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QC Profile picture
QC
@QiaochuYuan
irrationalist
6 subscribers
Nov 2 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
tried getting claude to write funny tweets starting from 9 examples. it generated some okay stuff but nothing that actually made me laugh. then i tried asking it to generate tweets written from its perspective rather than a human's and actually laughed. hmm Image asked claude to use a more authentic voice, then asked it to reflect on the nature of humor and what kind of humor would be more authentic to it. not bad, a couple of these made me laugh out loud. that last one though lmao Image
Oct 6 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
there’s this woman awhile ago who tweeted something like “i was mentally ill until i fell in love with someone i had to have my shit together to be with, so i decided to stop being mentally ill and it worked” and not to overstate this but there’s something real and impt here coherence therapy takes the pov that many (most?) mental illness “symptoms” are on some level strategies for getting needs met. it assigns the “patient” enormous amounts of agency, which starts out shadowed, and part of how the therapy works is reclaiming this agency
Feb 14 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
thread of notes on scattered minds by gabor mate
Image > ADD has much to do with pain, present in every one of the adults and children who have come to me for assessment

> "Every aspect of my life hurts," a thirty-seven-year-old man told me during his second visit to my office Image
Feb 14 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
ADHD megathread 1. @visakanv constructive ADHD draft notes (Contains Actionable Advice)

Feb 4 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
on the question of whether human-level AI is possible even in principle, people seem to reflexively believe “obviously yes” or “obviously no,” and i’ve never seen anyone publicly change their mind in either direction. and the split is like 80% predictable by STEM background being a rationalist in the yudkowskian sense selected heavily, among other things, for people who believe that human-level AI is obviously possible. to me at age 22 it boiled down to “humans are just very complicated machines built out of molecules by evolution”
Dec 26, 2023 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
short reviews of / commentary on movies i watched on netflix because netflix told me they were leaving soon, or some other place, or for some other reason: 1. the road to el dorado (2000): aged weirdly. it's impossible to ignore the colonialism now and chel now stands out as bizarrely horny for a kids' movie. nobody's allowed to be that horny anymore. some cool animation but deeply mediocre music. watch prince of egypt instead
Nov 21, 2023 • 165 tweets • 35 min read
at the first bio-emotive retreat i was paired up to facilitate bio-emotive for this woman. we started with

"there's this friend who owes me money and i haven't been on her case about it"

got to

"why do i always let people walk all over me"

then: raped when she was 14 the point of this story is not about me but i'll mention that i noticed something funny about her while we were talking at the beginning of the session: anytime she answered a question, regardless of her answer, she shook her head like she was saying "no"
Mar 14, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
ah. i've been relating to grad school as "that time i failed to write a thesis" but it would be more accurate to say that my mathoverflow / stackexchange answers + my math blog posts *are* my thesis. none of that was a waste of time. people still regularly thank me for it if i had written a traditional thesis on the topic my advisor wanted me to it would have been comprehensible to ~10 people in the world. meanwhile the actual writing i did instead was read by... hundreds of thousands of people? (numbers in the images are prob overestimates)
Mar 11, 2023 • 21 tweets • 6 min read
tweeting enthusiastic general proclamations about The Way Things Are is reconsolidating *your own* worldview in light of new experiences. none of those tweets should be read as claims in papers or whatever. that's just what thinking out loud actually looks and feels like rationalist speech norms actively interfere with the process of thinking out loud and in the worst case amount to constant gaslighting, including self-gaslighting; even when it's not that bad they interfere with the necessary spirit of *play*
Mar 7, 2023 • 22 tweets • 7 min read
the first girl i ever had a crush on was named austin. 1st grade. i had just moved to the united states and i had hardly seen any white people before. i have a single fleeting image of her face in my memory. she was a redhead with freckles and i would've died for her blake shelton wrote a song called austin which is about being permanently in love with a woman who is sort of named austin. and throughout elementary school i used to sing this song and think about austin and pretend i was singing it to her

Mar 6, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
anyone else here have favorite etymologies? pls share below. i am collecting them from a previous thread:
Mar 6, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
working with emotions eventually spills over into less comfortable topics. stuff i’ve seen (tentative):

anger + fear + grief ➡️ power, agency, harm, responsibility, ethics, politics, justice, gender, sex, race

shame + guilt ➡️ ethics, culture, religion, god, money

what else? ayyy

Mar 6, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
sometimes meditators use emptiness to gaslight themselves there’s nothing wrong with thinking. thinking is for figuring things out. if you find yourself thinking a lot, you are trying to figure something out. one of the things you’re trying to figure out is what you’re trying to figure out
Mar 5, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
i taught a class like this once but it was called introduction to leadership. i wrote “introduction to leadership” on the board then sat down and didn’t say anything and waited i ran it three times. my favorite time was when someone managed to convince the rest of the class to leave the classroom and talk about leadership outdoors
Mar 5, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
[slams hand down on table] rationality is an attempt to reconstruct judaism but using exclusively the mind instead of the heart, and effective altruism is the same thing but for christianity. motherFUCKER nothing makes sense without this. eliezer is jewish, holden and elie are jewish, will macaskill is scottish which i assume means he’s christian as balls, peter singer’s parents were austrian jews. godDAMNIT
Feb 26, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
omg ok so when i was in 8th grade i was in a gifted program and they taught us an intro to philosophy class as an experiment. on the first day our teacher mrs. B wrote "who am i" on the board and then shouted it three different ways:

who am IIII
who AM i
WHO am i anyway that was a really fucking heavy question to lay on a group of 13-year-olds in retrospect and it might've taken me 19 years but i think i'm finally starting to get a handle on who i am. sorry this assignment took me so long mrs. B it was really hard but i did my best
Feb 25, 2023 • 133 tweets • 30 min read
diane duane's "so you want to be a wizard" is one of my favorite YA novels and i wish more people knew about it so i could reference it more easily. there are some beautiful ideas about magic in this book but one of the spookiest is about what happens if you give magic up there's a refrain in these books that "magic does not live in the unwilling heart." when you become a wizard in this universe you take an oath to use your magic to do good and be of service. you can decide to renounce that oath, though, if the burden becomes too heavy
Feb 23, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
seeing a lot of people making fun of other people for being too anxious about AI and absolutely zero offers of emotional support for people who are anxious about AI, not a single one "have you considered not being anxious?" has that ever worked for anyone ever, a single time, you're literally not even trying to help
Feb 22, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
there’s a certain fear i have about writing fiction which is like… ok so when tolkien wrote lotr he was working off of extensive knowledge of folklore, history, linguistics, plus his own experience in wwi. when lesser authors write fantasy they’re trying to sound like tolkien i think probably all the best fiction is like one step removed from real stuff, either the author’s experiences or real history or folklore or mythology. but most of the obvious places to start writing fiction are pastiches of other fiction and i feel uneasy about this
Feb 11, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
no, this is terrible, explicitly making requests like this is a recipe for putting people in double binds ("ah, so you're saying that in order for you to like me more i have to both do this thing and feel a certain way about it"). you have to vibe it talking like ⬆️ is a recipe for producing stuff like ⬇️

Feb 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
changing what is and replacing it with something better is a completely ordinary thing to do, it is where progress comes from, shame is also a completely ordinary thing to feel and it's part of what drives you to acknowledge your mistakes and become a better person the dysfunctional thing about shame in modern society is that we no longer have institutions which reliably produce absolution and forgiveness