Posted on Thursday, 06/05/25.

A recent pleasure has been seeking out serious writing on the internet——writing that purports to be serious often has minimal styling applied, sometimes just bare HTML edge-to-edge in the browser. Reading this way you can almost hear the unicode frames clicking. Even the most purposefully abstruse and loquacious text sits generously within a few slim kilobytes. Page-loads resolve instantaneously.

People think gwern is a serious writer, but the Serious writers are in the comments. They submit posts to Less Wrong, which as of late oscillates between long essays on hypothetical apocalypses and the true shape of Intimacy (and why you can’t have it, and why even if you could have it it would be unfulfilling and a cognitohazard). The Serious writers know the names of all of the various Rhetorical Devices, and carefully accuse one-another of employing them to induce misapprehension or misconstrual. They speak of high-trust and low-trust societies, g-factors, and ignore many established ideas. They have opinions on Cicero and SSC. They can sound insidious at times and have complicated ideas about women and minorities. Many of them are polyamorous and deeply hate polyamory. At the end of a long essay by a previously-frequent but now-infrequent rationalist Poster, they spend a few paragraphs vaguely chewing out another apparently well-known poster with a severely barebones website. This Poster, to give context, has another Post in which they recount coming out as autistic on Facebook, receiving pushback from a friend as to the utility of equating their condition with that of a nonverbal autist, and their recount of their partner’s verbatim reply ‘taking down’ this idea by stating that if they had not had rich parents they, too, could have turned out that way/who’s to say/etc. Someone in the comments of the original Post points out that they didn’t feel that this sort of vague pettiness was very Rational, to which the original author responded that anyone who immediately discounted the Value of an Essay on account of its criticism of another person must themselves not be very Rational because they perhaps had not yet grasped the possibility of Value even for this interstitial invective re the Essay as a whole, etc. A child comment of this exchange comes from the antecedent of the invective, who states that they are actually Fine with its premise if not its style, though to be clear they have not requested that anything be changed because they feel it is ‘unfair’ but rather because its current state may violate Provision 7 of the Rationalist Rules (authored, coincidentally, many years ago by the original poster). The original poster responds (following polite throat-clearing) that this is actually a Gross Misapprehension of Provision 7, thus constituting a straw-man which, ipso facto, blah blah. Reading this website I am overwhelmed by a sense somehow that somewhere something is clenching.

Many of the posts on these forums are about struggles with ‘play’ and ‘intimacy.’ They posit grand theories of those ‘different worlds’ into which the chill and debauched are divided by merit of Signals and Frames and (shudder) Grokking at early ages. Almost all are home-schooled or ‘gifted.’ Many take substances described by strings of letters and numbers. As I walked to the station in the morning on Tuesday I considered the usual question of why some of us do not feel that we can Be Present, and thus take time to triage and dowse the issue to the effect of becoming increasingly unable to Be Present while becoming increasingly able to see the sheer distance one hath shimmed between oneself and Being Present. I walk along a largeish road to the place where it crosses into 渋谷区. It is a sort of taxidermical skill, I guess——proficiency in the art of the application of formaldehyde, which both fixes n.b., to make immobile, to stabilize. and kills what it touches. If we did not know how to use formaldehyde we would not be able to observe the bloated body of colossal squids in the low halogens of natural history museums, we would be unable to lift the wing of an extinct island bird harvested in 1896 and kept in a cool drawer ever since, we would not be able to see Lenin’s waxy mien. There is, therefore, a crisis calmed by the use of teratogenic ethers. I do not know how to console these men who write Seriously; they seem so angry, so sinewy-in-the-soul. I brush against what I imagine they must feel, sometimes, though my tendency is to inhale the vapors. I don’t know well how to use a cannula. There is a bland fear of becoming bitter in much of late 20th century literary fiction, too. There is a terror at ‘calcification’ inside of anyone of my age and education level I have ever spoken to. We fear alchemical changes. I look up Tumblrish words like chrysopoeia. I see so little peace in the Serious writing, despite its being being framed to point toward something like blissful immediacy. To be slack-jawed in the laminar flow of the now. The boring answer is that this is only because the disturbed can muster the energy to Post, but still, none of us is stopping them. None of us is letting them rest their tumescent heads, swollen by aporia, on our shoulders.

Other serious writing I go through includes online entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The page on Adorno was updated for the first time in twenty years in 2024, and reminds me of the luxurious language of ascetic graduate students. Ibid abounds and large names flow freely and confidently.

In a cafe and then a university library I read from a collected book of essays and lectures by Jung I found for ￥300 at my local academic bookstore. The first are a pair of talks on the physician Paracelsus. The second pair are lectures on Freud, the second of these just after his death, where Jung compares his once-mentor’s apparently parthenogenic cosmology to negative definitions against the ails of the Victorian era, etc. I know their relationship was a long and complicated one, that Jung eventually thumbed-the-nose while and after war convulsed Europe; i.e., I am aware that I am missing so much. The essays on Paracelsus are more pleasant and immediate, though his respect for psychoanalysis is anyway evident in the others——I am reminded how easy alchemical modes slip back into our thoughts, the multitude of ways in which ‘pagan’ patterns reassert themselves once one becomes sufficiently skeptical. I try to imagine the early 16th century. I read more about the phlogiston theory.

I read a string of Tweets from some anonymous user I used to follow on my second alt account (basically inactive), who chews out other users in frankly needlessly ornate language that nevertheless also pleases me. They say desultory and scurrilous and exegete——they call something ‘atrociously puerile’, say something ‘apes the language of digital shortform mourning’, and distinguish between their ‘affective’ and ‘functional’ seriousness, before bemoaning that they cannot go to their local university library to study because of its competitive atmosphere and repletion of ‘pretty girls.’ I consider if I would prefer to write this way; part of me is ashamed that I have to work so hard to even approach this sort of register, and usually ever only (falsely) imply that I could do it if I wanted by mocking the sort of high-low ‘bit’ common to the DeLillo and Wallace pretenders of the world. What stops me from completely despairing is an inference that this Poster is quite gloomy, quite twilit, as though this means that the price of easy, lambent language were one’s hikikomorification.

The needless expenditure of this sort of independent, online, serious writing is immense——this is another explanation of why it is appealing. Like inspecting mature knots of strangling fig vines. The oncogencic aspect is part of what tenders a kernel of respect——is why I was not totally put out by a subset of my former MIT-frat roommates between 2021 and 2024. They really seemed to be spending a hell of a lot of time and inducing a lot of suffering (internal and adjacent) to try and figure out what was Wrong with them. They explicitly cited these sites, these communities, the sulking communes of SF and the massive online treatises on meditation prefaced (necessarily, for what Rational reader would imbibe them otherwise?) by lengthy meta-warnings on the dangers of meditation. There is a grossness and fear that the density and opacity is a necessary part of it, an admixture only to allow one to consume the stuff without gagging, but this seems like an unsolvable problem to pin down, and I also have to take pleasure in the utility of us all miskeying what we think and what we do. As in, I think people are like pre-stressed, post-tensioned concrete——the injuries we inflict selfward may make sense only under extreme, anomalous, possibly hypothetical loads.

To keep myself low I try to remember tableaux from my commutes. In 下北沢駅 in the morning I see a young man ‘crashing out’, squatting on the floor with his eyes covered, comforted by a companion woman. I see a young boy run across the street without warning, narrowly missed by a mother on a large electric bicycle who is not looking. I inspect firm buds and place my camera up close to them, snapping a photo almost instantaneously optimized and adjusted by what Apple knows makes botanical snapshots look ‘excellent.’ I have learned the order of smells on the green-way by my commute home (prefaced by some flowers’ mild perfume released only at sundown, and ended by a bakery’s burnt sugar). If I make it near the station before 8am I see a calisthenic copse of older men and woman bending their knees and swinging their arms. Men in bright synthetics jog in puffy sneakers. I try to identify the fabric of formal suits. I look at the variations in school uniforms, and see from afar the bright orange and yellow sunhats of elementary school children being herded across intersections by women with low ponytails. I see whether the oncoming train has a pantograph or a linear-induction drive (there are almost no third rails in Tokyo; only the 銀座線 and the 丸ノ内線). For trains, I note if a station is preceded by a gentle ‘S’ curve, prized by enthusiasts as they allow photographs to capture both the face and gently bending flank of the oncoming train. They look like great steel caterpillars, and move so quietly. Noticing is very cheap and pleasurable: its produce can be stored durably for rehydration in times of fallow.