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scp-wiki.wikidot.com

191–200 of 200 posts

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#191
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a common theme among fantasy stories of a race of (usually dwarves) that 'dug too deep' and uncovered something evil underground. It's interesting that this cautionary tale already seems embedded in our lore. I wonder why? Have we made this mistake before, at some point in our forgotten past? Probably not, but it's interesting to think about.

"dug straight down" and fell in a cave... cave might have been full of something that eats flesh like piranha or bacteria, or even just angry bats... Seems pretty trivial for this kind of lore to get started.

Yeah, or heavier than air gasses settling in the bottom of caves that silently kill anyone who enters.

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#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that Makefile rule... smr: smr.c @${RM} -rf smr ${CP} smr.c smr ${CHMOD} +x smr

why the "wow"? Looks ok to me.

Copy a .c file to an executable is definitely not ok, normally you'd call the compiler here.

It only works because it is a very special c file.

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#193
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perceptions of one-sidedness are coming from the force of your passions. I assure you that people on the opposite side of this story say exactly the same things, just with one bit flipped. I addressed all of this in depth at the time (ironically, in a submission of the same URL that you posted, which wasn't killed): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26714003 https…

> force of your passions Someone was falsely accused of being misogynist ("Stallman never made me feel uncomfortable." - Molly De Blanc, leader of the anti-RMS letter.), transphobic ("My pronouns were always respected by Stallman and the rest of the GNU Project the day my transition was announced, and the same for other trans developers."), and more. I am outraged that HN failed to prevent– or even show balance– in t…

I didn't count, but the story stream that I saw seemed roughly balanced between pro and anti RMS. There certainly wasn't a strong skew.

Your feeling that it was unbalanced is another example of the bias I'm talking about. Both sides over-weight the datapoints they dislike and under-weight (or simply don't notice) the ones they approve of, so both sides end up with a feeling of unjust imbalance. This is what I mean by false feelings of generality.

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#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if each person on earth simulated one neuron in your brain, communicating by passing little slips of paper around? I do think this kind of group consciousness or meta consciousness exists, on many layers even. That's how society works.

That does raise the question of where group consciousness ends though: * Is my immune system conscious? * Is my family conscious? * Is my community conscious? * Is my country conscious? * Is the universe conscious?

> Is my immune system conscious?

What's all this RNA doing in here? Why am I making so many of these stupid spiky things? Dammit, now I've got to clean up this mess.

3 weeks later: What the fuck, not this shit again.

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#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a thought experiment on the viability of retrocausal blackmail, a techno-futurist rebranding of conventional christian eschatology. The real-life hazard is minimal, although probably not strictly zero. There are known real informational hazards for humans, but they generally only affect people with epilepsy or those predisposed to staring at odd optical illusions for longer periods of time than most would consid…

Do you have any examples or references for real informational hazards for humans? I'd love to read more about that

Absolutely! I'm afraid they're actually pretty boring though.

The most common informational hazards are varying forms of behavioral modifiers, e.g. advertising, religions/cults, state-sponsored propaganda. Edward Bernays' is one of the more interesting people to study here, both through his written works (namely Crystalizing Public Opinion and Propaganda, both from the 1920's) and his later actions (popularizing female smoking, helping fruit companies and the CIA overthrow South American governments, etc). Roko's Basilisk falls into this category, if you want to think about it really hard it can hurt you but(somewhat ironically) the only people really susceptible are pseudo-intellectuals who congregate on places like lesswrong.

Next up are simple forms of adversarial inputs such as discordant sounds or rapidly blinking lights. People's susceptibility to these varies, generally only those with neurological disorders (epilepsy, severe misophonia) are severely impacted by known tech. Applied examples include LRADs, dazzlers[0], and/or some bowling alleys.

Last up there is at least one true informational hazard where perception alone is enough to disrupt the underlying structure of your brain (or at least your visual cortex). It's called the McCollough effect, and I'm not going to link to it but if you're curious a quick glance is generally safe. On the surface it's a simple color shifting optical illusion, but unlike most of those, if you stare at it for more than a handful of seconds, the aftereffect lasts for months.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon), the boring ones are based on just blinding while the interesting ones attempt to disorient your brain with high frequency color patterns

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#196
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> force of your passions Someone was falsely accused of being misogynist ("Stallman never made me feel uncomfortable." - Molly De Blanc, leader of the anti-RMS letter.), transphobic ("My pronouns were always respected by Stallman and the rest of the GNU Project the day my transition was announced, and the same for other trans developers."), and more. I am outraged that HN failed to prevent– or even show balance– in t…

I didn't count, but the story stream that I saw seemed roughly balanced between pro and anti RMS. There certainly wasn't a strong skew. Your feeling that it was unbalanced is another example of the bias I'm talking about. Both sides over-weight the datapoints they dislike and under-weight (or simply don't notice) the ones they approve of, so both sides end up with a feeling of unjust imbalance. This is what I mean by…

I did an unweighted, unfiltered count of the submissions with more than 10 comments in your post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636

16 negative

8 positive

In the examples of popular threads you cited, a two-thirds supermajority were anit-Stallman.

I did a cursory search for "RMS" and "Stallman" in the past month, since your link was posted. I found 3 pro-Stallman articles (and no anti-Stallman ones):

https://meribold.org/2021/04/07/critique-of-rms-open-letter/ https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-... https://stallman.org/articles/dr-stallman.html

That brings our total to 16 negative and 11 positive, or 1.5 anti-Stallman articles per pro-Stallman articles. (60% anti-Stallman.)

Weighted by the number of comments, there are 378 more comments on the links you provided.

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#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples or references for real informational hazards for humans? I'd love to read more about that

Absolutely! I'm afraid they're actually pretty boring though. The most common informational hazards are varying forms of behavioral modifiers, e.g. advertising, religions/cults, state-sponsored propaganda. Edward Bernays' is one of the more interesting people to study here, both through his written works (namely Crystalizing Public Opinion and Propaganda, both from the 1920's) and his later actions (popularizing fema…

Thanks for the reminder, I've read about Bernays before (maybe in the Century of the Self documentary?) and forgot that I've been meaning to study him more. I think behavioral modifiers is a great example. That's the exact kind of thing I was hoping for; something that reveals vulnerabilities we have but feel like we shouldn't.

I also love the adversarial inputs and McCollough effect. Another example of what I mean: it shows how we're fundamentally just machines that have exploits like any other, and in a very dangerous way.

Thanks for sharing; I find stories and topics that try to elevate and glorify mankind tired and repetitive. In contrast I find things that reveal the dark sides and weaknesses of humankind endlessly fascinating. Unfortunately those topics don't seem to be as popular to create content about.

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#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! I'm afraid they're actually pretty boring though. The most common informational hazards are varying forms of behavioral modifiers, e.g. advertising, religions/cults, state-sponsored propaganda. Edward Bernays' is one of the more interesting people to study here, both through his written works (namely Crystalizing Public Opinion and Propaganda, both from the 1920's) and his later actions (popularizing fema…

Thanks for the reminder, I've read about Bernays before (maybe in the Century of the Self documentary?) and forgot that I've been meaning to study him more. I think behavioral modifiers is a great example. That's the exact kind of thing I was hoping for; something that reveals vulnerabilities we have but feel like we shouldn't. I also love the adversarial inputs and McCollough effect. Another example of what I mean:…

I find these types of things to be a lot more interesting as well. With respect the behavioral modifiers I feel like they really help explain how societies actually function, once you start paying attention you see just how effective and pervasive they really are.

This study[0] discusses adversarial images which fool both ML classifiers and time limited humans, a rather interesting development in the field.

It's a good space to keep an eye on in general, at some point someone's probably going to discover a snowcrash-level informational hazard and it would be nice to have some warning.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.08195.pdf

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#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good long form SCP read: http://www.scpwiki.com/antimemetics-division-hub

I really loved reading through this one. Such a great idea for a story.

If you liked this story line, check out the author's other work on http://qntm.org.

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#200

SCP Wiki has really matured over the years; it started out as creepypasta and murder monsters -- many of them well-written, to be sure, and an interesting setting -- but still just basically straightforward horror stories. In recent years some of the writers there have really upped their game, they're tackling much more nuanced and complicated issues than "SCARY THING WILL DESTROY WORLD". I'm particularly fond of htt…

This is a good long form SCP read: http://www.scpwiki.com/antimemetics-division-hub

At least one of the authors of that section ("qntm") has Kindle and print versions of those and other stories on Amazon (search "There Is No Antimemetics Division") if you want to support them...
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