leaving utopia

goodbye lighthaven

here are some things I have done over the past thirty days:

• almost get unbanned from the Alexander Wales discord, but absolutely fumble the bag

• play a wargame as “The AI,” and attempt to kill everyone, then accidentally establish world peace instead

• have sex (for the Zoomer male, this is noteworthy)

• send a knight on a holy quest to buy ice cream at 1 AM. obtain Unregistered Ice Cream from the shadow world (it tasted like shit).

• receive the nonstandard analysis pill.

• meet quasi-obscure but known-to-me internetizens by coincidence such as Sophia Light, hath, and lc

• invent a combination interview/heist, then perform it on future classical artist Bavitz

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this is the best place I have ever been. it has the highest density of quality people I have ever encountered outside of academic department lectures, but the people here aren’t cucked by bureaucrats.

i cannot write a paean to lighthaven. just go reread Bostrom’s “Letter from Utopia.” the word “haven” connotes protection, refuge, distance. so “lighthaven” means a refuge for light in a world which is abysmally black. but here I feel the phantom fingers of a perfect future, reaching retrocausally back, just enough to raise goosebumps.

the deranged land economy of California mean that Lighthaven is packed tight with stuff, the Mario 64 of locations, an open-world of content crammed into a tiny cartridge. books, actual good books and not covid-fake-bookshelf slop, line the walls. unrelatedly, there’s paper copies of HPMoR on sale. ZING!

people here are not just intelligent, they are diverse. legal scholars radicalized by a failed education system, men who used books like heroin, daytrading physicist vtubers, exhibitionist AI doomers, clown school graduates.

here there is finally no excuse for my tendentious rejection of social norms, because people here do not brainlessly follow inherited norms, they warp and manipulate them to their own (largely prosocial) ends, and simply (because of how Schelling points work) have converged on some not too different from the ambient culture, at least from my standpoint as a space alien.

lighthaven is a society run by and for Actual Humans. (shoutout to the various service staff, who I hope are paid and treated well.)

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and now, of course, i must leave. a healthy and vivacious thing in a hostile environment must enforce its boundaries. well-kept gardens die by pacifism.

as one of my favorite bloggers here and well-known localist shill Hill Citizen describes, people deserve to and are obligated to create and inhabit communities which reflects their values. i intend to return to these lands, despite the rationalist diaspora.

may all people be safe, happy, and free. may the machine-children we produce surpass us as a well-raised child surpasses his parents, may we live together in a prosperity we justly share. may each individual and each country be separate because their preferences differ, and may we all be remember that our inescapable togetherness as (for now) we are all trapped in the gravity well of the same floating rock.

it is increasingly likely that we will achieve our destiny soon, or not at all. i hope i live to see a world where places like lighthaven are so common that they are no longer called “walled, surveilled compounds” because they are no longer walled and surveilled.