Hi.

the good news is you will be able to near-effortlessly dominate the post-cognitive husks that will proliferate

the good news is you will be able to near-effortlessly dominate the post-cognitive husks that will proliferate

STIHILIST, Twitter

Consider: just how dependent are you on your civilization? Just how zero-sum do you think Earth is, exactly? Is the misfortune of your fellow man ever to your advantage? Does it depend on the type of misfortune? If half your generation turns into a pack of blubbering shorts-addicted incompetents, does that make it easier to rise the ranks? Do “the ranks” lose some of their value? Is it just your generation? Are there any healthy “adults” left, e.g. the engineers who programmed the algorithms that took everyone else by storm? Do Meta engineers wash in their own filth? Do they capture any of the value that these algorithms supposedly generate? How much value do shorts take away from a human life? How much wealth do they generate for advertisers/Meta/Google? Are shorts worse than TV used to be, when that was the civilizational-stupidity worry on everyone’s minds? What do statistics say about Gen Z’s current ability/attention span? What in the Ancestral Environment could possibly have caused shorts to be such a crowning achievement of 21st century superstimuli? How much worse do shorts get every year? Is there a limit where shorts cause such damage to human ability to generate wealth that advertisers lose money in aggregate? Are advertisers locked in a Moloch race to the bottom? How are Meta engineers incentivized to do what they do? In time, does sexual selection take its toll as only the shorts-free are able to raise children while everyone else stares at their screen and civilization collapses around them due to the weight of a low fertility rate and rising pension costs? Does “cull the weak” really apply to this situation?

Related question: just how far above the resistant-to-shorts waterline are you, exactly? Imagine the absolute guiltiest of your pleasures: in 30 seconds of thinking, can you imagine how it could be made even more pleasurable than it currently is? If you unleashed a team of a hundred $300K Silicon Valley engineers onto the job, could you get there in under a year? And you still think yourself safe?ˆ1

You are homo sapiens, like the rest of us. The map of your psychology is shared by nearly everyone on the planet. As for the variation you have left, it’s only a matter of time till someone in a San Francisco lab or an algorithm in Arizona running trial-and-error or RL figures out how to “crack” your specific psychology due to someone else exactly like you existing in either SF or the training data… And then you’re screwed. Your blueprint is open-source and free for any to study and exploit! Do not think you will last long under such conditions: there is little you know that “they” do not, or cannot figure out with ease.

How dependent are you on your civilization?

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