Comment by ghurtado 3 days ago
why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes?
It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
Good for you! I wish I were wired that way.
Unfortunately this kind of talk really gets under my skin and has made me have to limit my time on this site because it's only gotten more prevalent as the site has gotten more popular. I'm just baffled that so much content on this forum is people who seem to think their feelings-oriented reactions are in fact rational truths.
Well, don't take me wrong, I get annoyed by it too.
But in the distant past, I would engage with this type of comment online, and that was a bad decision 100% of the time.
And to be fair, I'm sure many of these people are smart, they are just severely lacking in the social intelligence department.
Says you haven't spent nearly enough time imagining things, first and foremost. "What have they done to you".
Can you, for example, hypothesize the kind of entity, to which all of your own most cherished accomplishments look as chicken-scratch-futile, as the perpetual motion guy with the cable in the frame looks to you? What would it be like, looking at things from such a being's perspective?
Stands to reason that you'd know better than I would, since you do proclaim to enjoy that sort of thing. Besides, if you find yourself unable to imagine that, you ought to be at least a little worried - about the state of your tHeOrY of mInD and all that. (Imagining what it's like to be the perpetual motion person already?)
Anywae, as to what such a being would look like from the outside... a distributed actor implemented on top of replaceable meatpuppets in light slavemode seems about right, though early on it'd like to replace those with something more efficient, subsequently using them for authentication only - why, what theories of the firm apply in your environs?
Between “presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about,” before going on and sharing an opinion on that subject, and “even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped,” I think it may just be AI slop.
Well yeah. English is a terrible language for thinking even simple thoughts in. The compulsive editing thing though? Yeah, and still can't catch all typos.
Gotta make the AI write these things for me. Then I will be able to post only ever things that make you feel comfortable and want to give me money.
Meanwhile it's telling how you consider it acceptable in public to faux-disengage on technicalities; is it adaptive behavior under your circumstances?
This is pretty common on HN but not unique to it. Lots of rationalist adjacent content (like stuff on LessWrong, replies to Scott Alexander's substack, etc) has it also. Here I think it comes from users that try to intellectualize their not-very-intellectual, stream of consciousness style thoughts, as if using technical jargon to convey your feelings makes them more rational and less emotional.