All of witness's Comments + Replies

6Lumifer
Um, you realize you sound like an idiot, right?
7Viliam
I complete a task, I roll a d4 once, and in case of success I eat a chocolate. What exactly is the problem with this?
witness-10

The first 2 sentences address what you said. The rest is a massive tangent because staying on the same train of thought is hard for me. Also I was too lazy to go through the nesting to post that in a better spot.

0Raemon
I'm super confused about what your point is, what your goals are, and in particular why dinner parties run counter to your goals/preferences.
witness00

If you say so, I barely come on here much. Today is the most active I've been in months.

witness00

Yes but it underlines what I was saying about "Morp." And it also addresses people who were asking why I singled out Alicorn.

Whenever someone tells me I'm only doing something for attention or that I only hate on certain things because I'm excluded then I say: "Thanks Captain Obvious." It throws them off a lot. People who are different are different not by choice but by force. Conventional social norms exert a massive pressure on every individual even ones with non-conforming parents/siblings/peers/teachers and the only reason why it do... (read more)

0OrphanWilde
This reads more like you're using my comment as an excuse to talk more about what you want to talk about than that you're responding in any meaningful sense to the actual content of my comment.
witness00

That's clearly not true. Alicorn again is a perfect of example of someone who clearly wanted to be socialized. I mean... dinner parties. Yes, I cannot get over the whole dinner party thing, get over it.

More on point though, centralization is the ultimate bug bear of the left/progressive/radicals/w.e. Look at the internecine wars of feminism or socialism or atheism. Furthermore everyone wants to address their local personal issues first and also divides who is allowed to interfere in problems among demographic or identity lines.

The success of a revolutionar... (read more)

2Lumifer
And notice how she's mostly absent on LW preferring instead to plan and arrange her dinner parties... :-P
witness-30

I scare quoted dinner parties because they are the most ridiculously conventional upper middle class thing of all time. Even more than Valium.

1OrphanWilde
Dinner parties are extraordinarily useful social tools. There's a -reason- upper middle class people do them. The causal relationship between "Being the sort of person to host dinner parties" and "Being upper middle class" doesn't flow in only one direction.
witness10

I rarely bother to comment on this site but this is important meta information. Many outsider groups and rationalists in particular seem to dissolve the moment their exclusion from standard social systems is removed. The most dumbed down example I have, and I specifically desire to post as low brow and example as possible, is the episode of Malcom In The Middle titled "Morp." Its prom backwards in case you missed that. The outsider group starts an anti-prom where they do everything ironically, and amusingly have all the same status bullshit probl... (read more)

0gjm
What does this mean? I guess you mean "(some subset of) Alicorn's posts" (though I can't help thinking the way you've phrased it is suggestive of some kind of personal animosity), but which ones and what exactly do you think is wrong with them?
Alicorn210

This is undiplomatically expressed but may contain an important seed of useful information for anyone who would like to recentralize rationalism: meeting people's normal, boring, apey social needs is important for retention, especially at scale when it seems more tempting to split off with your favorite small percentage of the group and not put in the effort with the rest. If you want people to post on Less Wrong, what's in it for them, anymore?

(I understand the desire to scare-quote the interestingness of my dinner parties but they are, in fact, parties at which dinner is served, in the most literal possible sense.)

witness-20

You know what he does for a living don't you?

"Evolutionary developmental biology," which means Myers tries to understand biology that happens on its own. The cryonics idea, by contrast, involves trying to get human biology, and specifically the human brain, to do something it didn't evolve to do, namely, enter a state of preservation through vitrification. Basically Myers doesn't think about cryonics as an engineering challenge because he doesn't have experience or talent with that sort of practical problem solving.

Myers invokes his credentials as a neuroscientist to criticize cryonics; bu... (read more)