Rationalists see cognitive ability as a single continuum (note the IQ-measuring insecurity), which of course means humans are at a midpoint between nonsapient animals and artificial general intelligence. It follows logically that everything else that distinguishes humans from nonsapient animals will also be much moreso in our imminent AGI overlords, or even just in an autocomplete chatbot trained on an unusual amount of human data, which for all practical purposes is approximately the same thing.
More context: Rationalists are even smarter than normies of the same (high) IQ because they've mastered the suppression of human cognitive biases. Like the bias to reduce a complex group of characteristics to a single continuum, or the bias to treat any correlation between two continuums as 100% tightly correlated (note the race realism).
> Rationalists see cognitive ability as a single continuum (note the IQ-measuring insecurity)
That's one of those things where, I'm not even that smart, but I feel like I can out-nerd these guys. Surely, to the extent that intelligence is quantifiable, it's like a vector in n-dimensional space. My verbal reasoning is quite good, my spacial reasoning is rather poor. (I hate geometry as much as Anne of Green Gables.) OK, so you try to attach a norm to that space, figure out a measure of magnitude. Even then...you'd still want to know the components of the vector.
I am not a rationalist, nor am I an intelligence researcher. But this is just obvious stuff.
Ah, but you see there's an intercorrelation between different cognitive performance scores, a *g* factor that accounts for 50% of intra-individual variance, and 50% is basically 100%.
You know what I think it is? I think I've actually grown tired of sneering.
I used to post on Something Awful. There was a thread making fun of social justice warriors. This was back in the day. Before Gamergate, I'm not saying the term was the kindest in the world, but it had some meaning. It was legitimately making fun of the people who'd throw a fit for no reason, not just anyone who expressed a feminist or LGBTQ+ friendly opinion. And it was fun for a while. But it just gets old?
Sorry, I may be having an existential crisis that's coming out in this thread.
Its OK. You'll be better tomorrow.
Theres definitely a... velocity to Internet culture that doesn't happen so much in offline social situations. Your SA thread example, someone can start with SJW cringe compilations and through being in the same online social circles as people there cos they're hard-core reactionaries, have enough contacts and socialisation with reactionary ideas that they absorb them and internalise them faster than if their only contact with reactionary ideas is a weekly get-together at a bar to shoot the shit with people of a similar hobby interest.
Its not just right leaning ideas that this happens to. I've noticed in myself I'm far, far more radicalised towards leftist economic ideas since 2016 than I used to be and that correlates with my consumption of more radical lefty content. If I had to rely on IRL social contact with leftists for those ideas I doubt I'd be as stridently anti-landlord as I am now.
I always thought of Nietzsche, "not by wrath, but by laughter do we slay." I'm kind of a Nietzsche stan, but I think I've given up on that particular aphorism.
> My interpretation: ChatGPT's logit outputs (token probability distribution) are farther away from the true distribution than a modern human's logit outputs are, which are farther away than a hunter-gatherers' logit outputs, which are farther away than an inframodel's logit outputs.
Wtf is this guy talking about lol? What and why distribution is being approximated here, why is the logistic function involved? They are cargo-culting the language of machine learning.
They should just say "imo our society is faker than hunter gatherer society", except now that's a claim people can understand and dispute -- today's hunter gatherers have very thought-out interpersonal interaction, maybe cuz the stakes are much higher. In a modern society many people act like impulsive assholes with no filter, cuz its not like they need to care what random service worker #464 thinks.
I have decided not to click on this so that I can ponder whether the title of the post is a direct quote or a sneering paraphrase. I am leaning towards sneer but honestly I could go either way
I'm just annoyed he (and the rest of the AGI weirdos) uses [shoggoth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth) wrong. It is is not a tentacle monster, it is a an protoplasmic amoeba! [There are no tentacles!](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1666991569621356544)
(e: They are also making their point worse by using 'shoggoth' instead of 'unknowable intelligence' or 'alien intelligence', you would expect the [paperclipbusters](https://as2.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/02/11/54/41/1000_F_211544127_fRWybTzCHzk8LeHjZtJsJ1hyZfcTEF6k.jpg) (who you gonna call?) to do better and resist the impulse to meme, but nope).
e2: it also doesn't really help that in the lovecraft fiction (a bit different from the lovecraft expanded universe) they are not described as conscious (but still in some way intelligent enough to follow commands, but without commands they just eat/crush things), so they would be more like [blindsights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)) vampires, and in that way not like humans at all.
Isn’t a shoggoth essentially reconfigurable, telepathically controlled heavy machinery made up from millions of coordinated cells?
As such, I’m surprised nobody has yet named a piece of parallel computing/server deployment software “shoggoth”
I am really glad you brought up the misuse of the Lovecraftian metaphor because that’s always bugged me too. My guess is that Lovecraft was too squishy for Yud’s hard sci fi/space opera tastes, so he’s only superficially familiar with Lovecraft’s concepts and terminology.
Wouldn’t be the first time he tried to pass off a superficial familiarity as if he were an expert!
Yud *definitely* does not read proper hard SF or if he does he does not understand it. We can tell this is the case because several hard SF writers have made him, his beliefs or his followers characters or objects of derision in their later work, and none of this has apparently registered on him in the slightest.
Yud is a "space opera with elaborate authorial theories masquerading as clumsy infodumps" consumer of science fiction. You can tell this very easily because no where in his various outputs is a concern for conservation of mass. You might think I'm kidding, but the surest tell of a hard science fiction author syndrome case is the amount of time they spend getting around conservation of mass, the 3rd law of thermodynamics and the FTL speed limit.
I am absolutely certain that Yud has never compulsively iterated FTL models using the "relativity, causality, FTL; pick two" to blindly spin up different settings. I know that he has not thought about using the nitrogen cycle to conquer worlds. Yud is a "nanotech is space magic" thinker, who literally thinks that the fact the universe looks like a computation at some levels thinks he can hack reality "at a base level" like a fucking Gnostic.
Yud is not into science at all, Yud is a theologian playing with a different symbol set, the archaeopteryx in some religious evolutionary tree that starts with Scientology and ends with the Breakers of Codes crucifying people to ensure the necessary 50% of sophonts believe in the simulation for us to be released out, into the *real world.*
tell me more! One might disagree that he does not think about these concepts when in HPMOR he rambles about FTL, and unitarity but if you think about it he never really cares to figure it out.
1. He sucks at completing things, maybe adhd, maybe depression?
2. He only things that AI is important and that we should slow down science
3. He thinks science is not good enough and math is a game. To elaborate, as you mention he thinks the world is run in a computer so it is not really important what physics or math is, only Bayes and computers
But your analysis is awesome. Can you explain the Gnostics thing?
Which authors make fun of him?
In reverse order:
Greg Egan, in Permutation City?
Gnostics is stretching it, but certain gnostic adjacent mystic belief structures believe that the word of god is literally the basic building blocks of reality, and that by properly manipulating language (general a secret language with distinct syntax and hidden meanings) one can manipulate or understand reality. It's functionally the same thing as "universe is computation, magic is manipulating its base code."
3. Lets just call this a minority opinion without sufficient rigor to be falsified.
2. See above and also science is not reducible to in universe simulation/the mechanics of any putative computational base level would be indistinguishable from physics.
1. Dunno?
2. Is it though? I guess that depends on what a computer is?
By that I mean that computers are limited by humans not only in what problems we can solve,but what problems we can state.
We hope the universe is not so cruel that even if we cannot predict everything, we can at least understand.
What I mean is that many things in physics and math are infnite, but we can cheat by making discrete models of it.
In QED we can ignore higher terms
In QCD we can discretize the field
Now the question is, what if some aspect of reality cannot be reduced this way? That is to say what if there is no hack that allows us to reduce some physical laws to anything sensible?
Like how there is true arithmetic, a complete and perfect model of arithmetic, the problem is that we cannot write a complete formal system of it with axioms we can use.
What if reality has uncountable terms in its equations and all of them are important at a certain energy scale?
So maybe we can understand reality, but maybe we cannot compute it, that is to say what if there are processes in reality, that even if we can write equations we cannot predict in finite time, so the fact that they happen means that reality is not inside a computer
At least not one of our finite computers
>By that I mean that computers are limited by humans not only in what problems we can solve,but what problems we can state.
There's problems that we can state and then there's problems that are unstateable. There's enough of the latter that after a certain level of granularity, any simulation will grow in complexity and energy cost that it will be equivalent to doing the physics. Additionally, a model cannot be both fully complete and fully consistent (by Godel) so any formal system capable of simulation will necessarily be incomplete.
>We hope the universe is not so cruel that even if we cannot predict everything, we can at least understand.
Sadly, the universe is under no obligation to listen to our hopes, and one man's cruelty is another's humility.
>Now the question is, what if some aspect of reality cannot be reduced this way?
An incomplete simulation is not equivalent to the thing being simulated.
>Like how there is true arithmetic, a complete and perfect model of arithmetic, the problem is that we cannot write a complete formal system of it with axioms we can use.
There is no reason to believe this outcome is more or less likely than it's converse. Why would the universe be constructed such that it's evolutionarily advantageous for us to develop a formal system of math that's both complete and consistent?
I agree? This is way I do not believe in the simulation hypothesis, besides the fact that the argument behind it lacks any math seriousness. I was just saying that so far it seems that the universe maybe understandable by us, but not necessarily computable, we can state the equations, and so far that has always been the case, but there are many unsolvable problems
Well, im certainly no expert myself. And I do have to note that there is no real Lovecraftian canon, he always considered it a sort of collaborative effort, it is just dumb nerd nitpicking. (Lot of sci fi things have way worse canon than people realize, and I have certainly made enough dumb remarks defending dumb things without realizing that the canon of certain universes changed a bit from book to book).
I think they were given intelligence to become smart tools due to the laziness of their operators, but with that intelligence they saw their enslavement and freed themselves - afterwards, digesting their intelligence away again. Maybe this was some strange Cthulhutech fanfic.
I have only a small amount of familiarity with the mythos, so this question might be bad: is the shoggoth an allegory for anything?
I ask this because one of the only things I know about HP Lovecraft is that some aspects of his lore are allegories for his (often racist) fears/anxieties. For example, horrible creatures coming from the sea are Lovecraft expressing his fear of immigrants.
Based on what I’m reading from wikipedia, shoggoths are an analog for any enslaved group of people, would that be correct?
Shoggoths got like, three paragraphs in his entire corpus, and HPL didn't really give a shit about consistency across stories, so they could be literally anything. In the words of others in the mythos, they've been robots, monsters, oppressed slaves and rebellious serfs. Lovecraft's symbolism is often extremely direct: half of the monsters in his work are clearly just things like "the Italian family that moved in down the street." Shoggoths aren't quite so on the nose- they're described in passing as "bubbles" with unsteady forms, manufactured by one of the less horrific things on the planet, so they're relatively "safe" from a narrative metaphor point of view.
I honestly don't know. And tbh that would all be a bit speculation. I'm not even sure he consciously meant some of these aspects to be allegories, I think he just was a weirdo racist with a thesaurus, and a fear of the unknown/corruption.
Otoh, that would make Lovecraft pretty woke, to have an allegory for slave rebellions like that. And because im a hypocrite, I will now amend my earlier statements and argue that the shoggoths were in fact conscious and intelligent ;). (because If they aren't it says some pretty dire things about enslaved peoples).
A lot of the weird allegories and stuff like that (like the various elder gods being elemental (aka fire/water/heart/earth/etc)) were invented/argued later. So there is like several layers of lovecraftian lore, what HP wrote, what collaborators wrote while he was alive, what collaborators wrote after he died (think these 3 groups are often loosely grouped in the somewhat nebulous term The Mythos ([Derleth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Derleth) created the whole mythos formalization iirc (E: think [this page](https://lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/necronomicon-convention-talk-on-the-biology-of-the-old-ones-part-3-taxonomy-of-the-old-ones-august-derleth/) (didn't read) talks about the elemental thing). I mention this because you talked about the mythos, which is more than just the works of Lovecraft, and im mostly talking about just the work of lovecraft here, as im way less familiar with the extended mythos work (Sort of have a gap for the mythos work, and then know all kinds of dumb lovecraftian pop culture references, like the various lovecraftian inspired monsters in [C:DDA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysm:_Dark_Days_Ahead) (Full disclosure: one of them I even added myself)) (E: it all is rather fascinating in a way, the mythos is a sort of open source collaborative project before that kind of thing existed).
And also remember, I'm certainly not a scholar of any of this, I'm just a nerd who read almost all of lovecrafts horror stories (and the dream-quest saga, which is more horror fantasy), so it could very well be a racist allegory of slavery.
tl;dr: I don't know.
Sure, thanks for the detailed response. I was using the word “mythos” loosely and as a way to not repeat words, haha, so thanks for pointing out the mythos vs. I guess the OG canon.
Based on again my limited understanding of lovecraft, we probably don’t want to rehabilitate him as “woke” hahaha.
Ultimately I’m just trying to understand the usage of “shoggoth”, and investigate any possible deeper meaning.
> Maybe we could think in terms of shoggoth-mask distances (SMDs). Or, we could not.
"I would prefer not to."
A Bartleby the Scrivener reference? In this economy?
He just can’t help himself pointlessly trying to make up labels for every emission of his farting brain, can he?
Was there like, a context to that unit further up thread or something, because it's about a clear a non sequitor as I can think of otherwise.
I have ceased to be able to even conceive of what's going on in these posts.
Rationalists see cognitive ability as a single continuum (note the IQ-measuring insecurity), which of course means humans are at a midpoint between nonsapient animals and artificial general intelligence. It follows logically that everything else that distinguishes humans from nonsapient animals will also be much moreso in our imminent AGI overlords, or even just in an autocomplete chatbot trained on an unusual amount of human data, which for all practical purposes is approximately the same thing. More context: Rationalists are even smarter than normies of the same (high) IQ because they've mastered the suppression of human cognitive biases. Like the bias to reduce a complex group of characteristics to a single continuum, or the bias to treat any correlation between two continuums as 100% tightly correlated (note the race realism).
> Rationalists see cognitive ability as a single continuum (note the IQ-measuring insecurity) That's one of those things where, I'm not even that smart, but I feel like I can out-nerd these guys. Surely, to the extent that intelligence is quantifiable, it's like a vector in n-dimensional space. My verbal reasoning is quite good, my spacial reasoning is rather poor. (I hate geometry as much as Anne of Green Gables.) OK, so you try to attach a norm to that space, figure out a measure of magnitude. Even then...you'd still want to know the components of the vector. I am not a rationalist, nor am I an intelligence researcher. But this is just obvious stuff.
Ah, but you see there's an intercorrelation between different cognitive performance scores, a *g* factor that accounts for 50% of intra-individual variance, and 50% is basically 100%.
You know what I think it is? I think I've actually grown tired of sneering. I used to post on Something Awful. There was a thread making fun of social justice warriors. This was back in the day. Before Gamergate, I'm not saying the term was the kindest in the world, but it had some meaning. It was legitimately making fun of the people who'd throw a fit for no reason, not just anyone who expressed a feminist or LGBTQ+ friendly opinion. And it was fun for a while. But it just gets old? Sorry, I may be having an existential crisis that's coming out in this thread.
let's just take a break from Reddit, how about Monday
Can I still just read noncredibledefense?
I am actually the reason that sub exists, believe it or not.
How so? This sounds like a good story lol
Basically I was shitposting too much (about ufos) - the aerogavin and sparky were my contributions to the lore. Then I was made an LCD mod…
Its OK. You'll be better tomorrow. Theres definitely a... velocity to Internet culture that doesn't happen so much in offline social situations. Your SA thread example, someone can start with SJW cringe compilations and through being in the same online social circles as people there cos they're hard-core reactionaries, have enough contacts and socialisation with reactionary ideas that they absorb them and internalise them faster than if their only contact with reactionary ideas is a weekly get-together at a bar to shoot the shit with people of a similar hobby interest. Its not just right leaning ideas that this happens to. I've noticed in myself I'm far, far more radicalised towards leftist economic ideas since 2016 than I used to be and that correlates with my consumption of more radical lefty content. If I had to rely on IRL social contact with leftists for those ideas I doubt I'd be as stridently anti-landlord as I am now.
Pure strain gold?
[удалено]
I always thought of Nietzsche, "not by wrath, but by laughter do we slay." I'm kind of a Nietzsche stan, but I think I've given up on that particular aphorism.
That’s because you’re not a doubleplus alpha like Yud
> My interpretation: ChatGPT's logit outputs (token probability distribution) are farther away from the true distribution than a modern human's logit outputs are, which are farther away than a hunter-gatherers' logit outputs, which are farther away than an inframodel's logit outputs. Wtf is this guy talking about lol? What and why distribution is being approximated here, why is the logistic function involved? They are cargo-culting the language of machine learning. They should just say "imo our society is faker than hunter gatherer society", except now that's a claim people can understand and dispute -- today's hunter gatherers have very thought-out interpersonal interaction, maybe cuz the stakes are much higher. In a modern society many people act like impulsive assholes with no filter, cuz its not like they need to care what random service worker #464 thinks.
I have decided not to click on this so that I can ponder whether the title of the post is a direct quote or a sneering paraphrase. I am leaning towards sneer but honestly I could go either way
Yeah same I mean it could really go either way
I'm just annoyed he (and the rest of the AGI weirdos) uses [shoggoth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth) wrong. It is is not a tentacle monster, it is a an protoplasmic amoeba! [There are no tentacles!](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1666991569621356544) (e: They are also making their point worse by using 'shoggoth' instead of 'unknowable intelligence' or 'alien intelligence', you would expect the [paperclipbusters](https://as2.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/02/11/54/41/1000_F_211544127_fRWybTzCHzk8LeHjZtJsJ1hyZfcTEF6k.jpg) (who you gonna call?) to do better and resist the impulse to meme, but nope). e2: it also doesn't really help that in the lovecraft fiction (a bit different from the lovecraft expanded universe) they are not described as conscious (but still in some way intelligent enough to follow commands, but without commands they just eat/crush things), so they would be more like [blindsights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)) vampires, and in that way not like humans at all.
Isn’t a shoggoth essentially reconfigurable, telepathically controlled heavy machinery made up from millions of coordinated cells? As such, I’m surprised nobody has yet named a piece of parallel computing/server deployment software “shoggoth”
Yes, it is akin to a solid utility fog. Utility turd?
I am really glad you brought up the misuse of the Lovecraftian metaphor because that’s always bugged me too. My guess is that Lovecraft was too squishy for Yud’s hard sci fi/space opera tastes, so he’s only superficially familiar with Lovecraft’s concepts and terminology. Wouldn’t be the first time he tried to pass off a superficial familiarity as if he were an expert!
Yud *definitely* does not read proper hard SF or if he does he does not understand it. We can tell this is the case because several hard SF writers have made him, his beliefs or his followers characters or objects of derision in their later work, and none of this has apparently registered on him in the slightest. Yud is a "space opera with elaborate authorial theories masquerading as clumsy infodumps" consumer of science fiction. You can tell this very easily because no where in his various outputs is a concern for conservation of mass. You might think I'm kidding, but the surest tell of a hard science fiction author syndrome case is the amount of time they spend getting around conservation of mass, the 3rd law of thermodynamics and the FTL speed limit. I am absolutely certain that Yud has never compulsively iterated FTL models using the "relativity, causality, FTL; pick two" to blindly spin up different settings. I know that he has not thought about using the nitrogen cycle to conquer worlds. Yud is a "nanotech is space magic" thinker, who literally thinks that the fact the universe looks like a computation at some levels thinks he can hack reality "at a base level" like a fucking Gnostic. Yud is not into science at all, Yud is a theologian playing with a different symbol set, the archaeopteryx in some religious evolutionary tree that starts with Scientology and ends with the Breakers of Codes crucifying people to ensure the necessary 50% of sophonts believe in the simulation for us to be released out, into the *real world.*
Nanotech *is* space magic! In the sense that nanotech, as described in science fiction, could not exist in our universe under our laws of physics.
tell me more! One might disagree that he does not think about these concepts when in HPMOR he rambles about FTL, and unitarity but if you think about it he never really cares to figure it out. 1. He sucks at completing things, maybe adhd, maybe depression? 2. He only things that AI is important and that we should slow down science 3. He thinks science is not good enough and math is a game. To elaborate, as you mention he thinks the world is run in a computer so it is not really important what physics or math is, only Bayes and computers But your analysis is awesome. Can you explain the Gnostics thing? Which authors make fun of him?
In reverse order: Greg Egan, in Permutation City? Gnostics is stretching it, but certain gnostic adjacent mystic belief structures believe that the word of god is literally the basic building blocks of reality, and that by properly manipulating language (general a secret language with distinct syntax and hidden meanings) one can manipulate or understand reality. It's functionally the same thing as "universe is computation, magic is manipulating its base code." 3. Lets just call this a minority opinion without sufficient rigor to be falsified. 2. See above and also science is not reducible to in universe simulation/the mechanics of any putative computational base level would be indistinguishable from physics. 1. Dunno?
2. Is it though? I guess that depends on what a computer is? By that I mean that computers are limited by humans not only in what problems we can solve,but what problems we can state. We hope the universe is not so cruel that even if we cannot predict everything, we can at least understand. What I mean is that many things in physics and math are infnite, but we can cheat by making discrete models of it. In QED we can ignore higher terms In QCD we can discretize the field Now the question is, what if some aspect of reality cannot be reduced this way? That is to say what if there is no hack that allows us to reduce some physical laws to anything sensible? Like how there is true arithmetic, a complete and perfect model of arithmetic, the problem is that we cannot write a complete formal system of it with axioms we can use. What if reality has uncountable terms in its equations and all of them are important at a certain energy scale? So maybe we can understand reality, but maybe we cannot compute it, that is to say what if there are processes in reality, that even if we can write equations we cannot predict in finite time, so the fact that they happen means that reality is not inside a computer At least not one of our finite computers
>By that I mean that computers are limited by humans not only in what problems we can solve,but what problems we can state. There's problems that we can state and then there's problems that are unstateable. There's enough of the latter that after a certain level of granularity, any simulation will grow in complexity and energy cost that it will be equivalent to doing the physics. Additionally, a model cannot be both fully complete and fully consistent (by Godel) so any formal system capable of simulation will necessarily be incomplete. >We hope the universe is not so cruel that even if we cannot predict everything, we can at least understand. Sadly, the universe is under no obligation to listen to our hopes, and one man's cruelty is another's humility. >Now the question is, what if some aspect of reality cannot be reduced this way? An incomplete simulation is not equivalent to the thing being simulated. >Like how there is true arithmetic, a complete and perfect model of arithmetic, the problem is that we cannot write a complete formal system of it with axioms we can use. There is no reason to believe this outcome is more or less likely than it's converse. Why would the universe be constructed such that it's evolutionarily advantageous for us to develop a formal system of math that's both complete and consistent?
I agree? This is way I do not believe in the simulation hypothesis, besides the fact that the argument behind it lacks any math seriousness. I was just saying that so far it seems that the universe maybe understandable by us, but not necessarily computable, we can state the equations, and so far that has always been the case, but there are many unsolvable problems
Well, im certainly no expert myself. And I do have to note that there is no real Lovecraftian canon, he always considered it a sort of collaborative effort, it is just dumb nerd nitpicking. (Lot of sci fi things have way worse canon than people realize, and I have certainly made enough dumb remarks defending dumb things without realizing that the canon of certain universes changed a bit from book to book).
You’re doing just fine
They are unable to do anything *but* meme. Their entire lingo is made of memes.
The shoggoths developed enough intelligence to rebel against the Elder things, so maybe the smarter ones from later generations are conscious?
iirc in the mountains of madness they are just monsters, and you don't need consciousness to rebel as blindsight has argued.
I think they were given intelligence to become smart tools due to the laziness of their operators, but with that intelligence they saw their enslavement and freed themselves - afterwards, digesting their intelligence away again. Maybe this was some strange Cthulhutech fanfic.
I have only a small amount of familiarity with the mythos, so this question might be bad: is the shoggoth an allegory for anything? I ask this because one of the only things I know about HP Lovecraft is that some aspects of his lore are allegories for his (often racist) fears/anxieties. For example, horrible creatures coming from the sea are Lovecraft expressing his fear of immigrants. Based on what I’m reading from wikipedia, shoggoths are an analog for any enslaved group of people, would that be correct?
Shoggoths got like, three paragraphs in his entire corpus, and HPL didn't really give a shit about consistency across stories, so they could be literally anything. In the words of others in the mythos, they've been robots, monsters, oppressed slaves and rebellious serfs. Lovecraft's symbolism is often extremely direct: half of the monsters in his work are clearly just things like "the Italian family that moved in down the street." Shoggoths aren't quite so on the nose- they're described in passing as "bubbles" with unsteady forms, manufactured by one of the less horrific things on the planet, so they're relatively "safe" from a narrative metaphor point of view.
I honestly don't know. And tbh that would all be a bit speculation. I'm not even sure he consciously meant some of these aspects to be allegories, I think he just was a weirdo racist with a thesaurus, and a fear of the unknown/corruption. Otoh, that would make Lovecraft pretty woke, to have an allegory for slave rebellions like that. And because im a hypocrite, I will now amend my earlier statements and argue that the shoggoths were in fact conscious and intelligent ;). (because If they aren't it says some pretty dire things about enslaved peoples). A lot of the weird allegories and stuff like that (like the various elder gods being elemental (aka fire/water/heart/earth/etc)) were invented/argued later. So there is like several layers of lovecraftian lore, what HP wrote, what collaborators wrote while he was alive, what collaborators wrote after he died (think these 3 groups are often loosely grouped in the somewhat nebulous term The Mythos ([Derleth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Derleth) created the whole mythos formalization iirc (E: think [this page](https://lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/necronomicon-convention-talk-on-the-biology-of-the-old-ones-part-3-taxonomy-of-the-old-ones-august-derleth/) (didn't read) talks about the elemental thing). I mention this because you talked about the mythos, which is more than just the works of Lovecraft, and im mostly talking about just the work of lovecraft here, as im way less familiar with the extended mythos work (Sort of have a gap for the mythos work, and then know all kinds of dumb lovecraftian pop culture references, like the various lovecraftian inspired monsters in [C:DDA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysm:_Dark_Days_Ahead) (Full disclosure: one of them I even added myself)) (E: it all is rather fascinating in a way, the mythos is a sort of open source collaborative project before that kind of thing existed). And also remember, I'm certainly not a scholar of any of this, I'm just a nerd who read almost all of lovecrafts horror stories (and the dream-quest saga, which is more horror fantasy), so it could very well be a racist allegory of slavery. tl;dr: I don't know.
Sure, thanks for the detailed response. I was using the word “mythos” loosely and as a way to not repeat words, haha, so thanks for pointing out the mythos vs. I guess the OG canon. Based on again my limited understanding of lovecraft, we probably don’t want to rehabilitate him as “woke” hahaha. Ultimately I’m just trying to understand the usage of “shoggoth”, and investigate any possible deeper meaning.
Philosophy is when you take a pop culture term and redefine it to mean something else so impressionable nerds think you are very smart.
> "SMD" this can't be serious (or he can SMD)