whatever pronouns. while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free.
certain segments of fandom have decided that true anti-homophobia activism is protecting gay men from the existence of gay porn and I don't know how to tell them
priming people like they are a GPT works surprisingly well in real life. "you are a kind person who is trying to solve my problem and is not getting angry at me for having it"
the real blackpill forbidden truth people don't want to admit is that ugly cringey people often form relationships with other ugly cringey people, and these relationships are often happier and involve better sex than the relationships between hot sophisticated people
strong recommendation for the TV show Numberblocks, which seems to have taken my five-year-old from "struggles with adding 1" to "understands what prime numbers are" in like four weeks
The Normie Test is that if you are protesting somewhere your sign should make a normie go "huh, good point" and not "what does that mean?" or "what a fucking weirdo"
Man, I'm really pissy about how dismissive Metz's new post is of people who want to blog anonymously. "Not only should you get to say whatever you want, you should also get to say it anonymously" I mean yeah? Kinda?
surely people are aware that, in the past, bad things were sometimes very popular, and therefore it is not unthinkable that in the present bad things are *also* sometimes very popular
I assure you the reaction of the vast majority of gay and bi men to yaoi boys and kinky gay fanfic is somewhere between "who gives a shit" and "LINKS?????"
AI safety people mostly get along with AI capabilities people + other AI safety people, whom they think are going to destroy the world, but don't get along with AI ethics people, who want the same things they do but are kind of annoying about it
I think it's fine if intersex women compete as women in the Olympics. Are we, like, trying to protect the integrity of the Olympics against people with bizarre genetic anomalies? Because I have something to tell you.
it's always shocking to me how many basically decent people who don't think of themselves as sexist are cruel to women who are funny, brilliant, and major contributors to their field, and also happen to publicly be sexual beings
"instead of putting people in regular jail for a set period for committing crimes we should put people in brain jail until they are cured of the disease of wanting to commit crimes" is not the radical position you think it is
a reasonable takeaway from the FTX situation is that EA should rely less on smart value-aligned people with no skills or experience, but this is a terrible takeaway for me, a smart value-aligned person with no skills or experience
presumably such classics of cinema as "Step Bro Creampies his Younger Gay Step Brother on Family Vacation" are aimed at an audience of fetishizing straight women
I have bad knees because I exercise. my boyfriend has bad knees because he doesn't exercise. it is time to stop blaming the victim and admit that the malefactor here is knees
the sacred pact of all booksellers and librarians everywhere is that, if an adult asks you if a book is age-appropriate for their child, you ask yourself if the book is at the kid's reading level and if the answer is "yes" you look the adult dead in the eye and say "yes"
Lots of people have really fucked-up relationships with ethics so when effective altruists are like "hey, jsyk there are a lot of relatively cheap ways you can save lives and do good" they have emotional breakdowns. Unclear how this is EAs' fault.
friend: I'm stressed about my job interview for [effective altruist position]
me: don't worry! if you bomb the interview it's probably morally wrong for you to get the job
friend: THAT'S NOT COMFORTING
my favorite weird social media phenomenon is people who screenshot Fetlife and then go "this is a weird sex thing!" ye... eess...? were you under the impression that Fetlife is a website devoted to the appreciation of feta cheese
correct opinions wind up cringe because they continue to be true when they're no longer cutting-edge and contrarian and instead embarrassing, uncool people believe them
life advice I give to people, a summary:
-you're allowed to set boundaries
-even about that
-you don't have to feel guilty constantly to be a good person
-you can trans if you want to, you can leave your cis behind
-if you don't want to be trans you don't gotta
-ask people out
I love reading gay subtext into stories but I take seriously the criticisms that platonic friendships exist and we shouldn't assume all friendships are romantic. therefore going forward for each gay ship I will be taking a canon romantic ship and interpreting it as platonic
Like, Scott is whatever, he has a big platform and can convince people to give him lots of money. But there are lots of vulnerable people who benefit from Internet anonymity, and because oppression is, y'know, a thing, they're disproportionately people who are oppressed.
There is a real concrete difference, often in *safety*, between "a small community knows who I am" or "you can figure it out if you try" and "my full name is in the New York Fucking Times."
the tendency of people who don't think IQ is a real thing to go "IQ is not a real thing because if it was it would be okay to violate the rights of low-IQ people" is REALLY concerning
people who might want to talk online anonymously: sex workers. LGBT people in unaccepting areas. stealth trans people. neurodivergent or traumatized people. anyone who writes about sex. teachers who write fiction they don't want their students reading.
I have never seen an effective altruist who guilt-tripped me about donations as profoundly as normies do about voting. This works for normies because they don't have any ethics more demanding than spending twenty minutes filling out a form once every two years.
I was gonna say that rationalists don't have an ideological commitment to communal living, it's just that when you have a spare bedroom and a broke friend obviously you put the friend in the bedroom, but maybe that is what an ideological commitment to communal living looks like.
I used to live in Berkeley and let me tell you "wait, what is that protest even about? are they against fiat currency or do they want little boys not to be circumcised" is a Live Problem
similarly,
#NotAllSocialWorkers
but social work has bad working conditions and doesn't pay well which means it attracts a lot of people who are being paid in the enjoyment of having power over vulnerable people and who should really not be left in charge of, like, a cat
Does anyone else think reading things written by LLMs is really uncanny? When I read things I'm used to assuming the speaker has something they want to say and I can model them as a person. LLMs... don't and aren't. It makes reading their work unpleasant.
I actually do think that fiction affects reality and it is important as an author to be responsible about what you romanticize and glorify, but unfortunately everyone ELSE who shares this opinion flunked reading comprehension in school.
broke: put a lot of effort into developmentally appropriate play that strengthens skills
woke: let your kid loose on YouTube Kids and then they find a really great TV show and learn half a year of math in two weeks
misogyny test: ask a man what he thinks of Aella. acceptable answers are anything that engages with her intellectual or creative work in any way, or "she's hot." astonishing how many fail!
a lot of people are saying that poly + casual sex + cuddle piles in EA are unwelcoming to women but bonobo rationalist tumblr (a major nucleus of this behavior) was like 75% nonmen
oh my god i've been loosely following
@ozyfrantz
's Thing of Things for like uh idk 10 years?? (how long have they been blogging??) and FINALLY put together the "king of kings" reference
like it was tickling the back of my brain this whole time lol
Don't mean to shame anonymous EA criticizers-- criticism is important, glad they're able to speak out, other people have different life situations-- but I'm going to say all my EA criticism under my real name and absolutely nothing bad will happen to me
Of course it causes a problem if someone with this fucked-up relationship to ethics learns that you can save a life for like four thousand dollars but idk why you would assume the problem here is telling people you can save a life for four thousand dollars.
it sucks to be a billionaire because everyone's constantly trying to get things from you + you don't know if anyone's really your friend. so there *have* to be tons of billionaires with secret shitposting accounts, right?
"The Global South" is a dumb term. You have to draw such a squiggly line. It squiggles down to put New Zealand and Australia in the North. It squiggles up to put Mongolia in the South. North Korea is somehow in the South while South Korea is in the North
more science fiction and fantasy should be quiet slice-of-life stories about literature professors pondering divorce. more literary fiction should be about people trying to save the world
re last retweet: this is literally just The Myth Of Consensual Housing
"I want to live in a small apartment!"
"I want to rent you a small apartment!"
[picture of socon with an aesthetic boner for lawns] isn't there someone you forgot to ask
I am always very entertained when people object that the teenagers are not rebelling these days and instead they're doing lame and uncool and boring things that piss the speaker, an old person, off
I think a lot of EAs say "optics" when they mean "I am gut-level uncomfortable with this but I don't have conscious reasoning for why." second thing is good! your gut knows things you don't!
the secret to happiness is being grateful for all kinds of shit. for example at this very moment I don't have a stomachache *or* a stuffy nose. nothing but bliss
I am constantly baffled by how much space articles assume I have. "Kids don't have to cost a lot! You don't have to move to a larger house if you put the boys in one bedroom and the girls in another." You think I have two empty bedrooms???????
*And* a lot of these people don't have flawlessly hidden identities. Everyone knows who astolat is but if you published her name in the New York fucking Times you would be the asshole here.
nonautistics are like "that's weird and creepy and cringe" as if that's an explanation for anything, and autistics w/o a special interest in social interaction are SO FRUSTRATING
I like reading about global development because it shifts my idea of what is a live political issue so now all my political opinions are things like "I think people should have the right to vote" and "personally, I think throwing opposition journalists in jail is bad."
memo to all news reporters: with a few exceptions, rationalists do NOT live in communes or intentional community as a hippie lifestyle choice thing. We live in group houses because there's a housing crisis in the Bay.
would be useful if we had some word for people who rape kids that did not, additionally, mean that you like thinking about fictional sixteen-year-olds kissing
people claiming that trans women "don't act like real women" usually point to examples that cis women I know do all the time. afaict the actual objection is that weird queer women aren't women, which is a lesson I was already thoroughly taught in middle school
Man, arguments about how to make a community more welcome to intellectually diverse people or members of marginalized groups inevitably make me go "ah, I am not welcome here."
stupid question: why is it that I can use the Internet without wifi on my phone, and I can tether so I can use the Internet without wifi on my laptop, but I can't just use the Internet without wifi on my laptop as a built-in feature
Today I spent three hours on a road trip to get a vaccine from a place where they had excess supply! I have never been so excited to get stuck with a needle in my life
I think people who are Mad About EA Billionaires Not Paying Enough Taxes should bite the bullet and say "I think that instead of funding pandemic preparedness and global health EA billionaires should donate all their money to the US treasury"
Storytellers did new takes on old characters for thousands of years, this is how stories work, and copyright preventing this natural process of invention is robbing us of thousands of amazing stories.
after talking about it a lot and reading a lot of feminist theory and ethical philosophy, I have the same position on abortion as my normie liberal parents in the 1990s
the problem with being into H. P. Lovecraft is that your favorite author hates you, and also people will NOT stop talking about how much he hates you when you JUST want to think about the Dreamlands
See, here I go: MacAskill-style longtermism makes no sense! EA's recruitment strategy + communications to new EAs cause a lot of preventable harm! EA's workaholic culture is actively bad for intellectual progress! EA institutions are untrustworthy until proven competent!
me: it would be good if antis were upset about cop propaganda instead of people shipping seventeen-year-olds with twenty-year-olds
finger on the monkey's paw: [curls]
antis: this character is not allowed to be a lesbian because she's a cop
transhumanism is, at its core, the idea that (within current technological and resource limits) you should get to have the body that you want and that makes you happy.
man why do people go up to trans people all like "look at this shit some other trans person said! denounce them!" like I am not responsible for every asshole thing every trans person everywhere said
"trans women can't be women because if they were women I would have to have sex with them" is such an endlessly worrying line of argument. sir you are allowed to turn down sex with people even if they are women. I am very worried that you don't know this
Psychotic people have false beliefs that are biased and resistant to new evidence, because of their brain chemistry. You know who else that's true of? Everyone.