Abstract Fairy

I literally do not have a better pointer for this than 1. notice a thought 2. look at its shape 3. ?????!!

i am always suspicious of people who claim to be smart but are miserable. if they really were that smart, they would have figured out how to live a joyous life.

It would be impossible to hate ux designers as a class enough I think

the content of a thought is the "I just need to …" the shape of a thought is noticing there is a sticky tangled ball of pain running around in your head and body you cannot resolve this through the contents the thought

I have a full time job that only exists because it requires constant begging and tree shaking to get 15 of you motherfuckers to take 2 minutes, call a phone number, and leave a voicemail. You're not ready for a civil war. You're begging for a full remodel of your house when you can't be asked to pick your clothes off the floor. You want the hard thing now but can't keep up easy, bare fuckin minimums. Everyone in the replies getting lippy are turbo larpers and less than useless, they distract and reduce from proven strategies so they can be edgy online. Shut up, go away.

The dislike button will also make it extremely difficult to promote new and controversial ideas. Humans are wired to notice negativity more than positivity. A dislike will be like 100 likes. I can’t think of a worse idea than a dislike button on this app. Make ppl articulate their dislike for something or they can ignore it. Don’t give them a cheap way to be negative.

Welp, he's done it again

Best interrupting I've ever seen. Never realized that when you hesitate then interrupt, people can tell you've spent precious microseconds letting The Irk grow. They're pre-emptively bracing for resentment.

Academic Agent is basically right about what's happening to The West. But perhaps I can translate it into a more "techbro" digestible language. ------------------ Elite Theory = Control of Chaos Scenario: you are a network of tens to hundreds of thousands of individuals trying to control a civilization of a billion people. That might sound like a lot, but it really isn't: for each one of your people, there are something like 30,000 plebians who must be controlled. Furthermore your people don't necessarily agree perfectly on everything and they are also not perfectly loyal or in perfect agreement about everything. But they are in positions of power in media, government, military, finance etc. One take on this is that you just create a totalitarian system. Have all your people put uniforms on and create a good old fashioned dictatorship. This has some downsides though: it's quite fragile and it is vulnerable to a revolution. Okay then instead of a dictatorship you create a fake democracy. You get the plebs to think that they can vote for a party which will really change things. But every time people try to enact change, you just sabotage or infiltrate it. For example, if there is a left-right split over class issues you get your people into the left party and the right party and then whoever wins the election is "your guy". If the left party elects someone who is genuinely out of your control, you keep sabotaging the left party and keep letting the right party win until the left party gets fed up of losing and fires the problematic leader. Then when they do that, you let them win. If people set up a new "real" right wing party, you infiltrate it and make it just hire the exact same people from your previous "fake" right wing party. Just say they changed their minds and deserve a second chance! What you are doing here is technically called "control of chaos". Rather than deciding in advance on one single explicit system of your choosing to do your bidding, you just sit in the background and sabotage or subvert any systems that do arise and use them for your purposes for as long as you can and then discard them and move on to subverting the next one. You give people an illusion of control and choice. Keep people's minds occupied with a fake battle where you secretly control both sides. A "punch and judy show". When the fake democratic system manages to do something you don't want, you delay and frustrate it with procedural rules. Get friendly judges to block policies. Use discretionary powers of investigation. Promote unfavorable media coverage and suppress favorable media coverage. Individual actors who act as agents of The People can often be bribed or failing that blackmailed. When The People try to get something done they find themselves continually frustrated by betrayals. Propaganda also works wonders. People can be persuaded to believe all sorts of nonsense if you repeat it enough on TV. Scientific institutions are corruptible and mix truth and evidence with authority and power. Obviously you take maximum advantage of this. Things like Reform Yookay hiring all the tories and Trump's unwavering support for Israel make much more sense see through this lens of elites controlling society using minimal rather than maximal force.

post-singularity career idea: become a hermit

Here's the thing I actually think is underrated: mental improvement is less about peak performance and more about floor management.

Most women with attachment issues ramp their sex drive through the roof at the start of a relationship and then nosedive the moment it becomes secure. And they hate themselves for both sides of it.