Some light sneerclub content in these dark times.
Eliezer complements Musk on the creation of community notes. (A project which predates the takeover of twitter by a couple of years (see the join date: https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes )).
In reaction Musk admits he never read HPMOR and he suggests a watered down Turing test involving HPMOR.
Eliezer invents HPMOR wireheads in reaction to this.
It’s sad when people pretend to have read some great piece of literature (like War and Peace), but at least it’s understandable from a social perspective - the pretender wishes to conform to an ideal of a cultivated person.
It’s hard to say if it’s sadder or just more pathetic to pretend to have read a piece of dreck like HPMOR.
Something I will say about War and Peace that’s rarely mentioned - probably because it is a work that is meant to mark one out as a cultured person - within the first 50 pages of the book, there’s a scene where a group of the main characters tie a policeman to the back of a bear. For some reason, it’s the part of the book that’s stuck with me the longest in association with its story.
I read War and Peace but have only vague memories of it, because I read it in eighth grade. We had an “accelerated reader” program, you see, in which we were supposed to read books and then take quizzes on them to accumulate points. The longer books counted for more. Nearly all of the list we could pick from looked incredibly boring, so I decided to get a year’s worth of points in one go.
Congratulations?