/trollnrx/ - Neoreactionary Board

>I think that you should not directly include anyone else’s desires besides your own in a project to optimize the world according to some set of values, even if you are an altruist.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171623/http://nyansandwich.info/doublealtruism.html

Being selfish is like the definition of altruism, LOL.

>A few years ago, I was in an unambitious rut. I just wanted to make $10k/year, live comfortably, and spend my time doing my projects. Part of my motivation was that poverty enthusiasts said it wasn’t possible for poor people to live on less than $22k/year, or some obscene wage like that. Thus, to demonstrate to myself that I was not a low status poor person, I decided to live for less than half of the poverty limit, and developed the art of doing so. I am no longer non-ambitious, but I still live comfortably on very little money.

>Alchoholism is a vile philosophy. I stopped drinking at 15, after I got too drunk the night before the math final and had a bad time. In the intervening 9 years, I have gotten drunk enough to lose my balance maybe once, and spent less than $100 on ethanol.

>Looking down on the people who need more money (and other groups we need to not be in, like alchoholists) is not just me being a jerk, but a major component of being cheap. Virtue ethics is very motivating. You have to really feel that doing the cheapskate thing is high status and virtuous, and that needing more money just to live is low status.

The Leader NRx deserves.

>(I don’t smoke or drink coffee or do heroin or anything like that, but that is obviously an expensive habit as well, to which all the same advice applies.)

>I don’t have a car. I ride a bike. Every day, rain, shine, or snow. This is perhaps too extreme, and I might adjust my habits a bit in the future (take transit on snow days, for example).

Of course.

>On personal spending, like clothes, textbooks, eating out, bike maintenance; basically everything other than rent and sustenance, I also budget. I budget the remainder of the $10k/year, which is currently about $200. Doing it this way gives a bit of an incentive to keep other costs down. I don’t budget this hard, I just sort of keep track of it in my head and err on the side of spending too little. I'm probably a bit over, as I actually have too much money right now. You really ought to track this if you can, though.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171415/http://nyansandwich.info/cheapskate.html

>Recently I've been not really writing much because sometimes I make mistakes and say things that turn out to be stupid. That feels bad and discourages me. On the other hand, there’s a lot of value in practice and feedback and building habit.

>I'm probably a better writer and thinker by having spent many bytes on writing my naive ideas, arguing with idiots on the Internet, being an idiot on the Internet, and having that output exposed to harsh criticism, praise, pride, and regret.

Beep Boop.

>When I write something stupid and realize it later, it feels really bad and makes me feel worthless. It also feels like it makes people dislike me. This is sometimes enough to make me feel like deleting everything I've ever done and starting a new identity somewhere else. Probably an overreaction.

Ragequit, faggot.

>Everyone else is a fucking idiot on certain subjects where I am slightly less of an idiot, but still an idiot sometimes. My non-idiocy is apparently appreciated, even if the idiocy part is totally mortifying.

>It’s totally possible to get bogged down endlessly pruning the crud out of my previous writing in order to not be associated with stupidity.

>If I'm writing anyway, even if I'm just pumping it out, I do prefer to write well, so that push would still be there, even if it were put in a subordinate position.

>I guess I should write more, just to be thinking and learning, and because my insights are probably not totally worthless. It also looks like a good idea to systematically practice writing and philosophizing somehow, but that sounds hard. In any case, writing more seems like a better idea than writing less, and ignoring quality is probably OK for the most part.

>I am going to have to learn to live with my past idiot self. Part of that is probably having a policy of “I probably don’t still believe it unless I either just posted it or just said it’s still current. (Even then, things change fast, sometimes it only takes hours)”. So if something I wrote is stupid, we'll just have to deal with it.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171532/http://nyansandwich.info/crud.html

"""Past""" idiot self.

>I have a problem; I am not accomplishing anything with my life. There are probably comprehensible reasons for this other than being retarded. I'm not retarded, right? Let’s figure this out.

>I often get stuck on my projects and almost never finish anything worth mentioning. Most of my projects have been writing or programming. I got one story to 10000 words, and have never gotten a software project beyond 2000. I get stuck somewhere and things fall apart and never get restarted. This pattern holds remarkably well over a great many projects.

BEEP BOOP.

>Not all though. One night a few years ago, I got frustrated with never accomplishing anything, and wrote the easiest game that was worthy of being mentioned: Tetris. It worked. Then I wrote Space Invaders a few nights later. When I tried to write Pac-Man, I got somehow stuck and it never went anywhere. I think I got too creative, and attempted some stuff that was beyond me.

>I tried to write a lot of other games over the years, but never finished anything. I think they were all too ambitious.

>Since I realized that games were stupid and I should write other things, I still haven’t finished anything. This site is the closest I have to deployed working code, and it’s only about 100 lines of code, and no one reads it.

>The specific details of the failure are often that I get stuck or distracted somehow, then the whole thing feels too wobbly and unmaintainable, and I get thinking of a better way to do it, or lose track of how I was doing it so that restarting seems easier, and then I restart and the cycle repeats.

>Or I try to do something too big without meaningful checkpoints, and get bored halfway through.

[Beeping and Booping intensify]

>I think scope creep is related, but not the entire problem. I think that the core problem is that my ambition exceeds my current ability, though it’s often a problem of just not staying at it long enough. I have always just asked “what do I want to build?”, imagining the most awesome thing I could plausibly build, and then attempted to do so. This is clearly folly; no one accomplishes the greatest thing they can imagine directly on the first move.

>(On the other hand, perhaps I would learn fastest by doing exactly that? That seems to be EY and my-past-self’s opinion.)

You need to calculate this one.

>I have never done the deliberate practice thing that everyone says is totally critical to mastering anything. I have never attempted to build small skills in the right order. I have never done the exercises.

>In school, I usually didn’t need to study, but when I did, it gave me a huge boost in my marks and understanding of a subject. I should have got the hint.

>So what exactly do the experts recommend? What heuristics should I deploy here? I have this helpless feeling where I don’t even really believe in my own agency (ie free will). Still, if I meditate on useful things often enough, I do seem to change sometimes.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171500/http://nyansandwich.info/notready.html

[BEEEEEEEP BOOOOOOOOOOOP]

>With a bit of gardening, my social network could be my most valuable resource. It probably already is, even with only a few high-value connections. I'm going to start being a bit more proactive in social network grooming.

>(2013-11 Future me says “Ha ha ha, are you? Turns out you didn’t. Still, you'll be fine and meet many cool people by accident. Maybe I should actually do this…”)

Do you also talk with your alternate universe self?

>The easy way would be to find clubs and events with the right sort of people, and mingle there, or to not try at all. The easy way may not work because such events are saturated with my fellow losers who thought the same thing, instead of the kind of people who I want to be talking to.

>The hard way is to systematically collect specific awesome friends; as many as possible. Cold approach, introductions, interesting questions, etc. By whatever means, I will collect an awesome social network.

As many as possible! Like those magic cards you used to collect!

>Why am I doing this? Not just because I want to know whether it’s a good idea, but because knowing why I am doing a thing is motivating and helpful in figuring out how exactly to do it.

>Unbiased sample of success. Selection/survivor bias is a problem in all post-hoc analyses of greatness. Getting an unbiased sample of smart people doing cool things before they achieve anything will give me a much better window into the shape of greatness, what works and what doesn’t, and will sharpen my intuitions and predictive ability.

[Death by Autism]

>Practice at cold-approach. Being able to talk to and build a relationship with anyone, especially heroes, is useful for pretty much any serious life strategy.

ESPECIALLY HEROES. I'M DYING HERE.

>Ok, so we know who to talk to, and why we want to talk to them, but how exactly do we come at this for highest chance of an interesting conversation that doesn’t waste everyone’s time.

>Do my homework. It is critical to be able to respond intelligently to all aspects of the target’s work, to know what they are working on, etc. This is more important on the stuff they are currently interested in, which of course I have to find out through research. Another big part of this is just coming across as an interesting person. I don’t know how to prepare for that, though.

>Besides knowing my shit, I have to come in with some interesting question that gets the conversation started and gives some direction to my inquiries. This is hard to fake; it’s probably best to study cool people until I have some itch that they can scratch. For example, one of my friends recently talked to all the coolest people in the Effective Altruism movement and got tons of useful perspective by simply asking the question of where he should donate his altruism money.

Know thy shit, normies.

>There are a few more points that came up when I was listing important considerations with a friend who is doing this with me:

>Just do it; data beats speculation or algorithms.

But you *do* have those algorithms, right?

>Speaking of which, this is all highly speculative and I don’t place much confidence in a lot of this stuff, they are mostly plausible sounding ideas to be tested.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171434/http://nyansandwich.info/network.html

>I think “awesomeness” is what you should be thinking of when you talk about morality. Why would I think that?

>“Awesome” is not a philosophical landmine. If someone encounters the word “right”, all sorts of bad philosophy and connotations send them spinning off into la-la land. “Awesome”, on the other hand, has no philosophical respectability, hence no philosophical baggage.

>“Awesome” is vague enough to capture all your moral intuition by the well-known mechanisms behind fake utility functions, and meaningless enough that this is no problem. If you think “happiness” is the stuff, you might get confused and try to maximize actual happiness. If you think awesomeness is the stuff, it is much harder to screw it up.

>“Awesomeness” doesn’t seem mysterious, instead it brings to mind concrete things like starship-whale-math-parties and not-starving-children, which is what we want anyways. You are already enabled to take joy in the merely awesome.

>“Awesome” is implicitly consequentialist. “Is this awesome?” engages you to think of the value of a possible world, as opposed to “Is this right?” which engages to to think of virtues and rules.

>The above works for me, and in daily life, is pretty much everything I need to know about morality. It handily inoculates against the usual confusions, and sets me in the right direction to make my life and the world more awesome. It may work for you too.

>“Morality is Awesome” is not intended to be a complete formal theory of morality, it’s a pointer to your moral intuitions that attempts to bypass 2000 years of philosophical crud. If your moral intuitions then conclude that “Awesome” isn’t quite right, then “Morality is Awesome” is working as intended; you using your moral intuition.

>Our intuitions about what is “awesome” are the most accurate currently available source of moral information, but I don’t intend to imply that “awesome” is the definition of morality. “Awesome” is the best proxy for morality, but is not necessarily the thing itself.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171249/http://nyansandwich.info/awesome.html

Everything here sounds normal and makes sense, normies.

>This reminds me that it’s possible to conduct your life with more or less efficiency, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Further, while we don’t have actual life extension, it’s content we care about, not run time. If you can change your habits such that you get 3 times as much done, that’s like tripling your effective lifespan.

>So the mechanism behind a lot of this seems to be recalibrating what seems hard or scary or beyond your normal sphere. I used to be afraid of phone calls and doing weird stuff like climbing trees in front of strangers, but not so much anymore; it feels like I just forget that they were scary. In the case of the phone there were a few times where I didn’t have time to be scared, I needed to just get things done. In the case of climbing trees, I did it on my own enough for it to become normalized so that it didn’t even come up that people would see me, because it didn’t seem weird.

>I guess the thesis behind all this is that these level-ups are permanent, in that they make you more like a 1000 year old vampire, and you don’t just go back to being your boring old mortal self. If this is true, the implication that you should seek out hard stuff seems pretty interesting and important.

Wolf has the right algorithm for every hypothetical scenario in the world. It's a True Story, btw.

>Bad habits like reading crap on the Internet, watching TV, watching porn, playing video games, sleeping in, and so on are obvious losses. It’s really hard to internalize that, but this 1000-year-old-vampire concept has been helpful for me by making the magnitude of the cost more salient. Do you want to wake up when you're 30 and realize you wasted your youth on meaningless crap, or do you want to get off your ass and write that thing you've been meaning to right now, and be a fscking vampire in 10 years?

>I have 168 hours a week, of which only 110 are feasible to use (sleep), and by the time we include all the chores, wage-work, bad habits, and procrastination, I probably only live 30 hours a week. That’s bullshit; three quarters of my life pissed away. I could live four times as much if I could cut out that stuff.

Okay, but why don't you provide us with statistics about how many minutes and nano-seconds you have each week?

>I notice that I'm most alive and do my best intellectual work when talking to other people who are smart and interested in having deep technical conversations. Other things like certain patterns of time pressure create this effect where I work many times harder and more effectively than otherwise. A great example is technical exams; I can blast out answers to hundreds of technical questions at quite a rate.

>By seeking many new experiences to keep learning, I think we can plausibly get 10x speedup over what you might do by default. Obviously this can be more or less, based on circumstances and things I'm not thinking of.

>On top of that, it seems like I could do 4x as much by maintaining a habit of doing it now and avoiding crap work. How to do this, I don’t know, but it’s possible.

I do too much crap. (Not literally)

>The final question of course is what real speedup we can expect you or I to gain from writing or reading this. Getting more than 2 or 3 times by having a low-level insight or reading a blog post seems stretching of the imagination, never mind 500 times. But still, power laws happen. There’s probably massive payoff to taking this idea seriously.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140720020911/http://nyansandwich.info/vampire.html

>I'm feeling pretty down right now, as happens occasionally with me. This one is especially deep so I'm getting especially introspective. I'm starting to properly grasp the problems behind this, but not quite. I guess we can start with what I think are the relevant observations:

>I have major emotional swings sometimes. Sometimes I'm happy and on top of the world, other times horribly depressed. Sometimes I'm deeply in love with my wife, and then a day later I'm saying mean things and kicking her out of the house. The swings usually don’t last very long, and the overall condition is on and off; sometimes I'm stable for months, sometimes I'm all over the place. This is really hard for my wife to deal with.

This only gets worse.

>I can be very narcissistic. I think I'm awesome a lot of the time, and I want to take over the world. I am proud of this and consider it to be a feature, thank you very much.

>I don’t have many friends. I have an ok time meeting people and starting things, but difficulty maintaining relationships. When I think through examples of why, it’s usually feelings of “this person is no use to me anymore”, or “this person doesn’t need me” that prevent me from initiating time together. What are you supposed to do with friends, again?

Much worse…

>I think of other people in cynical and utilitarian ways (like “how is this person useful to me?”) that often fuck things up when others find out. In principle, I should be able to maintain genuine relationships on top of this framework, but that doesn’t seem to be true in practice.

>I sometimes feel an intense need for emotional intimacy and friendship, and very much enjoy connecting to people on that level. I get very excited when I think I've found an opportunity to be close to someone in this way. This causes trouble, because I feel like other people do not have the same need and expressing it would just drive them away or give them an opportunity to attack me in a moment of weakness. This feeling is consistent with observation, though perhaps more pessimistic in interpretation than reality.

>I process emotional issues in a faster and more “spock-like” way than other people sometimes (at least apparently; the emotions often crop up again later), which has caused people to reject me as an emotionless alien.

>I often find myself planning or executing bad emotional behaviors for attention-seeking impact. This is hard to admit but it is what it is. This very document, for example…

I promised autism and mental illness, and I delivered.

>When I'm horny, I seem to have a fetish for things that play to my insecurities. This causes all kinds of trouble when I sober up and have to face my insecurities. This precipitates large emotional episodes.

You're a literal cuck, so it makes sense.

>I often impulsively say or do callous and damaging things to my friends. This even ranged into violence when I was younger. I fucked up at least one really high-value friendship with pointless violence. (Don’t worry, these days I just make harsh insensitive comments.)

>I forget to do nice things for my wife and other friends, and basically just take those relationships for granted. This causes all sorts of trouble.

You think? Is it provided by the algorithms?

>I have bad habit/dependency issues with the internet. I usually have some set of blogs that I'm checking multiple times per day. I can practically feel my executive function atrophying when I do this…

>I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Were you self-diagnosed at 11?

>I was bullied quite a bit as a child and generally had a shitty time. There are other parts to this that don’t belong on the public internet. I never really admitted this to myself before now.

>Everyone else in my immediate family has similar problems; crazy emotional issues that require medication, caustic personalities with blame issues and emotional swings, dysfunctional neuroticism, etc.

I am a crazy man, NRx.

>Fuck. Seeing it all written in one place is quite damning. La Wik has a whole list of nasty sounding personality disorders comorbid with ADHD and associated with childhood emotional trauma that have symptoms from the above list.

>I had to write this down to properly deal with it, but I'm not sure why I'm baring my weaknesses on the public internet. Must be my insatiable appetite for attention.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171553/http://nyansandwich.info/feels.html

The profile of a NRxer.

>I've been developing an approach to anthropic questions that I find less confusing than others, which I call Anthropic Atheism (AA). The name is a snarky reference to the ontologically basic status of observers (souls) in other anthropic theories.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171311/http://nyansandwich.info/anthropics.html

>As usual, I can’t resist writing and thinking and reading. For bright half-decent philosophers such as myself, absolutely the happening place these days is the budding neoreactionary movement. All sorts of forbidden knowledge, vast fields of untapped philosophy waiting to be formed, and very smart and knowledgeable people. Delicious.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171709/http://nyansandwich.info/2014-01.html

>Officially separated from my wife. This has been coming a while, and is entirely my fault. It’s interesting how you can hide the obvious problems from yourself until you're out of the situation. Hopefully I will grow into a stronger person instead of spiralling into despair. Some of my friends have been especially helpful. With that out of the way, I'm now on the prowl for new females. Studying Game in a half-assed sort of way.

You should check out Roosh and read those PUA ebooks goddamnit.

>On that front, In February I started developing something I call “neotribalism”, which is intended as a relatively easy-to-deploy and individually profitable way to restore high social technology in your own local sphere. It borrows a lot of analysis from the Dark Enlightenment, Startup Culture, Puckup Artists, etc.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140816171715/http://nyansandwich.info/2014-02.html

what kind of a fucking name is wolf tivy??

No one rules Nrx, homey, it's about being worthy of the pain that Kali Yuga will put us through.

LOL just found out about this pathetic creep via Renegade Tribune, haha, what a loser.

>>41

http://renegadetribune.com/jews-behind-nrx-part-2-curtis-yarvin-wolf-tivy/