Your "perfect" world sounds quite boring. I would either play games, and find meaning in them (just as I have many times in the past) or, more likely, ask the ASI to uplift me until I could contribute meaningfully.

And in fact, this is the effect AI has had on me today. I offload as much as I can to it, and in the process am able to take on bigger and cooler and more ambitious projects. AI has made me more agentic, confident, and competent, and I'm excited to see where this goes once I can become a true cyborg.

I weak down voted.

I agree with the core thesis that we (rationalists) fucked up by abandoning politics... but this post is so badly written. It's painful to read, especially when the core ideas are actually pretty original and insightful. Like a beautiful new laptop being casually tossed in the mud.

I'm worried about discouraging you too much from writing, but... maybe learn to prompt a little better next time? You have good ideas; they just need better presentation.

Yes, it's permanent because it kills the hair follicles.

Holy fuck.

There's a small gravel and asphalt clearing at the end of the driveway that you can park in!

I think LW actively tries to promote user agency. Some examples that I've noticed in the design:

• Downvotes
• Strong votes
• Configurable feed
• Text heavy design (images are only bestowed upon the best posts and even then they're heavily stylized and not grabby)
• Notification settings including batched notifications
• Votes placed after the post body to encourage voting after reading
• Non infinite scroll feed
• lots and lots more, there are many tiny things about lw that make me think the people who designed it cared about UX in a very different way from the typical marketer

You seem to have a rather warped and narrow view of rationality, maybe because LW rationality and ancient rationality are, despite sharing a name, not at all the same thing. Most of what you name Strategy I would consider part of rationality, whether or not any given rationalist is skilled at it. Your frame is unnecessarily adversarial and limiting, failing to understand what LW rationality is and how Strategy meshes with it, even though the critique of the rationality community as lacking Strategy skill is accurate.

Yes. I use chronological sort on all posts for LW. I use Reddit and Twitter like this too - algorithms have always sucked for me (just in the basic sense of delivering what I want) so I got in the habit of avoiding them a while ago.

This resonated with me a lot. The wizard vs king power thing really clicked for something I've been feeling a lot lately. (And apparently I'm not the only one, your post had 320 upvotes when I wrote this comment lol)

I got into programming when I was a kid because I liked creating things, and it took me a long time to realize that generalized to physical creation too (I've only been getting into maker stuff for like a year). Vibeclipse (the TPOT event) kind of sparked the transition for me, but I think it just leveled up my agency, and the desire-to-create was already there.

I'm still very low level with making stuff, the sorts of things I make are like, laser-cut lamps or a deck of custom metal tarot cards, or a wooden plaque for scanning the house's wifi password. Pretty trinkets, nothing like vaccines or biotech research!

But even so, there's something about it that feels right in a way that's hard to explain. A focus on the end result, a dedication to improving skills. The way you described the toothbrush, wanting something that you couldn't simply buy—that's a very familiar feeling underlying all my maker projects. When I create something it's completely unique.

I held on to that thought, for a few days. Some time back in college, I’d decided not to build CAD skills; it seemed like too much of a time sink. That was a mistake, wasn’t it? If I wanted to make a nice toothbrush, the main thing I’d need was basic CAD skills, a bit of money for a one-off injection molding job, some research to figure out more robust bristle materials, plus a little elbow grease to assemble it all.

You could also 3d print it and then seal it, in which case you could get by without true CAD and use something simpler like Blender or Plasticity.

You had me until Electronic Arts lmao.