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Kenku10

This means that the base model is really doing something very different from what I do as I write the post, even if it’s doing an amazing job of sounding exactly like me and making the exact points that I would make.

I don’t have to look over my draft and speculate about “where the author might be going with this.” I am the author, and I already know where I’m going with it. All texts produced “normally,” by humans, are produced under these favorable epistemic conditions.

But for the base model, what looks from the outside like “writing” is really more like what we call “theory of mind,” in the human case. Looking at someone else, without direct access to their mind or their emotions, and trying to guess what they’ll do next just from what they’ve done (visibly, observably, “on the outside”) thus far.

This paragraph is mockingbird-approved.

Kenku105

Polish responses to Polish users are strong evidence against the “responses to other people's requests” hypothesis.

Kenku20

[Diogenes voice] This device provides both heat and decorative visual effects, therefore it's a fireplace: Desktop computer with high-end graphics card and RGBT lighting

Answer by Kenku50

I discovered John C Wright's Golden Age trilogy thanks to one Eliezer Yudkowsky, who mentioned it multiple times in his notorious Sequences. By the end of the first book i was expecting something very much in the deception genre you've mentioned — a tragic psychological horror about an unreliable narrator being gaslit about the nature of reality. This is a genre i really enjoy, and i kind of hoped for a novel-length version of Scott Alexander's The Last Temptation of Christ.

I did not get that, the trilogy goes in a wildly different direction. But saying whether for better or for worse — heck, even saying if it's a good or bad book — would constitute massive SPOILERS for anyone who discovered this book through Yudkowsky. (If you know why he dropped it, it should be obvious).

I kept hate-reading it.

Answer by Kenku1-1

When the Seagulls Cry by Ryukishi 07 is practically Online Algorithms: The Visual Novel, or even Infrabayesianism: The Visual Novel. I find it hard to recommend though, because while the concept is interesting and the mysteries good, the writing is overlong and the worldbuilding cringe. (Or maybe i just hate VNs as a medium).

Minor spoilers (explaining the story's premise):
The main meta-story is a murder mystery game for two players: the “detective” and the “witch” who presents clues and insults the detective's intelligence by presenting him elaborate “supernatural” non-explanations. (The last part is not in the rules, but it's traditional.) The main plot point in that story is that as the witch player begins to lose, she starts cheating, retroactively changing the mystery solution, constrained only by the facts presented to the detective. Soon it becomes apparent that cheating is in fact expected, and the detective has to brute-force all solutions Absurdle-style.

Major spoilers (for ongoing rationalist drama): Grokking the ontology presented in Seagulls led me to understand how people may become Zizians.

See also Gwern's more spoilerrific review.

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