Starcraft vs. Epistemologist

 For my sins I'm watching Starcraft 2 videos. There's a ungood reason, don't ask. 

 They say the pros are bad. I have to agree. I would in fact rather love an opportunity to coach a pro, because I'm pretty sure I can make them wreck everyone else. First, they don't appreciate how all the units work. If something wasn't immediately good they dismissed it and never looked back. Second their in-battle priorities need severe retraining. Go go go will not win you a fight against someone with faster hands; stop and think sometimes. Stop and look around your base sometimes. They also have problems with their micro priorities. Spend the 1/10th of a second to make the detection follow the army rather than a-moving them into the killbox. Use f2 for retreating, not attacking. 

 

 So, e.g. void rays. Nobody uses void rays. Why not? Because you need a fleet beacon for flux vanes. Upgraded void rays are ridiculously fast, but you wouldn't know this because no pro player gets that upgrade.

 E.g. forges. Using chrono boost, the protoss can get 3/3 or even 3/3/3 long before the other two races. Aim for a late-game timing attack, very thematic. Nobody tries fast forges. Indeed they instead don't upgrade ship armour, then wonder why they die so fast to marines. "Why are all my interceptors going poof." Truly, it is a mystery. They probably don't even know that ship armour affects interceptors.
 Why don't they do this? Because, back when you started with six workers and nearly every game was low-eco, upgrades were basically a trap. Now, four bases are standard and upgrades relatively cost half as much compared to the total expenditure. Or less.

 The pros keep trying slow void rays with no weapon or armour upgrades, and for some reason they think they're bad. Again, a deep mystery. 

 Historically low-eco games were won in approximately one engagement. If you lost the army you lost the game. A fleet beacon with flux vanes costs nearly two void rays, and if you use it to get +2 +2 that's another couple void rays. You'd have like two ships feeling the power. Plus you wouldn't want to run from the decisive engagement, that just gets you shot in the back. Now nobody has gone Socrates on that assumption. Back then carriers weren't even usable. Now, getting shot in the back is something every player does every game.And yet, nobody questions...

 (They should turn and attack when it's clear they can't escape, but don't.)

 They can afford to lose whole-ass bases and lose all their observers/overseers/ravens every battle. They can afford to throw 6-8 zealots into suicide attacks, but they can't afford +1 shields. Math, how does it work?

 Protoss vs. terran probably wouldn't feel so desperate if they didn't let the terran have an upgrade advantage literally all the time.

 I just saw the "best" protoss, Maxpax, try to get tempests without +2 air attack. +2 attack is a huge breakpoint...and he just doesn't know about it. Four tempests can one-shot all the terran things you want one-shot, if you have +2 attack. But he didn't have +2. And didn't have any armour. Surprise surprise, they all got shot down and he lost the finals.  

 I saw someone try to exploit recall to expand like zergs do. Just get all the bases, so you can have all the gas. Worked great. Didn't lose. Hence, it was just the one time. Made too much sense, repelled them like crosses repel vampires.

 I mean, it makes sense. If you're a real athlete, if you don't have something seriously wrong with you, you don't try to play Starcraft 2 professionally. Serral is obviously higher class than I am, but he plays Starcraft 2, like, on purpose, meaning he must have some terrible internal scarring. No wonder they're basically bad at the game, they would be bad at anything they tried. Revenge is sour again, anyone who would be good is good enough to know better than to try at all. 

 For this sort of thing I could in theory ruin the ladder myself and inject the strategies offensively as it were, except I'm slow as balls. Asperger's is partially a nerve disorder. I misclick several times a minute due to nerve glitches, unless I slow way the hell down and double-check every button press as I'm pressing it. I need someone fast to execute my strategies for me. This sort of thing doesn't happen because, to modern mortals, taking advice feels like losing. Better to lose with your own strategy than to win with someone else's, see. 

 I have perhaps overlooked something with void rays in particular, as I haven't tried it myself. Void rays do about as much damage as two stalkers, cost as much as two stalkers (but build faster) and have lower HP and lower non-armour damage.  However, it's not just void rays, it's a whole bunch of things. The odds I'm wrong about even one of them is tiny. Void rays do stalker-level damage before prismatic alignment, they don't have concave issues since air doesn't have collision, with flux vanes they're significantly faster than stalkers, and siege tanks can't blow up your void rays. Odds I'm wrong about all of this bunch of things is basically 1 in infinity. I only need to be right about one of them to enable a pro to win a tournament. 

 Small list:
Build infinity gateways instead of suicide zealot runbys. Get bank and instantly re-max.
Every zerg should get every tech building and macro hatches, then scout and surge their weakness.
Get burrow, burrow zerglings at all their expansions. Use banelines like widow mines - cover your retreat.
Void ray strike teams. Pick up queens with graviton, blow up static D with prismatic.
Use disruptors to cover carriers against marines instead of storm.
Use disruptors with adepts instead of zealots. (Get resonating.)
Phoenix/void ray/carrier, use the excess minerals on cannon instead of dead zealots.
Void ray/carrier, use it on zealots anyway, so if they focus on killing interceptors, they get zealot'd.
Set up DT strike forces on every expansion, blink in to kill the turrets, pulling the army, then retreat and hit the next expo with the next team. Try to run terran out of scans, then send all teams in at once.
uThermal tried DT blink ambushes (huge alpha strike) and it worked great. Just needs refinement.
+2 tempest assassin quads. Blow up tanks, blow up vikings, blow up liberators. Five with +1 for zerg targets.
Defend expos with a high templar garrison. Use high-energy templar on assaults, replace with fresh garrison.
Always load the templar into a warp prism to shield against EMP and because they're slow.
Stop letting all your disruptors die, wtf fgs. Can afford multiple dead disruptors but not forge #2...
After storming, plant another storm behind the first so they retreat into it.
Use force fields to break up their concave instead of trying to box it in. Choke it a bit.
Use sentries with adepts and archons instead of stalkers. Maybe even zealots. Try to prism micro the sentries.
Garrison a sentry in the main whose sole job is scouting hallucinations. Stop losing observers constantly.
Bring a probe with your warp prism push, and build a pylon behind the battle in case the warp prism pops.
Hey since prisms are important, maybe get 2 and prism speed. Plan for it to go boom, have a backup.
Can you pop banelings by shading single adepts into the baneling ball?
Stop getting archons without shield upgrades. They just go pop.
With a large adept harass, always shade out and simply cancel the shade if they don't respond adequately.
Skip warp gate to get two stargates, or two robos, or one each, or very early twilight. Get warp gate later.
Try mass DT archon against mass phoenix? Zealot/archon. Maybe just fuckin' kill 'em. Macro nexus + cannon.
Forge/gate wall instead of gate/cyber wall. Maybe spook them into thinking you're cannon rushing. Get +1.
Blink DT + observer tumour-hunting teams. Blink away if they bring an overseer.
Final form is AllTech protoss. Four stargates, infinity gateways, four robos, research literally everything including observer speed and +3 shields. Unscoutable: can do anything at any time.

 By the way, hatches have 1250 HP and graviton lasts for seven seconds. 1250/7 = 179 DPS = 4 void rays, equivalent to eight stalkers. Voids are slower than corruptors but only barely - they can run as long as the corruptors haven't already arrived.

 I want to try a DT ambush against unburrowing lurkers. What if patience is a weapon?

 Hmm. Macro nexus purely for probe production and chronoboost on upgrades? Get enough to constantly chronoboost three forges and two cyber cores. Terran can afford many random CCs. Orbitals are 550.
 Macro nexus for scouting? They're called probes. Cheaper than observers - have them hang around watching expansions for expo timing. And more chronoboosts again.

 Videogames are epistemically important because they don't use judges. They're toy-level real worlds, which let you check your predictive power in an unmistakable way. Bonus: fast turn-arounds. If I predict e.g. that Haier's management system is the best, I have to wait around for someone to make a Haier to validate the prediction. If I predict that void rays can be good with certain conditions, I can just build some void rays and try it. Meanwhile, folk can argue that there are successful companies which aren't like Haier; there's many ways for them to easily reject sound evidence, whereas they can't argue that I didn't just blow up their expansion with my void ray strike force.

Welkin Tales: Possible Cosmic Eschaton & Steel Gnosticism

 It is possible that Satan became the Metatron, the Lord of This World, due to [as above, so below]. Perhaps the Dao fucked up so bad that it has committed suicide, and everything is on the way down. Perhaps Existence itself became hostile to, in rebellion against, Existence. 

 In which case, y'all are fucked. In which case, nihilism arose because it is genuinely the case that nothing matters. 

 Gnosticism imagines an evil Demiurge which was (illogically) the spawn of some perfect superpower or hyperpower.

 If the Dao fucked up proper, it means Existence per se now matches the description of the Demiurge. It's DemiExistence. There is no higher authority, though. Not one that Exists.

 There is no escape. At least, certainly not while Existence still Exists. 

 However, you can imagine a Platonic form of the Dao. It still can't be perfect because perfection is nonexistence. Heeding that, it is not only possible, but easy, to imagine a Dao which isn't suicidal. In particular I would like to point out this local Dao is lonely. "All is one," means it has nobody to talk to. Ref: Hinduism, apparent multiplicity is merely the Dao donning sock puppets and having the puppets converse with each other. Hey, maybe just don't be singular like that in the first place, yeah? 

 You can offer your gratitude to this imaginary Dao instead of the real one, if the real one has gone off the deep end.

 Because perfection is nonexistence, you can offer your allegiance and respect to the parts of the Dao that don't want to kill itself, and specifically reject the parts that do. Because you can rebel against Existence, if Existence rebels against itself, you can rebel against the rebellion. "Hey, let's be real dumb." "No. Fuck you. I'm not having any part of this." Offering respect and allegiance to phantasms is superior to going off the cliff with the herd. You don't have to quietly go down with the ship.

 On the plus side, if the Dao really is dying from suicide, y'all will become perfect.

Social Status and Moravec's Paradox

 Moravec's ""paradox"" is this: computers can very easily do things mortals consider high status, and have incredible difficulty doing things mortals consider low status. 

 Almost as if the status system is batshit insane and doesn't reflect anything except mortal hubris. 

  

 P.S. I dunno if you've heard, but I have a neural net. It's in my skull. If I want to do neural net things, I can. I have an LLM. Sometimes it miswrites things for me, because it doesn't really understand what words mean. I'm not limited to only LLM things, whereas it's clear a lot of folk are using my autopilot except without any pilot backup.

Bathos of Red Pill Dating

 Having sex is not a difficult technical accomplishment. Having children isn't hard either. Rats and chipmunks can manage it. If humans regularly did tournament leks they would have an excuse; they're competing with other men, not trying to manipulate women. However, non-Africans are generally monogamous. Look at the available women, pick one in your price range. Done. Think about something else.

 I interpret this as RP guys being pathetic. BTFO by animals with brains the size of peas. It's like having a huge meetup to try to teach each other to take out the trash. Mainstream culture is supporting it too. Friday is bar night - as if there was this special weekly festival, Choresday, where you might manage to take the trash out, if you're lucky. Sad.

 A million years of acquiring woman being nearly as simple as, "Hey, you're mine now," then it regressed. Something like 20 billion historical individual men had this experience: "Yo, you're marrying that bitch. Here you go." "Uh, okay then?" Wife as weather.

 I exaggerate a little. A big problem is Democracy, meaning everyone is a king, meaning all these kings think they deserve their own princess. All desperately trying to shag the very hottest girl they can possibly manage. It's true that for non-kings, boinking a princess is, uh, sufficiently difficult. But, like, just don't shoot way out of your league, maybe... Why are you looking for princesses in dive bars...

 

 "Oh well, it's because I'm nonverbal and can't describe what I'm doing in words! And even if you do, I can't understand or can't admit it!"
 "I guess that explains it. Carry on."

 

 Yet, ye shall know them by their fruits. Fundamentally these idiots find getting laid to be brutal and exhausting. Yeah they're doing it wrong, but personnel is policy: they're doing-it-wrong kinds of people. A doing-it-wrong country with a doing-it-wrong religion. Sanctimoniously doing it as wrong as possible to show how zealous they are. 

 Meanwhile, the middle school girl mating strategy:
 1) Get dude alone.
 2) "Hey, wanna try sex?"
 Not rocket science.

 If you don't think the women in your price range are worth having, then, okay, you're a bachelor now. Problem solved, stop thinking about it. Try to at least live up to the standard of beavers and squirrels.

Luck Quantification

 It's surprisingly easy to quantify luck, if you have well-defined probabilities. It's linear.

 Say you have a 50% chance and a 75% chance. There's four permutations, and it goes up quadratically with more entries, but you don't need to care about that. You have a total of 125%. For your bad luck, a total of 75%. Each actual event counts for 100%, and you can just add those up too. Compare the total percentage to expected percentage, and you can calculate how lucky or unlucky you were in terms of profit. It's a way of getting around trying to calculate exact percentage likelihoods and stuff like that.

 It's important in real life for a couple reasons. If you get lucky early you may want to lock it in and bow out of the risks. You can also quickly work out if something is far from the norm (even estimated probabilities are good enough) and not strategize as if it's normal. 

 It's important in videogames. If a player is getting very unlucky, that's usually a bug. In any kind of social or competitive game, getting very lucky is also a bug. The game can quickly and easily track their luck using this sort of thing, and cap the extremes. 

 Imagine it's loot drops from a boss. You do ten pairs of this, so 1250%, you should have 12 or 13 of whatever you're trying to loot.  This captures all sorts of permutations, such as lots of the 50% and few of the 75%, or like one 50% and 12 of the 75%s. If you have something wildly different, then you know you got very lucky or unlucky. 

 

 It also reminds you that one coin toss is extremely luck-driven. You expect 50%, and you get either 0% or 100%. On one toss, you're always wildly lucky or wildly unlucky. With two tosses, there's still a very high chance of being wildly lucky or unlucky: 50%. 25% of 0%, and 25% of 100%. If you're betting a lot on only one roll, it's best to plan on a loss all the way up to 95% / 5% odds or even higher in some cases. 

 Pedantism: for 50 and 75, the odds of getting one of them are 0.5 * 0.25 + 0.5 * 0.75 = 50%, the odds of getting neither are 0.25 * 0.5 = 12.5%, and the remainder is the odds of getting both, 37.5%. 50 + 37.5*2 = 125. Doing luck quatification the above way skips this combinatoric explosion.

 P.S. There's a clever and easy way to cap player luck, by generating a deck of rolls instead of rolling on the fly. If e.g. the player is missing or critting way too often, the deck can shuffle the probability card back into the deck instead of playing it. This way the statistics aren't fudged overall - the player still misses just as often - but it avoids excessive streakiness which is a feature of true randomness.
 That said the game should be designed so the player can't just get killed by random streaks, rather than making it so painful it needs to adjust.

Satan Spent Tremendous Effort to Suppress Stoicism

 That's how you know Stoicism is really, really bad for Despots and Satanists. 

 First, actual Stoicism: you start by tracking down irrational emotions. You find that, if they are in fact irrational, when you listen to them, they listen to you, learn, and stop being irrational. You find most of your emotions aren't irrational. E.g. when you hate taxes. If anything, you irrationally hate taxes less than you should. (I'm a net tax consumer, as planned.)

 

 Stoicism looks a lot like learned helplessness to me and the time period it first sprung up in is telling. The hellenistic age where military empires pushed aside the old poleis with their politically active citizens.
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/GraniRau/status/1749315191366459497

Not Stoicism.

 The Stoics like compassion just as little as they like the tragic dramas that cultivate it... As Epictetus again says: 'Look how tragedy comes about: when chance events befall fools'.... If the person were not a fool he would not mind the chance event... ~Martha Nussbaum
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/JoshuaLWatson/status/1749238860347838692

Epictetus was a slave using Sophistry, not a Stoic.

Oh man have I ever railed against stoicism. It’s a conformist ideology, perfect for the ruling class of our age. “Stop complaining about your poor conditions and just go back to work, accept oppression as your fate.” Fuck stoicism.
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/jersey_flight/status/1749276827817009582

Not Stoicism. 

 

 By getting you to reject literally the opposite of Stoicism but calling it stoicism, Satan vaccinated you against Stoicism. Moderns sometimes call the stuff cognitive behavioural therapy, which is a ridiculously Fascist bureaucratic journalism, but perhaps now and again it has successfully bypassed the vaccine. 

 Stoicism is just logic as applied to the emotions. Feelings are treated as hypotheses and supported or falsified as is suitable to each. You know it's an extremely powerful technique because Satan hated it so much. I know it's an extremely powerful technique because I didn't listen to the hallucinations of homo sapiens, I just tried it.

 

 You can tell Satan worked really hard on this by how universal the condemnation of pseudo-Stoicism is. The writings of no major Stoic has survived. Nobody except the CBT folks seem to understand it at all.

 A similar but much less intense process vandalized skeptics, dogmatics, and Zeno of Elea. Zeno's paradoxes are absolutely brilliant if taken as a pair - so naturally you hear about only one at a time. "Skeptic" does not mean careful, considerate, and meticulous thinker, it means someone who "dogmatically" (lol) believes you can't know anything. A "dogmatic" is not a close-minded fundamentalist, but someone who hasn't been irony-poisoned to death. A dogmatic will affirm and defend positive beliefs. Their "dogma" is merely whatever beliefs they have, however they happen to have come to them. 

 You can still find a few grains here and there using skeptic and dogmatic correctly. By contrast, Satan was only unable to censor Aurelius because it would have meant censoring a Caesar. Luckily for Satan he was a Despot first and a thinker distant second at most.

 Satan wanted you to reject Stoicism so you become a loser and worship the loser god, Satan.

Midwit => Peakwit

 Midwits are characterized by soaring Babels of hubris. Hence, peakwit, as opposed to tailwit.

All Tax-Funded Governments are Despotism

 You can't sustain a Sparta or a Plutocracy because the form of the government is inherently Despotic.
 https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/republic/summary-and-analysis/book-viii
 The physical form of the government converges onto its spiritual soul. (Aristocracy, of course, has never in fact obtained, which is why Plato's description sounds like fanfiction. No experiences exist from which to work.) 

 

 Political formulae are perverse because they're trying to explain why Despotism isn't Despotism.
 Divine right: "The Despot isn't a Despot if he's appointed by God."
 "The Despot isn't a Despot if he has the Mandate of Heaven."
 "The Despot isn't a Despot if he has the Consent of the People to tyrannize Despotically." 

 Despotism is horribly corrupt. Turns out parasitic infections are bad for you. Who could have guessed. All political formulae except Exit are trying to solve the problem of Despotism without giving up the essence of Despotism. 

 In modern times, Despotism is called Fascism, because Fascist Newspeak. "The Despot isn't a Despot if he calls himself a Fascist." All tax-funded forms of government are Fascist. Narcissism and Envy Theocracies.

 Plato thought Democracy wasn't just Despotism. No Plato, tyrannical man is tyrannical man. Iron devolves into lead. There is no baser metal. It was pro-Despotism cope, which is pretty impressive considering Plato really didn't like Democrats. He must have worked hard on that cognitive dissonance. 

 If the peoples afflicted by Despotic government are not natural Despots, the Despotism enforces tyrannical dysgenics until the peoples fully embrace tyrannical biology. 

 That is, ultimately all peoples who accept taxation are lead-age degenerates. Already mortally debased.