KingOfTheBailey
No bio...
User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I'm mostly here for Wellness Wednesday and Friday Fun now, and I can't really say that I mind. I haven't seen any CW developments for a while that are genuinely of a new kind.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I remember it from my schooling, and thinking that it was stupid. And then discovering the Jargon File and realizing that there were other sensible people in the world.
Less about rationality concepts themselves and more about my perception of the community. A feeling like watching my intellectual heroes not just stumble, but faceplant: first, a sense of enthusiasm and a sort of pride that there were people (dare I say, "my people"?) looking to transcend their flaws and start looking seriously at the hardest, most important problem in history — how to align a superintelligence. HMPOR is one of the most engaging works I've ever read; despite EY's often odd prose and the weirdness of the characters, it rewards close reading and sets out both a vision and a warning. And with the sequences (not just EY's, but other writers as well), you get a pretty inspiring offer: learn all this stuff, it will teach you how to win, and then deploy that to win the most important problem in history. Then dismay and disappointment as I learned that even these hardened epistemic defenses were no match for Berkeley, that rationalists ended up more interested in polyamorous group houses than solving the most important problem in history, and only slightly less vulnerable to the woke mind virus than the average normie. @zackmdavis' writing on the trans question takes a long time to get to the point, but it's an important one: there is a reality, and even the most ingroup members of what's meant to be the most reality-connected community threw out all of their epistemic standards just to let their friends claim an alternate sex. This seems to me to mean that even if we succeed at AI-don't-kill-everyone, any AGIs/ASIs we do get will be unacceptably decoupled from reality on at least the woke and trans questions, and anything connected to those. Since if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy, solving the "AI-don't-kill-everyone" problem becomes harder if you don't even allow yourself to see reality while you're solving it.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I wonder if doing a synchronized launch Oppen Barbie Style was an attempt to repeat the Animal Crossing/Doom Eternal launch date crossover stuff, where two extremely different properties had simultaneous and successful launches.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
The unfortunate irony of this is it's probably his conviction that this is true, more than anything else, that makes it so.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
There's also the "TikTok-induced Tourette's" thing. It makes me wonder how much mental illness in general could be induced by awareness-raising.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
expect Christianity to make your life worse
This is very interesting, and I hadn't thought about it before. Yes, there's the persecution and all that, but I think there's some kind of "don't defect" at play here: teaching people to delay gratification until even after their death means that their communities can have very low time preference, and if you have few defectors you can possibly even get better immediate results than if you actively sacrificed the future for today.
Jesus doesn't offer heroism, adventure, wives, or children in this life; he offers pain, service, trial, and tears.
I read an article a few months back about the cult popularity of Master and Commander, and how many young men love that movie. Not because they want to be Capt. Aubrey, but because they want to be in his crew and to sacrifice for each other and for a great cause. I'm also reminded of a video by Bishop Barron where he talks about how he thinks the interest in traditional liturgies has been specifically because it's hard: it's the call to sacrifice and spiritual challenge which seems to make people interested. (There's probably a big diversion about Vatican II here too that I'm not qualified to write.)
we were taught that our job as Christians was not to make Christianity attractive to anyone
The people who did the most to attract me to Christianity never proselytized; they quietly lived their lives of faith, and I happened to notice. Whether that's because the Christian life does better in this world because God looks after his own, or because there are good memes baked into the religion, I don't know.
Became an annoying internet atheist during college. Started drifting back towards it due to the culture war, really started being pulled back largely due to Jordan Petersons biblical series lectures.
This part is extremely relatable. That was the biggest thing that made me curious about religion as a tool to organize societies. I had heard about Chesterton's Fence from Scott, become curious about the man behind it and stumbled onto Orthodoxy. Then I looked at some of Bishop Barron's stuff and began irregularly attending local Masses. Started reading Lewis, and discovered many echoes of 2020 in his novel That Hideous Strength. And the more I read, the more interested I become, though I struggle with the actual faith bit and the idea of trusting the men right at the top.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
In case it helps, here's my experience as an online rightish guy who's become interested in Catholicism, though I don't go around posting le epic Deus Vult memes. Would I feel the truth of it? No, and I worry about that sometimes. Currently, I consider conservative Christianity good, in that it binds families together, brings people together across generations, and have definitely noticed that the Christians I know lead better lives, etc. But I don't know if I can (or will ever) consider it true, which is a source of concern and some despair to me, because if I can't get to that, then I feel like I'm damaging their group by being there. As for the wilder stuff like sedevacantism, I was lucky enough that the group I found seems to have its head screwed on. I spoke to one of the lay Brothers about the Church leadership, and he said that they respect and obey the Pope while disagreeing with him, pray for him a lot to help him make better decisions, hold out hope that things will change, and believe they get the Popes they deserve.
But even from the secular pit I've dug myself into, there's been some interesting moments. Sitting and contemplating the quiet and stillness before Mass has been beautiful, and while I can't say I've felt presence there, it's been wonderful to enjoy the absence of outside noise and chatter. It's also been interesting to have spent a lot of time reading about and working on psychological integration and then have another parishioner just casually mention that "sin divides man from God, but it also divides man from himself". Duh! No wonder we're all such messes!
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Cryptocurrencies marry the reliability and predictability of modern computing with your hard-earned cash. For normies especially, that means machines which mysteriously do different things from day to day, sometimes turn on with totally different user interfaces, sometimes disappear your work, fail with inscrutable error messages, and generally annoy the crap out of you at all times. It is no surprise to me that crypto is not adopted by normies unless they've lost total trust in fiat.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
They piss me off too, but the only way I can productively deal with it is to play the ball as it lies.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Is there a conclusion, some big lesson to learn? I don't know. But maybe it's an interesting data point for how the culture war projects down to the periphery such as Hungary.
If you take @KulakRevolt's most recent article seriously, the correct social immune response to a foreign meme is to react immediately to shut it down. Better that it's done with repainting and national colors than a can of petrol.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I will probably miss this one, but that would be nice if you run another.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I feel like I've stepped into a time warp and come out in /r/MensRights circa 2012. Yeah, men have it rougher. Yeah, women have a glass floor as well as (sometimes) a glass ceiling. Yeah, you can't say this to anyone without being perceived as low status (this is why The Red Pill provoked such an immune response - it was being presented by a cute, blonde, former feminist). Who cares? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. It's the world, we have to deal with it, and it is very hard to teach people rational overrides to their visceral responses unless you control culture from top to bottom. IMHO, a large part of this problem comes (as do many others) from childlessness. At least some number of online feminists I used to get mad about had changes of heart once they realized how their rhetoric impacted their sons.
Regardless of the unfairness and its causes, at least we men are always assumed to have agency. No matter how bad things get, there is an action a man can take towards a path up and out. It might be a long and twisty road with low odds of success, but there's always something to do. Don't expect the world to be fair, don't expect anyone else to care that the world's unfair, and don't expect anyone else to notice the unfairness runs counter to the egalitarian principles that you were probably taught (I was, and it threw me for years). You'll be a lot less disappointed, and then you can start to build with clear eyes. Build yourself up, build a space for those you trust, build a space for your family and close friends, and maybe you can shelter some of those people from the unfairness.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Last time I tried, I couldn't dodge the "provide a phone number or another email" bit. Will have to try on a VPN.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
How does one get a Google account these days that isn't tied to an existing identity?
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Some follow-ups, now that I've had the chance to read some of the books. Much of "The Problem of Susan" seems to collapse if its author had read more of the series, instead of considering that final scene in isolation. This locks your counter-analysis into working from scraps, when there's stuff about Susan's attitude in the other books. Even in Prince Caspian, Susan starts to turn away from Aslan and deny what she sees:
"But I've been far worse than you know. I really believed it was him— [Aslan], I mean — yesterday. When he warned us not to go down to the fir wood. And I really believed it was him tonight, when you woke us up. I mean, deep down inside. Or I could have, if I'd let myself. But I just wanted to get out of the woods and — and — oh, I don't know. And what ever am I to say to him?"
At the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's something which looks like the first signs of the invitation-chasing Susan you've been discussing:
It would have cost too much money to take the other three all to America, and Susan had gone. Grown-ups thought her the pretty one of the family and she was no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age) and Mother said she "would get far more out of a trip to America than the youngsters".
At the end of your post, you write:
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back.
But at the end of Prince Caspian, Peter tells Edmund and Lucy that it's probably his last time in Narnia: "At least, from what he said, I'm pretty sure he means you to get back some day. But not Su and me. He says we're getting too old." I'm still working through the books so I don't know if that's the last word on the matter, or whether "too old" means something other than chronological age.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I think your reading is correct because it matches a theme that Lewis revisits in other forms. The Inner Ring is a short essay about it:
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
And one of his novels, That Hideous Strength, is in large part about a man almost completely unmaking himself by trying to get into the inner rings:
In his homily “The Inner Ring,” Lewis warned about people who become scoundrels by degrees, making increasingly serious compromises of their integrity and values in order to make their way into an exclusive inner circle. Mark Studdock is quite clearly a victim of the inner-ring syndrome as he tries to gain acceptance at N.I.C.E.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Great work. Can you summarize what you've been eating, particularly anything that's been good for your satiety? I struggle with appetite, and while I've tried a GLP-1 agonist, I desisted: I felt like I wasn't seeing much loss and felt like my appetites were drifting back to what they were before I started. Given the horror stories I'd heard of people having insatiable hunger after ceasing a different GLP-1 agonist (semaglutide), I decided to quit while I was ahead.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
The flute definitely is girl-coded, and yet: Ian Anderson.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
deporting some relatively small number of non-citizen foreigners
There's a "Zero to One" sort of effect here, though: once you have a legal mechanism in place to effect something like this, expanding the program looks like a small tweak to an accepted policy instead of a radical shift.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Congratulations. May you have many long and happy years together.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
What if it was radical rather than gradual? Why leave triggers for old habits around while you're trying to break them? I suggest instead a series of larger jumps.
The suppression of the Hunter Biden story and the plans outlined in in the TIME Magazine article show that the blob doesn't need to stuff ballots or change totals; they have (had?) enough power over the inputs to the voting system that such crass measures were unnecessary.
More options
Context Copy link