Even More Search Terms That Led People To This Blog

[Previously in series: Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog and More Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog. Content warning: profanity, rape, and other unfiltered access to the consciousness of the Internet]

Sometimes I look at what search terms lead people to SSC. Sometimes it’s the things you would think – “slate star codex”, “rationality”, the names of medications I’ve written about.

Other times it’s a little weirder:


why is my sister so pretty
I mentioned this query last post, probably based on this article, and the onslaught hasn’t stopped.

my sis is so pretty
Sometimes I can pretend it’s just people happy for their family members’ good qualities…

my sister is really pretty
…many people, very very happy…

my sister is so sexy what to do
…and other times, not so much.

sweet sister so pretty
You can stop any time now.

how we attract our sister for sex
NO, REALLY, YOU CAN STOP ANY TIME NOW.

sister aroused by my touch
ANNNNNY TIME NOW.

www.my sister pic sex.com
…frick.

the fate of a cruel snake re arrange ssc answer
Other times people really seem to think I have an article on something but I have no idea what they mean.

what is the hormone responsible for soliloquising?
Other times I just have no idea.

hivemind ape and young girl army experiment
Garrett Jones, what exactly are you doing over at GMU?

Glasgow coma scale
I got a lot of these from people looking for this.

glassco coma scale
Some of the spellings were very creative

glass go coma scale
glascov coma scale
glasco comma scale
glawcow coma scale
glasscoma scale
glascoma score
glassma coma scale
glascow comma scale
glosvow coma scale
glass cow coma scale
glass comma scale

slate satr codex
slate star xodex
slate static codex
slate star cosex
slate star cpdex
str slate codex
sstar slate codex
astark star codex
slate state kodaks

delay cool condom codex
???

slate star codex of hate
?!?

i canot talret anything
You’re probably looking for the Slate Star Codex Of Hate

rapist linked to prostate cancer

which star sign is most likely to be a rapist

scott alexander the gay guy’s biography
Versus…

scott alexander is no gay
Versus…

fuck scott alexander endless

criticize the statement “you can see atoms”
It’s really dumb

fnord soros fnord
…did someone just try to see the fnords by typing it into Google? That’s great.

considered armed and dangerous for cow pox

i am polynesian and so is my husband both with brown eyes however our son has blue eyes how

if hundreds of americans die tragically today, it’ll be on account of sarcastic cocksucker citizens

unreasonable autism cures
It makes me so happy when our medical system is set up to satisfy someone’s needs this perfectly

whale…. medical cartel hoax . borax
I don’t know what conspiracy this person thinks connects all these things, but they should probably put some fnords in there if they want results.

victory lotto forecast for tomorrow tuesday 11-07-17
Nice try.

using secret pyramid to hit 3 digit lottery

was rene descartes racist

what is going on here? how can just the opinion of 1068 people always determine the opinion of the entire population, no matter how large it is? is statistics broken? is 1068 just a magical number?
It’s because of [fnord] the medical cartel, whales, and borax [/fnord].

there are many things i want to say but do not know how to say. hope you will understand

I am [person’s real name removed] iwant to join illumenatic member want can i do or who can help me in order direct me
Find a member of the medical cartel and say the code word “whale”. They’ll do the rest.

i want to join illuminati brotherhood church in uganda, south africa and kenya post comments on usa blogger
Find a whale and say the code word “medical cartel”. What happens next is up to you.

is fentanyl being used for population reduction by the illuminati
No, that’s what the borax is for

jews hate alcoholics anonymous

can i get a s sample ogre biscuit factory dimension

what decisions might the police make base on crime
One would hope all of them.

why is aa mostly bullshit
Looks like we’ve got a Jew here.

list of human experiences
1. Birth
2. Eating
3. Sleeping
4. Being attracted to your sister
5. Misspelling “Glasgow Coma Scale”
6. Using secret pyramid to hit 3 digit lottery
[…]

how can we deal with cactus person?

now if we can prove the electoral college was seeded with purely partisan voters for trump, and illegal, then we can have a new vote
[164/777] …and as these documents clearly prove, Putin sent the files to Trump through the medical cartel, hidden in envelopes marked “WHALE BORAX”.

islamists deport murderous racists
Well, that was a wild garden path of a four-word sentence

bigotry xxx yup to video

creators of remote neural monitoring are gay designing an ass weapon

massage with bombastic words of wishing good lucky to all people doing matriculant

how to start a zombie story
ZOMBIE. STORIES. ARE. SUPER. DONE.

100 statements about albion’s seed: four british folkways in america that almost killed my hamster

give directly illuminati

how to summon abraham lincoln

you are my pleasant gustatory sensation

i hate polyamory
polyamory people are ugly
are all polyamorous people ugly
why are polyamorous people ugly
polyamory aspies
polyamory is sick
polyamorists tend to be narcissists

Versus…

good looking polyamorous
pics of women who are polyamory

versailles ohio alien military genetics
A clone of Louis XIV spliced with whale DNA by aliens is being stored in a secret base disguised as a borax mine beneath Columbus by the medical cartel.

many people agree that there should be “some sort” of restraint considering abortion
I think regardless of our beliefs on this issue, we can agree those “quotation marks” are creepy.

what is cost disease by elephant

victim to organ harvesting yankee bob found murdered
If I were a beneficiary of black market organ harvesting, I would be pretty concerned about the possibility that my new organs came from someone named “Yankee Bob”.

explain d theories of truth n d best one dat suits d saying if u can’t beat dem, join dem using events in university as a case study

you r destiny, you r fate, is the gift that god bestowed me. you so different that i had been before. anh is something special that i must keep. i hope time will help me answer everything. time will help me keep you.
I think this person has too much of the hormone responsible for soliloquizing.

satanic company (that public likes)
Apple. Trust me on this one.

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133 Responses to Even More Search Terms That Led People To This Blog

  1. Paul Brinkley says:

    Posting about all the search terms that led one here: the new Google bombing?

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Also, this just occurred to me:

      profanity, rape, and other unfiltered access to the consciousness of the Internet

      …somehow I suspect you filtered out the sane stuff.

  2. Tracy W says:

    People in the train are now looking at me weirdly.

    • christhenottopher says:

      That is not a coincidence! See one in a lab coat? That’s the medical cartel, say “whale” to him now. See one who is actually a whale? Tell it “medical cartel” before calling for help to push him back in the ocean.

      • Svein Ove Aas says:

        There are no literal whales on the train.

        But there are ‘whales’, who are people who spend too much money on pay-to-win games, and some of those may be on the train. The naming is not a coincidence, because nothing ever is. They should walk up to one, lean downwards, and whisper, ‘Medical Cartel.’

    • quaelegit says:

      Similarly, although I’m up past my bedtime, I’m glad I read these now instead of at work tomorrow…

  3. quaelegit says:

    I find these MUCH more amusing than the insults list. 😛

    I think my favorite is “How to Summon Abraham Lincoln” for the long callback.

  4. kboon says:

    slate star codex of hate

    Possibly looking for Toxoplasma of Rage but can’t remember the title.

  5. C_B says:

    “what is the hormone responsible for soliloquising?”

    I feel like this is one of the redpillers from the previous post hoping you’ll set him up for a “…CUZ IT SURE AIN’T TESTOSTERONE” burn or something.

  6. Evan Þ says:

    my sis is so pretty
    Sometimes I can pretend it’s just people happy for their family members’ good qualities…

    Seriously, I think I messed up one researcher’s study because of this. I was an undergrad volunteer subject, and he started by asking me to imagine being on a cruise with my sister (picture of young pretty woman on cruise ship). He then started asking me questions about X, Y, and Z financial and life issues. I’ve got a very good relationship with my sister, so I answered quite normally, only to find out at the end that the researcher was studying some hypothesis about subliminal sexual tension and contrasting with another group asked to imagine going on a cruise with their girlfriend.

    On the other hand, my abnormal financial setting might’ve messed it up in the opposite direction – this was a little after I’d accepted a well-paying job offer at Very Large Software Company.

    (And yes, if I say so myself, I think my sister does look pretty.)

    • Murphy says:

      So so pretty…. [heavy breathing]

      Of course now scott simply has to publish an equivalently titled article “why is my brother so hunky” to see if he starts getting similar google hits. For science.

    • cactus head says:

      My little sister can’t be this cute!

  7. akarlin says:

    SSC attracts the very best people.

  8. Ketil says:

    the fate of a cruel snake re arrange ssc answer

    Can this be anything else than a Chinese translation of Roko’s basilisk?

  9. Francesca says:

    I fear you are underestimating the danger of the cactus person.

  10. xylix says:

    I consider many social media companies more evil than Apple. Can’t really see Apple as a lot worse than any other big share computer / software manufacturer. And well then there’s the fact that macOS actually works.

    • Watchman says:

      I would find Apple harmless, but I recognise the symptoms of a cult when I see them…

    • Doug says:

      > And well then there’s the fact that macOS actually works.

      Generally agree. Out of the three desktop options, OS X is generally more stable and better designed than Windows or Linux. Linux is rock-solid for servers, devices, or heavy duty workstation loads. But none of the desktop options really hit the mark.

      That being said, I’ve found that the stability and reliability of OS X has generally decreased over the past seven years or so. Not sure if this is due to the loss of Steve Jobs’ leadership or just because phones have become so important to Apple that they no longer send their best to the Mac teams. Regardless I used to be able to hit my MacBook Pro with high workloads, even inside the Unix subsystem’s guts, and still go months between reboots. Nowadays I’ll be lucky to get two weeks of this before the desktop starts acting like its haunted.

    • Saint Fiasco says:

      The search wasn’t for evil companies, but satanic ones. How many companies are named after a (possibly forbidden) fruit that is in turn named like the Latin word for evil?

    • Doesntliketocomment says:

      Yes, but nobody likes those companies.

    • 75th says:

      Scott has a history of making anti-Apple comments I find unjustified and annoying, but his most recent comment I saw was where macOS autocorrect (which probably shouldn’t exist and certainly shouldn’t be enabled without asking the user) automatically changed the name of one psychiatric drug to the name of a different psychiatric drug that ended with the same few syllables. So I don’t feel like it’s worth defending Apple to him anymore when there is such a sincerely terrible and dangerous thing he can point to, relevant to his daily life, that doesn’t happen anywhere else.

  11. shacklesburst says:

    how can we deal with cactus person?
    Just do what your father did.

  12. Watchman says:

    I assume cost disease by elephant is simply the realisation that the cost of ivory going up can make a lot of elephants unwell?

  13. MawBTS says:

    100 statements about albion’s seed: four british folkways in america that almost killed my hamster

    If anyone wonders, this is the title of a book.

    https://www.amazon.com/100-Statements-about-Albions-Seed/dp/5458804090

    People scrape funny reviews from Amazon and repackage them into books of their own.

    • switchnode says:

      If they were ebooks this would make sense to me, but they all seem to be paperback-only and “out of print”. What’s the business plan here?

      The publishers go by several names, although the cover designs are all the same; as far as I can tell they don’t exist anywhere except for these books—there are a variety of other phrasings used for the titles, and their “subjects” aren’t restricted to creative works (unless “Yule log” and “Pva glue” are books)—and although the books are listed by a large number of sellers, not just Amazon, they can’t be bought anywhere.

      Seriously, what’s the scam? (If unsuspecting buyers, why can’t you buy them? If a Nigerian-style ultra-fake backlog for a vanity press, why can’t you find them and give them money to print your fake book? If some kind of financial fraud, why so very fake?)

      • Lambert says:

        I would have thought them to not be in or out of print, but rather laser printed just-in-time.
        Allows greater economy of scope.

      • whateverthisistupd says:

        Money laundering? Often the point is to conceal illegal income by having a source of lost money to offset the money you want to keep untaxed. Front businesses will sometimes operate at a loss, but overestate the actual losses for this reason.

  14. Orpheon says:

    whale…. medical cartel hoax . borax
    I don’t know what conspiracy this person thinks connects all these things, but they should probably put some fnords in there if they want results.

    There is a large conspiracy-theory-collection site called whale.to, I would not be surprised if the person searching for the whale borax medical cartel was searching for http://www.whale.to/a/borax6.html or similar.

    • Deiseach says:

      The arthritis cure thing is dumb, but boric acid in eye drops is certainly very good for relieving soreness, dryness, and the rest. Use borax for scrubbing your floors/doing your laundry, not consuming as a cure for joint paints. Just because something is an old fashioned home cure that provably works for one thing does not mean it’s a miracle secret cure that the medical cartel are suppressing.

  15. Deiseach says:

    I am [person’s real name removed] iwant to join illumenatic member want can i do or who can help me in order direct me

    Find a member of the medical cartel and say the code word “whale”. They’ll do the rest.

    Hey, Scott is a member of the medical cartel! These all make sense now! 🙂

    • am [person’s real name removed] iwant to join illumenatic member want can i do or who can help me in order direct me

      They used to be based in the outskirts of Wolverhampton. The address was given in one of RAW’s books. I lived nearby at the time, which is not a coincidence…

  16. OptimalSolver says:

    Schizophrenia in some of those, or just non-English speakers?

    I also wonder, as someone who came to SSC via Less Wrong, what impression somebody unfamiliar with the AI/rationality sphere gets when they come across this blog.

    • LadyJane says:

      I mostly read SSC for Scott’s insights on politics, sociology, psychology, etc. I originally found this page through an editorial that linked to I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup and I’ve been hooked ever since.

      I’ve been to Less Wrong a few times, but I’m not that familiar with the rationalist movement as a whole. I do find some rationalist terms and concepts useful (for instance, the object-level/meta-level distinction), but I also find some rationalist terms and concepts to be silly, pointless, or just redundant. And there are aspects of the movement itself that make me somewhat uncomfortable, for a variety of reasons.

      • OptimalSolver says:

        Could you expand on which parts you find most off-putting?

        • Bugmaster says:

          I’m not LadyJane, but here are some things I find off-putting about the capital-R Rationalist movement:

          * These are people who unironically call themselves “The Rationalist Movement”.

          * As time goes on, the community is (seemingly) becoming more and more cult-like. It started with a website whose leader could seemingly do no wrong; and now we are at the point where everyone is living together in communal houses, speaks their own lingo, and does not associate with outsiders unless absolutely necessary.

          * A lot of time is spent seriously pondering and discussing ideas which are at best irrelevant, and at worst kooky; i.e. cryonics, AI risk, uploading, etc. The justification for doing this most often (though not always) ends up being, “we’re just smarter than you”.

          * A tendency to advertise products and causes directly related to the above two points, i.e. “donate to MIRI” or “these specific EA charities are the only ones you can trust”, etc. It is never entirely clear where the money goes or how effective it actually is (or, in case of causes like MIRI, whether it is even theoretically possible for it to be effective).

          I think Scott is doing a great job of alleviating some of these problems, but still, my desire (hitherto unfulfilled due to space/time concerns) to attend a Rationalist meetup has almost vanished. I still enjoy SSC, though.

          • David Shaffer says:

            Why do you object to them calling themselves “the Rationalist Movement?” Does it seem arrogant, as though no one else were rational? Perhaps, but if you have a movement based on trying to be more rational, what other name would you prefer? Also, most people are not interested in being rational; it’s fair for someone who is to consider themselves to be unusual.

            The seemingly-cultish nature of the movement has been a problem from the beginning. For one thing, Eliezer loves the aesthetics of the mystic sage or cult leader. That said, a lot of this is more cliquish than cultish. When you have a group of people with similar interests, communities form. When you have a community that is very dissimilar to the average person, insularity is to be expected. It can be a problem, but it tends to make rationalists appear more cultish than would otherwise be the case, even in the absence of genuine cult-style problems.

            Cryonics and AI risk are irrelevant? Where are you getting this? If you believe that the odds of either one having an impact is low, fair enough, but it’s not unreasonable for people to be interested in such things, especially when the case for them is that they’d be expected to work if current technological trends hold, and the case against them is mostly just “this seems weird.”

          • Bugmaster says:

            @David Shaffer:

            Does it seem arrogant, as though no one else were rational?

            That, but with the added implication that the members themselves are super-rational, despite evidence to the contrary (also, see below). This incongruity is somewhat ironic.

            When you have a community that is very dissimilar to the average person, insularity is to be expected…even in the absence of genuine cult-style problems.

            I am not a member of the community, so I’m not privy to its true state. As an outsider, when I observe cult-like behaviours, I can only conclude that they are best explained by underlying cult-style features. It would, in fact, be irrational for me to conclude otherwise.

            Cryonics and AI risk are irrelevant? Where are you getting this? … it’s not unreasonable for people to be interested in such things…

            Ok, so another failure of the Rationalist Movement is their extremely weak ability to understand the mindset of people different from themselves. This is actually a feature of most movements you can name — Social Justice, hiking aficionados, AC-DC fans, most religions, whatever. The difference is, the Rationalist movement specifically prides themselves at being highly resistant to mental biases, so one would think they’d be able to analyze the failure modes of other movements, and filter them out of their own thinking… but apparently not.

            Anyway, I don’t think you fully appreciate how unlikely most people find things like Cryonics and AI risk. We’re not talking “a little weird” here; we’re talking “about as likely to happen as alien invasions, time travel, and the Sun going nova”. Don’t get me wrong, these are all interesting concepts, and they are really fun to discuss in the domain of philosophy or science fiction. However, the Rationalist movement not only treats these concept as inherently obvious, but also repeatedly fails to address legitimate counter-arguments leveled against them. The usual answer seems to be “you’re just not smart enough to get it”, or “well obviously [incredibly unlikely concept X] will totally solve your objection to [incredibly unlikely concept Y]”. Once again, this is what many other movements do as well, but one expects a self-professed Rationalist movement to be at least a little better…

          • deciusbrutus says:

            That sounds exactly like post-hoc rationalization of “I don’t like this group”. Every specific complaint is both weak and the strongest complaint that can’t be overruled by appeal to facts.

            Did you discover those things and find that they caused you to dislike “the rationalist movement” as a handle, or did you dislike the hubris and then find reasons why?

          • Bugmaster says:

            @deciusbrutus:

            Every specific complaint is both weak and the strongest complaint that can’t be overruled by appeal to facts.

            That’s easy for you to say, but just saying “your complaint is weak” doesn’t make it so. You’ll have to elaborate a bit.

            Did you discover those things and find that they caused you to dislike “the rationalist movement”…

            When I discovered that the movement existed, I was broadly in favor of it. Learning more about the movement and its members — by interacting with them on LessWrong, SSC, and other online places — gradually changed my mind, to the point where I am no longer sympathetic to the movement at its core. That said, there are lots of movements whom I dislike a lot more… Of course, you only have my word for it.

            As for the facts, as I see it all of my complaints are factual, other than possibly the complaint about the name. Still, if you were a member of a group called “The Temperance Movement”, and then I discovered that all you guys do is get totally soused every Friday night, I’d feel the same way.

        • LadyJane says:

          The constant use of rationalist jargon can make discussions inaccessible to non-rationalists. Often unnecessarily so, since a lot of rationalist terminology is basically just reinventing the wheel anyway.

          Also, a lot of rationalists seem way too skeptical of the scientific and academic establishment, to the point where it can almost feel like talking to young-earth creationists in terms of how little they care about empirical evidence and commonly-accepted theories. Galileo gambits appear to be obnoxiously commonplace. And, likely for related reasons, the movement tends to attract a fair number of people with political and cultural views that I find reprehensible, as well as an even greater number of people who are just obnoxiously tone-deaf on certain social issues.

          Finally, I get really strong cult vibes from the core group. Maybe it’s the focus around a single charismatic leader, or the wholesale rejection of mainstream societal norms, or the isolationist atmosphere. Maybe it’s the promise that being a rationalist will lead to better life outcomes, or the use of absurdly vast risks and rewards to motivate people (“donate to transhumanist groups and cryonics facilities if you want to live forever, and don’t forget to give money to our AI research institute to prevent the robot apocalypse”). Or maybe it’s just the way they feel compelled to constantly and vehemently deny being a cult.

          • Nornagest says:

            The cult thing’s been done to death, but — Eliezer, at minimum, is really obviously attracted to the aesthetics of being a cult leader. I don’t think he’s trying to start a cult as such, but I do think his explicit preferences are kinda fighting with his instincts there, so his attempts to avoid it often come off somewhere between hyper-abstract theorist stuff with limited practical application, and straight-up “do not do this cool thing”.

            I also don’t think he fully appreciates how much that tends to skeeve people out if they don’t share his aesthetics.

          • Bugmaster says:

            Agreed on all counts; I tried saying something similar in my comment above, but you said it better.

            Also, I find it amusing that whenever someone says, “hey guys, your movement seems kinda cultish”, the immediate response always is, “no, we are not a cult, we merely look and act identically to a cult”. Well, that sure put my mind at ease !

          • Nornagest says:

            I find it amusing that whenever someone says, “hey guys, your movement seems kinda cultish”, the immediate response always is, “no, we are not a cult, we merely look and act identically to a cult”.

            Glad I could be amusing to you, but if that’s your take-away then you’re missing a lot of nuance.

            Let’s try being a little blunter. Eliezer and his followers like to LARP at being cultists. One one level I feel like many of their critics don’t get the joke, but on a deeper level it strikes me as ha-ha-only-serious — conscious or not there’s a real desire for structure there, and a willingness to create it, that I find kinda skeevy. See that Dragon Army thing for a good example. There are reasons I hang out here and not on Less Wrong or Lesser Wrong or whatever it’s calling itself now, and a big one is that Scott’s not trying to position himself as some kind of guru.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Nornagest:
            You’re right about LessWrong, of course; but even Scott is not immune. When he says stuff like, “Isn’t it wonderful to live in a big communal house where everyone shares your beliefs, sleeps with each other, and doesn’t have to worry about pesky outsiders”, the average person is not going to appreciate all the layers of nuance behind that sentiment. Don’t get me wrong, though — Scott does not come off as a cult leader at all, but rather more like an earnest follower.

            That said, Scott is usually pretty good about keeping his private life and his blog separate, so maybe 80% of the time he doesn’t give off any cultist vibes at all.

          • Aapje says:

            @LadyJane

            Also, a lot of rationalists seem way too skeptical of the scientific and academic establishment, to the point where it can almost feel like talking to young-earth creationists in terms of how little they care about empirical evidence and commonly-accepted theories. Galileo gambits appear to be obnoxiously commonplace.

            Can you give two or three examples of this?

            Also, are you familiar with the replication crisis?

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Aapje:
            I haven’t read LessWrong in a long time, but I can give several examples.

            1). The emphasis (in the Sequences) on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; both in terms of the sheer amount of space spent on it, and the oft-repeated sentiment that if you believe in the Copenhagen interpretation, you’re irrational. As far as I know, physicists are still divided on the issue.

            2). When I joined LessWrong, a lot of the discussion centered around some murder case, with several people explicitly stating, “if you don’t believe the accused is guilty [or maybe innocent, I forget], then you’re hopelessly biased beyound redemption”. I don’t remember any of the details, but my reaction at the time was, “wait, so you guys expect me to study some obscure court case and to come to a specific conclusion before you’d let me into your movement ?”.

            3). The avid support for cryonics, to the point where the chances of reviving a frozen human head — specifically, your head — hundreds (if not thousands !) of years from now are seen to be close to 100%. Meanwhile, actual biologists are rather skeptical on the subject. Of course, this revival is broadly believed to be implemented via molecular nanotechnology, which brings me to…

            4). …Self-replicating molecular nanotechnology being seen as a near certainty, whereas scientists and engineers are dubious about it, at best.

            5). Saying things like “machine translation will become flawless in 5 years”, without even acknowledging that this may not even be conceptually possible, given how human languages work.

            I could go on and on like this, but these points should suffice for now.

          • Protagoras says:

            @Bugmaster, On 2, it seems strange to describe the Amanda Knox case as obscure (there has now been a Netflix documentary about it, you know). And for the record, it’s if you don’t think she was innocent that you’re hopelessly biased beyond redemption. Which seems right to me.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            You say : “obnoxiously tone-deaf on certain social issues”

            and I hear : “What’s wrong with you! Why are you not burning all these witches!? It’s $current_year already! Ugh!”

          • quanta413 says:

            The emphasis (in the Sequences) on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; both in terms of the sheer amount of space spent on it, and the oft-repeated sentiment that if you believe in the Copenhagen interpretation, you’re irrational. As far as I know, physicists are still divided on the issue.

            I found that funny too. I believe a better description would be physicists don’t care; the issue is mostly philosophy. There are no meaningful experimental tests distinguishing Copenhagen from Many-Worlds from pilot-wave theory from “shut up and calculate”. And if we did know the answer, it wouldn’t matter to almost everything that physicists study.

          • pontifex says:

            There’s a bunch of philosophical stuff I disagree with EY and the capital-R Rationalists about. But the movement doesn’t seem scary or anything. Especially compared to “traditional” colleges things like ashrams, political groups, fraternities, etc.

          • Brad says:

            2). When I joined LessWrong, a lot of the discussion centered around some murder case, with several people explicitly stating, “if you don’t believe the accused is guilty [or maybe innocent, I forget], then you’re hopelessly biased beyound redemption”. I don’t remember any of the details, but my reaction at the time was, “wait, so you guys expect me to study some obscure court case and to come to a specific conclusion before you’d let me into your movement ?”.

            There was also some strange stuff about diets that gave off a very contrarian for the sake of contrarianism vibe. Circling back to the cult stuff, a good deal of the diet discussion seemed to centered around justifying why it was reasonable for EY to be unable to lose weight.

            Anyway, EY really rubs me the wrong way and I lost interest in LW and the rest of Rationalism pretty quickly. It’s a testament to SA’s writing ability that despite the fact that he is clearly influenced by EY the things that annoy me don’t seem to leak through much.

          • Nornagest says:

            a good deal of the diet discussion seemed to centered around justifying why it was reasonable for EY to be unable to lose weight.

            I felt the same way about that one. But to be fair, Eliezer’s hardly alone in wanting an easy justification for that.

          • Aapje says:

            @Bugmaster

            1. This seems like a good example.

            2. Your conclusion seems incorrect. Your description of what they said is perfectly consistent with them being fine with you not having an opinion, just not with having the opinion that Knox was guilty. The case against her was truly quite bad, which is why she was eventually fully exonerated (not just due to a lack of evidence, but the judge declared her innocent). I also don’t see how this is an example of rationalists being way too skeptical of the scientific and academic establishment. They were also proven right in the end (in so far that court cases prove things).

            3. I agree with you that a strong belief in the viability of cryonics right now, is rather silly. It’s an obvious bias for the type of crowd that is attracted to rationalism. On the other hand, I don’t recall extreme confidence that it will work when this topic is discussed here.

            4. Seems like a decent example.

            5. Seems like a good example, although it was just a prediction by one person, who got a lot of pushback.

            Ultimately, I think that you have rather high standards though. I am a bit of a misanthrope in that I believe that the human hardware is fundamentally incapable of rationality, so I would give an A for effort just for a having some focus on fallacies and biases.

            Furthermore, this crowd tends towards scrupulosity, so when they are wrong, they rarely do anything about it that can have serious negative impact.

          • LadyJane says:

            @Aapje: I was going to bring up Eliezer’s insistence on the many-worlds interpretation being correct, since it was the best non-politicized example I could think of, but Bugmaster already went over that. Another example is the community’s near-certainty that Singularitarian technologies (like cryonics, life extension, nanotechnology, and superintelligent AI) can exist and will exist within the next few decades, which I find highly unlikely. The other specific examples I had in mind were all highly politicized (climate change skepticism and theories about race/sex being the most notable ones).

            And yes, I am aware of the replication crisis. I recognize that questioning established knowledge is an important part of the scientific method, and I do believe that the scientific community should be held to higher standards than they currently are. But I’m still not going to put a lot of faith in a group of contrarian autodidacts who mostly seem to be challenging the status quo because it fits their agenda or just because they’re trying to prove how smart they are.

          • Aapje says:

            But I’m still not going to put a lot of faith in a group of contrarian autodidacts who mostly seem to be challenging the status quo because it fits their agenda or just because they’re trying to prove how smart they are.

            Do you think that scientists never favor theories because it fits their agenda or just because they’re trying to prove how smart they are?

            Furthermore, scientists who actually invent/research new things are generally autodidacts for the innovative things they do. Many of them were contrarians, because they went against what people considered true.

            Furthermore, the opinions of people here tend to be heavily informed by scientific findings, also on issues like race/sex. I think our opinions are generally far more informed by science than the average person who takes their beliefs from the media or memes. The media and the memes not infrequently are inconsistent with very clear scientific findings.

            Of course, you don’t have to listen to us, but are you sure that the people that you get your information from are any better?

        • name99 says:

          Have you read David Chapman’s Meaningness “blog”?
          It’s a huge rambling work in progress which means it’s not that easy to grasp, but it’s worth diving in occasionally and just jumping from page to page as the spirit moves you.

          For the purposes of this comment, perhaps the best entry point is
          https://meaningness.com/meaningness-and-time

          Anyway one of his primary points is that a hierarchy of understanding that we might put as something like
          – pre-rational
          – rational
          – post-rational.
          The first two are clear, what’s the third? The point is that “rationality” (as actually practiced — we’re interested here in understanding the world, not in winning word-definition games) is not JUST things like “use of evidence” and “deducing consequences from axioms”, it is ALSO a set of assumptions about the axioms we should use for deduction, for example that there are only a few axioms, and that they are “elegant”.

          Post-rationality is an assertion that these claims about the axioms are grievously incorrect.

          The trajectory is most obvious in physics where we get the transition to rationality first (let’s say Galileo and Newton) and yeah, it gives you immense power and really does seem to explain everything. BUT, oh dear, it’s actually very very wrong.
          We now have a different set of axioms for physics, they’re much more difficult, much more complicated, no-one dares to claim that they understand them, and extracting any sort of deductions from them is a tremendously complicated task that only works in tremendously simple circumstances. Meaning that you have areas like solid state physics that combine quantum weirdness with many moving parts and it’s still possible to find wildly unexpected things that weren’t anticipated and aren’t really explained (like high temperature super-conductivity).

          Now consider the same sort of trajectory in social science. We have social sciences (with various degrees of arrogance, most aggressively economics, with political science a close second) asserting the same sort of 19th C physics claims, that they own the axioms of human nature and are carefully and successfully deducing from them the ideal ways to structure government, society, schools, the healthcare system, and every human interaction.

          Post-rationalism is not a return to pre-rationalism, it is an assertion that it is EXTREMELY likely that the axioms on which these towers of deduction are based are more or less complete garbage; that if the towers of deduction result in conclusions that seem silly or evil or otherwise false, it is very likely that they are in fact wrong; and that you’re not going to understand this and the flaws in the system by simply asserting that you did all the deducing from the axioms absolutely correctly with not a single logical error along the way.

          Rationalists frequently respond to criticism by asserting that their opponents are too stupid to understand logical reasoning, that they’re all pre-rational.

          So that’s a start to explaining why at least some find Less Wrong off-putting.

          (I’ll add here that, one way or another, Scott seems to do VASTLY better, IMHO, than any other member of the “Rationalist community” in terms of pointing out logical consequences of social-science-type things in a way that I, at least, view as valid, not idiotic or self-serving. Maybe this is because he, more than the other members, tries to align his deductions with data — and all the data, not just cherry-picked data — and is willing to accept that the deductions have gone wrong when they don’t match the data?)

  17. apollocarmb says:

    sweet sister so pretty
    You can stop any time now.
    how we attract our sister for sex
    NO, REALLY, YOU CAN STOP ANY TIME NOW.
    sister aroused by my touch
    ANNNNNY TIME NOW.

    Twitch “sister” with “fellow male friend” and you would probably call such comments homophobic. Its sad how bigoted some people are with regards to incest.

    • JohnNV says:

      Agree. I have no attraction to my sister, but I’m amazed at the hypocrisy of those who claim that people should be free to marry who they choose, and anybody who disagrees is an immoral bigot. But then immediately contradict that by saying that people shouldn’t actually be free to marry their adult siblings. Or people who are already married to someone else. What principle are they actually espousing?

      • Watchman says:

        Incest is not normally associated with free choice you know. The reservations against it (other than the ones that are basically ‘it’s icky ‘) are either biological – lt’s the only form of partnering guaranteed to increase genetic risks to children to that extent – or based on the fact that family dynamics are not conducive to free choice, at least as normally practiced.

        And proponents of free marriage normally allow for polygamy/polyandry (they may stipulate existing partner’s consent though – that is reasonable I believe?). You fail to mention that almost universally they oppose child marriage though, which perhaps illustrates that they don’t actually believe in totally free marriage but in free marriage for those who are competent to decide – and therein lies a key concern about incest.

        • apollocarmb says:

          You seem to be conflating two issues. The issue of incest and the issue of incestuous reproduction. Even if incestuous reproduction is bad that is not a reason to oppose incest.

          There are people out there with genes that are a serious danger to their children (should they have them) but nobody calls for banning them from having sex. Which is a ridiculous idea, right?

          I think the idea that an adult would not be able to freely choose to have sex with someone just because they are related is not based on any sort of empirical evidence. People simply dont agree to have sex with someone because of things like that. Some sort of scientific evidence must be provided for a claim like that.

          • A1987dM says:

            Even if incestuous reproduction is bad that is not a reason to oppose incest.

            Yeah because it’s not like contraception ever fails.

            “Even if car crashes are bad that is not a reason to oppose incest.” No, unfair comparison, P(having a crash|driving drunk) << P(having a child|having sex) as far as I can tell.

          • apollocarmb says:

            @A1987dM

            Do you think old people having sex is a bad thing and that it should be made illegal and that they shouldn’t be allowed to get married?

          • Watchman says:

            If incestuous reproduction us bad then surely incest is a social risk? It is after all the exclusive cause of incestuous reproduction. I can’t see the two issues as separate since the one we want to avoid is caused by the other. Yes, not all incest leads to pregnancy, so there is a debate that might be had here about appropriate responses, but you can’t ignore this debate by claiming incest and incestuous reproduction are separate issues.

            Another issue with incest is that your model seems to be two well adjusted siblings making a mutual decision to have sex (I’ve just realised this is probably the synopsis for the worst Adam Sandler movie possible…), which seems reasonable. Yet this ignores the parent-(adult) child relationship for a start, which might not be the popular image of acceptable incest but is equally part of this debate. Is this also acceptable if both parties genuinely desire it?

            As to empirical evidence for incest, I don’t think we have it. Cases are rare, and setting aside the occasional mutual attraction between siblings separated when young incidents, they seem to be parent-child in the main, although this might be reporting bias. I would suggest though that there us a viable argument for suggesting cousin marriage is likely to map the most likely bits of society to adopt incest, simply because they are already discounting some taboo barriers by practicing this. Outside of royal families, cousin marriage is most likely in less educated groups, with a preponderance in poor rural communities and some immigrant communities. You may notice these are also the sort of community where arranged and forced marriage is more prevalent – certainly if an immigrant group practices these things is much more likely to practice cousin marriage. I don’t think I’m going beyond the bounds of reasoned argumentation by saying, therefore, that assuming cousin marriage would be a good indicator for the occurrence of legalised incest, then the communities involved are those where consent to relationships is less normalised and also where the expectation of a relationship having children is much more of a norm. Actual empirical data for legal incest might disprove this, but I need some good reasons to accept that would be the case.

            In effect if the argument is why shouldn’t well-off educated siblings in a western society be able to have consensual sex then you have a strong case. But I contend here that we have grounds to question that is the model that legal incest will normally entail, and that in practice legal incest would be most prevalent in sections of society where consent is less valued and where childbirth is more common. It’s not a killer argument against legal incest, but it is grounds for considering it in terms beyond sexual freedom.

          • apollocarmb says:

            @Watchman

            Incestuous reproduction isnt bad though. The odds of having children with genetic deficiencies merely increases and it is far from certain that there will be genetic deficiencies. Individuals with genetic deficiencies caused by incest can live just as happy, if not more happy lives then normal people.

            There are plenty of people with dangerous biology that are allowed to have sex and reproduce (including old people) but they are rightly allowed to reproduce. How is this any different?

            I can’t see the two issues as separate since the one we want to avoid is caused by the other.

            A tactic I use when thinking about things is replacing words with other words and seeing if it makes sense or not. Lets try that here and replace “incest” and “incestuous reproduction” with “marriage” and “divorce”.

            >Yet this ignores the parent-(adult) child relationship for a start, which might not be the popular image of acceptable incest but is equally part of this debate. Is this also acceptable if both parties genuinely desire it?

            If it is consensual and they are adults then yes. No human being with a fully developed brain is going to have sex with someone just because their mother wanted them to do it. Wouldn’t you be the same?

            they seem to be parent-child in the main, although this might be reporting bias.

            That would be media bias alright. It is probably spread evenly in each category based on my interaction with the incest community on reddit (/r/incest). If you look at the incest subreddit you will see most are sibling relationships.

            Regarding the cousin marriages argument. That is a cultural thing and it is related to marriages and not sex itself. The solution there is to either ban incestuous marriages from poor areas (which I dont recommend) or eliminate the cultural practice of forced marriages. The answer is certainly not to ban incest.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            The claim I’ve heard about the genetic risk from incest, is, for a single pairing (e.g. ignore compounding multiple generational incest, like the old Spanish nobility did to themselves), is that the risk from a pair of otherwise healthy twenty-year-old siblings having a kid is about the same as a pair of unrelated forty-year-old people having a kid. And (again, ignoring compounding multiple generational) a pair of first of cousins is no more risky than two random people.

            However, while the risks are substantially similar, the impact is different: when the siblings or the cousins are unlucky, the outcome is generally much worse.

        • JohnNV says:

          How could one’s adult sibling be incompetent to decide to marry? Any marriage isn’t or shouldn’t be predicated on reproduction. We rightly allow two men to marry despite the fact that they can’t biologically reproduce. We allow post-menopausal women to marry for the same reason. Why wouldn’t we allow siblings to marry?

      • Tracy W says:

        Or people who are already married to someone else. What principle are they actually espousing?

        Isn’t the issue here is that marriage, in the West, is legally tied into a whole bunch of laws and precedents around property division (at death or divorce), which are all based on there being two people. We could make up rules for polygamous relationships, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do so. Nor do we have a sense of what rules will tend to work for polygamous marriage endings. Nor, in a precedent based system, is it clear how rulings on property divisions for a polygamous marriage ending would affect monogamous marriage rulings.

        If people want polygamous relationships, a settling down period of people writing their own rules and courts grappling with the issues that arise when said relationships end seems wise.

        I’d be surprised if there was one model that was best for all polygamous relationships, let alone that model also applying to monogamous ones.

        • Aapje says:

          @Tracy W

          If we give financial and other benefits to large groups of partners, we effectively change from supporting a small unity of two whose power is bounded to giving benefits to a larger community.

          This can have all kinds of repercussions, both to the viability of giving benefits to spouses, but also the power balance in society and the strength of groups vs the individual. An example of the former is that healthcare may effectively become universal, when a person can just keep marrying people, giving them access to the employers’ healthcare plan. Then in turn, this may make such plans nonviable, depriving even monogamous relationships from such benefits…or of course, it could provide the momentum to have true universal healthcare, making it individual and independent of employment for everyone. Hard to say.

          An example of the latter is that single people, who are not let into or who don’t want to be a part of a polyamorous community may have further reduced well-being, when society becomes more centered around small groups.

          Of course, such incentives may be positive and cause a reverse to the atomisation of society, but if it doesn’t, it may actually put the legislation further at odds with what most/many people need to be content.

    • Andrew says:

      I don’t think that’s what he’s saying?

      He’s poking fun at how he wrote something innocuous but with just the right words 5 years ago and Google therefore sends him a steady stream of people obviously looking for porn. The exact type of porn he accidentally advertised is totally irrelevant to the joke.

    • Tracy W says:

      Really? You want people to be attracted to their siblings? There’s strong reasons why we’d evolve a disgust reaction to incest.

      That’s not the same as a moral objection.

      I have several school friends who went into medicine or vetinary training and I have learnt never to eat in the company of more than 1 of them at a time. I thought I was strong-stomached up until they started trying to top each other’s stories. Nope, I’m easily disgusted. That doesn’t mean I object to medical practice intellectually.

  18. Alsadius says:

    > explain d theories of truth n d best one dat suits d saying if u can’t beat dem, join dem using events in university as a case study

    “OK Google, please do my homework for me”

  19. bean says:

    I’m really glad you’ve done another one of these. Unfiltered access to the consciousness of the internet is disturbing, but also hilarious.

    • johan_larson says:

      “Top queries” lists are almost always censored, because the actual top queries are inevitably about porn. Whatever we say we want, we actually want porn.

      Since this one includes actually sexual material, it seems to be unfiltered, unless there is some even nastier stuff Scott is withholding from us to save our collective sanity.

      • Watchman says:

        I’m guessing it’s edited – the escalation of the pretty sister searches and the Apple joke at the end would be really nice coincidences otherwise.

      • bean says:

        You did see the second list about the anti faq searches, right? I’m aware that there’s some filtering for the best material going on, but I still find the results inevitably funny.

  20. ninjafetus says:

    can i get a s sample ogre biscuit factory dimension

    And who among us hasn’t needed the appropriate dimensions for an ogre biscuit factory at some point? You can’t expect our high fantasy SimCity-style indie game to have disproportionate buildings for one race. That’s just inviting culture war.

  21. johan_larson says:

    “hivemind ape and young girl army experiment”

    If someone wants to write a story that fits this description, I’ll kick in $100 to make it happen.

    • sclmlw says:

      Elisa woke up with a start in a strange new place. She had never been in a laboratory before, but the wall of animal cages and the benches full of half-completed experiments told her this was definitely some kind of lab. What did that mean for her? She couldn’t remember how she got here. Suddenly, as she worked to remember anything at all, she found she could recall the most peculiar things.

      She could remember sleeping on a bed of leaves. She could remember swinging from the branches of trees, and the thrill of dropping from high in the canopy, only to catch herself, confidently, at the last second on a stray branch. She remembered the terror of her whole troop being shot at by strange creatures, and the fear of the chase. Her whole troop? She didn’t have a troop. She had prom and that college-age boy she’d gone with.

      She remembered staring out of those cage bars across from her. She remembered watching HERSELF being wheeled in on a stretcher, while the part of her that watched chewed on a piece of fruit with … gorilla hands. She peered more closely at those bars across from her. The wrinkled, flat, black face of a gorilla stared back at her. And then she saw herself, through those same bars. And again, through other bars. Over and over again, from each face in … her … troop?

      What was happening to her? What had they done to her! And who were they?

  22. RC-cola-and-a-moon-pie says:

    Joking aside, of course the quotation marks around the phrase “some sort” actually signifies a good search, since the two words are common and you’d want to focus on searching for them together as a phrase.

  23. Gil says:

    From now on I will only refer to this blog as Slate State Kodaks.

  24. sclmlw says:

    This post will likely lead to even more random search hit results. Interesting to see how Google’s algorithm can pretty much lead you anywhere on the internet if you string together enough random search terms.

    Maybe the comments section and open threads help guide crazy random people to this blog.

    The Mad Hatter rode a jet ski into a Bose-Einstein condensate for 45.28 femtoseconds.

    • Halikaarn says:

      This post will likely lead to even more random search hit results.

      That’s assuming that anyone wants to search for those terms again, which in most of those cases seems unlikely. Unless there’s a burning collective desire to summon Lincoln among a segment of the population I don’t spend time around. (Actually, Lincoln would probably be pretty unpopular in modern political terms: insufficiently progressive for the left, an inconveniently reanimated version of a handwaved symbol used by the right).

  25. enye-word says:

    the fate of a cruel snake re arrange ssc answer

    Apparently there’s an exam called the SSC, and in the 2014 version of this exam, you had to rearrange the phrase “the fate of a cruel snake”. Now you know.

  26. stanprollyright says:

    But really, how do you summon Abraham Lincoln?

  27. Sigivald says:

    “delay cool condom codex
    ???”

    Autocorrect substitution for “Durex”, a condom brand, I imagine.

    • switchnode says:

      Sample size (rounded up) for a margin of error of ±3% at 95% confidence when estimating the true mean of a Bernoulli random variable, sampling from an infinite population with an uninformative/pessimistic prior (p = 0.5) and using the normal approximation for the confidence interval.

      (To the Googler: We assume that the sampling process is random.)

  28. switchnode says:

    criticize the statement “you can see atoms”
    It’s really dumb

    Well…

    • eyeballfrog says:

      I’m reminded of the phenomenon that lets you see infrared laser light. Scientists noticed that sometimes their IR laser would appear to flash green. It was determined that this was caused by two IR photons hitting a single retinal cell simultaneously. The cell saw this as a single photon of half the wavelength, which would be a green photon.

      • EmilAich says:

        That’s cool. I wonder whether it contributes the green flash that people see at sunset?

        On a completely different note, “whaleborax” will be in lot of peoples passwords from now, I’m sure.

        • Bugmaster says:

          AFAIK — and I could be wrong — the green flash is basically the green part of a rainbow that dynamically forms as the Sun sinks below the horizon… but since the Sun is moving very quickly at that point, and everything is reddish anyway, your human eye can only see the green component.

          If I’m totally wrong about this, someone please correct me !

    • Helaku says:

      I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot

      Yeah, it’s like our planet dissected from the Universe by alien scientists.

  29. BethanyAnne says:

    I first found this blog when something on it outraged the feminist/SJ blogosphere. Came for outrage and found rationalists instead.

    • mupetblast says:

      “Came for outrage and found rationalists instead.”

      I think I heard that in a Steve Miller Band song or something.

  30. mupetblast says:

    OT but can anyone recall the link Scott provided some time back showing that most campus speakers no-platformed and shouted down are in fact liberal/left? It was in one of those linkfest posts. Thanks!

    • j1000000 says:

      Post this question in the latest hidden Open Thread. Someone around here once said several regular OT commenters have savant-level memories of everything that’s ever happened on SSC and it’s pretty true.

      • quaelegit says:

        A few people keep written notes and bookmarks. Bean started a google doc of effort posts
        around the same time as Naval Gazing but I don’t know if it’s been maintained.

        Otherwise I think its mostly normal-level memories of past conversations + Google. 😛

        • bean says:

          It hasn’t. There wasn’t enough interest, and I got busy as Naval Gazing ramped up. The best place to find the link is somewhere in the OTs of probably late September. The last time I used it was during the airline seating thing, because I linked my aviation effort posts there.

    • quaelegit says:

      I don’t know the SSC post you’re looking for, but the website is probably ‘theFIRE.org’ which tracks disinvitations to speakers on college campuses and maybe other things.

      If you want to find the SSC post, try googling with the string “site:slatestarcodex.com” and relevant keywords. I wasn’t able to find an SSC post by searching “fire college campus” and similar but if you remember any keywords more specific to the discussion it might work for you.

      As j1000000 said, the Open Threads are for general queries like this. (You can find the link at the top of the left sidebar or in the Archives, just go to the most recent one.)

  31. Yosarian2 says:

    how to summon abraham lincoln

    Well? You know we all came here looking for the answer to this question. How do we summon Abraham Lincoln?

  32. fishchisel says:

    The ‘Glasgow coma scale’ ones make me a little depressed. I am imagining a panicking mother in the waiting room at A&E, questioning a harried doctor and nervously typing the half-heard reply into her iPhone:

    “How is my son doing?! is he going to be ok?”
    “He’s a 5 on the Gla???v Ko?? Sc??e, ma’am. We’ll do what we can.”

    She tries a few different spellings, lands on your blog; skips over the first few paragraphs of your post, pauses at the first figure. It’s not looking good. She reads further – not understanding or trying to understand the ‘g’ stuff, only caring about the analogy.

    She gets here:

    Although it is not an official use, a lot of people use GCS as a quick and dirty way of estimating someone’s chances. In a particular ICU, it was discovered that mortality rates ranged from about 10% at GCS 11 to about 66% at GCS 3. Other indicators like the aforementioned APACHE are better for this, but GCS will do in a pinch.

    Drops the phone, bursts into tears.

  33. pansnarrans says:

    Yeah, but what is the hormone responsible for soliloquising?

  34. Steve Sailer says:

    Seriously, how useful are search engines for building an audience for a high end blog?

    My experience: not very. When my platform was Google’s Blogger (up through mid-2014), I got outstanding Search Engine support on Google. Now, in contrast, Google barely notices my existence.

    But it doesn’t seem to make much difference in terms of long-term audience because barely any of the flood of searchers Google used to send to my blog stuck around for the long run. I would imagine that Scott’s blog is even more baffling to the average Google user.

  35. Nicholas Conrad says:

    I don’t subscribe to the ‘evil corporations’ narrative, but OMG yes, apple is the most consumer-hostile company on Earth!

  36. MatthewCStein says:

    Hey Scott Alexander,
    Those search terms are weird, and there needs to be a better way to find your best ideas and share them.
    I googled to check if I remembered your name exactly right, because I knew Slate Star Codex was an anagram. I made a new account under my real name here to tell you this because I think it’s that important of an idea.
    I’m still reading your posts because after a year or more, I think Meditations on Moloch might be one of the most important things I’ve ever read. It’s a really excellent idea, and I want to spread it everywhere, at least to every friend I think would get it. It was, as far as I remember before rereading, your best attempt to explain why the world sucks. Why we can’t live in Utopia.

    So here’s the best idea I can coherently write in response to that for how to fight it. This took a lot of editing for me.
    Searching for things can be a lot better than it is because words are ambigious. Computers do their best to understand what you mean, search engines especially, but they spit out nonsense. What about turning each one of your most important posts into a short phrase that’s always googleable? Meditations on moloch becomes a short tag of “mdtnOnMOLOCH”

    (which is more understandable than my first try of
    mdtnmlch
    because people still need to understand them.)

    But just salt your tags with a few random letters.
    Anyone can always reach it or talk about it.
    Forever.

    You can condense your ideas into a tag and a few random letters, and teach Google a new word. Then teach people to search for it. The teach the entire world something better. Until the noise of the internet spambots or whatever drowns out what you meant originally. Then, you’ll just have to see what came out of that, and write something better in response to all those challenges.

    Why this way? Because the knowledge of what term to search to find exactly what you mean is difficult. But you can ask a friend who knows about stuff, and they can give you a few good terms to search. But Google interprets words as words, and if you’re looking for the same word on one topic another topic also uses, it’s impossible to find.

    We don’t necessarily need hashtags to be pronounceable, just understandable. And tags to be better to find things.

    I don’t know if this a great, stupid, or already done idea. But you’re incredibly smart.
    And I really hate Moloch, frankly.
    So here’s the best I could do to at least kick it really hard in the shins.

    Thank you,
    Matthew Stein

  37. Dopaminer says:

    Ohmygoodgod.
    I don’t know if it’s because I haven’t slept or I just can’t fully trust you, but I can only read this as glorious surreal poetry unless you swear to me, personally this is true.
    I may still have doubts until provided more evidence though, to be frank. I love your posts on digesting massive amounts of research and spitting it back out. It’s incredible to see everything condensed like that.
    On the weird flip side, I think Meditations on Moloch may be one of the most important poems anyone could read.
    Alongside that cactus person post, I’m sure I can reread that by searching better than… any of those bold text examples.
    I mean, I yelled at my phone “OK GOOGLE, take me to my local library” the other day, and that incredibly worked first try.

    If you can make me believe this is true, I will personally provide you with recordings of me reading aloud Meditations on Moloch and… the cactus person post. And if you aren’t satisfied with them, I will rerecord each from scratch. If you don’t believe me, I don’t care, but I still will commit to posting a blind reading of me rereading Meditations on Moloch, aloud, and I’ll start reading and recording that by 9 am, less than one hour. I’ll post it as a reply to this comment on a brand new Soundcloud under this username.
    Provide me proof you coward! I will remix that weird, weird list of epithets you posted and call you them as if you cared until you do!
    But I’m also sorta lazy so I will just believe you saying it anyway.
    And I would never want to be OBNOXIOUS, so I would post at most one weird epithet a day at you.

  38. MatthewCStein says:

    https://soundcloud.com/user-707781630/a-blind-re-reading-of-meditations-on-moloch-part-1

    Are you ready Scott? There’s been some minor untruths. I lied about posting a thing under the same name. Getting doxxed scares the hell out of me. Not because of anything I’ve ever said on under it, online. But because I have a loving wife and amazing friends who I would dearly love to never call forth an angry internet mob upon.

    As I can recall, to the best of my abilities, the only “lies” or slightest mistruths involved in this project:
    I started at 9:13.
    I couldn’t do a full blind reading.
    I did change 2 lines in the original MOLOCH by Ginsberg, I inserted a “get ready” shakily, and said “I WAS CRUSHED BY MOLOCH” or whatever that line roughly is.
    And then I did stop somewhere around 4. on the list of real life MOLOCH issues. I can’t do the whole thing in one sitting. I forgot how long it was, frankly.
    But it’s good. Very good. And I forgot how many comments were on it.
    The internet is a portal to all the media ever made with in reach of how much time you want to waste acquiring it, if you might have to pay money, etc.
    So much is free out there.
    This might be one of the most incredible things I’ve ever read, because it contains that ART of the heart and soul, but a firm, safe, rational grounding of exactly why it is right. I physically feel pain when I worry now. But my doctors have assured it will not kill me. I need to rest, relax, and eat breakfast (so texteth wonderful wife, and she has a point.).
    After that though?
    I’m going to get back to kicking Moloch in the shins, metaphorically.
    I’m going to keep reading Meditations on Moloch aloud until I get it right.
    I think you might have said someone read Cactus Person Post I still haven’t searched for to focus, that no one had been crazy enough to read it yet.
    Maybe I am that crazy.
    Certainly enough for part one and determination to do the rest.
    I want to even do the comments.
    I’ll try to do the rest without commentary.
    After I rerecord a perfect, accurate, simple version of that first part.
    Willing to iterate on it until you love it as much as I love that post.

    tiny stubborn lights vs clustering darkness forever, and I’ll be ok.

    Edit: 🙂 Excellent, I see the edit timer on here is 1 hour. Let’s try to sneak that rerecord in here again, after breakfast.

    Edit 2: No, don’t, faintly cried bill wurtz. I’ll relisten to part 1 blind reading eating breakfast.
    Then I’ll go again at it.
    Running into MOLOCH again until I can make it stumble a lil.

    Edit 3: Ok, 25 minutes left to edit. Eating breakfast until I’m full, I’m a grazer tho so it could be some time.
    I have a new, better plan.
    I will reread this.
    Paragraph by paragraph
    Until I am satisfied with a first draft.
    And post each to soundcloud.
    and maybe add this lil edit as a recording to that sound cloud account.

    I PROMISE I WILL SHUT UP AT SLATESTARCODEX’S ENTIRE GENERAL INTERNET DIRECTION UNTIL I RECORD A FULL, ONE SITTING, VERSION OF THAT I AM HAPPY WITH.
    Because I talk to much.
    And I need to shut up and listen.
    And I need to make art a lot now, apparently.
    So let’s combine a lot of good ideas I’ve read before, make art at them until they get I’m weirdly tying them all together.
    but also just shpost until you can’t and then
    leave an all caps line promising to shut up
    and telling them to hurl all the slings and arrows outrageous internet yellin’ can muster back if i say anything toward them until I DID THE ART THING I CAN SHUT UP

    I WILL COME BACK WITH A SOLID READING OF THE ENTIRE MEDITATIONS ON MOLOCH. ASSEMBLED. ONE. PARAGRAPH. INTO. PERFECTION. (imo, idk lol shruggie <3 damn, my ahk script to make shruggie that lil guy you get when you google him broke. next time. 🙂

  39. ckrf says:

    I can explain “give directly illuminati”! (it may even have been my search)

    People in rural Kenya are often confused by GiveDirectly. They are used to lots of in-kind aid and development projects, but the idea of strangers who want to give them large sums of cash is unfamiliar and sometimes suspicious. “It’s a deal with the devil” is one plausible explanation. Whether for benign or nefarious reasons, GiveDirectly staff get accused of being devil worshippers, Illuminati, and Freemasons.

    One evaluation of a GiveDirectly tweak in particular ran into concerted opposition from an Anglican diocese. I was running a separate evaluation (no connection to cash transfers) a few hours away, and at one point I had a wave of enumerators from the GiveDirectly project come to me asking for jobs because the accusations had made their lives quite unpleasant.

  40. madrocketsci says:

    versailles ohio alien military genetics

    In Ohio, they pronounce the town’s name “Ver-sales”. We also have a “Russia” pronounced “Russie”.

    Multiple choice:
    1) We like to out Europeans by watching them twitch.
    2) We’re aliens who learned everything we know about other continents by reading about them. We have a good grasp of grammar, and understand anything deducible from local referents and context, but no idea how anything is actually pronounced.
    3) A military genetic engineering project gives us a bizarre speech impediment, along with a deep understanding of aerospace, civil, and mechanical engineering, useful for building crazy weapons. The government got a little nervous about how gung-ho we were about it all, and took our strategic air command away. : (
    4) https://i.imgur.com/qnHZQ9o.jpg

  41. arancaytar says:

    I love that these posts practically ensure your ranking for weird search terms climbs even further.

    Apple. Trust me on this one.

    For one thing, its name is full of kabbalistic implications.