#MetaProblems

[independentjournalism]

Facebook Outage

Facebook Outage Follow-up

Hello, this is Jordan The Producer with a follow-up on the recent Meta outage. According to the latest information from downdetector.com, it appears that Meta’s Facebook and Instagram services have been largely restored in most parts of the United States. However, the situation remains challenging in various locations globally, with users reporting ongoing outages. In the aftermath of the…

[evilminji]

@stealingyourbones I feel like? He'd groan, slap on a Gotham U hoodie, and make a shitty sign that reads "It's not a Scarecrow Attack, I'm out of meds and going to pick them up. Don't be racist. #MetaProblems #FuckOffBatFurry #SignalWillYouSignMyShittySign" and then just float his ass one inch above the ground towards the bus?

Like? This is GOTHAM not Metropolis. People gonna Mind Their Business(tm). They don't see SHIT. No, sir. This is normal, mmmhm, will you look at all these games right here on their phone! Oh look! Interesting poster! Still not seeing shit!

And like a tourist might fuss? But look at the sign, man. Kid's some sort of weird ass fucked up looking Meta. It's not illegal to be ugly af! He's allowed to go get his meds! Who the hell you callin' a "monster"? An'.... DID YOU JUST CALL THE COPS ON A KID FOR BEING A META!? *Gothamite rage*

Danny's a lil gremlin shit whos played the "nothing to see here but us chickens" game for YEARS. No fucks given. He'll dead ass make eye contact with Batman and wave a noodley limb at him as he goes to pick up some Soup(tm). Free country fucker! Prove to me it's illegal to be what ever the fuck I am! You CAN'T! I get to be here and if you don't like it that sounds like a YOU problem!

Short DPXDC Prompts #653

Danny moves to Gotham and doesn’t realize there isn’t enough ambient ectoplasm until there’s too late. Waking up one day he’s fully reverted to his true ghost form to preserve energy. He can sense a Lazarus Pit somewhere in the city. Great, somewhere to refuel. Hopefully his horrifying demeanor won’t scare too many people on his way to the Pits.

[eka-mark]

The meta-problem of consciousness is (to a first approximation) the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness.

Just as metacognition is cognition about cognition, and a metatheory is a theory about theories, the metaproblem is a problem about a problem.  The initial problem is the hard problem of consciousness: why and how do physical processes in the brain give rise to conscious experience? The relevant sort of consciousness here is phenomenal consciousness. A system is phenomenally conscious if there is something it is like to be that system, from the first-person point of view. The meta-problem is roughly the problem of explaining why we think phenomenal consciousness poses a hard problem, or in other terms, the problem of explaining why we think consciousness is hard to explain.

[afroinsider]

Action for Community Development: Cameroon youth movement taking the

Action for Community Development: Cameroon youth movement taking the

Published on 07.08.2019 at 19h29 by Amindeh Blaise Atabong* Global climate change has been one of the most disturbing issues in the last decade attracting global attention. The climate crisis is a metaproblem which is so severe in its extent and reach that it surpasses most other challenges…

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

You wanna know what the worst part is?

The burnout of people helping to fix the Bad Problem is, of itself, a perennial Bad Problem.

And boy is the ratsphere ever (correctly) interested in cognitive tools and weird recursive metaproblems and spooky difficult-to-spot community-scale failure modes!

We're lucky so far that the handful of people in the ratsphere explicitly thinking about "why do people burn out and what can we do about it" very much started from "what did I burn out and what did I do to recover from it"; alas, this will only last until someone figures out how best to answer the subsequent obvious-to-rationalists questions of "how could I have avoided that from the start? what habits of behavior and mind would have prevented me from getting burned out in the first place?" and I am going to put in a guess that whatever answer people first come to on best practices there will, ironically, likely themselves be misaligned to favor productivity over, like, anything else. (Which misses the point of burnout, as a lot of those people I mentioned earlier have noted! You cannot fix burnout by doing a thing explicitly intended to fix burnout! Your brain is smarter than that! You have been using it to predict the future this whole time do NOT get surprised when it keeps on doing that.)

Rationalists tend to self-conceptualize as nerds, but as far as I'm concerned they are in general not nerds and this bothers me.

As far as I'm concerned, a nerd is an otaku; that is to say, a nerd is someone who is unabashedly enthusiastic about the minutiae of some topic for its own sake. Someone who has a bottomless desire to learn about... trains, or bugs, or math, or whatever their thing is, relatively unconcerned with the degree to which this knowledge is useful to them or anybody else. Doing their nerd thing is its own reward.

Rationalists might be nerds in their off time, but they generally aren't nerds when they're participating in rationalist discourse. One of the things I've noticed since finding myself adjacent to rattumb is rationalist posting in general has a tendency to look for "take aways" in things. A rationalist will read some book or article, and then make a post summarizing what insights they think it contains and what they think these mean or imply for themselves or their audience. I guess this goes back to Scott's book reviews, or maybe some habit of Yudkowsky I don't know. One way or another I've observed this tendency to be extremely strong among rationalists, and it strikes me as almost a maximally un-nerdy thing to do. This is a behavior befitting of startup guys and self-help gurus; a nerd would be principally interested in gaining more knowledge about their chosen subject, rather than extracting some (usually sociological or political) "point" from it.

In general rationalists spend their time talking about The Fate Of The World, whether that be in the form of AI Doom or the advancement of their chosen politics or veganism or whatever. Never have I encountered a non-religious community more fervently interested in The Fate Of The World. So I propose that rationalists are (often; of course this whole post is generalizing) zealots cosplaying as nerds. Kind of ticked off that they're appropriating my culture tbh.

[afroinsider]

Action for Community Development: Cameroon youth movement taking the

Action for Community Development: Cameroon youth movement taking the

Published on 07.08.2019 at 19h29 by Amindeh Blaise Atabong* Global climate change has been one of the most disturbing issues in the last decade attracting global attention. The climate crisis is a metaproblem which is so severe in its extent and reach that it surpasses most other challenges…

[txttletale]

i think ultimately all these complaints about d&d (and all my complaints about d&d which i'm sure anyone on my blog is familiar with by now lol) are exacerbated massively by the biggest metaproblem with 5e which is that it has spent huge amounts of money marketing itself as something it isn't. e.g. the fact that ability checks are a terrible system wouldn't be a big issue for a high fantasy dungeon-crawling wargame (as d&d has historically been and still, mechanically--inasmuch as 5e is mechanically anything--continues to be)--but now it's being marketed in a way such that a whole bunch of people, including people totally new to roleplaying games, come into it expecting a general-purpose roleplaying game, which creates a whole spectrum of new problems and makes a lot of the problems you've mentioned here worse

we rag on D&D 5e a lot for justifiable reasons but i'm still glad i've played a lot of it because it makes Baldur's Gate 3 fully comprehensible to me. never was able to get into Divinity: Original Sin 2 because the combat system didn't click for me

[helleborus-viridis-l]

Yes, but it's a metaproblem, not a design problem. As in, a problem in how we know the faith is, vs some details that contradict that. The author of the 2e Skullport book (not sure who they are, might even be Greenwood himself) probably just didn't think this through, but I really doubt they wanted to give the Eilistraeans a cult of personality aspect. Especially because books that come after that explicitly tell you that Qilué's word is seen as an elder sister's advice, not as a rule to follow, and that Eilistraean hierarchy is very loose.

Note that this is a decades old problem with D&D and FR. It's kinda inevitable to find contradictions with the quantity of lore out there. It's not an excuse to tolerate major contradictions, though, on that I can agree.

“Why does Eilistraee in practice bother me?” I ask, having a special interest in religion in the context of cultures and having very specific pet peeves as a result of that special interest.

Truly, it is a mystery.