Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles — LessWrong
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> It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing…

content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    This circuitous, n-tuple negative tenor pervades the whole piece. It’s first and foremost frustrating, but after that just sad.

    • Deborah@hachyderm.io
      0·
      10 months ago

      Everything about Zack is sad.

      On this episode of Zach Depresses Me, I got hung up on his deeply sad aside about community college. A C isn’t to shame you in the contest proving your self-acquired knowledge is As Good™️ as college, it’s there to show you have room to grow in your skills. It’s great to be able to teach yourself things! It’s also great to be able to learn from other people. There’s no shame in not having pre-learned the entire curriculum.

      • 200fifty@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        Everything about Zack is sad.

        I have to say, if you look past the, well, you know, stuff, he’s actually pretty decent at injecting pathos into the posts about his personal life. His writing does a good job bringing you into his extremely depressing/self-loathing inner world – you really feel for the guy, or at least I do. That said, it’s this exact effect which makes me think he is probably not perceiving things as lucidly as he thinks he is. Depression can feel like clarity, but that’s no way to live.

        • Deborah@hachyderm.io
          0·
          10 months ago

          Yeah, exactly. And the lies his depression tells him feel absolutely true to him because his religion tells him you can reason out absolute truth and anyone who disagrees with it is ignorant or lying to you. He gaslights himself.

          • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            10 months ago

            Y’all have nailed how I felt reading this. You have this fellow who has constructed a cognitive process to self-harm at every juncture. Whenever there is an opportunity to believe in something that could bring them joy or closure etc., they head in the opposite direction because of some tenet they think is “correct” or “obvious” even though said tenet usually has a paper-thin justification. Davis is haunted by an Imp of the perverse; that imp is named Yudkowsky.