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Post-mortem on Dragon Army Barracks. Suggestions for v2.0 include: being more cultish, having more fights, demanding more money from members, and making Dragons monitor each other more closely. (description nicked from analemma on /r/sneerclub)
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Mar 23, 2018 09:42
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It didn't load for me.
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Mar 23, 2018 11:38
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Cowards deleted it. You can still find it w/ search (89 points and ten comments) but the page itself returns the "We couldn't find that" when you click the result. Divabot, please copy/paste.
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Mar 23, 2018 11:50
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Relevant Tangent posted:Cowards deleted it. You can still find it w/ search (89 points and ten comments) but the page itself returns the "We couldn't find that" when you click the result. Divabot, please copy/paste. sadly I don't have a copy - have asked on /r/sneerclub. It's so JavaScript-based that neither IA nor AI managed to archive it. The SneerClub post has some quotes. edit: and even /r/slatestarcodex is going "wait, what" sadly the page has fallen out of both the Google and Bing caches divabot has a new favorite as of 12:45 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 12:38
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divabot posted:sadly I don't have a copy - have asked on /r/sneerclub. It's so JavaScript-based that neither IA nor AI managed to archive it. The SneerClub post has some quotes. Edit: so is their lovely system designed to make it easier to purge things that they'd rather be forgotten, or is that just a bonus? 90s Cringe Rock has a new favorite as of 13:33 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 13:30
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Edit: so is their lovely system designed to make it easier to purge things that they'd rather be forgotten, or is that just a bonus? A bonus, but one I'm sure they're delighted with. These guys are really into burning the evidence then denying it ever happened. Currently dredging archives for leftover stuff from the post. Why yes, I have no life. edit: otoh, this is all boring and inane. I will note though that Duncan deleted not only this post, but the original Dragon Army post. Also, LessWrong.com is now served by the new LesserWrong beta site software, and eleven years' links have been broken. Yay! divabot has a new favorite as of 14:19 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 14:04
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If you're A Rationalist Thinkfluencer and also burning the evidence the only difference between you and a cult leader is how many followers you have. I may think Big Yud is not a very smart man, but at least all of the Sequences are right there, so people can go decide for themselves that that's the case. I mean, even Roko's Basilisk post is findable with a bit of a search.
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Mar 23, 2018 15:35
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Did you find anything? I would love to read it even if it's inane, honestly.
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Mar 23, 2018 19:03
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I had the page open in chrome from yesterd but when I selected all to copy the page automatically refreshed and was lost to the ether. Failure upon failure.
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Mar 23, 2018 19:16
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The post isn't available, but you want to read the slapfights in the comments they're available here e: I didn't see anything particularly interesting in there. Although there was yet another example of "bayes for everything, except inference of people's thoughts from the things they said" Qwertycoatl has a new favorite as of 21:38 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 21:30
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That Dragon Army Retrospective, in full courtesy the estimable tangled_zans from sneerclub
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Mar 24, 2018 00:52
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Someone mind telling me what the gently caress dragon army is? This is the first I'm hearing about it but that retrospective makes it sound like Final Fantasy VII House
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Mar 24, 2018 01:21
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Improbable Lobster posted:Someone mind telling me what the gently caress dragon army is? This is the first I'm hearing about it but that retrospective makes it sound like Final Fantasy VII House the original post even rationalist tumblr melted down about this abject goddamn lunacy
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Mar 24, 2018 01:29
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I thought this would be them wanking over Ender's Game, and thinking how they could be better rationalist order following machines (auto correct suggested Nazis there), but I have no idea what that was about.  E: re: the retrospective E2: I read the link above this post. What in the heck was that??? Anticheese has a new favorite as of 01:37 on Mar 24, 2018 |
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Mar 24, 2018 01:32
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Being kind, it was one man's attempt to see if he would be a good charismatic leader and be able to bring out the excellence in people who subordinated some of their decision making to him ala the Army or other authoritarian institution. Being accurate, a cult of personality.
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Mar 24, 2018 05:24
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divabot posted:That Dragon Army Retrospective, in full I can see why he tried to scrub this, yikes.
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Mar 24, 2018 05:51
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quote:I dont think we at all ran into the failure mode of being too insular and cultish; if anything, we didnt pull together tightly enough, and many people (especially in the last two months) ended up Ghosting back toward their prior relationships almost entirely. I'm glad this guy doesn't actually have the ability to be the cult leader he desperately wants to be I'm surprised he deleted it. The comments on LW/rSSC aren't really overwhelmingly negative and I doubt he cares what sneerclub thinks. Did he get massively shat on by rationalist tumblr or rationalist facebook or something? Qwertycoatl has a new favorite as of 09:58 on Mar 24, 2018 |
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Mar 24, 2018 09:44
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divabot posted:the original post "fascist/authoritarian take on rationalist housing," "I have a unique combination of expertise that includes being a rationalist, sixth grade teacher, coach, RA/head of a dormitory, ringleader of a pack of hooligans, member of two honor code committees, curriculum director, obsessive sci-fi/fantasy nerd, writer, builder, martial artist, parkour guru, maker, and generalist. If anybody's intuitions and S1 models are likely to be capable of distinguishing the uncanny valley from the real deal, I posit mine are." yes, I'm not screaming in terror/confusion right now. I am on-board 100%. trying to think how it must be to interact with this kind of person face to face and it feels like I got spiders crawling all over me.
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Mar 24, 2018 18:27
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Improbable Lobster posted:Someone mind telling me what the gently caress dragon army is? This is the first I'm hearing about it but that retrospective makes it sound like Final Fantasy VII House My immediate assumption was that it was Final Fantasy VII House as played by Yudkowsky acolytes. How on the nose was I?
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Mar 24, 2018 19:13
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uber_stoat posted:"fascist/authoritarian take on rationalist housing," This person pretty obviously worships ESR. Crawling with spiders is the appropriate reaction.
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Mar 24, 2018 19:18
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eschaton posted:My immediate assumption was that it was Final Fantasy VII House as played by Yudkowsky acolytes. How on the nose was I? It's hard to tell what actually happened since it's all couched in jargon and weird metaphors, but the impression I got was that it didn't end up as a horrorshow, and failed because nobody really wanted to put up with the wannabe cultleader's poo poo.
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Mar 24, 2018 19:38
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Qwertycoatl posted:It's hard to tell what actually happened since it's all couched in jargon and weird metaphors, but the impression I got was that it didn't end up as a horrorshow, and failed because nobody really wanted to put up with the wannabe cultleader's poo poo. I'm fluent in lesswrong jargon! You might need some context here - the rationalist community is full to the brim of people who are very impressed with their own ideas, but who constantly suffer from self-loathing because they do not accomplish any of them. You should notice that this hypothetically results-focused community writes a lot of blog posts, but never really does anything else. Imagine the phrase "not living up to my potential" scrawled on every wall of a padded room to get a sense of the undercurrent of angst and anxiety that this community feels, constantly. What happened was, the house was supposed to make you better at "medium-to-long-term projects", which is code for "the great ideas you have but never accomplish", or for "we'll teach you to live up to what your fifth grade Gifted teacher said". A very appealing offer to some people in that community. Unfortunately, three things: One, the house was put together by Duncan Sabien, a guy who suffers from this exact problem, and so he implemented less than a third of his actual ideas over the course of six months, which means of course that he's convinced he'll get it right the second time. This is why he says that he needs more hand signals, orders, and secret cultic rituals - he didn't get those this time and he's sure they're the missing ingredient. Two, the plan for improving your accomplishing-things ability was to listen to Duncan Sabien explain abstract decision theory, and this did not work, because the people willing to go to remedial get-stuff-done summer camp already know that. They're mostly software engineers, where Duncan is a summer camp counselor at the Yudkowsky-affiliated CFAR. This is what that whole explanation of "stags and rabbits" is about - it's a theoretical exploration of a sort of problem that never comes up. If nobody does the dishes, it doesn't really matter whether they can collectively solve a puzzle room. Point two and a half: no one did the dishes. Three, most important, it didn't work. This really hurt some of the people in the house. They bought into this weird idea, threw away a lot of their time and normal lives to follow a guru who said he was going to fix the thing that made them feel so broken, and then some months later they find that it hasn't worked. You can imagine the dawning sense of comprehension and despair. So they stop showing up to things, they started following the letter of the law, just enough to not get kicked out. And when that happens to one person it makes the whole thing worse for everyone, which cascades. This is where he's going with the white, red, and black knight metaphor. It was a bad idea that didn't work and somehow Duncan Sabien, rationalist, has come out of it thinking that he has proved his critics wrong. At least one person got something out of it, I guess.
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Mar 24, 2018 20:23
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SolTerrasa posted:Imagine the phrase "not living up to my potential" scrawled on every wall of a padded room to get a sense of the undercurrent of angst and anxiety that this community feels, constantly. Hey so how do people who don't join cults deal with this? Asking for a friend
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Mar 24, 2018 21:57
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Being average and non-exceptional is fine, being a good and supportive person has more to do with how we treat others than how much we excel in intellectual achievements. If you got the gifted child bullshit from your parents (whether or not it was true), drop that crap like a bad habit and focus on being a warm-blooded mammal. 
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Mar 24, 2018 22:11
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Hey so how do people who don't join cults deal with this? Asking for a friend Smoke a loooot of weed, IME
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Mar 24, 2018 23:20
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That retrospective sure is something. There were two things that I found particularly striking about it. First was that the retrospective was every bit as vague as the original post. The original Dragon Army post already seemed sort of dippy in that it established as one of DA's goals accomplishing "medium-to-large-scale tasks requiring long-term coordination," as opposed, to say, setting out to accomplish a specific task which fit those criteria and then seeing if the group's methodology worked. But we're talking about internet rationalists here, so it wasn't surprising that the original post dealt only with glittering generalities. I found it a little more surprising that after six months of Dragon Army adventures, Duncan is still speaking in abstract terms of "This Experiment or That Experiment" instead of detailing any of the allegedly worthwhile tasks his "army" set out to accomplish. I also thought that his version of the stag hunt was sort of amusing, especially since he describes it as "super important." Without going into the ways in which his description varies from the typical game theory stag hunt, Duncan's super important variation on the game is ridiculous on the face of it. The way he sets it up, 10 players can hunt a stag for a total cost of 50 utilons in order to obtain 100 utilons in return, or they can each hunt rabbits for a total cost of 10 utilons in order to obtain 30 utilons in return. In other words, he created a game in which players can engage in a high risk strategy that has a 1:2 cost:benefit ratio if everyone cooperates, or a no-risk strategy that has a 1:3 cost:benefit ratio. Unless you add additional rules to Duncan's version of the game, any rational player will pick the rabbit every time. The only rationale Duncan offers for why anyone would choose otherwise is "But stags, tho." Upon reflection, I do agree with Duncan that he should have explained stag hunts from the beginning. If nothing else, the fact that the guy who wants to explore an authoritarian approach to fostering group cooperation is apparently incapable of even devising a hypothetical scenario in which cooperation is desirable might have served as a warning sign to potential recruits. Since the original post didn't contain enough warning signs as is, obviously.
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Mar 25, 2018 00:07
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The rationalists who actually moved in said it wasn't that utterly disastrous, so ... not Jonestown in Berkeley, then? That of course PROVES Duncan's CORRECTNESS, and
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Mar 25, 2018 00:17
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Improbable Lobster posted:Smoke a loooot of weed, IME This won't help you long-term, for the exact same reason that people who can't socialize without alcohol develop problematic relationships with the stuff. The actual trick here is to stop living in your head and start being a part of the world around you. Focus less on being successful and more on forming genuine connections with the people around you and in your life. You will still have that voice in your head, but you will have a bulwark against it. Do your best to cultivate meaningful experiences that have nothing to do with your intellect. Go dancing, talk to strangers about stupid poo poo, wander around town or a forest and look at cool poo poo and do your damnedest not to think about yourself. Eventually you will learn a trick for it. Focusing on my breathing works for me. Another good trick is learning a lot about local plants and animals, especially insects, before going hiking. Then you have a massive variety of things to focus on that aren't you. I am telling you this also as someone who has some "achievements" to go along with that garbage that was forced down my throat as a child at that age when people don't stop talking about how smart you are. It does not stop, and no matter how far you go it will not abate. You can collect all the trophies you want but it will never be enough, and that part of you will always be whispering that you can do more and should want more. We are raised from childhood to think that there's some innate potential that we have to meet to have succeeded in life. Intelligence is not an obligation, the idea of it is a burden more than anything. The thought that you have to work your hands to the bone to achieve some valuable thing isn't true, it is a sickness ground into us by a poisonous culture that values success over personal happiness. SolTerrasa posted:Imagine the phrase "not living up to my potential" scrawled on every wall of a padded room to get a sense of the undercurrent of angst and anxiety that this community feels, constantly. This is the most accurate description of the rationalist community I have ever encountered. They have a million different ways to say "I'm smart but I'm living in an apartment in Berkeley eating TV dinners and none of my friends talk to anyone who isn't in computers and I don't even have money to show for it." Everyone in the community talks about having some sort of executive dysfunction or some ineffable problem that prevents them from Doing Things and they're all dogged every waking moment by the specter of their own brain-power because they'd rather drink kool-aid then realize that they really aren't that extraordinary.
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Mar 25, 2018 00:32
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Hate Fibration posted:This won't help you long-term, for the exact same reason that people who can't socialize without alcohol develop problematic relationships with the stuff. The actual trick here is to stop living in your head and start being a part of the world around you. Focus less on being successful and more on forming genuine connections with the people around you and in your life. You will still have that voice in your head, but you will have a bulwark against it. Do your best to cultivate meaningful experiences that have nothing to do with your intellect. Go dancing, talk to strangers about stupid poo poo, wander around town or a forest and look at cool poo poo and do your damnedest not to think about yourself. Eventually you will learn a trick for it. Focusing on my breathing works for me. Another good trick is learning a lot about local plants and animals, especially insects, before going hiking. Then you have a massive variety of things to focus on that aren't you. Eh. I feel that people do have some degree of moral obligation to use their talents for the greater good. A lot of the "rationalist community" has unrealistic ideas about what this entails, though, and are convinced that they could Save the World if they applied themselves; it's a kind of guilt born of arrogance, and often leads them to waste their time on projects that are complete dead ends.
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Mar 25, 2018 01:21
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If you want a serious  , read The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller.
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Mar 25, 2018 02:14
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Hate Fibration posted:The actual trick here is to stop living in your head and start being a part of the world around you. Focus less on being successful and more on forming genuine connections with the people around you and in your life. Boo! Boo this man! After lessons my dancing is terrible, and after years of practice I smile on the outside while internally I say, with dread, "I have nothing to say in this conversation, what can I do when the conversation stops?" There's no "actual trick." "Stop living in your head" is a cliche. Don't be facile.
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Mar 25, 2018 02:38
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:Boo! Boo this man! It is a cliche for a reason. If none of that works then you should probably get anti-depressants or the help of a qualified psychologist. Actually I would probably recommend seeing the qualified psychologist first. There's a chance though that they'll just recommend basically what I said up there. Hate Fibration has a new favorite as of 02:59 on Mar 25, 2018 |
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Mar 25, 2018 02:54
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Hate Fibration posted:It is a cliche for a reason. If none of that works then you should probably get anti-depressants. Jesus Christ. I only mentioned my own experiences to hopefully make you realize that your own experience could not be generalized, and there is no "actual trick." Your response is "well, if my 'actual trick' doesn't work, I guess you should take...drugs. I don't know which ones, I'm not a doctor or anything. Just not weed, that won't work."
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Mar 25, 2018 03:05
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Neon Noodle posted:If you want a serious Whew, I read the first two chapters - is this book still well-regarded? It's about twenty years old, and I ask because it's pretty harsh to our collective mothers. I have the vague recollection that that's gone out of style recently.
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Mar 25, 2018 03:29
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:Jesus Christ. I was deliberately not engaging you and being flippant you weirdo.
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Mar 25, 2018 03:32
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Hate Fibration posted:I was deliberately not engaging you and being flippant you weirdo. Shaddup. You'll note I quoted your original, very flippant post.
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Mar 25, 2018 03:34
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Not sure this is the time or place for life advice...
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Mar 25, 2018 03:35
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Not sure this is the time or place for life advice... Agreed, sorry for the derail.
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Mar 25, 2018 03:37
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Sorry, I can't let totally let this go as telling someone with social issues that they should just go out take dancing lessons etc is about as useful as telling someone with depression that they just need to cheer up. Second piece of advice of talking to a Psychologist (and I'd add to that talking about your problems to someone you trust if a Psychologist isn't an option for some reason) is much better but also not a Panacea.
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Mar 25, 2018 17:48
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Munin posted:Sorry, I can't let totally let this go as telling someone with social issues that they should just go out take dancing lessons etc is about as useful as telling someone with depression that they just need to cheer up. Call it stupid and leave it, for the sake of comity.
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Mar 25, 2018 19:02
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