“I’m not saying TV Tropes is right about everything,” I typed into the chat window, “but right now it understands your life better than you do.”
I have invented a new form of psychotherapy
I call it Cognitive Trope Therapy
the way it works is that when you have a thought, you write it down
like, say
“You are different from the others. You will never know their innocence… and that is why you should hate your own existence. Die. Die. Die.”
then you figure out whether, if your life were a fantasy novel, these words would be spoken by figures wearing black robes, and speaking in a dry, whispering voice, and they are actually withered beings who touched the Stone of Evil
and if so then you don’t listen
I would write this up as a pop psych bestseller but it would be only two pages long
now
I know what you are thinking
you are thinking “but what if the whispering voice seems like it might have a point”
I get that this isn’t meant to be rigorous, but “it’s okay to focus on yourself, hurting yourself in the name of effective altruism is bad, why not sit down and rest for a while?” sounds exactly like the sort of think a dark-robed figure would hiss at a protagonist.
You obviously don’t read the same books I do. :P
Wait, am I missing something?
Eliezer on LW: “We should become supremely rational, moving faster than the comparatively timid procedures of Old Science. We must conquer death itself and win immortality, the faster the better, dismissing those who would urge restraint in this effort as hidebound and inferior thinkers. We shall build unspeakably powerful artificial intelligences to rule over us, transform us from weak creatures of flesh into beings of pure information. Then we’ll build giant structures that blot out the stars, and finally realize our destiny of taking over the galaxy.”
Eliezer on Tumblr: “Avoid things that sound too much like what a fictional villain would say.”
To say that humans “fundamentally want to be good” is mystic nonsense.
But, humans are enmeshed in a larger web of other humans, who aid in their own survival, and are similar enough to have empathy for. They have significant motive to want this web to flourish rather than die.
And if you take all other incentives away (like competition, envy, friction, and abstract ideals) and you’re only left with the aforementioned web, then you can say “underneath all those other things, humans want to be good.”
It kind of bugs me that Tumblr has seized upon “taking everything literally” as the Defining Neurodivergent Experience™ – not only because it’s actually pretty uncommon, but also because it’s erasing an enormous variety of other frequent communication style issues, including but not limited to:
Having your brain stubbornly seize upon the first interpretation that happens to pop into your head as the Only Possible Interpretation, regardless of whether it’s literal or figurative
Easily identifying several possible interpretations of a statement, but having absolutely no ability to parse for context and identify which of those interpretations is most plausible
Being confronted with a statement that has Implications, then getting thrown for a loop when it turns out that the speaker wasn’t considering any of that and really did just mean it literally
Perfectly understanding a statement’s intended meaning, but getting annoyed with the speaker anyway because they didn’t phrase it Correctly, seriously, are you the only person here who gives a shit about the goddamn Rules?
This is like the only post I’ve ever seen that actually gives me a feeling of having my autism represented.
The word “handle,” as you’d expect, is derived from the Arabic al-Andalus, in reference to the fact that the Iberian peninsula is the part of Europe that sticks out in a graspable fashion.
You do understand, I hope, that an authoritarian philosophy is – at best – only as good as the best authority you have available.
As something-maybe-akin-to-an-authoritarian myself (in certain respects), I take this problem very seriously. The science of finding, selecting, and controlling your authority figures is a fertile field of inquiry! I encourage you to give it some thought!
But, seriously, folks…if you find yourself desperately wishing that your favorite institutions of rulership had more power and fewer constraints, while simultaneously despising all the actual people in charge of those institutions and all the decisions they make…there is an important lesson in that, and you should learn it before you go claiming to have ideas about How the World Should Be.
Today I learned that in Germany, you can get insurance for your insurance–basically, it pays for legal expenses if you have to sue your first insurance (or otherwise incur legal expenses) for not doing what they should.
I actually kind of love this. I wonder if it would work in other countries; here, for instance, what health insurance is obligated to pay for is specified quite particularly by law.
So people in my circles posted this and be like:
“Hey.”
Me: No.
“This tumblr post feels incomplete.”
Me: Stop it. I’m watching you.
“The obvious question -”
Me: Has it ever occurred to you that maybe normal human beings are capable of just having insurance on their fucking insurance
Sometimes I go to myself “you know, I don’t understand what NFTs are” and then I go look it up again and discover, yes, actually I do know what NFTs are. It’s just that every time I read about them again I’m left going “this CAN’T be it, there has to be something else to make this make sense” and the answer is always no.
ALT
