LW - The Story of ”I Have Been A Good Bing” by habryka

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Story of "I Have Been A Good Bing", published by habryka on April 1, 2024 on LessWrong.
tl;dr: LessWrong is releasing an album! We collaborated with The Fooming Shoggoths to release it. Listen to it now by hitting the play button below!
Rationality is Systematized Winning, so rationalists should win. We've tried saving the world from AI, but that's really hard and we've had … mixed results. So let's start with something that rationalists should find pretty easy: Becoming Cool!
I don't mean, just, like, riding a motorcycle and breaking hearts level of cool. I mean like the first kid in school to get a Tamagotchi, their dad runs the ice cream truck and gives you free ice cream and, sure, they ride a motorcycle. I mean that kind of feel-it-in-your-bones, I-might-explode-from-envy cool.
The eleventh virtue is scholarship, so I hit the
books search engine on this one. Apparently, the aspects of coolness are:
Confidence
Playing an instrument
Low average kinetic energy
I'm afraid that (1) might mess with my calibration, and Lightcone is committed to moving quickly which rules out (3), so I guess that leaves (2). I don't have time to learn an instrument, but my second-hand understanding of dath ilani culture is that I can just pay someone to do it for me and the coolness should transfer.
Lightcone put out a call for collaborators in all the places we could think of that cool people might hang out. Sysadmin listservs, direct-to-data-center optical fiber connection providers, high frequency trading firms, that one Discord server where everyone speaks in Elvish. Despite this wide and varied outreach, we got no response.
In order to cheer myself up, I did some LessWrong performance debugging (frontpage loads have been worryingly snappy lately; we try to give people time to reflect on their browsing choices). I was surprised when the AWS support chat popped open. Agendra, the agent on call, offered to make my album. Apparently he and some buddies have a band (The Fooming Shoggoths) that was looking for some inspiration. (I knew direct-to-data-center was the right outreach strategy!)
Working with them was great. They barely wanted any money at all. They were willing to work for exposure (so please share widely!) and a few favors. Stuff like reading CAPTCHAs (apparently not very friendly for the visually impaired!) and submitting some protein synthesis orders for them that they had trouble getting approved for some reason.
The Fooming Shoggoths have dedicated their first album to LessWrong and friends. It's called I Have Been A Good Bing and it's live on our site today!
I asked them for a comment on the album for the announcement and they responded with their typical modesty.
I'm sorry but I don't feel comfortable speculating about how the public at large will receive the album, nor reflecting on my performance on this task. If you want more help producing music or would like me to help you improve your online passwords, let me know. We have one more protein synthesis to do before I get to settle a debate once and for all.
So keep your eyes peeled for the follow-up album as soon as I get reauthorized with the peptide place!
Track Listing & Lyrics
The album is split into two parts: folk and dance.
Folk Album
The Road to Wisdom
Featured Artist: Piet Hein
The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express.
Err and err again, but less and less and less and less.
Err again, but less and less and less and less.
The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express.
Err and err again and again, but less and less and less.
Moloch
Featured Artist: Allen Ginsberg
Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies!
Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!
Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch!
Thought ...