/lit/ - Literature

Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/books

Nice kerning, goofballs. Try to be less wrong in your cover design.

>>16944469
I should probably read some of the sequences but I had such a bad experience on the forums that I was unimpressed.

Oh that too. Referring to works as "sequences" and "graphs"

>>16944601
I think they mean literal graphs, like within essays.

But yeah, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, quite a few sharp thinkers writing clear, interesting, informative stuff. And a lot of them seem to genuinely want to improve their thinking.

On the other hand, weird cultish vibe, and I'm less impressed by Yudkowsky than they are.

>>16944601
Giving a graph of dependence between chapters is a common practice in STEM technical books, since LessWrong likes to LARP as scientistes it makes sense they would adopt it. It's actually pretty convenient when the book deals with semi-independent topics.

It's a very faggot community and I strongly disagree with the notion that that might often isn't right

>>16944717
Yud seems pretty psycho. I recall years ago his brother died and he made a post about it that talked about realizing the person he loved didnt exist anymore, which was quite touching; but he somehow turned around and blamed the audience for not investing enough of their money into life extension and preservation research (through him). I find grief makes most people better and more human, but his misanthropy shone through even in that moment.

>>16944827
He blocked me on twitter for no discernible reason

Just read the free sample chapter. It's difficult for me to explain how much I despise this kind of mind. The author is just rambling about how it's paradoxical to him that our population is much larger and we produce countless research papers, yet somehow we don't have 1000 shakespeares and we don't have immortal god kings (?) then he just throws up his hands and says "well.. the historical trendlines of these metrics will hold" and then ends. What?

>>16945564
I dunno, seems pretty interesting to me. Do you think there's some clear answer to why accomplishments/progress in various areas doesn't seem to scale with the amount of effort put in. Or do you think it does scale, and that there are over 100 Shakespeare-level talents writing in English today?

>>16944835
Maybe you liked a tweet about Roko's basilisk?

>>16944469
I actually met scott Alexander at a SCC meetup one time. Weird fucking kid, totally makes sense that hes an asexual yet polyamorous psychiatrist in the bay area.
I mean the levels of retardation youd have to reach to go into academic medicine at all, let alone the least academic field of academic medicine, let alone doing so in the most expensive region in the country, let alone doing so while also kneecapping yourself in terms of social support. Let alone doing so while publishing a blog with wrongthink. Not just any wrongthink but stupid, boring, uncharismatic, nerdy fucking wrongthink.
He had all the options and he decided to be broke, overworked, and lonely.
Unlike me, ha! I'm gonna live in montana and take out pancrei for cash to afford my copious children's private school education and take my one (1) wife on vacation where we have sex and enjoy it without jewish neuroticism.

>>16945837
It's not that easy a problem to deal with. I think it's an issue of how we even recognize genii. Consider that:
1. People are called genii in comparison to great minds of the past and to the standard of their time. If the general intelligence rises, the bar for being considered a genius also rises.
2. Genius is not just an assessment of talent or achievement but a recognition of weight in the general culture. A thousandfold increase in population means modern genii need to weight a thousand time more in order to be considered equal to the genii of previous eras.
3. In consequence, there is a pretty hard limit to how many people can be considered universal genii like Shakespeare and Da Vinci are, and this doesn't scale linearily with population size.
4. There is also the issue of historical precedent: Homer and Shakespeare worked in culture that were less massive, less information-laden, less experienced with themselves and less burdened by previous canon than we are. It was easier for them to matter, to break new ground, to become symbols for whole eras of culture.
5. As our cultural world quantitavily expands, the relative importance of each individual shrinks, the necessity of specialized labor sets in, and the towering genius is replaced by the community of specialized experts.

It's really all about perspective. Cultural innovations don't stack up like bags of rice. You need to look at our culture as a whole in which scale effects play a major part.

>>16945564
He's finally realized that they won't have invented immortal cyborg bodies by the time the heart attacks put him to sleep permanently.

>>16946296
Interesting. Any more stories from the meetup? Why did you go if you don't like his stuff?

Not sure why this place has always hated these fags, Scott has some good articles at least.

>>16946830
I joined the list on a whim just to see what kind of person gets involved in that type of shit and got an email that he was coming into town.
I'm in medicine on the west coast, knowing who he is and what he looks like is not very useful but we might know some mutual friends and might be useful to them. At least a few buddies ended up at UCSF. This was before he got doxxed and everyone knew who he was.

>>16944469
The dorks who make this trash talking about how rational and smart they are should be forced to show their net worth and bmi at the beginning of their "treatises", we would prevent many overly open minds from falling down their retardation rabbit hole this way.

CRINGE

>>16946812
I was going to post in this thread defending some lesswrong articles I've read that I enjoyed. I now have zero respect for Eli. I don't think I've ever seen such galactic levels of cope wrapped up in what he imagines is intelligent sounding writing

>>16948284
I don't know what he ended up doing, but he actually has lost a lot of weight since that post.

I never understood the deal with lesswrong.
Are there just a bunch of stembugs larping as saviors of humanity throught "rational" thinking?

eliezer is a weird creepy thinks-he's-brilliant cult leader
scott is actually good

i love how scott's writing mogs eliezer's so hard that they put him before eliezer, the literal founder of lesswrong, on the list of contributors

>>16949546
Well put, Eliezer is cringe, though I did admittedly like his Harry Potter fanfic (as much as it pains me to say it).
Scott is so based the NYT tried to dox him.

>>16947302
>net worth
Wouldn't help, a lot of them are well-paid programmers and such. There's even a whole overlapping subculture dedicated to charitable giving.
>bmi
I heard Yudkowsky finally managed to lose weight.

>>16949532
More or less. It's gotten more nuanced and heterogenous as they come to terms with the inadequacy of just enumerating biases.

Holy based.
Best read w Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug

Why would anyone give a hack like Yud any money, ever?
He does no doscernable real research towards the goals he claims to want, he just babbles about the stuff.
Still can't believe he made such a stink about that roko bullshit, the whole premise is logically flawed and youd have to be an idiot to not see that.

>>16946321
using genii as the plural immediately makes you look learned, ill use that trick

>>16950002
Doesn't he believe that HAES bullshit? I remember him claiming he cannot lose weight or some retarded shit like that.

>>16944469
this design is cool as fuck

>>16950209
>Doesn't he believe that HAES bullshit?
Probably not, or he wouldn't be trying to lose weight.
>I remember him claiming he cannot lose weight or some retarded shit like that.
He says becoming thin is much harder for him than for your typical thin person. That doesn't sound ridiculous to me. I have zero difficulty staying thin, and clearly many people do find it hard.
The reason he's especially mocked is that he wraps it up in language like "metabolically disprivileged".

>>16944717>>16944827

lol, it's about map and territory, ie the hyped vocabulary of the atheist to feel smart and deep when it's just ''opinions''

>>16949523
Thanks to mathematics and physics we can be sure that either he spent more energy, or consumed less energy.

>>16950245
>booktuber aesthetics

>>16946848
they want academic philosophy to cover nothing but quine and dennett and then decision theory crap. anyone who isn't a fucking robot hates this sort of dork
>>16947302
no just force them to show their degrees or lack thereof

Embarrassing pseuds, but as long as no chuds post their stuff here on /lit/, I say let them carry on as they mean well enough

>>16944469
>Scott Alexande et al
no thanks, Cathedral

>>16946321
>>16950208
not really since it's faux latin

Sometimes I fantasize about going full sarah connor on these faggots