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[silverspawn]

Reading Antkind from Charlie Kaufman. 69 pages in, it's starting to become very strange, which I suppose was expected. What I didn't expect was the social justice angle. The main character is this guy who's incredibly insecure despite being a reasonably successful writer* and constantly thinks about social justice issues. There are situations where he will go onto a one page monologue/rant over a minor thing. But it's Charlie Kaufman, so it's not clear what the point of it is. There probably isn't a straight-forward point or purpose. It's probably just supposed to be a realistic take on the inner lives that some people today actually have.

It opens with a monologue about how cool and rebellious he is (specifically his beard) and how he doesn't care what other people think, but it soon becomes clear that he cares so much about what other people think that he worries about it constantly

Also he's super literate about film and thinks about directors and stuff a lot, and at one point in passing makes a dig at Charlie Kaufman, which is funny.

* ikr

[silverspawn]

Now he's just trolling me. This is in a 5+ page long rant that the main character gives out of nowhere about how films must be watched seven times

[silverspawn]

high quality game:

[silverspawn]

Based on various observations, I think people on LessWrong are quite opposed to the idea of optimizing for persuasion, even if it just means intentionally sounding friendly. A lot of people in general may be opposed to the idea, in fact.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. The reason it doesn't make sense is because writing style is a ridiculously important property and different people do widely differently on that axis. If no one optimized for it, all that means is that the people who happen to hit the style naturally have an unfair advantage. Which is pretty close to where we are anyway because many people don't optimize their style on purpose.

(Related, Aella had the same justification for why it's okay to be deliberately seductive.)

Also man if I hadn't changed my style on purpose, no one would ever want to read anything I wrote ever because my native way of writing makes me sound like an arrogant asshole. I mean it's not native anymore; I now have a tolerable native style, but it's only because I consciously changed it.

I would maybe take this more seriously if people weren't so obviously affected by style everywhere. When I posted my fan card thing here for the first time (Dominion Reverence), I didn't yet understand any of this and since my native writing made me sound like an arrogant asshole, that's what the post sounded like. And wouldn't you know it got zero upvotes. (Which is a massive slap in the face to a signaling sensitive person.) Later I edited it to sound differently and it subsequently got a bunch of upvotes. But I'm sure it's all coincidence and people just picked up on the objective improvement in average card quality.

This whole thing is just like saying pronouns are stupid, or caring about offensive gg is stupid, or mocking people for not getting up and doing stuff, or for being too scared to watch movies, or whatever. Like all of this is in the category of taking something that isn't a problem for you and extrapolating it to everyone else. The unfathomable stupidity of the golden rule; I've talked about this before.

So all of this not optimizing for style is silly. And there's a really straight-forward way to do it ethically; just optimize under the hard constraint of only writing things you think are true.

But LessWrong people definitely don't like to hear about this so I'm going to shut up about it indefinitely. It's totally fine to optimize style as long as you don't talk about it!

[silverspawn]

I was going to link to the Joe Rogan episode with stephan guyenet as an example of why you don't really want people to not optimize for style, but I forgot that he doesn't put episodes on youtube anymore because JOEROGANNEEDSMOREMONÄYMKAY??ßß. But case in point, Stephan sounded unfathomably insufferable on that podcast and the youtube comment section at the time was full of people roasting him for it. Most people are just clueless about how bad this can get, and how astonishingly little it tells you about the person. I had listened to stephan guyenet before on RationallySpeaking (link), and there he sounded totally nice, because he demonstrably wasn't nervous.

[silverspawn]

Reddit comment thread has a lot of shitting on Stephan as well, mostly a bit further down, though it's not as unanimous as it was on youtube

[silverspawn]

today in a discord channel someone was like "next weekend I'm gonna take LSD and then sit down for 50 hours". Now this probably doesn't sound special because you thought it was hyperbolic, but they meant literally, sit on a chair for 50 hours straight. Like the longest meditation I ever did multiplied by about 30.

but it seemed genuinely dangerous to me (I have these memories of stories about people who die after playing video games nonstop, no idea if they're true, but seems risky, if nothing else the dehydration seems bad). I think they've settled on something less hardcore now like only 24 hours with two breaks in between. How moderate!

the moral is that there are impressively many things you could spend your time doing. they'll probably have a more intense experience during those 24 hours than most people ever do in their life. certainly a different one. I am not this hardcore, alas.

[faust]

One of my favorite YouTube channels made a video on Effective Altruism:

[silverspawn]

uh I'm sort of scared that watching this will make me very angry. I get very annoyed at arguments based on who does a thing vs the thing itself

[faust]

uh I'm sort of scared that watching this will make me very angry. I get very annoyed at arguments based on who does a thing vs the thing itself

Well this does mention SBF, though it's more like a hook, and the argument that EA is bad because of SBF is explicitly dismissed.

[Awaclus]

uh I'm sort of scared that watching this will make me very angry. I get very annoyed at arguments based on who does a thing vs the thing itself

The title is pretty clickbaity, the video itself is a lot better. I watched it while playing generals.io so I'm not 100% sure I didn't miss something crucial, but it's definitely not a "ShiTting on EA because some of the people involved are rich" video, there's both criticism and defense of EA in it based specifically on the thing itself.

[silverspawn]

ok will watch

[silverspawn]

ok will watch

But first I gotta try the chess thing again. my rating is a whopping 200 points below where I think it belongs, and I think I'm in a pretty relaxed mental space, so now should be the time. And if it works poorly, that'll be an interesting data point.

[silverspawn]

Game 1 (b/W)



This is the opening where I said I usually lose because white gets a very clear way to attack and it's hard to defend. But I feel like I want to so I tried again and managed despite apparently playing widely suboptimal early. Everyone always goes apeshit trying to checkmate you, and no exception here; it was all a long effort to defend.

[silverspawn]

Game 2 (w/W)



Opponent misplayed the opening and I tried hard to punish; insanely complex positions resulted. That was the kind of game with a serious luck component; could have also lost that if things had worked out differently. Also when I decided on a piece sacrifice early, which did give me a better position, I missed a much easier and stronger move that would have probably ended the game quickly.

[silverspawn]

Game 3 (w/W)



And god wrote thusly: thou shallt not accept the queen's gambit or thine game will be suffering. Though actually it turns out that what I thought was misplay was actually theory and I got into a bad position trying to punish it. But then my opponent made several bad moves in a row as tends to happen when you don't think and don't just get lucky.

[silverspawn]

Game 4 (w/W)



I don't know this opening by black so I tried to play based on ChessPrinciples™, which seems to have worked ok. Then opponent missed a fork and then a follow up skewer and resigned.

I have no idea what's up with all these people being honorable resigning after they're behind. This usually doesn't happen.

[silverspawn]

Game 5 (w/W)



I think this is like supposed to be the sharpest or most exciting opening that's played in top level chess, but I don't think that's any reason to play it because man the reasons why go so far beyond my understanding.

Anyway, I messed and lost two pawns in the opening. Serves me right for playing more than 4 games in a row. Then my opponent missed a capture that messes up their king's defenses. Then they didn't realize the severity of the threat. I've lost plenty of games like that. It was then mate in 2 and my opponent had no idea and I missed it as well even though I realized the attacking potential, just not the concrete moves. Then my it was mate in 2 again and this time I saw it.

I should have been black this game but alas.

[silverspawn]

Game 6 (b/L)



Tough game. Opponent played well and I missed the move in the crucial moment. Should have realized that the move I played is very bad and then kept looking. No complaints. Idk what it is with chess being so wholesome today.

[silverspawn]

Game 7 (w/W)



So this was kind of stupid. My opponent misplayed the opening and got a bad position with their king exposed, but for inscrutable reasons it was extremely difficult to take advantage of (and the move that the engine says is there is preposterous, would have never found that). So they got a better position with a big time advantage, but I kept calm which I often don't and eventually could make it work.

[silverspawn]

Game 8 (b/L)



My opponent was all like "good luck" before the game. Who does that

Also someone was watching so they probably only pretended to be nice!

Anyway this game was silly. I slowly grinded out a better position through thoughtful play but then the position got so stale-y that I didn't know what to do, then things sort of worked out for my opponent. The graph is misleading because it's proportional to # of moves the entire part where white is better happened very quickly.

What I should have done is just make random moves once things got too stale and let my opponent figure it out. Shouldn't try to force it.

[silverspawn]

Game 9 (b/L)



That was the definition of things just working out because the unknown-parts-of-the-chess-tree god says so

[silverspawn]

Game 10 (w/W)



Enough wholesomeness. We're back to people who don't think and play the clowniest move at every position. This play style is so low entropy that I can almost always tell what they'll play, and if I can't, that's usually when they start thinking.

Anyway I didn't let my annoyance get in the way and grinded it out. A few months ago I would have probably thrown the game in the last move by offering a royal fork. But just putting the queen one square higher also worked while avoiding the fork. Yay thinking.

But my opponent resigned when the game was lost, so all is forgiven. Great person!

[silverspawn]

So 7-3. I'll take it. I think expecting 8-2 or better is unrealistic.

[silverspawn]

Game 5 was also silly in the opposite direction so I guess it's ok