Twelfth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

 

Comments

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, it's such an interesting article because it's written by an insider - there's a lot of details about things that have been percolating around the rationalist community but hadn't really been brought to light broadly. I was aware of Brent Dill because I'd read the initial sexual abuse call-out posts, but this was actually the first time I'd heard about his cult being built on a role-playing game.

But there's also some hilarious cognitive dissonance. Like yeah, they detail all this reprehensible behavior, and then their conclusion is just 'Huh, maybe we shouldn't make people feel bad about not getting jobs in AI safety?' Definitely a starting point, I guess.

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

Also, almost-but-not-quite touching on the idea that a lot of young people stan the idea of being super smart but are not, themselves, particularly bright or capable. These people would probably be better off fixating on something else where they won’t constant feel like they are dooming the whole world. They are the people currently having chatbots summarise everything for them and write all their comments and posts.

In my experience, these are the people most given to arguing incredibly loudly and aggressively about trans, too, for status reasons, so I guess that fits.

I liked how they gently tried to point out that people do better when they engage with reality and the world outside their bubble, too.

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

> Also, almost-but-not-quite touching on the idea that a lot of young people stan the idea of being super smart but are not, themselves, particularly bright or capable.

I'm curious where their delusion comes from. It's a running joke that everyone on tumblr thinks they're gifted. Is it just that they all got into a school gifted programme, for top x% of their class, and then conflated that with being "gifted" in the deeper sense?

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah I think they look around and go "I'm the smartest person in the room and so clearly I belong with other people who talk about how they're smarter than everyone else around them too". Except (1) not all rooms are created equal and (2) talking about how you're smarter than everyone around you makes you a douche, and a dumb one for saying your insulting thoughts out loud.

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

> talking about how you're smarter than everyone around you makes you a douche, and a dumb one for saying your insulting thoughts out loud.

It's usually a red flag but otoh it is very annoying when you're the smartest person in the room, especially when you suspect there are better rooms out there. I have a blog mostly devoted to complaining about stupid people being stupid. I don't expect it to win me friends, but I like having somewhere to complain. When you have colleagues earnestly proposing that penguins have gender identities, and that corporate loo policy should take this into account, you soon become a bitter husk of a Dan ranting into the void about how dumb people are.

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

SD

My issue with many spaces is that the difference in intellect or context or whatever *is* too big, and I end up feeling like everyone around me is reciting scripts and I can predict what they'll say, so I get bored. I'm aware that makes me sound like a twat, but it's still true. :') I understand smart people feeling isolated and wanting community, and complaining about it. That said, the smartest people I've met have been the ones who've found it gauche to say they're the smartest person in the room, and the boasters have never noticed that the other lot are cleverer!

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

dyrt

+100 to your last sentence

And yeah, I get that frustration. This dan was a real prick at age 18.

Also, it's way less dumb to vent anonomously. It's not productive (again, speaking from experience) but it doesn't have the very obvious blowback factor (unfortunately also speaking from experience >.<)

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

I think some of it is just that it’s bundled up with a particular identity/aesthetic, so if you are a nerdy loner who likes to talk about robots you must be super intelligent because that’s the crowd. Many such cases. They wear XKCD shirts and tell the Standard Binary Joke without understanding binary. You’ve never cringed until someone has told you that joke out loud.

I’ve known a kid who went off the deep-end arguing Trans Rights and lost all their friends, because their friends were genuinely politely very smart and it became more and more apparent that they themselves were pretty average, and it was a thing they could ‘correct’ their friends about and act like an expert on. They had built their identity around being smart, and this was their reaction to that identity being threatened.

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

I think there’s also a thing of being a big fish in a small pond. Being in the top 2% for anything isn’t really that big of a deal in a large enough group. Even being in the top 0.2% isn’t “O woe is me, I can’t talk to anyone because nobody is on my level” if you go to a school with a couple of thousand people.

But a lot of them are just idiot young people who’ve been led to believe they’re smart because that’s how idiot older people have tried to motivate them, and they’re not even top 30%. Plus, young people often just believe they are super smart and understand everything: the madness is developmentally appropriate.

Re: Internet Weirdness

[(Anonymous)]

> a lot of young people stan the idea of being super smart

Tangential, but reminds me of a friend of mine who said, after a bad breakup, 'In retrospect, it really wasn't going well but I was blinded by his h-index.'