[^internship]: The Singularity Institute at the time was not the kind of organization that offered formal _internships_; what I mean is that there was a house in Santa Clara where a handful of people were trying to do Singularity-relevant work, and I was allowed to sleep in the garage and also try to do work, without being paid.
-[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover from the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default (and that this was a bad thing)](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually rebranded as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2013.
+[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover from the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default (and that this was a bad thing)](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually rebranded as the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](https://intelligence.org/) (MIRI) in 2013.
[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see that my date with the escort was the same day as the "20% of the ones with penises" post (and my comment thereon and following conversation with "Thomas"), 26 March 2016. They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day", likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize what I would be spending the next seven years of my life on.
Third—yes. Yes, it _absolutely_ was kind of cultish. There's a sense in which, _sociologically and psychologically speaking_, Yudkowsky is a religious leader, and I was—am—a devout adherent of the religion he made up.
-By this I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is much comparable to (say) Christianity or Buddhism. But whether or not there is a God or a Divine (there is not), the _features of human psychology_ that make Christianity or Buddhism adaptive memeplexes are still going to be active. [If the God-shaped hole in my head can't not be filled by _something_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/), it's better to fill it with a "religion" _about good epistemology_, one that can _reflect_ on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are often false. It seems fair to compare my tendency to write in Sequences links to a devout Christian's tendency to quote Scripture by chapter and verse; the underlying mental motion of "appeal to the holy text" is probably pretty similar. My only defense is that _my_ religion is _actually true_ (and that my religion says you should read the texts and think it through for yourself, rather than taking anything on "faith").
+By this I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is much comparable to (say) Christianity or Buddhism. But whether or not there is a God or a Divine (there is not), the _features of human psychology_ that make Christianity or Buddhism adaptive memeplexes are still going to be active. [If the God-shaped hole in my head can't not be filled by _something_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/), it's better to fill it with a "religion" _about good epistemology_, one that can _reflect_ on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are often false. It seems fair to compare my tendency to write in Sequences links to a devout Christian's tendency to quote Scripture by chapter and verse; the underlying mental motion of "appeal to the canonical text" is probably pretty similar. My only defense is that _my_ religion is _actually true_ (and that my religion says you should read the texts and think it through for yourself, rather than taking anything on "faith").
That's the context in which my happy-price email thread ended up including the sentence, "I feel awful writing _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I _really_ want to spend that on _this topic_?" (Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe where many subjectively-indistinguishable copies of everyone exists, including [inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past](https://www.simulation-argument.com/), there would plausibly be _more_ copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)
Anyway, I don't think I should talk about the results of my cheerful price inquiry (whether he accepted the offer and a conversation occured, or what was said if it did occur), because any conversation that _did_ occur would be protected by the privacy-norm-adherence rules that I'm holding myself to in telling this Whole Dumb Story.
-(Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
+(Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the MIRI office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff