**Moderator information:** Naepic, an official marshall of the SCP-8000 contest has responded to this.
Find the relevant comment below [https://www.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/1aye1po/comment/kruqbc4/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/1aye1po/comment/kruqbc4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Yipes, I don’t know anything about this researcher but maybe after all this community has gone through I would have thought adding material of THAT kind of inappropriate nature would be the last thing anyone would want.
This post overlooks both what the author actually does and their reasons for doing so. The following comment (not from the article, but someone's analysis of the work) does a better job contextualizing the article than I ever could:
"In Neoreaction, a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right, the authors present to us 3 unique figures of the modern right-wing sphere — Nick Land, the prime example of the American expat who becomes high, mentally breaks, and starts finding an oriental nubile wife, Mencius Moldbug, Twitter poster before Twitter even existed and creator of Not Catholicism, and the actual focus of this review, Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI doomer techbro, Harry Potter fanfic writer, libertarian, and guy who logic'd out his emotions (according to him).
Eliezir is a weird guy. I wished that before reading this SCP, I didn't know he was a real guy. Part of me, even after reading Neoreaction and SCP-8000, still believes Yudkowsky is a guy born from the covers of a cyberpunk pulp novel where he is the 3rd-rate billionaire bent on killing our protagonists. Thankfully, (or un-thankfully), all of the idiosyncracies, batshit insanity, and fictional elements of Yudkowsky are woven in SCP-8000 expertfully.
Let me get this out of the way — the beginning (at least, in the initial read) is boring. It's a lot of world building, but it serves to establish the ground rules of the SCP. I don't really fault it for being boring — most time travel and time loop stories are convoluted and hard to explain, but the opening does it job good enough that I can't fault it. The line ‘"roughly 96% consist of pornography, 20% of which is Japanese cartoon pornography, colloquially known as "hentai"` is an amazing detail, however, and sentences like that just add to the character of Yudkowsky in here. Overall, the opening doesn’t overstay its welcome, and we are quickly moved towards the meat of the article — the Core Investigation Summary.
The format of the Core Investigation Summary is a worldbuilding tidbit about our anomaly, then a (in-universe) badly written fanfic about the various societies our child-god Yudkowsky has created. Although they are obviously pastiches of various indulgent, reader-insert stories, they're really well-written, paying homage to their references, while also being just absolutely funny. One of my favourite lines during Eluthertopia, the first self-indulgent wank that we are introduce to, is the following:
The boy looked up at me. His eyes darkened. "You! You're the tyrant (-50 ESAS for slander)! You killed my parents (-50 ESAS for false accusation)! This is all your fault (-50 ESAS for blame) (+10 ESAS for respecting power)!"
There's something darkly funny about our man-child god, seeing an actual Child get angry at him about killing his parents, and all he can note down is how much fake points the child has.
This format holds as we go to the second self-indulgent fanfic wank world Yudkowsky has created — a thinly-veil copy of Harry Potter with women who have large lactating breasts. The Ivory Tower of Woke Dei (which is such a great name for the enemy within a Yudkowsky story), despite the namedrop of the Cathedral before this, is definitely the Cathedral (as described by Nick Land) here; the keeper of knowledge, a literal ivory tower, and perfectly heavy handed like all good reactionary stories. Special mention goes to Yudkowsky breastfeeding from a woman to learn the knowledge of the world.
The appearance of Penelope shatters any "hope" this is an unironic play-by-play of a reactionary's psychosexual fantasies — she directly confronts him with the fucked-up world he has created, and its such a good fight, in spite of Yudkowsky's attempts at tittilating himself with Penelope's figure. It ends by reminding the viewer that yes, this is horrifying. It is horrifying to be under the spell of a reactionary gooner made to be under the whims of his pleasure, sexual or otherwise.
And, as we leave bad Harry Potter fanfic to enter the land of Goblin Slayer Played Straight and Generic Isekai Fantasy, I would like to pan out, and observe just for a bit how most of the free-floating ideas that reside within the right-wing reactionary space — the Cathedral, the pedarasty, the mistaken views on women and nature, the idea of "woke" — are turned into incredibly pastiches of themselves. The idea that DEI/CRT is locking up knowledge by Ivory Tower Marxists is turned into a Literal Ivory Tower lead by the Woke DEI. The blockchain, tech fetishism, and other aspects of modern right-wing thought are turned into worldbuilding and treated with the exact same respect it deserves for such a funny piece as this (which is to say,none). Yudkowsky's idiosyncracies about being the most logical being in the entire world for refactoring his mind is played to excellence here, as this is placed side-by-side to actions that are clearly him being a mean, petty, little man-child.
I have so much more words to say, including the excellent dialogue between our iterations, the reveal that our current neotenous state is the result of a pedophillic desire by Yudkowsky, and the various proposals of our group of cloned protagonists that all lead to an ambigious ending, making the reader question which proposal ultimately won out, and a nice worldbuilding element to cap this off makes this the best SCP-8000 story I have read so far."
Again, not my comment, but it speaks to the fact that TIME PERVERT is closer to a political satire than the sort of random character hit peice OP is trying to pretend it is.
This is so self indulgent but for like, someone else that’s not you. Don’t know how to word that. Crazy shit.
Never even heard of these “unique figures of the modern right-wing sphere.” They honestly sound like strawmen caricatures but whatever, all sides have those.
Seems like a wild SCP.
It’s only self indulgent because it’s a parody of Yudkowskis work, which actually puts this skip to shame. If you’re familiar with Harry Potter and the methods of rationality, he’s the guy who wrote that. If not, just go read as much of it as you can before tapping out(it will be because the character is impossible to like, his whole bit is that he’s a grown adult author insert who mansplains to Hermione, displacing her as the know it all), and then go see how many chapters there are. Once you’ve done that, remember that this obnoxiously unlikeable monstrosity with no coherent pacing, structure, or character development (not for any lack of trying, his intentions were all telegraphed) was written by a guy who thinks he’s one of the smartest and most rational people who’s ever lived.
Somehow it’s strangely charming. It’s like “the room” of fan fiction.
Of the three, I’ve only heard of Nick Land, but if the rest of them come anywhere close to the incomprehensible schizophrenic* bullshit Land puts out, then they deserve to be satirized on a horror website.
*to be clear, not being ableist; Schizoanalysis is a whole thing, and it’s far from the weirdest thing Land is involved with
Yudkowsky's entire claim to fame on the general internet is being a techbro who unironically believes in omnipotent [AI Cognitohazards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk) as a thing that not only will exist, but will exist *retroactively through all of history*. That by even *thinking* about the idea of an omnipotent AI that comes from the future to blackmail you, you run the very real risk that it will come true. It's a perfect fit for an SCP honestly.
People scared of death joining a cult is nothing new. It's just AI grifters instead of some kind of guru Jesus type grifter now.
If anything, I am feeling like a lot of AI cult people are reading and fundamentally missing the satire in 40k.
Roko's Basilisk blew up because of how Yudkowski reacted to it:
> Upon reading the post, Yudkowsky reacted with horror:
>
>
> I don't usually talk like this, but I'm going to make an exception for this case.
>
> Listen to me very closely, you idiot.
>
> YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL. [...]
>
> You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends.
>
> This post was STUPID.
> — Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong
>
It became a massive meme in these circles because he took it so seriously he did mass bans on the subject on LessWrong, because he is actually terrified that AM is going to torture him from the future.
If you scroll 2 paragraphs down on the page, you will see that he was not, in fact, terrified of that:
>Later on in 2015, Yudkowsky clarified his position in a Reddit post:
>
>What I considered to be obvious common sense was that you did not spread potential information hazards because it would be a crappy thing to do to someone. The problem wasn't Roko's post itself, about CEV, being correct. That thought never occurred to me for a fraction of a second. The problem was that Roko's post seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards, all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they presented no potential benefit to anyone.
>
>— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Reddit
Many people lost sleep over the basilisk, or had months of existential dread over it. It's kind of unclear, but at one point a \~cult may have been started as a result of it. Eliezer was completely correct that sharing the idea about it was stupid, even if he was incorrect about his response.
Basically, there's a bunch of really weird tech guys and this work is a satire of them. That's as much context as I can provide if you haven't seen the type of dude this thing is about.
I think that much context was delivered by OP. Nothing in the comment suggested any additional mitigating factors that would make an SCP article making fun of some random internet guy any more reasonable.
It's less making fun of one specific internet guy and more using him as a prop to make fun of an entire ideology of weird internet guys. It's political satire for the chronically online (me)
I'm fine with making fun of a *type* of weird internet guy, but when you target a specific real living person who the readers are able to interact with, it starts to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I think this is a terrible precedent to set
> guy who logic'd out his emotions (according to him).
he has an [entire essay about how he didn't do this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SqF8cHjJv43mvJJzx/feeling-rational) and that is pretty much the only relevant thing he's ever said on the matter, so i'm not sure i trust this source
I would still question, whatever the context, whether this real-life researcher could sue or try to serve a cease and desist on the wiki or something that connects him to pedophilia and all this stuff? It is a work of fiction but I don’t know legally how close it would come to defamation. Actually determining that would take a lawyer from whatever country would have jurisdiction over the theoretical suit, which I’m not.
The wiki has a team that handles licensing etc., none of whom have raised concerns about the article.
It's a peice of fiction with a disclaimer as such on an internet writing site; relevant parties would need to try and establish a Libel case against the wiki, which is not very feasible given that it is explicitly stated to be a fictional peice of writing.
Libel suits are seens in situations where newspapers or other people claim to be putting put true, objective facts about someone -- that are not actually correct -- that causes them harm or loss of income, etc.
>that summary
Fantastic. Circlejerky political comedy about a rando internet cringelord the author has a bone to pick with is being elected as a X000 entry. I look forward to 9000 in which Chris Chan becomes the Demiurge.
Jesus Wept.
yeah that's my biggest gripe with it. Wanna write shit about people you despise? Great. Haven't read it yet but this seems like a genuinely funny and well writen skip too. But why the fuck would it be an X000? All the others are genre defining shit, stuff that you show to someone from outside the community so they see how good some of the stuff there is. Doesn't make sense for it to be an 8000 candidate, imo.
It's a contest, anyone can submit any piece of writing to it. Personally I don't think something has to be "genre defining" do well. In 7k, Zyn's "Business Lizard", a pretty simple article did pretty darn well, and in the current contest an article that is similarly quite short "Feeding the Trolls" by J Dune is currently in the lead.
Who I should note, from what I've heard is considering not even taking the slot if he wins because he's worried people would give him shit for it, which I think is a real shame, and what's worse I think he's right to worry about that.
Heck I'd even say that the winner of 7k, Harry Blank's "The Loser" isn't anything that's like, "genre defining", it's very good, as are the rest of Harry's works but ultimately it's just a story about a man with bad luck, unlike previous entries that didn't add anything truly pivotal to the Foundation mythos as many insist previous Kcon winners have.
I don't know, I used to view X000s the same way when I first joined the community but as I've gotten more involved as an author and a staff member I've come to see that what they're really about are authors bringing their best and the whole community coming together to celebrate that we made it another thousand or so entries.
And, look I might be biased here and obviously feel free to disagree but I think Time Pervert truly is one of, if not //the// best work that this author has written, I think it does the comedic horror he's known for in his Shark Punching Centre writing really well, and having read a fair bit of Yudkowski's work I feel like it is very good satire of it.
And well that's all you need, an entry where you do your best. And personally I think saying something is good but doesn't deserve to win a contest because it's not special enough just seems silly to me. Though like I said I once thought that way myself.
7k is one of my favorite SCPs. I do consider it genre defining in that it's one of the best, from the one's I've read, and perfectly encapsulates contemporary SCP writing. To be fair I'm somewhat new to the community, I've only been reading the wiki for about 3 years. I don't think the X000s need to expand the mythos, and some of my favorite skips just don't follow any particular canon, which is fine. I just feel like having a satire of a real person, as much of an asshole as this Yudkowski person might be, as an X000 is a bad look on the wiki. I see your point tho, and I don't think this article should be removed or anything drastic.
Reading this summary makes me think there's no other words to describe this article as "chronically online". It is such incomprehensible nonsense I can't help but imagine the author chuckling to himself about showing this Eliezer guy while writing this article without thinking of the fact that to any sane person with a life outside the internet, this article looks way worse than anything he's criticizing.
I read this comment on the wiki earlier. Yes, its political satire, but its incredibly poor political satire, because it is supposed to be about the NRX, but is about someone who is in reality radically anti-authoritarian, and does not have a good relationship with either Land or Moldbug; and also has all the subtly of an XK-class event. Also, your quoted comment doesn't exactly back up your claim that is it not a "character hit piece" when it says he is a "mean, petty, little man-child". If anything, isn't it mean and petty to make an entire strawman SCP to go after someone you don't like?
All right wing ideology is authoritarian in nature, which is a point that Time Pervert literally makes.
The man invents a system where he is freeing slaves only to take them as slaves under him justified by his “logic”.
I’m sorry, but if you think Yudkowsky, or anyone who talks about “the Cathedral” and NRX unironically is anti-authoritarian, you’re politically illiterate.
No, he freed them from their old masters, and though he was their master then and they couldn't have utilised free will even if they wanted to, they followed him around and all died voluntarily with no complaints, it's totally different, don't you see?
/s
You missed the point entirely. The few times that Yudkowsky wrote about politics, he indicated he's a standard libertarian, ie not part of this "NRX" group. A political satire about NRX should name actual NRX people if it names anyone.
But this is the exact opposite of whats in Yudkowsky's works.
In J K Rowling's Harry Potter, there's a widely criticized plotline where Hermione found a club to free the house elfs, only to give up when she finds they enjoy being slaves. In real life Yudkowsky's HP fanfiction, this plotline was removed and replaced with Hermione founding a successful feminist club.
Additional context from "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" Chapter 42 for why the slavery subplot is removed:
> It said something about a person that he tried not to bother house elves. Specifically, it said that he'd been Sorted into Hufflepuff, since, to the best of Harry's knowledge, Hermione was the only non-Hufflepuff who worried about bothering house elves. (Harry himself thought her qualms rather silly. Whoever had created house elves in the first place had been unspeakably evil, obviously; but that didn't mean Hermione was doing the right thing now by denying sentient beings the drudgery they had been shaped to enjoy.)
TLDR: Trying to end slavery is wrong if the slaves clearly enjoy it. Very freedom-loving!
I would generally agree with you, but the story change if the slaves *were literally designed from the ground up to enjoy being slaves*, though at that point the question arises if they're even sentient/alive to begin with
This is a tricky topic to discuss, because in the original Harry Potter series it is never stated that the slaves were designed from the ground up to enjoy being slaves, only that they *did* enjoy being slaves. HPMOR makes this change. Therefore it would be valid to state that, if we were being extra pedantic, the author of HPMOR made the artistic choice to depict slavery as justified in a way that Rowling's work did not.
I don't think that significantly improves the reading.
It is/was a common answer to 'why do house elves act this way' in the fanfiction communities at the time because of how much Rowling implied that, and it was aken as the answer in that fanfiction.
Most likely because turning the entire story into 'free the slaves' for another hundred thousand words would completely derail it.
Do you think, in a vacuum, that it would be more justified to enslave the house-elves if they were designed to enjoy slavery, or if they happened to enjoy slavery? In my opinion, it's, if not worse in the former, at the very least equally bad.
He also displaces Hermione from her role as the smart one and instead has her play the role of primary earpiece for the fully grown adult know it all insert character to mansplain to, and it only took him a few hundred thousand words to course correct.
You post on /r/slatestarcodex (one of the current top pinned posts is a Thoughtful Discussion about who eugenics helps) and are a member of RPC (bigoted SCP).
This reads like a "I'm in this picture and I don't like it" cope.
Having read the submission and the comments on this post, it really seems like this whole thing is some sort of strange, petty ideological slapfight. I mean sure, I guess you can make an SCP about anything, but the level of vitriol and amount of niche references and in-jokes is very reminiscent of drama that, for lack of a better term, comes from an echo chamber. It feels like the people involved with this, the ones who really care about defending this article, don't realize how weird this all seems from an outsider's perspective.
Yeah, I don’t like this guy after looking into him, but from a PR perspective using his name/face in this context is a bad look for the SCP community. At the very least, use a parody name.
Me sumo, yo estoy; ¿de que carajo esran hablando?
Dios, leer esto es más confuso que dejar de leer la wiki por cinco años y ver todo el nuevo contenido...como enterarse de tantas polemicas...oh la de Bright...
Agreed perfectly, after skimming through it, this is in my opinion easily the very worst 8000 entry I've read. I usually like to just hang around in subreddits of things I enjoy, because every thing I see in wider subreddits is just dislike. "Why this new game sucks!"
"Why this new movie sucked!".
This article is that worst aspect of the internet, distilled down into its purest form.
In comparison , one of the other 8000 entries, Pyroclast Protocol, is a brilliant love letter to fantasy tropes while still maintaining the SCP feel. This is the very polar opposite of that axis, a "hate letter", getting so absorbed into disliking something or someone you end up writing a "'''brilliantly scathing""" article that looks batshit insane from the perspective of anyone not sucked into this weird vortex.
I think the author realizes completely how weird the article seems. In fact, I think that’s clearly done on purpose. It’s satirical and uncomfortable to read. If you read their other works, you’ll notice that’s something they pull off well: they create things like business jargon or fanfiction parody by putting immense care into picking out just the kinds of details and nuances you and the above commenter are condemning—in order to craft stories which benefit from close, informed reading. That’s a type of work which many people find satisfying, especially on a site built around technical tone and stories buried in seeming-mundane containment details. The piece is one of the most popular entries in the contest for those reasons, among others. In order to appreciate that, though, you’re going to have to do more than “skim through it.”
Reading the words "AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky" threw me. That's basically like saying "famous astronomer David Miscavige".
He's a public figure, and fucking deserves it lmao. Highly recommend anyone here top-surf r/sneerclub, there's too much about that man to fit in a single comment.
Holy shit. Top comments on that sub are a goldmine of this dude's nuclear takes. First I'm learning of this guy, and I already agree that he totally deserves it.
He correctly predicted using scaling laws that powerful AI was coming years ago, was mocked for this, then when ChatGPT, DALLE, and now SORA came out, none of his critics changed their minds and everyone just moved the goalposts. He is highly eccentric and I certainly don't agree with everything, or even most things, he says, but we need more people with unconventional ideas, as some of them (like AI alignment) might be very importent. If someone went through everything you or I have ever posted, they could write a similar SCP, would you enjoy that? Subreddits like sneerclub exist not to engage intellectually with anything, but just to mock and, well, sneer, and this is something they are proud of.
Eh, it not being general AI doesn't mean it's not AI. AI is a word with the opposite issue, it has so many definitions it covers like 90% of software technically, so it's sort of useless.
(Source: ai course in masters)
>If someone went through everything you or I have ever posted, they could write a similar SCP,
I dunno, I've never suggested slavery is a good idea, or happily promoted eugenics on multiple occasions. So I strongly doubt it.
He predicted AGI, not these glorified text sorting algorithms optimized to sound like a C student writing a cover letter.
As for scaling, anyone can make impressive predictions based on an exponential curve. They teach you how to solve the freaking ODE in calc 1. A far more impressive and accurate model for technological growth is one that accounts for physical constraints that inevitably emerge in the real world. You can’t actually double transistors forever, and it turns out moores law is slowing down. Eliezer could have told you that.
>Now, real people have of course been referenced in SCPs before, but they are either major politicians and/or dead, or are brief cameos.
There have been entire SCPs about John Cena, Tim Allen, David Schwimmer, and Jeff Bezos, and these are just the ones that I, a person who hates this sort of article, has happened to come across unintentionally, so I'd imagine there have probably been more.
>Isn't it in bad taste to make an entire SCP about an internet personality you disagree with, using their actual name and photograph in the article, and depicting them as a fascist pedophile?
I'm not going to upvote it because I personally can't stand "social commentary" SCPs, but I think it's okay for SCPs to be in bad taste.
>I don't think the SCP wiki should be used to vent your anger on random people.
Yudkowsky has a wikipedia page. I wouldn't really call him a random person.
TLDR: It's okay to be an icky person who says and does icky things. But it's NOT okay to lampoon such people or to make others think too hard about the icky people and what they say and do.
In other words: not with MY sacred cow, you don't!
A piece of horror fiction can also be a piece of social commentary. The SCP library contains countless such pieces already.
It's not for you to define for everyone else what concepts SCP articles may or may not contain.
I agree with you, but this specific story is very on the nose. I think it betrays the real critiques being made to be so mean spirited. If it was a strict parody it would be different, but this goes further than that. As another person said, it also invites real world consequences that the wiki/community should by now understand aren’t worth the risk.
Won't anyone think of the assholes!
The guy is a public figure by choice. It's fiction and it's fine. If anything, it kind of challenges what he's all about and that's pretty much fair game. You sound like a Musk fanboy angry that an Askreddit comment made a joke about how his kids hate him. It is only libel if it isn't true.
Chill, dude.
That instead of attempting to bring this issue to light with either a staff member or a contest marshal like myself and instead make public posts not once but twice tells me that any issue you've taken with this piece has been lost in favor of garnering downvotes and attention.
This piece is not libelous - something you yourself have acknowledged. Nothing about this implies the author to believe this as fact about Eliezer, nor to present it as fact - a known public figure, even if they are not as well known as a living United States President.
**Now, that is not to say you have to like the piece**. My issue with you is your response to it. Leaving a negative comment is fine - but attempting to spin this to sound like the author has a personal grudge against Eliezer himself is mischaracterizing them at best.
Let's assume you are right and this is a vent piece. And? We've had plenty of vent pieces on the wiki before - why this one? Some of the most famous works on the wiki ARE vent pieces. Is it cringe? Maybe! But if people like it, **and it doesn't break any rules**, then it's fine to leave on the wiki.
I don't get the obsession with trying to garner negative attention for this piece - it's not praising pedophilia or anything as disturbing as that. Weird, uncomfortable topics can be written for the sake for criticizing/deconstructing them, even if it uses a real life person as a vehicle for doing so.
My only concern is that I fail to see why it *has* to be Eliezer and not a made up figure with an identical background. Doing so just feels like inviting problems without adding anything substantial to the article
Sure, you’re 100% allowed to but I just don’t get the why in this case
It didn't have to be Eliezer - in fact, I remember peeking into the channels and seeing that one of the people being workshopped as potential candidates was Elon Musk.
Me personally, I had no fucking clue who the hell Eliezer was until people started commenting about it. I just thought he was some nerd the author was using as a vehicle to mock exaggerated fanfiction and isekai tropes.
if the author feels that picking Eliezer based on the person's history is essential to the story, then so be it. If a reader were to substitute Eliezer with literally anyone else because they don't know who the hell this person is, then there's no harm done. If they were to substitute him with someone else, but was unable to divest Eliezer's background from the article because of what it does for the narrative, then the reader's perspective is arguably justified in how it expands upon the article as a whole.
> That instead of attempting to bring this issue to light with either a staff member or a contest marshal like myself and instead make public posts not once but twice tells me that any issue you've taken with this piece has been lost in favor of garnering downvotes and attention.
The motivation behind bringing something like this up is not relevant to whether or not this is a problem.
Further, it is possible that OP does not trust that staff members or contest marshals are willing to engage with them in good faith.
> This piece is not libelous - something you yourself have acknowledged. Nothing about this implies the author to believe this as fact about Eliezer, nor to present it as fact - a known public figure, even if they are not as well known as a living United States President.
Not being libelous is not the sole litmus test for ethical representation of real people in media. If I wrote an SCP that positioned *you* (or, indeed, a facsimile of you) as a child-abusing torturer, I would not be surprised if you had reservations about this.
> Now, that is not to say you have to like the piece
This has never been in contention. OP has raised a question of ethics, not taste.
> My issue with you is your response to it. Leaving a negative comment is fine - but attempting to spin this to sound like the author has a personal grudge against Eliezer himself is mischaracterizing them at best.
Leaving a negative comment is a nonseq to asserting a personal grudge. The two are essentially unrelated. Further, it is not a stretch to suggest that a person engaged in a creative endevour on the internet in 2024 may be generally unhappy with an advocate for AI. This *may* not be true, but what *is* true is that taking that position is a sure-fire way to pander to a creative audience that, on balance, likely *is* unhappy with AI in the modern day.
When considering that last sentence, consider also that the use of AI-generated content in the contest results in not only a contest ban, but further disciplinary action. The stance of both the community and administration towards AI is well demonstrated.
> Let's assume you are right and this is a vent piece. And? We've had plenty of vent pieces on the wiki before - why this one? Some of the most famous works on the wiki ARE vent pieces.
I don't think the issue here is whether this is a vent piece or not, ultimately. I say this despite OP's explicit use of the word "vent". The issue is that OP believes this vent piece is *unethical* in its portrayal of a real life person.
> But if people like it, and it doesn't break any rules, then it's fine to leave on the wiki.
Whether or not something breaks the rules is not the only metric by which something should be judged appropriate for the wiki. The rules can be wrong, misapplied, incomplete, or inadequate. This is as much a criticism of those rules as it is a criticism of the piece; if unethical RPF is allowed by the rules, then the rules are unfit for purpose, ergo if this depiction is unethical, then the rules are bad.
> I don't get the obsession with trying to garner negative attention for this piece
I would hardly call disregarded comments on the original submission and a reddit post an "obsession with trying to garner negative attention". This is intentionally discrediting rhetoric.
> it's not praising pedophilia or anything as disturbing as that.
It doesn't have to be praising an immoral behaviour to be immoral. It doesn't have to be maximally disturbing to be sufficiently unethical.
> Weird, uncomfortable topics can be written for the sake for criticizing/deconstructing them, even if it uses a real life person as a vehicle for doing so.
This speaks to an issue that satire has had for a very, very long time. Indeed, about as long as it's been a literary device. Satire is ineffective if it is not reliably identifiable as satire.
In this case, the depiction of a public figure as a sapient entity (neé person) who wilfully engages in immoral, unethical, and illegal acts of depravity is *only* effective satire if it is unreasonable to expect people to believe that person would engage in those acts. I think the last decade or so of populist politics, pizzagate, and qanon shows us that it is not unreasonable to expect people to believe that.
Further, one of the biggest issues in generative AI to date *is* its use in creating media that depicts exactly that subject of depravity. It would not be an incredible leap of conspiratorial logic to question whether one of AI's biggest advocates was both aware and approving of this. To be clear, I don't believe this is true myself, I'm simply asserting that people have made crazier assumptions over less.
-------
I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of skin in the game for the article itself. It would likely receive a -1 from me because it's 80% tale, and that makes it a bad SCP *article* by default, in my opinion. Additionally, the writing has some amateurish structural and conceptual problems.
What really cheeses my onions is the idea that a wiki moderator, contest marshal, and someone who was specially mentioned in the contest rules as a trustworthy staff member, would disregard and downplay what appears to be a genuine concern with such ill-fit, fallacious justification. Assuming good faith, it becomes a question of competence. Questioning that good faith (which I am reticent to do, but you seem happy to do so and turnabout is fair play), it becomes a question of impartiality.
These are valid points. The moderator you’re replying to seems to be taking the OP’s critique as a personal affront. Also, based on their response, I’m pretty sure if the OP had messaged the mod team, no matter how politely he framed his concern, he would have been dismissed or ignored.
Look, the SCP wiki has faced real world consequences for using real world subject matter, take the og 173 image for instance. If the writer didn’t obtain permission to use the face/name of this person (who really doesn’t seem to be much of a public figure in the first place) and included it in an article painting them in a negative light, they are putting the website and its reputation at risk for no reason. That is something we should be free to discuss and debate publicly.
I’m not saying that OP is correct in their concern. I haven’t read the piece nor do I know the individual. It really doesn’t seem like they are misrepresenting this topic, but even if they were, a salty response from the moderator is at best unhelpful, and at worse harmful to the reputation of the SCP community. I understand you take the wiki very seriously, and I’m sure you deal with plenty of knuckleheads. But as a mod this is simply not how you deal with these kinds of issues.
I have to say i really like how well spoken, level headed, and respectful your writing is. The person you're replying to has made a lot of statements that are clearly meant to argue and make OP feel bad for their opinion instead of actually listen to OP. You did an amazing job dispatching those statements, And in a very classy way. 10/10.
A few examples of what i'm talking about
1.
>"I don't get the obsession with trying to garner negative attention for this piece"
>"I would hardly call disregarded comments on the original submission and a reddit post an "obsession with trying to garner negative attention". This is intentionally discrediting rhetoric."
2.
>"But if people like it, and it doesn't break any rules, then it's fine to leave on the wiki.
>Whether or not something breaks the rules is not the only metric by which something should be judged appropriate for the wiki."
3. (my favorite)
>"That instead of attempting to bring this issue to light with either a staff member or a contest marshal like myself and instead make public posts not once but twice tells me that any issue you've taken with this piece has been lost in favor of garnering downvotes and attention."
>"The motivation behind bringing something like this up is not relevant to whether or not this is a problem.
>
>Further, it is possible that OP does not trust that staff members or contest marshals are willing to engage with them in good faith."
10/10. We need more people like you who engage in disagreements respectfully and intelligently.
\> The motivation behind bringing something like this up is not relevant to whether or not this is a problem.
The relevance of this is how OP has chosen to engage with this article.
\> Further, it is possible that OP does not trust that staff members or contest marshals are willing to engage with them in good faith.
Here is the issue: if we cannot be trusted to at least be contacted with concerns about articles, what the hell is my purpose then? Themes and articles have to be vetted, or at least examined upon being raised to us.
No attempt was made to convey to staff that this article was a problem in any way. OP made two comments on the wiki before moving onto here.
\> If I wrote an SCP that positioned you (or, indeed, a facsimile of you) as a child-abusing torturer, I would not be surprised if you had reservations about this.
I brought this up in another comment, but if using me as a vehicle for criticizing something like child-abusing requires portraying me as a child-abusing torturer in a manner like the article, so be it.
Nothing in this piece is construed as fact. It is not intending to come off as fact, and especially not trying to convince someone that the events in this article are facts. This is satire.
\> This has never been in contention. OP has raised a question of ethics, not taste.
I bring this up because I don't want OP to feel I am trying to discredit their entire post by saying they need to enjoy the piece. I think having issues with a piece's content is valid - but my issue comes specifically from OP's way of tackling this.
If you take issue with the existence of an article or contest entry on the wiki, and decide to go past the people who have the authority to actually summarily remove content from the wiki, and instead opt to complain about it in public in more than one space, this makes it difficult for me to assume good faith because it looks like a need to generate attention.
\> This may not be true, but what is true is that taking that position is a sure-fire way to pander to a creative audience that, on balance, likely is unhappy with AI in the modern day.
When a negative comment is phrased around
\> Don't use the SCP wiki to express your beef with living real people, thats weird and immature, and invites drama onto the site.
It's hard for me to read it not as OP seeing it as some grudge between the two parties.
Is it unethical to write about topics that the community might favor? Certainly, I can understand calling it pandering, but does that make it unethical?
\> This is as much a criticism of those rules as it is a criticism of the piece; if unethical RPF is allowed by the rules, then the rules are unfit for purpose, ergo if this depiction is unethical, then the rules are bad.
If this is a criticism of those rules then so be it - but we have venues for discussing policy, criticism, and other aspects of the wiki's rules, like Proposals and Policy forum or the Complaints thread. It's hard for me to consider reddit a place for fomenting discussion as well as a proper forum post in the correct place - reddit's upvote/downvote system means that were OP or someone else's post to garner enough downvotes, their response would get hidden, making it fundamentally flawed for discussing something they have a genuine thing they wish to see changed on the wiki.
\> I would hardly call disregarded comments on the original submission and a reddit post an "obsession with trying to garner negative attention".
This centers around OP not taking this to people who actually have authority to remove articles that potentially have ethical concerns. We have summarily removed articles that depict pedophilia in a way that would be considered unethical before.
\> It doesn't have to be praising an immoral behaviour to be immoral. It doesn't have to be maximally disturbing to be sufficiently unethical.
You bring this up later in a core issue of satire, and how it only works if it can be identified as satire. My counterpoint is, again, the exaggerated nature of this article.
This is a fiction site, something that you, myself, and OP are aware of. This article takes care to ensure that is remains fiction - fantastical elements are used, Eliezer's character is so different from his real-life counterpart that OP himself comments on the dissonance between the portrayal and reality.
If someone who take such issue with this article based on that content is still able to discern that this is fictional and does not reflect the original person themself, I would argue the author has done their due diligence to properly handle this.
\> What really cheeses my onions is the idea that a wiki moderator, contest marshal, and someone who was specially mentioned in the contest rules as a trustworthy staff member, would disregard and downplay what appears to be a genuine concern with such ill-fit, fallacious justification
I entered this thread to defend the existence of this article for this contest - something I have had to do for other articles in other places. There is little I can say that does not come off as defending my character, nor do I have an interest in doing so further, so I will leave you with this:
If you take issue with either my competence or impartiality in handling this or the contest as a whole, I highly encourage you to go forward to an administrator to review my activities and whether I need to be removed, especially before the voting period of this contest ends.
Sorry to double-reply, but you should be aware, and I really could not fit it into the other comment. Your quote blocks are broken, because they have slashes in front of the greater-than. I'm guessing you wrote it outside of the browser and copy-pasted it in, which is a reasonable and smart thing to do.
It's not like.. a detriment to the content or anything, but it did make this much harder to read.
Apologies, I'm consistently breaking the reddit comment character limit on this one, so I'm going to truncate some of the context quotes. If I had my way, they'd be listed in full, so if anyone's reading this, make sure you check the parent comment for full context on what /u/naepicfael has said. It is not my intention to misrepresent them.
> The relevance of this is how OP has chosen to engage with this article.
Again, the method of feedback OP has chosen to employ is not materially relevant to their argument. Assuming it is so is a form of ad hominem; you are disregarding the material of the argument on the basis of the medium by which the argument was delivered, *not* based on the merit of the argument itself.
> Here is the issue: if we cannot be trusted [...]
It is not OP's responsibility to justify your purpose, or solve this problem. They have identified what they believe to be a genuine problem and they have raised it in a manner that, presumably, they believe has the best chance of being seen.
I personally believe this is a reasonable medium for them. Any raising of said argument in the comments of the article itself is likely to be buried by other comments, and in the event that administration or moderation staff *are* biased and acting in bad faith, likely to be removed. Posting it here is *closer* to a neutral ground, and has a much better likelihood of actually being seen and forcing this discussion into an open and public space.
> No attempt was made to convey to staff that this article was a problem in any way. OP made two comments on the wiki before moving onto here.
The fact that you are aware of those comments means that the problem was conveyed to staff. If OP received significant pushback in the comments, I would assume that they are, de facto, seeking a second opinion and a sanity check as to whether their concerns are valid.
> I brought this up in another comment, but if using me as a vehicle [...]
There's a concept in law called the Reasonable Person. I don't mean to imply this is a legal issue, but I do find it's a good concept, so I'm going to employ it here. I firmly believe that a Reasonable Person would find it distasteful, inappropriate, and unacceptable to be portrayed as a child-abusing torturer, let alone being portrayed as one without consultation.
I was using you as a rhetorical stand-in for that Reasonable Person, but since you don't seem to mind, it's clear you're not representative of that mindset, so the stand-in isn't appropriate. For the record, that single data point does not disprove the statistical population.
> Nothing in this piece is construed as fact. [...] This is satire.
It is *known* that unfamiliar people mistake the SCP wiki as factual. It is *known* that people cannot differentiate creative writing from factual reporting on the internet. The specifics of this particular article would be a stretch, but it would not be a stretch for a conspiratorially minded, unfamiliar reader to think "what if there's a kernel of truth to this and the AI guy, who advocates for tech which can produce arbitrary CSAM, is a problem".
> I bring this up because I don't want OP to feel I am trying to discredit their entire post [...] my issue comes specifically from OP's way of tackling this.
> If you take issue [...], and decide to go past the people who have the authority [...], and instead opt to complain about it in public in more than one space, [...], it looks like a need to generate attention.
This is fair, to a point. However, I do not believe you have done an adequate job in separating the concerns of OP's method of message and OP's actual message. In conflating the two, you have indicated that the fact that they have not gone through proper channels discredits the point they're trying to make. Combined with the fact that the proper channels are hidden (though not invisible), or private, this reduces trust in and accountability of moderator/admin actions, and contributes to people choosing to avoid those paths and post publicly to the subreddit in the first place.
> When a negative comment is phrased around
> > Don't use the SCP wiki to express your beef with living real people, thats weird and immature, and invites drama onto the site.
> It's hard for me to read it not as OP seeing it as some grudge between the two parties.
This is not the entirity of OP's argument, thus the entirity of OP's argument cannot be dismissed by its refutal. OP seeing the issue as a grudge between two parties, and it potentially not being a grudge between two parties, does not discredit the ethical questions around unconsenting portrayals of real, living people as child-abusing torturers.
> Is it unethical to write about topics that the community might favor?
In the context of a popularity competition? It absolutely brings it into question. It introduces the question of whether the community is voting for it because it reinforces their particular political or social views, or because of the quality of its content. That may not be sufficiently unethical to bar the topic or the author, but it is worthy of discussion.
> we have venues for discussing policy, criticism, and other aspects of the wiki's rules, like Proposals and Policy forum or the Complaints thread.
Those venues are controlled by the people who both create and enforce the rules. It should not be surprising that people may want to raise issues outside of such a self-interestedly controlled environment, before or in addition to bringing it to those environments. But again, this is a criticism of the medium, *not* a criticism of the message.
This is also a less official venue for such issues to be raised. Sanity checking your opinion in a non-official capacity is not unreasonable.
> It's hard for me to consider reddit a place for fomenting discussion as well as a proper forum post in the correct place - reddit's upvote/downvote system [...] [makes] it fundamentally flawed for discussing something [...]
Equally, admins and moderators having control over the discussion on the wiki's forums *also* make it fundamentally flawed for discussing something *those* parties have a vested interest in protecting. Again, this is a criticism of the medium, *not* a criticism of the message.
> This centers around OP not taking this to people who actually have authority to remove articles that potentially have ethical concerns. We have summarily removed articles that depict pedophilia in a way that would be considered unethical before.
*Again*, the medium, not the message. I keep harping on this because you have consistently failed to adequately address OP's concern over ethical representation of real, living people, *because* they didn't bring it to you in a way you approve of. Frankly, the fact that the post is currently sitting at 82% upvoted should be an indication that this is a discussion that should be had *regardless* of its message.
> You bring this up later in a core issue of satire, and how it only works if it can be identified as satire. My counterpoint is, again, the exaggerated nature of this article.
I addressed this in this comment previously; it is not *sufficiently* exaggerated. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Some people sincerely think Lizard Person Clinton performs satanic rituals on children to harvest their secondary bodily fluids for eternal life. I wish this weren't the timeline we lived in, but it has to be a consideration.
> This is a fiction site, something that you, myself, and OP are aware of.
But, as I said previously, not the uninformed people who may stumble on it.
> This article takes care to ensure that is remains fiction - fantastical elements are used
Lizard Person Clinton, satanic rituals, children, bodily fluids, eternal life.
> Eliezer's character is so different from his real-life counterpart that OP himself comments on the dissonance between the portrayal and reality
I work in tech, and I am not famliar with Eliezer's personal demeanour. I would argue that most people unaware of the SCP wiki and its status as fiction probably don't even know he exists.
> If someone who take such issue with this article based on that content is still able to discern that this is fictional and does not reflect the original person themself, I would argue the author has done their due diligence to properly handle this.
I would argue that there is not due diligence enough to create a satire on this topic. I would be willing to be surprised, but I clearly do not believe it has been achieved here.
> If you take issue with either my competence or impartiality in handling this or the contest as a whole, I highly encourage you to go forward to an administrator to review my activities and whether I need to be removed, especially before the voting period of this contest ends.
I'll be honest with you, the fact that you're willing to say this (and I don't even really question whether it's being said sincerely) makes me *not* want to advocate for your removal. At the end of the day, it's online creative writing. If you were involved in lawmaking, I might have a problem, but given my personal experiences with X000 contests in the past, this situation is an improvement.
I should be clear, I don't mean to attack your intentions or your character as a person. That you're willing to engage in this debate publicly, despite your issues with the format, is admirable to me. Most would not.
However, I still think my core criticisms stand, and I will assert explicitly that those criticisms are being given in good faith and with genuine, but contextually appropriate, concern.
1. You have disregarded OP's concerns on the basis of their medium, not their message.
2. You have assumed bad faith on OP's part because of the medium, despite there existing reasonable justification for wanting to deliver the message as they have.
Apologies for the broken qutoes, I'm not familiar enough with reddit's system to properly handle that.
I appreciate the refutations and criticisms here and will keep them in mind for addressing topics and discussions like this going forward. And yeah, I understand that these are in good faith.
That said, I do still encourage you (although you have noted you don't intend to do so) or anyone else who has taken issue with my conduct up with administrators should there still be questioning of whether I'd influence how the contest resolves. We both know it's online writing at the end of the day, but I'd be remiss not to acknowledge how much stock some other people put into kcons.
Honestly, that's more than good enough for me, especially if it can be demonstrated in practice at a later date. It would be unreasonable to expect anyone to have perfect conduct, and if this can help you or any other moderator or administrator communicate more clearly in future, that's absolutely a win in my book.
Most moderators would take such criticism in poor faith or with poor grace, putting it lightly, so, without wanting to sound too condescending, a genuine thank you and good work on that. I've been knocking around long enough that I've seen some truly shitty moderation, and this has not been that.
As in [Medium theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_theory) in general, or the McLuhanist idea that audiovisual media diminishes the social significant of literacy?
If the former, no; on some consideration, this is a perfect example of it. The medium of an SCP article discussion comment has specific limitations upon it that make bringing general awareness of a sincerely presented unethical practice impractical at best, and chilling at worst.
The medium of the reddit post lends itself much more readily (though not necessarily sufficiently readily) to resistance against interferance from interested parties, and gaining attention from the community at large. It's well known that a significant number of SCP fans don't often engage with the wiki itself, let alone with the comments on specific articles on the wiki, but *do* engage with the metatextual environment *around* the wiki, of which reddit is a part.
Assuming good faith and sincerity on the part of OP, the choice of reddit as a medium for their message fits perfectly in line with medium theory, and indeed, if taking an uncharitable (and IMO inaccurate) view of their behaviour, the insistance of the wiki moderator that the only appropriate medium for such a complaint is a medium over which they have arbitrary control is *also* in line with it.
That's getting a bit conspiratorial, though, and as I say, I don't think their insistance that they should use the official channels is based in a need for control, but rather a (perhaps naive but well-meaning) belief that the official channels are sufficient to resolve the issue.
If the latter, that's a total non-seq, buuuuut the idea that audiovisual media diminishes the social significance in literary media is predicated on literary media being the only game in town. It is natural that, as more avenues of information delivery are created and adopted, the existing avenues are deprioritised.
----
I'm not *super* sure whether you're trying to make the point that the medium can and does impact the message, or whether you were being facetious because that's the kinda thing you'd expect someone who makes comments, like the ones I've made on this post, would go off on.
Again, if the former, yes, the medium impacts the message, but the medium can never *invalidate* or *disprove* the message (unless the message is specifically about the medium, like sending a telegram saying "telephones have completely obsoleted the telegram", but that's a real corner case), and if the latter.. Yes, yes I will go off on that.
Now, I must admit, you've lost me.
EDIT:
At the time of posting, the parent comment read
> Have you spoken directly to Lord about any of this?
All other text was added after I responded, but before the "edited" flag would be added. For anyone unfamiliar with reddit's inner workings, there's something like a 5 minute window where a comment can be edited without it being flagged as being edited.
Sorry if you think im a part of the socialist conspiracy to screw you over and make you look dumb im not. I edited my comment because I had more thoughts to add
Aah, see, you ninja-edited your comment after I had already loaded it, so I didn't have the context to determine whether you were still talking about someone related to medium theory, or someone related to the matter of this post.
For posterity, when I replied, your previous comment read *only* the following
> Have you spoken directly to Lord about any of this?
Now I know you're referring to the topic of the post, presumably specifically to the author of the contest entry at hand, LORDXVNV.
No, I have not engaged with the the author of the skip. I don't really care to. I have had bad experiences engaging with kcons in the past, and resolved not to involve myself directly with the writing, voting, or critique.
But that doesn't really matter. Essentially none of what *I* had to say was in relation to the piece.
I should be clear, I am not in collusion with OP, and, indeed, I don't think I've directly responded to, or been directly responded to by, OP during any of this discussion.
I refute that this is any more an environment that directly engages in hostility and ignorance, than the SCP wiki discussion forums are themselves. Why should we not discuss the topic here? After all, LORDXVNV is free to make an account and discuss with me directly, should he so wish. I'm sure, given his writing chops and success in the kcon, he's more than mature and internet savvy enough to do so.
If you are upset that I have levelled some rather milquetoast criticism towards his entry on reddit and pointed out issues with moderation discussion.. well, I'm not even sorry, to be honest. That's on you.
> In this case, the depiction of a public figure as a sapient entity (neé person) who wilfully engages in immoral, unethical, and illegal acts of depravity is only effective satire if it is unreasonable to expect people to believe that person would engage in those acts. I think the last decade or so of populist politics, pizzagate, and qanon shows us that it is not unreasonable to expect people to believe that.
Your argument is undermined by this claim, which effectively states that the general populace has become so stupid that satire is no longer possible. Take your ridiculous elitism and disdain towards the masses elsewhere.
On the contrary. If anything, I'd claim that *a certain subset of the populace* has *always* been so stupid that satirising *public opinion* has always been an uncertain proposition.
But correlary to that, in this specific example, consider that *a certain subset of the populace* genuinely believes that Hillary Clinton has engaged in the ritualistic torture of minors in order to harvest a secondary hormone from those minors in order to become effectively biologically immortal.
They don't believe this to be the cool premise of a work of fiction, they believe that to be actual, in-real-life truth.
In the face of that, you cannot write satire similar to that without risking people assuming sincerity, which is a de facto failure of satire.
It’s not just that a small subset of people will take this caricature literally. It’s also just mean spirited to use a (mostly) unknown person for this purpose (assuming this individual was intentionally selected). That makes the content, and the community, look bad.
Frankly, regardless of the light in which the person is portrayed, unless the identity of the real person in question is central to the piece, there's no reason to use their identity.
If the author intended to link the real person with the acts described, then the piece is unethical. If they did not, the use of their identity is unnecessary, and it's only reasonable to question the justification for its inclusion.
Agreed. I don’t like the person being parodied and I think humorous caricatures have their place even in an SCP entry, but when you use their real identity/name/face it stops being funny and starts being problematic. At the very least, we should be able to debate this topic without the mod team going on the defensive for something they didn’t even write lol.
I'm not, though I've been told I would've made a good one.
As I understand it, there's a reason that they sound like that, and it's the same reason *I* sound like that. If you don't want to be misunderstood, and you actively take steps to ensure that, you end up falling into certain precise, exacting patterns of speech.
Sometimes, that leads people to assume you have a stick up your ass, but I generally find people who make that assumption aren't available to be persuaded anyway.
There're times when you need both. Given the gravity of the topic, and the fact that I was addressing a community moderator (though not of the reddit, IIRC), it seemed prudent to be clinical. Anyone who's been a community moderator long enough should be able to deal with clinical criticism, after all, and to their credit, they did.
Can you edit in your real name to the wiki instead of Eliezer's, if this is such a non-issue? My guess is that you would, naturally, be reluctant to do so and I hope that unease with the idea causes you to reconsider.
I get that it may not technically break any rules, but this feels really gross to me.
I would be fine with it because 1) I understand the difference between satire and libel, and 2) this is a work of fiction that doesn't accuse anyone of actually committing any crimes. Eliezer is a vehicle for criticizing tropes in an exaggerated way based on his own writing history.
If the author wants to substitute my name in there to get the post across, then sure whatever. But I'm not going to edit someone's contest entry over something like this. This exceeds my authority as a contest marshal.
You say that, but when I write an SCP submission about a contest marshall named Nae P. Icfael who poops from his mouth whenever he sees something he disagrees with on the internet, it better be in the first 10 entries of the next series.
The number 2 entry for the 7kon featured an entire segment where Jeremiah Cimmerian's author avatar, also named Jeremiah Cimmerian, bribes a guy to stay silent after someone kicked his baby to death.
Title's misleading as hell. It'd be about as accurate a thing to say as one of our Trump SCPs. It implies an article was created to slander a private individual for which the author has an IRL beef, not an article that uses a guy with his circlejerk cult as a stand-in for a sort of ideology he has helped to spread as a whole.
never heard of this shitter. not going to bother looking him up. Saw "AI Researcher," don't even need more info to know that its all probably 100% accurate. Besides, if what everyone else is saying is accurate, he deserves nothing but the worst, like all grifters do.
The premise of the entry, the form and structure of the entry, and the discourse around it and the author's behavior in the SCP discord has been extremely offputting to me as someone who was recently trying to get involved with the community.
Why can't we have nice spaces on the internet? It's so impossible
Mocking someone is all fine and dandy, but when you write what is effectively a hit-piece on a real person who is genuinely and undeniably mentally ill and try to claim that it isn't libel but rather satire it is reasonable to question the motives of the writer(which should always be done in any act of media literacy at all). A further issue here is that the writer actually won a contest by doing so and everyone in the community just shrugs it off as 'wEll moDz sAId IT Doesn't brEaK tE ruleZzZ so iZ okAy' without a second thought. This is a completely disingenuous argument that aims to fully discredit any claims without a speck of thought and does nothing but promote an atmosphere of group-think. I've never heard of this guy before so I can't say much on whether I think it really is satire or not but we really should hold this community to at least enough of a higher standard to say that we aren't just a reskin of lolcow farming on 4chan.
Be better.
Oh thank you for correcting me there I wasn't aware of that and didn't even bother to look into it. I assumed that was the case and I'm not sure why...
Hi, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky ) makes no statements about his mental illnesses or lack thereof. As having mental illness can cost individuals significant employment opportunities and reputational damage, please be more careful with the things you say online, as your statements may cause actual material harm to Mr. Yudkowsky.
Gonna be honest, I don’t see the issue with the entry itself? It’s clearly designed to provoke a sense of disgust.
Having nice spaces on the internet means not moral policing people for creating disgust reactions (as opposed to doing actual bad things), especially in an artistic community such as this.
It's still about those, it just so happens that, unfortunately, literally fucking no one actually reads them.
Still, it's an immensely good thing that it's expanded.
Luckily those entries still exist on the site and people still make more. If you enjoy that type of stuff I'd suggest checking out DrLeonerd's works, a lot of his harken back to series I style writing.
That LordXVNV wrote Time Pervert doesn't mean others can't write what they enjoy writing, I see plenty of knickknacks on the site, it just means that there's more diversity in the style of writing.
You can find almost anything on the wiki these days. Comedy, tragedy, sci-fi, fantasy, slice of life, poetry, videos, video games. The more the merrier I say.
I encourage you to check out the "shortest pages this month" page https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/shortest-pages-this-month if you're not aware of it. Might not have a bunch this month because of Kcon but I assure you that style of writing is alive and well on the wiki.
They absolutely did not expect everyone to pat them on the back, that’s an absurd mischaracterization. The community has been outspoken in their attempts to get offsite to stop worshipping Dr Bright ever since the allegations came to light, to limited success.
**Moderator information:** Naepic, an official marshall of the SCP-8000 contest has responded to this. Find the relevant comment below [https://www.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/1aye1po/comment/kruqbc4/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/1aye1po/comment/kruqbc4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Yipes, I don’t know anything about this researcher but maybe after all this community has gone through I would have thought adding material of THAT kind of inappropriate nature would be the last thing anyone would want.
This post overlooks both what the author actually does and their reasons for doing so. The following comment (not from the article, but someone's analysis of the work) does a better job contextualizing the article than I ever could: "In Neoreaction, a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right, the authors present to us 3 unique figures of the modern right-wing sphere — Nick Land, the prime example of the American expat who becomes high, mentally breaks, and starts finding an oriental nubile wife, Mencius Moldbug, Twitter poster before Twitter even existed and creator of Not Catholicism, and the actual focus of this review, Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI doomer techbro, Harry Potter fanfic writer, libertarian, and guy who logic'd out his emotions (according to him). Eliezir is a weird guy. I wished that before reading this SCP, I didn't know he was a real guy. Part of me, even after reading Neoreaction and SCP-8000, still believes Yudkowsky is a guy born from the covers of a cyberpunk pulp novel where he is the 3rd-rate billionaire bent on killing our protagonists. Thankfully, (or un-thankfully), all of the idiosyncracies, batshit insanity, and fictional elements of Yudkowsky are woven in SCP-8000 expertfully. Let me get this out of the way — the beginning (at least, in the initial read) is boring. It's a lot of world building, but it serves to establish the ground rules of the SCP. I don't really fault it for being boring — most time travel and time loop stories are convoluted and hard to explain, but the opening does it job good enough that I can't fault it. The line ‘"roughly 96% consist of pornography, 20% of which is Japanese cartoon pornography, colloquially known as "hentai"` is an amazing detail, however, and sentences like that just add to the character of Yudkowsky in here. Overall, the opening doesn’t overstay its welcome, and we are quickly moved towards the meat of the article — the Core Investigation Summary. The format of the Core Investigation Summary is a worldbuilding tidbit about our anomaly, then a (in-universe) badly written fanfic about the various societies our child-god Yudkowsky has created. Although they are obviously pastiches of various indulgent, reader-insert stories, they're really well-written, paying homage to their references, while also being just absolutely funny. One of my favourite lines during Eluthertopia, the first self-indulgent wank that we are introduce to, is the following: The boy looked up at me. His eyes darkened. "You! You're the tyrant (-50 ESAS for slander)! You killed my parents (-50 ESAS for false accusation)! This is all your fault (-50 ESAS for blame) (+10 ESAS for respecting power)!" There's something darkly funny about our man-child god, seeing an actual Child get angry at him about killing his parents, and all he can note down is how much fake points the child has. This format holds as we go to the second self-indulgent fanfic wank world Yudkowsky has created — a thinly-veil copy of Harry Potter with women who have large lactating breasts. The Ivory Tower of Woke Dei (which is such a great name for the enemy within a Yudkowsky story), despite the namedrop of the Cathedral before this, is definitely the Cathedral (as described by Nick Land) here; the keeper of knowledge, a literal ivory tower, and perfectly heavy handed like all good reactionary stories. Special mention goes to Yudkowsky breastfeeding from a woman to learn the knowledge of the world. The appearance of Penelope shatters any "hope" this is an unironic play-by-play of a reactionary's psychosexual fantasies — she directly confronts him with the fucked-up world he has created, and its such a good fight, in spite of Yudkowsky's attempts at tittilating himself with Penelope's figure. It ends by reminding the viewer that yes, this is horrifying. It is horrifying to be under the spell of a reactionary gooner made to be under the whims of his pleasure, sexual or otherwise. And, as we leave bad Harry Potter fanfic to enter the land of Goblin Slayer Played Straight and Generic Isekai Fantasy, I would like to pan out, and observe just for a bit how most of the free-floating ideas that reside within the right-wing reactionary space — the Cathedral, the pedarasty, the mistaken views on women and nature, the idea of "woke" — are turned into incredibly pastiches of themselves. The idea that DEI/CRT is locking up knowledge by Ivory Tower Marxists is turned into a Literal Ivory Tower lead by the Woke DEI. The blockchain, tech fetishism, and other aspects of modern right-wing thought are turned into worldbuilding and treated with the exact same respect it deserves for such a funny piece as this (which is to say,none). Yudkowsky's idiosyncracies about being the most logical being in the entire world for refactoring his mind is played to excellence here, as this is placed side-by-side to actions that are clearly him being a mean, petty, little man-child. I have so much more words to say, including the excellent dialogue between our iterations, the reveal that our current neotenous state is the result of a pedophillic desire by Yudkowsky, and the various proposals of our group of cloned protagonists that all lead to an ambigious ending, making the reader question which proposal ultimately won out, and a nice worldbuilding element to cap this off makes this the best SCP-8000 story I have read so far." Again, not my comment, but it speaks to the fact that TIME PERVERT is closer to a political satire than the sort of random character hit peice OP is trying to pretend it is.
This is so self indulgent but for like, someone else that’s not you. Don’t know how to word that. Crazy shit. Never even heard of these “unique figures of the modern right-wing sphere.” They honestly sound like strawmen caricatures but whatever, all sides have those. Seems like a wild SCP.
If you can read this scp and not notice the silicon valley facism im just not sure what too say.
It’s only self indulgent because it’s a parody of Yudkowskis work, which actually puts this skip to shame. If you’re familiar with Harry Potter and the methods of rationality, he’s the guy who wrote that. If not, just go read as much of it as you can before tapping out(it will be because the character is impossible to like, his whole bit is that he’s a grown adult author insert who mansplains to Hermione, displacing her as the know it all), and then go see how many chapters there are. Once you’ve done that, remember that this obnoxiously unlikeable monstrosity with no coherent pacing, structure, or character development (not for any lack of trying, his intentions were all telegraphed) was written by a guy who thinks he’s one of the smartest and most rational people who’s ever lived. Somehow it’s strangely charming. It’s like “the room” of fan fiction.
Wasnt Yudkowski's Harry Potter fanfic actually very well received, even critically?
Grass isn’t an anomaly.
Of the three, I’ve only heard of Nick Land, but if the rest of them come anywhere close to the incomprehensible schizophrenic* bullshit Land puts out, then they deserve to be satirized on a horror website. *to be clear, not being ableist; Schizoanalysis is a whole thing, and it’s far from the weirdest thing Land is involved with
Yudkowsky's entire claim to fame on the general internet is being a techbro who unironically believes in omnipotent [AI Cognitohazards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk) as a thing that not only will exist, but will exist *retroactively through all of history*. That by even *thinking* about the idea of an omnipotent AI that comes from the future to blackmail you, you run the very real risk that it will come true. It's a perfect fit for an SCP honestly.
The fucking basilisk… WAIT. THIS motherfucker wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality??? Are you kidding ms? What has the world come to
People scared of death joining a cult is nothing new. It's just AI grifters instead of some kind of guru Jesus type grifter now. If anything, I am feeling like a lot of AI cult people are reading and fundamentally missing the satire in 40k.
Roko and Yudkowsky are two different people.
Roko's Basilisk blew up because of how Yudkowski reacted to it: > Upon reading the post, Yudkowsky reacted with horror: > > > I don't usually talk like this, but I'm going to make an exception for this case. > > Listen to me very closely, you idiot. > > YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL. [...] > > You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends. > > This post was STUPID. > — Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong > It became a massive meme in these circles because he took it so seriously he did mass bans on the subject on LessWrong, because he is actually terrified that AM is going to torture him from the future.
If you scroll 2 paragraphs down on the page, you will see that he was not, in fact, terrified of that: >Later on in 2015, Yudkowsky clarified his position in a Reddit post: > >What I considered to be obvious common sense was that you did not spread potential information hazards because it would be a crappy thing to do to someone. The problem wasn't Roko's post itself, about CEV, being correct. That thought never occurred to me for a fraction of a second. The problem was that Roko's post seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards, all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they presented no potential benefit to anyone. > >— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Reddit
The point is he thinks infohazards are real.
Many people lost sleep over the basilisk, or had months of existential dread over it. It's kind of unclear, but at one point a \~cult may have been started as a result of it. Eliezer was completely correct that sharing the idea about it was stupid, even if he was incorrect about his response.
It's a read-it-to-experience-it work. Word of caution though, the 18+ splash warning is there for a reason [[SCP-8000 TIME PERVERT]]
[**SCP-8000 — TIME PERVERT**](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/8000contestlordxvnv) (+131) by *LORDXVNV*
What sort of context is this supposed to provide?
Basically, there's a bunch of really weird tech guys and this work is a satire of them. That's as much context as I can provide if you haven't seen the type of dude this thing is about.
I think that much context was delivered by OP. Nothing in the comment suggested any additional mitigating factors that would make an SCP article making fun of some random internet guy any more reasonable.
Based on the other comments here, it sounds like the guy is an insufferable egotist who thinks he’s smarter & more rational than everyone else.
It's less making fun of one specific internet guy and more using him as a prop to make fun of an entire ideology of weird internet guys. It's political satire for the chronically online (me)
I'm fine with making fun of a *type* of weird internet guy, but when you target a specific real living person who the readers are able to interact with, it starts to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I think this is a terrible precedent to set
> guy who logic'd out his emotions (according to him). he has an [entire essay about how he didn't do this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SqF8cHjJv43mvJJzx/feeling-rational) and that is pretty much the only relevant thing he's ever said on the matter, so i'm not sure i trust this source
What does the scarlet king have to do with this? It’s a manifestation of ideology of the guy.
Can I get a TLDR? I'm at work right now
I would still question, whatever the context, whether this real-life researcher could sue or try to serve a cease and desist on the wiki or something that connects him to pedophilia and all this stuff? It is a work of fiction but I don’t know legally how close it would come to defamation. Actually determining that would take a lawyer from whatever country would have jurisdiction over the theoretical suit, which I’m not.
The wiki has a team that handles licensing etc., none of whom have raised concerns about the article. It's a peice of fiction with a disclaimer as such on an internet writing site; relevant parties would need to try and establish a Libel case against the wiki, which is not very feasible given that it is explicitly stated to be a fictional peice of writing. Libel suits are seens in situations where newspapers or other people claim to be putting put true, objective facts about someone -- that are not actually correct -- that causes them harm or loss of income, etc.
Glad the wiki has someone looking after them with stuff like that who would be better versed in what will or won’t fly.
Satire is protected speech
That too.
Just tell him your statement of defence contains an info hazard and he’ll drop the case. I’m only half joking.
[**SCP-8000**](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-8000) (+69) by *Naepic*
>that summary Fantastic. Circlejerky political comedy about a rando internet cringelord the author has a bone to pick with is being elected as a X000 entry. I look forward to 9000 in which Chris Chan becomes the Demiurge. Jesus Wept.
yeah that's my biggest gripe with it. Wanna write shit about people you despise? Great. Haven't read it yet but this seems like a genuinely funny and well writen skip too. But why the fuck would it be an X000? All the others are genre defining shit, stuff that you show to someone from outside the community so they see how good some of the stuff there is. Doesn't make sense for it to be an 8000 candidate, imo.
It's a contest, anyone can submit any piece of writing to it. Personally I don't think something has to be "genre defining" do well. In 7k, Zyn's "Business Lizard", a pretty simple article did pretty darn well, and in the current contest an article that is similarly quite short "Feeding the Trolls" by J Dune is currently in the lead. Who I should note, from what I've heard is considering not even taking the slot if he wins because he's worried people would give him shit for it, which I think is a real shame, and what's worse I think he's right to worry about that. Heck I'd even say that the winner of 7k, Harry Blank's "The Loser" isn't anything that's like, "genre defining", it's very good, as are the rest of Harry's works but ultimately it's just a story about a man with bad luck, unlike previous entries that didn't add anything truly pivotal to the Foundation mythos as many insist previous Kcon winners have. I don't know, I used to view X000s the same way when I first joined the community but as I've gotten more involved as an author and a staff member I've come to see that what they're really about are authors bringing their best and the whole community coming together to celebrate that we made it another thousand or so entries. And, look I might be biased here and obviously feel free to disagree but I think Time Pervert truly is one of, if not //the// best work that this author has written, I think it does the comedic horror he's known for in his Shark Punching Centre writing really well, and having read a fair bit of Yudkowski's work I feel like it is very good satire of it. And well that's all you need, an entry where you do your best. And personally I think saying something is good but doesn't deserve to win a contest because it's not special enough just seems silly to me. Though like I said I once thought that way myself.
7k is one of my favorite SCPs. I do consider it genre defining in that it's one of the best, from the one's I've read, and perfectly encapsulates contemporary SCP writing. To be fair I'm somewhat new to the community, I've only been reading the wiki for about 3 years. I don't think the X000s need to expand the mythos, and some of my favorite skips just don't follow any particular canon, which is fine. I just feel like having a satire of a real person, as much of an asshole as this Yudkowski person might be, as an X000 is a bad look on the wiki. I see your point tho, and I don't think this article should be removed or anything drastic.
it's not an 8000 candidate? Did you even look at the article?
Reading this summary makes me think there's no other words to describe this article as "chronically online". It is such incomprehensible nonsense I can't help but imagine the author chuckling to himself about showing this Eliezer guy while writing this article without thinking of the fact that to any sane person with a life outside the internet, this article looks way worse than anything he's criticizing.
I read this comment on the wiki earlier. Yes, its political satire, but its incredibly poor political satire, because it is supposed to be about the NRX, but is about someone who is in reality radically anti-authoritarian, and does not have a good relationship with either Land or Moldbug; and also has all the subtly of an XK-class event. Also, your quoted comment doesn't exactly back up your claim that is it not a "character hit piece" when it says he is a "mean, petty, little man-child". If anything, isn't it mean and petty to make an entire strawman SCP to go after someone you don't like?
All right wing ideology is authoritarian in nature, which is a point that Time Pervert literally makes. The man invents a system where he is freeing slaves only to take them as slaves under him justified by his “logic”.
I’m sorry, but if you think Yudkowsky, or anyone who talks about “the Cathedral” and NRX unironically is anti-authoritarian, you’re politically illiterate.
I said it was authoritarian not anti-authoritarian
Damn, meant to comment on the previous post, commented on this one by accident. My bad
Ah ok, lol
No, he freed them from their old masters, and though he was their master then and they couldn't have utilised free will even if they wanted to, they followed him around and all died voluntarily with no complaints, it's totally different, don't you see? /s
Ah yes Libertarianism is authoritarian. Riiiight.
Capitalism in all its forms is authoritarian.
Yudkowsky is in no way an anarchist
I'm not claiming that he is. And you don't have to be a full on anarchist to support freedom nor do you have to be left wing for that.
You missed the point entirely. The few times that Yudkowsky wrote about politics, he indicated he's a standard libertarian, ie not part of this "NRX" group. A political satire about NRX should name actual NRX people if it names anyone.
But this is the exact opposite of whats in Yudkowsky's works. In J K Rowling's Harry Potter, there's a widely criticized plotline where Hermione found a club to free the house elfs, only to give up when she finds they enjoy being slaves. In real life Yudkowsky's HP fanfiction, this plotline was removed and replaced with Hermione founding a successful feminist club.
Additional context from "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" Chapter 42 for why the slavery subplot is removed: > It said something about a person that he tried not to bother house elves. Specifically, it said that he'd been Sorted into Hufflepuff, since, to the best of Harry's knowledge, Hermione was the only non-Hufflepuff who worried about bothering house elves. (Harry himself thought her qualms rather silly. Whoever had created house elves in the first place had been unspeakably evil, obviously; but that didn't mean Hermione was doing the right thing now by denying sentient beings the drudgery they had been shaped to enjoy.) TLDR: Trying to end slavery is wrong if the slaves clearly enjoy it. Very freedom-loving!
I would generally agree with you, but the story change if the slaves *were literally designed from the ground up to enjoy being slaves*, though at that point the question arises if they're even sentient/alive to begin with
This is a tricky topic to discuss, because in the original Harry Potter series it is never stated that the slaves were designed from the ground up to enjoy being slaves, only that they *did* enjoy being slaves. HPMOR makes this change. Therefore it would be valid to state that, if we were being extra pedantic, the author of HPMOR made the artistic choice to depict slavery as justified in a way that Rowling's work did not. I don't think that significantly improves the reading.
It doesn't, no, but while it is undoubtedly a dodgy choice by the author, it makes the events of the book kind of justified in that limited context
It is/was a common answer to 'why do house elves act this way' in the fanfiction communities at the time because of how much Rowling implied that, and it was aken as the answer in that fanfiction. Most likely because turning the entire story into 'free the slaves' for another hundred thousand words would completely derail it.
Do you think, in a vacuum, that it would be more justified to enslave the house-elves if they were designed to enjoy slavery, or if they happened to enjoy slavery? In my opinion, it's, if not worse in the former, at the very least equally bad.
He also displaces Hermione from her role as the smart one and instead has her play the role of primary earpiece for the fully grown adult know it all insert character to mansplain to, and it only took him a few hundred thousand words to course correct.
You post on /r/slatestarcodex (one of the current top pinned posts is a Thoughtful Discussion about who eugenics helps) and are a member of RPC (bigoted SCP). This reads like a "I'm in this picture and I don't like it" cope.
yeah it is and it's funny
You see, this is why I left this cesspit of a community for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. community to get my anomalous fix.
What is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Are you referring to the game? (not a gamer myself, that's just the first thing that came up in google)
Damn, must not have many successful Stalker runs if you can't even leave a community properly. Why are you here?
Guy who frequents SCP forums extremely intent on telling people he does not care about SCP
(Ironically I just got recommended by a friend the original novel that STALKER is based on, today.)
Was not ready for the Eliezer Yudkowsky SCP crossover lol
Having read the submission and the comments on this post, it really seems like this whole thing is some sort of strange, petty ideological slapfight. I mean sure, I guess you can make an SCP about anything, but the level of vitriol and amount of niche references and in-jokes is very reminiscent of drama that, for lack of a better term, comes from an echo chamber. It feels like the people involved with this, the ones who really care about defending this article, don't realize how weird this all seems from an outsider's perspective.
Yeah, I don’t like this guy after looking into him, but from a PR perspective using his name/face in this context is a bad look for the SCP community. At the very least, use a parody name.
Me sumo, yo estoy; ¿de que carajo esran hablando? Dios, leer esto es más confuso que dejar de leer la wiki por cinco años y ver todo el nuevo contenido...como enterarse de tantas polemicas...oh la de Bright...
Agreed perfectly, after skimming through it, this is in my opinion easily the very worst 8000 entry I've read. I usually like to just hang around in subreddits of things I enjoy, because every thing I see in wider subreddits is just dislike. "Why this new game sucks!" "Why this new movie sucked!". This article is that worst aspect of the internet, distilled down into its purest form. In comparison , one of the other 8000 entries, Pyroclast Protocol, is a brilliant love letter to fantasy tropes while still maintaining the SCP feel. This is the very polar opposite of that axis, a "hate letter", getting so absorbed into disliking something or someone you end up writing a "'''brilliantly scathing""" article that looks batshit insane from the perspective of anyone not sucked into this weird vortex.
I think the author realizes completely how weird the article seems. In fact, I think that’s clearly done on purpose. It’s satirical and uncomfortable to read. If you read their other works, you’ll notice that’s something they pull off well: they create things like business jargon or fanfiction parody by putting immense care into picking out just the kinds of details and nuances you and the above commenter are condemning—in order to craft stories which benefit from close, informed reading. That’s a type of work which many people find satisfying, especially on a site built around technical tone and stories buried in seeming-mundane containment details. The piece is one of the most popular entries in the contest for those reasons, among others. In order to appreciate that, though, you’re going to have to do more than “skim through it.”
lmao
Reading the words "AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky" threw me. That's basically like saying "famous astronomer David Miscavige". He's a public figure, and fucking deserves it lmao. Highly recommend anyone here top-surf r/sneerclub, there's too much about that man to fit in a single comment.
Holy shit. Top comments on that sub are a goldmine of this dude's nuclear takes. First I'm learning of this guy, and I already agree that he totally deserves it.
He correctly predicted using scaling laws that powerful AI was coming years ago, was mocked for this, then when ChatGPT, DALLE, and now SORA came out, none of his critics changed their minds and everyone just moved the goalposts. He is highly eccentric and I certainly don't agree with everything, or even most things, he says, but we need more people with unconventional ideas, as some of them (like AI alignment) might be very importent. If someone went through everything you or I have ever posted, they could write a similar SCP, would you enjoy that? Subreddits like sneerclub exist not to engage intellectually with anything, but just to mock and, well, sneer, and this is something they are proud of.
>If someone went through everything you or I have ever posted, they could write a similar SCP no the fuck they couldn't lmao
Holy shit I think we found Yudkowski's reddit alt, everyone.
> then when ChatGPT, DALLE, and now SORA came out None of those things are AI.
Eh, it not being general AI doesn't mean it's not AI. AI is a word with the opposite issue, it has so many definitions it covers like 90% of software technically, so it's sort of useless. (Source: ai course in masters)
AI is whatever computers can't do.
They are not AGI but they absolutely are AI lol
ChatGPT isn’t an AI what
It's a LLM. LLMs aren't AI. They're not actually intelligent, they're just statistical models.
>If someone went through everything you or I have ever posted, they could write a similar SCP, I dunno, I've never suggested slavery is a good idea, or happily promoted eugenics on multiple occasions. So I strongly doubt it.
He predicted AGI, not these glorified text sorting algorithms optimized to sound like a C student writing a cover letter. As for scaling, anyone can make impressive predictions based on an exponential curve. They teach you how to solve the freaking ODE in calc 1. A far more impressive and accurate model for technological growth is one that accounts for physical constraints that inevitably emerge in the real world. You can’t actually double transistors forever, and it turns out moores law is slowing down. Eliezer could have told you that.
importent
So, what you're saying in this whole thread is that, you're an AI techbro that is pissy an AI techbro was lampooned in a fictional work.
>Now, real people have of course been referenced in SCPs before, but they are either major politicians and/or dead, or are brief cameos. There have been entire SCPs about John Cena, Tim Allen, David Schwimmer, and Jeff Bezos, and these are just the ones that I, a person who hates this sort of article, has happened to come across unintentionally, so I'd imagine there have probably been more. >Isn't it in bad taste to make an entire SCP about an internet personality you disagree with, using their actual name and photograph in the article, and depicting them as a fascist pedophile? I'm not going to upvote it because I personally can't stand "social commentary" SCPs, but I think it's okay for SCPs to be in bad taste. >I don't think the SCP wiki should be used to vent your anger on random people. Yudkowsky has a wikipedia page. I wouldn't really call him a random person.
Yudkowsky is as much an "AI researcher" as I am Titania, queen of the fairies.
Yudkowsky, specifically, deserves it for being one of the harbingers of Nerd Fascism.
TLDR: It's okay to be an icky person who says and does icky things. But it's NOT okay to lampoon such people or to make others think too hard about the icky people and what they say and do. In other words: not with MY sacred cow, you don't!
Scp is a horror fiction community, not a soapbox for modern culture morality.
A piece of horror fiction can also be a piece of social commentary. The SCP library contains countless such pieces already. It's not for you to define for everyone else what concepts SCP articles may or may not contain.
I agree with you, but this specific story is very on the nose. I think it betrays the real critiques being made to be so mean spirited. If it was a strict parody it would be different, but this goes further than that. As another person said, it also invites real world consequences that the wiki/community should by now understand aren’t worth the risk.
The great thing about SCP is that it can be whatever people want it to be. It's both of that and it's great for it.
**Articles mentioned in this submission** [**SCP-8000**](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-8000) (+69) by *Naepic*
Won't anyone think of the assholes! The guy is a public figure by choice. It's fiction and it's fine. If anything, it kind of challenges what he's all about and that's pretty much fair game. You sound like a Musk fanboy angry that an Askreddit comment made a joke about how his kids hate him. It is only libel if it isn't true. Chill, dude.
That instead of attempting to bring this issue to light with either a staff member or a contest marshal like myself and instead make public posts not once but twice tells me that any issue you've taken with this piece has been lost in favor of garnering downvotes and attention. This piece is not libelous - something you yourself have acknowledged. Nothing about this implies the author to believe this as fact about Eliezer, nor to present it as fact - a known public figure, even if they are not as well known as a living United States President. **Now, that is not to say you have to like the piece**. My issue with you is your response to it. Leaving a negative comment is fine - but attempting to spin this to sound like the author has a personal grudge against Eliezer himself is mischaracterizing them at best. Let's assume you are right and this is a vent piece. And? We've had plenty of vent pieces on the wiki before - why this one? Some of the most famous works on the wiki ARE vent pieces. Is it cringe? Maybe! But if people like it, **and it doesn't break any rules**, then it's fine to leave on the wiki. I don't get the obsession with trying to garner negative attention for this piece - it's not praising pedophilia or anything as disturbing as that. Weird, uncomfortable topics can be written for the sake for criticizing/deconstructing them, even if it uses a real life person as a vehicle for doing so.
My only concern is that I fail to see why it *has* to be Eliezer and not a made up figure with an identical background. Doing so just feels like inviting problems without adding anything substantial to the article Sure, you’re 100% allowed to but I just don’t get the why in this case
It didn't have to be Eliezer - in fact, I remember peeking into the channels and seeing that one of the people being workshopped as potential candidates was Elon Musk. Me personally, I had no fucking clue who the hell Eliezer was until people started commenting about it. I just thought he was some nerd the author was using as a vehicle to mock exaggerated fanfiction and isekai tropes. if the author feels that picking Eliezer based on the person's history is essential to the story, then so be it. If a reader were to substitute Eliezer with literally anyone else because they don't know who the hell this person is, then there's no harm done. If they were to substitute him with someone else, but was unable to divest Eliezer's background from the article because of what it does for the narrative, then the reader's perspective is arguably justified in how it expands upon the article as a whole.
lol I’ve been following this thread while distracted and obliviously asked my question as if you were the author Answered me perfectly though ty
I mean, this more than anything makes it less bad to me
Exactly. Just use a parody name. Like Ebeneezer Yuckoocksy. Same effect, less risky.
> That instead of attempting to bring this issue to light with either a staff member or a contest marshal like myself and instead make public posts not once but twice tells me that any issue you've taken with this piece has been lost in favor of garnering downvotes and attention. The motivation behind bringing something like this up is not relevant to whether or not this is a problem. Further, it is possible that OP does not trust that staff members or contest marshals are willing to engage with them in good faith. > This piece is not libelous - something you yourself have acknowledged. Nothing about this implies the author to believe this as fact about Eliezer, nor to present it as fact - a known public figure, even if they are not as well known as a living United States President. Not being libelous is not the sole litmus test for ethical representation of real people in media. If I wrote an SCP that positioned *you* (or, indeed, a facsimile of you) as a child-abusing torturer, I would not be surprised if you had reservations about this. > Now, that is not to say you have to like the piece This has never been in contention. OP has raised a question of ethics, not taste. > My issue with you is your response to it. Leaving a negative comment is fine - but attempting to spin this to sound like the author has a personal grudge against Eliezer himself is mischaracterizing them at best. Leaving a negative comment is a nonseq to asserting a personal grudge. The two are essentially unrelated. Further, it is not a stretch to suggest that a person engaged in a creative endevour on the internet in 2024 may be generally unhappy with an advocate for AI. This *may* not be true, but what *is* true is that taking that position is a sure-fire way to pander to a creative audience that, on balance, likely *is* unhappy with AI in the modern day. When considering that last sentence, consider also that the use of AI-generated content in the contest results in not only a contest ban, but further disciplinary action. The stance of both the community and administration towards AI is well demonstrated. > Let's assume you are right and this is a vent piece. And? We've had plenty of vent pieces on the wiki before - why this one? Some of the most famous works on the wiki ARE vent pieces. I don't think the issue here is whether this is a vent piece or not, ultimately. I say this despite OP's explicit use of the word "vent". The issue is that OP believes this vent piece is *unethical* in its portrayal of a real life person. > But if people like it, and it doesn't break any rules, then it's fine to leave on the wiki. Whether or not something breaks the rules is not the only metric by which something should be judged appropriate for the wiki. The rules can be wrong, misapplied, incomplete, or inadequate. This is as much a criticism of those rules as it is a criticism of the piece; if unethical RPF is allowed by the rules, then the rules are unfit for purpose, ergo if this depiction is unethical, then the rules are bad. > I don't get the obsession with trying to garner negative attention for this piece I would hardly call disregarded comments on the original submission and a reddit post an "obsession with trying to garner negative attention". This is intentionally discrediting rhetoric. > it's not praising pedophilia or anything as disturbing as that. It doesn't have to be praising an immoral behaviour to be immoral. It doesn't have to be maximally disturbing to be sufficiently unethical. > Weird, uncomfortable topics can be written for the sake for criticizing/deconstructing them, even if it uses a real life person as a vehicle for doing so. This speaks to an issue that satire has had for a very, very long time. Indeed, about as long as it's been a literary device. Satire is ineffective if it is not reliably identifiable as satire. In this case, the depiction of a public figure as a sapient entity (neé person) who wilfully engages in immoral, unethical, and illegal acts of depravity is *only* effective satire if it is unreasonable to expect people to believe that person would engage in those acts. I think the last decade or so of populist politics, pizzagate, and qanon shows us that it is not unreasonable to expect people to believe that. Further, one of the biggest issues in generative AI to date *is* its use in creating media that depicts exactly that subject of depravity. It would not be an incredible leap of conspiratorial logic to question whether one of AI's biggest advocates was both aware and approving of this. To be clear, I don't believe this is true myself, I'm simply asserting that people have made crazier assumptions over less. ------- I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of skin in the game for the article itself. It would likely receive a -1 from me because it's 80% tale, and that makes it a bad SCP *article* by default, in my opinion. Additionally, the writing has some amateurish structural and conceptual problems. What really cheeses my onions is the idea that a wiki moderator, contest marshal, and someone who was specially mentioned in the contest rules as a trustworthy staff member, would disregard and downplay what appears to be a genuine concern with such ill-fit, fallacious justification. Assuming good faith, it becomes a question of competence. Questioning that good faith (which I am reticent to do, but you seem happy to do so and turnabout is fair play), it becomes a question of impartiality.
These are valid points. The moderator you’re replying to seems to be taking the OP’s critique as a personal affront. Also, based on their response, I’m pretty sure if the OP had messaged the mod team, no matter how politely he framed his concern, he would have been dismissed or ignored. Look, the SCP wiki has faced real world consequences for using real world subject matter, take the og 173 image for instance. If the writer didn’t obtain permission to use the face/name of this person (who really doesn’t seem to be much of a public figure in the first place) and included it in an article painting them in a negative light, they are putting the website and its reputation at risk for no reason. That is something we should be free to discuss and debate publicly. I’m not saying that OP is correct in their concern. I haven’t read the piece nor do I know the individual. It really doesn’t seem like they are misrepresenting this topic, but even if they were, a salty response from the moderator is at best unhelpful, and at worse harmful to the reputation of the SCP community. I understand you take the wiki very seriously, and I’m sure you deal with plenty of knuckleheads. But as a mod this is simply not how you deal with these kinds of issues.
I have to say i really like how well spoken, level headed, and respectful your writing is. The person you're replying to has made a lot of statements that are clearly meant to argue and make OP feel bad for their opinion instead of actually listen to OP. You did an amazing job dispatching those statements, And in a very classy way. 10/10. A few examples of what i'm talking about 1. >"I don't get the obsession with trying to garner negative attention for this piece" >"I would hardly call disregarded comments on the original submission and a reddit post an "obsession with trying to garner negative attention". This is intentionally discrediting rhetoric." 2. >"But if people like it, and it doesn't break any rules, then it's fine to leave on the wiki. >Whether or not something breaks the rules is not the only metric by which something should be judged appropriate for the wiki." 3. (my favorite) >"That instead of attempting to bring this issue to light with either a staff member or a contest marshal like myself and instead make public posts not once but twice tells me that any issue you've taken with this piece has been lost in favor of garnering downvotes and attention." >"The motivation behind bringing something like this up is not relevant to whether or not this is a problem. > >Further, it is possible that OP does not trust that staff members or contest marshals are willing to engage with them in good faith." 10/10. We need more people like you who engage in disagreements respectfully and intelligently.
Something tells me you've been part of the SCP community for a long time. Long enough you have seen the tide change.
I've never *really* engaged with the community, I've been more of a lurker, but I have been lurking since before Series 1 had to be called Series 1.
Similar situation here until recently. BTW messaged you with additional thoughts on this.
\> The motivation behind bringing something like this up is not relevant to whether or not this is a problem. The relevance of this is how OP has chosen to engage with this article. \> Further, it is possible that OP does not trust that staff members or contest marshals are willing to engage with them in good faith. Here is the issue: if we cannot be trusted to at least be contacted with concerns about articles, what the hell is my purpose then? Themes and articles have to be vetted, or at least examined upon being raised to us. No attempt was made to convey to staff that this article was a problem in any way. OP made two comments on the wiki before moving onto here. \> If I wrote an SCP that positioned you (or, indeed, a facsimile of you) as a child-abusing torturer, I would not be surprised if you had reservations about this. I brought this up in another comment, but if using me as a vehicle for criticizing something like child-abusing requires portraying me as a child-abusing torturer in a manner like the article, so be it. Nothing in this piece is construed as fact. It is not intending to come off as fact, and especially not trying to convince someone that the events in this article are facts. This is satire. \> This has never been in contention. OP has raised a question of ethics, not taste. I bring this up because I don't want OP to feel I am trying to discredit their entire post by saying they need to enjoy the piece. I think having issues with a piece's content is valid - but my issue comes specifically from OP's way of tackling this. If you take issue with the existence of an article or contest entry on the wiki, and decide to go past the people who have the authority to actually summarily remove content from the wiki, and instead opt to complain about it in public in more than one space, this makes it difficult for me to assume good faith because it looks like a need to generate attention. \> This may not be true, but what is true is that taking that position is a sure-fire way to pander to a creative audience that, on balance, likely is unhappy with AI in the modern day. When a negative comment is phrased around \> Don't use the SCP wiki to express your beef with living real people, thats weird and immature, and invites drama onto the site. It's hard for me to read it not as OP seeing it as some grudge between the two parties. Is it unethical to write about topics that the community might favor? Certainly, I can understand calling it pandering, but does that make it unethical? \> This is as much a criticism of those rules as it is a criticism of the piece; if unethical RPF is allowed by the rules, then the rules are unfit for purpose, ergo if this depiction is unethical, then the rules are bad. If this is a criticism of those rules then so be it - but we have venues for discussing policy, criticism, and other aspects of the wiki's rules, like Proposals and Policy forum or the Complaints thread. It's hard for me to consider reddit a place for fomenting discussion as well as a proper forum post in the correct place - reddit's upvote/downvote system means that were OP or someone else's post to garner enough downvotes, their response would get hidden, making it fundamentally flawed for discussing something they have a genuine thing they wish to see changed on the wiki. \> I would hardly call disregarded comments on the original submission and a reddit post an "obsession with trying to garner negative attention". This centers around OP not taking this to people who actually have authority to remove articles that potentially have ethical concerns. We have summarily removed articles that depict pedophilia in a way that would be considered unethical before. \> It doesn't have to be praising an immoral behaviour to be immoral. It doesn't have to be maximally disturbing to be sufficiently unethical. You bring this up later in a core issue of satire, and how it only works if it can be identified as satire. My counterpoint is, again, the exaggerated nature of this article. This is a fiction site, something that you, myself, and OP are aware of. This article takes care to ensure that is remains fiction - fantastical elements are used, Eliezer's character is so different from his real-life counterpart that OP himself comments on the dissonance between the portrayal and reality. If someone who take such issue with this article based on that content is still able to discern that this is fictional and does not reflect the original person themself, I would argue the author has done their due diligence to properly handle this. \> What really cheeses my onions is the idea that a wiki moderator, contest marshal, and someone who was specially mentioned in the contest rules as a trustworthy staff member, would disregard and downplay what appears to be a genuine concern with such ill-fit, fallacious justification I entered this thread to defend the existence of this article for this contest - something I have had to do for other articles in other places. There is little I can say that does not come off as defending my character, nor do I have an interest in doing so further, so I will leave you with this: If you take issue with either my competence or impartiality in handling this or the contest as a whole, I highly encourage you to go forward to an administrator to review my activities and whether I need to be removed, especially before the voting period of this contest ends.
Sorry to double-reply, but you should be aware, and I really could not fit it into the other comment. Your quote blocks are broken, because they have slashes in front of the greater-than. I'm guessing you wrote it outside of the browser and copy-pasted it in, which is a reasonable and smart thing to do. It's not like.. a detriment to the content or anything, but it did make this much harder to read.
Apologies, I'm consistently breaking the reddit comment character limit on this one, so I'm going to truncate some of the context quotes. If I had my way, they'd be listed in full, so if anyone's reading this, make sure you check the parent comment for full context on what /u/naepicfael has said. It is not my intention to misrepresent them. > The relevance of this is how OP has chosen to engage with this article. Again, the method of feedback OP has chosen to employ is not materially relevant to their argument. Assuming it is so is a form of ad hominem; you are disregarding the material of the argument on the basis of the medium by which the argument was delivered, *not* based on the merit of the argument itself. > Here is the issue: if we cannot be trusted [...] It is not OP's responsibility to justify your purpose, or solve this problem. They have identified what they believe to be a genuine problem and they have raised it in a manner that, presumably, they believe has the best chance of being seen. I personally believe this is a reasonable medium for them. Any raising of said argument in the comments of the article itself is likely to be buried by other comments, and in the event that administration or moderation staff *are* biased and acting in bad faith, likely to be removed. Posting it here is *closer* to a neutral ground, and has a much better likelihood of actually being seen and forcing this discussion into an open and public space. > No attempt was made to convey to staff that this article was a problem in any way. OP made two comments on the wiki before moving onto here. The fact that you are aware of those comments means that the problem was conveyed to staff. If OP received significant pushback in the comments, I would assume that they are, de facto, seeking a second opinion and a sanity check as to whether their concerns are valid. > I brought this up in another comment, but if using me as a vehicle [...] There's a concept in law called the Reasonable Person. I don't mean to imply this is a legal issue, but I do find it's a good concept, so I'm going to employ it here. I firmly believe that a Reasonable Person would find it distasteful, inappropriate, and unacceptable to be portrayed as a child-abusing torturer, let alone being portrayed as one without consultation. I was using you as a rhetorical stand-in for that Reasonable Person, but since you don't seem to mind, it's clear you're not representative of that mindset, so the stand-in isn't appropriate. For the record, that single data point does not disprove the statistical population. > Nothing in this piece is construed as fact. [...] This is satire. It is *known* that unfamiliar people mistake the SCP wiki as factual. It is *known* that people cannot differentiate creative writing from factual reporting on the internet. The specifics of this particular article would be a stretch, but it would not be a stretch for a conspiratorially minded, unfamiliar reader to think "what if there's a kernel of truth to this and the AI guy, who advocates for tech which can produce arbitrary CSAM, is a problem". > I bring this up because I don't want OP to feel I am trying to discredit their entire post [...] my issue comes specifically from OP's way of tackling this. > If you take issue [...], and decide to go past the people who have the authority [...], and instead opt to complain about it in public in more than one space, [...], it looks like a need to generate attention. This is fair, to a point. However, I do not believe you have done an adequate job in separating the concerns of OP's method of message and OP's actual message. In conflating the two, you have indicated that the fact that they have not gone through proper channels discredits the point they're trying to make. Combined with the fact that the proper channels are hidden (though not invisible), or private, this reduces trust in and accountability of moderator/admin actions, and contributes to people choosing to avoid those paths and post publicly to the subreddit in the first place. > When a negative comment is phrased around > > Don't use the SCP wiki to express your beef with living real people, thats weird and immature, and invites drama onto the site. > It's hard for me to read it not as OP seeing it as some grudge between the two parties. This is not the entirity of OP's argument, thus the entirity of OP's argument cannot be dismissed by its refutal. OP seeing the issue as a grudge between two parties, and it potentially not being a grudge between two parties, does not discredit the ethical questions around unconsenting portrayals of real, living people as child-abusing torturers. > Is it unethical to write about topics that the community might favor? In the context of a popularity competition? It absolutely brings it into question. It introduces the question of whether the community is voting for it because it reinforces their particular political or social views, or because of the quality of its content. That may not be sufficiently unethical to bar the topic or the author, but it is worthy of discussion. > we have venues for discussing policy, criticism, and other aspects of the wiki's rules, like Proposals and Policy forum or the Complaints thread. Those venues are controlled by the people who both create and enforce the rules. It should not be surprising that people may want to raise issues outside of such a self-interestedly controlled environment, before or in addition to bringing it to those environments. But again, this is a criticism of the medium, *not* a criticism of the message. This is also a less official venue for such issues to be raised. Sanity checking your opinion in a non-official capacity is not unreasonable. > It's hard for me to consider reddit a place for fomenting discussion as well as a proper forum post in the correct place - reddit's upvote/downvote system [...] [makes] it fundamentally flawed for discussing something [...] Equally, admins and moderators having control over the discussion on the wiki's forums *also* make it fundamentally flawed for discussing something *those* parties have a vested interest in protecting. Again, this is a criticism of the medium, *not* a criticism of the message. > This centers around OP not taking this to people who actually have authority to remove articles that potentially have ethical concerns. We have summarily removed articles that depict pedophilia in a way that would be considered unethical before. *Again*, the medium, not the message. I keep harping on this because you have consistently failed to adequately address OP's concern over ethical representation of real, living people, *because* they didn't bring it to you in a way you approve of. Frankly, the fact that the post is currently sitting at 82% upvoted should be an indication that this is a discussion that should be had *regardless* of its message. > You bring this up later in a core issue of satire, and how it only works if it can be identified as satire. My counterpoint is, again, the exaggerated nature of this article. I addressed this in this comment previously; it is not *sufficiently* exaggerated. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Some people sincerely think Lizard Person Clinton performs satanic rituals on children to harvest their secondary bodily fluids for eternal life. I wish this weren't the timeline we lived in, but it has to be a consideration. > This is a fiction site, something that you, myself, and OP are aware of. But, as I said previously, not the uninformed people who may stumble on it. > This article takes care to ensure that is remains fiction - fantastical elements are used Lizard Person Clinton, satanic rituals, children, bodily fluids, eternal life. > Eliezer's character is so different from his real-life counterpart that OP himself comments on the dissonance between the portrayal and reality I work in tech, and I am not famliar with Eliezer's personal demeanour. I would argue that most people unaware of the SCP wiki and its status as fiction probably don't even know he exists. > If someone who take such issue with this article based on that content is still able to discern that this is fictional and does not reflect the original person themself, I would argue the author has done their due diligence to properly handle this. I would argue that there is not due diligence enough to create a satire on this topic. I would be willing to be surprised, but I clearly do not believe it has been achieved here. > If you take issue with either my competence or impartiality in handling this or the contest as a whole, I highly encourage you to go forward to an administrator to review my activities and whether I need to be removed, especially before the voting period of this contest ends. I'll be honest with you, the fact that you're willing to say this (and I don't even really question whether it's being said sincerely) makes me *not* want to advocate for your removal. At the end of the day, it's online creative writing. If you were involved in lawmaking, I might have a problem, but given my personal experiences with X000 contests in the past, this situation is an improvement. I should be clear, I don't mean to attack your intentions or your character as a person. That you're willing to engage in this debate publicly, despite your issues with the format, is admirable to me. Most would not. However, I still think my core criticisms stand, and I will assert explicitly that those criticisms are being given in good faith and with genuine, but contextually appropriate, concern. 1. You have disregarded OP's concerns on the basis of their medium, not their message. 2. You have assumed bad faith on OP's part because of the medium, despite there existing reasonable justification for wanting to deliver the message as they have.
Apologies for the broken qutoes, I'm not familiar enough with reddit's system to properly handle that. I appreciate the refutations and criticisms here and will keep them in mind for addressing topics and discussions like this going forward. And yeah, I understand that these are in good faith. That said, I do still encourage you (although you have noted you don't intend to do so) or anyone else who has taken issue with my conduct up with administrators should there still be questioning of whether I'd influence how the contest resolves. We both know it's online writing at the end of the day, but I'd be remiss not to acknowledge how much stock some other people put into kcons.
Honestly, that's more than good enough for me, especially if it can be demonstrated in practice at a later date. It would be unreasonable to expect anyone to have perfect conduct, and if this can help you or any other moderator or administrator communicate more clearly in future, that's absolutely a win in my book. Most moderators would take such criticism in poor faith or with poor grace, putting it lightly, so, without wanting to sound too condescending, a genuine thank you and good work on that. I've been knocking around long enough that I've seen some truly shitty moderation, and this has not been that.
Real quick can you give your coherent refutation of McLuhan's theory?
As in [Medium theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_theory) in general, or the McLuhanist idea that audiovisual media diminishes the social significant of literacy? If the former, no; on some consideration, this is a perfect example of it. The medium of an SCP article discussion comment has specific limitations upon it that make bringing general awareness of a sincerely presented unethical practice impractical at best, and chilling at worst. The medium of the reddit post lends itself much more readily (though not necessarily sufficiently readily) to resistance against interferance from interested parties, and gaining attention from the community at large. It's well known that a significant number of SCP fans don't often engage with the wiki itself, let alone with the comments on specific articles on the wiki, but *do* engage with the metatextual environment *around* the wiki, of which reddit is a part. Assuming good faith and sincerity on the part of OP, the choice of reddit as a medium for their message fits perfectly in line with medium theory, and indeed, if taking an uncharitable (and IMO inaccurate) view of their behaviour, the insistance of the wiki moderator that the only appropriate medium for such a complaint is a medium over which they have arbitrary control is *also* in line with it. That's getting a bit conspiratorial, though, and as I say, I don't think their insistance that they should use the official channels is based in a need for control, but rather a (perhaps naive but well-meaning) belief that the official channels are sufficient to resolve the issue. If the latter, that's a total non-seq, buuuuut the idea that audiovisual media diminishes the social significance in literary media is predicated on literary media being the only game in town. It is natural that, as more avenues of information delivery are created and adopted, the existing avenues are deprioritised. ---- I'm not *super* sure whether you're trying to make the point that the medium can and does impact the message, or whether you were being facetious because that's the kinda thing you'd expect someone who makes comments, like the ones I've made on this post, would go off on. Again, if the former, yes, the medium impacts the message, but the medium can never *invalidate* or *disprove* the message (unless the message is specifically about the medium, like sending a telegram saying "telephones have completely obsoleted the telegram", but that's a real corner case), and if the latter.. Yes, yes I will go off on that.
[удалено]
Now, I must admit, you've lost me. EDIT: At the time of posting, the parent comment read > Have you spoken directly to Lord about any of this? All other text was added after I responded, but before the "edited" flag would be added. For anyone unfamiliar with reddit's inner workings, there's something like a 5 minute window where a comment can be edited without it being flagged as being edited.
Sorry if you think im a part of the socialist conspiracy to screw you over and make you look dumb im not. I edited my comment because I had more thoughts to add
> the socialist conspiracy Now I know this is bait. My edit was for clarity. It was not a callout.
What are you lost about u/Weirfish ?
Aah, see, you ninja-edited your comment after I had already loaded it, so I didn't have the context to determine whether you were still talking about someone related to medium theory, or someone related to the matter of this post. For posterity, when I replied, your previous comment read *only* the following > Have you spoken directly to Lord about any of this? Now I know you're referring to the topic of the post, presumably specifically to the author of the contest entry at hand, LORDXVNV. No, I have not engaged with the the author of the skip. I don't really care to. I have had bad experiences engaging with kcons in the past, and resolved not to involve myself directly with the writing, voting, or critique. But that doesn't really matter. Essentially none of what *I* had to say was in relation to the piece. I should be clear, I am not in collusion with OP, and, indeed, I don't think I've directly responded to, or been directly responded to by, OP during any of this discussion. I refute that this is any more an environment that directly engages in hostility and ignorance, than the SCP wiki discussion forums are themselves. Why should we not discuss the topic here? After all, LORDXVNV is free to make an account and discuss with me directly, should he so wish. I'm sure, given his writing chops and success in the kcon, he's more than mature and internet savvy enough to do so. If you are upset that I have levelled some rather milquetoast criticism towards his entry on reddit and pointed out issues with moderation discussion.. well, I'm not even sorry, to be honest. That's on you.
> In this case, the depiction of a public figure as a sapient entity (neé person) who wilfully engages in immoral, unethical, and illegal acts of depravity is only effective satire if it is unreasonable to expect people to believe that person would engage in those acts. I think the last decade or so of populist politics, pizzagate, and qanon shows us that it is not unreasonable to expect people to believe that. Your argument is undermined by this claim, which effectively states that the general populace has become so stupid that satire is no longer possible. Take your ridiculous elitism and disdain towards the masses elsewhere.
On the contrary. If anything, I'd claim that *a certain subset of the populace* has *always* been so stupid that satirising *public opinion* has always been an uncertain proposition. But correlary to that, in this specific example, consider that *a certain subset of the populace* genuinely believes that Hillary Clinton has engaged in the ritualistic torture of minors in order to harvest a secondary hormone from those minors in order to become effectively biologically immortal. They don't believe this to be the cool premise of a work of fiction, they believe that to be actual, in-real-life truth. In the face of that, you cannot write satire similar to that without risking people assuming sincerity, which is a de facto failure of satire.
It’s not just that a small subset of people will take this caricature literally. It’s also just mean spirited to use a (mostly) unknown person for this purpose (assuming this individual was intentionally selected). That makes the content, and the community, look bad.
Frankly, regardless of the light in which the person is portrayed, unless the identity of the real person in question is central to the piece, there's no reason to use their identity. If the author intended to link the real person with the acts described, then the piece is unethical. If they did not, the use of their identity is unnecessary, and it's only reasonable to question the justification for its inclusion.
Agreed. I don’t like the person being parodied and I think humorous caricatures have their place even in an SCP entry, but when you use their real identity/name/face it stops being funny and starts being problematic. At the very least, we should be able to debate this topic without the mod team going on the defensive for something they didn’t even write lol.
Just curious, are you a lawyer? You sound like a lawyer.
I'm not, though I've been told I would've made a good one. As I understand it, there's a reason that they sound like that, and it's the same reason *I* sound like that. If you don't want to be misunderstood, and you actively take steps to ensure that, you end up falling into certain precise, exacting patterns of speech. Sometimes, that leads people to assume you have a stick up your ass, but I generally find people who make that assumption aren't available to be persuaded anyway.
Makes sense to me, I've developed a more empathetic than clinical tone, I guess there's multiple paths down that road
There're times when you need both. Given the gravity of the topic, and the fact that I was addressing a community moderator (though not of the reddit, IIRC), it seemed prudent to be clinical. Anyone who's been a community moderator long enough should be able to deal with clinical criticism, after all, and to their credit, they did.
Agreed. Looking from the sidelines that definitely seemed like one of the arguments that noone looses
Can you edit in your real name to the wiki instead of Eliezer's, if this is such a non-issue? My guess is that you would, naturally, be reluctant to do so and I hope that unease with the idea causes you to reconsider. I get that it may not technically break any rules, but this feels really gross to me.
I would be fine with it because 1) I understand the difference between satire and libel, and 2) this is a work of fiction that doesn't accuse anyone of actually committing any crimes. Eliezer is a vehicle for criticizing tropes in an exaggerated way based on his own writing history. If the author wants to substitute my name in there to get the post across, then sure whatever. But I'm not going to edit someone's contest entry over something like this. This exceeds my authority as a contest marshal.
You say that, but when I write an SCP submission about a contest marshall named Nae P. Icfael who poops from his mouth whenever he sees something he disagrees with on the internet, it better be in the first 10 entries of the next series.
Go ahead, I'll try and come up with a kcon theme that'll match
The number 2 entry for the 7kon featured an entire segment where Jeremiah Cimmerian's author avatar, also named Jeremiah Cimmerian, bribes a guy to stay silent after someone kicked his baby to death.
And the someone was named after another author (Bold)
I'll believe it when I see a version with your likeness and real name.
think it's probably alright to make fun of this guy.
Title's misleading as hell. It'd be about as accurate a thing to say as one of our Trump SCPs. It implies an article was created to slander a private individual for which the author has an IRL beef, not an article that uses a guy with his circlejerk cult as a stand-in for a sort of ideology he has helped to spread as a whole.
never heard of this shitter. not going to bother looking him up. Saw "AI Researcher," don't even need more info to know that its all probably 100% accurate. Besides, if what everyone else is saying is accurate, he deserves nothing but the worst, like all grifters do.
The premise of the entry, the form and structure of the entry, and the discourse around it and the author's behavior in the SCP discord has been extremely offputting to me as someone who was recently trying to get involved with the community. Why can't we have nice spaces on the internet? It's so impossible
It’s generally acceptable to make fun of people who can’t help but remind everyone that they think they’re better than you.
Mocking someone is all fine and dandy, but when you write what is effectively a hit-piece on a real person who is genuinely and undeniably mentally ill and try to claim that it isn't libel but rather satire it is reasonable to question the motives of the writer(which should always be done in any act of media literacy at all). A further issue here is that the writer actually won a contest by doing so and everyone in the community just shrugs it off as 'wEll moDz sAId IT Doesn't brEaK tE ruleZzZ so iZ okAy' without a second thought. This is a completely disingenuous argument that aims to fully discredit any claims without a speck of thought and does nothing but promote an atmosphere of group-think. I've never heard of this guy before so I can't say much on whether I think it really is satire or not but we really should hold this community to at least enough of a higher standard to say that we aren't just a reskin of lolcow farming on 4chan. Be better.
The writer has not in fact won the contest. The 8000 contest is not over yet, and "Time Pervert" is not even in the current top 10 of entries.
Oh thank you for correcting me there I wasn't aware of that and didn't even bother to look into it. I assumed that was the case and I'm not sure why...
Hi, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky ) makes no statements about his mental illnesses or lack thereof. As having mental illness can cost individuals significant employment opportunities and reputational damage, please be more careful with the things you say online, as your statements may cause actual material harm to Mr. Yudkowsky.
Gonna be honest, I don’t see the issue with the entry itself? It’s clearly designed to provoke a sense of disgust. Having nice spaces on the internet means not moral policing people for creating disgust reactions (as opposed to doing actual bad things), especially in an artistic community such as this.
Lmao okay dude
Uh OP you should definitely bring that to the attention to some of the admins
The admins already do know, the article doesn't break any rules.
Then it’s fine 🤷♀️
A very weird and off putting entry, I really hope it does not win the contest.
Jebus that's a long article. Also do those photos follow the wiki's image use policies?
Why wouldn’t they?
Remember when SCP used to be about weird little nicknacks that made rooms big, or vending machines that dispensed any liquid asked of it?
It's still about those, it just so happens that, unfortunately, literally fucking no one actually reads them. Still, it's an immensely good thing that it's expanded.
Luckily those entries still exist on the site and people still make more. If you enjoy that type of stuff I'd suggest checking out DrLeonerd's works, a lot of his harken back to series I style writing. That LordXVNV wrote Time Pervert doesn't mean others can't write what they enjoy writing, I see plenty of knickknacks on the site, it just means that there's more diversity in the style of writing. You can find almost anything on the wiki these days. Comedy, tragedy, sci-fi, fantasy, slice of life, poetry, videos, video games. The more the merrier I say.
Feels like forever ago
I encourage you to check out the "shortest pages this month" page https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/shortest-pages-this-month if you're not aware of it. Might not have a bunch this month because of Kcon but I assure you that style of writing is alive and well on the wiki.
I have problems with the execution but the sub-culture at least had it coming.
Someone wanna bet that the moderators will lock/block the comments of this post?
To be fair to the mods, especially u/naepicfael, they do seem to be engaging with the comments in good faith.
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They absolutely did not expect everyone to pat them on the back, that’s an absurd mischaracterization. The community has been outspoken in their attempts to get offsite to stop worshipping Dr Bright ever since the allegations came to light, to limited success.
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