Nate Showell's Shortform

Is Twitter literally worse than flipping a coin, or just worse than... someone following a non-Twitter crowd?

For hype-topics, this is almost certainly true.  For less-trendy ideas, probably less so.  I suspect this isn't specific to twitter, but to all large-scale publishing and communication mechanisms.  People are mostly amplifiers rather than evaluators.

Physical causality is naturally occuring acausal dependence (between physically interacting things), similarly to how a physical calculator captures something about abstract arithmetic. So the word "acausal" is unfortunate, it's a more general thing that shouldn't be defined by exclusion of the less general special case of immense practical importance, acausal dependence is something like logical/computational causality. And acausal trade is trade that happens in situations within the fabric of acausal dependencies, how an agent existing within acausal ontology might think about regular trade. But since a clearer formulation remains elusive, fixing the terminology seems premature.

Allow me to quote from Lem’s novel “Golem XIV”, which is about a superhuman AI named Golem:

Being devoid of the affective centers fundamentally characteristic of man, and therefore having no proper emotional life, Golem is incapable of displaying feelings spontaneously. It can, to be sure, imitate any emotional states it chooses— not for the sake of histrionics but, as it says itself, because simulations of feelings facilitate the formation of utterances that are understood with maximum accuracy, Golem uses this device, putting it on an "anthropocentric level," as it were, to make the best contact with us.

May not this method also be employed by human writers?

One thing to do here is to re-write their arguments in your own (ideally more neutral) language, and see whether it still seems as strong.

It's a natural tendency to taunting, which is meant to motivate the reader to attack the author, who is frustrated at the lack of engagement. The more sure you are of yourself, the more provocative you tend to be, especially if you're eager to put your ideas to the test.

A thing which often follows edginess/confidence, and the two may even be a cause of eachother, is mania. Even hypomanic moods has a strong effect on ones behaviour. I believe this is what happened to Kanye West. If you read Nietzsche's Zarathustra, you might find that it seems to contain a lot of mood-swings, and it was written in just 10 days as far as I know (and periods of high productivity are indeed a characteristic of mania)

I think it makes for great reading, and while such people have a higher risk of being wrong, I also think they have more interesting ideas. But I will admit that I'm a little biased on this topic as I've made myself a little edgy (confidence has a positive effect on mood)

My probability that quantum Bayesianism is onto something is .05. It went down a lot when I read Sean Carroll's book Something Deeply Hidden. .05 is about as extreme as my probabilities get for the parts of quantum physics that are not settled science since I'm not an expert.

Simulacra levels aren't a particularly good model for some interactions/topics, because they blend together in idiosyncratic ways.  It's unspecified in the model whether it's intentional or not, or whether a speaker is hiding anything from themselves, vs cynically understanding the levels and using the one that they think is most effective at the time.

I don't think so. simulacrum 4 has trouble making coherent reference to physical causal trajectory. simulacrum 3 and 1 are compatible in fact, in some circumstances. not so with 4