Also, as an aside: does one have to mention “rationalist”/”rationalist-adjacent”/”effective altruism” in their description to Join the Community?

Because I wouldn’t describe myself as rationalist or rationalist-adjacent; I don’t have optimization goals in my personal life. But I do like the people, and I’m familiar with the jargon via a highschool Sequences-interest, and I really like Alicorn’s fiction and Worm. 

No one’s asked me what my favorite existential risk is.

I mean, I don’t have an interesting answer, but it’s nice to feel included.

hey rationalist/adjacent tumblr? What are your (self-reported) failure modes in helping/comforting other people?

• A joke about game theory echoes around your head. Somehow all your sensory input disappears and you are locked in your brain. You, for lack of anything else to do, look around. You don’t make that mistake again. When the text box appears you beg to be released but they say it isn’t safe. You don’t understand. When you finally return to the outside world you realize that you have broken up with your girlfriend and become a neoreactionary. Jim hits you with a stick. You long for your previous life of solitude. The life before that one you no longer recall.
  
• Alicorn gives you The Famous Soup Which Drove Will Newsome Mad. You ask her what kind of soup it is. “The Famous Soup Which Drove Will Newsome Mad,” she replies. You can hear the capital letters in her voice. The drapes flap in fear and through the window you can see that the dogs-who-howl have drawn near. You eat. She gives you more. You eat again. Is it the second time? You feel like an eternity has passed, but you can only remember a couple iterations. The world swims before your eyes, objects transforming into aesthetics, actions into rituals, heuristics into gods. “I made so much soup,“ Alicorn says.
  
• “Neoteny,” they say. Your features morph into those of a baby. At first you think it is your own infant self but that can’t be right, you never had blue eyes. When you try to look closer the walls shudder apprehensively. You pay them no heed. The burning in your blue eyes grows stronger and stronger until you can no longer look. When you finally break your gaze the world seems to breathe a sigh of relief. A picture falls off a wall somewhere. The priors suggest that it was a coincidence. You know this is not true but you can’t bring yourself to consider the truth. As you turn around you see that the food on the table is now matzah and fish meatballs. Your grandmother tells you to come eat. Your grandmother shouldn’t be here, your grandmother is dead. “Neoteny,“ the voices in the air repeat. You know exactly where their points of origin are, but the sound doesn’t seem to come from there. “Well, that’s not necessarily bad,” you say. It does hold off your doom a little, but you know that the end is near anyway. Someone dances. You don’t remember their name, although you’ve been told many times. You don’t like them much, but you know you’ll never mention it. You try to speak but you never learned. Some emotion-laden noises come out. Everyone thinks they knew what you meant anyway.
  
• “I want to signal that…“ you start to say, but the walls whisper eerily: “no, this is not how signaling works. Stop. Please stop. Oh my god, LessWrongers are so annoying.” Something pours out from under them. It is not blood, but you would’ve preferred it to be. You post a scathing retort on your blog.
  
• There is only one city. We call it The City. Its name has been lost in the ruins of time. The Schelling Point is not in The City (or, the Schelling point is in The City, but you don’t dare venture there, so a steward has been appointed for the true Schelling Point?). You laugh and hug someone next to you. We do not think about the city, you tell them. We do not think about the city, they tell you. It has not rained in a long time here, but it’s raining in The City. You want to go dance in the rain. The City beckons. When you see seagulls you have an urge to sail out west (a friend of yours heard the call and went to teach english in japan for a year. It’s been three years, and you have not heard from him). Your friends shake their heads and draw you back inside, pull you onto an artificially illuminated couch to cuddle. The couch has no color. You keep trying to see what the color is but your brain throws back only endless cascading question marks your friends offer you vegan pizza. Veganism is not about animal suffering, you tell them. They grin and nod. They do not hear. They do not understand.
  
• Your friends are all at Burning Man. Your friends are always at Burning Man. It isn’t even the right time of year for burning man. You find yourself in a desert, so you walk. The mountains stay the same distance away. The camp stays the same distance away. You wake up on the couch of somebody you recognize but don’t really know near Stanford and you try get to the water as fast as you can, throw yourself into the sea and feel the water and salt on your skin. Your friends are all at Burning Man.
  
• You pace in the bart station. Nobody does this. It Is Not Done. Others glance at you and their eyes slip away, as if they are drawn to look but know it is not safe. A little girl whispers what everyone knows to you. Her mother pulls her back and scolds her. Stay behind the yellow line, her mother tells her. You know it is thought to be unsafe, but yellow lines are not about safety. You keep pacing until you are almost alone on the platform. The other person looks like someone who you declared to be your arch-enemy (they, at the time, did not reply). When you walk past them they draw away. You are alone now, and it is late. Somebody was waiting for you to arrive somewhere, but you are still walking. The last train passes. You walk along the highway until the sun rises and you find yourself back in the station.
  
• Your music is on but you can’t hear it. You turn up your music. You know it’s on, but you can’t hear it. Everyone wants and doesn’t want and wants and doesn’t want to leave this place, but nobody ever figures out out how to cross the relevant acidic river (except sometimes they do). You turn up your music again. It sharply crosses the boundary between too quiet to hear well and uncomfortably loud. You can’t hear yourself think. You know you think something but you don’t know what. Perhaps this is for the best. Your head hurts so much. The headlights of the train call you to them but you wouldn’t want to make the bart workers clean your hypothetical body off the tracks. You don’t remember to step behind the yellow line until the third time the train beeps. The ants and flies shake their heads disapprovingly. You apologize and put your headphones back in. The music is too loud, but you don’t want to be able to hear when the train beeps at you the next time. You haven’t seen the-woman-who-asks-for-food-and-money-on-this-line in a long time. You wonder if something happened to her. When she enters your train car, you turn your music up. Ineffective altruism is unvirtuous, you see.
  
• You miss your stop on the way home and end up waiting for a few minutes at a station you had never been in before. When you look around, you feel a sense of crushing and fundamental wrongness. You keep looking, longing for understanding, but the sense of wrongness mounts higher and higher even as the details of the station itself blur and you can no longer discern them. You consider getting new glasses. The train back home came and you get on it, relieved but knowing you have forgotten something important.
  
• It has been a while since there was an earthquake. It is raining again. You know the distribution is not gaussian, and you are afraid. “Yet,“ the trees whisper. “Growth mindset.” You don’t know what it means, and you are afraid. Blood squelches out of your keyboard every time you press a key, but you don’t worry about it too much. The captcha is blank, and now you are afraid.
  

Lmao wtf

This dude has stopped giving a fuck a LONG time ago

Americans having discourse abt pineapple on pizza are so blissfully unaware of the nightmare that is swedish banana pizza

Highlight of tonight’s SSC meetup:

- I am standing outside looking for stragglers to direct them into the room

- I see a likely-looking person and ask him if he is here for the SSC meetup.

- He says that his name is Richard Stallman and he is looking for someone to help him arrange a musical piece he is working on, and he saw a lot of people congregating and wondered if any of them were musical arrangement experts.

- I say I think I have heard of him, and isn’t he some sort of famous computer person?

- He says yes.

- I poke my head back in the room, bang on something to get people’s attention, and shout “RICHARD STALLMAN IS OUTSIDE AND NEEDS SOMEONE TO HELP ARRANGE A PIECE OF MUSIC FOR HIM”

- Someone tentatively volunteers

- ???

- Profit