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/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

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File: 611313b2982f8fd⋯.jpg (119.36 KB,568x702,284:351,Cthulhu_sketch_by_Lovecraf….jpg)

 No.14467

Why don't rationalists write horror? We have some of the scariest ideas of any subculture.

____________________________
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 No.14471

I think we can. What about this plot: The decline of intergroup norms partly due to the decline of Christianity and partly due to SJW insanity finally led to a genocidal worldwide race war which caused all tribes capable of producing WMDs to destroy each other using nukes, ethnic biological weapons, military drones etc.

Only Sub-Saharan Africans, Australoids, Pacific Islanders etc continued to exist. Civilization completely collapsed, starvation and cannibalism were widespread and diseases such as Ebola got out of control. Survivors rapidly declined to Medieval or even earlier tech and never recovered.

When aliens arrived at Planet Earth or when some mutant non-human species in the nuked world developed civilization they wiped out the remaining humans and did not even believe that human civilization had ever existed.

Moral of the story: Do not become a sociopathic defector for humanity is more fragile than what we think we are.

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 No.14476

>>14471

The plot doesn't really sound like horror fiction, but the heavy-handed moralizing is par for the course for the genre.

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 No.14477

Because to write horror you don't just need an idea that scares you personally, you need to be able to leave things unsaid and keep the fear uncertain. Some rationalist concepts are compatible with that, but the general rationalist attitude isn't.

The Northern Caves is at least horror-adjacent. Not coincidentally, the author is arguably only rationalist-adjacent, disliked HPMOR, and is very Yudkowsky-critical in general.

Nick Land is a horror writer. Not coincidentally, he's not exactly a rationalist.

The rationalist impulse is to turn your story into a puzzle with a neat solution for people who are clever enough to figure it out. That's diametrically opposite to good horror.

>>14471

This doesn't even try to be a horror story. This is just the same post you make every thread. Please don't.

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 No.14492

Oh but we do. “Friendship is Optimal” is hands down one of the two best pieces of horror i've ever read. (The other one is “Permutation City”.

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 No.14495

>>14492

I haven't read it, but apparently Greg Egan specifically dunks on Overcoming Bias in Zendegi. I love his books but he's not a rationalist.

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 No.14496

File: b4771721fba471b⋯.jpg (887.98 KB,2000x2000,1:1,1577102604331.jpg)

I haven't added anything to it lately, but here's a list of rat-adjacent horror fiction.

The Northern Caves (nostalgebraist)

>"One does not listen to Mundum in expectation of reward."

The Gig Economy (Zero HP Lovecraft)

>"The most menacing thing in the world is the ability of the cloud to correlate its contents."

also God-Shaped Hole

There Is No Antimemetics Division (Sam Hughes)

>"It's called 'inverted containment'."

also Ra

SCP-2747 (minmin)

>"This watchlist should consist mainly of individuals, groups and organisations whose works tend toward containing metafictional content, such as mise-en-abymes and stories-within-stories."

The Human Depository (Dylan Spencer)

>"-all your fault-"

Deletion Permits (& The Suicide Mortgage) (ctrlcreep and Alex Mennen)

>"Anthropic reasoning suggests that you must expect to find yourself as the last copy every time."

also ctrlcreep on twitter

Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator (Nick Land)

>“It's one of the Filter theories. Absorption into simulations. Cultures swirling out of the universe like dirty water down a plug. Derealization vortices.”

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

>"This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams."

The 'Three Body' Trilogy (Cixin Liu)

>"If I destroy you, what is it to me?"

Quarantine (Greg Egan)

>"An inconsistent set of axioms can be used to prove anything at all."

also Permutation City

Recommend authors and works, please.

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 No.14497

>>14496

Is ctrlcreep rat-adjacent? Where did they come from?

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 No.14562

File: 32099c37aa64df0⋯.png (232.28 KB,466x469,466:469,yudkowsky_AHHHHH.png)

>>14467

>Listen to me very closely, you idiot. YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL. You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends. This post was STUPID.

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 No.14563

>>14562

This post remains a masterpiece of bad optics and lack of memetic foresight. Why did he do it? Just to signal?

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 No.14564

>>14563

>Why did he do it?

To me it seems like an honest account of his feelings at that moment; he was actually enraged and disheartened about the post and not worrying about optics. Presumably there's also some signalling at play, which is what allowed his subconscious to sign off on the outburst, but I don't think

>dude signalling

is the full story.

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 No.14567

>>14492

wtf are you on about, FiO is one of the most optimistic Good Ends for humanity ever written lol

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 No.14569

>>14492

>>14567

the two genders

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 No.14570

>>14496

>The Human Depository (Dylan Spencer)

It's somewhat disturbing, and I understand a standalone webcomic strip has limited space to work with, but it has always felt cheap. "Whoa, they just scream forever!" The short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream instantiated the same idea better. It does feature a more comprehensible and human AI torturer, which one may consider a weakness of the story. Despite this it is more effective as horror because you get to know the AI's victims, who have a personality and talk, and see the personalized nightmares the AI puts them through.

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 No.14571

>>14570

Yeah, it kinda sucks. The author acts like he's never heard of scope insensitivity. The big reveal is the mountains of tortured heads, but for the reader it just adds one panel worth of discomfort instead of multiplying the previous discomfort by a billion. And it has no plot whatsoever, it's just "imagine this bad thing".

>I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

I didn't know where this phrase came from before reading this. Now that was some good shit. I particularly enjoyed the paranoid narrator claiming that the AI hadn't changed him at all.

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 No.14574

File: 85c856358e668d7⋯.png (1.25 MB,800x4266,400:2133,the_human_depository.png)

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 No.14579

>>14574

If the only immortality available was like this, would you take it?

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 No.14580

>>14579

No. Life is not worth living if it means eternal suffering. I would have killed myself long ago had I never found out about David Pearce and the prospect of paradise engineering.

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 No.14588

>>14580

fun theory, wireheading, paradise engineering: all copes

there's no pain without pleasure

no pain or pleasure means no stimulation

removing loss/pain aversion eliminates motivation

no stimulation or motivation would grind the species to a halt

constant "happiness" becomes a baseline with a hard upper limit, pure novelty engines limited by compute and complexity

no goals, no rationality

just an opium den of NPCs

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 No.14594

>>14588

"Paradise engineering" and compete abolition of suffering and its replacement with "gradients of cerebral bliss" of the type https://www.abolitionist.com/ advocates are dubious projects. But it would be strange indeed if you couldn't strictly improve on the human condition. A large percentage of human suffering (50%? 80%?) comes from medical conditions and mental illness. It is not adaptive. It is a product of weakness of the species. You could remove it and increase individual intelligence, productivity, rationality and every other positive quality.

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