Repetition & Difference

Noise to Signal #10

An Internet of tunnels; a city of rooms:

POOLBOYISM ! @heartlocketxo

when i was facetiming paul from the bible a month or 2 ago and he said nyc is a city of rooms dam i feel that

Believing there’s only one kind of repetition, or that signals are easy to contextualize, is a classic mistake. (L=A=N=G Po types RT this every time.)

🌟 Reality gamer @realboyphysical

While the Twitter user repeats the same to prove that he is different, the Redditor repeats differently to prove that he is the same

I’ll take “useful frames to delude yourself into” for $100:

Invincible Summer @whomademecrispy

"playfulness" seems to revolve around believing "I can't fuck up in a way that matters" either because you think the stakes are low compared to what they could be or because you believe there are no stakes high enough to scare you

Oral history thread on surrogation and degenerate effects in Skyrim:

Joel Burgess @JoelBurgess

Alright, so inspired by @NPurkeypile's bee post yesterday, here is one of my favorite bits of Skyrim oral history - the myth of the treasure fox. I've told this story before in talks/etc, but I don't think I've shared it with twitter. Here goes.

Medium-rare type of guy:

𝔻𝕤𝕪𝕝𝕩𝕚𝕒 𝔻. ◉̶ @Dsylxia

Esoteric Twitter Starter Pack

Introducing “psychotechnology”:

acid shill @acidshill

kinda the way i think of it was that there were a lot of ancient philosophers who were absolute geniuses, but they didn’t have the tools we have today; they had to *invent* those tools so they had to struggle through a lack of psychotechnology to do things that seem trivial now

First good Yud tweet in years:

Eliezer Yudkowsky @ESYudkowsky

Let's be clear on this: Covid-19 was not a disaster. Covid-19 was a warning shot. It says that we need massively scaled up mRNA vaccine factories, that can vaccinate everyone on Earth in 1 month, before a serious pathogen gets released. And it is, of course, being ignored.

Peter Sullivan @PeterSullivan4

NEW: Democrats are considering cutting back on new funds for *pandemic preparedness* in the reconciliation bill to make room for other priorities, sources say, prompting an outcry Ex-CDC head Tom Frieden calls it "stunning" https://t.co/jExwVC4iDH

What we talk about when we talk about “intent” is literally just a predictive algorithm for future behavior:

sir(?) dirty little lawn carrot @goblinodds

in the context of consequentialism, intent is relevant-- because intent is predictive of behavior

On astrology as a form of entropy generation:

snav @qorprate

people keep asking me "why are you studying astrology? what's so cool about it?" so i decided to write up my go-to response:

listed.toWhat is Astrology? | simpolismThe intent of this document is to answer common questions I get about how I conceive of astrology and why I think it’s cool and useful. Basic Concepts Astrology is a description language for agenti...

Examples wanted:

Hazard @natural_hazard

Help needed! I'm collecting examples of video clips that begin with pure visual confusion (you can't even parse what you're looking at), and then eventually everything "snaps into place" and you go from confused disjoint visual sensations to seeing *objects*

(But seriously send us your examples of anything you find well-captured by an example, we want them)

The people around an idea are its embodied representation, and our representations for groups of people are… idiosyncratic:

Benjamin Todd @ben_j_todd

1) Turning effective altruism into an identity has been powerful, but has had many downsides: * Associates the ideas with a (weird) social scene * Creates social pressure to conform * Puts off people who don't want a label My take is we shouldn't do the same for longtermism...

The new gossip girl knows its stuff:

Invincible Summer @whomademecrispy

time to watch episode 2 of the gossip girl reboot and catalog some of the interesting dynamics, a 🧵

As soon as red flags are codified, they’re avoided. Evaluation regimes are always adversarial:

David Chapman @Meaningness

@mrgunn @WisdomRebel There are well-meaning efforts to publicize “here are some simple red flags for mainstream-hyped ‘scientific discoveries’ that are probably not true” (small N, small effect size, etc.) but even that seems borderline quixotic. I don’t clearly see a way forward… do you?

Thread on villages:

Kasey Klimes @KaseyKlimes

This is the village in Germany where my parents met in the 1980's. It is called Imsbach, population: 971 The longest walk you can take while staying in the village is 15 minutes. a thread about villages/

Kevin Focke on his own ideas around surrogation and selection games:

Kevin Focke @KevinFocke

You talk about ‘selection games’, I talk about ‘fulfillment games’. It’s interesting to read and I would like to explore the similarities and differences between our approaches. I’ll first try to charitably summarize your concept. Do correct me if I misunderstood parts:

Self-deception is inherently limited by cognitive load, but not just because it’s “hard” to keep things in mind:

Yatharth @AskYatharth

To effectively pretend to be a certain way, you have to really believe it, or be aware of it. This impedes any access you might have to how you actually feel. So you live in a fake world, a world “above”, and have no connection with the below.