Optimize Literally Everything
Month
Computers beat humans at Go, the Cubs won the World Series, Donald Trump was elected President, and now all of your friends are being transformed into anime characters. 3 seals left.
Behold my next (actually first) light novel. In my own opinion, “A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero?!” is better, but experience has taught me that I have no darn idea which of my writings people will like more or less. Feel free to let me know how it went.
Content warnings: sexual abuse, economics.
Original writing prompt: “Write a romantic comedy. Difficulty: both lovers are emotionally mature and have excellent communication skills.”
SHE is gowned in a black dress sewn with tiny emeralds, rubies, sapphires too small to detract from the darkness of her gown, instead giving it the illusion of a rainbow sheen. The gown falls modestly to the floor around her legs, and covers her bodice completely, but is incongruously backless. A thin gold circlet surrounds her head, set in front with a diamond the size of an eye. Her golden chair is set with cushions also gold-dipped.
She is sitting at one end of a marble table clothed in silk damasked with the tracery of ravens; a table long enough to separate her from the other side by further than a man could lunge in a single motion.
HE is huge, muscular, a full head taller than her, clad only in a thin white loincloth; and he is chained to a solid stone chair on the other side of the silk-clothed marble table. His face is clean-shaven, and somebody has braided silver flowers into his flowing brown locks.
MAN: I swear upon my father’s bones that I will not attack you if you remove my chains.
The WOMAN’s voice is prim in reply.
WOMAN: My father may also have died too early, Mr. Thoron, but when I was a child, His Grim Majesty recited to me every night from our family’s accumulated list of guidelines. Rules thirteen through seventen are quite clear about how to behave in the presence of an attractive captured hero… forget I said ‘attractive’. I mean, you are, of course, but… damn it, I’m making a fool of myself, aren’t I.
MAN: Maybe a little.
WOMAN: Hold your tongue, wretch.
MAN: Thoron holds his tongue for no one! But in all seriousness, your Grim Majesty, my own people also have ideas about guidelines for dating. There aren’t supposed to be chains. At least, not on the first date.
The WOMAN taps her fingers thoughtfully on the table.
WOMAN: There seems to be some cultural distance between us.
MAN: One could say that, yes.
WOMAN: Is this really… dating? I captured you. I now own you. You’re my harem slave, not a, a…
MAN: We’re seated at a nice marble table waiting for a chef to cook our food. I am reasonably sure this is a date.
The WOMAN covers her face in her hands.
WOMAN: It is, isn’t it. Oh, god, I’m on a date.
MAN: And you chained your date to a chair.
WOMAN: Silence, slave!
MAN: You know what they say about women who have to chain their men to heavy stone objects.
WOMAN: But I'm… I’m not…
MAN: I can’t help but wonder if you also intend to keep me chained down while… inviting me in for coffee.
WOMAN: I… yes, I suppose I do. But if you’re not restrained, you might…
MAN: Ravish your majesty’s fair form?
WOMAN: Escape. Look you, don’t think I don’t understand what you’re up to! You’re trying to seduce me! Yes, I know, I started it, but you’re trying to seduce me back only so that you can get away and rejoin your army!
MAN: Maybe I’d ravish you first and then escape… you’re blushing. Ha, you’re actually blushing!
WOMAN: You should perhaps ask yourself if it is wise to taunt the Grim Empress when you are her captive!
MAN: You commanded that I be taken as your harem slave and you’re blushing because I talked about ravishing you. You’re not… you’re not a virgin, are you?
WOMAN: Oh god no. I’ve had the best courtesans in the Empire, male and female. So you’d better not slack off in, in…
MAN: You can’t even say it. 'In bed.’ Go ahead, try to say it.
WOMAN: What’s wrong with me? I’m the Grim Empress. I don’t do shy.
MAN: Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking, but… do you do serious relationships?
WOMAN: Not… yet. Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m thinking about this.
MAN: With respect, your Grim Majesty, if a long-term relationship is what you have in mind, you might want to consider how to best proceed past this point and whether chains should be involved.
The WOMAN looks away.
WOMAN: We could have a long-term relationship with you in chains.
MAN: It might end up somewhat one-sided. Empress Teria, I’ll level with you. I don’t have any relevant traumas in my past, so I’d probably think it was hot the first time you tied me up and had your way with me. It’d be less hot the thirtieth time.
WOMAN: You presume much.
MAN: You named me your harem slave.
WOMAN: I did. And let’s be clear on one thing, you will be… what was that phrase you used? Something coffee?
MAN: Invited in for coffee.
WOMAN: Is that seriously what they call it in the Unconquered Territory? How does that even make sense? What does coffee have to do with sex? Is the coffee a metaphor, for, for… I can’t figure out what the hell that’d be a metaphor for.
MAN: No, it’s literal. The notion is, you’re drinking with somebody at a bar. You head home together, and when you get there, whoever’s house it is asks if the other person wants to come in for coffee. If they say yes, they’ve entered your house and that’s one step closer to the two of you having sex.
WOMAN: You Lightsiders and your crazy taboos! Why all the indirectness? Not that it isn’t cute, but just… pay her, blackmail him, kidnap somebody. Or, I don’t know, fucking talk about what you actually want from each other, maybe?
MAN: So what do you actually want from me, your Grim Majesty?
The WOMAN stares down at the table.
WOMAN: I want that over-muscled body in my bed. I may want a long-term relationship. And maybe, god, I don’t know, you were very nearly smart enough to defeat me. I want you as my loyal lieutenant, and, and, shut your mouth, I’m still talking. I might want you to father the next heir to the Grim Throne.
MAN: You understand that there are parts of that you can’t get just by chaining me in convenient positions.
WOMAN: I know. I can’t even get everything I want from you as a harem slave that way.
MAN: So, if I understood you correctly, your philosophy of life is based on just directly trying to get what you want. How will you obtain what you desire, your Grim Majesty?
WOMAN: Through… winning your heart by being really good in bed with you? Ugh, no, you don’t have to say it. I wouldn’t believe you if you pretended to be that easy.
MAN: I’m not. For me, it’s about… well, it’s about ideals.
WOMAN: Fucking Lightsiders! Ideals, really? Can’t it be about power and wealth and having your way with the pliant form of the Grim Empress herself?
MAN: No. I’m sorry.
WOMAN: I don’t suppose this is as simple as my asking you what you’d want in exchange.
The MAN looks down at the table.
WOMAN: You want your homeland, the country of Yoruun, freed from the Grim Empire. That's… not on the table.
MAN: It’s, it’s not just Yoruun. You want me as your loyal lieutenant? I’d have to believe in what you were doing. In everything you were doing.
WOMAN: This is the Grim Empire, you don’t have to be that loyal. A certain amount of trying to bend the Empire to your own whims is expected, it could include lower taxes or something…
(Both of them are silent.)
WOMAN: This isn’t going to work out, is it.
The MAN smiles.
MAN: Maybe not, but I’m not giving up just yet.
(Waiters silently enter, bringing with them plates of food.)
MAN: However, you need to at least unchain my hands enough to let me pick up the silverware.
WOMAN: Oh, we have slaves for that here!
“I’m not saying TV Tropes is right about everything,” I typed into the chat window, “but right now it understands your life better than you do.”
I have invented a new form of psychotherapy
I call it Cognitive Trope Therapy
the way it works is that when you have a thought, you write it down
like, say
“You are different from the others. You will never know their innocence… and that is why you should hate your own existence. Die. Die. Die.”
then you figure out whether, if your life were a fantasy novel, these words would be spoken by figures wearing black robes, and speaking in a dry, whispering voice, and they are actually withered beings who touched the Stone of Evil
and if so then you don’t listen
I would write this up as a pop psych bestseller but it would be only two pages long
now
I know what you are thinking
you are thinking “but what if the whispering voice seems like it might have a point”
I get that this isn’t meant to be rigorous, but “it’s okay to focus on yourself, hurting yourself in the name of effective altruism is bad, why not sit down and rest for a while?” sounds exactly like the sort of think a dark-robed figure would hiss at a protagonist.
You obviously don’t read the same books I do. :P
Wait, am I missing something?
Eliezer on LW: “We should become supremely rational, moving faster than the comparatively timid procedures of Old Science. We must conquer death itself and win immortality, the faster the better, dismissing those who would urge restraint in this effort as hidebound and inferior thinkers. We shall build unspeakably powerful artificial intelligences to rule over us, transform us from weak creatures of flesh into beings of pure information. Then we’ll build giant structures that blot out the stars, and finally realize our destiny of taking over the galaxy.”
Eliezer on Tumblr: “Avoid things that sound too much like what a fictional villain would say.”
I see no fictional villains here.
This isn’t going to work, but for the record, and on the vague off-chance that anyone who doesn’t already know possesses the mental capacity to update, I’ll state that I am actively hostile to neoreaction and neoreactionaries. Anyone posting a neoreactionary concept on my Facebook wall would be instablocked and the comment deleted. It’d be like their posting creationism on my wall; somebody needs to reeducate them, but it’s not going to be me. I think that if you do argue with neoreactionaries instead of just blocking them, then you’ve been suckered into Somebody Is Wrong On The Internet syndrome and trollfeeding.
I’m writing this, not in any real hope of any of my Tumblr kismesis-stalkers listening, but because I do think there is a reasonable duty to occasionally repeat “Nope” for the historical record when somebody has gone around suggesting that you are endorsing the Cult of Hastur or whatever.
So if in the future you hear anyone on Tumblr mention “Eliezer Yudkowsky” and “neoreaction” in the same sentence and the connector isn’t something like “deletes", then remember always that that poster is intellectually dishonest and probably lying to you about other things as well.
so, i’ve done with hpmor reading. and let me say you, sigh.
I hate it when plot has an EVIL and while lesser evils and fiends and minions are killed of for justice, in the end of the big plot the EVIL is handled with mercy, heroes remember their moral stances and author has a placeholder for the redemption ark. I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT SO MUCH
and when the author themselves has enough conscience to know it would raise a question so makes it through deus-ex-machina that there is no other way than to have EVIL be held alive BUT still have a place for redemption UUUUGH
wait you actually read the story
and your critique of HPMOR actually makes sense and isn’t based on a wildly uncharitable misconstrual of the story involving a motivated epic failure of reading comprehension
and you haven’t even attributed a conspiracy-theoretic dark motive to me as an author where I’m plotting to train people to tolerate evil or something
i’m confused
is this actually tumblr
Fuck Eliezer
Marry: potter
Kill: HG
Consider the claim, “There are no leafy greens that are good in salads.” We can refute this claim by presenting arugula.
Consider the class of claims that cannot be refuted by presenting arugula. We will term these claims unarugulable.
Consider the term “unarguably”. It may initially seem like this term is empty of meaning, since we can argue with just about anything, e.g., “Well, I say the Sun *did* crash into the Earth yesterday.” But what about arugula? You can’t argue with arugula. It’s just a plant. Thus, arugula is unarguable.
We can furthermore demonstrate the above fact by presenting arugula - “See? It’s right here! You can’t argue against it, it’s not a claim!” Thus arugula is arugulably unarguable.
If the claim that something is arugulable is itself arugulable, then, following the terminological rule for designating similar philosophical concepts such as superdupervenience, we shall say it is arugulabugulable. Conversely, everything not in this class is unarugulabugulable.
Today is National Coming Out Day!
I have nothing to declare.
My friends are all going into the red line at Customs with their guns and swords and dial-a-yield suitcase nukes, and all I have are the plastic butter knives of polyamory and BDSM.
Maybe it’s not vanilla, but it’s sorta, you know, Trader Joe’s 73% dark chocolate flavored with organic orange peel.
The plus side is that sneering can be usefully used as a barometer to which memeplexes are currently in power. Who Sneers, Rules, no matter what persecution narratives they’re selling.
This is either false or the word ‘sneering’ is now being used in a different way than I originally meant. The Dark Lord Potter form is clear sneer culture: they consider themselves the sophisticated connoisseurs of edgy dark adult Harry Potter fanfiction and get together to sneer at slashfic (or HPMOR). They are not the dominant memeplex in Harry Potter fanfiction and are little noticed outside their own tiny Internet forum. Sneering doesn’t go with power, period.
It goes with self-perceived power and a belief that you are a successful bully getting in hits on the target, but it doesn’t go with actual power and it is found just as much in marginalized outsider groups as in mainstream journalists.
The parts I have in mind are the places where it just feels like… ok, for example, any part (specific examples escape me since it’s been years since I’ve read parts of the story, but my impressions are firm that such scenes existed) where Harry gets upset at how some new observation doesn’t mesh with his muggle knowledge and expresses this displeasure by monologuing about all the deep principles that this violates in a tone of indignation at the universe for switching things around on him.
My own impression from such scenes is that the story is stopping to say, “Consider Thing from canon. Look at how absurd it is! Laugh at its’ childish ignorance in the face of my wall of jargon that you either already understand or have become completely lost in! Laugh at it!”
Okay, um… I’m trying not to rant at the Wise Reader, but… that’s such a foreign way of thinking to me that I don’t know how to understand when I’m doing something that might trigger it. The facts are the facts, their violation of every other generalization you previously had should properly provoke a huge emotional WHAAAAT? reaction. But the concept that this is critiquing Rowling for having her fantasy novel violate Conservation of Energy… it’s such a type error to me that I just don’t know how to handle it. Conservation of Energy is not a social rule! It’s not a literary rule! It’s a physical generalization that’s true in our universe but false in various fictional ones but that Harry strongly believed was true! And not having the characters react with shock is not an option. They have to be shocked! She just turned into a cat! Your soul is dead if you can see that and not scream out loud in horrified curiosity!
So how can this very real and very deep shock at the observed violation of a previously well-supported physical generalization be conveyed in a way that doesn’t seem like it is critiquing Rowling for violating Conservation as if that were a literary or social rule? I mean, I think there’s an interaction here with a basically different perspective on science and physics that I don’t natively comprehend well enough to avoid triggering it. When the woman turns into a cat, Conservation of Energy is over until further notice. Harry thinks this explicitly. But that won’t stop the misinterpretation so… ugh, there are times when I feel tempted to just write off part of my audience. But maybe there’s some small tweak that doesn’t destroy the realism and that would prevent people from trying to interpret a character’s New Observation Shock as the author’s… thinks hard… Ha Ha Smart People Know About Conservation? But I confess to feeling a very strong ick reaction right now (that is totally not your fault), and a sense that my cherished physical laws that are true in our universe but false in the Potterverse have some totally other social meaning that I would find even ickier and don’t want to look at. I’ll get over the shock eventually, I guess.
I also think it’s important to have a compact category that fires when you see a Slate journalist talking about a ‘referendum on autism’ or someone talking about how Yudkowsky gets in all these great punches on Rowling (something that disturbs me every time I see it said, because the only part of HPMOR that I see as even arguing with Rowling is Ch. 39) or someone boasting about how they wrote their criticism while drunk, etc.
To be honest “sneering at canon” is how I would initially think to describe a lot of different parts of HPMOR.
Of course, you wouldn’t expect sneering to feel like sneering from the inside, right?
That’s a disturbing suggestion. I had imagined that it would feel like sneering, it would feel delicious, it would feel like getting in a solid hit and demonstrating superiority. These are the feelings that I often see reported out loud and explicitly in writings that I think of as sneer culture. I know I wasn’t feeling anything like that when, e.g., I had Draco suggest that Ron had no reason to exist. It felt more like a mixture of a fandom nod to Ron the Death Eater and the fact that from Draco’s viewpoint Ron doesn’t exist and Harry wouldn’t argue with that (as soon as we shift to e.g. Hermione’s viewpoint, or Neville’s, Ron suddenly exists again, and he also exists in the larger universe e.g. Ch. 88). But your suggestion disturbs me, and I shall have to think about it.
To be very clear, I understand why a lot of people thought HPMOR was sneering at canon. This is very obvious. I’m just not sure how that effect could have been avoided without, you know, just writing some entirely different other book instead. How do you rationalize everything into an adult science fiction novel starting from a children’s fantasy novel (again: children’s books are harder to write), and deconstruct multiple tropes that became common in a fandom (e.g. Ch. 29′s deconstruction of the Peggy Sue Scabbers Revelation Scene), without it ever looking like it might be sneering?
Actually, now that I think about it, the cue to look down might actually have been given in Ch. 63 regarding the plot of Goblet of Fire, which would mean this section is actual sneering (yikes).
You don’t want people to say “I’m not a sneerer, they only attack nerds!” when they are employing sneer tactics against some other group.
Is it enough to say sneer tactics? I mean, social-justice culture has the “shaming” construct that is a compact way of describing a particular kind of social censure that is considered to be unjust, eg. fat-shaming, kink-shaming, nerd-shaming, body-shaming, slut-shaming, and so forth.
Would -sneering work as a suffix? :)
Possibly? It’s better than just ‘sneer tactics’ because it conveys more the idea that this is a bad habit of mind rather than something that people deliberately do on purpose. A ‘smear tactic’ is used by a journalist with a goal, sneer culture is something that people can fall into without really being aware of it. The problem I have with the -sneering suffix is that, first, the ‘ing’ starts to make it awkward, and second, what is being sneered at often doesn’t have a good compact description of its own.
EDIT: Also, it feels like with ‘kink-shaming’ the key idea is that you shouldn’t shame kink in particular. While with ‘sneer culture’ the idea I want to convey is that Dark Lord Potter mocking slashfic authors and men rating glamour photos 4.3 have something in common; and you should also recognize that thing when you see it in the newspaper. It’s the cross-domain aspect that’s the interesting and startling insight, and it’s when you generalize across the domains that you realize, “Oh, wait, maybe I shouldn’t have written that thing about the Virgin Mary because I don’t want that culture here.”
What sneer culture members have in common is that they’re strongly reinforced by sneering, seek out provided info that they can sneer at, and hang out with other people who sneer at things in a group where they know they have an approved target. There are more skillful professional sneerers who specialize in feeding those audiences, but the masses below are just as much a part of the culture. “Lol homeopathy” skepticism is sneer culture, just as “Burn down the churches” atheism is hate culture, but neither of these are apex predators of Blue-coded spaces (if I understand correctly what that term means)…
“sneer culture” seems reminiscent of the “serious people” concept that floats around political journalism, where proposing certain ideas makes you unserious and hence dismissable, eg. Ron Paul, or any non-mainstream candidate.
But I think it’s better to describe tactics than cultures, otherwise it is too tempting to identify the bad tactics with the bad groups we don’t like in isolation, and forget that these tactics are incredibly tempting and crop up in every group that doesn’t carefully police itself against their use.
I agree that it would be good to have some magic way of reminding people that ‘sneer culture’ or ‘the culture formerly known as sneer’ or whatever we end up calling it is a degenerate state that any group can end up in if they don’t pump against entropy. I also think it’s important to have a compact category that fires when you see a Slate journalist talking about a ‘referendum on autism’ or someone talking about how Yudkowsky gets in all these great punches on Rowling (something that disturbs me every time I see it said, because the only part of HPMOR that I see as even arguing with Rowling is Ch. 39) or someone boasting about how they wrote their criticism while drunk, etc. How will we know what not to do if we don’t have a category for it?
The phrase ‘sneer tactics’ occurs to me, but it’s probably a little too close to ‘smear tactics’ and doesn’t convey the cultural depth of the problem.
Some people have questioned the term “sneer culture”. I don’t have any particular thoughts as it relates to HPMOR, but this seems to me to be a real natural kind…
The apex predators of the signaling world, at least in Blue-coded spaces. People who have optimized for always being on the right side of a lynch mob. People who really enjoy punching down at non-conformists, and trying to invoke people’s Disgust foundation to urge them to treat such non-conformists lower than dirt.
You’re making them sound way more formidable than I had in mind. The apex predators of sneer culture are journalists at relatively prestigious newspapers. The archetypal example of the thing I’m pointing to is more like the Dark Lord Potter forum. They think of themselves as the apex predators of Harry Potter fanfiction, to be sure - thinking of yourself as an apex predator does seem to be an intrinsic or correlated part of sneer culture - but in the case of Dark Lord Potter that doesn’t correlate to any noticeable influence among HP fandom, so far as I can remember seeing. They’re not mainstream journalists trashing somebody’s reputation in Slate with an aside about ‘a referendum on autism’, but they’re definitely sneer culture just as much as Valleywag. The groups of men who take glamour photos and point out flaws and then rate them 4.3 out of 10 are a visual form of sneer culture, but again, apex predators they are not.
What sneer culture members have in common is that they’re strongly reinforced by sneering, seek out provided info that they can sneer at, and hang out with other people who sneer at things in a group where they know they have an approved target. There are more skillful professional sneerers who specialize in feeding those audiences, but the masses below are just as much a part of the culture. “Lol homeopathy” skepticism is sneer culture, just as “Burn down the churches” atheism is hate culture, but neither of these are apex predators of Blue-coded spaces (if I understand correctly what that term means).
When I was writing the Sequences I was, in retrospect, flirting perilously close to sneer culture about religion, even though I had guardrails against ad hominem (there is nowhere I was flirting with hate culture, I think; I knew what Diane Duane would say about that). I would not write “The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy” again, knowing what I know now. It is too dangerous to seem to be inviting other people to laugh with you at an approved target.
I’m perfectly happy to hear better terminology than ‘sneer culture’ for the cluster I’m describing. I’m separately happy to hear a better term than ‘hate culture’ for the thing that haterz are part of - the culture where people are reinforced by hating, deliberately read things that they can hate more, get together in groups to hate at an approved target, etcetera. This is closely related to sneer culture but not exactly the same thing.
I used to worry that trolling would be the downfall of the Internet and possibly human civilization - that we would get to the point where basic infrastructure was being lol-disrupted by the advanced trolls of 20 years later - but now that the Internet is being taken over by hate culture and sneer culture, I look back and miss the intellectual vibrancy and creativity of my old enemy of troll culture. There was a sense of mischief to trolling that led them to try to do interesting new things to show off to each other, and at least some self-aware troll groups considered themselves honorable villains who would pick worthy targets and not hurt children and so on. Hate culture and sneer culture lack the intelligence and creativity of trolling, and the reduced level of joie de vivre seems to correlate with an equal collapse of aspirations to honorable villainy.
hermione is resurrected because… she’s Harry’s moral center
jesus christ, Eliezer
Would it kill you to wait literally ten more days so I can respond to this sort of thing?
Koan (probably not solvable due to transparency illusion): In the author’s original intent, there are two underlying principles informing the literary existence of HPMOR!Hermione, above and beyond her canon self. What are they?
“I’m not saying TV Tropes is right about everything,” I typed into the chat window, “but right now it understands your life better than you do.”
I have invented a new form of psychotherapy
I call it Cognitive Trope Therapy
the way it works is that when you have a thought, you write it down
like, say
“You are different from the others. You will never know their innocence… and that is why you should hate your own existence. Die. Die. Die.”
then you figure out whether, if your life were a fantasy novel, these words would be spoken by figures wearing black robes, and speaking in a dry, whispering voice, and they are actually withered beings who touched the Stone of Evil
and if so then you don’t listen
I would write this up as a pop psych bestseller but it would be only two pages long
now
I know what you are thinking
you are thinking “but what if the whispering voice seems like it might have a point”
Sometimes, people say something along the lines of “not all desires are good. You might desire something about your desires, and that is what we should actually follow, so that we don’t just give addicts more heroin and off unstable teenagers.” But I don’t think that meta-desires are necessarily better. Let’s create a person, and call her T.
T is a submissive, and wants to be have sex. But, T was raised in a cult, and desires that she not desire to have sex. However, T has escaped this cult, and desires that she not desire that she not desire to have sex, because she is trying to reject the trappings of the cult and accept her true self. On the other hand, T desires that she not desire that she not desire that she not desire to have sex, because she doesn’t like mental dissonance and wishes that she wasn’t trying to change her beliefs about something this hard to shake off. Lastly, T desires that she not desire that she not desire that she not desire that she not desire to have sex, because she also really appreciates mental games and trickery and philosophy questions, and thinks that her life would be less interesting if it were less meta.
Now, is it the case that the last desire, because it is the most meta, should be the one that we pay attention to? Do we only pay attention to the meta-desire, even though the meta-meta desire seems pretty important and relevant in this case?
I reject the claim that meta-desires should be privileged over normal desires. Thoughts?
Well, my intuition is that eventually it bottoms out. I suppose maybe in principle you could have an agent that goes omega meta-steps in their utility function by contradicting the next lower meta-step, but that doesn’t happen in real life.
And even if it did, we have a lot of ordinal numbers to go beyond omega.
What I’m trying to say is, unless the agent’s meta-desires are completely self-contradicting forever in all possible ordinal meta-levels, eventually they will have an infinity of agreeing meta-utilities. That’s where the weight comes from in (what I see as) the meta-desires argument: I not only desire not to desire eating sweets, I also desire to desire not to desire eating sweets, and I desire to desire to desire not to desire eating sweets, and I (desire to)* desire to not to desire eating sweets.
So um… in most agents, the inconsistencies are only finitely deep, I’d think, which means that they have zero weight when summing up all desires, so the meta-level after the highest meta-level that’s inconsistent with some meta-level above it feels like the one that should be heard.
In the case of an infinitely inconsistent agent? I dunno, that agent can probably just toss a coin or something.
(I feel like this should be looked into wrt FAI.)
It seems to me that not all desires have the same weight, and a finite number of distinct desires could very easily have greater total weight than the total weight of an infinite number of total desires.
Oh hey I see you’re trying to do Friendly AI theory on Tumblr.
And it’s actually pretty good FAI theory so I’m going to chip in, despite the very real risk this poses that Tumblr will prove to be the best format for the debate and that all moral philosophy of FAI will move to Tumblr and be done with examples involving sex, until finally Tumblr bloggers devising increasingly weird sexual scenarios end up determining the fate of humanity, because frankly humanity deserves it at this point.
The moral problem of FAI is to start with a detailed but strictly factual description of existing human beings, and get “What is the right thing to do?” out the other end. In the original CEV document there’s listed four types of extrapolation that might end up being involved with this: (1) The counterfactual question “What if this (description of a) human being knew this new true fact or rational probability distribution (as computed by the AI, we assume correctly or rationally)?” (2) The counterfactual of the human being able to consider lots of good arguments. (3) The human being having better self-knowledge or self-control. (4) Some unspecified counterfactuals about interactions between human beings.
This was meant to be a complete list of all the directions of extrapolation I could think of, but it doesn’t have to be an irreducible list. In particular, it seems to me that this debate invokes the question of whether (3) has force independently of (1) and (2), or whether (3) just emerges from (1) and (2). There’s also a side order of entanglement with the question of whether we determine what a given extrapolation “wants” by something that looks more like (a) “What is this adviser’s extrapolated decision, or verbal answer to this question?” or (b) “What is this adviser’s extrapolated weight of desire?”
If our answer looks more like (a), then we could say that the (3)-ish forces in moral progress, the thought experiments that seem to tell us that more meta desires ought to take precedence, really reduce to the more meta desire being the more stable one—the most meta desire usually being what we imagine being the “last word” in a process that is extrapolating changed answers in response to more knowledge or more arguments.
Then dataandphilosophy’s example is challenging (on this interpretation) because “Lastly, T desires that she not desire that she not desire that she not desire that she not desire to have sex, because she also really appreciates mental games and trickery and philosophy questions, and thinks that her life would be less interesting if it were less meta" seems like the sort of whim that could just as easily change given consideration of more arguments; or the sort of whim that would predictably change if T could view all her future life-moments at stake stretched out before her and being emotionally weighed all at once, without scope insensitivity. So on this interpretation, the key to the dilemma is that for once the most meta desire is not the most stable one, in which case we don’t think it should take precedence, thereby arguing that (3) is just a special case of (1) and (2).
It could also be that we find T’s most meta desire unpersuasive because we don’t think it would be a very strong drive and our moral intuitions are being driven by strength more than stability, the case (b) above. But then this defies our intuition that we can have meta-desires that trump object-level desires for more heroin.
In general the heroin addict seems like an argument for (a) over (b) despite the very real sense in which (a) seems dangerously unstable and arbitrary compared to (b). The heroin addict’s case argues that our moral philosophy should reduce our intuitions favoring stronger desires and meta-desires, into intuitions about which overall decisions would be stable after fairly considering many arguments.
It’s also possible that (3)-reflectivity could be a separate force from (1) and (2), but that it also usually aligns with (1) and (2), and sometimes (3) comes into conflict with (1) and (2) and gets trumped by them. So we ordinarily would accord some degree of privilege to T’s most meta desire, but not enough that we think the most meta desire should win here. It seems to me like a thought experiment to govern this case should describe a case of (1) or (2) indifference, or very slight care, and see if we think (3) ought to govern. Like when I try to figure out whether (4) is a legitimate independent force at all, I ask myself questions like:
Suppose that Hot Dave is currently strictly heterosexual, and currently strongly disprefers that he want to have sex with men (that is, Hot Dave currently strongly disprefers that he become bisexual, because Hot Dave has a System 1 feeling that this is icky). If there were no positive reason to have sex with men, Hot Dave would have a strong dispreference for acquiring a desire to do it. However, Hot Dave is also extrapolated to have some interesting experiences and meet people he otherwise wouldn’t by becoming bisexual, and avoid some social awkwardness; but not very much because the people in this extrapolated future are known to be graceful about taking no for an answer and there will be plenty of women for Hot Dave to have interesting times with. In fact it so happens that, inside Dave’s extrapolated mind, these two considerations end up exactly balancing. Does it make sense for the deciding vote to be cast by the fact that Hot Dave is very attractive to a number of gay men who would wholeheartedly prefer that Hot Dave end up bisexual? Does it make sense for the deciding vote to be cast by a non-counterbalanced consensus from a large number of people outside Dave that the story of the human species seems nicer somehow if Everyone Is Bi? Do we consider this as a factor influencing what we say should count as Hot Dave's own vote inside CEV, the way it seems potentially okay for my belief about how babies should end up as humans to correspond to a CEV that extrapolates babies into humans instead of superbabies?
I’m not sure what an analogous example for (1) and (2) indifference vs. a (3)-difference might be, but I thought I’d turn it over to people who seem like they might have an advantage in inventing weird scenarios of sexual desire and meta-desire in order to expose underlying points of moral philosophy.
And to the rest of humanity, if you didn’t want it to play out like this, you should have allocated your official institutions’ grant money more wisely.
(Two-sentence horror stories are a thing now, and when I saw the challenge format I couldn’t resist.)
“I wonder if the devils tell you right away when you get to Hell, or if it’s more effective for them to let you figure it out yourself. And whether it’s just a coincidence that I had that horrible vivid dream about crashing my car, the night before I lost my job, ended up on the streets and started going blind.”
I have a confession to make. It’s something which has been weighing on my mind for a long, long time - since late 2000, actually.
I did not invent timeless decision theory.
I did not invent the rationality techniques I’ve claimed as my own.
I’m not any kind of genius. I wasn’t slated for a technical job. If only I had learned the math and the background theory instead of reading popularizations, I’ve wished that I don’t know how many times, all too late. Everything I’ve tried to do here would have gone much faster, if I’d learned the math before. I had to try to reconstruct the math behind timeless decision theory from scratch, knowing only in vague terms what results I was supposed to get, and what popular accounts described in intuitive terms as the reason. I remember seeing the equations written down, but I didn’t know the definitions of the terms, and was at a loss to remember them later. If I had studied the theory behind the training I received as a child, the art of rationality I’ve tried to teach would be far more advanced. All I have left are scraps and shadows and the stuff that everyone learns before they’re 23.
When I was a child,
saying the Pledge of Allegiance,
I would always end,
under my breath:
“With freedom,
and justice,
for all except the children.”
Those days are now long gone,
and I can’t quite imagine,
a Pledge I could say today,
maybe something like this:
“I pledge conditional friendship,
not to any flag,
but to the ideals,
which the constitutional republic of the United States,
was originally formed to protect.
Thirteen nations,
bound together in mutual defense,
against huge Foreign Powers,
which could have crushed any state alone;
and unrestrained trade,
without tariffs imposed on riverboats;
with several freedoms and justices,
theoretically guaranteed to every citizen of that nation,
if they were one of the select,
a group which widened over time,
but never enough to include children.”
Those years are now long gone,
never to return,
for Time does not tick backward.
And I might say a kind word,
for the megademocracies of Now,
and the war they fought against Hitler,
in the years when some wars were just.
But that era also passed,
carrying with them the time
when an intelligent person
could pledge allegiance to a flag
and say it honestly and proudly
and not be foolish or evil.
Maybe that time ended with Guantanamo,
and maybe it never existed,
but I know I remember it,
from when I said the Pledge in class,
even if it was a dream.
That dream is gone,
and I can’t wish for its return,
for to see the blood upon the flag,
is a sign of understanding,
and I will not be the better
if I forget what I have learned.
With the passing of that small allegiance
has come a wider fealty
not to stars on a flag,
but to stars in a sky,
and my loyalty to them,
is not plagued by catches in my voice,
nor evils to unsee.
Even so,
knowing the flag was never clean,
and that nations are not worthy things
for human minds to give allegiance,
I miss the Pledge,
that childhood error,
which must never return.
I find that fiction writing in general is easier for me when the characters I’m working with are awesome. The most important lesson I learned from reading Shinji and Warhammer 40K is that every character has the potential to be awesome - I’m thinking particularly here of when a random bridge bunny ends up holding off a riot using a fake movie-prop chainsword and Kensuke being turned into a Techpriest. Awesome characters are just more fun to write about, more fun to read, and you’re rarely at a loss to figure out how they can react in a story-suitable way to any situation you throw at them.
But what if you’re having trouble thinking of a sufficiently awesome character? Worse, what if your story doesn’t seem to call for one?
Let’s say the cognitive skill you intend to convey to your readers (you’re going to put the readers through vicarious experiences that make them stronger, right? no? why are you bothering to write?) is that of continuing onward in the face of adversity, instead of breaking down and crying. Say, you’ve been trying to put some skill points into this trait yourself, so writing about it can both tell others what you learned, and help you solidify your skill points yourself.
You could try to write litfic about this, but then nobody would read it, and you don’t see any reason to make this an Earthfic. So instead you decide to start with a high school girl who doesn’t yet possess the skill of Continuation, and transporting her into a dangerous magical world where she will acquire it.
There’s just one problem with this apparently well-premised piece of cognitive fiction: You’ve set yourself up to start with a weaksauce non-awesome character. Your premise requires that she be weak, and break down and cry.
“Can’t I show her developing into someone who isn’t weak?" No, because I stopped reading on the first page. You haven’t given me anyone I want to sympathize with, and unless I have some special reason to trust you, I don’t know she’s going to be awesome later. Your protagonist can develop additional sympathetic qualities later, but right from page one I need a reason to continue sympathizing with her.
"Okay… I’m trying to add additional sympathetic qualities to this character in my mind. I can imagine her helping little puppies across the street, so she’s very altruist and kind… and I can imagine that she was taking advanced math classes, so she’s smart… but somehow, nothing I’m doing seems to be creating an awesome character, in my imagination. Come to think, even if I didn’t need this protagonist to start out ignorant of this particular cognitive skill, I still wouldn’t know how to create an awesome character from scratch. How do I do that?”
I was just struggling with this problem myself recently (while considering what could come after HPMOR) - the original protagonists I was envisioning didn’t seem to occupy the same tier of awesome as the HPMOR characters, and the premise of the story forbade that they be given larger problems to solve. (I couldn’t just demand that they save the world from Cthulhu, which would be the standard way of amplifying characters; it wouldn’t have fit in the story.)
The approach I may end up using for that story is to envision protagonists which have awesome destinies… well outside the scope of the current story, just to force me to envision someone who matches that destiny and thereby produce an awesome character.
Let’s say your hapless protagonist tossed into a magical universe is going to eventually - not in this story, but eventually - going to end up as Empress of a magical country. Or conquer the entire world. Or convert her new world to a democratic society. Or go toe-to-toe in magical power with Cthulhu.
Maybe someday you’ll write that sequel, and maybe someday you won’t…
…but just knowing that this has to happen someday will color your imagination of where this character starts, and what has to happen to her in the current novel.
If your protagonist starts out with a character deficit in Continuation - well, clearly she must have some awesome other qualities if she’s going to end up as Empress someday. She’d better be a keen observer and manipulator, and we should expect that over the course of the novel she’ll manage to insert herself into the flow of great events and get some powerful people in debt to her. Or she’ll be taking Very Advanced Math at a nearby university, which is how she gets her hands on all the magical power she’ll need.
The reader will never be told that you’re imagining her as a someday-Empress; that’s not going to happen in the current novel, maybe not for another 10 novels, none of which you’ll actually write. Talking about Empresses would just make her actual in-story accomplishments seem to pale in comparison.
But we’ve set her up to be a much more interesting person coming in, and your brain will be thinking of more exciting and vicariously powerful events to happen to her… now that you’re not just thinking about a high school girl who learns Continuation, but the high school girl who remedies her Continuation deficit on the way to becoming an Empress in her new world.
Why isn’t googology (the study of large numbers) a recognized subfield of mathematics with its own journal? There’s all these different ways of getting large numbers, and different mathematical questions that yield large numbers; and yet all those vast structures are comparable, being either greater, less, or the same.
The process of considering how to construct the largest possible computable numbers naturally yields the recursive ordinals and the concept of ordinal analysis. All mathematical knowledge is in a sense contained in the Busy Beaver series of huge numbers.
You’d think there’d be more Math done on that, rather than there just being a recently-formed Googology Wikia.
Three hypotheses come to mind:
1) The process of determining which two large numbers is larger, is usually just boring tedious legwork and doesn’t by itself produce new interesting insights.
2) By Friedman’s Grand Conjecture, most proofs about numbers can be formalized in a system with an ordinal no greater than ω^3 (omega cubed). Naturally arising huge numbers like Skewes’ Number or Graham’s Number are tiny and easily analyzed by googological standards. Few natural math problems are intricate enough or recursive enough to produce large numbers that would be difficult to analyze.
3) Nobody’s even thought of studying large numbers, or it seems like a ‘silly’ subject to mathematicians and hence is not taken seriously. (This supposes Civilizational Incompetence.)
I would think (2) most likely rather than (3) in this case; someone like Conway, who invented the surreal numbers, would not have balked at… inventing Conway chained arrow notation, come to think, possibly as late as 1996 from what I’ve read, and that’s just up to ω^2. Hm. Maybe it is just Civilizational Incompetence and the googology wiki will blossom into a new field of math? I honestly don’t know.
The form of the Enemy loomed huge on the horizon, a living castle of dark flesh, brown-grey and pulsating, folds of tissue the size of mountains, huger than her mortal mind could grasp. The vast incomprehensible monstrosity which stood in the way of all that was right, and all that was true; the final obstacle, which if it could only be beaten…
She wiped her forehead grimly, clearing her eyes of sweat. She hefted her sword in both hands, channeling just enough mana to light the blade with silver glow. Small and lonely her form, a dust speck against her foe, the light of her sword invisible against the flesh-mountains.
It wasn’t the most winnable battle ever.
Gritting her teeth, she charged forward anyway.
It seemed ages later that she was panting in the middle of a sea of ashes, the charred remnants of the Enemy scattered widely around her, red-glowing with fading fire.
Her own flesh was torn and bloody now; would always be scarred, from this day. Her body finally exhausted, along with her mana, her ki, her willpower, her aura, and her soul.
But the war was won.
It was over.
It was done.
And things would be easier, from now on. Everything would be easier, with the Enemy finally conquered, no longer an obstacle to every single damn thing she tried to get done. She could feel the relief through her whole body as her clenched will relaxed, knowing that it was over, all over, that the endless battle was finally over -
And then she woke up, eyes blinking away the light crust of sleep that blurred her sight of the grey dawn’s light seeping through the windows of her apartment.
She lay there for awhile, wishing futilely that she could go back to sleep. It was too early, said the shade of blue-grey light, the color of 6AM. She would be bleary and weary and slow this whole day long, for lack of sleep.
But she knew by this point, from sad and long experience, that she could lie in bed all she wanted, for hours even, and she wouldn’t fall back asleep.
Her brain wouldn’t let her.
It took a while to force herself to accept the reality of that, as she lay motionless in bed, wishing that things were other than they were. Hyperbolic discounting ensured that the brief shock of cold air from removing her blanket, loomed larger in her thoughts than the minutes she was wasting; and she was too sleepy and exhausted to use the discipline to counter that. She knew that being bitter about the whole thing would just waste mental energy, and possibly apply some type of negative conditioning on waking up or getting out of bed. And yet she couldn’t make herself stop being bitter.
Stupid dream…
As she stumbled off toward the shower, some final remnant of dreamlike state provided her ears with an auditory image; she could have sworn she heard her brain, laughing.