@EY
This advice won’t be for everyone, but: anytime you’re tempted to say “I was traumatized by X”, try reframing this in your internal dialogue as “After X, my brain incorrectly learned that Y”.
I have to admit, for a brief moment i thought he was correctly expressing displeasure at twitter.
@EY
This is of course a dangerous sort of tweet, but I predict that including variables into it will keep out the worst of the online riff-raff - the would-be bullies will correctly predict that their audiences’ eyes would glaze over on reading a QT with variables.
Fool! This bully (is it weird to speak in the third person ?) thinks using variables here makes it MORE sneer worthy, especially since this appear to be a general advice, but i would struggle to think of a single instance in my life where it’s been applicable.
I don’t understand what he means by “my brain incorrectly learned” - he’s comfortable reducing everyone’s trauma down to X and Y variables AND asserting that their trauma is always based on a brain fart?
It’s gotta be a cult programming thing. X happened to you, you learned Y, but that’s incorrect, you should have learned Z, read this 10000 word manuscript, then come to our learning session/poly orgy and we can become less wrong together
yeah, my first thought was “how does this work as an excuse”
He’s trying to say: “There’s no such thing as abuse in our church, for in our truth seeking (of which I am the arbiter) we are holy. If your pain has allowed you to divine our twisted mysteries, it is no pain, if you stray from doctrine, then repent sinner! The sin is in you, never in the church or its elders”
I’m almost certain this is an oblique reponse to some recent abuse complaint, maybe the Nonlinear stuff.
EDIT: Spelling
He had a showerthought on how trauma works, and how to fix it, and didn’t bother to check if it was true, but just stated it like it would fix people. Big R Rationalism!
Just-so stories and their consequences have been a disaster for the internet discourse. Too bad the guy is quoted by press as an expert on anything.
Someone in the replies brings this up, that trauma could be the result of learning something correct. Yud’s brilliant response is that this makes no sense to describe this as trauma, because you don’t get traumatized by physics class, right?
https://nitter.net/ESYudkowsky/status/1701691489548697793#m
I feel like this is where first-principles rationalism + his intelligence god complex really shines through. He thought he had figured out the root cause of trauma, was told that this wasn’t the case, then tries to redefine trauma itself instead of admitting that his (extremely simple, by the way) idea was wrong. I mean look at the way he starts his response:
Because it’s traumatic, that’s why. No further explanation required.
Isn’t this literally formally fallacious? “There exist non-traumatizing true things” doesn’t imply “all true things are non-traumatizing.”
Ordinarily I’m not one to harp on logical fallacies, but come on Yudkowsky, you’re supposed to be Mr. Rational!
It’s funny how this is a perfect model for how transhumanists, rationalists, cryptoists etc try to model human behaviour in binary terms.
Scene: Yud, a middle aged man, walks around in a forest. epistemic status: no knowledge of bear traps.
Yud steps in a bear trap. His shin bones break, blood begins geysering out from his leg, and he howls in pain.
Yud, gritting teeth: “I have attained correct knowledge about bear traps. My biases are now less wrong. Thusly, this is not trauma!”
You’re in a forest, walking along in the leaves, when all of a sudden you look down…
You look down and see Yud, Swlabr. he’s crawling toward you…
Yud lays on its back, his leg bleeding in the hot sun, struggling to get a bear trap of his leg, but he can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.
You’re correcting his usage of the word trauma! Why is that, Swlabr?
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I thought this was going to be a shia lebeouf reference, pleased to see it’s a VK reference.
Haha, I was thinking about dropping in a ref to actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u4M6vppCI in there but, simply didnt.
All I’m saying is, one man’s flesh is another man’s nootropics.