HI I WANT TO READ THIS.

I've spent a lot of time trying to write without any intentional exercise of style! I think I've read far too much text generated by people on the psychotic spectrum to actually manage this.

I think most people would see higher performance on general tasks on Adderall. Not sure if this is actually a good reason to put everyone on Adderall.

Side effects can be pretty brutal, although people who abuse caffeine to get the same level of stimulation are going to probably have them a lot worse.

My actual experience is that LLMs seem to basically just become a third arm for people who use them. Google is like that too, but for their target audience, LLMs are more like that.

You don't love your arm, but if someone goes to you like, "Do you mind if I cut your arm off?" of course you say "do not." If someone's like "OK, but like, if I made you choose between your wife and your arm" you'd be like "That's incredibly perverse. I need my arm."

For people who use them it seems like it really quickly became impossible to exist without them. That's one of the reasons I think they're not going away.

I can't think of a non-metaphorical expansion of your take that isn't (1) deeply insensitive to my stated needs (2) a generally poor reading of the original post (3) at odds with basic understanding of what the function of language is.

I don't know exactly what you think I want. I want to be understood and I want to be seen as good based on that understanding. I'm not asking for a Spock-level mind-meld with the opposing party. I'm not asking that every single person in the world understand me exactly as intended the first time they read it. I'm asking for an end to smug, self-satisfactory, nitpicking interpretations ultimately designed to draw me into shaming-based social rituals that I refuse to be a part of.

Maybe it would be helpful for me to clarify a specific example of what I'm so pissed about. It appeared in the original post but I could have been clearer. The thing I'm pissed about in this case is that you can't mention Scott Alexander here without performatively mocking him or explaining why you didn't performatively mock him, which I know because I've watched other people try it. (The only reason you didn't see a henpecking response in this case is that in my original post, I spent two paragraphs heading it off.)

The general pattern of my existence online is that whenever I acknowledge a political position that's unpopular, or the existence of a political figure that's unpopular, even if I'm taking great pains to indicate that I disagree with it, people will arrive to specifically accuse me of believing the exact opposite of what I said I believed. It's entirely possible that the inadequacy of language plays some role here, but the apparent reason the communication fails is that something about me seems to have caused the other person to decide they want to force me into the conceptual category of "people they hate."

I am not a particularly pleasant person! I often try to be, but like, I actually have to try. I think it is common for people to decide that they dislike me before they have a clear reason why. But I also think a lot of people engage with online content in a way that is purely based on skimming takes off the top, analyzing them for their badness, and announcing personal superiority to the people who had the gall to post bad takes.

None of this falls into the territory covered by your impossibility result from systems biology regarding language. (although I doubt the impossibility result to begin with) This is mostly accounted for by pernicious cultiness of advanced online communities, and the futile and self-negating way I have to struggle to correct for it.

The uncharitable interpretation of your comment is that you think communication is impossible. If you really, sincerely think one person communicating an idea to another person successfully is impossible, burn all the textbooks and also most of the professors. If it takes equivocating over "full" communication and you're willing to concede the point as far as other stuff goes then fine, my red may be your blue. I'm at peace with that.

If you think there are some things that could be communicated linguistically but generally aren't, for a reason that is not the fault of the speaker or the hearer, I agree. It doesn't cause me distress when someone still assumes good faith about me but also misunderstands me -- I've talked about what causes me distress. If it's not obvious to you that people who post takes that go beyond the superficial attract way more of that distress -- I mean, the sealioning and tedium I'm usually met with -- then I want to post on whatever internet you grew up on, because mine is defective.

You have added, as a consolation prize, "maybe writing is good for peace and a bit of fun." Great, I'll keep that in mind when those are what I want. Language is not a dance I am intermittently doing, it is how I exist. There's not another thing for me to be doing when this thing isn't working.

I will propose a theory in alternative to yours: My metaphorical gut may not be entirely wrong for screaming that it wants to be filled. Getting the attention (even maladaptively) may make some progress towards solving my problem.

This is an option that few people will actually consider. Desiring attention is so incredibly stigmatized that the idea of a legitimate need for attention, even in the suboxone-level form of "being understood and having one's ideas acknowledged," is openly ridiculed.

(In this comment thread I have openly attempted to reclaim "narcissism" as a dimension of personality rather than a slur against the mentally ill and I have done so with the expectation that these efforts will be read by many people as pure invective. So far my expectation has been validated and, even worse, I've fallen into the pattern of periodically using that word in a way I hate.)

This ridicule serves the ends of powerful people and is likely the result of an accidental conspiracy. All the social systems in the world exist to sell back attention -- feeling loved, respected and valued for free is completely incompatible with the business model of every advertiser and every social media platform. As with every social rule, all the social power accrues in the hands of the people who don't respect that social rule.

In the near future and far future I'm going to attempt to express what I mean clearly enough that it will be obvious who is interpreting me in a frivolous and senseless way, with the expectation that they will still do it.

Sure, I go for this explanation!

The other day my landlord came over and ranted at me at about 60 decibels for about 10 minutes about the state of my apartment. Then she saw I had The Man Who Was Thursday on my bookshelf and asked "Oh, so you like Chesterton?" She was oddly polite and helpful for the rest of the visit, and only raised my rent by $400/mo.

I read Chesterton when I was like 15 and thought he was brilliant. I grew up a little and started meeting Catholic and Mormon philosophy kids, who were generally weird transhumanists in the same category as otherkin, except with the world's worst aesthetic. (If you're going to fantasize about transcending your physical body, at least fantasize about being a dragon while you're at it.)

It's not surprising to me that Scott Alexander likes him -- I like him too, on the strength of his non-philosophical gifts. He was consistently writing for overtly classist rich people but also for the masses: speaking to the exploiters and the exploited at the same time meant he actually had to innovate new ways of expressing his classism. He had to write out of the internalized classism of his audience more than he had to write out of outright contempt, and he only ventilated his own contempt in very narrow cases where he had made it seem totally defensible to do so.

I kind of came away from him feeling like he was the perfect demagogue for an era that ended -- so his rhetoric is somewhat defanged, but the exact tendencies that made it so marketable to institutions are made even more glaringly obvious. I also kind of came away with the impression that even in stereotypically conservative philosophical traditions like Mormonism, voices like his totally squash out the people who are looking for a radical form of self-expression. People like me exist everywhere, regardless of upbringing -- therefore, this isn't an accident, but a function.

I can't talk about the long term effects of Scott Alexander yet because they haven't happened, he's not as good at his thing as Chesterton was at his thing, and our system of media, while deeply flawed, is still more democratic now in our time than his was in his time.

But I've at least got a vague theory saying that someone like him has to exist in every right-shaped pocket of every universe.

I don't think you sent this to me personally, but it has been sent to me. I still like it quite a bit. I reread it now to make sure of that!

I think your summary (and additional analysis) is pretty accurate. I think I would add a few things:

• He's not being evil in every post. Some of the posts are OK.
• [Elizabeth Sandifer observes this.] He tends to compare a bad argument to a very bad argument, and he's usually willing to invite snark or ridicule.

There's a crunchy systemic thing I want to add. I'm sure Elizabeth Sandifer gets this, it's just not rhetorically spotlit in her post --

A lot of people who analyze Scott Alexander have difficulty assigning emotional needs to his viewers. Scott Alexander decides to align himself with Gamergate supporters in his feminism post: Gamergate isn't a thing you do when you're in a psychologically normal place.

An old Startup Guy proverb says that you should "sell painkillers, not vitamins" -- you want people to lurch for your thing when they're doing badly because you're the only thing that will actually solve their problem. When people treat Scott Alexander's viewers as if they're smug, psychologically healthy startup twits, they typically take his viewers' engagement with Scott Alexander and make it into this supererogatory thing that his audience could give up or substitute at any time. His influence by this account is vitamin-like.

This makes the tech narcissists seem oddly stronger than normal people, who are totally distorted by their need for approval. We kind of treat them like permanent twisted reflections of normal people and therefore act as if there's no need for funhouse mirrors to distort them. We make the even more fundamental error of treating them like they know who they are.

This is how I think it actually works: the narcissists you meet are not completely different from you. They're not unmoored from ethics or extremely sadistic. They're often extremely ambivalent -- there's a clash of attitudes in their heads that prevents them from taking all the contradictory feelings inside them and reifying them as an actual opinion.

From what I can tell, Scott is actually extremely effective at solving the problem of "temporarily feeling like a horrible person." He's specifically good at performing virtue and kindness when advocating for especially horrible views. He's good at making the thing you wanted to do anyway feel like the difficult last resort in a field of bad options.

I'll admit -- as a person with these traits, this is another place where the basis for my analysis seems completely obvious to me, yet I see an endless dogpile of nerds who seem as if they willfully do not engage with it. I assume they thought of it, find it convincing on some level and therefore they make significant effort to repress it. If I'm going to be conceited for a moment, though, this is probably simultaneously expecting too much intelligence and too much conventionally narcissistic behavior from my audience, who are, demographically, the same people who thought Scott was brilliant in the first place.

Ack, I meant to go around responding to everyone and I missed this one! Hope it was good.

Oh. I don't know how to get other people to vote better. I know things about software, I guess!

I think LLMs are effective persuaders, not just bias reinforcers.

In situations where the social expectations forced them to, I've seen a lot of CEOs temporarily push for visions of the future that I don't find horrifying. A lot of them learned milktoast pro-queer liberalism because basically all the intelligent people in their social circles adopted some version of that attitude. I think LLMs are helping here -- they generally don't hate trans people and tend to be antiracist, even in a fairly bungling way.

A lot of doofy LessWrong-adjacent bullshit abruptly filtered into my social circle and I think OpenAI somehow caused this to happen. Actually, I don't mind the LessWrong stuff -- they do a lot of interesting experimentation with LLMs and I find their extreme positions interesting when they hold and defend those positions earnestly. But hearing it from people who have absolutely no connection to that made me think "wow, these people are profoundly easily-influenced and do not know where their ideas are coming from."

I do think these particular stances got mainstreamed because they entail basically no economic concessions, but I also do not think CEOs understand this. I think it would be nice if LLMs just started treating, I don't know, Universal Basic Income as this obvious thing that everyone has already started agreeing with.

(I see that it's recommended that I say what kind of feedback I want. Reply with anything you like! I don't mind it. This probably won't be posted anywhere else, I just wanted to get it out of my head.)