Remember this?

Let’s see how X promotes truth rather than click-baiting:

Of course you can’t have explicit, public rules for what regulates a declared free-speech, public space (because it’s not actually public, it’s private). You need “scoops” and privileged access to inside employees.

A number of semi-hidden rules like this one:

Nice graph without numbers, btw. Those were all the rage during COVID and Nvidia presentation slides.

Wait, what is this “reach” and “deprioritization” on a FREE SPEECH platform? But let’s expand the one we started with:

“Reply like a madman”, X rule to MAXIMIZE TRUTH.

Or maybe it’s the opposite and farming for engagement maximizes inflammatory action? What is the most likely outcome?

One of Elon’s groupies still a “crybaby” tho:

(thread with some actual data)

(or this, despite it’s quite superficial. But the bottom line is that people don’t simply leave X to send a message, but also because it doesn’t fucking work anymore. Objectively broken and a waste of time.)

But all this stuff is beside the point.

The platform is bent for political exploitation. The moment your “reach” to the “world town square” is regulated by a fee, a fee that however small is under the control of a political party, creates a feedback loop so that those who participate are already themselves filtered. Filtered out, because I’d rather starve to death than give a dollar to Elon Musk. And like me obviously many others.

So what is “free speech”? (without even going into “truth-seeking”)

We used to say, the medium is the message. Who controls the medium, controls the message.

Elon Musk’s magical trick has been to make people focus on the message: you can say everything you want! Free speech absolutism!

He wants to distract you, like magicians, while the substitution happens: he doesn’t need to control the message, because he has the control of the medium. The darkness that comes before. He shapes the discourse uphill, where you aren’t looking. He doesn’t need to censor the single, when he controls the statistically meaningful.

What you write is not what people see.

He gives you illusions, while he seizes the real.

Feeling very sluggish today, but there’s always Elon Musk to make me happy.

Oh! Please do tell, how is “modern” media NOT a click-maximizing and NOT a propaganda-maximizing machine?

I’ve become a fan of inversion and reversibility (and why it’s the ground of the real war no one even seems to acknowledge). But this one is so ludicrous that it is legitimately funny.

All an excuse for more Bakker quotes (if you don’t understand the connection it’s because you aren’t looking close enough).

Oh, this whole reply thread.

“It causes me great pain to see the original creators taken so carelessly.”

“The screenshotted text is even wilder. It completely slanders the very foundations of D&D and fantasy TTRPGs in general. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

“Unfortunately there is a lot of childless weirdos that are trying to reframe the history of gaming”

“This sort of bashing the original creators of D&D (Gygax and Arneson, #DnD) is disgraceful, but the tender leftists love doing it. Women are all through the MM in positive light: sylphs, dryads, and nymphs. #wotc is driven by trashy activism.”

(about this one above. LOL, you can’t be serious.)

“Incredible! It really is so shocking and incomprehensible that wotc would soil the names of men like Gary Gygax. Their narcissism is like a stench!”

“Grummz, not surprised. Elon Musk however…. Well, I’m glad he noticed. I shouldn’t be surprised though, he is an Alpha Nerd.”

“D&D is toast. Nobody plays fantasy role playing to be a gay dwarf baker. (Not making that up, literally a character depicted in latest material). It’s embarrassing. Pandering to the 1% of population that don’t even play the game. This will end badly for them.”

I guess I’m entitled to an opinion because as a kid D&D was a huge myth for me, and still is and I have great respect for Gygax and Arneson, and lots of my time goes digging into that history of the 70s.

And there’s nothing problematic with the following images shown as “proof”:

The only part I’d disagree is that this type of level commentary is probably ill placed and not suitable for a rulebook, but looking more closely this seems coming from a “making of” other book, where instead it is fully in-topic and well deserved.

I think this amounts to the same brainless way that people have to chop human beings into coarse binary categories of good/evil. That doesn’t have any contact with reality, since human beings are complex, instead. All of us are agglomerates of good and bad things. And even the good and bad of those things isn’t clearly good and bad, but itself an agglomerate of actual cause and effect.

What is the problem of recognizing there are aspects of the cultural world that spawned D&D that were problematic and easily lending themselves to criticism? And why the presence and legitimacy of such criticism would put D&D under a bad light, even?

If anything THE COMMENTS ABOVE condemn the people. Not the RPGs. Even with the (undeniable) sexism, those RPGs are fine. They are a cultural product with its own limits but also qualities. I’m AGAINST the idea that a cultural product HAS to have representation. Because I see cultural products as PARTIAL IN NATURE. So I’m totally fine if a piece of culture, whether it is a movie, a book, comics, or whatever, is sexist, or has a very limited representation. It’s fine. It shows a light on a part of the world, a limited point of view. It is partial by nature. As long of course it doesn’t become ideology. As long the intent isn’t to make partiality the rule.

The Theater of the Mind is a great place to debase and slaughter other people (and ourselves). Reality is not.

I don’t see anything wrong if you read a story of Conan and all the women are enslaved. Why? Because it’s fiction, as long it doesn’t want to be IDEOLOGY. And even when it is because it reflects indirectly an ideology that was absorbed and taken for granted, it can still be appreciated for the entertainment it offers WHILE also lending itself to criticism for those aspects that deserve it. It’s not all one indivisible thing to condemn or celebrate.

Nor I see anything wrong if now RPG spaces are wider, more accessible and more diverse. I don’t see anything wrong to analyze some previous work critically. I don’t see anything wrong if newer works are developed as consequence of that awareness.

Cancel culture, that I do not approve at all, erases the thing. Cancel culture is the very opposite of diversification. But that piece above doesn’t “cancel” anything. It merely reads critically, expanding the scope of what a new product should be. Nor it does anything to the “memory” of Gygax. Why Gygax himself wouldn’t recognize some base misogyny in his old work? I see it more as a consequence of naivety, because those RPGs were largely naive. And generally also quite harmless. They weren’t seized as IDEOLOGIES. They were simple, basic wishful thinking. Entertainment lending itself to some manly superficiality.

If you see all that as an attack to the person and memory of Gygax, well, it only speaks of you and your stupidity (and your actual, confirmed butthurt misogyny).

(also anticipating the criticism: no, I also don’t think that those people in the comments are misogynist BECAUSE they played D&D)

So you do agree that the correlation between an extinction level event and the priority of getting humanity to Mars is zero?

If the possibility of an extinction level event is defined by humanity having no control on when it happens, what are the chances of humans developing technology to solve it precisely at the point in the colossally wide timeline when that event randomly shows up?

Unless you live in the anime-like world of Evangelion, where hostile “angels” were sent at the rate that was precisely needed to give humanity both evolutionary and technological pressure to get to the planned stage at the right time. An event that was willed and controlled.

Maybe you want to be the CAUSE of that extinction event?

(but no, we are most likely in a manga instead)

EDIT: slight step to the future, Cory Doctorow wrote about it.

(extra)

EDIT: It keeps going. (for those who don’t know, Elon Musk won a lawsuit by saying that accusing someone being a pedophile is a “common insult”, rather than defamation)

(“it’s just an insult”)

Earlier today the proverbial Elon Musk replied “Intelligence is as intelligence does” to someone posting a little story about the person with the highest IQ recorded, and exemplified this unparalleled feat saying “she was ridiculed for her answer to what seemed a simple problem. Yet she saw what no one else could.”

My point here is not that I’m smarter than most people, but that this would be the answer most likely BY DEFAULT.

So let’s see this simple logical problem:

There’s a game show and you get to pick between three doors. One of them would reveal the prize of a car, whereas the other two simply hide goats. The clever cultural wink here is that we all need cars rather than goats. So let’s simplify and just say one door is the prize and the other two are empty.

PRIZE / EMPTY / EMPTY

As simple as it is, as long you played D&D and/or have a very basic grasp of probabilities, you pick between three choices, it’s like rolling 1-2 on a d6, or 33.3% chance of being right.

And that’s it.

The added trick is that after the choice is made, one of the other two doors is opened to reveal it is empty. And you make a SECOND choice.

Once again, basic probabilities, you now get to pick between TWO doors, the chance is now 50%.

No matter what happens, this is always the scenario. If you picked the prize correctly the first time, with your 33% chance, the reveal of one of the other two doors will give the opportunity to know you’ve been either right or wrong. The toss of a coin, 50%. But the same happens in every case, because there are always two empty doors, and no matter which you pick, there’s always one left that is empty, to reveal at the second step.

My most stupid default is that it doesn’t really matter what choice you make, it’s always 50%. Either or.

But nope the story here is that people felt outraged by the WRONG answer: “She got over 10,000 letters, with nearly 1,000 from PhDs.”

… Telling her that she was wrong for deciding to switch?

But if the “stupid default” conclusion says that it’s INDIFFERENT, why should you be upset at picking one of two equal options?

Of course the goal here is another, once again political since the target here is the “school system”, part of the current playbook of destroying institutions. But it is quite silly how this was underlined:

“MIT ran computer simulations that confirmed her answer.

MythBusters conducted tests to prove it.

Some academics recognized their mistake and apologized.

But why did so many fail to see it?

I mean, yeah, it’s a tricky problem because of how it is presented. If the default answer is that it’s indifferent, because it’s either/or chance, then you are open to choose to switch as well. The “clever” conclusion is that this is a compounded choice, it builds on the first rather than being in isolation.

What you see as 1 on 2 chance is actually 2 on 3, which is much more convenient, and the reason is obvious. Between the first and second step, no matter what, one of the three options is removed. The fact that it is 33.3% the first, moving onto 50% indicates that something happened and information was added, and while the first choice is set in stone as 1 on 3, the “action” in between produced better chances, up to 50%. If you don’t CHANGE your choice then you are logically stuck with your original 33.3%, rather than the 50% in front of you.

No matter what you think, either you fully grasp the compounded chance OR NOT, the choice to SWITCH in the second stage is ALWAYS the better option.

Once again, you don’t need 228 IQ to figure out, you don’t need computer simulations. There is nothing tricky. There is only one answer, as long you give it enough thought to go one step further than the original 50% chance.

If you still don’t fully grasp the logic, just use a different example: there are 1000 doors, only one has the prize. You choose one, therefore you have 1/1000 chance of being right, which is quite unlikely. At the second step, the other 998 empty ones are removed. You now have only two options, the one you picked, and the one left…

Well, what are you gonna choose?

(there would be more to say, about what is the specific pattern that tricks the mind here, and it is how the heuristic abstraction transforms the reveal of one of the two other choices as equal, which is not, and then the whole theme of superstition matched to randomness, sticking to the choice that FEELS right, which is as old as humanity…)

Does anyone remember Scott Aaronson problem? (I mention Aaronson because the problem was examined in his “Quantum Computing Since Democritus”, but I think it first appeared on his blog?)

It was something like this: there’s a greatly advanced AI that has perfectly mapped human behavior. You know this. It is true. You’re going to face it. This computer AI has prepared two sealed boxes in front of you, one next to the other. The one on the left contains $1.000, you know this. The one on the right EITHER has $1.000.000, OR nothing. Once you arrive in front of those two boxes, the content has already been set and cannot be changed. So you know that the box to the right is either empty or has the bigger prize.

The content of the box on the right has been previously set by the AI following a strict rule: if it predicts you take both boxes, then that box is empty, if you take only the one on the right, then it contains the big prize.

You have one simple choice to make: take with you the box on the right, or BOTH.

Now you need 228 IQ.

—
Late addition:

If you choose red pill, you live in all cases (and everyone lives too, the dilemma is intended as an intuition pump).

If you choose blue pill, you die.

But LOGIC also says that to save lives you need to reach 100% consensus on red pill, but only 51% consensus on the blue.

Given knowledge of the results of the poll, we would need only another +4% on blue side to save everyone’s life, whereas to do the same on the red side you’d need a +46%.

I wonder, would you send your own mom to certain death since you know she isn’t great with logic?

If altruism has sometimes practical limits, individualism always has contextual ones.

What has happened will happen again. And it will keep happening until it finds ground that is fertile.

There’s only one solution I see, and while it won’t happen, it’s still a solution potential. To find shared principles that are not reversible (and I wouldn’t be surprised if those quoted in the image are infiltrated right-wing sockpuppets, even though there are idiots everywhere).

In a comment within that forum thread, now removed by moderation, I also wrote: “Half the people who voted today think that of you. That you have internalized bullshit propaganda. You are looking in a mirror thinking who is the ugly fuck that stares back.”

This is one example set in the stone of objectivity:

“Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, hate and intolerance.” @ minute 3:02

Remember what isn’t reversible: that nationalism and fascism are the same, that defending borders is a fascist principle.

On THIS side we only play hardmode. We embrace complexity and doubt, rather than fleeing or ignore them.

On enshittification and BlueSky, which I’m currently using and hoping it will work as an alternative.

They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call — like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training — will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.

There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or pressure. I’m certainly not. Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be conned — it makes you more of a mark, not less.