self_made_human's profile

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 19hr ago

My condolences. At least it's the whole company going down the drain instead of you being fired after 20 years of work. I hope you land on your feet and your buddies get you a good word elsewhere. Good luck!

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

I'm an atheist, and an antitheist, but I don't bother with being militant about it.

I feel like we reached the heat death of the theism debate sometime around 2011. Every argument has been deployed, countered, steelmanned, mothballed, and then resurrected as a zombie argument so many times that the marginal utility of another forum post is effectively zero. I am happy to report that life as a Western atheist is actually quite pleasant. I leave them alone; they generally leave me alone. It is a functional equilibrium.

I am so confused by this conversational mindset. What could someone perceive as the value to themselves of jumping into a discussion among Christians, with Christian premises, to declare that actually Christians are morons who believe in a "sky fairy" or whatever? If you truly believe that Christians are benighted superstitious freaks, then surely you're wasting your time yelling at them on the internet. Or if you think they're ordinary people with mistaken beliefs, then it seems like the attitude should be one of polite curiosity and question-asking?

But I want to push back on the quoted dichotomy. It suggests that if I believe religious people hold fundamentally absurd beliefs, I must either view them as raving lunatics worthy of scorn or simply be politely curious about their worldview.

This assumes a unitary model of the human mind which psychology tells us is almost certainly false. The correct model is that humans are world-class champions at compartmentalization.

The average religious believer is not a caricature. They are behaviourally indistinct from the general population. They take out thirty-year mortgages. They trust the FDIC to insure their deposits. They accept the efficacy of amoxicillin. They engage in normal signaling regarding movies and electoral politics. They are hosting a parasitic memeplex, yes, but it appears to be a commensal organism rather than a fatal one. It is not metabolizing their ability to function in a modern economy.

I have an uncle who is a highly credentialed microbiologist. He spends his days applying the scientific method to bacteria, running PCRs, and adhering to rigorous evidentiary standards. He also believes, with total sincerity, in homeopathy. If you tried to model this as a consistent worldview, you would fail. But he doesn't have a consistent worldview. He has a work-mode partition where dilution removes active ingredients, and a home-mode partition where dilution increases potency. I have tried to bridge this gap in debate. It does not work. It only generates heat, not light.

The peace treaty works both ways. The religious generally grant that despite my lack of a divine command theory of ethics, I am probably not going to eat their babies or harvest their organs for the black market. I am a Cooperator in the Prisoner's Dilemma of civilization.

In return, I acknowledge that their "God module" is just an unfortunate quirk of their hardware. It is a glitch, perhaps a spandrel of our evolutionary history that makes them susceptible to hyper-active agency detection. Maybe they genuinely do have a God-shaped Hole, which I fortunately lack. But outside of that specific theological blast radius, we share a surprising amount of epistemological territory. We can agree on the price of tea in China. We can agree on the laws of thermodynamics. We can agree that the new Star Wars movies were disappointing.

I feel a certain distant pity for the condition, the same way I might pity someone with a benign but annoying tinnitus. But since they are otherwise high-functioning members of the tribe, I see no utility in screaming at them until they admit the ringing sound isn't real. We can (usually) just ignore the noise and watch the movie.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

I don't know of any meds that can help, he's not psychotic, he's just a dick. Can't cure ASPD.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

I hope you can appreciate that an atheist watching a thread devolve into bible study would be miffed.

I'm an atheist/antitheist. My stance on the Bible study threads is bemused tolerance, sure, it's not for me, but I'm sure that my passion for AI alignment research isn't what others are looking for. In both cases, the sensible thing to do is collapse the thread and look for something else to read. Perhaps appreciate that this sub has a diversity of opinion and discussions!

I certainly don't see an assumption of Christianity in general, most of the discussion is usually found away from the CWR threads, and where it does come in, well, topics like abortion or immigration and one's attitudes towards the same do hinge on religious beliefs or lack thereof.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

Hugbox for fundamentalist Christians? Nobody told me.

Thanks for defending our honor, and hopefully some new people will follow the links over.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

So is this book's Modern Age at least a couple centuries delayed relative to reality? I'd hope so, as the alternative suggests an untenably-strong view of historical inevitability.

Nope. Not in the least. It moves in lockstep, we get the Middle Ages, a Renaissance+Industrial Revolution, and a 20th century that's pretty similar to our own. At the start of the 21st century, they're practically identical, barring a reduced prevalence of consumer electronics since they use standalone desktop computers instead of mobile devices.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

Damn it. I'd written a full review of the novel at some point, but I can't find it. I guess I'll have to do it all over again:

I really wanted to love this book. In the grand calculus of my reading preferences, it scores a solid 7.5 out of 10. But the experience was less like a perfect meal and more like being served a top-tier Wagyu steak in a kitchen that has just failed its health inspection. The texture is savory, the preparation is skilled, but there is a lingering, bitter aftertaste suggesting that the underlying infrastructure is infested with pests. I felt compelled to turn the pages, but I could not bring myself to love it.

Here's particular aspects that turned me off, and some of the good:

The novel opens with a masterful depiction of the end of days. We see the final days of Europe and Byzantium through the eyes of a Mongolian soldier, and it effectively conveys the sheer scale of the Black Death. It feels like a genuine apocalypse, a wholesale deletion of cultures where the map is suddenly wiped clean of territory.

And then, inexplicably, the point of view shifts. We leave this fascinating post-apocalyptic landscape and barely return to Europe until centuries later. This feels like a massive failure of resource allocation. I would have happily read five hundred pages detailing the logistics of recolonization and the emergent order of new societies filling a vacuum. There is a smattering of this, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the premise.

This is compounded by the fact that several chapters/hundreds of pages dwell on civilizations in South and East Asia that were practically unchanged by the catastrophe. This is plausible, since I doubt Imperial China would notice or care about the death of all the gweilos. But that makes it boring to dwell on them, Akbar is the same Akbar, the Ming/Ching/Ding-Dong dynasty does their usual stuff. Another missed opportunity.

Then there is the Buddhism.

I generally try to be charitable to an author’s metaphysical framework, but the inclusion of the Bardo and literal reincarnation strained my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. The book frames these not as poetic metaphors or cultural delusions, but as real events interacting with the material plane. Characters experience déjà vu and, in some cases, regain actual memories from past lives.

This presents a serious world-building problem. If Buddhism is literally true to the extent that personality continuity survives death, this is a much bigger deal than the geopolitical maneuvering of the Chinese Empire. It is the discovery of a new law of physics. To include this high-fantasy element in an otherwise grounded alternative history feels jarring. It is like reading a hard sci-fi novel about Mars colonization where the astronauts occasionally cast magic missile spells, and nobody treats it as unusual. It makes the story feel a bit like a sitcom, oh, what are B and K getting up to this episode? How will that scoundrel P fuck things up again?

My biggest gripe mirrors the standard rationalist critique of deterministic history. KSR seems to subscribe to the "Civilization Tech Tree" view of scientific progress. We spend long, dense chapters watching a group of reincarnated souls invent the scientific method and discover new paradigms. There is a commendable depth to the description of their rational analysis and use of period-accurate tools.

And then they die of the plague.

The narrative result is that nothing comes of their work. I understand the literary impulse to show that the universe is uncaring and that nature does not respect narrative arcs. However, the subsequent eras simply reinvent the same things. It feels like rail-roading. The author assumes that scientific discovery is a single narrow path that must be walked exactly as we walked it.

Where is the divergence? Where is the serendipity? I can conceive of a timeline where the plague pressures lead to a biomedical boom, resulting in the discovery of penicillin in the equivalent of the 19th century. Instead, we get a reshuffled version of our own history, implying that the history of science is inevitable rather than path-dependent. It is a missed opportunity for genuine speculation.

The geopolitics were acceptable, if somewhat safe. One might describe the author’s sociological framework as "Standard Blue Tribe Consensus," completely bypassing any engagement with human biodiversity or more controversial anthropological theories. That is forgivable, or at least I couldn't read most fiction if I expected authors to acknowledge such facts. That said, there's no way in hell that the Iroquois end up in control of North America when faced with Islamic and Chinese colonialism. I would have been okay with some kind of weird syncretic mix, but other than the Chinese holding California, the Native Americans won the rest.

I did appreciate the depiction of the Chinese imperial system. By positing a world with no external peer competitor, the author plausibly argues that an autocracy could persist much longer than it did in our timeline, avoiding the specific trap of making it just a reskin of 20th-century Communism.

The scale of that war also completely stretched my credulity: look at how exhausted all the combatants were by 4 years of WWI, and how absolutely destroyed the USSR, Britain, and Germany were by 6 years of WWII.

Here I personally disagree.

World War 1+2 in a single package, a grinding forever war that ran for decades and killed over a billion people? I actually liked that, it made sense in context. The technological level seemed to be at about our WW1, with a massive theater that seemed to span half of Siberia, the Himalayas, Burma and a front in the Americas. The individual blocs were also much larger, and China in particular was an autocratic state that very much could throw a lot of meat into the grinder. The novel does make clear that the war pretty much wrecked all the players, Arab Europe was practically depopulated. Especially since nukes weren't invented till much later (and never used because of some kind of weird cabal of peacenik science hippies), there simply wasn't any decisive engagement and the core lands were unthreatened till the end of the conflict. We don't have to assume it ran at maximal intensity for the entire duration either.

Finally, the scope. If you are going to write a history that spans millennia, why stop at the equivalent of our present day? I found myself wishing KSR had extrapolated past the turn of the millennium. A three-way space race between a neo-Arab bloc, China, Greater India and the indigenous American federations would have been fascinating. This is Kim Stanley Robinson, if he won't do it, who will?

I give points for the deep historical research and the richness of the cultural flavor. KSR clearly did his homework. I only wish he had used that homework to explore new territory rather than simply walking a slightly more scenic route to the world we already live in.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

I wish, I really do. Unfortunately, this place is best described as rationalist-adjacent, which is the next best thing.

LW? The ur-rats.

Scott himself? Of course.

SSC/ACX and the subreddit? Mostly the case.

Us? The blood is a bit diluted.

Of course, this is my personal opinion, but IMO, a real "rationalist" forum includes more explicit discussions of the tenets of rationality itself, which we really don't do very often. We have high standards for discourse, we have people using Bayesian arithmetic when they feel like it, but we are a more general interest kinda place. And that's fine!

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I don't see where "rationality" even comes into the picture here. If we were modding people for being "irrational", we would have far fewer participants left.

As it stands, your comment is a non-sequitur. To assess the rationality of armed resistance to what you perceive as a hostile state is not in my remit as a moderator. Questions of rationality don't even come into the warning/tempban here. He was building consensus, being a culture warrior, and so on and so forth. Fedposting isn't in the sidebar rules last time I checked, but we frown on it because:

It goes against the culture and ethos of this forum. Doesn't get much more heated than that.
Zorba prefers the FBI don't kick his door down. We're all here at his behest, and on his sufferance.

You want to discuss your to natural rights to defend yourself against a state? Buddy, that's half of all we talk about over here. But if things have gotten so bad across the pond that you feel the need to form a militia and shoot the AG, then take it to Facebook. And if everyone else feels that way, I think moderation guidelines will be a less than pressing concern during a civil war.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

You're not going to get far with a consistent habit of booing the outgroup and clear consensus building. I note multiple previous warnings, so I'm going to extend a 3 day ban to make this one stick.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3d ago

Thanks! Funnily enough, I'm already subscribed to Burial Goods, but didn't know he'd done voice work for this specific meme.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3d ago

Thanks for the heads up. I've let it out of the cage.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3d ago · Edited 3d ago

It would be uncharitable of me to simply point out that you're being sloppy in your thinking and leave it at that. But unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that is true. There is a kernel of truth here, but it's not a particularly new or non-trivial observation, and the bulk of it doesn't stand up to scrutiny when we going from playing word-games to considering what those words mean.

Let me explain:

You seem to think that the medium really is the message. Or, to steelman things, that media shapes our perception of our lives. Uh... That bit is true? I strongly wish I had a copy of that meme where some Twitter wag points out that when humanity invented the wheel, we imagined the universe as a wheel, when we invented clocks, the universe became one of clockwork, and when we invented computation, the universe became increasingly interpreted as one of computation.

Edit: Here you go, found it. https://old.reddit.com/r/sciencememes/comments/1jh25uw/5_minutes_after/#lightbox

Here's the central confusion, and it's worth stating it plainly: you keeps mistaking "X is a metaphor for life" with "life is literally X."

For a start, the "paradox" isn't paradoxical. The essay keeps returning to this idea that it's weird or significant that "life comes before books, but life is like books." This is only strange if you forget how similes work. Of course the thing being compared to comes first! We compare unfamiliar things to familiar things, and we create the familiar things from the unfamiliar template.

The fact that we can say "a neuron is like a computer" doesn't mean neurons are secretly running Windows 11 in your basal ganglia. It means we have computers now, and they provide a useful conceptual model. Your "paradox" is like saying: "Whales existed before nets, but now we say 'the net is like a whale's mouth and its filter feeding.' Isn't it strange how the whale came first but now the net defines our understanding of the whale?" No. That's just how language evolves.

I get the feeling that you consider this a deep ontological discovery when it's actually a banal observation about metaphor. You can tell because you never actually derive anything from this "paradox." There's no syllogism like "Books have property X; life is like books; therefore life has property X." Instead, there's just a vague sense of spooky symmetry, like discovering that the word "dog" spelled backward is "god" and deciding this reveals something about canine theology.

The bit about African audiences and the chicken is doing a lot of unearned work here. Yes, film literacy is real. Yes, different cultural contexts produce different ways of seeing. But the leap from "Africans in mid-century educational films noticed different things than Western audiences" to "educated modern humans are trapped in a film-plot prison and can't see reality anymore" is what I can only call an exceedingly ambitious framework.

First, the McLuhan anecdote is more complicated than presented. The original context was about audiences unfamiliar with cinematic conventions, not some profound statement about Western alienation from reality. When you show someone their first movie, they don't yet know the grammar. They don't know the significance of close-ups, cuts, tracking shots. They're seeing moving images, not narrative. This is a literacy issue, not evidence that literacy itself is a prison.

(I would bet my net worth that the flourishing African movie industry in the present day is not plagued by an epidemic of utter incomprehension. They watch movies just fine. Literacy is an acquired trait.)

But here's another problem: the essay uses this as a Just-So story about naive perception versus educated illusion. The African audiences see events (a chicken!) while the literate see plot (sanitary education!). That is really not how things work.

First, if you show me a boring instructional video and there's a random chicken in the corner, I will probably notice the chicken too. Not because I'm "film illiterate" but because the chicken is the only interesting thing happening. My "literacy" doesn't make me stop seeing the chicken; it just means I can also track the intended message. The dichotomy is false.

The implication is that these poor naive Africans, untainted by literacy, see the real world while we educated Westerners (for a very generous definition of "we" or "Western", given that this is my critique) are trapped in our symbolic prisons. This is just noble savage mythology with extra steps. Maybe the audiences were bored. Maybe they were resisting missionary-style health propaganda. Maybe McLuhan was just wrong. You don't stop to ask such questions, you're just using them as a prop for a point about how education = blindness.

But with the introduction of books, stories can now be singular. There can be just one author and one version. The pages remember. The beginning is set. And so is the ending. The story is already finished before you read it. Life comes before books. But life is like books. I see life as a book. Books have a determined end, so life has a determined end. One life, one book. As many books as there are lives. The books are stored in a library, surrounded by fog. Rumors said it contains all books in existence. The books were there before I came, and it will be there after i'm gone. I see books but see no authors. I see effects but don't see causes

The universe, and thus life itself, is deterministic at macroscopic scales, or close enough that I don't care about the difference. But just because events and their outcomes are pre-determined doesn't provide any additional power to alter them, or change the subjective experience of being a computationally bounded agent working under conditions of uncertainty.

A sorting algorithm still has to sort the array. That task gets no easier even when we know precisely how it works, or what the sorted outcome should be. Your mind can't just skip to the end either.

You seem to think there's a library somewhere (the fog is a nice touch, very Dark Souls) where "your life" is already written, and this is somehow proven by the existence of libraries with books in them. But this is just more spooky existential poetry. You've come to a correct conclusion with an invalid argument, or rediscovered the Library of Babel. You could equally say "Life is like an improv show; improv shows are unscripted; therefore life is unscripted." The metaphor is not the territory.

An educated man sees a book, but not a dirty stack of paper. The stack of paper has been hidden. Likewise, an educated man sees only the plot and not the events.

This is framing predictive processing as a delusion. Our brains are prediction engines. We ignore the "dirty stack of paper" (the raw sensory data) to perceive the "book" (the meaning) because that is computationally efficient. You're treating this efficiency as a tragic loss of contact with reality. It’s not. It’s the only reason we aren’t catatonic from sensory overload. We don't see "plot" because life is a movie; we see "plot" because brains are causal inference machines.

Or, in another sense:

The educated man sees both. He acknowledges the stack of paper (the medium) but possesses the additional software to decode the symbols upon it (the message). For most practical purposes, the message really is more important. Both of us are engaging with written text, as opposed to parsing the specific arrangement of pixels on a screen.

Every action becomes a statement to the invisible audience. What you eat, what you play, who you meet, where you go.... in 1998, Truman could rebel against the show and move to reality. But where would modern humans go, when reality is a film now?

Reality isn't a film. That aside, behaving like you are being watched is a rational response to actually being watched! Gen Z in particular lives and dies through their phone and social media, we've got better panopticon surveillance than the Truman Show did. Curating one's personality and behavior makes sense, given that the thoughts and opinions of others can meaningfully impact your life. The only issue is going overboard and becoming a slave to public perception. But becoming some kind of schizoid who doesn't give a fuck what they're recorded as saying or doing is just a mistake in the opposite direction.

Before you arrived, some choices must have been made... That being vanished when you arrived, leaving you with a past that you did not create. What makes you you?

This is just a description of being born. Every human being "arrives" in a world where choices were already made (by parents, history, genetics, some butterfly farting in the Mesozoic). You inherit a genetic "past" you didn't create. Framing this as a unique failure of the video game medium ("The future is not yours"), when it’s actually just the fundamental condition of existence is a tad bit unfair. God knows I'd love it if video games were truly open ended with maximal player agency, but that's a possibility for the near future. You can't really draw any real conclusions from noticing that the medium is restrained by the limitations of human effort or even computational feasibility on existing hardwares and budgets, any more than them once using 8-bit graphics says something of real importance about the human condition.

"People like stories about transmigration and regression, therefore they must be unhappy with their own identity." This is a speculation presented as a proof. People also like stories about murder, but even the average True Crime Wine Mom doesn't actually want to be murdered. The popularity of a fantasy genre might indicate escapism, sure, but it might also indicate good marketing, or cultural trends, or just that reincarnation is a cool magic system. The essay treats the most surface-level pop culture observation as deep psychological evidence.

Life is not a book (it has no author). Life is not a film (there is no external audience, only peers). Life is not a game (there is no win condition, only continuation or cessation).

You're staring at a map, noting that the map is made of paper, and then worrying that the territory might be made of paper too. It’s a poetic thought, but as a rigorous analysis of reality, it’s hopelessly confused. We don't need to worry about whether we are "literate" enough to read the plot of our lives. We just need to realize that the "plot" is something we invent in retrospect to make sense of the little bit of signal buried in all of that noise.

(This is why I'm a card carrying member of the Rationalist community, and why I refuse to read Continental philosophy. It helps to be immersed in a tradition where one's expected to speak plainly, and to refrain from the use or abuse of simile and metaphor any more than strictly necessary. Otherwise it's easy to end up making superficially striking connections and tie yourself into a knot)

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 5d ago

I'd be genuinely surprised if there were enough Koreans (or even East Asians) in my neck of the woods to provide demand for that. On the other hand, I can only assume the margins are great, if they're flipping cuts of meat raw or marinaded for 2-4x cost.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 5d ago

With frank confusion, I discovered that a Korean place near me offers raw meat as a delivery option on Uber Eats. This is normal enough for a grocery store, but this is a normal ass restaurant that'll sell you sliced pork belly, steak and the like, all raw, alongside relatively standard (and cooked) options.

Why? Is there a market for people who order ingredients for their meals from a restaurant? Having to cook takeout seems to diminish the value proposition, but I can't keep up with the kids these days.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 7d ago

I would strongly recommend that you speak to your doctor about a short course of anxiolytics. While benzos can be scary, this sounds like just about the perfect time. Alternatively, beta blockers will probably help.

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