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This link floated across my dash but I can't seem to find who posted it
The inside story of Peter Thiel's MKUltra by someone who thinks it was kind of good, actually.
And man, I am just fascinated by the sheer number of cults that float around a movement called "rationalism".
Quick critical thinking lesson:
Then Geoff posed a thought experiment: What if Tyler took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes?
Anybody who says something like this is trying to recruit you to a cult, sell you snake oil, or both, 100% of the time no exceptions.
"If I keep proving that I can guess which card you picked out of the deck, why would you ever bother to examine the deck?"
I have a lot more to say, maybe, when I'm less tired. Lydia Laurensen is also a real odd duck.
Speaking of not being able to admit what your actual politics are, after skimming that incredibly long article Laurensen wrote about Leverage, I also somehow read this one as well.
And a few things that happened while I was there
It's paywalled now, so I don't know if it was previewed for a while, or if I accidentally pressed the button that gave me my one free article, or what, but I did read the whole thing.
The executive summary is that, like a truly surprising number of people the George Floyd riots broke her brain, and she gravitated towards a neoreactionary discord because they were actually willing to listen about her feelings of stress about living in the St Paul Minneapolis region and not really knowing how to deal with the riots without calling her a racist.
I don't really care about that part, riots are scary, I've often found that, especially back then left-wingers had a tendency to psychoanalyze you and explain why you were making an argument from internalized racism or whatever and right-wingers were often more able to argue directly which is, honestly, easier to deal with. "You're wrong" is a more respectful and less disorienting way to argue than, "I bet so-and-so only thinks this way because he's secretly a conservative."
The real question, which she not only never addresses and in fact seems totally unaware of, is what the fuck Curtis Yarvin was even doing there.
According to Laurensen, both now and at the time she was obsessed with the fear that increasing polarization would lead to a civil war and the final collapse of the American government, and she is intensely patriotic.
So when Yarvin sent a message to the group saying he was looking for a new fiancee (???) she thought, in her words, "What's the worst that could happen?"
So, like... Your mental health is suffering because you're afraid that increasing polarization will lead to the collapse of the government, and you're wondering what is the worst thing that could happen if you get engaged to a man who is funded by billionaires with the explicit project of increasing political polarization until the US government collapses and is replaced by an authoritarian government?
I mean... like, just off the top of my head...
It's so weird, she even brings up the leopards eating faces cliche, and like, she seems put out by it and thinks it's unfair, but she also wrote this whole article where in the middle she says, essentially, "I was having nightmares about face eating leopards, and the danger they posed to the country, so when the head of the Face Eating Leopards Party asked for a fiancee, I thought, hey, why not?"
She's a really overly wordy writer, but she is so accidentally revealing that it almost comes off as a bit.
We need some sort of "Horseshoe but rotated 90 degrees theory" for this kind of thing, where you continuously talk about your centrism and then read Yarvin and go, "Sure, can't see anything wrong with this!"
In these kind of narratives, it's always hard for me to tell what's genuine naivetee and what's self-aggrandizing lies.
One thing I noticed very early on as a child was the way that Christians who claimed to have converted from militant atheism often seemed to have pretty much no grasp of the most common atheist arguments or skeptical culture.
Took a lot longer for me to realize "Oh wait a lot of them are just liars".
Here's a free article which is different but goes over more or less the same territory, including the complete lack of explanation as to why someone who was so concerned with politics and polarization was hanging around with Yarvin.
What cancel culture reveals and conceals about redemption
someday someone will figure out what it is about being into rationalism that makes someone crazy. Like, even people who I like on this very website that are former LessWrong types will fall into these kinds of really really bizarre thoughtforms about AI where it's not clear why they're arguing against something because they don't actually hold the contrary position and aren't even playing devils advocate. There's just something about the failure to follow a certain script in other peoples arguments and logic that really grabs some people. idk. anyone ever done a survey of rationalism as a fertile substrate for cults in the same way the hippie movement was as well?
one time I decided I was going to sit down and read some Yudkowsky to see what all the fuss was about. I was immediately so put off by his writing style that I bounced off. It sounded like a guy trying to hype up an auditorium crowd in text format. Like, disturbingly nonclinical. Like, you could easily picture this guy slowly walking a stage back and forth while doing increasingly loud call-and-responses with his audience.
I think maybe there is a selection effect for people who get drawn in by that sort of thing or at least don't consciously pick up on it. The Brennan article in the reblogs briefly talks about people who seem to want to be in a cult.
I got to participate in such a study, although probably due to the exact spots they stimulated, bliss wasn't one of the sensations provoked.
The best one they gave me was like a rush of electric energy, feeling like it welled up in the core of my chest and rolled out into my limbs like a wave (at which point I would have to wiggle my hands and feet to "shake it off"). I wouldn't describe it as unpleasant either, but it was kind of overwhelming, and after several jolts I'd feel like I'm done and want to take a break.
That one came from tickling my ventral capsules, which a little pacemaker-type device continues to do several hundred times a day every day in order to make me not severely depressed (at a milliamperage too low for me to feel it, mind you). They did also hit spots in my my amygdala, hippocampus, subgenual cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex, but none of those produced euphoria either. Brains are so fiddly that you can get different results from stimulating sites a fraction of an inch apart, so it wouldn't be surprising if they just didn't happen to poke whatever square millimeter of brain tissue does that for me.
I also occasionally have dreams about weird and off-brand variants on this sensation. Like probably once every five months or so. It's the only one that stuck hard enough to make it into my dreams. They're always cyborg anxiety/thrill dreams about being forcibly exposed to electricity or some powerful EM field or something that sets it off.
there was this other one which was Evil Wireheading. I forget which site prompted this one, but I'd very abruptly feel everything go distant and fuzzy, yet not in a losing-consciousness kind of way -- it kind of felt like I was the only thing remaining real while everything else got hazier. it made my eyes unfocus unevenly which didn't help. and imparted kind of a faint swollen feeling I can only describe in a synaesthetic way. Made me think of bubblegum reddish-pink and rubber balloons and the word "heee" but in a strained kind of way. Also I quickly started getting the inexplicable sense that something Bad would happen if they kept pressing that button. So they didn't try to find out.
the only "irreplaceable sensation I wish I could experience on demand" I've had was when I was in the ER and they gave me a refrigerated Dilaudid IV and the combination of the low temperature and the opioid effect made me think "omg they're changing my coolant 😊"
this was also the only time I've been on really strong painkillers and I also remember thinking "man this feels great, I really want to keep feeling like this, maybe if I--oh, hm, that's why they're addicting"
I really wonder if this was a broken brain thing, and that now I'd get a different/normal response, but dilaudid never felt good. it did make the nauseatingly severe pain I was in go away, which was awesome. but besides that I was too drowsy to even watch a movie on my phone, which I found very annoying and unpleasant. same deal with other opiates, I've had oxy and it's just "I hate being so sleepy, how about I don't take this"
if you're going to be serious about getting people to stop doing a heavily corporate-pushed and societally pressured thing that harms them you cannot hope that banning them from doing it will do literally anything. you have to do whatever they were doing in the 90s that turned the tide against smoking so hard that Big Tobacco had to invent a whole new form of nicotine to hook the youths en masse
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I still don't think it should be banned/heavily restricted because then what happens is you get the worst of both worlds in which diabetics are told to fuck off and reasonably healthy women will have doctors offering to find an excuse to give them glp1s
it's like how depending on where you go doctors are either still actively trying to get people addicted to opiates or calling you drug seeking for asking for a tylenol when you are literally dying
ozempic discourse reminds me of when I realized I was having weird blood sugar issues and tried metformin about it. which did stabilize my blood sugar but it also made me hate eating food. I became viscerally disgusted with all food except like small amounts of soda and chocolate. if that is what ozempic is doing to you, you are in "I guess you should be allowed to cut your own fingers off if that's what you really want" territory.
although even then it's not really the same since there is presently a massive complex dedicated entirely to pressuring all women to cut their fingers off and scrolling finger-chopping ads all over social media
ozempic discourse reminds me of when I realized I was having weird blood sugar issues and tried metformin about it. which did stabilize my blood sugar but it also made me hate eating food. I became viscerally disgusted with all food except like small amounts of soda and chocolate. if that is what ozempic is doing to you, you are in "I guess you should be allowed to cut your own fingers off if that's what you really want" territory.
I got to participate in such a study, although probably due to the exact spots they stimulated, bliss wasn't one of the sensations provoked.
The best one they gave me was like a rush of electric energy, feeling like it welled up in the core of my chest and rolled out into my limbs like a wave (at which point I would have to wiggle my hands and feet to "shake it off"). I wouldn't describe it as unpleasant either, but it was kind of overwhelming, and after several jolts I'd feel like I'm done and want to take a break.
That one came from tickling my ventral capsules, which a little pacemaker-type device continues to do several hundred times a day every day in order to make me not severely depressed (at a milliamperage too low for me to feel it, mind you). They did also hit spots in my my amygdala, hippocampus, subgenual cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex, but none of those produced euphoria either. Brains are so fiddly that you can get different results from stimulating sites a fraction of an inch apart, so it wouldn't be surprising if they just didn't happen to poke whatever square millimeter of brain tissue does that for me.
I also occasionally have dreams about weird and off-brand variants on this sensation. Like probably once every five months or so. It's the only one that stuck hard enough to make it into my dreams. They're always cyborg anxiety/thrill dreams about being forcibly exposed to electricity or some powerful EM field or something that sets it off.
there was this other one which was Evil Wireheading. I forget which site prompted this one, but I'd very abruptly feel everything go distant and fuzzy, yet not in a losing-consciousness kind of way -- it kind of felt like I was the only thing remaining real while everything else got hazier. it made my eyes unfocus unevenly which didn't help. and imparted kind of a faint swollen feeling I can only describe in a synaesthetic way. Made me think of bubblegum reddish-pink and rubber balloons and the word "heee" but in a strained kind of way. Also I quickly started getting the inexplicable sense that something Bad would happen if they kept pressing that button. So they didn't try to find out.
the only "irreplaceable sensation I wish I could experience on demand" I've had was when I was in the ER and they gave me a refrigerated Dilaudid IV and the combination of the low temperature and the opioid effect made me think "omg they're changing my coolant 😊"
take this knowledge and go forth to every dipshit who quotes jurassic park against whatever new thing they're upset and scared about and tell them about how the jurassic park guy once tried to actively prevent a bunch of epileptics from ever getting the only medical treatment that works for them
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When people are like "This is bad because it went horribly wrong in this movie I watched" I can't take it seriously.
Do you realize you're arguing from fictional evidence?
The fact that Dark Dungeons exists doesn't mean playing a TTRPG is going to end up with demon magic cults and suicides. Writers can just be ignorant or biased actually.
They made a horror movie back in the 70s about what terrible things would happen if we started putting electrodes in people's brains to treat their neurological disorders. The original novel was written specifically because the author saw this treatment being developed in real life and thought it was scary and thought he needed to turn people against it.
Turns out what happens is "fucking nothing, except for treating neurological disorders".
I got to participate in such a study, although probably due to the exact spots they stimulated, bliss wasn't one of the sensations provoked.
The best one they gave me was like a rush of electric energy, feeling like it welled up in the core of my chest and rolled out into my limbs like a wave (at which point I would have to wiggle my hands and feet to "shake it off"). I wouldn't describe it as unpleasant either, but it was kind of overwhelming, and after several jolts I'd feel like I'm done and want to take a break.
That one came from tickling my ventral capsules, which a little pacemaker-type device continues to do several hundred times a day every day in order to make me not severely depressed (at a milliamperage too low for me to feel it, mind you). They did also hit spots in my my amygdala, hippocampus, subgenual cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex, but none of those produced euphoria either. Brains are so fiddly that you can get different results from stimulating sites a fraction of an inch apart, so it wouldn't be surprising if they just didn't happen to poke whatever square millimeter of brain tissue does that for me.
I also occasionally have dreams about weird and off-brand variants on this sensation. Like probably once every five months or so. It's the only one that stuck hard enough to make it into my dreams. They're always cyborg anxiety/thrill dreams about being forcibly exposed to electricity or some powerful EM field or something that sets it off.
there was this other one which was Evil Wireheading. I forget which site prompted this one, but I'd very abruptly feel everything go distant and fuzzy, yet not in a losing-consciousness kind of way -- it kind of felt like I was the only thing remaining real while everything else got hazier. it made my eyes unfocus unevenly which didn't help. and imparted kind of a faint swollen feeling I can only describe in a synaesthetic way. Made me think of bubblegum reddish-pink and rubber balloons and the word "heee" but in a strained kind of way. Also I quickly started getting the inexplicable sense that something Bad would happen if they kept pressing that button. So they didn't try to find out.
I got to participate in such a study, although probably due to the exact spots they stimulated, bliss wasn't one of the sensations provoked.
The best one they gave me was like a rush of electric energy, feeling like it welled up in the core of my chest and rolled out into my limbs like a wave (at which point I would have to wiggle my hands and feet to "shake it off"). I wouldn't describe it as unpleasant either, but it was kind of overwhelming, and after several jolts I'd feel like I'm done and want to take a break.
That one came from tickling my ventral capsules, which a little pacemaker-type device continues to do several hundred times a day every day in order to make me not severely depressed (at a milliamperage too low for me to feel it, mind you). They did also hit spots in my my amygdala, hippocampus, subgenual cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex, but none of those produced euphoria either. Brains are so fiddly that you can get different results from stimulating sites a fraction of an inch apart, so it wouldn't be surprising if they just didn't happen to poke whatever square millimeter of brain tissue does that for me.
I also occasionally have dreams about weird and off-brand variants on this sensation. Like probably once every five months or so. It's the only one that stuck hard enough to make it into my dreams. They're always cyborg anxiety/thrill dreams about being forcibly exposed to electricity or some powerful EM field or something that sets it off.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
