Only Bayes Can Judge Me

  • 43 Posts
  • 2.21K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 4th, 2023
  • swlabr@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    23 hours ago

    Followup:

    Look, the world is fucked. All kinds of paradigms we’ve been taught have been broken left and right. The world has ended many times over in this regard. In place of anything interesting or helpful to address this, Yud’s encoded a giant turd into a blog post. How to stay sane? Just stay sane, bro. Easy to say if the only thing threatening your worldview is a made-up robodemon that will never exist.

    Here’s Yud’s actually-quite-easy-to-understand suggestions:

    1. detach from reality by pretending you are a character in a story as a coping mechanism.
    2. assume no personal responsibility or agency.
    3. don’t go insane, i.e. make sure you try and fulfil society’s expectations of what sanity is.

    All of these are terrible. In general, you want to stay grounded in reality, be aware of the agency you have in the world, and don’t feel pressured to performatively participate in society, especially if that means doing arbitrary rituals to prove that you are “sane”.

    Here are my thoughts on “how to stay sane” and “how to cope”:

    It’s entirely reasonable to crash out. I don’t want anyone to go insane, but fucking look at all this shit. Datacenters are boiling the oceans. Liberalism is starting its endgame into fascism. All the fucking genocides! Dissociating is acceptable and expected as an emotional response. All of this has been happening in (modern) human history to a degree where crashing out has been reasonable. Yet, many people have been able to “stay sane” in the face of this. If you see someone who appears to be sane, either they’re fucked in the head, or they have some perspective or have built up some level of resilience. Whether or not those things can be helpful to someone else is not deterministic. If you are someone who has “stayed sane”, please remember to show some empathy and some awareness that it’s fine if someone is miserable, because again, everything is fucked.

    Putting the above together, I accept basically any reaction to the state of the world. It’s reasonable to go either way, and you shouldn’t feel bad either way. “Sanity” has different meanings depending on where you look. I think there’s a common, unspoken definition that basically boils down to “a sane person is someone who can productively participate in society.” This is not a standard you always need to hold yourself to. I think it’s helpful to introspect and, uh, “extrospect”, here. Like, figure out what you think it means to be sane, what you want it to mean, and what you want. And bounce these ideas off of someone else, because that usually helps.

    I think there is another common definition of sanity that might just be “mentally healthy”. To that end, things that have helped me, aside from therapy, that aren’t particularly insightful or unique:

    1. Talking to friends
    2. Finding places to talk about the world going to shit.
    3. Participating in community, online or irl.
    4. Basically just finding spaces where stupid shit gets dunked on.
    5. Leftist meme pages

    I mean, is that so fucking hard to say?

  • swlabr@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    1 day ago

    The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes.

    Nobody is above tropes. Tropes are just patterns you see in narratives. Everything you can describe is a trope. To say you are above tropes means you don’t live and exist.

    Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.

    Not going mad as the world ends is also a trope, you fuck!

    This sense – which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life – is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.

    We now have a canon mental age for Yud of drumroll nine.

    Just decide to be sane

    That isn’t how it works, idiot. You can’t “decide to be sane”, that’s like having a private language.

    Anyway, just to make the subtext of my other comments into text. Acting like you are a character in a story is a dissociative delusion and counter to reality. It is definitively not sane. Insane, if you will.