And the worst: making sense of art. I sometimes ask Claude for interpretation of something, and it's rather weird to see how typically my own takes are just plain worse. I don't know how to feel about this, except that perhaps one could get better with practice.

What I'm basically saying is: hold on, why should I grant that? If the earring-plus-human system comes to contain a high fidelity continuation of me, perhaps with upgrades, perhaps with some functions migrated off wet tissue and onto magical jewelry, why is the natural reaction horror rather than transhumanist interest?

Similarly, if a superintelligent entity can reproduce my behaviors, memories, goals and values, then it must have a very high-fidelity model of me inside, somewhere. I think that such a high-fidelity model can, in the limit, pass as myself, and is me in most/all of the ways I care about.

I'm going to raise an eyebrow here: this sounds profound, and maybe is, but it is also suspiciously close to a moralization of friction. The anti-earring position often treats effort, uncertainty, and self-direction as terminal goods, rather than as messy instruments we evolved because we lacked access to perfect advice. Yet in ordinary life we routinely celebrate technologies that remove forms of “agency” we did not actually treasure. The person with ADHD who takes stimulants is not usually described as having betrayed his authentic self by outsourcing task initiation to chemistry. He is more often described as becoming able to do what he already reflectively wanted to do.

Of course the orthodox reader can reply that the earring goes far beyond stimulant-level support. It graduates from life advice to high-bandwidth motor control. Surely that crosses the line. But why, exactly? Human cognition already consists of layers of delegation. "You" do not personally compute the contractile details for every muscle involved in pronouncing a word. Vast amounts of your behavior are already outsourced to semi-autonomous subsystems that present finished products to consciousness after the interesting work is done. The earring may be unsettling because it replaces one set of subsystems with another, but "replaces local implementation with better local implementation" is not, by itself, a moral catastrophe. If the replacement is transparent to your values and preserves the structure you care about, then the complaint becomes more like substrate chauvinism than a substantive account of harm.

where the FUCK is my triangular vinyl for purchase!?

Somehow they've figured out how to play a guitar with a French accent.

Just weird enough to stand out in the general pop landscape and just catchy enough to not get instantly turned off and deemed obtuse.

It's a mystery to you that many highly competitive positions are filled by people strongly optimizing their lives to get those positions? I would be mystified if I looked around and found anything else. This is what makes policy hard. You need to make a system that doesn't break when people optimize it hard for personal gain. Deluding yourself into thinking that most people in your country/organization/game etc. will be motivated primarily by the common good just leaves you wide open to selfish optimizers (c.f. communism). If people truly wanted to work for the common good, we would already be living in paradise. Of course, this doesn't make it any less good to actually be altruistic! You just need to make sure that you're not also being naive.