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Fox Mulder and The X-Files of Rationality

> In general it's striking to consider how different LessWrong and its consequences would have been if The Sequences had focused by word count largely on the thing that determines most of whether you are correct.

I have been considering compiling a tome of epistemology in adversarial environments

> You can no longer assume people get their news from a shared, relatively non-partisan source like a newspaper subject to the fairness doctrine, or public broadcast news.

This literally rearranged my internal experience from "going after light in a dark dungeon" to "annoying seizure raveparty"

> I think a greater and greater number of people now do not have the epistemic basics covered. In previous eras, you had implicit information control through the high cost of publishing. Now, the cost is near zero.

> Most aren't even attempting to monitor whether their beliefs predict reality at all. [...] We don't teach people in public school, "Hey, you should make sure your beliefs correspond to things that will happen later. Your beliefs should pay rent in terms of anticipated experiences."

very much so; the sequences provide a different kind of value if you're in an environment when people can't/won't even reliably generate non-deranged hypotheses to begin with

> But what I'm trying to say is that the information environment in 2008 was such that those foundational "29 bits" might have seemed less important. Now they're critically important, and I think part of the reason this is salient to me is because of how I got into Less Wrong in the first place.

> If you train people in a style where the goal is to refute all bad arguments, and that if you can't refute one, you don't have a good reason to disbelieve it, that is an incredibly toxic mindset.

kinda sounds right and maybe there have been some downsides to endorsing memetic immune disorders

there are two wolves inside you

memetic inoculation makes you retarded
vs
i will not sing of walls

> If you do feel compelled to engage deeply every time, it's like being memetically immunocompromised. You have no defense against people acting in bad faith.

This was actually pointed out in Reason As A Memetic Immune Disorder or something

> A lot of people would become less obnoxious and more nuanced if they stopped the common failure mode of feeling obligated to argue with every wrong argument put in front of them.

> I think "warrant" is a completely reasonable name for this. If you take this idea seriously, your approach to epistemology would change dramatically.

I'm here to commit epistemic police brutality

Some bangers in this.

> If I can get you to consider an argument that is not well-founded to begin with, I'll eventually trick you.

I used to have a catalogue of "questions that pull you deeper into their framing the harder you think about them"

waow I think this is the first service I see that federates with bluesky

you'll never believe who started haloposting

strangest internet incursion into daily life is the statue avatar AI art on the lighters at the tobacco store

like they have some sort of visor that i'm pretty sure takes after the rainbow visor sunglasses from twitter

and a few bitcoin symbols

based honestly

looking forward to this; i don't have the brainpower atm to predict whether it will be good or bad but hopefully a step away from reliance on a single identity arbiter

you know, there might be something here.

a) i say i'm disagreeable partly because if i'm perceived as such, don't feel like disputing it. (seems i said so 2 years ago too)
b) intent-wise, i see "you're wrong" as a kindness if it rests on earnest belief. opportunity to mutually update worldmodel

then the [redacted] spoke to me and said: all those mysteries you sought lay bare before you

and i said: not now i'm playing factorio

geeks/mops/sociopaths rules everything around me etc etc

thus "finding is less about looking for a signal against a quiet background and more about looking for signal in the noise"

i think AI grew the total volume of art being produced, and because it grows the "mid" segment, the proportion of bespoke art shrinks even if it gets produced at the same rate

evidently there is demand for it and i expect it to be normies and people who don't try to be discerning art consumers

this seems to apply to ai slop too -- people be competing on discernment as always

i think this is an interesting thread to follow, but i can't exactly tease it out.

for example: i don't like kitsch (what cool kid does?), but conspicuous hate for it reads as an attempt to farm status

the interesting part is that this parallels my experience with information before i had reliable access to the internet (and before the social media era), vs. after

finding is less about looking for a signal against a quiet background and more about looking for signal in the noise

i saw someone talking about ai slop and i realized something: from the art enjoyer perspective, ai art means that art goes from a relatively scarce commodity to plentiful but mid.

finding art one likes becomes a matter of sorting through, instead of searching

(cont.)

Evergreen tweets:
>[...] The specific swindle is the slide from "All Xes are political..." to "...and therefore the rightful property of MY politics." [...]

x.com/St_Rev/statu...
x.com/St_Rev/statu...

any main characters lately

what a strangely plain world these here specimens live in