but Ray are you really so sure i should not be the one to turn The Sequences into a collection of belligerent tiktoks? i’ve been covering the same beat for ten years what if it’s time for A CHANGE?
LoganStrohl
Karma: 6,093
but Ray are you really so sure i should not be the one to turn The Sequences into a collection of belligerent tiktoks? i’ve been covering the same beat for ten years what if it’s time for A CHANGE?
I, um, don’t have anything coherent to say yet. Just a heads up. I also don’t really know where this comment should go.
But also I don’t really expect to end up with anything coherent to say, and it is quite often the case that when I have something to say, people find it worthwhile to hear my incoherence anyway, because it contains things that underlay their own confused thoughts, and after hearing it they are able to un-confuse some of those thoughts and start making sense themselves. Or something. And I do have something incoherent to say. So here we go.
I think there’s something wrong with the OP. I don’t know what it is, yet. I’m hoping someone else might be able to work it out, or to see whatever it is that’s causing me to say “something wrong” and then correctly identify it as whatever it actually is (possibly not “wrong” at all).
On the one hand, I feel familiarity in parts of your comment, Anna, about “matches my own experiences/observations/hearsay at and near MIRI and CFAR”. Yet when you say “sensible”, I feel, “no, the opposite of that”.
Even though I can pick out several specific places where Jessicata talked about concrete events (e.g. “I believed that I was intrinsically evil” and “[Michael Vassar] was commenting on social epistemology”), I nevertheless have this impression that I most naturally conceptualize as “this post contained no actual things”. While reading it, I felt like I was gazing into a lake that is suspended upside down in the sky, and trying to figure out whether the reflections I’m watching in its surface are treetops or low-hanging clouds. I felt like I was being invited into a mirror-maze that the author had been trapped in for… an unknown but very long amount of time.
There’s something about nearly every phrase (and sentence, and paragraph, and section) here that I just, I just want to spit out, as though the phrase itself thinks it’s made of potato chunks but in fact, out of the corner of my eye, I can tell it is actually made out of a combination of upside-down cloud reflections and glass shards.
Let’s try looking at a particular, not-very-carefully-chosen sentence.
I have so many questions. “As a consequence” seems fine; maybe that really is potato chunks. But then, “the people most mentally concerned” happens, and I’m like, Which people were most mentally concerned? What does it mean to be mentally concerned? How could the author tell that those people were mentally concerned? Then we have “with strange social metaphysics”, and I want to know “what is social metaphysics?”, “what is it for social metaphysics to be strange or not strange?” and “what is it to be mentally concerned with strange social metaphysics”? Next is “were marginalized”. How were they marginalize? What caused the author to believe that they were marginalized? What is it for someone to be marginalized? And I’m going to stop there because it’s a long sentence and my reaction just goes on this way the whole time.
I recognize that it’s possible to ask this many questions of this kind about absolutely any sentence anyone has ever uttered. Nevertheless, I have a pretty strong feeling that this sentence calls for such questions, somehow, much more loudly than most sentences do. And the questions the sentences call for are rarely answered in the post. It’s like a tidal wave of… of whatever it is. More and more of these phrases-calling-for-questions pile up one after another, and there’s no time in between to figure out what’s going on, if you want to follow the post whatsoever.
There are definitely good things in here. A big part of my impression of the author, based on this post, is that they’re smart and insightful, and trying to make the world better. I just, also have this feeling like something… isn’t just wrong here, but is going wrong, and maybe the going has momentum, and I wonder how many readers will get temporarily trapped in the upside down mirror maze while thinking they’re eating potatoes, unless they slow way way down and help me figure out what on earth is happening in this post.