing to interact with. I don’t need to script to interact with friends. I don’t need to convince myself I have an “excuse” in order to go anywhere near them.

This is not true of anyone else. Be they strangers or classmates; if I’m not completely sure they like me, I can’t initiate any sort of contact without convincing myself that I have a good reason to.

Which is to say that my useless traitor of a brain won’t let me leave my room when my flatmates are about. Ugh.

3 months ago · tagged #it me #where did all these brainclones suddenly appear from #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #nothing to add but tags · 24 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink