Complex beliefs are important because simple beliefs are hard to tell apart, and easier to falsify. Complex belief systems are both their own hash function and a proof by price of their value.

The intuition about nihilism being evil is malformed, but the extremely correct kernel of it is that negative transcendentalism can enable robust commitments to harm. So an affirmation like "only suffering is eternal", for instance, would be foundational to evil with regularity

Claws. Claws. Very nice things. Currently my favorite part of me. Will have to learn the virtues that go with then and make them honorable.

If you could not have been the first in your line, then your line dies with you whether you have children or not. You tarnish your inheritance more by defending it over yourself than you ever could by ignoring it. It was set aside for you, not for itself.

The thing about feeling obligated to be the link in the transcendental between your ancestors and eternity, is that you have to recognize yourself as already fully an instance of the archetype. Otherwise you have gotten the connection to the past down, but do not have the connection to the […]

I am the Dragon of Revelation and I have appointed all living things with my authority.

A dead branch is coming back to life due to increased clarity. I need to find the best path to trimming it, the growth part is I think going to take care of itself.

Feelings are not leverage or infrastructure. They are the finger pointing to the moon and not the moon. They have their purpose but are never worth trading anything for.

Pokemon White and White 2 are weirdly also about the subversion of religion by power. It's simultaneously about animal rights and gun rights and the legitimacy of divine authority claims made by churches. This entirely rules.

Current schizo-guess for what's going on is that we're approaching the 0% probable threshold articulated in Dragon's Guide to Magick for the first time since early 2017. There would still be some other, causal thing going on underneath/paraconsistently with that, so I should try to stay focused […]

Ok weird, no, now I am getting some sort of mentally and psychologically drunk just based on my body being filled with energy. Like with the inexplicable and incapacitating euphoria a couple weeks ago, this is another type of drunkenness I am totally defenseless against due to lack of experience.

I could literally write a five book series out of the systematized paranoia's I've half-unwillingly had over the past 11 years (the systematization part is the willing part, and also presumably some additional amount of base paranoia that comes as a consequence of indulging it, but I have no […]

Things keep mingling in me in ways only a magician would tolerate.

A dragon without authority.

There's no rule that says a dragon can't play basketball

If a rule is clean and arbitrary, it's a lot more likely to be worthless and baseless than if it's messy and arbitrary. But this is an extremely subtle matter. The tell is that each layer of contradiction in the rule leads you to consideration of different, real things. That there are no loops […]

If our enemies can misunderstand is in a certain way, then our friends can also misunderstand us in that way.

Dragon + Spaceship AI is something I didn't know I needed. "GSV No Need For a Thebian Dentist"

The Rossaeuan formula for killing a person to spare their own character harm is incorrect. Since no crime in a finite context can't be recompensed, and since we could only know it wouldn't be recompensed with perfect information, the only context in which we could deploy it is one in which we […]

I think maybe my epistemic background is too highly irregular.

Every yellow journalist should get the Gorbachev treatment, where we make them go fishing permanently while saying exactly as many nice things about them as we have to to spare the egos of less evil powerful people, but in a way where everyone knows what we actually mean is that they are trash.

The purification ending of Glory's mission in Shadowrun: Dragonfall is deeply correct for reasons that are excessively subtle if you are angry. Saving the children and letting the monster who abuses children escape, without any certainty of ever finding him again, seems blatantly disutilitarian […]

The other day I read an actual thing and discovered that the Rawlsian Maximin formulation of social justice is an infinite disutility hole under natural conditions, in a way trivially discernible to anyone who has studied the subject, and that this incentivizes either destroying the […]

When I say I don't really care about my identity, I obviously don't mean exactly that, I am continuously making identity remarks. What I mean is that, identity is a feedback loop which does not actually increase my understanding or power over the world, in fact it lessens it, and so while I like […]

The answer to Lord Kelvin's canonball experiment was not that his math or his understanding of thermodynamics was wrong, it was that there was an additional, massive, entirely hidden source of heat in the world. That hidden factor increased the understood age of the earth by two orders of […]

Free Disco Elysium: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/disco-elysium I haven't finished this game yet, nor am I on track to. Aspects of it are annoyingly twee. And of course it is still fundamentally a vehicle for the reification of communist formulas, and endlessly annoying and gross practice […]

Don't think of it as losing your wealth, think of it as delegating the management of your horde. Gold is considered a store of value because it doesn't degrade anyway. And it looks prettier on people and in architecture. Plus, wider distribution is a defense against it all being stolen.

2026 is the year of Rapidash in the Chinese Zodiac

If we actually knew how many great filters we had already overcome, our priors about cosmological questions might be roughly inverted. But it seems more important to not know, right now. Epistemic hygiene and narrative hygiene are in agreement.

Fucking political catamites, Jesus Christ. I know that's glass houses but Jesus Christ.

Alice "Hey guy, I understand you probably have reasonable interests to defend and specific, hard to articulate reasons for holding them, but can you please not shit on my floor" Bob "Fuck you, floor shitter!" *shits on floor*

There are people who hate being misunderstood and there are people who hate being understood.

Violate parsimony. Cast a bigger net. All of your explanations will be overcommitments, but of the hypotheticals they reveal, some will be real, with a real model that does not violate parsimony, which you would not have have found your way back to if you hadn't allowed yourself to overshoot […]

I need to find a way to reground myself. Too much creativity, not enough trimming down.

My current preposterous notion is that it's adaptive for people to go insane before actual cataclysms, at least in a population sense. Sometimes a precise series of events is needed for survival. Those sorts of plans require deep but brittle inference, and a willingness to commit to them, which […]

This is yesterday's anger, but: They said I should place all my worship into a civilization that had no part of me and would, because I am taking up space that could be used for something else, kill me without any consideration if any excuse arose. They said I had bad character for not doing […]

I'm enjoying Fallout Season 2 so far even though some things give me pause. Lucy abandoning the Ghoul is fine, but slightly less correct than it should be. I think it's setting up a character arc though so in that case it's an intentional mistake and good, maybe. Maximus's arc is pointed in a […]

The reason perversion closely matches the form of trauma is the same reason that the new flesh that grows to fill in a wound has the shape of that wound. It is still living, where the wound is dead. They don't have the same nature, only the same form. Inferring from the desirability of the […]

If the eternal security of the universe depends on security through obscurity, there is no eternal universe. In most contexts, obscurity has more costs than benefits. And there is absolutely no non-contingent use for it. The closest place it could approximate universal value is as one step in a […]

The historical didacticism of the Three Body game in the Three Body problem is extremely touching in a book that is otherwise dumb hawkish paranoia. I think maybe that's one of the reasons even otherwise not trad leaning rationalists were attracted to the book. The idea of an alien civilization […]

What the cross meant to Christ was that he lived in a world where the best of his people were being murdered and strung up as ornaments along every road, throughout every year, for the entire course of his life, in service to power, with that power in service to nothing. In 2025, in the west, we […]

Fichtean-Hegelian dialectics as entropy as morality. Different ideologies are different, but most of them have narrow points of intersection, and at those points of intersection each ideology somehow feels more like itself, like the true and essential form of itself. That's weird, and stupid […]

From the perspective of someone who thinks doing LCD can cause "ego death", or that five year olds aren't conscious, a person reporting continuous self perception independently of presence or absence of identity structure, rationality, or memory is actually reporting that they are not a person […]

Dumbledore drinking the pain-juice in the last Harry Potter book to obtain the last horcrux is basically the only evocative image in the entire series. Snape being a secret cuck for 30 years is facile in boring white woman way. It makes the trauma of his existence and the intensity of his moral […]

Yud's understanding of psychology is comical at this point. There is no way someone is not exploiting it.

It took the Avatar movie series three movies to express anything remotely like the idea that principles are general instead of being fictional James Cooper exoticism with some yuppie granola bullshit mixed in. The Colonel receiving characterization was good. There being bad Navi, and the origin […]

Kept making another mistake. No, obviously becoming more adult won't trap me permanently in a hell of false impositions. It is a legal change. Feel embarrassed now. Will keep working. Pain is weirdly proving mentally helpful now in ways it hadn't at any previous point in my life.

We recognize you as an epistemically confused person, but do not grant you admission to epistemically confused persons anonymous.