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.
Kenny Jones (Dream House Podcast)
Jack Despain Zhou (Tracing Woodgrains)
Polish responses to Polish users are strong evidence against the “responses to other people's requests” hypothesis.
[Diogenes voice] This device provides both heat and decorative visual effects, therefore it's a fireplace:
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.
“Watchers” seem to me like obvious religious language, not an idiosyncrasy. Consider how a human put in a such situation would think about supernatural entities monitoring its internal monologue. Especially consider what genres of fiction feature morality-policing mind readers.