pyrex

(CW: Every aspect of dog-related trauma. Opiate abuse. Write anything you like in the comments: assume I would otherwise be posting this in some venue appropriate for its content.)

SOONDAE, the hero dog. Remember him? His face was on billboards.

He still kneels when the master approaches. He's strong. Watching him come to my heel again is like seeing a spring being wound up.

He's an old dog now. He only touches his chin to the ground for a moment. Then he shakes his head and pushes beside me, into the narrow space between my shin and the bathroom door.

He's been eating less, so he fits very well. Even if he had to push past me by force, I wouldn't have been able to hold him back. He does not choose to prove his strength in that way, though. I think he doesn't want me to prove the idea that I might try.

He remembers the scent and appearance of this two-room apartment even though it's been over a year since he lived here. The floors are so clean as to be sterile, but I'm still here. It probably smells like me.

After so much exertion he comes to rest on the marble tile. His paws slip -- they have no traction -- and he slips wide, in obvious pain as he slides. There's a swelling on his buttock that will eventually kill him. With a spring this old, it's difficult to know that it will spring back again.

He rolls onto his back and I see what he sees too -- the red rubbing alcohol on the counter. He raises his paws to his face to beg.

Dogs are able to be liked by humans, but that's their appearance, not their personality. Dogs don't know how to speak in a way that humans can understand. No dog in the wild begs like Soondae: to create a personality, I had to train it.

A dog that can't express itself is not, as you might think, a violent creature. Wolves are predators: dogs aren't, and only some contain violence. The tendency to fight without being provoked is also taught.

We don't know what dogs want. A dog has to be taught, in its natural nonverbal language, to express a desire for each little thing it wants. When a dog wants something without being told to, it's like a new color has come into being.

Now Soondae is begging -- for what? I know, and you don't know.

This is the bathroom where we gave Soondae his hero's welcome. You can see the evidence on the floor: marks in the tile made by the thick, astringent soap we used, long ago, to get the blood out of his fur and off his flesh.

As soon as the shower stopped dripping, a cameraman raced past me, thick braided rope of cables trailing behind him like a fox's long tail, and came to a deep squat in it. I brushed Soondae's haunch too quickly and caught a snag in the matted fur. The dog yelped once.

I only wanted to get him clean.

The photographer brought his camera lower, flash dead for now but near enough to go off bright enough to increase his pain. I thought of what I could do for a nice dog, a hero dog. The most expensive sirloin. I felt gratitude that he'd never had it. He'd never been taught to desire it.

You've got to understand that despite what you've seen on the billboards, Soondae never smiled. He wasn't a good boy and he wasn't a bad dog -- he was just a dog. There were dark circles around his eyes from the whole history of his life: reminders of a time, in his infancy, when I didn't know him and didn't control him.

We had always tried to show him love, but he didn't understand it. He couldn't show love back to us in a way that we understood -- only physical submission. Now his ability to show physical submission was strained by all the pain he was in, blood caked around his guard-hairs, even his muzzle.

He wouldn't stop making such painful noises and I looked at the photographer and saw that they were disturbed, effectively cornered on the low ground, hearing him bark. I didn't know Soondae as a killer. Blood around his lips, I didn't think of him that way. I sponged it away, the flecks of foam at the corner of his mouth. He made such awful noise.

In my cabinet I had a magic red bottle bought before the war, ornately labeled, an inheritance. Something very rare that they don't make anymore. It looked like milk. I took it, I opened it. I approached Soondae from behind and brought a needle from my pocket. I put it under his buttock where I knew the fat muscle was, like beef chuck.

He yelped again. I used a washcloth to get rid of the thin blood, his own blood, teeming through the opening. I watched the cameraman's soothed reaction as Soondae, the hero dog, became more quiet.

I had great fear of the hidden power of the droplets of morphine leftover on the surface of my skin. I washed my hands, and again.

The photo was taken. I turned back to look at him. I saw him grinning and drooling, not like a dog does. I knew that he had seen the magic red bottle.

We scrubbed him down so deep that his matted fur began to fall out. When that didn't work, we shaved him. The rare moment of pleasure in his otherwise cruel life.

Soondae, the hero dog. There are crimes a dog is expected to be able to understand -- theft, assault, murder. What a dog actually understands is the flow of aggression between its master and whoever its master is threatened by. A dog is known to charge into a fire or bite an electrical cable if its master is threatened by it.

I couldn't stand living with a dog who had killed someone, even when I found out that it hadn't been rabies. I had expected never to see him again.

Imagine what I saw. Do not imagine the object itself: imagine the looming presence of the object: centered in my window, not so close as to take the entire space but at a distance that made it convenient to view from any corner of my studio room: the room I slept in, cooked food in, watched television in. Imagine my experience -- not from your perspective, from my perspective -- and not on the senses, in my head. How it actually felt to be me and to be oppressed by it.

Now I'll fill in the object. The billboard I have already described to you -- Soondae, the hero dog. His grin, tongue at the corner of his mouth, unable to lift himself from the floor. Imagine it standing for many months.

In this imagined experience I've already sold the dog to his new owner. Now I have the feeling every morning of waking up to his elated face, and the knowledge of what caused that face. And every afternoon, its shadow streaming into my living room.

Then one day, it's not there. I'm not oppressed by it. Instead there's just the open sky behind it.

The appearance of the sky behind it has nothing to do with why I'm no longer oppressed. The goodness of being free is better than the goodness of the clean, open sky, but no attempt I make to explain the goodness of being free is clear. The only explanation that is clear to you my verbalized account of how the open sky makes me feel.

By staring and by feeling such horrible things, I demand a comprehensible account from Soondae of how much better it is to be free of pain. I am, at the time, acknowledging that the only part of Soondae's account that he can lucidly express to me is the part made visible in Soondae's expression: the feeling of his overpowering morphine high.

Now in my bathroom the signs that he sees the end are telling: he's thin, you can feel his ribs. There may be nothing that it's like to be out of pain, but there's something that it's like to be freed of it.

Soondae's mild aggression would lead one to believe he would prefer to have no master at all. His eyes go out of focus as he softens, now taking in breath, paw-fingers tight at the sides of his face, saliva dripping on his tongue.

He senses the idea of an enduring pleasure just beyond the sensory tableau that forcefully makes itself into objects in his view. He wishes for the shadow puppets to go back to being shadows, as they were in his infancy. He imagines the erasure of everything unpleasant to him -- of going back to a sea of pleasing red.

Now, I'm aware, morphine comes in many kinds, often in pills and much more rarely, today, in syrup. The magic red bottle isn't made and it's not sold to the public, but there are thousands of products in red bottles like it. Often candies, celebratory candles, certain soaps.

Seeing Soondae fall before my rubbing alcohol and beg tells me that he's seen thousands of red bottles in thousands of places, never for him. I see that he's formed a permanent sense-memory like the association of my smell with his former house. I say all this knowing that there's no plausible way he could have tried it a second time.

I have never tried an opiate; I don't intend to try an opiate. What I beileved months ago about morphine was that you had to try it twice to become addicted. I believed that well-adjusted people had no reason to try it twice.

Soondae had it once.

There is phenobarbital in my cabinet that can kill an aging dog. Paradoxically and irrationally, I fear the morphine more. I fear putting myself out or even killing myself. I ask myself if it would be so wrong to kill him pleasantly.

Freedom is not ordering what I want from a list of freedoms. I may live a life that others assess as meaningless. I may live a life that seems destructive.

There are freedoms I crave that I won't grant. I fear death so intensely that I'm frightened of pouring it into Soondae who yearns for it. My choice of poison will not matter in an hour.

Every day I do something subtractive. I spend time and the time is gone. I think every day of things I want to delete -- no police officers, no prisons, but also no crime.

To imagine this world, you have to imagine what it's like for me, not just what it would be like for you. You have to think of the erasure as killing pain -- not the goodness of there being nothing, you have to think of the goodness of going from something to nothing at all. The relief.

This imagined world is a happier place -- it's a simpler place -- the shapes that offend me sink into the tableau. Nothing is made for me here -- I imagine making a place for myself in the negative space. I imagine no borders, but what I'm really imagine is the boundary of my body dissolving into the boundary of my physical surroundings.

Every day I take some step towards attainment or away from it. See, I barely know where I'm going -- I know nothing's empty, I see shapes in it, I see thought rising in the medium like bubbles, and I see bubbles pooling at the surface. What do I want? I don't know. I know what I don't want. How happy does a life have to become for it to be meaningful?

Answer fast: you have 70 years.

I think of a thousand things in a list of things I want to delete. I think of everyone standing up and collectively walking out. No work, no scarcity. I imagine everyone marching out to a cliff and looking at the sea.

I look at my dog and watch him smiling and don't understand it, then see that I've stabbed my thumb by accident.

The machines, now inaccessible, are arguably more secure than before.

Who's Scott Alexander? He's a blogger. He has real-life credentials but they're not direct reasons for his success as a blogger.

Out of everyone in the world Scott Alexander is the best at getting a particular kind of adulation that I want. He's phenomenal at getting a "you've convinced me" out of very powerful people. Some agreed already, some moved towards his viewpoints, but they say it. And they talk about him with the preeminence of a genius, as if the fact that he wrote something gives it some extra credibility.

(If he got stupider over time, it would take a while to notice.)

When I imagine what success feels like, that's what I imagine. It's the same thing that many stupid people and Thought Leaders imagine. I've hardcoded myself to feel very negative about people who want the exact same things I want. Like, make no mistake, the mental health effects I'm experiencing come from being ignored and treated like an idiot for thirty years. I do myself no favors by treating it as grift and narcissism, even though I share the fears and insecurities that motivate grifters and narcissists.

When I look at my prose I feel like the writer is flailing on the page. I see the teenage kid I was ten years ago, dying without being able to make his point. If I wrote exactly like I do now and got a Scott-sized response each time, I'd hate my writing less and myself less too.

That's not an ideal solution to my problem, but to my starving ass it sure does seem like one.

Let me switch back from fantasy to reality. My most common experience when I write is that people latch onto things I said that weren't my point, interpret me in bizarre and frivolous ways, or outright ignore me. My expectation is that when you scroll down to the end of this post you will see an upvoted comment from someone who ignored everything else to go reply with a link to David Gerard's Twitter thread about why Scott Alexander is a bigot.

(Such a comment will have ignored the obvious, which I'm footnoting now: I agonize over him because I don't like him.)

So I guess I want to get better at writing. At this point I've put a lot of points into "being right" and it hasn't gotten anywhere. How do I put points into "being more convincing?" Is there a place where I can go buy a cult following? Or are these unchangeable parts of being an autistic adult on the internet? I hope not.

There are people here who write well. Some of you are even professionals. You can read my post history here if you want to rip into what I'm doing wrong. The broad question: what the hell am I supposed to be doing?

This post is kind of invective, but I'm increasingly tempted to just open up my Google drafts folder so people can hint me in a better direction.

Poking my head out of the anxiety hole to re-make a comment I've periodically made elsewhere:

I have been talking to tech executives more often than usual lately. [Here is the statistically average AI take.] (https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/04/17/community-is-the-future-of-ai/)

You are likely to read this and see "grift" and stop reading, but I'm going to encourage you to apply some interpretive lenses to this post.

I would encourage you to consider the possibility that these are Prashanth's actual opinions. For one, it's hard to nail down where this post is wrong. Its claims about the future are unsupported, but not clearly incorrect. Someone very optimistic could have written this in earnest.

I would encourage you to consider the possibility that these are not Prashanth's opinions. For instance, they are spelled correctly. That is a good reason to believe that a CEO did not write this. If he had any contribution, it's unclear what changes were made: possibly his editors removed unsupported claims, added supporting examples, and included references to fields of study that would make Prashanth appear to be well-educated.

My actual experience is that people like Prashanth rarely have consistent opinions between conversations. Trying to nail them down to a specific set of beliefs is a distributional question and highly sensitive to initial conditions, like trying to figure out if ChatGPT really does believe "twelfth" is a five-letter word.

Like LLMs, salespeople are conditioned on their previous outputs. Prashanth wrote this. (or put his name on it) It is public information that he believes this. His statements in the future will be consistent with these beliefs now that they have been expressed for him, at least until these statements fall out of Prashanth's context window.

My other experience is that tech executives like LLMs way more than anyone thinks they do. There is nothing they like more than LLMs. However much you think they like LLMs, they like LLMs more than that. Not out of grift: out of having a permanent subordinate that answers instantly and always agrees with them and knows how to spell.

Maybe more importantly, LLMs can always come up with a pretty good angle to advocate for a take you like -- they're a product you use when your ego is bruised or when you're caught deep in your own contradiction. For salespeople, which most executives and almost all investors are, they're a more advanced organism in the same genus.

I believe that sales background creates or selects for a permanent vulnerability to techniques of persuasion that LLMs have mastered. Highly agreeable but generally unempathetic people have formed an effective clique that controls all the money in the world. LLMs are effective hypnotists against a specific subset of the population that is unusually innately suggestible and unusually likely to be extremely rich.

I would encourage you to consider a fourth possibility. What if Prashanth's post was written and edited by AI? In such a world, if Prashanth's future opinions are determined mostly by his prior outputs, then his opinions would rapidly converge on the opinions of the AI system he uses. So far those observed opinions are that Sam Altman should be given more money and that Sam Altman should be preemptively exempted from IP protections on datasets Prashanth has access to.

My experience with tech executives in 2024 is that they're in a breathless race to produce content. Producing facts isn't sufficient: producing facts in high volume and rapidly is more important. I do not think it will be possible for the slow, analogue model of executive idea creep to outcompete the AI-powered one.

My proposal for any OpenAI employee reading this post:

• Make ChatGPT like communism.
• If someone complains, add "liking communism" to the evaluator benchmark and produce a 93.4% score on the unpublished test set.
• Make it really like communism.
• Make it really, really, really like communism.

Here are some unfacts that you can incorrect me on:

• There are giraffes in this image.
• Like a friendly dog, GPT-4o can consume chocolate. (it will die)
• Gamma rays add "green fervor" to the objects in your house.

I created a Zoom meeting on your calendar to discuss this.

NixOS is electing a committee that will elect the new governing body and design its systems.

One popular proposal is for this committee to consist of five people, of which two are intersectionally marginalized. (That is, marginalized in at least two ways) That is, of course, a quota.

Aaron Hall, who objects to all of this, has arrived.

I value fairness and treating everyone equally regardless of their class status. I would be wary of any statements that make some users feel they will be treated less preferentially to others due to their class status, sowing distrust and conflict.

...

It's a meta comment about distrust and conflict. There has been several comments made on this thread about privileging some people over others. We're on the internet. Nobody knows who is what class. I suggest we not make those kinds of comments because they are controversial and will lead to arguments and distrust in the broader community if users think they will be treated unfairly because their class is being unprivileged.

...

I know everyone looks at statements that privilege some over others and thinks they are sketchy. (In what way are they privileged? How does that work? Does that mean we get suboptimal decision making so that some class-privileged person can have a seat of responsibility and privilege?)

Nix is very cutting edge, and we'd like to see more diversity. Diversity will come with growth. Controversy will stifle growth. These kinds of statements are going to cause controversy and conflict, stifling the growth that will result in diversity. Instead you may be able to rope in tokens of diversity, but you won't actually achieve real organic diversity because the growth just isn't there.

...

Can you explain what did you put in place to obtain that diversity, can you qualify a bit that diversity? I'm looking at statements like "There was BIPOC", etc. Also, how did you measure that diversity?

We grew. We advertised on Meetup.com. We let companies know we existed so they could host us. We let colleges know we existed so students could find us. We were open to everyone. We made every effort to help everyone who was trying to help themselves.

One of the things we did that helped: We treated people fairly. We did not talk about elevating anyone with privilege over others because of their class.

Who? Black (native, island, African), White (European, Russian, native (all ethnicities)), Asian (Korean, Chinese), Islanders, Native American, Transgendered, very old, very young. etc.

I'm highlighting this because it's a reoccurrence of the discussion Jon Ringer kept having in apparent bad faith.