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Alright, folks, I'm out.
Consider me the first Motte casualty to AI. No, I'm not planning on any self-harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. But reading about this shit is so depressing and anxiety-inducing that it's giving me a premature mid-life crisis, so I'm going to do the reasonable thing and take the grill pill.
As part of that reevaluation of how I've been spending my time, I've taken a look at the 15ish years I've been "Very Online And Politically Aware". Since the financial crisis in 2008, really. And I have to conclude that the investment of 10's of thousands of hours of my life has been basically a wash. I don't think I can point to a single tangible benefit to my life, it's all just sunk opportunity cost. Maybe a few memes pushed out, but thinking I inspired them is probably just arrogance. My lazy, slacktivist involvement almost certainly didn't matter for anything at all. Being Politically Aware is arguably the worst thing I've done with my life; I would rather have played more video games.
Even the insight porn is getting stale.
So combining these two epiphanies, I'm going to block TheMotte and SSC, and ACT and Instapundit, and unsub from any remotely political or AI-interested subreddit and block /all. Anything else I can think of or that comes up, I'm just gonna dip. (I would like some advice on how to block websites on chrome mobile for Android. The recommended apps seem to not really work the way they're presented.)
Because if this is the beginning of the end, of us becoming either obsolete or all dying, I would rather go out in a eudaemonic frenzy than wasting my time whining and worrying. I would rather double-down on being an amazing dad, and son and brother. I'll double-down at the gym, and run the best D&D campaign my friends have ever seen. I've had fantasy novels fermenting in my head for decades, I'd like to write a couple before GPT-X makes human creativity obsolete (and then I can have GPT-X churn out countless sequels!) Maybe I'll even try dating again.
And if and when the nanite disassembler swarms come for me, I'll go down on my feet knowing that I was a pretty kick-ass human, back when that mattered.
If anyone has suggestions for other things worth doing or being, or that satisfy that "check my phone while waiting in the line to pickup the kids" nudge that avoids my new no-nos, I'm all ears.
I've enjoyed this community a great deal, and think fondly of many of you. Thank you for contributing to making this a place where I felt at home. Maybe we'll have a grand meetup if humanity wins, and spend a subjective eternity having AI-moderated arguments about who was right.
And if any of you are in a position to do anything about the future - godspeed. We're all counting on you.
Thank you again. <3
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take this empty propane tank to ACE for a refill.
I know this goes against the point, but would you consider writing up a 1 month and 6 month update on how this is working for you? Maybe email it to someone to post so you don't have to post it yourself.
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Am I the only one who just totally doesn't understand this thing at all? What on earth are they even trying to accomplish? You can treat it as an engineering problem like many here are doing but how does that help a DEI lecture? Seriously, what the hell does this sheet even mean? I'd consider it definitely a troll if it other people didn't seem to think it were real.
That's why it's such a potent meme. The idea of a DEI education committee so egg-headedly absorbed in intersectionality that they think choices here will reflect your subtle implicit biases rather than, you know, the strategic concerns that will swamp those in any normal person looking at this scenario. It seems the DEI lecturer will then tut-tut students who avoid the most intersectional candidates.
Smart people fall for fakes all the time. Especially when they want to believe the outageous premise a meme suggests is true.
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What does this person's melodramatic blog post have to do with any sort of Culture War?
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Knowing about things that might transform your life or society as a whole is important? Even if there's nothing you can do about the trend of AI as a whole, whatever smaller-scale goals you have are surely impacted, so knowing about it is important. And more generally, that the forum was capable of demonstrating to you, viscerally, that AI will transform the world, suggests it might inform you of similarly-important things in the future.
I just don't think that's very true.
Because the effects it will have are going to be relatively unpredictable, and your choices trying to respond to every little development have potential to make things worse for you.
Its like trying to 'time the market' and day trade vs. just stick with a long term investment strategy.
There are almost certainly diminishing returns to becoming deeply informed about [current thing.]
For instance, if you're a woman who makes her living spinning fabric and selling it, knowing about the 'industrial revolution' or 'factory production of cloth' is incredibly relevant. Knowing about it three years earlier seems very useful. That "long term investment strategy" of continuing to spin fabric to feed your kids doesn't work.
You say there are diminishing returns to being deeply informed, but without being deeply informed, you might just stay confused. that It's difficult to know beforehand what the 'big things' will be. A lot of people were not, three years ago, sure that AI would be a 'big thing' in five years, even though they probably saw something about 'neural networks identify cats in youtube videos' in a news headline. And today, most people still don't really care. So if you just 'read the headlines once every few months', maybe you'll hear about ChatGPT as a cool thing your young friend plays with, and write it off as something that doesn't matter. Maybe ten years ago, you could've trained to be a ML engineer or lesswrong alignment person or something.
Yeah, it'll make you sad to think about too much, or something, but ... humans being obviated in all aspects of life is, at least potentially, sad, right? Being sad isn't an unconditional bad! It's being aware that something not-good is happening. Consider: we could easily, by tweaking a few dozen/hundred genes, not feel any sadness after a family member dies - and, yeah, at that point it's too late to do anything- so why feel sad? Would that be good?
What does she do with the information?
Develop another skillset... which is ALSO going to be disrupted in short order?
How does she act when, knowing that the change is coming, she still can't tell what the second order impacts might be?
That's my point. Knowing about the coming change is perhaps useful, but how much information must one obsessively seek out in order to make a good decision with that information? And how much time should one spend before it is counterproductive?
For instance, I'm pretty sure AI is coming for my job inside of ̶1̶0̶ ̶5̶ 2 years. But how in the hell can I predict which jobs are going to be 'safe' with any precision?
So basically, I've done the best I can by buying stocks in companies that might take off due to AI development, and I'm preparing myself to jump when the inflection point arises.
But I am not obsessively churning through AI news to try and predict the outcomes.
... In that non-hypothetical historical situation, yes, you develop another skillset. And that skillset won't 'also be disrupted in short order', given we're hundreds of years later and plenty of people hold occupations for decades. But, given the primary occupations aren't 'farm / household laborer' anymore, every single person eventually retrained, whether because they saw the way the wind was blowing or because the price of their labor went to zero.
It's tough! But "plumber" or "doctor" are better jobs than "copyeditor" or "commodity artist", i think.
I'm not so sure about 'Doctor,'
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/googles-medical-ai-might-soon-answer-questions-about-health.html
Surgeon, maybe.
And while I agree with Plumber, I'm no longer very confident in my own predictions so I wouldn't be too surprised if we get "PipeGPT" sometime this year.
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As far as "need to kill time on the phone quickly or not-so-quickly," I usually just open up TV Tropes or the Internet Movie Firearms Database to do some wiki-strolling. I also like Lost Media Wiki and The Cutting Room Floor for this purpose and go to "Recent Changes" or "New Pages."
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I know that I'm late to the party since you probably already left. But how about being bored like a psychopath without distracting yourself? You know what we used to do back in the day before we got psychologically manipulated to give our attention so we can be force fed ads by AI algorithms? I know that your own thoughts are scary but that is a big part of a worthy life is the ability to think instead numbing yourself without your devices.
Chapter 4 of McLuhan's book Understanding Media has the heading "The Gadget Lover", but the subheading is equally apt to this situation "Narcissism as Narcotics", and the fucking book is written in the 60:s and the whole chapter is a prediction on what happens when we get social media. Right down to the "amputation" when we cut access to it.
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If you want a good adblocker on Android your best bet is to use Firefox. Van occasionally be janky, and ~1% of the time you'll need to launch Chrome for a site that's broken in FF, but having a proper adblocker is absolutely worth the fairly minor issues.
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Hope you have more success than I do! After ages of trying to permanently quit videogames, themotte, etc. I've settled on doing semi-regular fasts from those things. It's easier to stay off of them when I know I can get back on later, and by the time "later" rolls around I find myself less interested because the habit is weaker.
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I'm proud of you hermano. I will miss your wit and insights a lot, but I hope you never come back.
Via con dios, compadre.
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Have you tried getting involved with a local ACX/EA group? I did and it significantly impacted my life, for the better I’d say.
That vibe is sort of the opposite of what I'm looking for. But if any of you folks are ever in the hinterlands betwixt The City of Brotherly Love and America's Playground, feel free to DM on reddit.
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I think it's the opposite, at least for me. Not just better off in some abstract sense , but materially, too. The internet , broadly, and social networking and social media has created a lot of opportunities that in the '90s and '00s period did not exist. I think spending too much time on political-twitter is sorta waste of time though. You're not missing out on that much. How many contrarian takes does someone need.
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You and me both buddy, you and me both. I've already published >40k words on Royal Road, and while I have my doubts that GPT-4 can match my writing style (or ability, but less tooting my own horn), I strongly suspect GPT-5 is it.
I can at least say I tried! Good luck to you, and may things work out for the best.
I have been reading your story, and enjoying it quite a bit.
Thank you! The last few chapters have been slower going since I took some viewer feedback into account regarding pacing, but I should have something soon!
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I actually agree with everything you said here, and I've been pondering the parallels to the Cold War (I have a family history of hippiness on my mother's side). I see this as very similar to deciding that worrying about it was too much, so you just stop reading the paper, and instead read novels.
Intellectually, I really thought I'd met and defeated existentialism decades ago. But Aurelius has a bit early in Meditations where he says that all men know they'll eventually die, but the situation is actually worse than that because you'll probably go feeble and senile first, so your effective time is actually less than the span of your life. This is hitting me like an early dementia diagnosis. The degree of anxiety is not terribly rational, but it's also proving resistant to rational counter-argument, like the one you offered. There is probably a great deal of ape status anxiety involved as well.
And on a random tangent because there will probably not be a better time, you once showed up in a dream. I was on some sort of a stone quay, looking for some random dream nonsense thing, and something in my brain said about a figure standing near the water "Hey, that's 2rafa". I offered a polite acknowledgement, literally "Oh hey, how's it going?" "Good, you?" "Good, gotta run, have a good one." "You too." And then took off chasing a boat or something. It was just very funny to me, because I have fairly severe aphantasia and sometimes joke that I live in a world of words and numbers, and apparently my subconscious doesn't even bat an eye about visually "recognizing" someone I've never seen in any format whatsoever.
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That is the thing that scares me most. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a California Values bot hallmonitoring a human face, forever. That might be nicer than the infohazard my nick alludes to, but it will also be much sillier.
I want the story of "us" to be an inspiring 50s sci-fi, not an absurd kafkaesque comedy.
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Thanks for repping the positive side of the Singularity. Too few people around here (rat sphere) remember that.
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Best of luck to you.
The traditional exit post spends more time complaining about witches, so this is kind of an inspiring change of pace. I've been avoiding the Wellness threads for similar reasons; if I notice that I'm not getting anything valuable out of the others, I suppose I'll do the same. It's nice to imagine that, when I leave, it'll be a pull instead of a push.
Do you play an instrument? Learning the banjo has been remarkably satisfying, despite my complete incompetence. It doesn't speak to the "check my phone" niche. For that I can only suggest fanfiction. I'd shill /r/rational, but I'm pretty sure I've seen you around there before.
Luck to you, too.
What's wrong with the Wednesday threads?
I would say that I can't carry a tune in a bucket, but it's possible that an AI could possible attain true agency, and upon hearing my attempts at music, decide the human species was irredeemable.
Yeah, though that place lost a lot of my attention naturally. Anything worth checking out in the last couple years?
Looking into the Wednesday threads was basically providing only anxiety. I’m enough of a hypochondriac on my own.
As for rationalfic…where to start? Alexander Wales has consistently put out amazing work. You may have seen early Worth the Candle, which I highly endorse to a certain type of reader, but his next big project, This Used to Be About Dungeons, is a completely different and much fluffier work.
Mother of Learning remains more or less unsurpassed in its niche. Not for lack of trying, either; the roadside is littered with mage progression fantasies and the occasional timeloop. There’s also been quite a lot of LitRPG/SystemApocalypse, which I feel share some of the ethos, but I’m not really qualified to give recommendations on that front.
On the fanfiction side, the long-running r!Animorphs story finished in spectacular fashion. Pokémon: OoS is ongoing, and most every chapter continues to be packed with detail. Both stories lean into the LW-rationalist-sphere a good deal, which may be a pro or con. So does Chili and the Chocolate Factory, a shorter story which I can only describe as completely deranged. I don’t know whether it would actually be enjoyable to read in hindsight. As each chapter released, the sub really came alive trying to figure out what the fuck the author was calling out.
If I threw in more normal fanfiction, I’d be here all day. I can put something together if you give me genres or settings you liked. Or you can browse a few of the monthly rec threads and bookmark/epub stuff you find interesting.
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I share your general outlook about political engagement. I've been all across the board politically chasing truth and meaning since I was young and the older I get the more hollow the whole playing field feels. Even outside of the coming ... changes.
Do you have any interests that you could find very niche old school style forum communities for? A lot of the idle internet browsing attention I used to have pointed toward social media with has been redirected toward very specific small communities with very specific expertise banks and, on average, for the good ones, usually majority older members.
Try as it will to claim it does, GPT-6 won't have 40 years of experience doing mechanical work on the same model of tractor I have.
Best of luck. I don't know you, I don't really know anyone here, but I wish you success in parenting and being the person you want to be for your family and those close to you. (Also success with your D&D campaign. Being a truly good DM is a lifelong journey.)
I was kind of hoping to get some recommendations...
But if you want to feel old, apparently Taylor Swift is releasing new songs tonight. My teen daughter was excitedly telling me all the rumors she has been following, and I asked her where she finds them. "Are you reading Taylor Swift forums?" "No...?" "Do you know what a forum is?" "I... think... so?"
Thank you for the well wishes.
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Pray.
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Almost definitionally none of us here can provide good tips for breaking free from Internet addictions. That said, something that has seemed fairly effective when I've used it is Focus Mode on Android phones. You can specify what apps you are and aren't allowed to use and it at least provides a roadblock that you have to consciously overcome if you want to relapse, without depriving you of any of your phone's functions that are actually useful to you.
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Good luck and Godspeed.
Lighter fiction would be my suggestion. Collections of genre short stories (lots of excellent options for sci-fi /weird fiction/horror) are good, but also most more generic fantasy or sci-fi would work. Gotrek and Felix for Warhammer Fantasy, Ciaphas Cain for 40k, Discworld series has worked for me, haven't read R.A. Salvatore's D&D stuff but I've heard it's the kind of thing you can pick up and put down as needed.
Basically just fiction that isn't literature and isn't aiming for realism. If you want to be extra careful, can exclude stuff published after a certain year, year chosen to preference.
Comics or manga could also work depending on preferences.
Is there any way to read the 40k books aside from buying them each individually?
If you're already taking the grill pill might as well take the piracy pill too. It also means you don't have to have that nagging "am I financially supporting people who hate me" thought in the back of your mind any more, which will help you think about politics even less.
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There are anthologies available collecting different novellas + short stories on the same theme.
I know for sure most of the Ciaphas Cain and Gaunt's Ghosts books are covered by omnibus versions, would assume others as well. For those their wikipedia pages include book order + which books are included in which omnibus, hopefully same for the others.
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Battletech fiction is pretty fantastic. I went through a phase of Warhammer Fantasy fiction, but soured on it when they nuked the world and rebooted. Felt like it totally invalidated the attention I'd put into the world, inhabiting it with my imagination.
I hear people really like the new world, and the games are even legit good? But for me it seemed like a good place to step off the consoomer train.
Warhammer Fantasy is coming back, sort of. I myself like reading through the old Shadowrun novels. I admit they are not good, but they are great fun if you like the setting. Battletech is similar for me as well I think.
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Friends who actually play tabletop still don't like the new lore as much, but begrudgingly agree that the gameplay for AoS is much improved.
If by games you're also including the Total War Warhammer ones, they're set in the Old World pre-nuking, albeit with a kind of anachronistic hodgepodge of what units and leaders are included.
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o7
Blitz chess, as long as you don't care about your rating.
Blitz is too slow for that, you need 6 uninterrupted minutes. You can start with blitz and work your way down to bullet which fits in a more reasonable 2 minutes.
Bullet chess is a pretty different game but it's a lot of fun because you can gamble on traps which would be clear blunders at higher time controls.
Correspondence chess it is. Cycle through your dozen or so daily games one move at a time. Boardgamearena is also good for this, if chess simply doesn't do it for you.
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Godspeed and good luck. Thanks for all your posts.
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You could always play a mobile game? Or read some form of fiction.
Chess.com has a mobile app that is perfect for this.
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It may sound crazy but a friend of mine turned me on to Pinterest to fill the scrolly urges. Now if I have to pick up my phone, I can just look at pleasing images of Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett, Anouk Aimee, and Anna Karina, or at pictures of cool old crumbling steel mills, instead of learning about the newest way the world's getting worse.
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Best of luck.
I've been enjoying working with my hands to cope with anxiety about the future. I've found woodworking to be incredibly meditative. Plus sometimes you wind up with a marginally attractive piece of furniture that's 98% flat and only a half a degree out of square? You might as well practice and make a few extras. Feels like there is always a birthday, anniversary or other gift giving occasion sneaking up on me. So fuck it, everyone get's woodworking projects.
Spent the last two evenings making a hard maple, edge grain butcher block. Gonna make another one this weekend for the in-laws anniversary. The first is for my wife to beat the shit out of to determine if a butcher block countertop is viable for us. I'm kind of gung ho about it, because it would cost me about $600-700 in raw materials to do about 45 square feet worth of countertop. Granite would probably run us about $4000.
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Duolingo is addictive, and while not especially useful (it won't get you to fluency) it seems harmless enough. Memrise is actually better, but less addictive.
For intelligent low-glitter puzzle games, I like (free, no ads, no garbage):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles
Poetry a day style blogs could be nice, I just tend to binge and forget them, but could follow an actively updating one to check it once a day.
Ebooks can also help. Check if your library lets you borrow them via Libby/similar.
Good luck! I've never succeeded at maintaining my own breaks very long. Sticking time limits on the browser never helps. Deleting the browser helps for a week or two, then inevitably I simply need to Google some medical question or whatever and then I'm back at my bullshit.
I am perfectly well aware this is probably my biggest self-development problem and I'd be a much better person if I did break free, but I've gotten so bad at managing boredom without internet it's kind of pathetic, and every so often I encounter something cool and interesting and worthwhile and it's like the damn rat with the intermittent pellets all over again.
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Sorry to see you go, it's been fun. Godspeed.
Oh, boo. Remember, you are the alpha.
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See you in about three weeks!
We all know that nobody ever really logs off.
More seriously, I think that's the healthy thing to do. The forces at work are larger than any of us, and few of us seem to have much in terms of direct influence on outcomes. Attaching too much importance to any given political event and following it's development with more than a passing "how does this impact me" interest is a recipe for mental distress.
So maybe it's worth it to get insights into how to prepare for the potential futures but end of the day all you can do is arrange your personal affairs so as to hopefully maximize your own wellbeing. And if that includes cutting out your main sources of anxiety and wasted time and distraction from meaningful 'real life' interactions, then do it.
Martial arts. Boxing. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Something that is inherently challenging in both the physical and mental sense. Find some strenuous, relatively competitive activity and start a casual interest in it.
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