Ok folks, serious question. I know rats love excessively long word salad stream-of-unconsciousness essays. I understand how somehow can be so high on their own farts that they think this is an acceptable way of presenting their “thoughts”. But…
There’s no way rats actually read those longforms, right? Like, no one has enough time on their hands to read and engage with something of this length and this boring on a day-to-day basis, right? Same goes for those LessWrong posts, they must be banking on others not reading through the 10,000 words of nonsense, right?
By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Of course, as there is no other way to do this with posts of this length. If you want to dismantle an average SSC post you will need to explain so much more things than he already does so it blossoms into small novel territory. Any I gish nobody has the time or attention span for that.
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles, isn’t HPATMOR like a million billion chapters as well?
Siskind for sure keeps his wildest quiet-part-out-loud takes until the last possible minute of his posts, when he does decide to surface them.
If you are a normal, decent, well-socialized human being, you probably have not heard about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Actually explaining what this thing is will have to happen in several different stages. But I should start by telling you this re-write of the first Harry Potter book is around 660,000 words long.
The entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit, comes in at a little less than 580,000 words.
In my more innocent college days, there was a group of people doing a reading of it in the dorm lounge laughing their asses off. Ong I thought it was a hyper self-aware satire that was making fun of internet “umm ackshully” / iamverysmart posters. There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?
Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species. It’s only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life! Ready to out-sit eternity. They’re indomitable.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals!
There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles
Only in these circles could an article that AI can read to you in an hour and forty-eight minutes be clickbait for the paywalled “companion piece.”
unironically, their culture has a better use case for it than the rest of earth does. they’re not even losing informational value in the compression and nonsense-izing since there isn’t any to start with
Ok folks, serious question. I know rats love excessively long word salad stream-of-unconsciousness essays. I understand how somehow can be so high on their own farts that they think this is an acceptable way of presenting their “thoughts”. But…
There’s no way rats actually read those longforms, right? Like, no one has enough time on their hands to read and engage with something of this length and this boring on a day-to-day basis, right? Same goes for those LessWrong posts, they must be banking on others not reading through the 10,000 words of nonsense, right?
By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Of course, as there is no other way to do this with posts of this length. If you want to dismantle an average SSC post you will need to explain so much more things than he already does so it blossoms into small novel territory. Any I gish nobody has the time or attention span for that.
A novel which could often be abridged by saying:
“look at this incredibly offended dork” ;)
Someone has to post the Elizabeth Sandifer essay and I guess it’s my turn:
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method
I should note that I didn’t ghostwrite that one either
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles, isn’t HPATMOR like a million billion chapters as well?
Siskind for sure keeps his wildest quiet-part-out-loud takes until the last possible minute of his posts, when he does decide to surface them.
As Robert Evans put it:
The audiobook is 67 hours long.
In my more innocent college days, there was a group of people doing a reading of it in the dorm lounge laughing their asses off. Ong I thought it was a hyper self-aware satire that was making fun of internet “umm ackshully” / iamverysmart posters. There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?
Yud, it’s not too late to say sike bro.
citation needed ;p
Even just saying it was mescaline would help it make more sense.
Only in these circles could an article that AI can read to you in an hour and forty-eight minutes be clickbait for the paywalled “companion piece.”
@V0ldek
They’re going to end up cheating and using AI to summarize rat verbiage instead of reading it. And THAT is what will piss off the future AI god.
unironically, their culture has a better use case for it than the rest of earth does. they’re not even losing informational value in the compression and nonsense-izing since there isn’t any to start with