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Nothing Yudkowsky has ever done has impressed me as much as noticing the timestamps on the Mad Investor Chaos glowfic. My peewee brain is in shock.
How much coordination went on behind the scenes to get the background understanding of the world? Do they list out plot points and story beats before each session? What proportion of what I'm seeing is railroaded vs. made up on the spot? I really wish I had these superpowers, damnit.
"noticing the timestamps" not because there's anything impressive in the timestamps themselves, but just because it indicates Eliezer is cranking out writing very quickly? I think there is at least sometimes substantial offline planning before a bunch of new stuff comes along. (And sometimes, when they wing it and it doesn't work out, material gets reworked or just deleted, though neither of those happens very often.)
The craziest part of being a rationalist is regularly reading completely unrelated technical content, thinking "this person seems lucid", then going to their blog and seeing that they are Martin Sustrik.
A side-lecture Keltham gives in Eliezer's story reminds me about some interactions I'd have with my dad as a kid. We'd be playing baseball, and he'd try to teach me some mechanical motion, and if I didn't get it or seemed bored he'd say "C'mon ${name}, it's phsyics! F=ma!"
FTR I didn't really like this meme, in particular because I think it has an implicit element of "this person is unattractive", which feels like an irrelevant personal attack. I didn't want to just downvote because I don't want to implicitly signal "all memes bad", but this one does leave a bad taste in my mouth.