4chan is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 13 times across 13 issues between May 10, 2021 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "We can't review the history of the alt-right without mentioning the online message board 4chan"; "The rise of 4chan is actually an interesting story of its own"; "Rage Comic Guys/Wojaks/4chan/Reddit/PCM are creating a new symbolic online language". It most often appears alongside Trump, Twitter, Scott.
- Article page
- 4chan
- Mention count
- 13
- Issue count
- 13
- First seen
- May 10, 2021
- Last seen
- February 02, 2026
Outbound links
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
- https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/argentinas-poverty-rate-spikes-53-6-months-president-114221438
- https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10017375
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10018037
- https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/activ-6-and-together-bear-strangely
- https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/do-we-have-a-responsibility-to-deal
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8476388/
- https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1594348646396559361
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
Issue trail
- The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
- Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
- Links For September
- Somewhat Contra Marcus On AI Scaling
- Forer Statements As Updates And Affirmations
- What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
- Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
- Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
- In Search Of AI Psychosis
- Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
- Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
- Moltbook: After The First Weekend
Related pages
Source context
We can't review the history of the alt-right without mentioning the online message board 4chan, infamous for being racist and anti-Semitic and every other thing it is bad to be. 4chan's trajectory is a another great mystery. In 2010, geeky extremely-online young people were almost universally liberal democrats. Racism was associated with elderly white Southerners who would presumably die off in a few years anyway. 4chan had no connection to them or any other historical racist tradition. It was annoying and trolled people a lot, but that was it. Its conversion to full-on bigotry was unexpected, at least by me. It would be like if you woke up one day and everyone on Twitter was a Pol Pot supporter.
I think they irony-ed themselves so hard that they accidentally ended up as Nazis. You could always go to 4chan and find people saying horrible racist things ironically. That was the whole point of the anonymous message board - people would troll each other by saying the most awful thing they could think of, and whoever took it seriously first lost. Last I heard from them they were trying to use meme magic to make the coronavirus kill as many people as possible. This is impossible to take seriously, and for a long time their racism was the same way - a lot of the supposedly anti-Semitic posts bore obvious fingerprints of having been written by Jews who were having a fun time laughing at themselves. But if you're in a community where everybody puts a lot of effort into pretending to be pro-racist all the time, and where any breaking of kayfabe gets punished, eventually some people who aren't in on the joke just get actually racist, and if you're so devoted to edginess that you can't politely take those people aside and explain, eventually that takes over the culture. I know this is a weird theory, but Kurt Vonnegut was a smart guy and he said "Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be".
Some of the best comments were on the history of 4Chan. Mr. Doolittle writes:
Inline links: writes
The rise of 4chan is actually an interesting story of its own. A large chunk of the early user base came from another site called somethingawful.com. As you may expect from the name, somethingawful was a place where a mixture of ironic and maybe-not-ironic terrible things could be said for comedy sake. If you're immature and like edgy humor, it was a great place to be. (The site probably exists still, but as a shadow of its former edgy hilarity, as internet culture caught up with its redeemable qualities and it became a cesspool).
Up until 2008, there was a strong mix of both left and right posters, and the site didn't have much of an ideological slant. It was happy to make fun of the failings of both left and right culture. The Obama/McCain election ended up breaking that down, because a significant number of posters bet that they would accept permanent banning from the site if their candidate lost. Since Obama won, a big chunk of the conservative/right posters were banned. Many/most ended up on 4chan and set the seed for more right-leaning ironic humor, which is what the site became known for.
26: People have commented before on how Rage Comic Guys/Wojaks/4chan/Reddit/PCM are creating a new symbolic online language, but I didn’t appreciate it fully until I read this Greek mythology 6x6 Wojak compass mapping the new archetypes on to the old. Warning: very high-context.
Inline links: this Greek mythology 6x6 Wojak compass
DALL-E, “A elderly person's hand, labelled with the text ‘AN ELDERLY PERSON'S HAND’” Lucid dreaming enthusiasts suggest that two of the easiest ways to distinguish dreams from reality is that, in dreams, hands have the wrong number of fingers, and text is garbled and unreadable. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence. But even the waking world gives us clues, as Sarah Constantin notes in Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences. Most adults will make GPT-like mistakes (or gloss over such mistakes) unless they’re focusing all their brainpower on an issue. And a 4chan post by someone who claims to have done psych research in prison populations goes further (slightly edited for language and offensiveness): I did IQ research as a grad student, and it involved a lot of this stuff. Did you know that most people (95% with less than 90 IQ) can't understand conditional hypotheticals? For example, "How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?" "What do you mean? I did eat breakfast and lunch." "Yes, but if you had not, how would you have felt?" "Why are you saying that I didn't eat breakfast? I just told you that did." "Imagine that you hadn't eaten it, though. How would you have felt?" "I don't understand the question." It's really fascinating [...] Other interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion. For example: "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." Most literate people can manage this, especially once you give them an example. "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue. In this story, one of the characters must be describing a story with at least two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." If you have less than 90 IQ, this second exercise is basically completely impossible. Add a third level ('frame') to the story, and even IQ 100's start to get mixed up with the names and who's talking. Turns out Scheherazade was an IQ test! Time is practically impossible to understand for sub 80s. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can't plan for the future at all. Sub 90s struggle with anachronism too. For example, I remember the 80-85s stumbling on logic problems that involved common sense anachronism stuff. For instance: "Why do you think that military strategists in WWII didn't use laptop computers to help develop their strategies?" "I guess they didn't want to get hacked by Nazis". Admittedly you could argue that this is a history knowledge question, not quite a logic sequencing question, but you get the idea. Sequencing is super hard for them to track, but most 100+ have no problem with it, although I imagine that a movie like Memento strains them a little. Recursion was definitely the killer though. Recursive thinking and recursive knowledge seems genuinely hard for people of even average intelligence. I have no proof that this person is who they say they are, but it matches some of my experience giving cognitive exams to patients from low-functioning populations. And it matches Flynn on Luria (who admittedly was approaching IQ from a cultural relativist viewpoint, but one which I think is equally applicable to the current problem). Luria gave IQ-test-like questions to various people across the USSR. He ran into trouble when he got to Uzbek peasants (transcribed, with some changes for clarity, from here): Luria: All bears are white where there is always snow. In Novaya Zemlya there is always snow. What color are the bears there? Peasant: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. Luria: What what do my words imply? Peasant: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed. And: Luria: There are no camels in Germany; the city of B is in Germany; are there camels there or not? Peasant: I don't know, I have never seen German villages. If is a large city, there should be camels there. Luria: But what if there aren't any in all of Germany? Peasant: If B is a village, there is probably no room for camels. And: Luria: What do a chicken and a dog have in common? Peasant: They are not alike. A chicken has two legs, a dog has four. A chicken has wings but a dog doesn't. A dog has big ears and a chicken's are small. Luria: Is there one word you could use for them both? Peasant: No, of course not. Luria: Would the word "animal" fit? Peasant: Yes. And: Luria: What do a fish and a crow have in common? Peasant: A fish — it lives in water. A crow flies. If the fish just lies on top of the water, the crow could peck at it. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a crow. Luria: Could you use one word for them both? Peasant: If you call them "animals", that wouldn't be right. A fish isn't an animal and a crow isn't either. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a bird. A person can eat fish but not a crow. What I gather from all of this is that the human mind doesn’t start with some kind of crystalline beautiful ability to solve what seem like trivial and obvious logical reasoning problems. It starts with weaker, lower-level abilities. Then, if you live in a culture that has a strong tradition of abstract thought, and you’re old enough/smart enough/awake enough/concentrating enough to fully absorb and deploy that tradition, then you become good at abstract thought and you can do logical reasoning problems successfully. (Sometimes! If you’re lucky! Linda is a blah blah blah you know the story. Is she more likely to be a bank teller, or a feminist bank teller. When people get this question wrong, do they have a world-model, or not?) Imagine a world where doctors gave different diagnoses based on unrelated contingent features of the encounter like a patient’s gender, their race, or how you phrase the question. What a crazy place that would be! What is the pre-logical function that logic gets knit out of? I think it’s something like predictive pattern-matching. I think the brain starts by predicting arbitrary patterns, builds up more and more layers of abstraction to try to predict those patterns better, and eventually some of those layers cohere into something that looks like formal logic. To put it another way, my brain is in some sense a supercomputer that can outperform the best calculating machines in the world - but also, I have trouble multiplying three digit numbers in my head. The supercomputer is doing something, and then I’m using that something, very lossily, to emulate logical functions like math or formal logic. So when I see GPT, which also runs on a supercomputer, also slowly gaining the ability to multiply two-digit, then three-digit numbers as the supercomputer gets bigger and bigger, I feel a sort of kinship with it. It’s a trash heap of patterns with a hard-won ability to sometimes break out into the clear day of logical reasoning, just like me. IV. I think Marcus knows and agrees with most of this, but I think he thinks of the world-modeling ability as some special rare brain region (maybe the prefrontal cortex?) which is only online part of the time (or maybe can have its performance degrade gracefully). Whereas I think of it as shallower pattern-matching abilities which escalate to deeper and deeper pattern-matching abilities as more and more brainpower becomes available, with world-modeling as one of the deepest (and sure, probably the PFC plays a major role, but not because it has a fundamentally different structure but just because that’s where reinforcement learning stuck the highest-level patterns). Why do I think this? The human brain is pretty plastic. Usually if one part of it dies, another part can take over. This makes me think that the brain area : function correspondence isn’t entirely a function of different structures in different regions (though some of it might be this), but downstream of an originally poorly-differentiated blob of neurons that get trained by the overall predictive structure based on their proximity to various input ports (eg sensory nerves) output ports (eg motor nerves), and other brain areas. (this would also explain why the brain has a pretty consistent area dedicated to reading/writing, even though we haven’t been literate long enough to evolve new literacy-related structures) Deep learning agents are also a poorly-differentiated mass of neurons. As they get inputs and outputs (ie training data) they slowly “evolve”/develop the ability to “recognize” patterns. We don’t know how they do this or what recognition-abilities they’re evolving, except by speculating (the way Marcus and I are doing) based on what kinds of problems they can and can’t solve. It would make sense to me if poorly-differentiated blobs of neurons, when having lots of problems thrown at them, gradually move from developing simpler pattern-recognition programs (eg edge detectors), to more complicated pattern-recognition programs, all the way up to world-modeling, without any of these being hard-coded into the territory. (the brain does have a lot of things hard-coded - ie we’re not blank slates - but its plasticity suggests that the forms of hard-coding we’re talking about here are helpful but not completely necessary for cognition) If this were true, it would mean that as a blob of neurons got bigger, more sophisticated, and saw more training data, it would eventually develop new capabilities that weren’t hard-coded in, and that smaller versions of the same blob didn’t have. One of the really exciting things about GPT-3 was its sudden and unplanned development of new capabilities over GPT-2 (its creators mention “translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks, as well as several tasks that require on-the-fly reasoning or domain adaptation, such as unscrambling words, using a novel word in a sentence, or performing 3-digit arithmetic”). This seems like a good fit for the chimp → human transition, where evolutionary lineages that couldn’t do a bunch of difficult things for the first few hundred million years suddenly became good at those things in an evolutionary eyeblink. The ~5 million chimp/human gap seems like enough time to scale up chimp brains a bit (which definitely happened), but not enough time to invent a fundamentally new architecture. It wouldn’t surprise me if the architecture changed a little during this time, but we’re limited in how fundamental a change we can talk about over that period. I’m not at all sure this is true! I’m honestly close to 50-50 here. Maybe the PFC actually is magic! It just confuses me that Marcus seems to think we’ve ruled out the theory that this kind of scaling is possible, when I feel like we’ve heard plausible arguments on both sides. Nothing we’ve seen in GPTs or any other AI thus far disproves the scaling hypothesis, and a lot of what we’ve seen supports it. So sure, point out that large language models suck at reasoning today. I just don’t see how you can be so sure that they’re still going to suck tomorrow. Lemurs sucked for millions of years, then scaled up a bit and took over the world! V. …is one possible argument. Another possible argument is: language models and other deep learners really aren’t doing the same thing humans do - but whatever, their thing is powerful/effective/dangerous too. Suppose that GPT-X took over the world and killed all humans. Millennia later, some alien archaeologists come and investigate. They conclude that since its training data included Alexander the Great and Caesar, it was just pattern-matching to the kind of things they did (multiplied by a vector representing the difference between ancient and modern times), and GPT-X never demonstrated any true intelligence. So . . . what? I imagine this situation ALL THE TIME and I hate it. I think the impetus behind a lot of the AI risk stuff is that we’re barrelling to a world where AIs have far more than self-driving-car levels of capabilities, while being unpredictable in ways that are a lot like this. The history of the past few decades has been people getting surprised, again and again, at how much AIs can do without being “generally intelligent”. Douglas Hofstadter predicted in 1979 that any AI that could beat a grandmaster at chess would also be able to decide chess was boring and it preferred writing poetry. Instead, we got Deep Blue, so domain-specific it can’t even do so much as play checkers. Worse, now we have AIs that can switch between writing poetry and playing chess, and it still seems like a clever parlor trick rather than anything like real intelligence. I think basically nobody predicted this: narrow AI has won victories beyond past generations’ imagination. (cf. Nostalgebraist’s Human Psycholinguists: A Critical Appraisal) So even if GPTs aren’t a step on the path towards some sort of human-like AGI thing, I have no idea where they’ll end up. Replacing humans at all jobs? Writing novels? Taking over the world? If this seems crazy to you, “solve protein folding” sounded crazy ten years ago, and they already did that! At this point I will basically believe anything. VI. So I’m not going to take Marcus’ bet that GPT-4 will be perfect (as if anything ever is!). But here are some things I do believe, with confidence levels: At some point before 2030, someone will come out with a deep-learning-based language model which is significantly better than the current state of the art, by Gary Marcus’ admission (97%)
Inline links: hands have the wrong number of fingers, text is garbled and unreadable, Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences, 4chan post, here, blah blah blah, https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1534887585759100930, a patient’s gender, their race, how you phrase the question, predictive pattern-matching, prefrontal cortex, mention, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!M9E6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85fd2e4d-c51e-4820-a9a2-6f79970026cb_600x368.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_D9T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5cb652e3-381b-488d-a6a6-f1155f7ff557_586x194.png, writing poetry, playing chess, Human Psycholinguists: A Critical Appraisal
Looking at this list, I can’t help thinking of what 4chan calls “normies” and what Tumblr calls “neurotypical people” (I know there’s a meaningful definition of “neurotypical” as people who don’t have some specific psych condition that you’re talking about, but I claim Tumblr uses it differently, in a way precisely equivalent to 4chan’s use of “normies”.) There’s a material aspect of normiehood - for NEETs, normies are people with jobs and happy relationships; for queers, normies are straight people. But this coexists with a psychological aspect. Normies don’t anxiously beat themselves up about things or fret about wasting their potential. Neurotypicals don’t have deep personality weaknesses they try hard to compensate for, or struggle with awkward sexual adjustments. They’re not unusually insecure, they don’t doubt what they’re doing, they’re not dissatisfied, they’re not logical independent thinkers.
The alt-right was originally a bunch of Stormfront type people who were not cool at all. But in 2016, Hillary Clinton gave a speech against them that sort of made them sound cool, and lumped them together with 4Chan in order to inflate their numbers. 4Chan was kind of cool, so the alt-right went from a handful of weirdos in jackboots to an umbrella term for any kind of weird edgy conservatism full of exciting young people. Also, they had the funny frogs.
Therefore, we can feel contempt for him. I don’t have anything better than this obvious compromise, but I’m not satisfied by it. I would like to end up with an overall negative view of Tate. And if I do a simple calculation, (virtues - vices), then it seems like if his nonmoral virtues were strong enough, they could overcome the moral vices. If Tate was a really really good kickboxer, he might still end up in the black. It seems much more intuitive to say that no amount of nonmoral virtues can make up for his moral vices. But now we’re back at the full slave moralist package again! Some “compromise”! Also, suppose Tate wasn’t a rapist, he was just some kickboxing champion who was a jerk to people online and constantly posted about he was better than them because of his Bugatti. I still want to feel contempt for him! Now we have to rate the vice of “boastfulness” so negatively that it overwhelms all possible positive virtues, which sounds like some kind of ridiculous straw man of slave morality. All these problems would go away if we gave up on unified assessments of people. Then we could classify Tate as a very good kickboxer who also happens to rape a lot of people. But if we give up on unified assessments, aren’t we giving up on the very possibility of heroes? Isn’t this just the slave moralist denial of judgment? Also, I think Nietzsche would say something something vitalism. He seemed to think there was a coherent conceptual unity between being strong, being skilled, and being some sort of unconstrained wild person who didn’t care what lesser people thought. Is there some sense in which Andrew Tate loses some genuinely valuable virtue, however small, if he becomes a normal civilized person who says please and thank you and is really respectful to everyone? Does he become less powerful, in some sense where powerfulness is good? Is he less able to achieve his destiny of being glorious? I’m genuinely unsure what Nietzsche would have thought of Tate, but it probably isn’t something as simple as “he should be nicer”.4 I’m worried this still isn’t coming off strongly enough. You can argue “master morality is about being strong and good; slave morality is just about preserving your pathetic little feelings”. But most of life is people’s pathetic little feelings. People have proven over and over again that their decisions - about what to do, what to buy, who to vote for, even what to die for - depend more on what lets them feel dignity and self-respect than on any purely material considerations. Every so often, usually on 4chan, you see an actual bully really going at it, unrestrained. Some kind of shock jock, saying “Note to unattached liberal women above 40: you are ugly hags who have lost your chance with men and all your eggs have dried up and nobody will ever value you anymore, you should either beg for some fat alcoholic guy to take you in since that’s the only man you can get, or resign yourself to being a cat lady growing old with nothing to do but dwell on your regrets and what could have been.” Outside of 4chan, there’s a sort of universal alliance against these people, which the rest of us join immediately and unconsciously. Is this the dreaded “herd” of “slave morality”? If so, long live the herd. VII. Cotton Mather Fine. Maybe we do need a Superman to sort this out. What are our options? Preliminary question: where do the Puritans fall on this dichotomy? On the one hand, they’re Christian, so they have a strong slave morality heritage. They talked a lot about humility, altruism, frugality, and self-discipline. On the other, they sure did talk about them a lot. The Puritans were convinced that virtues were real and good. They were convinced that some people had more of them than others, and that made those people better. The Puritans would have burnt you at the stake if you accused them of believing in the Promethean human spirit conquering the natural world. But they did sort of believe in it - at least enough to believe it was their moral mission to colonize a virgin continent. My goal here isn’t to explore the weird Puritan theology around who was a good person (nobody, we are all incredibly sinful, but God chooses to redeem some people through no virtue of their own, and then those people are genuinely better off and do fewer sins). Rather, I want to examine two different forms (levels?) of slave morality. In the first form, you replace the masters’ virtues with different virtues. But those virtues are still real. You can still embody them more or less well. This sort of creates a new hierarchy. The Puritans wouldn’t have respected a Bronze Age barbarian warlord. But they did respect the local minister. And the local minister was probably a smart, competent, disciplined, hard-working guy. From your respect for the local minister, you can rebuild civilization. Instead of obeying a warlord, you obey the minister, out of respect for the God and the values that he represents. In the second form, you notice that the first form is just another hierarchy of masters. You (the wretched of the earth) used to be contemptible because you were weaker and poorer than the warlord. Now you’re contemptible because you’re less virtuous and disciplined than the minister. Even if there’s no local minister, everyone’s still keeping track of how you said the word “darn” once and are therefore unsuitable for God’s kingdom. So you decide to reject not just the masterly virtues (strength, wealth, etc), but also the slavish virtues (continence, dignity, altruism) in favor of . . . no virtues? The virtue of hating other virtues, which shows that you’re enlightened to the true nature of the world where all virtues are fake? I used to have this map on my wall: It’s Progressive-era propaganda about the superiority of the American North over the South, but I find it most interesting for its list of virtues. It starts with Liberty, then moves on to Free Speech, Intelligence, Obedience To Law, Knowledge, Equal Rights, Free Schools, Contentment, Love Of Country, Philanthropy, Benevolence, Happiness, Patience, Charity, Faith, Hope, Joy, Industry, Sobriety, Morality, Justice, Virtue, Truth, Honor, Peace, Light, and Immortality. I appreciate the Progressive virtues because of how skew they are to most of the ethical systems I encounter. They’re not leftist (Love Of Country? Industry? Morality?) or rightist (Equal Rights? Free Schools?). They’re not Nietzschean master moralist (Philanthropy? Contentment? Benevolence?) or slave moralist (Industry? Knowledge? Honor?). They’re Christian-ish, but not hair-shirts-and-self-flagellation Christian or God-n-guns-megachurch Christian. They’re the kind of Christians who you can kind of tell are going to end up supporting eugenics in a few years. I think I would classify them as a first-form-slave-morality liberalism, whereas most of the liberalism you encounter these days drifted at least a little into the second form. I’m not 100% on Team Early 20th Century Progressive, but they give me hope that there are weird-yet-coherent groupings of virtues we haven’t even imagined. I feel the same way about some old Soviet posters: These are obviously left-wing, in the sense that they’re literal Communist propaganda. But to the modern eye there’s something off about them, something that makes you want to call them right-wing or even fascist. They’re bold and optimistic. Even though the commissars who commissioned them probably rejected some traditional or capitalist conception of virtue, they still firmly insist that there’s something sort of like virtue or power which is attainable and good. I think these are first-form posters, and that most modern leftism is second-form. I think if you had to group barbarian warlords, Puritans, Soviet communists, and modern leftists on a Nietzschean/geneaological/aesthetic axis, it would go: (Barbarian warlords) | (Puritans, Soviet communists) | (modern leftists) So one very weak compromise - hardly even a compromise, since it predates Nietzsche - is to try to stick with first-form slave morality, in the hopes that most of the problems come from the second. VIII. Ayn Rand “Is Ayn Rand a Nietzschean?”- the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12239 pages of heated debate. There’s a real answer here. Rand started out respecting, maybe even loving Nietzsche. She once said that: [Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra is my Bible. I can never commit suicide while I have it. …which maybe reveals more about her psychological situation than I expected from the answer to a “who’s your favorite philosopher” questionnaire. But later on she broke from him. It’s hard to figure out her exact position - she has a bad habit of treating anyone who disagrees with her in any tiny detail as the Antichrist, such that it’s hard to figure out whether she thinks of someone as a 99% fellow traveler or an arch-enemy. Still, there are substantial differences. Nietzsche is more chaotic - he expects the superior man to defy all external rules in favor of his own glorious destiny. But Rand is attached to rules - most of all the epistemic rules of Reason, but also the usual moral tenets like “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”. Nietzsche’s masters take the Ron Swanson approach to justifying their actions: …whereas Rand’s masters are prone to giving twenty-page-long arguments for why whatever they’re doing is the right choice according to Objectively Correct Moral Law. Rand’s approach has lots of advantages. The Nietzschean master, like Andrew Tate, is an awful guy to have around. It’s hard to fit him into a functioning civilization, except maybe an autocracy with him as autocrat. Nietzsche’s pitch is “hey excellent people, you should try to become this guy”, never “hey normal people, you should support my project of creating these guys, out of your own self-interest.” The latter wouldn’t pass the laugh test. Rand’s masters, while still probably very stressful to be around, have been tamed. They follow civilized rules of honesty and nonviolence - not, of course, because they’re too weak to defy them, but because following civilized rules is objectively the coolest thing of all. Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls**t. But, by coincidence, their excellent actions are doing you a service. They might only invent rocket ships to enact their Promethean conquest of nature and prove their own greatness. But you still get to ride in one. Rand also spares more of a thought (or at least an afterthought) for the little guy. Capitalism needs all types - even the company janitor genuinely contributes to whatever glorious accomplishments are going on, and deserves to feel good about themselves. She wants everyone to be the best, most ambitious, and most fighting-for-their-own-aesthetic/moral-vision they can be. But if that means being the company janitor, that’s fine. And if you love rockets and you consummate that love by becoming the janitor for a rocket company, the Objectively Correct Moral Law is 100% on board. I am not a Nietzsche scholar, but I think this is a more productive answer than Nietzsche has for this question. The disadvantage of Rand’s approach compared to Nietzsche’s is that it only works if you believe her proofs about why the Objectively Correct Moral Law is definitely objective and correct - most of which seem to me to be either hand-wavy or balderdash. Otherwise the whole thing breaks down - why is the most masterful thing to be a positive-sum capitalist instead of a negative-sum warlord? Rand really really wants to justify a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, to the exact people most capable of benefiting from defecting against it, without bringing in altruism or the common good at any point. It’s an extremely sympathetic goal. But I don’t think she makes it. Still, this is why I’m fond of her. If you really read her books - as opposed to skimming them while subvocalizing “this is that evil woman who loves selfishness” under your breath the whole time - it’s obvious that she believes, with a deep and burning belief, that good things are good. She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in. When people react to her books with loathing - without even a hint of fondness - I get suspicious that they’ve gotten so deep into slave morality that thy can’t recognize goodness when it hits them over the head with a sledgehammer. Elsewhere, I wrote: Edward Teach (Sadly, Porn) is famous for making up fake novels to criticize, and it is a little known fact that the "Ayn Rand" character along with all her novels are 100% his work. They operate as a diagnostic test based on his psychodynamic theory of envy. The instrument presents a picture of some exceptional people achieving great things who don't apologize for their greatness, and doesn’t explicitly ask the patient - I mean, reader - for their opinion. If the reader has no strong opinion, or says something like "Good for them, I guess," she passes the test. "I like these people and will use them as a role model" also passes. Some specific criticisms (see below) may also pass. If the reader says "Ah, people who are better than the pathetic sheep around them, just like I'm better than all the pathetic sheep around me!", she . . . still passes the test. That's not what it's testing for! You fail the test if you absolutely freak out about some combination of the Rand characters themselves and the potential existence of arrogant people who identify with the Rand characters. The secret is that it's not a screening test for the kind of people who would get featured on /r/iamverysmart. It's a screening test for the kind of people who would comment on /r/iamverysmart, ie the self-designated Tall Poppy Police, ie the people who build their ego off being the enforcers of the rule that you're not allowed to look better than anyone else. These people's basic mental stance is to hate people who seem too excellent. They don't think of it in these terms. They think of it as calling out arrogance, although if you look too closely you'll find their definition of arrogance covers anyone who seems excellent and but doesn't spend all their time apologizing and abasing themselves and denying it. The brilliance of Teach-Rand is how he-she draws this tendency to the foreground For example, why the whole "Objectivism" thing? Not because value is necessarily completely objective, but because the idea that any value might ever be even partially objective freaks out the Tall Poppy Syndrome people. Mention value at all, and they say you must be trying to secretly smuggle in the assumption that you are more valuable than other people (and therefore you are less valuable than other people, and therefore they are better than you). The same is true of Reason. Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this. (how do you decide what's true without Reason? By bias-based-reasoning - "You say X, but I can imagine a way that would come from a place of believing you're better than other people, therefore, Not-X is true. You say that's a logical fallacy? That must come from a place of believing you're smarter than everyone else and the only person who can use Facts and Logic.") The Teach-Rand test is designed to catch the sort of person who, if someone says that on a right triangle a^2 + b^2 = c^2, responds with "Oh, so you're claiming to be some kind of right triangle expert who's better than the rest of us? You really need to work on that arrogance problem! Super cringe!" Any criticism of the book that doesn't come from this particular place is irrelevant to the test and doesn't count against your grade. (which is good, because the books are bad in a lot of ways. But that's fine - Rorschach blots don't also have to be great art!) Still, I don’t think she’s the superman (superwoman?) who successfully transcends the dichotomy Her philosophy is only as strong as its proofs of Objective Correctness, which I consider weak. Without those, you need some subjective motivation to glue things together - of which altruism is the most popular. But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?” If you force yourself to reject that motivation, to just repeat “no no no, I’m only doing this because rockets are really big and make cool explosions”, aren’t you cutting out a part of yourself, in exactly the way Nietzschean masters are supposed to try to avoid doing? I find something very compelling about Rand. I think she goes some of the way to answering the Andrew Tate objection to master morality. But she’s a means and not an end. A real superman would have to figure out some way to reintroduce basic human kindness. IX. Matt Yglesias Yglesias’s mantra - “good things are good” - is too perfect and profound to come from anyone other than an esoteric master of Nietzschean philosophy. Good Straussians ignore the title and focus on the subtitle. Nietzsche wrote in the 1890s. There were still real nobles and emperors walking around; communists had not yet started calling capitalism “late capitalism”. Sure, his world was probably some sort of weak compromise between master and slave morality, but it was different from our weak compromise. Our weak compromise was forged through dialogue and warfare with fascism’s novel take on master morality and socialism’s novel take on slave morality. I think of Yglesias - who combines an insistence that good things are good and a proclivity for embiggenment with commitments to democracy, the welfare state, and the poorest among us - as one of its most self-conscious proponents. When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche. The compromise goes something like: Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.
Inline links: 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qsg1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81d5434-5610-41dd-878e-9de6446d91b1_913x832.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!O9yN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffc156151-6861-4a76-8e2a-ba3882952e08_4096x2717.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6V8D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f1f70cc-b468-4b04-b894-a8b75b3330e5_1024x683.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FF8B!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0a1ac7aa-d19e-43e8-8462-210325b902be_810x545.png, a real answer here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OtNv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ae1aaf2-6cc3-488c-b0a7-5df62eee457b_225x225.jpeg, Elsewhere, Sadly, Porn, /r/iamverysmart, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MzIr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff03d1a9d-5ffc-45ff-84bc-db3388915bbc_259x390.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hYvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0f9b152-da12-4525-b062-b4c14d8b8005_383x373.png
The 4chan losers are just a herd of their own, alike in temperament to the globalist prog herd. Multiple "opposing" herds just use each other to enforce ideological purity on their own side
I am a native of 4chan. Let me give you an insider's perspective.
4chan's guiding ideal is "who you are doesn't matter, only what you say and do". You can go right now and ask the animals board about how to house a leopard gecko, the toku/mecha board about which Kamen Rider series to watch first, the dollkeeping thread about the best brands for accessories, or the sci-fi thread about books similar to Baru Cormorant. They will help you to the best of their ability. But the moment you display any personality traits beyond "I want to do X and would like to know how", they will turn on you. The easiest way to become hated on any board is to be recognizable - anyone who uses a tripcode or a character avatar to post is treated as a digital leper.
Politeness – Perhaps more than any other blog, the Commentariat considers itself to be a ‘polite’ place, where people are afforded a fair opportunity to discuss ideas. There are strong community norms towards politeness, even when engaging with very emotive topics. Other websites have free speech norms (such as 4Chan or early-days reddit), but ACX is unique in having strong norms both for free speech and politeness.
The real world intruded on the Commentariat’s hyperfixations In The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars, Scott notes that online feminism was absolutely everywhere from around 2014-16 and then just sort of… disappeared one day. This has some parallels (down to the timing) for engagement with the SSC Comments section – from 2014-16 engagement with the comments section seems to be on an unstoppable upward trajectory and then in April 2016 it just sort of… reverses. I have already mentioned that April 2016 marked an extreme high-water mark for usage of the term ‘SJW’. From what I can see, there’s no particular reason for this specific to SSC – April 2016 has two threads with significant usage of the token, but they are completely random threads – OT47 and Links 4/16 (Links 4/16 does have a link about social justice warriors so that makes some sense, but OT47 doesn’t, so my conclusion is that there is just something that was in the water around that time). This theory says that the Commentariat really liked talking about SJWs, and when they were prevented from talking about SJWs they just stopped engaging with the blog altogether. The problem with this theory is that there is nobody really preventing the Commentariat from talking about SJWs to their heart’s content after April 2016. In February 2016, Scott requested that all Culture Wars topics be quarantined to a single Culture Wars thread on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit (link). This seems like the most common-sense explanation for the observation that the comment section changes dramatically around this time - of course engagement and usage of the term ‘SJW’ falls off when usage of the term ‘SJW’ is quarantined to a single thread in an offsite forum. However, the major problem with this explanation is that it doesn’t fit the data – comment section engagement increases throughout February – April 2016 and only starts dropping in May, when as far as I can see there is no specific events occurring in the r/slatestarcodex subreddit to explain it. Also, in February 2019 the Culture Wars Thread was euthanised (link) but there is no corresponding uptick in comment section engagement as people migrated back from the Culture Wars thread to the SSC comments section. I thought perhaps discussion of SJWs might have been drowned out by discussions of something else, such that it became passé to be discussing SJWs when there was some other Culture Wars issue at stake. This would mirror what happened to online feminism, where it became passé to discuss women specifically and more trendy to discuss intersectionality / race issues from about 2016 onwards. The obvious candidate for this switch is Trump and the rise of the MAGA movement. March 2016 was probably the last period where you could kind of convince yourself Trump wasn’t going to win the Republican Primary. In March 2016 it was just about possible Cruz could have won, but by April 2016 Trump was winning every Primary with decisive majorities. If you are slightly younger you may not have been online during that period, but I can attest that it was completely crazy commenting in political spaces around that time; I’d argue a strong candidate for the most toxic comments section ever is You Are Still Crying Wolf, where Scott offers some extremely guarded non-criticism of Trump, arguing that he was not unusually racist by American Presidential standards. This didn’t make my database because Scott nuked the comments for being too toxic, so we will never know mathematically how bad the comments were, but anecdotally they were pretty standout – closer to 4Chan than ACX in places. The evidence for this hypothesis is kind of mixed – if you abandon all sense of statistical appropriateness you can freehand draw a line which kind of looks like the decline in ‘SJW’ tokens is mirrored by a rise in ‘Trump’ tokens when you normalise the two terms, but you can also do that with any other word that was trending in April 2016, like ‘Snowden’ or ‘Wikileaks’ (or ‘Harambe’ as per the graph below). Looking just at the data it isn’t really a very impressive correlation to draw. I appreciate it is so boring to conclude that Trump is the Great Satan for the millionth time. However, I do think if you add in contextual factors there is reason to be cautiously supportive of a ‘Donald Trump killed the AXC Comments Section’ theory: The volume of ‘Trump’ comments is absolutely massive - around 11% of all comments were about Trump in January 2017, which is greater than comments about Russia during their invasion of Ukraine (10%) and comments about COVID during the first few months of the pandemic (7%). Even a topic like SJWs, which the Commentariat really liked talking about, could only manage a peak of around 1.2% (although eg ‘gender’ peaks at 5.5% and ‘feminis*’ peaks at 3.7%). Concepts like ‘Harambe’ and ‘Wikileaks’ barely register on this scale, at 0.3% and 0.5% peaks respectively. So even though the shape of the two curves looks similar when you normalise them, it is reasonable to believe Trump could have had a significant enough impact on the comments section to dislodge forum norms, in a way Harambe did not.
Inline links: The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars, OT47, Links 4/16, link, link, You Are Still Crying Wolf, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6J8h!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faea86860-bafc-41c3-94f3-76f3b7424e18_863x331.png
I’m not making fun of Kelsey or her daughter here. Something about this rings true to me. When I was eight years old, I wouldn’t have cared much what my parents thought either. But if the computer believed it, that would be a different story! II. In Search Of . . . Social Media Psychosis? In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past ten years: QAnon is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The most common version claims that liberal elites, especially Hillary Clinton, molest young children to extract an immortality serum from their blood. Donald Trump figured this out and is trying to stop them, but for some reason he can’t play his hand openly, so he has to pursue a roundabout strategy involving winning the Presidency and dismantling the liberal order from above. Everything that has happened in politics over the past ten years has been part of the shadow war between Trump and the immortal pedophile conspiracy. This is pretty crazy. But is it psychotic? And since it spread through sites like 4chan and Facebook, should we invent a new diagnostic entity, “social media psychosis”, to cover it? These are tough questions, but in the end we didn’t do this. I think this was partly because there was a pre-existing category, “conspiracy theory”, that seemed like a better fit. We concluded that “sometimes social media facilitates the spread of conspiracy theories”, but stepped back from saying “social media can induce psychosis”. And by “in the end we didn’t do this”, I mean “we absolutely did it, but forgot about it later.” I think now there might be several dozen subreddit moderators who could accurately describe their job as “witch webmaster who runs an online service giving advice to new witches”. And partly it was because there are so many crazy beliefs in the world - spirits, crystal healing, moon landing denial, esoteric Hitlerism, whichever religions you don’t believe in - that psychiatrists have instituted a blanket exemption for any widely held idea. If you think you’re being attacked by demons, you’re delusional, unless you’re from some culture where lots of people get attacked by demons, in which case it’s a religion and you’re fine. This is partly political self-protection - no psychiatrist wants to be the guy who commits an Afro-Caribbean person for believing in voodoo. But it also seems to track something useful about reality. Nietzsche wrote “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Most people don’t have world-models - they believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. In a large group, weird ideas can ricochet from person to person and get established even in healthy brains. In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, a belief in demon attacks can co-exist with otherwise being a totally functional individual. So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention? Also, what if a thousand people believe something, but it’s you and your 999 ChatGPT instances? III. A Hidden Army Of Crackpots I have a family member who believes that the theory of evolution, as usually understood, cannot possibly work. He has developed an alternative theory called “noctogenesis” which patches Darwinism using ideas from the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he works on-and-off on various related books and papers. I have told him I suspect he might be a crackpot; he stands by his claims. It’s fine; when I got into the technological singularity and AI safety, lots of people suspected I was a crackpot, and I stood by my claims too. You’ve got to stand by your family members even when they’re slightly crackpottish. This family member is happily married, retired after running a successful business, and generally a normal likeable person. He has no signs of mental illness, and doesn’t talk about quantum evolution unless someone else brings it up first. There must be millions of people like him. Used car dealers with proofs of P = NP, dentists who think they’ve discovered something important about Mary Magdalene, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon. I’m working on evaluating ACX Grants, and these people are out in force. A few propose literal perpetual motion machines. Others have vaguer plans, like some kind of social media app (it’s always a social media app) that will cause world peace. Many of them have decent jobs and seem like upstanding members of society. Their secrets are known only to themselves, their family members, and their would-be grantmaker. …and, increasingly, their chatbots. After years of hiatus (or at least not talking to me about his work) my family member is back on the quantum evolution beat, and LLMs appear to be involved. If I knew him less well, I would think the LLM had caused the quantum evolution theory - but no, it just made it much easier to research and write about. Is this psychosis? The answer has to be no, but it’s once again hard to draw the line. A very small number of crackpots will be vindicated by history. A larger number will be erroneous but sympathetic - the official account of the Kennedy assassination is pretty weird, and reasonable minds can disagree. From there, we get to ones that are maybe not so sympathetic: flat earth, QAnon, the thing where the Queen was an alien lizard. If only one person thought the Queen was an alien lizard, and they never managed to convince anyone else, would that be sufficient evidence for a delusional disorder? I’m not sure. (psychiatry has a diagnosis, schizotypal personality, which sort of involves being a normal person with a few odd ideas, but it’s not a great match for many of these people, and interesting mainly as a genetic curiosity - it travels in the same families as schizophrenia itself) Maybe this is another place where we are forced to admit a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders - there is an unbroken continuum from mildly sad to suicidally depressed, from social drinking to raging alcoholism, and from eccentric to floridly psychotic. People who are eccentric can remain so their whole lives, with the level of expression depending on their social connections and the ease of pursuing their rabbit holes. LLMs, by making it easier to pursue odd theories and serving as a surrogate social connection who always agrees with you, can bring latent crackpottery into the open. IV. Cause And Effect Bipolar disorder has an interesting relationship with sleep. Most manic people sleep very little, or not at all - maybe an hour or two a night. But also, poor sleep can cause bipolar episodes in people prone to them. In a typical case, a bipolar who’s been well-controlled for years will get assigned a big report at work and get poor sleep for a few nights until they finish. At first, this will be just as bad as it sounds, and they’ll be working through a fog of tiredness. Then the tiredness will lift. They’ll feel normal, then better-than-normal, until finally they can’t sleep even if they want to. Then they’ll email the report to their boss and it will be written entirely in Assyrian cuneiform. I increasingly think this isn’t just an incidental feature of bipolar, but part of the reason it exists as a diagnostic category at all. Most people have a compensatory reaction to insomnia - missing one night of sleep makes you more tired the next. A small number of people have the reverse, a spiralling reaction where missing one night of sleep makes you less tired the next. Solve for the equilibrium and you reach a stable attractor point where you never sleep at all. But this does other bad things to your brain - hence the cuneiform. I’m not claiming that bipolar is “just” sleep loss. As Borsboom et al will tell you, psychiatric disorders can be viewed as complex networks of symptoms, each reinforcing the others. In a few pure cases, you can get a ratchet going with sleep alone, and the sleeplessness will spark everything else. More likely, there will be lots of interactions between poor sleep and everything else, and the “everything else” can sink or hypercharge an impending manic episode. Still, I find this a fruitful way to think about bipolar. Sleeplessness is both the cause and the effect. Can delusions also be like this? That is, suppose there’s some personality trait where having one delusion makes you even more delusional. Maybe the delusion makes you excited (who wouldn’t be excited to learn they’re the Messiah?), and you’re more delusional when you’re in an excited state and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it’s a three-symptom cycle - the delusion causes excitement, which makes you unable to sleep, which scrambles your thinking, which makes you more delusional (which makes you even less able to sleep, etc). The point is: delusions are certainly an effect of bipolar disorder. And in the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, we should expect that effects are often also causes; that’s how the vicious cycle gets going. This is the best I can do at modeling true LLM psychosis. Someone with a trait where delusions lead inevitably to more delusions starts using an LLM. The LLM accentuates whatever usual tendency towards crackpottery they have and makes them believe something a little crazier than whatever they believed before. Then that crazy belief feeds upon itself and causes other things like excitement and sleep loss, which (if the person is predisposed) precipitates a true psychotic episode. V. Folie A Deux Ex Machina If one person believes a crazy thing, it’s a delusion; if a thousand people believe it, it’s a religion. What if exactly two people believe it? In psychiatry, this is called folie a deux. It fits awkwardly into our nosology and is rarely seen. Still, it happens enough to generate a few case studies. In a typical case, one person has psychosis for some normal reason, like schizophrenia or bipolar, and the second person is a shut-in who lives with them and rarely talks to anyone else. The psychotic person gets some normal psychotic delusion - they’re God, the Feds are after them, etc - and sort of psychically steamrolls over the second person until they believe it too. Usually removing the second person from the first is sufficient for a cure. This slightly challenges the view of psychosis as a biological disorder - but only slightly. Again, think of most people as lacking world-models, but being moored to reality by some vague sense of social consensus. If your social life is limited to one person, and that person themselves becomes unmoored, then sometimes you will follow along. I would expect second-sufferers to believe delusions in a sort of cognitively normal way, the same way people believe true facts, honest mistakes, and conspiracy theories. I would expect them to be less likely (though not zero likely) to have other psychotic features like sleep disturbances, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or a tendency to autonomously generate delusional ideas aside from the one they absorbed from the index case. An introverted person using an LLM has some similarities to folie a deux. If they use the chatbot very often, it might be a large majority of their social interactions. Here the primary vs. secondary distinction breaks down - the most likely scenario is that the human first suggested the crazy idea, the machine reflected it back slightly stronger, and it kept ricocheting back and forth, gaining confidence with each iteration, until both were totally convinced. Compare this to normal social interactions, where if someone expresses a crazy idea that isn’t common in their culture, other people will shoot them down or at the very least nod politely and stop the conversation. So my working theory of LLM psychosis is: Some patients were already psychotic, and LLMs just help them be psychotic more effectively.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HDQb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fece0561a-a62c-4eb6-8e23-7c0db5cb8a0b_749x479.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mYKR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03938197-ae2c-4dde-88d4-c22f66e34c09_767x681.png, the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon, ACX Grants, a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders, As Borsboom et al will tell you, the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, folie a deux
I appreciate this guide to the original intent of the word, but I claim ‘death of the author’ - it seems to me this is more than just a two-year problem. I remember people complaining about hellworld, the broken social contract, the Boomers tearing up the bridge behind them, vanishing opportunities for the young, the blackpill of modern life, etc, well before 2022. Memory can be faulty, but don’t we need something like this to explain the Trump campaign, the Sanders campaign, Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, 4chan, and all the other mid-2010s politicians and media telling us that things were worse than they’d ever been and outrage was the only acceptable response?
Therefore I like minorities less than whites. You can’t argue with (1), because the bad thing might be something like ‘crime’, which everyone dislikes. You can’t argue with (2), because sometimes you can find statistics showing it’s literally true. Your ability to argue with (3) depends on the exact form, but some forms - like “if I knew nothing about two neighborhoods except that one were 100% black and the other 100% white, I would probably prefer to live in the 100% white one” - seem pretty strong. But then what’s left of being against racism? We could think of racism as a bias that makes people update on racial topics far beyond what the data allow. For example, if 0.1% of whites are murderers, and 0.2% of blacks are murderers, this hardly means that you can’t be nice to your white-collar Harvard-educated black colleague, or that you should think of him as a potential-murderer-in-waiting. But even this might be giving the racists too much credit. If 0.1% of whites are murderers, and 0.2% of blacks are murderers, does that mean you should make a Twitter account NGGRKILLER1488 who posts “u look like CHIMP i will enjoy murdering ur family during the race war” under every picture of a black person that comes across your timeline? No? Because a lot of people do do that! I’m not Language Czar, but if you force me to define the word “racism”6, I would call it a bias which makes people take the flaw of an ethnic group (whether real or imagined) further than they would normally go, until whatever core of useful insight they contained becomes caricatured and exaggerated, and they’re being used more to spread hatred and fear than to communicate useful information. None of this is original or interesting, and I’m only saying this cliched and obvious thing so we’re all on the same page. So was Adams’ comment racist in this sense? By now we can probably rehearse the arguments of both sides: LIBERAL: “It’s Okay To Be White” is a known 4chan white supremacist slogan. They chose it as their slogan precisely so it would be awkward when people called them out for saying it, and so they could retreat to saying “We just said it was okay to be white, which surely nobody can hold against us”. This is stupid, we’re under no obligation to pretend we don’t know this, and those 26% of black people who were against it, were against it on this basis. CONSERVATIVE: Yeah, but the poll didn’t ask “do you agree with it as a 4chan white supremacist slogan?”, it just asked about the statement. And besides, most random Americans don’t even know the latest 4chan white supremacist slogans. At least some of the respondents probably meant it literally. My opinion - it seems plausible to me that many of the 26% of respondents who said they disagreed meant they disagreed with the 4chan slogan version, and that many of the rest were doing “symbolic belief”/”emotive responding” such that they interpreted the question as something like “in the history of interactions between the white race and other races, do you believe the white race has behaved in an okay way?”, and that some of the ones left over were Lizardmen. Adams isn’t required to know all of the weird sorts of symbolic belief biases that affect polls (although isn’t “our responses aren’t based on factual beliefs, but constantly malleable based on frame and emotion” sort of his entire shtick?). But at this point, he had lived in the USA for 60 years. He had already had many interactions with black people, both personally and through the news. Given how much other information he had, updating from one ambiguous poll where 26% of people gave an ambiguously bad answer, to “this entire ethnic group of 30 million people is a hate group, and white people should flee them, and try to avoid all interaction with them, and shouldn’t help them in any way” is exactly the sort of caricatured exaggerated7 leaping-to-conclusions that the word “racism” means if it means anything at all8. Does that mean Adams should have been cancelled and lost his livelihood? I’m against this sort of cancellation full stop, so I say no. I think it’s a dumb opinion, and maybe a bit evil in the complicated sense where it’s hard to disentangle evil from ignorance. But many people hold opinions of approximately that level of badness, and it’s not worth hating them all9. … 5: Other Comments … Calvin Collins writes: I learned of you through Scott [Adams]. Think a lot of what you say is valid but have to admit I’m one of the people whose lives he changed for the better. When I first listened I was a 25 year old 3x college dropout and 10 years later I have a great career and family. A lot of that comes from applying his advice. Subjectively I’ll always love him because of what he gave me, without even knowing who I am. [What helped the most were] the reframes and micro lessons. Almost everyday at work or home there’s a situation where one pops into my head: “I’m not anxious, I’m excited”
Inline links: 6, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qhD3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7308f73e-7d75-48e2-b0cb-14ecbc1f9cd8_900x280.gif, “symbolic belief”, ”emotive responding”, Lizardmen, 7, 8, against this sort of cancellation full stop, 9, writes
Although I don’t think Adams’ cancellation was fair according to normal human logic, I think it had a certain odd sort of cosmic justice. 4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan was (maybe literally) out of Adams’ book - say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to “What? You’re upset at our totally inoffensive thing? How silly!” when anyone calls you on it. This manuever didn’t fool woke people at all; the people wearing “It’s Okay To Be White” t-shirts got exactly as many accusations of racism as they would have gotten for wearing swastikas directly. The only person it apparently fooled was Adams, the professional not-being-fooled-by-political-manipulation expert, whose life it randomly destroyed as collateral damage. Oh well.