Look, the world is fucked. All kinds of paradigms we've been taught have been broken left and right. The world has ended many times over in this regard. In place of anything interesting or helpful to address this, Yud's encoded a giant turd into a blog post. How to stay sane? Just stay sane, bro. Easy to say if the only thing threatening your worldview is a made-up robodemon that will never exist.
detach from reality by pretending you are a character in a story as a coping mechanism.
assume no personal responsibility or agency.
don't go insane, i.e. make sure you try and fulfil society's expectations of what sanity is.
All of these are terrible. In general, you want to stay grounded in reality, be aware of the agency you have in the world, and don't feel pressured to performatively participate in society, especially if that means doing arbitrary rituals to prove that you are "sane".
Here are my thoughts on "how to stay sane" and "how to cope":
It's entirely reasonable to crash out. I don't want anyone to go insane, but fucking look at all this shit. Datacenters are boiling the oceans. Liberalism is starting its endgame into fascism. All the fucking genocides! Dissociating is acceptable and expected as an emotional response. All of this has been happening in (modern) human history to a degree where crashing out has been reasonable. Yet, many people have been able to "stay sane" in the face of this. If you see someone who appears to be sane, either they're fucked in the head, or they have some perspective or have built up some level of resilience. Whether or not those things can be helpful to someone else is not deterministic. If you are someone who has "stayed sane", please remember to show some empathy and some awareness that it's fine if someone is miserable, because again, everything is fucked.
Putting the above together, I accept basically any reaction to the state of the world. It's reasonable to go either way, and you shouldn't feel bad either way. "Sanity" has different meanings depending on where you look. I think there's a common, unspoken definition that basically boils down to "a sane person is someone who can productively participate in society." This is not a standard you always need to hold yourself to. I think it's helpful to introspect and, uh, "extrospect", here. Like, figure out what you think it means to be sane, what you want it to mean, and what you want. And bounce these ideas off of someone else, because that usually helps.
I think there is another common definition of sanity that might just be "mentally healthy". To that end, things that have helped me, aside from therapy, that aren't particularly insightful or unique:
Talking to friends
Finding places to talk about the world going to shit.
Participating in community, online or irl.
Basically just finding spaces where stupid shit gets dunked on.
The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes.
Nobody is above tropes. Tropes are just patterns you see in narratives. Everything you can describe is a trope. To say you are above tropes means you don’t live and exist.
Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.
This sense -- which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life -- is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.
We now have a canon mental age for Yud of drumroll nine.
Just decide to be sane
That isn’t how it works, idiot. You can’t “decide to be sane”, that’s like having a private language.
Anyway, just to make the subtext of my other comments into text. Acting like you are a character in a story is a dissociative delusion and counter to reality. It is definitively not sane. Insane, if you will.
After finding out about her here, I’ve been watching a lot of Angela Collier videos lately. Here’s the most recent one which talks about our life extending friends.
E: just expressing my general appreciation for her vids. Things that I like:
low frequency of cuts/her speech isn’t broken up into 5 second clips
lack of kowtowing to algorithmic suggestion
subtle, dry humour
Which I’m now realising is somewhat counter to current trends in content, which might be contributing to why I like these.
Yeah i don’t get it. Like, my local sushi place started using sawdust as filler in their cooked tuna. I just don’t order the tuna. Plus, sawdust has a neutral taste and has fibre in it. I am very smart btw
I clicked as I was curious as to what markers of AI use would appear. I immediately realised the problem: if it is written with AI then I wouldn’t want to read it, and thus wouldn’t be able to tell. Luckily the author’s profile cops to being “AI assisted”, which could mean a lot of things that just boil down to “slop forward”.
Yud’s whole project is a pipeline intended to create zizians, if you believe that Yud is serious about his alignment beliefs. If he isn’t serious then it’s just an unfortunate consequence that he is not trying to address in any meaningful way.
hi hi I am budweiser jabrony please join my new famous and good website 'tapering incorrectness dot com' where we speculate about which OSI layers have the most consciousness (zero is not a valid amount of consciousness) also give money and prima nocta. thanks
I am not familiar with Case or her work, but based on my shallow research, she’s part of the cohort of internet stuff-communicators including people like Vi Hart or the Oatmeal etc. Not casting aspersions on anyone here, but I’d be interested to know who amongst them have revealed their chud nature and who has remained pristine (…for now).
I was teasing this out in my head to try come up with a good sneer. First thought: for an organisation that tries to appeal to EAs, you’d think that they would do a good job of being transparent about why so much money is being spent on someone with such low output. But immediate rebuttal: the whole point of the TESCREAL cult shit is that yud get free tuocs because he’s the chosen one to solve alignment.
Followup:
Look, the world is fucked. All kinds of paradigms we've been taught have been broken left and right. The world has ended many times over in this regard. In place of anything interesting or helpful to address this, Yud's encoded a giant turd into a blog post. How to stay sane? Just stay sane, bro. Easy to say if the only thing threatening your worldview is a made-up robodemon that will never exist.
Here's Yud's actually-quite-easy-to-understand suggestions:
All of these are terrible. In general, you want to stay grounded in reality, be aware of the agency you have in the world, and don't feel pressured to performatively participate in society, especially if that means doing arbitrary rituals to prove that you are "sane".
Here are my thoughts on "how to stay sane" and "how to cope":
It's entirely reasonable to crash out. I don't want anyone to go insane, but fucking look at all this shit. Datacenters are boiling the oceans. Liberalism is starting its endgame into fascism. All the fucking genocides! Dissociating is acceptable and expected as an emotional response. All of this has been happening in (modern) human history to a degree where crashing out has been reasonable. Yet, many people have been able to "stay sane" in the face of this. If you see someone who appears to be sane, either they're fucked in the head, or they have some perspective or have built up some level of resilience. Whether or not those things can be helpful to someone else is not deterministic. If you are someone who has "stayed sane", please remember to show some empathy and some awareness that it's fine if someone is miserable, because again, everything is fucked.
Putting the above together, I accept basically any reaction to the state of the world. It's reasonable to go either way, and you shouldn't feel bad either way. "Sanity" has different meanings depending on where you look. I think there's a common, unspoken definition that basically boils down to "a sane person is someone who can productively participate in society." This is not a standard you always need to hold yourself to. I think it's helpful to introspect and, uh, "extrospect", here. Like, figure out what you think it means to be sane, what you want it to mean, and what you want. And bounce these ideas off of someone else, because that usually helps.
I think there is another common definition of sanity that might just be "mentally healthy". To that end, things that have helped me, aside from therapy, that aren't particularly insightful or unique:
I mean, is that so fucking hard to say?