With such a disclaimer, I think I would have been less confused but still not positive on the text. Maybe I’d be less negative? Neutral, even? A lack of disclaimer is not really the core of it for me though.
I have strange tastes in fiction, I think, and normally after reading something that anti-resonated with me so much, I’d just stop reading. But, I read to the end because a bunch of upvotes signaled to me that I might otherwise miss out on something later in the text.
I live in the Bay Area and work in tech and follow AI news. For me, I already knew that there are traits I don’t like in others, and had approximate models of their frequency in and correlations to the AI scene. Each character struck me as plausible and not really meaningfully more concrete to me. Concrete in the sense of “Oh, this behavior is warning sign that this is a morally bankrupt person I should stay away from” or “I might accidentally be falling into this pattern if I find this character relatable in some way.” I can definitely see this being useful to others who do not live in the bay area/work in tech/do not follow AI news, but I mostly expected people on lesswrong to match enough of that description that they wouldn’t find themselves learning from this “concretely describing a vibe or something.” And indeed, some of the people liked it for reasons other than that, which I failed to predict!
A big part of it for me is that I just cannot stand the first person narration of this main character. An example line, pulled at random: “But regardless, she makes very good coffee and is very nice and beautiful which sometimes amounts to the same thing.” I find this thoroughly jarring. I read it as the character’s internal monologue, but this is just so thoroughly outside the domain of what would go in my own internal monologue it feels… rude? an empty attempt at caricature? a failure to understand what internal thoughts look like or otherwise an indication of a mind horribly alien to my own such that it bears no resemblance to real humans? I do find the characters unappealing, but this just seemed unnecessary to me.
this is just so thoroughly outside the domain of what would go in my own internal monologue it feels… rude? an empty attempt at caricature? a failure to understand what internal thoughts look like or otherwise an indication of a mind horribly alien to my own such that it bears no resemblance to real humans?
Interesting! Maybe there’s an experiential crux in there (so to speak)? My reader experience of this is that the first-person inner monologue is indeed very different from mine, but I perceive that as increasing the immersion and helping frame the story. To the extent that there’s a group of humans it saliently bears little resemblance to, I might think of that group as something like “humans who are psychologically ‘healthy’ in a certain way which varies across a wide spectrum, where social spheres with concentrated power may disproportionately attract people who are low on that spectrum”. I’m deliberately putting the main adjective in scare quotes there because in my fuzzy mental model, there isn’t really a clear delimiter between treating that trait cluster as a health indicator and treating it as intersubjective values dissonance; it feels consonant with but not directly targeting dark triad traits. But also, I’m not sure if you’re referring to the same thing I am or if it’s some other feature of the first-person description that bothers you.
FWIW, culturally speaking, I’ve been socially adjacent to Bay Area / SV-startup / “mainstream big tech” culture via other people, but not really been immersed in it—I’ve splashed around in the shallow part of that pool long ago, but for “try not to build the Torment Nexus” reasons (plus other unrelated stuff) I historically bounced away a lot as well and wound up in a sort of limbo. So that colors my impression quite a bit.
With such a disclaimer, I think I would have been less confused but still not positive on the text. Maybe I’d be less negative? Neutral, even? A lack of disclaimer is not really the core of it for me though.
I have strange tastes in fiction, I think, and normally after reading something that anti-resonated with me so much, I’d just stop reading. But, I read to the end because a bunch of upvotes signaled to me that I might otherwise miss out on something later in the text.
I live in the Bay Area and work in tech and follow AI news. For me, I already knew that there are traits I don’t like in others, and had approximate models of their frequency in and correlations to the AI scene. Each character struck me as plausible and not really meaningfully more concrete to me. Concrete in the sense of “Oh, this behavior is warning sign that this is a morally bankrupt person I should stay away from” or “I might accidentally be falling into this pattern if I find this character relatable in some way.” I can definitely see this being useful to others who do not live in the bay area/work in tech/do not follow AI news, but I mostly expected people on lesswrong to match enough of that description that they wouldn’t find themselves learning from this “concretely describing a vibe or something.” And indeed, some of the people liked it for reasons other than that, which I failed to predict!
A big part of it for me is that I just cannot stand the first person narration of this main character. An example line, pulled at random: “But regardless, she makes very good coffee and is very nice and beautiful which sometimes amounts to the same thing.” I find this thoroughly jarring. I read it as the character’s internal monologue, but this is just so thoroughly outside the domain of what would go in my own internal monologue it feels… rude? an empty attempt at caricature? a failure to understand what internal thoughts look like or otherwise an indication of a mind horribly alien to my own such that it bears no resemblance to real humans? I do find the characters unappealing, but this just seemed unnecessary to me.
Interesting! Maybe there’s an experiential crux in there (so to speak)? My reader experience of this is that the first-person inner monologue is indeed very different from mine, but I perceive that as increasing the immersion and helping frame the story. To the extent that there’s a group of humans it saliently bears little resemblance to, I might think of that group as something like “humans who are psychologically ‘healthy’ in a certain way which varies across a wide spectrum, where social spheres with concentrated power may disproportionately attract people who are low on that spectrum”. I’m deliberately putting the main adjective in scare quotes there because in my fuzzy mental model, there isn’t really a clear delimiter between treating that trait cluster as a health indicator and treating it as intersubjective values dissonance; it feels consonant with but not directly targeting dark triad traits. But also, I’m not sure if you’re referring to the same thing I am or if it’s some other feature of the first-person description that bothers you.
FWIW, culturally speaking, I’ve been socially adjacent to Bay Area / SV-startup / “mainstream big tech” culture via other people, but not really been immersed in it—I’ve splashed around in the shallow part of that pool long ago, but for “try not to build the Torment Nexus” reasons (plus other unrelated stuff) I historically bounced away a lot as well and wound up in a sort of limbo. So that colors my impression quite a bit.