poke at "Memento Mori"

diff --git a/content/drafts/memento-mori.md b/content/drafts/memento-mori.md
index 1e39133..3aa63ff 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/memento-mori.md
+++ b/content/drafts/memento-mori.md
@@ -13,21 +13,21 @@ _(Attention conservation notice: personal thoughts on the passing scene; [previo
 >
 > —Laura Barrett, ["Deception Island Optimists Club"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L4yB0LtP0U)
 
 >
 > —Laura Barrett, ["Deception Island Optimists Club"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L4yB0LtP0U)
 

-Six or fifteen or twenty or forty-six months later—depending on when you start counting—I think I'm almost ready to stop grieving and move on with my life. I have two more posts to write for the robot-cult blog about the philosophy of language (a short one explaining the thing [Brian Skyrms and the other guy taught me about about how to separate denotative meaning from mere information-transfer by looking at the common interest subgame](/papers/skyrms-barrett-propositional_content_in_signals.pdf), and a long one re-stating my thesis about the cognitive function of categorization with somewhat more math this time and then using it to give an account of _mimickry_)—and one long post to write here (some robot-cult liturgical commentary plus necessary autobiographical scaffolding)—and then I'll be _done_.
+Six or sixteen or twenty-one or forty-seven months later—depending on when you start counting—I think I'm almost ready to stop grieving and move on with my life. I have two more long blog posts to write—one for the robot-cult blog re-stating my thesis about the cognitive function of categorization with somewhat more math this time and then using it to give an account of _mimickry_, and one here doing some robot-cult liturgical commentary plus necessary autobiographical scaffolding—and then I'll be _done_.

 
 Not done writing. Done _grieving_. Done with this impotent rage that expects (normative sense) this world to be something other than what I know enough to expect (positive sense).
 
 
 Not done writing. Done _grieving_. Done with this impotent rage that expects (normative sense) this world to be something other than what I know enough to expect (positive sense).
 

-On Thursday, I "e-ttended" the conference associated with this open-source scene I've been into for a while—although I've been so distracted by the Category War that I've landed [exactly one commit](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/d1cdb02e4d4) in master in the last 13 months. (I think I'm still allowed to say "in master", although ["whitelist" is out](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/74127).)
+Last Thursday, I "e-ttended" the conference associated with this open-source scene I've been into for a while—although I've been so distracted by the Category War that I've landed [exactly one commit](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/d1cdb02e4d4) in master in the last 13 months. (I think I'm still allowed to say "in master", although ["whitelist" is out](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/74127).)

 
 

-Traditionally (since 2016), this has been [my annual occasion](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/#tech-conference) to travel up to Portland (the _real_ Portland, and not a cowardly obfuscation) and stay with friend of the blog [Sophia](/author/sophia/) (since 2017), but everything is remote this year because of the pandemic.
+Traditionally (since 2016), this [has](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/rustconf-2016-travelogue/) [been](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/10/some-excuse-for-a-rustconf-2017-travelogue/) [my annual occasion](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/#tech-conference) to travel up to Portland (the _real_ Portland, and not a cowardly obfuscation) and stay with friend of the blog [Sophia](/author/sophia/) (since 2017), but everything is remote this year because of the pandemic.

 
 

-But if I'm serious about exiting my grief loop, I need to stop being so profoundly alienated by how thoroughly the finest technical minds of my generation are wholly owned by Blue Egregore. I fear the righteous glee with which they proclaim that everything is political, that anyone with reservations about the Code of Conduct is _ipso facto_ a bigot, how empathy is as important if not more so than technical excellence ...
+Only if I'm serious about exiting my grief loop, I need to stop being so profoundly alienated by how thoroughly the finest technical minds of my generation are wholly owned by Blue Egregore. _I fear the successor ideology_—the righteous glee with which they proclaim that everything is political, that anyone with reservations about the Code of Conduct is _ipso facto_ a bigot, how empathy is as important if not more so than technical excellence ...

 
 

-I can't even think of them as enemies. We're the _same people_. I was born in 1987 and grew up in California with the same [glorious ideal of equality](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) as everyone else. I just—stopped receiving updates a few years back. From their perspective, an unpatched copy of Social Liberalism 2009 must look hopelessly out-of-date with the Current Year consensus, which everyone wants to be [corrigible](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/corrigibility) to.
+I can't even think of them as enemies. We're the _same people_. I was born in 1987 and grew up in California with the same [beautiful moral ideal](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) as everyone else. I just—stopped receiving updates a few years back. From their perspective, an unpatched copy of Social Liberalism 2009 must look hopelessly out-of-date with the Current Year consensus, which everyone wants to be [corrigible](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/corrigibility) to.

 
 

-Or maybe I'm not _even_ running unpatched Liberalism 2009? I still want everyone to have nice things (where, _e.g._, women and black people are trivially part of "everyone"), but I've done a lot of off-curriculum reading—[it usually begins with Ayn Rand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Usually_Begins_with_Ayn_Rand), but it gets [much](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) [worse](/2017/Jan/and-yet-none-more-blameable/#goldberg).
+Or maybe I'm not _even_ running unpatched Liberalism 2009? I'm still loyal to the beau—to _my interpretation of_ the beautiful moral ideal. But I've done a lot of off-curriculum reading—[it usually begins with Ayn Rand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Usually_Begins_with_Ayn_Rand), but it gets [much](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) [worse](/2017/Jan/and-yet-none-more-blameable/#goldberg). It ... leaves a mark.

 
 

-One of the talks was about using our software for computational biology. There was something I wanted to say in the Discord channel, related to how I might want to redirect my energies after I'm done grieving. I typed it out in my Emacs `*scratch*` buffer, but, after weighing the risks for a few seconds, deleted a parenthetical.
+One of the remote conference talks was about using our software for computational biology. There was something I wanted to say in the Discord channel, related to how I might want to redirect my energies after I'm done grieving. I typed it out in my Emacs `*scratch*` buffer, but, after weighing the risks for a few seconds, deleted a parenthetical.

 
 What I posted was:
 
 
 What I posted was:
 


@@ -37,15 +37,13 @@ The parenthetical I deleted was:
 
 > (_e.g._ if someone in the world is working on <https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection> and needs programmers)
 
 
 > (_e.g._ if someone in the world is working on <https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection> and needs programmers)
 

-It probably wouldn't have mattered either way.
+It probably wouldn't have mattered either way. In some ways, Blue Egregore is less like an ideology and more like a regular expression filter.

 
 
 
 
 
 

-The GPT-3 demos have been tickling my neuroticism.
-
-

 
 
 
 

+The GPT-3 demos have been tickling my neuroticism.