[PaulHoule]

Part of me wants to like Astral Codex (Bayes theorem is dear to my heart and my head) but I find it too rambling and too tied to the cringeworthy "rationalist" scene. (e.g. some of those people think the 'woke' folks are groupthinkers, but some of their circles would drive people out if they expressed disbelief in quasireligious concepts such as superhuman a.i., cryonics, etc.)

For people who want to understand "how to successfully promote a blog" my favorite is

https://www.righto.com/

which I think is captivating to people even if favors nostalgia vs timeliness (never news) and few people would find it useful (for my electronics hobby I expect to build increasing powerful illusion projectors and I find some of his talk on electronics inspirational and educational but I never expect to decap a chip or make discrete versions of things like current mirrors and op amps that are impractical to make on an artisan scale.)

[kens]

Thanks for mentioning my blog :-). By the way, anyone who is interested should try decapping a chip. Modern epoxy chips are hard to decap, but you can get an older chip in a ceramic package on eBay for a few dollars. Decapping one is simply a matter of tapping it with a chisel. To see complete details of the die, you need a special metallurgical microscope, but a generic microscope will still show a lot. Even with the naked eye you can see a lot of interesting structures.

[andrewmcwatters]

Rambling is probably the right word, though for other readers here, you can probably get that yourself from reading the About page[1] or even just casually scan the newest post[2] for 5 seconds.

>> once i threw a party for the bay area rationalists, and the rules to attend were you had to be wearing a full-face coverage mask, and be naked. Many came; they all bravely stripped, donned weird masks... and then proceeded to sit in a polite circle and debate global trade.

Ah, OK. It's clear why this blog is recommended so frequently here now.

[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/about

[2]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theres-a-time-for-ever...

[PaulHoule]

I am laughing my ass off because that tweet you quote is by a woman who drives me absolutely up the wall.

For a brief time I was intimidated by her combination of pretty and smart, except that the more I looked the more I saw that being born female can really be a chance to live life on tutorial island.

For the life of me I can't see how she thinks that Eliezer Yudkowsky is an evil genius frame controller, still thinks he is the greatest thinker of the 21st century, but the main talent I think he has is that he can always see the Emperor's Clothes even if he goes to a naked people party.

[reducesuffering]

If you look carefully, Aella's appearance never really shows up on the things that make her popular, her main Twitter and blog. In my opinion, it looks like you initially correctly thought she was smart, but found a superficial excuse to demean her. There is no doubt Aella is quite intelligent and unique in her insights, and the comments here yet again remind me of some of the shallow undeserved dismissals women get from time to time. Luckily she's smart enough to not put her mugshot very often on her media, like any normal dude who it wouldn't be related to his intellect, as a proactive defense against these type of remarks.

[honkdaddy]

Seriously. Aella is a great writer, but she's also had among the most absurdly comfortable existences I've ever heard of.

[reducesuffering]

Nonsense. Aella grew up in an extremely fundamentalist Christian household. We're talking 'non-Christians lead to the devil, don't be friends with them"-type. It is absolutely seriously uncomfortable breaking up your entire programmed worldview from that.

"I grew up in an isolated, homeschooled environment. I’d moved up to northern Idaho in an attempt to go to college, but my parents were very “use your bootstraps” people and wouldn’t help me financially or cosign on any loans. They also made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid, so I was screwed; a few months into college I got an ominous letter and had to drop out shortly afterwards.

I’d been brought up with the expectation of being a submissive housewife – but here I was, 19 years old, no support system, education, or future, and with an unsettling cultural disconnect from everyone around me. Everyone used words I didn’t know, references to movies I hadn’t seen, attitudes drawn from music I hadn’t heard.

So I worked whatever I could. I occasionally went hungry, unable to afford food. I slept on a mattress on the floor in a large group house. I ended up working very long hours at a factory with no windows where I wore a uniform and stood on my feet all day and saw the sun only on weekends."

https://knowingless.com/2020/05/25/readjusting-to-porn/

Luckily, her intellect allowed her to figure a way out of what would usually be a tough upbringing to bounce back from. But "absurdly comfortable"??

[AA-BA-94-2A-56]

She's a really good writer, and has obviously been through quite a lot. My background is amusingly probably her closest male analogue. I grew up homeschooled, had a similar experience in which I was flung into a world of alien pop-culture. I struggled with homelessness part way through university, and stayed in a house that was dilapidated. I can sympathise quite a bit with her background. I found myself struggling with atheism vs christianity, determinism (God has a plan for me) vs nihilism (there is no plan).

But she openly encourages conversations that seem extremely fascistic to me. One good example I have is this tweet:

https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1229230411760324609

Her Twitter is a gold mine of well-written, but ultimately half-baked ideas that lend themselves to seriously considering Nazi ideals. And I find that many of the rationalist crowd secretly encourage or at least allow discussions about Neo-Nazi ideas. This is not cool at all.

It's amazing to me to see Aella as perhaps who I could have been, had I not wholly challenged my beliefs.

[reducesuffering]

Imo, Aella's taboo-breaking questions comes from breaking out of the orthodoxy of her background. "If what previous authorities told me X,Y,Z was a lie, what lies are the new authorities telling me?" I can't condone people conflating everything a terrible group did with what you're not allowed to even ask questions about. It feels like it leads to people screaming "Commie!" if you ever advocate for social safety nets in support of a more egalitarian society. While rationalists do discuss from first principles and question a variety of orthodoxies, they in no way advocate Nazism or superiority or anything like that. From a superficial glance, rationalists often get conflated with a different similar-sphere (they debate them on blogs) group called "neoreactionaries", who do advocate for far right monarchy and fascism. Maybe that's where some confusion lies.

[runjake]

Based on?

I don’t know Aella, so I cannot speak to the comfortability of her existence, but I’d assume her attractiveness and circumstances and her public persona bring fairly unique challenges (eg. stalkers) that I cannot fathom.

My own hunch is that I probably lead a far more comfortable existence than her, but I’m only supposing.

[honkdaddy]

I mean she openly admits to having never had a real employer, yet owns a house in the Bay and has an Amazon wishlist which her fans never allows to stay full for long. I've got total respect for online sex work as a means to make money, but I won't pretend it's not a completely different experience from having a boss, paycheque, and cubicle.

She also, rather famously, created a 'Date Me' survey in which thousands (yes, thousands) of men wrote responses about why they'd be a good enough partner/provider for her. I don't know anyone else, even other beautiful women, who get to experience dating in a way that puts them on a pedestal.

Finally, she has a series about how she was able to trip acid, provided to her for free, multiple times a week, for over a year. To me, this sounds like a pretty comfortable existence. I don't doubt she gets her fair share of unsavory messages, or even the odd in-person encounter, but I would trade my life for hers in a heartbeat.

[PaulHoule]

LMAO. I was going to say you were wrong to say she was a "good author".

I never read the post "Aella takes LSD" because the title is cringeworthy enough. People have been taking LSD since 1943 but every day somebody from the bay area writes something obnoxious that is more an exercise in personal branding than an earnest addition to a large literature.

Also the acid doesn't seem like particularly outrageous simping. Ordinary people can get acid for $5 a hit or so in most places in the U.S. and that seems like an extraordinary value. In the 1990s I knew people who'd gotten $35 sheets (100 doses, albeit weak in that time frame) in the bay area which has long been a distribution center for the stuff.

[runjake]

Noted. Thanks for taking time to reply.

[reducesuffering]

Instead, I will recommend https://astralcodexten.substack.com/

Along with HN, it is the only other place I can find altruistic and intellectual discussion. Blind has some intellectual people but a dearth of morals ($ and status obsession). HN even can be a bit too cynical and sneer-like sometimes.

Scott is one of the smartest people I've encountered and has a very good way with words. I find myself laughing out loud sometimes with the special way he phrases things. I related to how curious he is about many different topics and you can tell he deeply means well. He constantly brings up things I've had hunches about but puts it so eloquently.

I think saying "some of their circles would drive people out if they expressed disbelief in quasireligious concepts such as superhuman a.i., cryonics" is inaccurate. I've seen plenty of debated skepticism. Ffs there's a guy making 20 low quality comments about Marxism every other thread.

Interested? Start with https://slatestarcodex.com/about/

On preferred pronouns: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

On Tragedy of the Commons / coordination problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

On government: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...

On finding uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...