i meant two man fistfights, not brawls

Delightful post.

"Normalize pub fistfights" is a statement I agree with wholeheartedly.

I am not sure I agree with this post.

On the thread of what it's like to be the pod people; here is a famous short story rewriting The Thing from the perspective of The Thing.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

I get that this is a joke post and all, but there is actually useful insight to be mined from taking it at face value, which no one seems to be doing. In the least convenient possible world where most of this is actually true (and this is not that far-fetched), why do you choose to not follow it anyways? Or, if you lived in that world, would you really follow its prescription?

This is quite interesting. I don't experience anything as consistent or useful as this, though I experience a grab bag of various altered states based on recent intellectual activities.

I object to the phrasing that you "got got" by Mastering the Core Teachings. That book is riddled with radiation warnings and, as far as I can tell, is entirely good faith.

You did not "get got." You took the demon core out of storage, placed it into the lower sphere, placed the top sphere above it, held them apart with a screwdriver, then flinched.

I am sympathetic to the lesson you are trying to illustrate but think you wildly overstate it.

Giving a child a sword is defensible. Giving a child a lead-coated sword is indefensible, because it damages the child's ability to learn from the sword. This may be a more apt analogy for the situation of real life; equipping humanity with dangerous weapons that did not degrade our epistemology (nukes) eventually taught us not to use them. Equipping humanity with dangerous weapons that degrade our epistemology (advertising, propaganda, addictive substances) caused us to develop an addiction to the weapons. Languages models, once they become more developed, will be an example of the latter category.

I am exactly in this post's target audience. Epic post.

A creature made out of a pile of contextually activated masks, when we consider it as having a mind, can be referred to as a "deeply alien mind," or a shoggoth.