Ah right yes, thanks.

““I would’ve been the chief rabbi of my shtetl,” I said. “All day long, I’d debate questions like how much restitution you’d have to pay if your ox gored your neighbor’s sheep. And for this, I’d get an arranged marriage with the most beautiful girl in town.””

The name of his blog was a reference that he thinks he was born in the wrong time, because in Shtetls people of his clear high intelligence would be assigned a wife (and get high social status).

Here is Sneerclub talking about it a while back. Dec 2022 is apparently 2 years ago for reddit.

E: Do note I can’t recall where he wrote about this, so I might be misremembering, or taking what we said in hyperbole about it for the real thing.

E2: unrelated to the blog name, I did think of incels/untitled/this kind of stuff like the troubles of lonely nerds/NDs not getting dating and going to the wrong places when I read the last part of this question Dr NerdLove answered, the ‘to be perfectly blunt’ part. And just how common the ‘you can’t be mad at me now’ thing is.

“You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”

And then everybody clapped.

(This is extra funny because he lost friends over the gaza genocide debate when his leftwing (and Jewish) friend told him ‘well we do have power over them’ re the protesting students, to which he has a good Rationalist replied with ‘FUCK YOU’. He himself describes the situation slightly differently, but he has shown he doesn’t always have the best ability to understand others in these kinds of emotional moment, and he cannot fathom he might be wrong (and that is how you end up stealing from the tip jar)).

E: And so much references to ‘the sneerers’ and our arguments again, he promised he would stop reading our shit because it is unhealthy for him. But looking at the arguments, I’m happy to see that he has indeed not read our stuff. The I in TESCREAL/TREACLES(*) stands for Incel.

Also, while the Rationalists are not incels, what does the name of your blog stand for Scott? (E: wanted to edit in a link but can’t find the explainer page, wonder if he read it again and went ‘wow yeah I get why people think that isn’t great’ and deleted it (I did find this congrats on being consistently wrong)).

*: still think these are dumb abbreviations, but not letting that get in the way of a dumb joke.

Brave New World mostly seems to do the same iirc. The main character just rejects going to intellectual island iirc. The Culture, or life as a House of Suns shatterling also doesn’t seem bad.

E: sorry slight spoilers for old and popular science fiction series. (You’d think they would have picked some more positive but less well known transhumanist science fiction books with nice societies, or pick specifics they liked but nope).

The Foundation is a horrible place to live, it is a frontier city created under false pretenses where you live under constant threat of a crisis, manipulated from afar by the second foundation, while ‘Rome’ falls apart around them. Billions die.

Hyperion is a horrible place to live, the main hegemonic force is a hypercolonialist empire that destroys all variety, kills the dolphins, is secretly run by AIs who abuse humanity, power everything by destroying the energy that gives us love, and morph into a authoritarian theocracy secretly run by AIs who are now at war with the beings in the love dimension. Also, billions die when the first empire falls.

Ringworld is … not a book series I remember much from, read it when I was young, might be ok might not be.

Also all these worlds also have a big magical element in it, dune with all the spice stuff, hyperion with the love dimension, foundation with the psi powers and magical prediction powers. And they are setups for the stories conflicts (and well, stories).

It is all a bit like saying you want Singularity skies Festival arrive without reading up on what happens afterwards. Helps if you actually read books not skim through them in 2 hours.

E: I need to make a confession, this guy changed my mind on agentic LLMs. They should use them, it will improve their reading comprehension. (they should also add pronouns, if they don’t want to be called they)

“Yes,” chatGPT whispered gently ASMR style, “you should but that cryptocoin it is a good investment”. And thus the aliens sectioned off the Sol solar system forever.

Using a death for critihype jesus fuck

Emil Kirkegaard

Drink!

So, would you say you send a lot of time thinking about the citizens of Eastmeg One and Two? Speak directly into the recorder perp.

At least Musk is hiring people smarter than himself.

E: this kernel mode stuff is very sovcit.

deleted by creator

Deleted earlier message, sorry I called Scott out for not doing things he had done. Even if the whole mods ‘restricting her messages now only after she went after Scott’ is quite iffy. (LW people write normally challenge failed “One upfront caveat. I am speaking about “Kat Woods” the public figure, not the person. If you read something here and think, “That’s not a true/nice statement about Kat Woods”, you should know that I would instead like you to think “That’s not a true/nice statement about the public persona Kat Woods, the real human with complex goals who I’m sure is actually really cool if I ever met her, appears to be cultivating.”” (The idea is good, this just reads like a bit of a sovcit style text and could have been replaced with ‘I mean this not as an attack on her personally, I’m just doubting the effectiveness of her spammy posting style’). (E: I do agree with them however, not the ‘we should check if this is effective’ but more that the posting style is low effort, annoying, boring, dated, bit cringe etc).

Also: Scott: ‘Mods mods mods, kat spill my jice help hel help help’

I was very tempted to go ‘don’t think it is more than one nobel guy, which is not great because of nobel disease anyway. I could link to rationalwiki here but that has come under threat because the people whos content you enjoy Scott started a lawsuit against them’ but think that might be a bit culturewarry, and I also try not to react at the places we point towards. As that just leads to harassment like behaviour. Also Penrose is a Nobel prize winner who is against AGI stuff.

That is the one I was thinking of, the way the comments are phrased makes it seem like there are a lot of winners who are doomers. Guess Hinton is a one man brigade.

Yeah the financial illiteracy is quite high, on top of the rest. But dont worry AI nobel prize winners say it is possible!

(Are there multiple ai Nobel prize winners who are ai doomers?)

and that’s how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don’t need sleep.

Wonder how many people stopped being AI-doomers after this. I use the same argument against ai-doom.

E: the guy doing the most basic ‘It really is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’ bit in the comments and have somebody just explode in ‘not being able to imagine it properly’ is a bit amusing. I know how it feels to just have a massive hard to control reaction over stuff like that but oof what are you doing man. And that poor anti-capitalist guy is in for a rude awakening when he discovers what kind of place r/ssc is.

E2: Scott is now going ‘this clip is taken out of context!’ not that the context improves it. (He claims he was explaining what others believe not what he believes, but if that is so, why are you so aggressively defending the stance? Hope this Scott guy doesn’t have a history of lying about his real beliefs).

Yeah, and despite me being quite anti LLMs, I did like how he didn’t make them useless, fits nicely with the story, also allowed the great ending line.

lol that tweet. But yeah why don’t the people who write dystopian fiction about the torment nexus and the people who want to build torment nexusses together? Don’t they want to understand why we cannot make life slightly better for the poor tortured kid?

I saw people complain his characters had no debt and character or something because they all were so agreeable, and I was a bit confused. (I have not read any of his earlier work, some of it I wanted to read but never got around to, mentally pushed it further upward now) but it was odd to see that comment after reading this short story. I mean yes they were agreeable (after all they had to work together) but it revealed a lot of character. This bit alone: ‘“So what do you call mine?” Ken asked bravely. “Peak Conformist,” Helen replied. Ken laughed, unoffended.’