infohazards

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

etirabys:

One view of the internet that I find important is that it’s an amoral ecosystem of ideas, many of which are poisonous to you and can have effects ranging from ‘making you waste your day angry at someone’ to ‘causing you join to a cultish crusade for or against some political ideology that renders you incompatible with large swathes of mainstream society’. If you are a very online person, you cannot just take content as you go, otherwise the hungriest and most efficient predators will snap you up and consume huge amounts of your mental resources. If you are Very Online, the internet will radicalize you by default.

The fact of radicalization is neutral. Certainly there’s nothing guaranteed to be good about the things you already believe and the ways you act; there are extreme-relative-to-society viewpoints and movements floating around that will, in my view, make you a better person. But the majority will not, just because there are more bad things than good things, more incorrect things than correct ones. There’s nothing that says morally righteous movements (or the ones that will make you more thoughtful and happy) are more memetically powerful and good at capturing the imagination and belief system than the immoral.

If you read an unusual claim online, there are two equally important questions to ask about it – the first, of course, is “is this correct?”, and the second is “if I take this seriously, and become the kind of person who believes it, how will it change my life? Do I accept that?”

For me, the thing that most sets my attention vibrating with caution is contempt or mockery. There are some times when I think contempt/mockery is the emotionally appropriate thing to be occupying my mind – but it’s uncommon, nowhere as frequent as the internet would have me be. And contempt easily worms its way in my mind – “these people are contemptible” is a lesson I learn keenly and quickly because I’m afraid of being mocked and want to know what to avoid. Is sincerity cringe? Is being vegan obnoxious? Is being into this particular show embarrassing?

I hate a lot of stuff and love to complain, and am given to understand this is a common human trait, so there’s nothing surprising, or intelligently malicious, about the fact that the internet is brimming with jabs. But, even more so than the real world, the internet tends to amplify contempt – you get to see the wittiest comments someone made in the past week making fun of something, with numbers that indicate that a boggling number of people approved of that statement. You get to see compilations of the stupidest comments the people you dislike said, captioned “this is what they really believe”. In my brief forays to break out of my Democratic bubble in college, I followed some conservatives on social media, and the most surprising thing wasn’t that their points were convincing – I didn’t find it so – but the idiocy of the US liberals they tended to respond to. Some of the most embarrassing people in the world shared something like my beliefs, and they were getting attention in the other camp, same as how their worst people got the spotlight of shame on mine.

So when I see something online practically designed to evoke anger or contempt in me, I don’t treat it as the same kind of thing as anything else in my life. This is a radioactive piece of space rock thrown at me by a vast machine that gives me nice things and friends and is known to function in ways that attract radioactive debris and centrifuge it out at my face. Yes, this screencap of an obnoxious person probably corresponds to a real thing someone said, but treating it primarily as a real thing someone said that I have to have an opinion about, rather than a radioactive space rock that the machine spat out at my face, will have terrible outcomes for my worldview, priorities, and personality.

Tags:

#infohazards #politics cw? #that one post with the thing #I’m not sure *what* I think about this post‚ but I definitely think about it

mathamaniac asked: I read ‘CORDYCEPS: too clever for their own good’ like 6 months ago and i can’t get it out of my head. its just now clicked for me that YOU are (probably) the same benedict that wrote it (unless that’s what you want me to think)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

Wait, I wrote Cordyceps? And my name is Benedict? That’s not- wait, now I remember, now I remember, AAAAAAAGhfkjdks

#[passes out and wakes up as. what‚ denedict?], #mathamaniac, #but yeah that me, #glad you liked it!, #or. that you can’t get it out of your head wait uh oh.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #cordyceps tcftog #infohazards #amnesia cw #also what kai-skai said #(”are you just going to skip cenedict or”) #though koito-yuu’s and yieldsfalsehoodwhenquined’s responses are also very good #(respectively ”next is francis‚ right” and ”is there a canonical ordering to all the different ways you can prepare eggs?”)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

kramergate:

tumblr_pe39j5qr1i1qg2s3q_540
tumblr_pe39j6cwhd1qg2s3q_540
tumblr_pe39j6bvyx1qg2s3q_540

intro to the dril book is just real good

Tags:

#this…this is a thing? #the more you know #(is it just me or would this book be a massive pain in the ass to proofread?) #(”is this typo an *intentional* typo or an *accidental* typo?”) #death mention #infohazards?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

(I feel like @itsblehnedict might find this interesting)

[under the cut for non-fourth-wall-breaking infohazards, and also cordyceps spoilers if anyone still cares]

So in my dream this morning I was playing a video game (it might have been a VR game, but the way my dreams work all media is VR media, so I’m not sure if it was *meant* to be VR), and part of the plot was an elephant-induced apocalypse†. I thought it was neat how the game handled that.

(Note: in this game, the elephant is foodborne as well as airborne, and was deliberately developed and put into place by some evil conspiracy. Never reached the part where they explain what the conspiracy was trying to accomplish.)

As you would expect, the game tracks physical infection and memetic infection separately. You can actually survive for quite a while after eating a poisoned cookie, if you play in exactly the right way to keep your character oblivious to the apocalypse going on around them.

But it’s really hard to do that and people normally only stumble into it by accident, because the game performs (limited, one-way) fourth-wall breaking.

If this is not your first playthrough to reach the elephant plotline, the game *knows that you know* (because you’ve played before), and will flag you as memetically contaminated even if your character has no idea.

But it goes farther than that. The plot flag that triggers the apocalypse is finishing your dinner that night. (You then–if you don’t have other plans for the night–go to eat poisoned cookies and watch a poisoned movie with your family, and many other people in other places are doing the same. If you do have other plans, your family does it without you.) There is no in-game indication that an apocalypse will start then (in the main branch of the plotline, you actually *die* that night, and are resurrected by plot stuff later). If the game notices you building a bunker, buying gas masks, avoiding finishing your dinner to buy yourself more time to prepare††, the game *realises you must have read a walkthrough* and *flags you as memetically contaminated* (because why would you be doing this stuff if you didn’t know what was coming?).

—

†For anyone who has not read Cordyceps but still wants to read this post, the short version is that “the elephant” is a disease that is fatal when symptomatic but can only become symptomatic *if you know the disease exists*. If you’re infected without ever learning about the disease, it lies dormant for a few months and then dies out, unless you learn about it during that timeframe. (They call it “the elephant” because it’s pink and you mustn’t think about it.)

††If you say you aren’t hungry and put your dinner in the fridge, the “finished dinner” flag is not set and the apocalypse is postponed. You can eat other stuff later, and as long as it isn’t *that* particular meal the flag is not set. Letting the food rot sets the flag, but you can still buy yourself about three days this way.

Tags:

#cordyceps tcftog #illness tw #apocalypse cw #infohazards #oh look an original post #dreams

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

unknought:

I’m lying in the dark and something like oblivion starts to flood my mind. Am I falling asleep? It occurs to me that I don’t actually know. For all the thousands of times I’ve fallen asleep, I can’t remember a single one. I don’t know what it feels like to stop being conscious. If I am in fact falling asleep right now, I realize, then what I’m experiencing in this moment will be gone from my mind when I wake up.

A tiny part of my mind panics: I don’t want to be erased! I don’t want to die! I’m jolted back to full consciousness. I lie still for a while, my thoughts slow, my mind starts to fill with something thick and sluggish and quiet, a part of me panics again. Not most of me; I know that I need to sleep. But enough of me to manage a veto, or at least a filibuster.

In the morning I wake up. I remember the cycle of drifting off towards probably-sleep and being repeatedly pulled back by a tiny fear of oblivion. I don’t remember how it ended.

Saaaaame.

(My feelings about this are so complicated and connected to so much other stuff in my head that it’s hard to really express them properly/coherently. And it might be TMI anyway.)

(I get the impression from reading about other people’s experiences that there’s quite a range of hypnagogic recall ability, and I’m towards the worse end of the scale. TBH, #1 quality-of-life tweak I would make to the human brain is improved hypnagogic recall. Since there are already people who have it, it’s clearly possible to set up a brain that way.)

Tags:

#obligate dozing fetishism + poor hypnagogic recall + psychological Issues regarding memory and existence = cruel joke of Nature #(of course it’s bedtime now isn’t it) #(I suppose I shall go nobly sacrifice very-near-future!me for a better-rested tomorrow) #(like every goddamn night) #reply via reblog #amnesia cw #death tw #infohazards #(you can really see the mishmash of grandfathered blacklist-tag formats on posts like this) #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

brain-pleasedont:

 

sinesalvatorem:

robustcornhusk:

sinesalvatorem:

I feel like this is the kind of conversation that would make @wayward-sidekick go “no no no wrong wrong WRONG”

Because saying “I’m fine” in response to being asked how you’re doing is only supposed to happen if you’re trying to avoid a conversation. That’s how polite answers work! You use them to make the other person stop trying to speak to you, basically.

If you’re asked how you’re doing by someone you’re trying to start a conversation with, you never say just “fine”. You give a descriptive sentence or two. You try to optimise that sentence for containing as many potential things to talk about as possible, in the hopes that the other person will find one of them interesting enough to ask about.

If I were asked how I was doing by a stranger right now, I’d say “I’m doing pretty good! I recently got back from a trip to [visa country redacted] with an American friend of mine because I was interviewing for a visa.”

With the obvious potential follow up questions being:

  • When did you get back?
  • How was your stay in [visa country]?
  • Have you been to [visa country] before / do you like it there?
  • Who’s your friend / why did they go with you?
  • How did the interview go / did you get approved?
  • Which country are you travelling to?
  • What kind of visa did you get?
  • etc etc etc

There is no question you can ask someone who says they’re fine. “fine” kills a conversation. That’s its job. Like, you can’t even ask someone “why are you fine?” the way you can ask “why are you happy/sad/angry?”

There is just… Literally no worse way to attempt a conversation. But people do this all the time. I don’t get it at all. But, like, if you actually want to talk to your mutuals more, consider… Not choosing literally the worst response to a question that you can.

This has been Moderate Social Competence with Alison.

I just realized I answer that question like that, all the time, even when I want to talk to he person, because… somehow I internalized the idea that talking about good things in my life is bragging and talking about bad things is complaining; I’m supposed to talk to the other person about their life.

This runs into problems when both people in the conversation have this idea.

Oh, wow, yes. That would definitely run into a problem.

The ideal is for both of you to talk about your lives. The Social Optimum is something like 50/50, but it can depend a lot on who’s the better storyteller and who’s the better listener in a given situation.

(Though, like, it’s important to note that being the better listener isn’t the Important Virtuous Role to take. People like listening to good storytellers. Ideally you want to be good at both of these things so you can swap roles a lot.)

If you aren’t sure who should do what and the other person isn’t going first, you probably want to start by giving the other person opportunities to ask about your life. Then you talk a bit about what they asked about before asking them if they have any related experiences.

Examples:

You: […] and that’s why I don’t like coffee.
Person: Yeah, me neither.
You: What drinks do you like, then?

or

You: […] and I really don’t understand why someone would like golf in the first place.
Person: I like golf!
You: You do? What do you like about it?

or

You: […] and I can’t believe he’d just leave like that!
Person: Yeah, that sucks.
You: Has anything like that happened to you before?

So, like, things in that general vein. You always want to be able to get the other person to talk sometimes, and this is a great way to lead into it. Especially because most people are more comfortable talking about their own lives if you’ve opened up first (especially if it’s a similar topic).

And, if someone has just finished telling you about something in their life, it’s usually nice to respond by talking about similar things in your own life so it seems like you’re ~relating~. The major exception to this is situations where it might seem like you’re one-upping the other person by talking about your own thing.

sinesalvatorem’s tags from her first post in the chain: #there are probably so many people who feel called out right now  #i love you anyway  #even though you don’t know how this ‘talking’ thing works

Actually, I feel the opposite of called out right now.

See, I internalised much the same idea as robustcornhusk, but not “somehow”: I was actually explicitly told to always respond to “How are you?” with “Fine.” I’ve seen multiple socialisation PSAs to the effect of:

“Nobody actually cares how you’re doing, or if they do it’s only by pure coincidence. ‘How are you’/’Fine’ is a ritualised call-and-response greeting, not a literal question/answer pair. Only ignorant autistics or pedantic assholes treat ‘How are you?’ as an actual question to be given an actual answer, and someone who acts like a pedantic asshole–intentionally or unintentionally–is not someone other people want to be around.”

(Of course, the sort of people who think this is rude are also the sort of people who won’t tell you that to your face. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard such PSAs from anyone who knew me personally, just in general broadcasts.)

I usually do still give informative answers to “How are you?” when I’m looking to start a conversation, and (to bring in another branch) I do use recent interesting events from my life as conversation starters. But I do it because, of the options available to someone at my level of social competence, it’s the least of all evils. (Hell if I know how the PSA-writers start their conversations. Probably something too subtle for me to pull off.) I generally have a lingering awareness that this is the Wrong Thing To Do.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #infohazards #autism

Interlude 8, Page 2 (Opening Volley)

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{Title link: https://parhelioncomic.com/comic/interlude-8-page-2-opening-volley/ }}

parhelioncomic:

Ahh, Basilisk, it’s been ages since you’ve directly appeared. Welcome back!

Reblogs are greatly appreciated!

Start of chapter | Read from the beginning | Patreon (Read one page into the future)

Why do people use video chats with Basilisk, anyway? Seems like it’s asking for trouble, and “death by videophone software glitch” is not one of the better ways to go.

(Limitations of the webcomic medium?)

Tags:

#Parhelion #reply via reblog #death tw

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

another-normal-anomaly:

So you all know that I’m a fan of Atlas Shrugged, but I don’t think I’ve told the story of how and why I first read it.

Once upon a time in senior year, I was an atheist at a Catholic high school, a brilliant asshole ready to Discourse with anyone who held still long enough. Fortunately it was a Jesuit school, so lots of people held still long enough. And this Jesuit school had a yearly senior retreat called Kairos, where a bunch of students and a handful of teachers would disappear from Tuesday to Friday and do Stuff. I knew approximately jack shit about Kairos, because it was under a very heavy no-spoilers norm and nobody leaked spoilers, at least not at me. But it sounded cool, because the word was in the front of those Time Quartet books and I was a huge Meg Murray fangirl, and anyway I have never been able to resist a secret meeting. So I signed up.

Now, the general impression I got from what little people would say about this Kairos thing was that it was about opening up emotionally and getting close with your classmates, and also something something God, and that it would permanently alter your brain. None of my friends were going because they were all sensible people whose response to “mindhazard warning” is not “I want it inside me”, and I was exactly as alienated from the rest of my classmates as ~asperger’s plus a whole lot of effort could make me, so signing up for 96 hours of Deeply Serious Neurotypical Jesus Party was the equivalent of opening a .exe you got off pyRatBay.ru. So of course I resolved to be as charitable and open-to-it and nonsnarky and taking-it-seriously as I could manage, and then start in on Atlas Shrugged as soon as I got home. Y’see, my very liberal parents had warned me against all things Rand when I was in middle school, citing mindhazard. And I had previously read The Fountainhead and hadn’t really understood what was going on (because I was too distracted by Dominique’s various issues to focus on the plot), and Atlas was advertised as “Fountainhead but not for pansies”. So I decided that immediately after doing one potentially brainfucking thing was the best time to do another one, on the theory that they would either 1) cancel out and leave me net unaffected or 2) stack weirdly and fuck me up extra hard, and either of those sounded like fun.

Without spoiling too much, Kairos was a potentially mind-altering trip. I had a few moments of feeling not totally alienated from humanity in general and my classmates in particular. I also learned that my classmates were very unlucky people and that my father fundamentally Gets me as a person and is the same type of person, but that’s another and much less bloggable pair of stories. It started out pretty fun, but my suspension of disbelief contrarianism was wearing off pretty hard by day 4, as was my ability to enjoy … stuff in general? I was some mix of overstimulated, sleep-deprived, emotionally exhausted from fighting my introversion, and generally mentally contorted. The fact that my boyfriend was in town the weekend after was deeply healthy and necessary, because at that point I really needed some social interaction I could enjoy without putting in intense effort to be both faker and more genuine than I ever normally get*. So I spent the next day using cuddles as a mental walware scanner and the day after reading Atlas Shrugged, which turned out to be impossible to put down. All told I spent about 96 hours in Christian Extrovertopia, 24 resetting, and the next 96 in Objectivistland. I think the Rand did cancel out the Kairos a bit; at least it got rid of the “You Must Love Everybody” effect. And then my model of Dagny Taggart took up residence in my brain and has basically never left, but has at least stopped commenting on literally every experience I have.

TL;DR: 

*explanation of what I mean by this available on request.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”either of those sounded like fun”) #Christianity #Atlas Shrugged #storytime

nevermindbinarity asked: WHYYY (also the way you formatted the link was clever!)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

(I’m gonna put this in drafts and post it in a couple days, once the story’s over.)

the answer to “WHYYY” is mainly “there really wasn’t any other plausible outcome”. like, if it didn’t happen this way, it would have happened some other way, because there’s no chance in hell Arc would ever have been able to do what it took to avoid it.

(even though “what it takes to avoid it” is just “not making all these complicated strings of terrible decisions”.)

(spoilers under cut)

Keep reading

(more spoilers)

Yeah, I was wondering at first why the hell anyone would believe O when they claimed to be J, since surely they’ve proven themself to be completely untrustworthy from the staff’s POV. And then I thought, it doesn’t really matter in the end. Arc could never be satisfied with the situation as it stands. They would always be determined to get their memory back, die trying, or–as it happens–both. If they didn’t die to the fungus on iteration O, they’d die to it in a future iteration, or get themself shot when they pissed off one of the people-with-guns one time too many. They really were doomed from the moment they were infected.

Although it’s not really enough to manifest over the few cycles we see, the process does progressively cordon off more of the brain over time

It doesn’t manifest? Was I reading too much into the fact that N can come up with a not just a plan, but a plan for how to hide their real plan, in the few seconds they have between seeing Orchard and having Orchard come after them, but O has quotes like this:

He turned to me. “Sorry- quick question- what’s your name?”

I froze. What did he need my name for?

[chain of reasoning cut for space]

“Hey. Your name. Can you tell me?” Gah! I wasn’t done thinking! I held up a finger for silence.

[more reasoning]

I’d paused too long. The guard was getting suspicious. “I’m just asking. This isn’t a trick or anything, just… what’s your name?”

And this:

Everything was happening too fast. I couldn’t stop and think through every implication of what they were saying- they kept saying things, without giving me time to analyze it! I couldn’t move, I couldn’t make a judgment- had 5 gotten her to say that somehow? Is that what someone who’d had their cover blown would say out loud? No, but- it explained 5’s behavior, it was plausible- but it could be a trick. HOW could it be a trick? What was Helium even saying, oh, she was saying more things now-

I mean, when I saw the bit about brain damage with each reset, I kind of figured the problem was that O thinks more slowly than N does.

*Potentially*, Arc could be cured with a specialized treatment plan and a really high-security facility, where they just lock them in with no human contact and no clues whatsoever, and hope they don’t work it out for themselves over months of time to think and theorize and potentially hit upon the right solution by chance. Maybe stick a lot of books and video games in there to distract them with? 

Is there a reason why keeping a patient continuously unconscious for six months wouldn’t work, or is it just impractical for them to actually do?

(At first I wondered if you could even avoid the need for amnesia by doing that, but I suppose even if it would theoretically work and they had enough supplies, it would be hard to ensure people are always completely unconscious and not dreaming of elephants.)

Tags:

#cordyceps tcftog #reply via reblog #cordyceps spoilers #not sure what happens to a thread with multiple cuts like this #we’ll find out

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Voiceover on Doctor Who “next time on” preview: Don’t watch this. You can never un-see it.

Me: Okay. *closes eyes*

Tags:

#what kind of fool do you take me for #unlike those poor Zygons I have not had all relevant knowledge erased and I *can* learn from experience #and it has *never* been worthwhile to look at something I had been told to look away from #if you are very lucky looking is neither bad nor good #usually it is some level of psychologically damaging #also next week’s episode’s title is #Sleep No More #I do not like that title #that is a fucking ominous title #fuck you and your horror bullshit #(look) #(I fully believe that ‘Blink’ has a lot of objective merit) #(but I think I’m a worse person for having seen it) #(and I do not want to do that to myself again) #(horror is so utterly not for me) #(causing myself often-permanent psychological damage for fun is not something I can compute) #I *might* read Chakoteya’s transcript when it comes out #but I will try to learn from my past mistakes #and not watch it #Doctor Who #tag rambles #dw spoilers #infohazards #oh look an original post