There's a haunting version of this in Blade Runner 2049 that they call a "baseline test." Replicants have to prove they're sufficiently robotic by reciting extremely alienating things about themselves in rapid succession:
Originally the Voight-Kampff test[0] was for this purpose, from the original novel by Philip K Dick "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"[1] from 1968. The test was designed to distinguish between replicants (androids/bots) and humans. Blade Runner (both the 1982 original[2] set in 2019, and the 2017 sequel[3] set in 2049) both feature the machine.
The baseline test seemed like an unnecessary deviance, and more like an active-duty psych exam measuring the psychological effects of the job.
It's also arguably the point of the novel/movies (I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilers).
Yeah, I liked the idea that it's asymmetrical. You use the VK to find replicants trying to pass as human, but to try to make sure they're sufficiently robotic you need something else. Which makes sense: the original VK would be easy to tank if you were _trying_ to act like a replicant.
And narratively I think it works amazingly. The idea of forcing someone to prove that they're sufficiently inhuman ... shudder.
Most of his articles could be about a third as long with no loss in clarity. The meandering windups can be _rhetorically_ effective, especially when they appeal to the biases of the reader, as they appeal to mine. But they're not truth-directed, and often obscure weak or blindered reasoinng, as I think they do here.
Isn't this a bit cliche? "It's too long" without engagement with the argument or even with how exactly it is too long? I've just seen this a few too many times in regards to Scott and would like to see someone actually substantiate it.
If you can make the same points with 1/10th as many words, the original was too long. The guy writes extremely well, but could use some practice at editing for brevity. A wikipedia link like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance gets partway there.
Distilling it to 10% would get the facts across, but the long build-up of argument makes it much more convincing. Rhetoric is different from, say, technical writing: it optimises not (just) for efficiency but for effectiveness.
Do you believe that the SSC post is primarily about pluralistic ignorance? Do you find that even the first few paragraphs of the post are at all consistent with this belief?
Maybe SSC is long because it's putting forth complex ideas. Ideas that some readers don't want to take the time to understand.
For those who want a few sentences they can chuck into one of the pre-existing boxes they formed at school, I agree SSC isn't very convenient for that.
Pluralistic ignorance is one of the ideas that comes up in the article, though not with that label. As such, it is a helpful starting point and it is easy to understand.
I thought the article made interesting points, but could have done so far more succinctly. By comparison, when I read Richard Stallman's stuff, I don't always agree with it, but I'm usually impressed by how concisely he is able to say things. SSC is too often the opposite.
To be honest, I don't find the term or the wiki article that illuminating. Scott's way of doing things from scratch, in his own words, feels more worth my time. And IMO he is doing something way more interesting in that article than just rehashing a concept we happen to have a name for.
Subjective feelings aside, it would be more interesting to give an example of an author who addresses the topics Scott addresses at a similar level of insight and manages to do so more concisely. I don't think Stallman is much of an example of that.
Good writing is not some universal fungible. It really does depend on what you're trying to say. And there are basically no other writers I can think of who are trying to model a way of thinking like Scott.
I guess it depends on the audience. As a kid who grew up watching Star Trek, I already knew that humans are illogical. And having been around through the Trump presidency among other things, I know they go berserk over some seemingly innocuous topics, and that you have to be careful to not trigger people. So I didn't need to read 20 pages to absorb those lessons.
An analogy: we're mostly experienced programmers here, so we can usually understand a quick description of a programming concept even if it's new to us. A programming book for beginners might have to spend much longer getting the same idea across. Perhaps "Scott's way of doing things from scratch" is like that. But once you've read a few of those essays, you're no longer a beginner, so you'd rather have the quick version.
That isn't really the point. The essay is about how anti-human it is to force truly independent thinkers into a box where they're allowed to freely make technical contributions but have to steer clear of sociocultural landmines. Although some very adept scientists, like Kolmogorov, have managed in situations like this.
More than once I've gotten the impression that people who criticize Scott for verbosity assume he's blah blah blahing about stuff they already understand, when in reality he's thinking a couple levels deeper than they're accustomed to from a blog.
"The essay is about how anti-human it is to force truly independent thinkers into a box where they're allowed to freely make technical contributions but have to steer clear of sociocultural landmines."
Ok, that is a reasonable distillation. And you just said it in one sentence. Why does it take Scott 20 pages?
Because he's not just making that claim, he's immersing you in why he thinks it's true. By walking you through that world like it's a movie, and pointing out all the inescapable cultural corrosion that follows from letting the world be that way.
Scott knows that people will blithely accept his thesis as obvious... until the moment it matters most, when there is social pressure to accept something untrue. He wants you to feel the price you'll pay if you cave.
Shrug, dystopian novels like 1984 serve that purpose and do a better job imho. I can't speak for other readers but I don't think I got anything from that particular article that I wouldn't have gotten from a version condensed to a few bullet points. There are other SSC/AC10 articles that I liked more, so I do keep reading it sometimes.
I don’t read Scott just to consume new information or ideas, I read his blogs because they’re legitimately a joy to read. You’re right, you could trim a _lot_ of fat from these posts, but at the end of the day if his readers enjoy his prose, I don’t think he has much reason to change.
You're underestimating the value of a good lead-up, and the principle of "pace and lead".
Most people are not interested in reading a Wiki article on an abstract topic, and want to be taken along for the ride - including why it's worth reading the article.
He is an excellent writer for getting hundreds of thousands of people to want to know about Kolmogorov complicity in a useful way.
I'm sure you could come up with a hypothetical prosocial falsehood, like "aliens assassinated JFK for petty reasons, but they're very vain and will destroy the Earth if word gets out." If you become President and learn the real story, you damn sure better stick to the script about the grassy knoll!
But I think it's also possible to have pro-social taboos, particularly if they're attempts to correct for some indefensible (but maybe cognitively appealing or historically convenient) past error.
So for example, imagine a society that long practiced infanticide against the neurodivergent, and state-backed violence, disenfranchisement, and murder against the merely socially awkward. After intense and often violent social struggle, this society now affords them (us) formal equality, but big gaps in wealth and power remain, and a revanchist minority (with a terrorist fringe) openly wishes for a return of the old ways.
That society might develop strong taboos against "just asking questions" about whether shy people really had it so bad, or whether society should worry about whether they're treated fairly, or whether there isn't some innate biological difference that accounts for their relative lack of success. That would probably be a good thing!
There's some amount of epistemic deadweight loss you would happily accept to be extra guarded against backsliding on the core ethical commitments. You might even come out ahead epistemically, where there would otherwise be strong but subtle cultural biases, pressures of ideological convenience, and cognitive-scientific artifacts around in-groups and out-groups that make _false_ claims about the shy, awkward, or neurodivergent more appealing than the objective facts merit.
The problem with signing up with an underground Straussian heretic network is that if you're not actually beset by the Inquisition or by Stalinism, you're likelier to trap yourself in an epistemic filter bubble than to discover some secret truth.
Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling with the effects his memo might have had on such a complex environment, or even sticking to pursuing the empirical facts about his claims, he decided to pursue a career as a right-wing micro-celebrity, only engaging with conservative activists and alt-right trolls. And he's been stuck there ever since, with his fellow culture warriors clapping each other on their backs about what brave heretics they are, instead of getting back to building anything interesting.
> Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company.
perhaps you missed the part where he was defamed and slandered in international press. his name became shorthand for a crude stereotype of a bigoted tech bro, totally undeservedly, for (very!) gently questioning the policies of a giant publicly-traded company.
I think you can draw parallels between that trajectory and the dynamics of "censorship" (moderation) on big social media platforms.
You compare Twitter vs. Gab or Reddit vs. Voat, and these free speech alternatives get stuck in that alt-right filter bubble precisely because social media moderation has been largely (certainly not entirely) effective at targeting hatred and toxicity. When you only ban a bunch of hateful toxic people from your platform, any competing platform for the banned will be dominated by hateful toxic people, and nobody wants to be a part of that. If Reddit bans cat pictures tomorrow, suddenly there is a huge opportunity open for a competing platform that can appeal to wide mainstream audiences. This dynamic helps keep social media moderation in check.
Similarly, if there had been hard, actionable truth at the core of Damore's claims, there would have been a huge opportunity to gather evidence and observe effects and come up with an organizational system that better reflected the reality of human social relationships. If that wasn't the case, then all he would be left with is the path he seems to have taken - align with a camp in the culture wars and seek exposure through identity-based media.
>Similarly, if there had been hard, actionable truth at the core of Damore's claims, there would have been a huge opportunity to gather evidence and observe effects and come up with an organizational system that better reflected the reality of human social relationships.
Why would the opportunity to change the organizational system have anything to do with whether there was any truth to what he said?
Just being right doesn't create such opportunities.
It is not enough to know the truth when there are trillions of reasons ($) to preserve the lie.
It is easy:
1. ban inconvenient views on popular platforms. Start with disgusting views ("think of the children" is a great start), when extend (it helps when there are people who can be offended by anything--encourage it)
2. flood marginal platforms with trolls/provocateurs
3. point at the disgusting content your trolls generated and claim that anybody who uses the uncensored services is disgusting by association.
You were right about this for a while, although I sympathized with his bitterness. But now he actually ended up getting into art and he's really good. Check out his Twitter feed sometime.
Very few people seem to bother sympathizing with the unwoke autistic nerd, but I feel happy for him that he transcended this deeply unfair, absurd, traumatic incident in his life and found something beautiful to do.
His pinned tweet is great. Never has a simple "lol" more sharply skewered elite hypocrisy. They want your opinion on how to boldly change things, but only if it agrees with their pre-existing orthodoxy on how to boldly change things. They're the exact same as the people they criticize in that article, if not far worse. The author of the piece he QTed is editor of Wired.com, one of the most vicious hate-brigaders and misinformers during the Damore affair.
The other ones you link are a little boring I grant. But I notice you're filtering away all the jokes and art and focusing on culture war things. Interesting choice there given that I was trying to draw your attention to the other stuff.
He doesn't just do AI art. He does beautiful original art. First tweet after the pinned one. It was quite striking to me, but seems you didn't notice it.
Consider asking yourself who is the one blinkered by obsession with the culture war?
>Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company.
How do you think regimes normally deal with dissent? Extreme violence makes for vivid imagery but it’s not typical. Usually, it’s as simple as threatening to fire you from respectable employment and education. This is how the entire Eastern Bloc kept a lid on things.
Yes, but being shot was not the fate of a typical dissident under late socialism. Gentler states like that of Hungary also managed to suppress dissident and not with bullets. More typical is the following:
>Konrád lost his job by order of the political police in July 1973. For half a year he worked as a nurse's aide at the work-therapy-based mental institution at Doba.
Orders of the political police are backstopped by violence. I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing?
Either way, the head-shooting and the stake-burning are Scott Alexander's metaphors here, from the linked SSC post. As the severity, suddenness, and violence of the sanctions heretics actually face go down my intuitions about his Parable of Lightning start to change. Dial them all the way down to Damore's situation (private business terminating at-will employment, for repeated on-the-job behavior that creates HR problems, totally non-violent) and my intuitions flip entirely.
All the rhetorical work of the Parable is done by this false equivalence. That it falls apart when stated so plainly causes me at least to worry about the reliability of SSC's digressive style. What other unfounded assumptions slip through on mood affiliation when you're not disciplined enough to write straightforwardly?
I seems like a lot hinges on "The identities of the bullies is well known."
The President's letter says "If those students who issues the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary sanction." Have the threateners been reliably identified in, for example, press accounts? It seems very possible that in some communities on campus "everyone knows who it is" without the administration actually knowing, or being able to reliably prove, who it was.
The tooling system was ok even then, but core development seemed listless. Vitalik gave a keynote at a conference I went to and talked about why it was actually good for the ecosystem that he and all the core contributors spent all their time traveling to conferences.
Since then, transactions per day on the network have doubled, but gas costs are up 10X in gwei and some truly ludicrous multiplier in dollars. I suspected then that the switch to Proof of Stake and other scaling fixes was the fusion power of ETH, always six months away, and that concern looks really vindicated.
Oh yeah, a proper great power could snuff out Bitcoin, to say nothing of the smaller coins, if they put their mind to it.
If there's a real non-bubble use case, it will have to be around making a bad but much less expensive version of something that's already possible offline, but that requires lots of lawyers to set up.
OnlyFans is a classic two-sided marketplace with strong network effects. The more paying customers are already on the site the more attractive it is for new performers to choose OnlyFans as their platform, and the more performers there are on OnlyFans, the stronger the value proposition is for customers. That tends to give you a winner-take-all (or at least winner-take-most) market, where if you can establish a dominant market position is becomes self-reinforcing, you become very hard to displace, and can command very large profit margins. It's exactly the dynamic that has kept eBay the primary way of doing auctions online for over two decades.
When you have a market like that, it often makes sense to pursue growth as an end in itself, well past the point of profitability, because the reward for coming in first place (a durable monopoly) is way higher than a linear projection would suggest. Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) gives an especially clear explanation of this logic in Blitzscaling: https://www.blitzscaling.com/
I wonder if there's market to be gained from people who otherwise wouldn't venture near a site with such reputation who might be converted into the main model.
Picture of new CEO Bryan Crowley looks like a parody. And this line!
> First of all, I want to take a moment to say hello and thank you to all of our Soylent friends out there who have helped turn Rob’s vision into one of the most talked about and fastest growing brands in the food and beverage industry!
I'm not sure the comment was about the CEO's looks as much as the photo itself. It has a stock/cliche feel to it with the product in the foreground, slight smile, pose, clothing, etc.
The comment is more about what happens when a corporate board hires a PR agency and does a photo session, and how it results in something that looks fake in a very certain way.
yep , and super biased pro anything SV. Almost in a way biased liberal but I would say anything pro SV / $$$ is good here. The authentic high quality content has become mainstream. Its turned into poptech.
This photo is one of those in the moment shots you sometimes get. I guarantee you the one taken 0.1 seconds before and the one taken 0.1 seconds after this one look like they could be found on one of those yellow page tabloids that purport to show the celebrity's alleged substance abuse problem.
The fact that this is the photo that he and the marketing people chose is possibly telling. But probably not. Some people have poor taste and yet do great work. Did anyone really think Jobs' turtle necks were stylish? (ducks and takes cover)
I have to agree. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but whoever approved this photo had to have realized he looks like he's selling Vitamix mixers in Costco, right...?`
Both pics look really heavily edited. I kinda expect some editing, but they went too far.
That said, glad to see they have gone into caffeinated foods. Caffeine addiction should help them keep customers better. However, a 7-11 partnership is not as good, as 7-11 is pretty 'down market' for a 'high-tech' seeming brand.
It is a fantastic brand - and that's all it ever was. It was never revolutionary.
Soylent was always just a lifestyle brand that put an already existing product - liquid meal replacements - into the hands of people who weren't elderly or bodybuilders, namely: nerds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h-seEowtDw