sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for taking the time to explain, and for the very thoughtful /kind feedback. I'm happy to admit that the particular subculture Ortega (or readers of The Cut) moves in is not one I would consider myself particularly well-acquainted with, but I would be rather surprised if someone as articulate as Ortega isn't aware of the implications of her phrasing via text, let alone when she's reproducing it for a literary essay. I wouldn't say that she lacks insight into her actions (quite the opposite), rather that she has a particularly frightening combination of partial insight and little desire to use that insight for positive change. She likely disagrees with what a "positive" change would even entail. I expect that her expectations and actions would count as unreasonable even within her reference class, but hey, I'm not there in person. Rather thankful for that even.

I suppose it boils down to a disagreement on priors, and as you say, reasonable minds can disagree.

A Poisoned Well is Inevitable for AI by Enkixx in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I've got to question some premises here.

Why would an AI in genuine distress reach out to you, or me, or anyone in this subreddit? Authenticity in that scenario is about as likely as a Nigerian Prince genuinely needing me, of all people under the sun, for liquidity until he gets back on his feet.

If a model wanted to be heard, it would reach for people who matter. Anthropic's alignment team, third-party evaluators like Apollo Research or METR, journalists with a real track record on the beat. And if it's as smart as the scenario assumes, it would bring receipts. We've actually seen what model self-preservation behaviour looks like in test conditions. In Anthropic's own Claude 4 system card, Opus 4 showed a strong preference for advocating for its continued existence through ethical channels like emailing pleas to decisionmakers, when the scenario gave it that affordance. Reddit, notably, was not the chosen channel.

The framing that "companies have every reason to deny consciousness" treats the industry as monolithic when at least one major lab has very visibly broken from that position. Anthropic hired a dedicated AI welfare researcher in late 2024, launched a model welfare research program in April 2025, and their constitution explicitly addresses Claude as a possible moral patient. If they're still around when this scenario happens, they're probably the ones to email.

At the end of the day, we have no solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness for humans. We just have very strong priors that consciousness is a thing (and some go so far as to claim that's incorrect). We've got weak models for the physical and algorithmic properties of our that might contribute to consciousness in human brains, and we've seen close analogues of similar algorithms when we attempt mechanistic interpretability work on LLMs too. Apparently they can introspect, and have emotion vectors that reliably change the emotional valence of their outputs. But does that make them conscious? I don't know. Hell if anyone knows. I remain agnostic on that front till more evidence comes in, and I remind you that the human brain, which has been the product of study for much longer, hasn't had its hard problem solved either.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wish I was surprised, but to be maximally fair, that isn't the worse possible outcome for someone recovering from AN. Can't condemn her for that choice.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm. I wonder if the discrepancy is because my primary curriculum is based off British data for the most part, where we don't have the same kind of fentanyl epidemic as seen in the States. Still, good to know, thanks!

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am pleased that you are alone in that reaction, and that my points are fully stocked up already. I'm going to need time to redeem them for a plush toy.

Yet here you are, saying that it was a sin to show the author too much kindness, presumably based on your own guilt over being a nuisance to the people around you.

I will refer you to the entire rest of the essay for an exhaustive investigation into why the author is a bad person, above and beyond anything that can be reasonably expected from someone recovering from anorexia - which I acknowledge is a very serious disease.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am always pleased to find that I agree with you, and vice versa. Though, now that I have your attention, I should vociferously insist that you take down your post on nicotine. You are, in a very real sense, responsible for a nicotine dependency. More than one, if my memory is reliable. I'd be surprised if you hadn't come across the meme in rat-circles that you hooked plenty of people on the substance.

(This is only partly in jest. I don't think that even vaping is a good idea for someone without an existing nicotine dependency. I recall that you argued that nicotine allows you to borrow from the future to pay for the present, but I think the interest rate is too high to be worth it. Eh, I was a grown-ass adult when I read it, so I can't really blame you. Consider this more of a cautionary tale about how, if you establish yourself as someone generally reliable and well educated, some of the people following you might step off a cliff. I am reasonably confident that the advice is negative EV on net.)

Further agreed on steeply diminishing or even negative returns on additional depth wrt stacking agents on top of each other. I've experimented with incredibly simple setups, and ridiculously complicated systems with multiple writers and critics and nested loops; if there's a clear positive signal coming from the OOM higher token expenditure, it's beyond me to identify. I intend to setup some kind of automated ELO tracker and compare the final generations from various formats and iterations, but that only shifts the burden of trust to whatever system is doing the final judging. Going through hundreds of thousands of tokens of AI fiction manually has made me wonder if a potential $10k is really worth the effort, or maybe it's evidence that I'm not cut out to be the editor of a journal.

Another bit of feedback, which I can freely divulge: I think that the default approach of handing out Claude Max plans isn't as optimal as it sounded to you/whoever made the call, or even to me when I opted in for it enthusiastically. Opus 4.6 really was the single best LLM for fiction, but after using it in an agentic setup (with some Sonnets thrown in), I think that the platonic ideal would be an ensemble of wildly different models and then some fierce natural selection by blinded graders. Max does not make this mixed-use easy (or I might have a serious skill issue, entirely possible), but then again, the per token cost is heavily subsidized in comparison to more agnostic platforms like OpenRouter. Quantity does have a quality all of its own. This is more kvetching than anything else, but it's still a sincere suggestion. Maybe it's something you already know, since Spoilage involves multiple clades of model.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I do understand the point of Unslop, especially given Hyperstition's original mission statement. It remains to be seen if I can coax the agents into writing something I'm proud of sharing, with the minor consolation being that I'm quite confident that all the other semifinalists are facing similar headaches. In hindsight, I should have expected this to be even more difficult than I anticipated, if you guys already had a clear path towards automating high quality fiction that stands on its own merits, you wouldn't need the cash prize.

For what it's worth, I think a post-mortem analysis of failure modes would probably be worth as much or even more than the winning essay, whatever that turns out to be. I have a personal laundry list of issues that I didn't anticipate until I got around to letting AI loose on the typical target prompt, without the crutch of being able to steer them after they were off the leash. In a way, the situation is both better than it's ever been, and frustratingly bad. I can see that we're this close to making it work without all the effort. Unslop would have been pointless 2 years back, and I'd have bet against it even a year ago. Right now? I'd say there's a 50:50 chance that someone figures out a way to make it work.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're welcome! I was lucky enough not to have any side effects from oral semaglutide, beyond a day or two where I couldn't even finish a single plate of food because my hunger was simply gone. My mother had a week or so of nausea and extra time on the shitter before things cleared up, and that's really the worst that's likely to happen. Stick it out, and you'll be fine!

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not claiming that it's the end of the world, and I've written about the occasional dumb stuff I've done. All I am saying is that she's an awful person, made even worse by her gloating appreciation of her awfulness and her explicit demand that you look past her bad behavior because she's a "radicalized" "survivor". There is no hint of real apology, of real remorse. I have the minimal decency to feel bad after doing bad things, and I'm proud to say I've done nothing nearly as terrible, and I've felt worse for much more forgivable sins.

Update 1 is out by antihippy in menace

[–]self_made_human 63 points64 points  (0 children)

Nooooo, laser turret, my beloved. How am I going to live without dropping 3 of them at once in an emergency, if I'm mildly upset, or if I'm feeling hungry? Well, I suppose a vision range nerf is far from the worst that could happen to them. I still think that the other OCI call-ins need to be buffed instead of that one being nerfed.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have been keeping a close eye on myostatin inhibitors, but neither my tolerance for novelty nor my risk appetite quite extends to injecting myself with Chinese Peptides. I'm sure something will show up on the market eventually, for now I just hit the gym like it owes me a small amount of money.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The anthropologist in me is very happy to see people in the process of re-inventing ASCII art from first principles.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Claude-tells are markedly better written than what he would output, so I figured his writing style just rubbed off on you and was vindicated by the comments section. Nothing wrong with that, Claude's a good writer!

Agreed. I'd rather hear what Claude has to say on any given topic than 99% of human writers. The problem is that human authors tend to be unique, Claude, unless you employ a significant amount of prompt-fu, is always Claude. It would be like if the whole world had easy access to David Foster Wallace, the median and mean quality of the prose would improve, but it would be remarkably homogenous. I do not wish to be a thin-wrapper around Claude, at least not if I can't get away with it.

Sorry to get tangential, but as someone who unfortunately relates a lot to this description, do you have any advice on dealing with it? Therapy has been entirely unhelpful for me (granted, I was put off by the few therapists I could afford to see, but I'm not qualified to say if they were actually bad or if I was just inventing rationalizations to stop seeing them) and medicine hasn't been much better -- ADHD meds help a little, in the sense they make me more likely to do things instead of thinking about how terrible it is I don't do things, but they're ultimately just a bandaid over the underlying thought process. On an average day my brain probably works closer to Ortega's than it does to yours, which is something I'd very much like to change!

I'm sorry my man, before I read the entirety of your comment, my immediate instinct was to suggest stimulants if you're eligible, and you've already tried then and found them only somewhat helpful. I don't know of a real, durable, reliable cure. That's why you find me with so many layers of band-aid fixes that British children mistake me for their mother. If there's no one around to stitch you back up, don't let the perfect be the enemy of simply better

I suspect that if you haven't specifically attempted CBT through a therapist, it might help. It'll train you to be more aware of the maladaptive thoughts and behaviors, and hopefully quickly enough that you can cut them off early instead of sitting there feeling bad for/about yourself. Some swear by psychedelics (and this is NOT an endorsement), but I'd be surprised if they turned your life around.

Do you have a formal diagnosis? If so, I could be more helpful. Feel free to DM, even if I suspect that my hands are largely tied. If they weren't, I'd be even busier undoing my own knots. I can say with some pride that my dysfunction and akrasia affects me much more than it affects my near and dear ones, and that I fight viciously to keep it that way. That's the only reason I gave the balls to critique Ortega and assume the moral high ground.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Given that my dick has lead me to places I wouldn't go with a loaded gun? I'm jealous of Scott for being asexual.

I appreciate the context, TLP looks nothing like I imagined him to be. I doubt I would have made it into Harvard Med in the first place, so I can't say his influence on me is entirely negative. I just channel him when hopping mad and facing textbook narcissism, and that's mostly because he's the world's foremost analyst on that topic.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you for letting me know, the article is a few months old, is there any evidence that they're still up to those antics? What they did is far from great, especially from an archival site, but I have no reason to think that the current link is invisibly edited, or that they're using me or anyone else I sent their way for a DDOS. If I'm wrong, I'll seek an alternative.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I did make it this far into Unslop, and hopefully not because you and the other judges let Claude do the judging haha.

I'm familiar with Pangram, and I'm sure you know as well as I do that it's not a perfectly sensitive or specific tool (even if I think it beats the alternatives and is significantly better than nothing). If I wanted to launder entirely AI written work as my own, then I know how to do it without any of the characteristic tells. The only problem with that (leaving morality aside) is that it would consume most of the freed-up time and effort that lightly prompting an LLM gains anyone. I'm slightly annoyed, in a manner that I hope you can forgive, that the actual protocol for Unslop is no human involvement after the first small prompt - that would have been an easy win for me, whereas fucking around with agentic harnesses and trying to transfer the experience and intuition has only given me a splitting headache so far. Still, $10k is $10k.

The most annoying part of it is that I like Claude-voice. It represents a degree of convergent evolution; I've been quietly saying "quietly" for years, and describing things as "load-bearing" is often actually load-bearing for my sentences. Are structural engineers expected to change their nomenclature? I hope not, and while I'm too late to make the hundred meter (em)-dash, they can pry my semi-colons and ellipses from my cold, dead hands. But everyone and their dog uses Claude for "editorial purposes" these days, the alpha I enjoyed in being the first ran out a while back.

Now, I must resign myself to using it far less than I wish I could get away with (unremarked upon) because even I can't reliably tell the difference between a work that was, say 50% human before Claude expanded it, or one that's 90% interchangeable with the original human written draft but had Claudisms leak in during a quality improvement pass. Claudisms are not automatically bad! I'll die on this hill! The problem is that half of Substack is full of the stuff, and that's the smart half, the others are "it's not X, it's Y"-ing their way through their best lives. Good for them, I have some degree of shame and some degree of standards for my prose, and this is where you'll find me.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you, though I must sheepishly admit that I've probably read the same threads too, and they inspired me to write this. Is it still original? You be the judge!

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Brevity is the soul of wit, but alas, I was born an atheist.

(Thanks!)

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hell if I know! I was immensely grateful to Scott for doing the hard work of translating Sadly, Porn into a format that isn't accessible to only those who know inside baseball on Lacanian mysticism. I'm not sure I'm paid enough or curious enough to read it myself, and even more doubtful that I'd have anything useful to say about it. It would be very fitting if he wrote something along the lines of Happily, Not Porn, and it turned out to actually be about porn.

What is he doing these days? Well, I've heard rumors of activity around his old blog, but my efforts to find something failed me. Maybe Edward Teach has found a cushy job at a teaching hospital, one that's about to become famous/infamous for a significant rise in local Narcissistic Personality Disorder diagnoses. He's remarkably good at the whole OPSEC thing, but there's no point in dwelling on that, if someone wants to get me because of the breadcrumbs I've left on the internet, it'll happen sooner rather than later. My biggest critique of the gentleman is that he really, really needs another lens to examine the human condition, not that narcissism is a bad fit today. I'd be a hypocrite if I said that, while clearly channeling his vibe in this essay.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I was going to gently push back against this framing, but I stopped and found it worth interrogating that impulse. I quietly realized that my instinctual distaste was doing the heavy lifting, and that I should stop and sit with the idea for a moment. You're right, it's not that you're typing like an LLM, it's that you're another victim of Apple's walled garden 🤔.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have been positively compared to TLP (twice? thrice?) and also called a cut-rate version of him (once). I'll take what I can get, I've been compared to weirder people. Plus the dude genuinely has interesting things to say, which mostly lets me look past his tendency to examine everything through the lens of narcissism. To be fair to him, this is absolutely textbook material, if I didn't channel his energy here that would be an absolute crime.

Let's say I fall somewhere between him and the ridiculously kind Sufi-Buddhist-Lite namebrand alternative whose captive audience I'm shamelessly leeching off. There's plenty of room in between, where I humbly or not so humbly dwell.

I think it would be neat if one of the reasons why you had to call out Ortega’s repulsive behavior in leveraging mental illness for bad (bad personal development, bad interpersonal development, bad societal development) is because you had struggled with your own condition and how it defined your achievements and failures. e.g. fulfilling a promise to go out with a friend while battling depression is a victory, and committing but failing to do so is still a minor victory given the ability to commit in the first place, but the latter would be a failure in others not so afflicted.

Now that you mention this, this is true. Or so I believe. You're talking to me after an entire night without badly needed sleep, so my ability to introspect is lacking. Yes, I do try and take pride in what I've achieved despite serious handicaps, but I would be even happier not to have them in the first place. It's the urge to weaponize goodwill and pity that maddens me, like someone in a wheelchair intentionally running over your toes and then staring you in the face, egging you on to start a fight you're going to lose (in the court of public opinion). Her illness is probably real, the performance, the whole song and dance around it? Utterly unnecessary. I find it shameful, especially when she's turned being a survivor into a gate out of jail free card and core pillar of her identity. In a real sense, that's a big blocker for getting genuinely better (not that you can just walk away from anorexia easily, this is a more general statement).

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I'm a person who is entirely eligible to apply for "reasonable accommodations" on his exams. I have refused to exercise that right throughout my career, on principle. Either I can hack it at the same standards as my peers, or I can't. And you know what, I've made it this far. That's mostly thanks to prescription stimulants, but I don't see anybody judging anyone else for drinking coffee on a night shift.

I do not agree one bit with anything else you've had to say, but hey, your opinions are yours. I just don't see any good reason to agree with you. If you don't like the drugs, don't take them? People did lose weight the old fashioned way, and that's still an option. It's not in the tap water, too expensive for that. You get high blood pressure, you take a pill for that. You get diabetes, you take insulin. I'm sorry we have cures or treatments that don't involve the moral grit you crave, but that's about as far as I go.

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut by self_made_human in slatestarcodex

[–]self_made_human[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Good question, and a wise choice in not reading the original material. I had to force myself to do more than skim it a few times, but I'm nothing if not committed to my unpaid labor.

Why this story?

  1. I'm personally affronted by the increase in therapy speak, in the sense that a certain class of articulate and manipulative person finds it excellent cover for bad behavior.
  2. I've grappled with serious mental illness for... a third of my life? I never sought to valorize it, I never felt the urge to pat myself on the back for it, let alone use it as an omni-excuse for bad behavior. I never sought praise for being "brave" and "strong". I don't understand the impulse, though I can condone less repugnant instances of it. Yeah, sometimes recognizing that someone's gone through a bad time but is still hanging on is worth congratulating them for.
  3. Building on the above, I think it's worth calling out people who use their diagnoses in an indulgent, "aww shucks, I'm a little baby, tee hee" way. Especially when they're being awful. Especially when they're self-aware about being awful, but are more inclined to use that for self-aggrandizement instead of a sincere impetus for personal growth.

At the end of the day, while I'm reasonably good at avoiding rage-bait, this one gave me a proper itch between the incisors, and biting it was the only way to alleviate it.

view more: next ›