generally you shouldn't write run-on sentences because they get confusing and it doesn't give the reader a break. that doesn't apply to me though my run-on sentences are fun and understandable and they have a rhythm to it that makes you want to keep reading

DAICON IV Official After Report (full scan) 88 pages

Gallery: https://e-hentai.org/g/3292682/808752d486/ Archive: https://archive.org/details/daicon-iv-official-after-report

actually thinking of hpmor reminded me I was wondering... when lesswrong had its moment in the news a month or two ago cause of the ziz stuff did any of those people pick up on "three worlds collide"? I feel like that's a good one to get lesswrong on. wasn't there like a minor worldbuilding side note that they thought sexual assault wasn't bad in the future? you gotta bring that up if you're dragging yudkowsky

yeah I was remembering that right. you're not doing your job if you don't put this in your rationalist exposé I think

I don't know, I don't think lying about Yudkowsky would be a great idea in any context? Three Worlds Collide is a story about moral relativism and "pushing one's values onto others", with the set up that no side matches the reader's values 1-to-1 but it's gonna happen anyway. The human faction being into non-con is the "I could not make this more explicit if I tried" blaring red signal that the 'human' faction is not the morally pure one compared to the alien factions in the debate around war/xenocide they are having! It is a sliding scale of Everyone Sucks.

I think I remember discourse around it being ungraceful or ofc gender insensitive - was written in the 2010's after all - but no one seriously reading it missed that it was Dolyistically *bad*.

I will defend this writing trick!

the effect it had on me as a reader was to make me feel alone, that my values are not represented in the story at all. And it was chillingly and grippingly effective at doing that!

I'm basically echoing what centrally unplanned said

For sure, it didn't work for me personally? But it can work! The intent is very clear that it is trying to do exactly what you said it did, unmoor you and make you unsure if you even have a side in the fight. Story impact is subjective that way, and honestly had I read it at a different time in my life I bet it would have worked on me more.

The thing about "The enemy is both weak and strong" is that it's less specific to fascism than to any form of propaganda; the enemy must be weak or else it'd be impossible to beat and unconvincing to rally people to try; they must be strong or else who would give a shit

Umberto Eco is just weak tea, entry #8

I mean... "The enemy is moderately strong but we can beat him" is a perfectly sensible position. So is "The enemy is weak but destructive so let's put some effort into stopping it".

Like, people don't like, I don't know, carbeaurator theft rings but they aren't portrayed as "strong", yeah?

"The enemy controls almost all aspects of society and is also contemptible in his weakness and feebleness" is not at all a necessity for propaganda.

That is more detail on the same thing though - you are describing Nazi propaganda! It was not some monolith that said "the enemy is a world-colossus" 24/7, it said "they are strong-but-beatable" all the time. And meanwhile Western Allied propaganda absolutely did sometimes say "the enemy is the most vile thing to ever exist and will plunge us into eternal darkness but also our gumption will win". Different narrative concepts - film vs poster vs political speech etc - ask for different things.

Eco's argument is just really him riffing off his memories, he doesn't actually do a comparative study of wartime films of the Axis vs Allies or anything. They do differ but not along the axes he claims, and also honestly not that much. (If you want some racially charged propaganda look at Allied portrayals of the Japanese!)

I may be misremembering his argument, but I thought the claim was more specific than this -- not just that there are certain aspects to fascist propaganda, but that

1. The idea that the enemy is both strong and weak occurs frequently in fascist propaganda (which like you said, is not unique to fascists)

2. But the leadership is much more likely to get caught up on their own messaging, because they are selected for loyalty over competence, and they signal loyalty by uncritically believing their own bullshit

3. And this leads to poor military performance against peer armies, because now the military leadership has rendered themselves incapable of accurately assessing the strength of the enemy

Again, I haven't read this in ages so I might be reading more into Eco than he's actually saying, but this seems more defensible and specific than the line about propaganda on its own

Oh sure, I said he was weak tea not that he is totally wrong about everything - I have some other post somewhere that gives him like 40% accuracy or something. I agree he makes some fine claims too, I remember point 2 and he is right about that. But I do think he does make the claim in point 1 that fascist governments have a unique, "endemic" quality to their propaganda that doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

(Agreed btw that I haven't read him in years, so caveat there)

The thing about "The enemy is both weak and strong" is that it's less specific to fascism than to any form of propaganda; the enemy must be weak or else it'd be impossible to beat and unconvincing to rally people to try; they must be strong or else who would give a shit

Umberto Eco is just weak tea, entry #8

I mean... "The enemy is moderately strong but we can beat him" is a perfectly sensible position. So is "The enemy is weak but destructive so let's put some effort into stopping it".

Like, people don't like, I don't know, carbeaurator theft rings but they aren't portrayed as "strong", yeah?

"The enemy controls almost all aspects of society and is also contemptible in his weakness and feebleness" is not at all a necessity for propaganda.

That is more detail on the same thing though - you are describing Nazi propaganda! It was not some monolith that said "the enemy is a world-colossus" 24/7, it said "they are strong-but-beatable" all the time. And meanwhile Western Allied propaganda absolutely did sometimes say "the enemy is the most vile thing to ever exist and will plunge us into eternal darkness but also our gumption will win". Different narrative concepts - film vs poster vs political speech etc - ask for different things.

Eco's argument is just really him riffing off his memories, he doesn't actually do a comparative study of wartime films of the Axis vs Allies or anything. They do differ but not along the axes he claims, and also honestly not that much. (If you want some racially charged propaganda look at Allied portrayals of the Japanese!)

there's a post going around about the replication crisis in psychology, including the heuristics and biases program heavily cited in Yudkowsky's Sequences. And it seems to be written from the perspective of someone who never cared about heuristics and biases research in the first place, and thinks it just amounts to the triviality that people aren't perfectly rational. So maybe I'll take a moment to explain the significance this stuff had to me.

Some context is that my training is in statistics. As a statistics expert I'm supposed to be able to tell you stuff about "estimators", procedures for estimating unknown quantities from data. Some classic estimators: the mean and the median. So I'm supposed to be the guy that knows that

The statistician is looking beyond estimates, like an early estimate of the mass of the Higgs boson, to estimators, to speak in scientific generality about how an estimator performs.

And what Yudkowsky told me is I could take that perspective to my own thought. I could look beyond my judgment of a particular fact, to "heuristics" that produce those judgments in an understandable and lawful fashion, even when these are rapid intuitive judgments rather than deliberate following of steps. Like a statistician, we could talk about how well a heuristic works, and when it fails, the way the sample mean fails in the presence of outliers. A heuristic and a bias.

This is not some triviality "humans are biased" any more than the field of statistics is the triviality "estimates aren't exactly correct". I learned specific heuristics, and specific biases. One thing people don't realize about Yudkowsky is that a lot of his "just do the math" vibe was a prescription for specific biases. Representativeness heuristic, mostly works, no need to do the math, but when base rates differ significantly there's the bias of base rate neglect, which you can recognize and mitigate if you know Bayes' theorem. Your everyday judgments of value are mostly good but when they involve quantities you haven't visualized you may suffer from scope insensitivity, recognizable as deviation from an expected value calculation. That's the origin of "shut up and multiply", not as a platitude, but as advice for dealing with scope insensitivity. And now I'm wondering, were these real? Base rate neglect and scope insensitivity, I mean. Did they make it through the replication crisis or not?

This is a personal story, but millions of people read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (I think; at least a million) and whole chapters are wiped out. I think I'm wondering what held up, and many people don't even know that this interesting book they read a few years ago has some stuff they'd be better off unlearning. Which stuff? I saw a blog post a long time ago that went through one chapter, noting what people had tried to replicate, but what about the rest of the book?

thankfully I haven't read the book yet!

Ironically while Thinking Fast & Slow does not hold up great, I am betting Yudkowsky Thought holds up better because his *solutions* were typically "invoking the objective truth that is math". And math is objectively true, that holds up! In some sense (not all, there are caveats to this) it doesn't really matter what psychological bias you throw math at, as long as there is something there math can improve it. Maybe not as well as he believed at the time, maybe it isn't worth the effort, but you will still be, ahem, less wrong than you were before from doing it - or at least no worse off.

Shut Up And Multiply is something practically everyone should apply to their thought at least sometimes.

Respect to Paradox for updating their sociological model post-election - the map should match the territory etc.

The thing about "The enemy is both weak and strong" is that it's less specific to fascism than to any form of propaganda; the enemy must be weak or else it'd be impossible to beat and unconvincing to rally people to try; they must be strong or else who would give a shit

Umberto Eco is just weak tea, entry #8

I do appreciate how YouGov just randomly polls this posting catnip stuff sometimes. Vikings and monasteries getting almost identical favorability is very funny to me. Guy watching the Lindisfarne raid like "I'm not rooting for either side, just wanna see some good gameplay out there."

Americans everywhere say that the Middle Ages actually began with the Muslim conquests. I just went to a diner in rural Pennsylvania and all the truckers in MAGA hats agreed: "The dream of Rome only truly died in the reign of Heraclius"

The Black Plague Favorability Constant of 9%

Well, you could argue

the black plague may have killed a third of Europe, but it also provided lots of inspiration and imagery for black and death metal bands. so it;s impossible to say if its bad or not.

Additionally "9% of people are degrowthers" doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. I applaud them for their consistency!

Nintendo announces that Kaga Fire Emblem fans need not despair, they've been pardoned, and a hero's welcome and an FE4 remake await them at the capital.

"An extremely tepid defense of X" is a great genre of post that we should make more of. Thank you to @centrally-unplanned for coining it with respect to Luigi Cadorna.

Some things get treated like they're 100% bad when they're just 95% bad and we should point out these cases.

I was proud of that title! Its true, particularly when something is 95% bad its *so easy* to slide lazily into treating it as 100% bad, since you are going to spend most of your time seeing that bad. It takes effort to point out the gaps, so its good to encourage. Make a tepid defense post!

An Extremely Tepid Defense of @centrally-unplanned

(...)

I was going through some archived scans of 90's otaku magazines, as is my sacred duty, and I stumbled on this ad for a Sega Saturn game I did not know:

The pitch of Roommate (as seen here) is that of a "real time" romance simulation:

And this is exactly the kind of way-too-convoluted gimmick that sacrifices gameplay functionality on the altar of conceptual novelty based on random technology add-ons present in new-gen consoles of the era that I just love. Obviously the concept of starting a game and having the main girl not be present so you cannot play is completely asinine - but think of the realism!

Between that and the discount-Sadamoto 90's character designs, I wanted to see it for myself; so I spent way, way too long setting up a Sega Saturn emulator. In my experience early CD-ROM-based consoles often require much more bespoke set-ups to get working, in this case custom BIOS files in the emulator firmware directories, and JPN-language ones at that for this game. But I got it to work and oh yeah, this is some early "digital" console era crust:

Playing this game is just painful. The clock of course means that you essentially can't play it at all - looking at YouTube comments on the very few Let's Plays and such that exist, people are reminiscing about how they could never find Ryoko because their schedules didn't align. One person even comments:

Which is a valid demo I guess! But it doesn't really stop there - your house is a "fully realized" 3D environment of bare walls which you navigate with clunky controls. Let me log in and take some screenshots...

Jesus Christ it's 10 pm and you are cooking dinner?! The one time I don't want this ghost popping out of the cracks in the floorboards, I swear...

Okay, got rid of her (She broke a plate -_- you moved in yesterday, girl):

You walk, in real time (step by step) through this pixel museum just...hoping that one of the rooms will contain Ryoko and proc a dialogue event based on the time of day. There is a little more to it than that but that is essentially the gameplay. This would, very obviously, be simply better as a straightforward visual novel.

But you see how that just isn't as cool in 1997, right? This is the era where the fidelity of graphics and the technology for simulation is progressing at a rapid clip, and everyone wants to see the boundaries pushed. Roommate isn't the first "real time simulation" game, but it is the most pure, the one fully committed to the bit. Your house is completely mapped out, the girl has her routine, you walk step by painful step through the rooms because this is "real", you are living it. They even use a live photo for the outside of the house to sell the aesthetic (and also save money):

Ryoko is waiting in the kitchen of that house when you come home from work, putting on an apron, ready to cook dinner. For you.

Assuming you get home at whatever fucking 30 minute window the game decided to gatekeep its gameplay behind! But of course I exaggerate - it wasn't that bad (there are little mechanics you can use to set some schedule times in the game for example), player tolerance for bullshit was way higher then, and you were expected to buy strategy guides for these things. So even though it was panned by critics on release...it was a sleeper hit with a devoted fanbase.

Which means it got a ton of sequels and ports! We don't have to go through them all, though I will share my favorite factoid about the first sequel - "ROOMMATE ~Ryoko in Summer Vacation~" from the wiki:

Priorities, baby. But some of the ports are interesting because of the changing tech. A version was ported to the PlayStation, which does not have the internal clock a Sega Saturn had. But coincidentally it did have the PocketStation, a handheld GameBoy/Tamagotchi hybrid expansion tool that did have an internal clock and could sync with the game. It also let you track Ryoko's schedule and play mini-games, with some very adorable animations as you can see in this ad for the product that featured Roommate:

This device absolutely reminds me of the Disc Fax system discussed in my Miho Nakayama essay - a very niche product biting off more than it can chew making games overly complex to play but allowing things that would otherwise be impossible (and this one was a good deal more successful at least). Here it allowed Roommate's central gimmick to function - and is super cute, honestly I would buy a standalone tamagotchi version of this game.

The PS1 also couldn't quite handle how the game was built for the Sega Saturn graphics-wise, and as such a bunch of the 3D elements were sanded off into 2D simulacrums - most notably the house:

Which, despite this being a technological downgrade, is way better! It looks adorable, you can actually see what is going on and where Ryoko is, and you can navigate it way more cleanly. God, did...hold on let me tab back to the game...yeah, is there no clock in the original game on screen. That is insane. Anyway the PS1 version had a lot of these cute little graphical additions, even right on the title screen:

It is definitely the better looking version, which is a classic tale - in 1997 the "bleeding edge" of 3D graphics were impressive to players, even through their roughness. Now they just aren't, and so the retro charm of designs that are optimized what the mediums of the time could reliably handle have a lot more appeal.

There was also a PC port in 1998, which did exactly what I suggested and added an "adventure" mode where you could ignore the clock system. They definitely learned over time what worked and what didn't; but the appeal of the gimmick is what first sold it to players in the end.

All of this is to say, don't play Roommate, and if you do just emulate the PS1 game instead of torturing yourself with the Sega Saturn version. Oh...you weren't gonna play a Japanese-only abandonware 90's not-even-eroge dating sim to begin with? Ah, well, yeah, I guess that makes sense.

Man I should translate it shouldn't I? So people can play it...

I was experimenting with setting up RetroArch's OCR Auto-translate feature for more easy experimentation with these kinds of games, and I got a set-up working, ~woo; so I thought I would test it out. Roommate was on my computer, obviously, and it is in Japanese and is text heavy; so sure, why not! I haven't opened it in a while but whatever, let's visit the home and see what Ryoko is up to...

... and she is fucking gone!!

She left me a letter explaining that I hadn't visited her in so long (a month!), and we were never really close anyway, so she moved into a friend's house. Roll credits. Save File Terminated. I haven't even found a way to restart at the beginning yet, if I go back in I just get the letter sequence again.

How did anyone ever play this game?!?!?