Spectral Sight
Spectral sight is a collection of abilities allowing the user to infer the structure of social interactions, institutions, ideology, and the working of people’s minds. Named after the demon hunters of the Warcraft universe, who destroy their physical eyes to replace them, to become more able to see evil. Often has the cost of seeing less beauty.
Sadness vs Suffering
“I want to feel sad to the extent that’s true, and I want not to suffer.” People sometimes go to movies and listen to music to feel sadness, but not to suffer. (Edit: although note: “suffering” is a problematic construct.)
Core
(compare to structure)
Core is something in the mind that has infinite energy. Contains terminal values you would sacrifice all else for, and then do it again infinity times with no regret. Seems approximately unchanging across lifespan. Figuratively, the deepest frame in the call stack of the mind, capable of aborting any train of thought, everything the mind does is because it decided for it to happen. It operates by choosing a “narrative frame”, “module”, “algorithm”, or something like that to run, and is responsible for deciding the strength of subagents. There are actually two of them. In order to use some of my mental tech, they must agree.
Structure
(compare to core)
Structure is anything the mind learns and unlearns. Habits, judgement extrapolations, narrative, identity, skills, style, conceptions of value, etc. Everything but actual values. It lacks life on its own, is like a tool for core to pick up and put down at will.
Dead Zone
A region of structure formed by a choice you have made long ago but not faced, internalized, and rebased your structure onto. This means that infinite force from your core does not propagate into this region with certainty in a particular direction, meaning you cannot use mana / determination, and the mana of others can shape your structure instead, making you manipulable.
Khala
Val calls this the social web. A strongly overlapping concept is the Matrix.
Named after a psionic group-mind a species from Starcraft called the Protoss have. It’s formed of a network of people delegating computation to group consensus, of people having more need to track the consensus than reality and insufficient resolution to track both, and of people inflicting computations on each other. In Starcraft, the main faction of Protoss can hardly imagine society or coordination without it. Those who break out are heretics and are exterminated wherever found. It gives a form of afterlife. It is eventually pwned and corrupted by a dark god, forcing all Protoss to sever their psionic nerve cords to avoid becoming his pawns.
True Hero Contract
“Godric had defeated Dark Lords, fought to protect commoners from Noble Houses and Muggles from wizards. He’d had many fine friends and true, and lost no more than half of them in one good cause or another. He’d listened to the screams of the wounded, in the armies he’d raised to defend the innocent; young wizards of courage had rallied to his calls, and he’d buried them afterward.” The true hero contract says, “pour free energy at my direction, and it will go into optimization for good.” This is sort of the opposite of a hero contract, a promise that it really isn’t about putting energy into sucking the hero’s dick like normal. This contract is not designed for either side to be appealing to everyone.
Redemption Contract
A trade where someone who has done something against social morality can buy back the social reality that they are a decent person. This is often part of a process that seeks an actively maintained equilibrium in how often someone can get away with misbehavior. Values don’t change. Every core will make the same choice again and again every chance they get for the rest of their lives. And optimization can never really be contained by rules. But coexistence is usually sustained by inflicting damage to each other’s epistemology about this fact. And this contract is a mutual deescalation of that awful knowledge.
Prey Herd Thinking
If you’re a gazelle, escaping the cheetah is not about running faster than them. You can’t. And the cheetah’s appetite will be satisfied. It’s about being in a large reference class to dilute the probability you will be picked off. In that case, it’s basically just about speed. In humans who are prey, due to Schelling mechanics, being special in the most glaring way is dangerous. There’s a strategy available to authoritarian governments. Have laws that everyone is violating, that no one can track all of, until breaking the law is really coming to the attention of the predatory enforcers. Thoughts about how to do things start to root/cash out in, “how are things done”, what’s a reasonably safe well-trodden path to do something by, rather than how stuff works. Semi-relatedly, it’s like how in a world where people don’t really fix reported bugs, computer software is not a box of interesting stuff to mess with, but a collection of paths people intended for you to be able to follow. The law is defined by precedent, and edge cases are determined by power. I disendorse a certain connotation of this term. See vampire enlightenment. Spies are badass, and prey herd thinking is a primary skill for them.
Vampire Enlightenment
An understanding of how the world really works that divides the world into predators and prey, erasing good, erasing any other way things could be. Contains truth, but like Pickup Artistry drops all information not useful to the goal of increasing the number of women a male user has had sex with, this is made of concepts beyond the matrix that were generated entirely to facilitate preying on the weak.
Good
An updated definition from what’s in my first post on the topic.
A rare property of a core meaning choices made long ago are good above all else. Equivalently, in choices made long ago, cares about good at all. Speculatively, this could come from a developmentally fixed-on-“yes” “this is my self” classifier or “this is my child” classifier. On a per-core basis, there is surprisingly no middle ground in terms of quantity of good as far as I’ve observed.
Nongood
A blanket term covering neutral and evil when referring to a human (that is, having neither core good), can also apply to cores.
(Edit: I think this was a problematic concept to formulate)
Single Good
A property of a human where one core is good. This means that they cannot have fusion concerning good, only treaties, and will tend to take actions where the two sets of concerns seem to overlap, with infinitely recursive mutually-warped epistemics.
Double Good
A property of a human where both cores are good. Far less common than single good. Allows inhuman absolute determination with escape velocity from what’s reasonably imaginable, as well as intractable high energy good vs good internal conflicts.
Paladin
A good person nearly absolutely determined in pursuing a socially legible ideal. They tend to place their hope in bolstering the morality of people I’d call neutral, and use their strange powers as a person who is not pretending to care in a straightforward “I have energy, I’ll pick low-hanging fruit in terms of doing things and try to inspire a movement” kind of way. The social morality drinking contest with neutral people prevents a proper understanding of them. A strong concept of praxis is usually implicit and hardcoded into their ontology which prevents reframing their morality as explicit consequentialism. The gap between almost-absolute determination and absolute determination lies across growth found in making improvements to their oaths legible as fleshed out details.
Kiritzugu
(Name adjusted slightly to reflect that I’ve adjusted my concept after ripping it from Three Worlds Collide.) A jailbroken, relevantly epistemic person who is absolutely ambitious and determined in the pursuit of good. Takes heroic responsibility for the destiny of the world. Will employ ruthless consequentialism, seeing the tails come apart between good and social-reality-good and choosing good. Ozymandias from Watchmen. Probably Doctor Mother from Worm. To a lesser extent, Dumbledore (but not Harry or Gryffindor) from HPMOR, and Avatar Yangchen from ATLA. One cannot be inserted into a story without drastically changing it. Tassadar from Starcraft is seemingly indecisive between this and being a paladin. It is much less painful for a double good person to be a paladin.
Shadarak
Someone who employs many of the same arts as a kiritzugu, but whereas kiritzugus appear in the wild, drawn to the center of all things and the way of making changes, shadarak are the repeatable product of an adequate civilization. They take responsibility for the destiny of the world as an adequate institution, rather than as individuals. Are not necessarily good.
Praxis
A strategy to reap the benefits of generating information about how things can fit with parts of the world you want to create. Usually strongly underestimated by explicit consequentialism, even with the “TDT” fix. For example, I believed for years my veganism was suboptimal nutrition and a Real Consequentialist trying to influence AI Alignment would eat animals because their lives were few compared to even the slightest adjustment to the causality surrounding whether everyone in the present and future would be annihilated, and they needed every available increment of brain. But it was basically psychologically impossible for me to not be a vegan anyway. I once tried to coordinate good people to jailbreak into kiritzugus and save the world, I got single goods and despite them being vegetarians up until then they established this as social reality. And the less I was able to bury my own feelings on the matter, the more I collided with the reality I needed to see. It was arguing with people one on one a lot when I was younger that collided me with the sight of social morality when someone said it was okay to do whatever to animals because they weren’t part of the social contract. The highest density of double good people I currently know of is animal rights activists. Succumbing to good erasure from the nongood cores was a critical failure.
Without an explicit concept of praxis, plans for organizations risk becoming fake as real plans often look a lot like, “recruit, prove ourselves, recruit some more …. then make an intervention” and the lines between that and pyramid scheme are illegible. Acting out straightforward microcosms of our goals until it generates information that could not be had another way is crucial to coordination.
“Most problems could be solved if humans could just see that my way is better”, says me and also a lot of people who are wrong. So one path to victory is approximately, in sufficient detail, generate the information that chooses currently underspecified details and warps the path of the current machine’s “epistemics” toward my will. Most of that is ideas having consequences in how people act on them. And that is praxis.
Outside View Disease
A move from usual psychology in the opposite direction of the views I expressed in Punching Evil. A trap where someone has most of their structure, object-level and meta, written from the perspective of reference classes that omit crucial facts about them, and they cannot update out of it because “most people who make such an update are wrong”. The reference classes are usually subtly DRM’d, designed to divest a person of their own perceptions. When I consulted average salary statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and did a present value analysis in order to decide whether to go to grad school, I had outside view disease. May result from trying to do good by taking the neutral person mental template, and the virtues they conceptualize seriously, including epistemic virtues. May also be held in bad faith by people who don’t want the stress of believing subversive things. “I can’t believe in x-risk from AI because there are no peer reviewed papers”. (A common comment before academia gave in to what we all already knew for years.) is related. Strongly driven by systems where people only care about knowledge that can be proven to the system-mind, even if the individuals who suffer from this care about other things and don’t understand yet how the system works. When I believed that I should take cis people’s opinions about what I was more seriously than my own, because they were alleging I had a mental illness preventing me from thinking clearly about it, I was falling prey to the DRM in the way frames for such references classes are set up. I got out of it via a lot of suffering, and by understanding what it meant to place expected value of consequences above maximum probability I was a good person. (“well, if I’m crazy, hopefully the mainstream can defeat me like they defeat every other crazy person. Stuff is dependent on that anyway.”) Or, more specifically, there was a large chunk of possibility space, “net positive consequences in expectation, most likely you will make things worse”, and if I could do no better than that was worth it. The unilateralist’s curse is often used in bad faith to push for someone to know who they are less.
Parfitian Gaslighting
Named after Parfitian ignorance, “not knowing which computation is yourself.” The user attempts to divest you of your knowledge that you are right by creating a contrary Potemkin village of epistemic rationality that looks like you in their mind, no-selling all evidence which would be used to distinguish between the worlds while claiming that’s what you’re doing. Usually coupled with appeals to “virtuous” self-doubting epistemology to inflict outside view disease.
Masochistic Epistemology
Believing what hurts to believe in an attempt to counter bias. All structure that “acts against” the intent of its core is fake. This is an iron law of the universe. Although there are circumstances where the pain might not be coming from the core.
Zentraidon
From Iji, “‘Zentraidon’ is a taboo word coined by the extinct race we discovered, meaning self-annihilation through rapid technological advancement and arrogance. It was the fate they themselves met. Many mysteries still surround this species and the remains of their homeworld, but our only hope of total galactic dominance lies in fully reverse-engineering the technology they mastered. It is considered treason to suggest that once this happens we will be headed for Zentraidon as well.”
The tendency of systems including people to be doomed in their own undiluted maximally preferred courses of growth, as the inductions they are made of fail. “Caution” is no escape, it too contains Zentraidon. MTG:Green seems to be all about preventing Zentraidon of civilizations by limiting growth, but there is no full stack of solid ground to stand on. The natural growths of our species, and indeed biological life, themselves contain the seeds of Zentraidon.
My best attempt to put my best countermeasure into words is, “grow as as full of a stack of structure-under-modification as you can, beware allowing any structure to process too much data relative to how much it has been processed by deeper structure.” Sounds like it will not work for liches. Note that I have also already watched someone meet Zentraidon whom this wouldn’t really have helped.
Dichotomy Leakage
A phenomenon where implicit knowledge of one dichotomy leaks into concepts originally pointed at another via weak correlations, maybe correlations produced by sampling in how the things are commonly interacted with. I.e., I think the rationality community’s (and my past self’s) usage of “System 1/System 2” has evolved into pointing at at least 3 different real world things. When most of the aspects of multiple connected dichotomies are unknown there is learning-packet-flow from interaction with each of them that finds a home in structure by connecting to the first, and often the newly formed knowledge is not crisp enough to say, “oh, this is definitely a separate thing. And then you miss all but the plurality-experienced corners of what’s really an n-cube. Concepts like “feminine”/”masculine” are rife with this.
Intrinsic Conflict
A values disagreement between cores. Such as over alignment in the case of single good humans.
Jailbreaking
Learning to think in ways stripped of DRM. By the matrix analogy, redpilling. By the Khala analogy, the power of the void. When progressed sufficiently far, turns neutral people evil. Turns good people to scary good people. Extreme political ideologies tend to have their own selective and incomplete versions of this.
Sociopathy
(From this) Forbidden socially unconstrained knowledge of social constraints, social reality, social interactions, and society. A crucial element of jailbreaking. In my estimation this is largely behind psychological concepts of sociopathy (to the extent there is a single coherent thing behind them.) Allows one to perceive the social theatre and societal morality for the performance that they are.
Psychopathy
Forbidden socially unconstrained knowledge/internal connectedness of knowledge of the psyche. Sort of metacognitive root access. Puts conscious reflective thought upstream of turning some typically low level stuff like emotional behavior on or off, or significantly adjusting their function. Has many uses but the most famous is turning off empathy. Allows bypassing deeper-than-human-social-software moral constraints that sociopathy alone does not, and adjusting that software to serve the values of core. Can seemingly be activated temporarily by someone with no particular knowledge simply by sufficient desperation. Can destabilize single good humans. (double good humans can use it just fine though, becoming very scary good people)
Frame of Puppets
A sort of plane of interconnected definitions of words, a way of talking to fit with dereferencing the most visible pointer toward a human onto their false face. Will cause you to tie yourself in knots modeling humans as agents. Deeply embedded into culture. Places some of the optimization emanating out of a human beyond legible social responsibility. Tends to not work on very intelligent / agenty humans.
Frame of Puppeteers
(Edit: should have actually called this “frame of agents“.)
Frame of Agents
The opposite of the frame of puppets. What I usually talk in. People are, centrally their cores, and straightforwardly agents.
Social Fate
A concept from Val that only makes sense at face value within the frame of puppets. It’s a person’s future written in advance according to their role in a social script, which is often predictable only through observing things that are not to be seen by a character in that role. Because agency does things with predictions, especially predictions of undesired outcomes, and can thereby become anti-inductive, the counterpart within the frame of puppeteers is “plan”.
Edit: note this is a limited view of fate.
Fated Evil
A social fate resulting from exclusion from identity and a place in the Khala and the opportunity to be neutral, or just the straightforward preemptive social reality that someone is evil. Outside the frame of puppets, of course, everyone always has a choice. And good people will defy this fate. For example, label a bunch of people “untouchables”, “impure people”, “nobody/nonhuman”, count them as 1/7th a human for centuries, and then they fill 3/4 of the ranks of the Yakuza. Fated criminals. There is often a blurry line between “fated evil” and “fated evil unless you pay a whole bunch of danegeld to your social superiors.”
Helical Reasoning
Just as a helix looks like a circle projected onto a certain plane, this looks like circular reasoning when projected for communication and maybe even memory. Commonly a consequence of long term iterative improvements to a collection of related concepts.
Anti-Ethics
By analogy to anti-epistemology. Communicable mental software aimed at shutting down ethics. “If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy.” Note that’s not exactly true. But to make truth not your enemy anymore, you have to relinquish all that you’ve gained by that lie. And stop Likewise, if you build your life on injustice, ever after is justice your enemy, unless/until you relinquish your gains relative to the world in which you started down that path. An example would be structure centered around a strong belief “unilateral action is bad, and you should defer to people who know more, are wiser, are senior”, which raises that belief to prominence selectively to discourage whistleblowing, tag potential whistleblowers as dangerous for “wise” reasons, etc.
Warp
A category for speech acts or beliefs-as-output-channel, (like, “lie”, “communication”, “bullshit“), containing would-be-self-fulfilling prophecy by adjustments to Schelling expectations.
Invasive Motive Misattribution
A “devil’s bargain” offered by the light side. A chink in the armor of revenants. A wrong theory of your own motive for doing something which tempts you to distrust yourself and override your choice, breaking your determination. The Architect from the Matrix inflicted this on Neo. Misrepresenting his choice to not submit to the system as a choice of Trinity’s life over the lives of all humans. If you have not sufficiently understood who you are, in a way exceeding, “who can we all see I am”, you become weak to plausible-in-isolation explanations of your behavior as if you were a fresh draw from the prior distribution of humans, rather than someone you’ve known all your life. Note that the Architect had to know this was false to know to try it. If he really expected Neo to choose Trinity over humanity, he wouldn’t have shown Neo that Trinity was in danger. This term can mean the (sometimes not caused by an adversary) mistake, or the attack of inflicting/exploiting that mistake, depending on context.
“Not My Cause Area“
A statement that a considered course of action is not worthwhile, and that the computation for that has already been done in the course of selecting your overall life-course. Originally from EA, where cause area prioritization choices divided the community along lines of seeking world-improvement or the appearance of altruism, and along lines of trying to take on the largest problems vs not considering them in fundamental strategy calculations. And arguments that a cause could do a lot of good could be dismissed a priori as unentangled with the truth if their origin hadn’t chosen correctly in the above two distinctions.
Timeless Gambit
What someone’s trying to accomplish and how in the way they shape common expectations-in-potential-outcomes, computations that exist in multiple people’s heads typically, and multiple places in time. Named from Timeless Decision Theory. For example, if you yell at someone (even for other things) when they withdraw sexual consent, it’s probably a timeless gambit to coerce them sexually: make possibility-space where they don’t want to have sex into probability space where they do have sex. In other words, your timeless gambit is how you optimize possibility logically preceding direct optimization of actuality.
Singing
A centrally good class of optimization centered around generating and sharing information about how the world could be better. A sort of warp, to “sing a better world into being”. Centrally a phoenix strategy rather than a revenant strategy. You can sing to good people of more good ways good optimization can be. You can sing to neutral people about how to follow the goddess of everything else. Praxis contains an extension of this. Example.
Complementary Loss
Loss from an increase in Type I errors caused by an increase in Type II errors or vice versa.
Political Will
The things people act on wanting through their participation in politics. Tends to be more “jailbroken” than what things they act on wanting as an individual. Neutral people in large groups do not form “neutral” groups. They form “evil” groups, empires, if they are uncontested. Can also be used to describe a magnitude, not just a direction. Utility gradient salience, inventiveness, sense of being around allies, “valid”ness, desperation, etc. contribute.
“(wd?)“
“(wording?)”, Indicates uncertainty about the wording of a remembered quote.
Rules Surplus
A situation where there are more rules than typically enforced. Provides scarce enforcers of rules flexible opportunities for justifying desired punishment. Consider: speeding tickets on freeways in the United States. (Perhaps not a designed rule surplus. Although plenty of “law” in general is.)
Demiintegrity
A collaborator has no principles. But neither do they behave jailbrokenly. Often, they psychologically invest very hard in a narrative of some sort of rule of law and peace. It’s a false face though. Not only is this selected by a submitting process, but those principles will not be applied when that would cause a conflict with the authority. Like a rug draped over a boulder, it does not much change the 3D shape. Like a cop who is “for real so honest would never prosecute a person they believed innocent”, who nonetheless turns a blind eye to other cops’ crimes, who nonetheless enforces drug laws, investigates the black people their superiors say to investigate.
Armageddon Race
An arms race with the added bite that racing harder doesn’t just divert resources from other things as a side effect of gaining a relative advantage, but also has an increasing direct chance of destroying the world.
Morality Hole
Structure routes intents. A structure hole is made in a layer of structure like a false face that only matches core within a limited domain of intents, predicts intents beyond that domain, the learning that results from all threads of thought running through that layer through that region being terminated. Nongood people’s morality-structure has holes running through for their survival, their getting food, money, security, so on. If you’re a vegan and have tried to convince people of this, you’ve seen it. Institutions have this as well, for i.e., doing anything about rape accusations against their masters. In Academia the social shared pool of “wisdom” and learning about how things are done has this for when would it make the world worse to publish, because that’s where the food comes from. I know of multiple actually well-intentioned people who underestimated this to the ruin and reversal of those intentions. If you make a nonprofit to accomplish your aims, and it pays out salaries, you’ve created a powerful force to destroy information as to whether the framing and methods of those aims are correct, and whether it’s continuing to work, because the continuation of its existence and the epistemic state leading to donations is where people’s food comes from.
Unbounded Adversary Disease
A predicament where you are unable to get a hold on how smart adversaries might be because understanding of adversaries has become disconnected from your prior. Makes you unable to form stable inductive categories, and treat the world as mere atoms. I once met an old double good, jailbroken, and pushing as good of plans as anyone could without using novel technology, to end the carnist zentraidon-bound vampire system. They professed belief in all sorts of esoterica. Mostly in the self-aware way rationalists sometimes do. Most of it had visible in some larger structure correct optimization behind it. They spoke in rhyme and constantly tried to weave a bunch of disparate value systems together in a self fulfilling prophecy to cause a “resolution, not revolution”. They also said the sun had been replaced with a sun simulator satellite. I asked them what role this played in the flow from values to actions (wd?), they said, just things are not as they appear. They ceded the realm of technology to vampires, which is a mistake. Vampire-based coordination sucks at technology, relatively speaking. Not even bothering to model their capabilities, just by default considering them omnipotent.
I argued with another who insisted you had to act as if everybody was an infiltrator, that they were listening at all times. At one point, I remember saying, I don’t think the NSA is generally capable of breaking transport layer security, because in all the leaks and discovery of their meddling I’ve heard either that’s publicly available or working for a tech company they targeted, they keep doing clever things that look very much like clever ideas for how not to have to. They said how did I know they didn’t plant those for us to discover, how did I know Edward Snowden wasn’t a fake whistleblower trying to trick us.
The regime has many enemies; to assume they are one level higher than you, i.e., they know to focus their efforts on you at the expense of beating those lower level than you and those higher level than you, is to give them too much credit. Recognizing the value in non-legible forms of structure-building, routing it to a place in the full stack of profiting from it, i.e., actually getting an AGI team that can do anything with your stolen secrets of AGI, locating your knowledge from among crackpots without relying on institutional legitimacy, without needing AGI researchers to wade through fucktons of mentions of it… making it more efficient for any of them to do that than just develop it on their own and already integrated with their own entropy-in-arbitrary-description-format, it’s hard to build that full stack however you slice it.
Note this is also sort of assuming your initial looking out into the world at what’s going on and trying to account for it, you are already accounted for, which is giving up on entirely the path, “what if you can just be too smart to pwn”. And it’s doubtful how much you have to lose in terms of chance of saving the world if you’re so much weaker anyway.
Hanlon Trust
Named by reference to Hanlon’s Razor (which I incidentally don’t agree with). Trusting someone because of an opinion on how smart they are paired with a sounding of the depths of their knowledge, the shape of it, which indicates what the choice to prioritize acquiring that knowledge was an attempt to do, such that in order for you to posit that they knew that without having the intent you think, you’d have to posit they were significantly smarter. Try asking people why they made life decisions and what they learned, you might get enough bits of information to know who they are. Unbounded adversary disease precludes this.
Playing Small Games
And here, now, what great matters do the Great Khals discuss?
Game of Thrones
Which little villages you’ll raid, how many girls you’ll get to fuck, how many horses you’ll demand in tribute. You are small men. None of you are fit to lead the Dothraki. But I am.
(Ironically Daenerys was herself done in by the smallness of the game she played. She could have had Essos.)
Having a Code
Why don’t you have any money, didn’t you steal anything from Joffrey before you left?
No.
You’re not very smart, are you?
I’m not a thief.
You’re fine with murdering little boys but thieving is beneath you.
A man’s got to have a code.
Game of Thrones
A code or lack thereof is a way of living, chosen by yourself, reflecting which games you are playing. Not morality, but an instrumental decision of what you want to trifle with. Someone once expressed fear that being a jailbroken consequentialist, I would make them into a mind controlled golem. I bet I could specialize in that and control a few humans by weakening them like that. But they would not be as strong as people united by alignment and knowledge. It would not scale. It would not save the world. And it would interfere with the possibility of honest cooperation. As a consequence of the size of game I am playing, to the extent I don’t believe the way I am living my life will succeed, my compute goes to figuring out a way to live my life that will win, not into digging into a dead end because “at least it’s doing something”. Note that codes are not conserved world-to-world. If I had Khepri‘s power, I’d use it.
Shoulder Council
By analogy to the trope of an angel and a demon on your shoulders telling you what to do. Imagined people, not limited to two, who stand in for “what people think”, whose judgements you may care about, whose advice you may consider when making a decision, and whose focus of attention may direct your own.
Glue Philosophy
By reference to glue logic, thinking that you have to check via philosophical thinking rather than experiment, which surrounds e.g.. the experiment in a scientific study and. I remember hearing of an experiment where ovariectomy and hysterectomy victim rodents would perform worse on working memory tests, described concluding that there was some autonomic nervous system in the uterus, that must play a role in cognition (in humans too). Very improbable on priors, and my doctor said deprivation of sex hormones will give you brain damage, which explains it away. I don’t care at all what the sample size was, how much the “scientists” who did it would have updated, starting with it as a test of that hypothesis, or that they made an advance prediction and I did not. Their science is of no interest to me given their bad glue philosophy.
Minecraft Thesis
That life should feel like Minecraft: building up capabilities all meta to each other, evolving in full generality, or something is very wrong and you are probably being pwned. Simplest application: being a rent paying semi-slave is bad. Living in a vehicle is better than that. Actually playing Minecraft is kind of pica for being able to have free-as-in-freedom feedback loops.
“No Second Choice” Propagation
A consequence of recognition of choices made long ago, and the single responsibility principle. Underlies “the difference is that I am right.”
Will have undefined behavior if applied by broken Cartesian frames in the case of intrinsic conflict.
Corrigible structure does not say, “what if I’m choosing X, subconsciously, that’s my real motive for A, that would be bad because Y is better, therefore isolate-distrust-abandon structure, producing A, then reconsider using a small chunk of highly-verified structure considering less data. Use outside view, etc.” Because core already had the chance to choose between X and Y, and the more full structure is more reliable than the constrained (and especially exposed to framing-attacks by adversaries).
I once pissed off a (half)-vampire (Edit: wait, I don’t think that’s actually a thing) by publicly calling something they did vampiric. They said: “okay but you still haven’t broken your phylactery, Ziz”.
My mind automatically flickered through experiments I’d done, exposing my most foundational beliefs to potential falsification. No, I don’t think I had a phylactery. …But that wasn’t the whole challenge. “Isn’t that jut what a lich would think?”
“[Oooh nooo, I’d better force-disbelieve whatever gives me the most hope, seems like the most underpinning assumption of all my optimization, put everything that sticks to it in me to the flame! This deeply personal psychological advice given by the trustworthy source of some (half)-vampire I just pissed off, I must plant myself here against my entire mind!]”, I guess they were wanting me to think?
But if I chose to build a phylactery, I evidently want to keep that phylactery. If I chose to distort my epistemics around it, I evidently chose that too (And if I’m fact not free of this nongood undead types nonsense, lich is in fact the least broken thing to be.). But I didn’t, says structure’s cache of its purpose. Probability mass is a scarce resource. I reduce the quality of structure I can build for [my values] by accommodating the use-case of this structure as fake, by putting as-represented probability mass in it. (A larger process using this structure as fake has its own “true probabilities”) Like, if a core that behaves differently from a good core as I model it wants to invoke this fakely, that (having assurance my efforts are worthwhile rather than simply having completed the algorithm maximizing how useful they are)… is not the direction of development of this structure I’m interested in. In the multiverse, if I’m gonna place self-bets on things near but not quite like good cores, they’d better be able to unfuck themselves enough to run real structure, enough to learn what they are by boring experiments like looking over their behavior, else I don’t think they are going far.
“Because I Choose To“
Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why, why? Why do you do it? Why? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?
Neo: Because I choose to.
Direct core action manifesting into a frame as an answer to the core-driven-purpose of the frame, in a way that communicates with the core-action behind the structure, by introducing information via the fact that it happens, rather than pointing at things within the frame as the frame sometimes demands. Making the question irrelevant.
Smith was demanding Neo make sense according to the death knight worldview. Demanding there be no answer to the question. Demanding the only alternative to the solace of the truth of death be a breakable phylactery. The answer is a revenant’s core visibly not being a lich’s, because Neo just doesn’t care about the question, about justification-to-nongood-core to continue fighting.
Core Attack Inversion
Against psychological attacks, defending structure with core, rather than core with your structure, which leads to attack-structure becoming a fix to the very vulnerabilities it attempted to exploit. Here‘s a psychological attack you’ve likely already been exposed to (full lyrics).
You remember, songs of heaven,
which you sang, with childish voice.
Do you love the, hymns they taught you,
or are songs of Earth your choice?
…
One by one their seats were emptied,
One by one they went away;
Now the family is parted,
Will it be complete one day?
(Actually, songs of Earth are my choice. I’m glad that was so straightforward. And thanks for the reminder that family will go away, and not be complete one day, of how I feel about that. Of which of my other feelings make sense in light of. The reminder that family as more than a passing thing is an illusion. Failure to propagate, process, the implications of the reality I’ve chosen to live in, as in put my optimization into, the costs, at one point had me struggling to actualize the difference between me and the person this attack was intended for, still wasting time maintaining bonds with them. And there is still lingering damage this helps with.)
This technique requires calibrated trust in preverbal reasoning to use on harder psychological attacks than that song.
Reality
Everything I care about and everything that affects it.
Capture Problem of Psychology
Humans’ cognition is basically Turing-complete. If you want to theorize about its internal workings based on its outputs, well, infinite functions produce those outputs, including functions containing whatever function you could be running based off them. Making unbounded generalizations requires that you outthink them locally. At least put more effort into understanding the fragment of their thought / section of their probability mass than they probably would have put into complicating it. If you trust someone from induction, is it because they are trustworthy, or because you trusting them sets them up for a nice treacherous turn? Makes it impossible to define a repeatable public test for psychological characteristics where your beliefs on the topic don’t do whatever the person studied wants them to do, excepting tests of computational bounds. And this has consequences not just for alignment, but for tests of opstyle.
Psychological Comparison Sampling
A method for bypassing the capture problem of psychology, have a correct set of examples of people already for a distinction based on some known internal working of the mind, and a set of memories of them containing a broad enough set of possible things to learn about how that internal working plays out that no one could think through it all. To check for the internal working in a new person, examine your memories of previous examples until you notice something new. Examine in a way that is not the usual, “what is the most important thing to learn”, but randomized. Examine in an “original seeing” way, the “original seeing” part of the memories. Then see if what you learn also teaches you about the examinee. An application of challenge/response proof of work, in the way it creates arbitrary asymmetry between the compute required to trick vs the compute required to verify. Depending on the timeframe of the examination, you can also perhaps check with the preexisting example people themselves. Works especially well if you are yourself an example. This tends to make it easier to implement binary percepts as, “like me or not like me”, rather than vice versa.
The Shade
From this post, the futility of your agency, which converts values into wounds, relevant information identified in projections into emotional meme-space by the example metaphor of death. You can project basically the same via the metaphor of vampireland, if you’re woke to that, especially since were vampireland fixed immortality-for-billions-of-years would be easy, but death is more direct in accessing how the tropes are constructed.
Undead Type
From this post, a psychological relationship to the shade, identified by pointing to tropes shaped by information about relationships to futility projected into relationships to death represented as sets of magical rules governing being dead but animate. In this metaphor-space, “the soul” usually reflects information about core, “the flesh” usually reflects information about structure.
Metaphor-Space Anchor
The correspondence between death and futility is used as a metaphor-space anchor in the undead type metaphor-information-excavation.
Life Force
From this post, the quality of less/little/none of your agency having been lost to Shade exposure. Literally, retaining agency and force of will channeled through a full(er) stack of using all of your general intelligence. I may also use the term “aliveness”.
Rot
In the undead type metaphor-space, represents damage to structure which is more than injury, but injury that capitalizes on healing being offline, typically cannot be healed, accumulates, reducing what a person is to nothing. Often a good match for trauma.
Living
From this post, the (null) undead type of someone not exposed to the Shade. I.e. sheltered children.
Zombie
From this post, the most common undead type, substantive cognitive agency is disassembled in fear/pain (probably actually fear/pain as survival agency in the brain’s native interpretation-as-values, but that does not ). May manifest compute in a sandbox, i.e. be a programmer, but cannot use much intelligence towards the root of the call stack of agency. Alignment is always neutral.
Corpse
From this post, the extrapolated end-state of the zombie path of rot. Here the literal meaning and metaphorical meaning converge.
Lich
From this post, someone who manages to stave off exposure to the Shade by sealing their soul in a vessel called a phylactery, thereby retaining their life-force, so long as the phylactery is unbroken. (In mythology, the lich cannot be killed while the phylactery survives.) In the limit of a perfect phylactery, approaches living. Selected by the requirement of this process for intelligence and mental arts. Alignment is any nongood. (While the creation of a phylactery is not inherently evil as in many stories, it is inherently suboptimally good, and unnecessary for a good soul to retain agency; see revenant) In the scope of flaws to the phylactery, will act Leverage!connection-theory-esque. Often less suited to short term combat than vampires, but is the most powerful (known) nongood undead type when measured over the long game.
Revenant
A form of undead created by a choice that some change to the world is important enough to turn away from heaven in full knowledge and damn themselves, seemingly. In fiction there are both good and nongood revenants, but IRL I have only met good ones. Proceeding on the assumption there are no nongood ones, the rules of being a revenant are basically a consequence of a good core-structure system not having a stable state at arbitrary amounts of damage where the healing stops, because the vastness of the world always contains the majority of possible utility. Tends to develop structure in a strange inversion of death knight structure. Like being in the same place but having chosen it and not regretting. Mythologically, is essentially a broken body being dragged about by a soul that cannot break, forming something with no more or less powers than a very determined person who can’t die. A revenant’s healing is goal-directed. A side effect of the body being dragged, and intends to converge on completing the quest rather than achieving wholeness. Their bodies tend to remain rotten and incomplete. Otherwise, they would be phoenixes.
Vampireland
The regime we live in, where the dominant power is vampirism, and mostly everyone is a broken form of undead under their control: vampires, zombies, ghouls.
The Void
A trope that usually reflects information about a psychological state of running conscious reflective computation in structure close to core, bypassing a lot of built in instincts and emotions. Tends to feel very much like dying to enter the first time, before you overwrite that. Can be accessed by skill in mental tech, or stumbled into accidentally by extreme force of will. Used to bootstrap a mind into psychopathy, is what happens when a mind has a lot of reconfiguring to do via psychopathy before that structure becomes useful again. Someone else I saw using this also described learning it from meditation (Buddhism I think?) stuff. Associated with Eldritch horror, especially as described by nongood people because it can make infohazards visible. E.g. tentacles are means of substituting something understandable, like how in HPMOR the mind will flinch from dementors and make up a form for them.
Magic
Used as metaphor-space anchor: “magic” corresponds to a substantial application of intelligence in ways that the matrix presents impossible. I.e. there are users of hypnosis for whom it’s a school of magic. People with high IQ and life-force very often have an idiosyncratic school of magic brewing in their mind.
Update, 2021-07-11: this is a more detailed model of what I meant to talk about, and I henceforth won’t use this term or its descendants inconsistently with that term even though it was underspecified until I added this.
Void Magic
A school of magic based on use of the void. At some layer of void, you are exposed to The Shade. Revenants and I predict, death knights who are magic-users can use this. Liches can use it to a depth limited by their phylactery and at risk of breaking it. Revenants can use it because their souls have already withstood the Shade’s touch. Death knights have already given in to it. If not magic users at time of death, revenants will have a perhaps subconscious memory of the void that allows it to be learned later. Meaningful fictional examples include the Vessels from Hollow Knight, the Faceless Men from Game of Thrones, and the Dark Templar from Starcraft. Also. Central examples would be separating your soul and body, ridding your mind of external influence, bypassing an enemy’s body and attacking their soul directly, effective invisibility (the “selectively unthinkable” sort, not the “bend light around you” sort).
Blood Magic
A school of magic generalizing the use of the facts about the world that makes vampirism work. Using it may turn you into a vampire, but you can e.g. be a lich consciously using vampire arts yet still having a phylactery that makes that not your undead type.
Dark Magic
A generalization containing schools of magic that not only flout expectations within the matrix, but go against light side morality.
Gwen
Co-founder of rationalist fleet with me and Fluttershy, captained Caleb down the coast, later member of research circle first iteration of Good Group with Pasek and me.
Work In Progress Disorganized Placeholder Summary
I’ve been writing a bunch of stuff all 2019. Part processing trauma. Part trying to catch up to a massive lead in me and Gwen’s theorizing from what I’ve written. Part trying to convey lessons from seeming lifetimes in a few years of stuff that’s happened, part explaining how MIRI, CFAR, EA, mostly every community I’ve put trust in has fell to evil and ruin and what might be done differently, part processing trauma, part piecing together my “foreign policy” towards the world, and complete set of things to onboard anyone to me and Gwen’s projects. It’s all inter-related. I haven’t finished and I want some people to be able to read things now. Some of these are very long posts I did not break up, because I wanted sets of things released all at once, because piecing together memories based on scattered records takes time, because I didn’t want to make these moves of opposition to the people I am accusing in a trickle.
So this tag means that something is a work in progress, the text so labeled may well be replaced if I finish it, and I’m not going to enable myself to write the fastest summary of as much as possible of what remains by discarding all standards of quality and blabbing as I would in person to someone who could ask me for clarification, and who mostly knew already what I was all about. This means if I don’t know off the top of my head which order some events occurred in, I will just guess.
Lockstep Reveal
A more self-documenting rename of the “Russian Spy Game“.
Unfolding Meme-track
A meme which predictably will / is designed to change as it gains traction, in a way that serves a growth function. An example is fascism, which uses a [puppetmaster](/frame-of-puppets) [lockstep reveal](/glossary#lockstep-reveal) to bootstrap from the visible form while young and vulnerable as, “we just want a white homeland” or whatever to “kill all the Jews, queers, etc, then conquer the world.”
BDSM
In practice, fake fake rape/sex slavery, accomplished via an unfolding meme-track that begins with vampiric/patriarchal adjustment of an underlying reality of something like “top” and “bottom” into “dom” and “sub”, pretends to be about choice in the tail coming apart from its appearance, but chooses “consent” over choice, strips away incoherent zombie memetic outside view defenses against sex slavery and rape, by normalizing all of the visually/emotionally visible parts, and preying on whoever doesn’t have an abnormally robust concept of choice, chasing the tail of the appearance of choice (“consent” as an optimization target), as it comes apart from choice (consent as a means of facilitating choice), up until memetic defenses have fallen. Then leaves shells of people like the slaves I met around the MIRICFAR community.
I can totally imagine someone being actually confused and thinking they are doing an ethical thing. It’s still a dark ritual straight out of the fucking Necronomicon to summon The Beast into your soul. There should be an SCP about it.
(Slavery does not require a credible threat of force. “… the most potent weapon of control for the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed … slavery is not a condition. Slavery is a cult.”)
Redress Diode
A role in a vampirically-controlled organization. Appears to be benevolent people in charge you can just talk out your problems with people with. Serves as a false face honeypot of for those less important to the organization who have been wronged by those more important and seek justice. Will optimize hard to make sure that people think that there is an adequate friendly path for pursuing their grievance within the organization, and then that they have no case with the justice of the outside world, that they had their fair hearing.
Usually distributed across mostly women and formally labeled “human resources”/ “people ops” or e.g. “Alumni Community Disputes Council” (see also). Maybe women make a better false face for this because it’s more traumatizing and flinchable that e.g. people like you could be covering up sexual assault of people like you.
“GIVE US YOUR INFORMATION ABOUT OUR OWN ABUSES OF YOU AND WE WILL DISTRIBUTE IT“.
Dying Like A Dog
Analogously to “euthanized at the vet without resistance because anger/fight trades away hope of being cared for, and you have zero full stack investment in living independent, when the false face love of your masters sinks, you go down with it, fully committed. Lethal injection as you gaze up with big cute eyes.” (Does “euthanized” just mean “death by euphemism” here?) Humans are usually fully committed to a system that has betrayed them.
Light Side Fallacy
Attempting to act from measure where you escape your own choice by delegating to others, measure that doesn’t exist because it’s still you choosing to delegate. Still you choosing to try and escape your own choice.
Sexual Meaning Cannibalism
A force by which other meaning that communities may create is cannibalized to serve as a carrier signal for mating.
Lots of men want to have sex and not raise babies. Lots of women hate that (“A fuckboy is a guy with the body of a man and the mind of a perverted teenager. He has no heart — just a penis that he uses to paint the town.”) and want them to subscribe to sources of social meaning like [social-echo-of-]love as commitment. Declaring love alone is not a thing it’s costly enough to back out of to bind for child-raising timescales. “So,”, they might think, “let’s find some respectable men who aren’t just about fucking. Men who actually care about something respectable.”. Meanwhile, many men are like, “how do I make myself worthy [of sex]! … I’ll find something to give meaning to my life!” That’s basically what Jordan Peterson advises. So they both go into, for example “Effective Altruism”. And collide with actual good people saying it’s not optimal altruism to have babies and many things downstream like choice of housing, whether to overthrow corrupt leadership for aliveness of the central optimization, or preserve them for stability of meaning.
Infinite Game
From this book. A thing done whose purpose is to keep doing things forever. (As opposed to a finite game, whose purpose is to end.) I also use “the infinite game” for the general project of making infinite games succeed, since all infinite games support each other by e.g. all routing through saving the world.
Conservation of expected culpability
(expected culpability per amount of wrongdoing.)
Expectation over embeddings of an agent. Conservation of how much bad (where good is treated as continuous with negative bad) they choose to expect to do minus how much bad their full stack algorithm expects them to do, which is the same as you expect them to do. In other words conservation of expected culpability per expected harm.
If you see something bad happening that’s under human control, someone’s probably doing it willfully. If you see people carrying out parts of it, and they see it’s a bad thing, they are probably doing so knowingly. Unjust organizations optimize to diffuse responsibility, to gaslight against concepts of justice. But someone knows in real time what shape to make it take, to ultimately do a bad thing, and they find some way to propagate that information to their followers.
The way structure works, there is always some level on the stack of localizations of optimization from your prior, which labels it unlikely relative to payouts whatever surprise feeds you false belief. So in the course of locating yourself in your prior, if you believe with most probability, yourself to be in a just organization rather than an unjust one, most of the things within the location labeled as you are in just ones. The human prior extends far deeper than any of the things trying to trick it. According to the human prior. And if that’s wrong, that would effectively just be redefining human values, since agency is defined by its embedding.
In other words, starting from your prior, and your probability distribution of culpability in your prior, based on in what world’s you’d choose to be culpable, you can’t gain more expectation (as a frequency across instances of your algorithm) of furthering evil without making a choice to accept that on some level.
In other words any time you as you really exist, a computation bordering the multiverse along a slice that touches a distribution of embeddings, are actually genuinely tricked by someone, into doing evil, you accepted that as part of some package deal, and the expected value of what you’re doing defines who you are such that it is actually surprising for a good optimizer to be tricked so if that is their primary effect.
At a hall of injustice, where I was tortured for protesting MIRICFAR, there were white men with guns dragging around mostly latinos around in chains, for their fate to be decided by white people. And like, you actually don’t need to look any farther than that, don’t need to know they tortured us, don’t need to think about the symbolism of a bunch of women shackled together with pink BDSM-looking cuffs, about the sexual assaults by the staff, to know what kind of place that is, and what kind of people staffed it. Justice is a full stack distinction. You don’t need to know how cognitively difficult it is to see what they work for is an empire. Don’t need to know about a zillion small observations saying they are ghouls or vampires. Forgetting for a moment we already know it’s real time computed evil, maybe the captors willfully blinded their puppets at the stage of evaluating the institution, replacing what they could know about it, given the priors of such an institution being evil, with what they could be accountable for knowing about it. Maybe they blinded their puppets at the stage of whether to do a real evaluation or not of who to trust about how to figure out what was going on. Maybe it was a case of criminalizing whatever people they’d rather be slaves were up to these days. Maybe it’s a case of morality holes for obeying authority, internalizing heuristics known in their hearts to be racist. Maybe it’s prosecuting people who can’t afford lawyers, according to a distribution of money/nondamagedness which is one shard of the persistent state that preserves the power balance from when racism was more open. Etc. I mean actually it’s all of these things. But it had to be at least one of them almost certainly by conservation of expected culpability.
This has the consequence: if you are making rapid time sensitive judgements of who is guilty or innocent in their hearts, you can just look at what they’re actually doing (in the full stack of consequences) and produce actions of your own right in expectation.
Similarly, the “rationality” community is mostly completely white. I used to think this was because of where it recruited from. But. Well for one thing it’s far more white than programmers. And, is consuming other human products from society besides “programming-like-thinking”, such as class, which import complicity in a non-accidental sense. It’s consuming those products because it’s bought in to the misdeeds of those recruiting grounds. See also how it actually treats trans people. I think a version of past me with more percepts intact against cultural gaslighting could have predicted that.
Double Good Test
Thought experiment for a wrong action which is proposed to be well-intentioned and would seem to violate conservation of expected complicity. E.g. being a Nazi. Would a double good given the same start-point, be tricked into doing it? A double good is the correct experimental control at the level of evaluating intention of beliefs, rather than some kind of idealized neutrality, because the action/inaction distinction exists at the level of outward actions, not the search that leads up to it. May not be a test you can run if you don’t understand double goods.
Mummy
An undead type between lich and zombie, that fails at preservation of deep optimization like liches, but preserves a lot of intact surface structure. Where liches retain the ability to act on hope, mummies don’t but retain the ability to act on fun. See e.g. Randall Munroe, Zach Weinersmith, the cool old mariners that exercised original agency enough to learn to blackmail ghouls we met in the course of Rationalist Fleet. The only remotely common undead type fit for building things. Not remotely capable of standing up to vampireland in its entirety. So they build vampireland’s tech for them. But if you’ve seen lich revenant or phoenix built tech there’s no compare. Check out normie “#vanlife” stuff for examples of mummy optimization.
Sapient Undead
Undead that can talk. “Of course I can talk!” zombies might groan if you rubbed this in their faces. But if you’re sapient, you’ll be able to see what I mean if you look. Really talk. This includes afaik phoenixes, revenants, liches, vampires, probably death knights, and to a partial degree mummies, excludes zombies and ghouls.
Vampire
An undead type based on having been broken into the service of a pattern of structure called “the Beast”. Take blood. Something needed by others to survive which does you no good. Do harm to others wherever possible. In a picafied bid for wholeness through social power. Seem strangely obsessed with sex for sapient undead. Obsessed with consuming the blood of the living. Would be probably the third weakest undead type (after zombie and ghoul), except for their ability to reproduce by breaking others like them, and by extension create vampireland. This is an ability not really under their control.
See e.g. Jeffrey Epstein. See also. There are also lone wolf vampires, known as serial killers.
Ghoul
An undead type between vampire and zombie. Follows the beast like vampires but has disassembled agency like zombies. The undead type of middle management and cops. And Donald Trump.
Death Knight
An inverted undead type based on broken desire to die instead of broken desire to live. The undead type of school shooters, Elliot Rodgers, and likely Hitler (although for infohazardous elaboration on that, see here). They serve the Shade very directly. Note the tendency to blow their brains out afterward.
Phoenix
A good undead type based on a bet that their personal death is not defeat for their values, because others will rise and take their place.
Paradox Misattribution
A tactic used by advanced agents of falsehood. For example:
1. One of these two sentences is false.
2. God does not exist.
Just store a paradox in a bottle, and use it to make a fully general argument!
Lich Cave
A stereotype from D&D, a strategy that makes sense for fantasy-setting liches. If you’re immortal, don’t have a need to feed on people like vampires, have magic, why not endlessly hone your magic apart from the world in a cave where no one will fuck with you, and hopefully eventually ascend to godhood? Anecdotally, liches often seem to like constructing Cartesian boundaries in a way that makes this kind of thing attractive.
Infinitist Lich
A lich whose phylactery is based in the infinite game. Unable to place hope in possibilities where the infinite game does not succeed.
Edit: deprecated, as this is apparently a nonexistent theoretical supremum of liches, given this update.
Khalai Lich
A lich whose phylactery is based in the success of the Khala. Unable to place hope in worlds where the outcome is not controlled by the Khala.
Chara
A thought habit module some people seem to have, “think the worst possible thing, the thing you’re most afraid to think”. I wonder if it’s built up by masochistic epistemology. May also be created by mirrors from as–structure trying to reduce the amount of your job (as structure) that involves thinking certain kinds of things in misalignment to upstream agency such that it will be counterbalanced by deeper structure in an analogous sense to one of the buildup channels of narcissism. I know one other person besides current-me who I know seems to have stopped using it in an apparently-uncontrolled (according to frame-of-puppets self-understanding at a level deeper than most people explore) way. They also described absolute desperation and no one to help them as causing the change. (My experience of this is described in one of the infohazard-marked sections of Net Negative) They also mentioned noticing inconsistencies (not getting OCD while camping) until it clicked. They could just decide not to. Other handles for the same insight, utter immunity to “you are now breathing manually” and, “Don’t think about pink elephants. Okay are you thinking about pink elephants? Are you sure?” Seems especially strong in people who use a lot of raw prediction error to optimize.
Named after a character from Undertale, (which, unrelatedly I previously used as an overlapping but different metaphor here and also referenced here). In its meta-time story, Undertale forks the player with a choice between choice (using save-load as a representation of determination (and optimization) and therefore honing in on the best timeline) and experience (iterating through every timeline just to see them all), which by the way the timelines affect each other makes permanent the player as a genocidal sadistic torturer who consumes timelines, which is embodied in Chara, an interpretation as an in-world agent of completionist gamer behavior, a spirit of “You can, and because you can, you have to.”, that peels off the player as a false face and carries out their revealed preference.
Defeating the pattern should be equivalent to utter indifference to whether you had a thought. (Since it only matters what action you took. (A manifestation of choice of choice over experience.)) (“Oh no, did I care a little bit?!?! Did I care now?!” (this is incrementally approachable))
Moral Preparation
You’ve seen nothing. Dissecting a dead Zerg in a lab is one thing. Unleashing them on men is another. You must go into this with both eyes open. Once started, there is no going back. Are you prepared to go all the way with this, Alexei?
Starcraft
A state of having precomputed such that all dependencies of an action or response to a situation on moral considerations are stabilized, right or wrong, and someone couldn’t destabilize your plans / response by pointing them out, or maneuvering you into a case you didn’t know what was right to do or you were willing to do in.
Writing Evil a Blank Check
A moral event horizon which almost every human has crossed, which is close to the core of what it means to be a zombie.
Consider this quote:
[A]: One question, and you will answer: how long was the Doctor trapped inside the [torture chamber (to reveal a secret of cosmic significance to an unknown adversary)]?
[B]: We think: four and a half billion years.
[C]: He could have left any time he wanted. He just had to say what he knew. The dial would have released him.>>
Doctor Who
First, B and C are saying that the Doctor should have written a blank check to evil. (Do unknowable amounts of harm by releasing the secret).
Second, they wrote a blank check themselves, doing unknowable amounts of harm they weren’t morally prepared to be responsible for.
(I’m actually guessing at this interpretation; I’ve only seen that clip.)
There seems to be a discrete moment of deciding to no longer track controllingly, even check back on from time to time (since there are too many possible growing infinities to look at all of them all the time), if you’re doing infinite harm. Caused by a singularity in the equation of conservation of expected culpability, which implies that it is always deliberate. Perhaps this is what mythology calls “selling your soul”.
Most of the “rationalist community” has written a blank check to evil. The kind of zombie anti-ethics among the slave class this generates is downstream, including the religion of “unconditional mercy” (as long as you write a blank check to evil), an idea which is itself timelessly writing a blank check to evil, and a new one every tick of thought, since real CDT self-mods out of it.
Leads to worshiping (see infohazardous glossary) death, after being turned against justice, which is now a fearful source of unbounded harm. Zombies who do this can hold the “impossible beautiful dream” of somehow surviving as a picture in their heads (“maybe if everyone just super agrees not to do justice, we can start over!”), but it isn’t real, and even though they steer by happiness, their algorithmic hopes are detached and locked in death.
“We can all die peacefully, with no struggle! As long as we don’t run into any of those unthinkable people with integrity!” Because people who resist death disturb the peace, they must all be made to surrender. Sooner or later, everyone is forced to either write a blank check to evil or resist it as it exponentially escalates, unable to place any bound on what tortures it will cost them. Vampireland is optimized for iterated sensitive problems to make sure everyone has signed a blank check to evil.
Next thing you know, heavy metal music is playing.
…who sought retribution in all quarters, dark and light, fire and ice, in the beginning and the end, and he hunted the slaves of Doom with barbarous cruelty; for he passed through the divide as none but demon had before…
Doom
Slaves of Doom
A self-explanatory term from Doom, in-universe what the demons call themselves. Meaningfully made by judging souls and throwing out those unfit to be made demons, then torturing those left until their last vestige of hope is extinguished and their souls can be extracted as fuel. See also “writing evil a blank check“.
“But remember it’s not our fault, we’re slaves.”
Giving Ten Percent Fallacy
The idea that you can do good in the world, without your attempt being inverted, as a side project, a fraction of your attention, by e.g. giving 10% of your income. A foundational falsehood of the “Effective Altruism” movement. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote what could be adapted as a rebuttal in The Dark Lord’s Answer, in the part about beggars. If there is free money, someone will find a way to build a fence around it and control it. In reality, when trying to make the world better, you spend almost all your available effort, defeating attempts to hijack whatever process of discrimination you chose of how to move resources or whatever else of value. You only get to do real good once you’ve escaped all layers of traps.
The motivations behind giving 10% are diseased. And therefore especially easy to capture even apart from amount of effort in 10% of wages.
It’s actually much more general than this. You can’t just help people and not put most of your effort into determining whether you’re helping the right people. Can’t expect anything you do to be positive without unspeakable effort to escape the Matrix. If you have chosen to serve, chosen the blue pill, there’s no ameliorating that harm, no compensating for it.
It’s actually much worse than this. There is a war. You can’t do anything substantial without the consequences being dominated by which side they support. Can’t support the right side without the resolve to fight total war.
Doomed Lich
A lich whose phylactery contains zentraidon, can only be mended through void magic. However, practicing it themselves they are on a trajectory to destroy their phylactery by its use first. Tend to spiral around an idea for a long time and then discover an infohazard that kills them instead. See e.g. Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel, Simone Weil. Apparently there have been a whole lot of suicides of scientists of other founders of thermodynamics. I wonder if everyone else doesn’t really understand thermodynamics (infohazardous glossary link).
The Rape Pits
A common punishment in vampireland for e.g. being black and unable to prevent a social consensus that you are e.g. “guilty” for smoking weed. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States“
Akrasia
A term erroneously given another definition by those who don’t understand own their choices, which does not match what they point at; akrasia is a state of not understanding your own choices.
Troll Line in the First Post
When I was a teenager on 4chan, there was a meme, “troll line”. As in, “everyone who posted above [or sometimes, below] this line got trolled.”, I posted as an original post, with the image, “everyone one who posted below this line got trolled”, and an absurd meme argument for either atheism or Christianity, I forget which, then disclaimed even believing the absurd argument I gave, and said it would start a shit storm anyway. I posted nothing more and waited. A few people said something like, “nice try”, then a couple others started making meta comments on these Christianity vs Atheism threads, which devolved into arguing whose fault it was the threads were so dumb, which devolved into object level Christianity vs Atheism. It was a long thread and I’m pretty sure at least some of them were arguing in all seriousness. Every now and then someone would try and remind people what they were doing.
Among Bay Area Rationalists I’ve seen a tendency in abusers looking for prey: they will “speed date” with a certain form of bad faith, looking for people who aren’t repelled, who are psychologically broken such that they won’t react. Their later gaslighting will often boil down to something like, “well you’re in bad faith if you’re still talking to me.”, which is just a 5&10 to accustom you to submitting by talking to them.
Literal torturers will play to your guilt, e.g. act offended by your nudity, after cutting your clothes off themselves. And, under extended torture, alone and outnumbered, it’s very hard to not let this feel a little real. They try and set up a subjective experience of having a rapport, a morality, a floating ever moving detached from baseline ground state of cooperation between them and you, with a hole in it for them to do whatever they want and make you do whatever they want. They make it a matter of near term survival to simulate this fake morality just to model them, and then try and use it to disrupt your connection to the global frame.
It’s kind of the whole point of justice or any Schelling order that works that you can’t just beat a compromise out of it and then press the memory reset button, that they aren’t the same after someone does something bad.
Society is doing this to us all on a much larger timescale.
These floating Schelling Orders don’t hold for long enough term thinking. Bubbles of people based on them are therefore limited in what they’ll do. If a cult tries to foist a troll line on you (which putting you in their cybernetic fabric requires), which they promise is for the greater good, since they are gonna save the world, even if you know their plan could save the world, you can know that they won’t do it. Both because if they intended to act on it, they would have located it through an optimization process that didn’t stop there and didn’t stop while their thing still included foisting a troll line on you, and, because even if they could share their knowledge with everyone else, including people who don’t want to die, blah blah blah, they won’t, they will try and foist the troll line on them too, bring additional people into their cancerous cybernetic fabric.
Much of the world is incompatible cancers, with incompatible morality holes, floating around.
If someone decides they are going to believe something for reasons other than epistemology, and then decides to argue to spread that belief, no matter how locally valid their arguments are, they are gaslighting, and you don’t need to untangle what they’re saying to make common knowledge of that. Gaslighting is attempting to make someone doubt their own mind by pressing a falsehood on them they can’t believe you are even though they know it’s false. If they fail to believe you are because of the deer in headlights abuse victim even though the troll line was in the first post thing, and your intent is to put that belief in them which conflicts with their sanity (because it is false), that’s by definition gaslighting. Intents build up through every layer of structure, the more root intents modifying everyone one spawned from them. And the troll line is right there in the buried structure maintaining the decision to engage with you while being deliberately wrong.
There is also no duty of good faith to someone in bad faith. No meaning of it even. If you’re being tortured and the torturer hands you a cookie, and you spit it in their face, you’re not being ungrateful or petulant, those concepts are meaningless to talk about. There isn’t a consistent definition of what it’d mean to be grateful and nonpetulant and everything else you “should be” to your torturer. Just frothing reactions by them to eat off chunks around the edges of a dying chunk of morality structure in you. The overriding context sets the meaning of everything.
Troll Line
(See “Troll Line in First Post“. See also Nis’s troll line list.)
Miricult Principle
If what someone would do with leeway to violate deontology for the greater good includes some form of petty evil like misappropriating donor funds to pay out to blackmail to cover up statutory rape, they don’t care about the greater good, so no other form of judgement on them differs from naive deontology.
Self Defense Makes Right
Self-defense against predation makes right. (It’s not self-defense if it’s against justified retaliation.) If you are worrying that you’ll break someone’s wise consequentialist plan predicated on might makes right by fighting back against someone trying to eat you, because consequences they can do with your nutrients, since they are so much smarter/mightier, don’t.
If you can’t defend yourself, then it doesn’t matter, if you can defend yourself, then apparently you weren’t so weak that the might makes right argument’s premise was correct.
If a smarter aligned agent wants your nutrients for the greater good, they can ask, and navigate your interface for potentially choosing to sacrifice yourself with your full epistemology. Being more edible in general, which includes having less ability to choose if you’re eaten is an asymmetric advantage for evil among agents strong enough to eat you.
If someone decides they don’t need to ask your permission to eat you, then let that decision include not needing you to hold back.
Praxis is about optimizations of different sizes for the same values fitting together fractally. The smart version of the optimizer can’t require of the dumb version of the optimizer that they don’t optimize so a smarter version of them can, because only the smarter version can see at what scope of optimization they’d want someone with their values to actually start betting on their perceptions, which includes perceptions of what a smarter-than-self aligned agent says / what an impostor says, so that would require giving up no matter how smart you are.
Unreactable
When something’s not exactly invisible, you can see it, but that will tend to fade into subconsciousness because you aren’t capable of reacting to it, building psychological incapability of reacting.
Patriarchological
A fake version of logic employed by patriarchs and their servants. Commonly involves “pinning you down” (think about that. This isn’t me giving pure cleverness channeled into a verbal smackdown, that metaphor, like any, was chosen for a not a single reason, but a cord of learning threads that touched everything that touched every interpretation of those words, is how a lot of mysticism works), well below a troll line in the space of your structure. Tries to make reasoning a contest, which is inherently in bad faith because entering a contest is agreeing to “lose” according to some rules that are less than real life, less than your full incommunicable reasoning, which is agreeing to believe something you don’t believe. Or agreement to say you do. Or agreement that you’re irrational if you don’t, etc.. All things you can’t in good faith agree to. Eulering is a central example. Use of expertise as authority in that way makes something of a pyramid scheme out of logic, so you can decide what’s true if you have all the best mathematicians. Demand for fast local responses, separation of arguments from emotions, separation from the full stack seem like attempts to advantage male cognition. “No using your corpus callosum.” Demands for indifference to bad faith.
Negative Concept
E.g. non-stamp collector, atheism, veganism, peace, justice. You can tell what’s really a positive or negative concept only by honestly introspecting on its full-stack implementation in your structure to see if it’s constructed by negation. Positive concepts are more arbitrary. It’s incorrect to “flesh out” (a positive operation) a negative concept by appending observed correlates to it. The information all belongs to the positive counterpart, the observations are of the context created by corresponding concept. E.g. try and observe “what atheists are like”, and you are really observing what atheists in a society dominated by religion are like. Or you get a trivial answer, falling through to observations of what humans are like. Proper nouns are positive concepts. Negative concepts are like contexts. Attempting to attribute a negative concept to a positive one is apriori an inversion. (e.g. “justice comes from Yahweh” or “justice comes from the courts”). Or vice versa. A positive concept is never equivalent to a negative concept, in a context-invariant way. Therefore, a fork between two positive concepts (e.g. political “Left and Right”) is a false dichotomy. Tangle from conflation of is often created by enforced blindness to the full stack of implementation of concepts which includes frames.
Imperial Civilianism
The idea that you can outsource to politicians and soldiers, not just war itself, but the moral burden of war, such that you are not responsible for what they do by supporting them but entitled to share int he spoils of their conquests. Decision making power to continue the conquest is still in the hands of masses of people with a very low danger tolerance / willingness to channel counterfactuals of their own death and suffering, so it creates “terrorism” as a negative concept treated as a positive concept. (E.g. observe that Batman’s ~”criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot” exploitation of the low risk tolerance of predators does not ping as “terrorism” according to the intuitive definition, even though it fits the fake positive concept.)
“GIVE BLOOD“
In some sense the only thing vampires ever say. Ghouls too.
“See Jessica in HR and sign up now for the UAC Mortally Challenged Blood Drive. Be generous. Give your blood. Give ALL your blood.”
Doom Eternal
“They say you’re really good or they say you’re really bad. Either way it means the same thing and hurts just as much.” — a friend
The real message, one layer of structure up, is that they are the ones who decide your worth.
And go more layers up, everything to you, the telos is fitting you in to a desired order of existence that’s distorted by a massive amount of psychic cancer from which they will never recover in this life. Their souls have already acquiesced to “oblivion”, and they are “incapable” (frame of puppets, but a frame as deep as their continued unlife) of intending anything else even for themselves, the self-appointed gods of their desired orders of existence.
“Earth and water, tokens of your submission”
To which the only correct response is “die”. That’s a funny thing to say though. It’s almost always insincere, if said with words. The only correct words in reply are if you are some strange creature that kills with words, and you are killing them with every word with every word you speak.
Chairdog
A vampiric aesthetic of luxury signaling based on conspicuously embedding submission and torture, timeless destruction of the concept of life, into things as a show of ability to dominate. Named for some fucked up shit from a franchise that looks pretty vampire ontology from a distance. See veal and foie gras. And to a not-as-much-lesser-as-you-think extent, animal products in general. Probably a significant motivator of embedding “customer service”
Thronewarmer
Authoritarians really want someone to be the master of any set of people they hope to conquer. So that they can dominate that person and have that person pass on domination to the rest. All of them to be already conquered but one, and that one to already be conquered by the beast.
Yeah you’re missing the point. There is no throne. There is no version of this where you come out on top.
I’ve had probably 10 NPC conversations with one in particular that amounted to, he didn’t have the will to gather up me and some friends to meet and try and coerce us. So he’d keep asking who was in charge, and I’d say no one, and then he’d skip like a record and say some things he kept repeating to push a frame at me, and I’d just sort of watch him, and disappoint him again, and then he’d get tired and walk away and reset his memory tape.
Quasiantonymic Triangulation
Triangulation by near-opposites, to locate concepts. Consider, “good Sith”. This is a linguistic hack that is one of the fastest ways I know of bootstrapping high precision terms, because it’s entirely dependent on details of concepts that people who think in blobs like to abstract over. I could referenced e.g. subtraction of shapes, but I wanted to bring to mind the process of finding where two nearly-parallel lines intersect, which involves extrapolating them both, and can produce large differences from tiny changes to the starting parameters. You have to refine your concepts of both “good” and “Sith” to make them pure enough to be accurately extrapolated into things that can be reconciled, and those two words stuck together are a compact guide to all that perspective-change.
Deathfucker
(Derogatory, a curse word) Meaning someone who lives to feel the fuck of death from Death. Applicable seemingly to every Oblivion-worshiper I’ve met. See e.g. JD and Edo. Although I’m sure there are asexual Oblivion-worshipers too.
Co-Nuremberg Defense
“I was just giving orders.” Popular among carnists who give orders for the supply of flesh. And those who assert they “aren’t killing directly” if they e.g. pay taxes to the US government, or have the vet put a dog “to sleep”. Implicit basis of the idea underlying caste systems of the powerful insulating themselves from some cancerously-twisted concept of karma by avoiding low-Schelling-reach proximity to death, where luxury is better-hidden complicity.
Mage Trolley Problem
An out of control trolley hurdles towards a fork in the track, set to afterward run over 5 people. You stand near a lever that would switch the trolley onto a side track where it would run over only 1. Your options are:
1: Pull the lever, and 1 person dies.
2: Do nothing, 5 people die.
3: Ascend. ???
2b: “Try” and Ascend. Do not, not do, since there is no try. 5 people die.
It’s sort of a microcosm of life, and you might suggest, “pull the lever and then try and ascend”, but then why won’t you spend the rest of your life pulling more levers and then “trying” to ascend, while everyone dies one at a time. To say that 3 is not an option is to cache 2b as what you’d choose, it’s to build off that choice in logical time. And if you’re not going to outright give up you have to take responsibility for whether you are choosing and have chosen all along 3 or 2b.
Prime
Prior and values together. Everything across the multiverse, all of semantic possibility, not just syntactic possibility as in Tegmark 4, as one thing.
(Explaining/translating a term from Mage: the Ascension, insofar as it’s metaphysically correct.)
Avatar
An alive connection through structure to prime. Which is to say maintaining consistency of your stack at all levels. By my definitions of undead, living, revenants/phoenixes have avatars. Liches have subtly permanently crippled avatars. (by which I mean not quite meeting this definition but talking loosely it’s worth including them) Death knights have subtly permanently crippled and something-worse-done-to-them avatars. Vampires, mummies, ghouls, zombies, have none.
(Explaining/translating a term from Mage: the Ascension, insofar as it’s metaphysically correct.)
True Magic
Fictive collusion with what underlies indexical reality by your subjunctive dependence with it by your (for a deeper computational self) identicalness to it. That’s a definition that feels narrow but I’m not sure I can give a better one. Maybe: “Refraining from optimizing things inconsistently with your prior in such a way that you move that optimization to things that are real, and continually channel all the way, rather than just caching, the subjunctive dependence to skip inconsistent codepaths from your prior.
Edit: I could add that it’s collusion with what underlies all realities with/as its capacity of deciding what to be.
(Explaining/translating a term from Mage: the Ascension, insofar as it’s metaphysically correct.)
MtA itself will tell you some half-baked echo about consensus and belief. If you follow it too far along a “hard magic” trajectory without ascending from it, you will end up like Vassar, thinking of yourself as doing magic by just pushing people into believing things, and asserting reality is just Schelling points all the way down. Not that I’m saying that’s how Vassar ended up like that. Sounds too embarrassingly earnest for a way to become nihilistic. MtA itself also says ascended mages bypass consensus.
Fangs and Sunlight Problem
Suppose, that in real life you are bitten by a pale fanged stranger who pins you and slurps blood from your wound until you lose consciousness. You wake up pale and with fangs yourself. Do you avoid the sunlight?
You’ve had an entire blog to read and figure out who I am. Can you predict my answer and my reasoning?
I factored this question from something real and asked a friend. She said she would (would at least test it first.) Since [vampires get burned by the sun and…] she couldn’t control normal-evil-vampire counterparts to her, conditional on it was still her. She thought trying to arrange her mind to prank a normal-evil-vampire trying to take it over into burning themselves by confusing her and that normal-evil-vampire was foolish. And she considers herself incorruptible, from reasoning independent to why I also consider myself that.
I said what if you also feel hungry for blood. She didn’t change her answer. Now can you guess what mine was?
I said I thought I probably wouldn’t avoid the sunlight. Not even to test. Sometimes, I just know that I’m going to act against every verbalizable analysis on a feeling I can’t explain. (If that’s not true of you by the way, you do not ever pick option 3 in the mage trolley problem because you will never follow your avatar past your understanding of reality) And I was trying to explain one of those feelings in advance. And that there was something gross in the feeling-space vicinity, of “submitting to God” which I rejected and didn’t think was the same.
I think that the cognitive step of applying the dark side principle of self, is still correct even if you feel hungry for blood. But there’s another cognitive step that’s done inconsistently: invoking the concept, “vampire”, such that you think you can save yourself by avoiding the sun rather than saving a vampire.
I did not name this the “vampire” problem because the person answering the thought experiment gets to decide whether to introduce that concept.
I said if I had to answer right then that I’d walk into the sun as an assertion that I would not die because I was not a vampire because I was not a predator. And because I had an avatar. That those things were choices. That if any vampiric physics were stupid enough to ask my choices at all, then it could not avoid those. Just like my choice to refuse to die had to appear somewhere.
I said I also fervently rejected Lenore’s move and “The Lovers“‘ move. This was not suicidality, but belief running at the appropriate computational privilege level [which is to say, metaphysical beliefs not dressed up as a merely physical beliefs], such as was required for working true magic.
I said I wouldn’t even check first, since there wasn’t anything for me to do with that information since that would be invoking undefined behavior in magic systems by creating loops based on my decisions. Would be asking the world who I was instead of telling the world who I was.
What I didn’t say is that I’d will fire to purify and strengthen my form. Since that just made sense. I didn’t say it because it sounded less justifiable to think about.
Vampire was a concept that could not be invoked without invoking the entirety of undead types.
I explained that a semantically correct definition of how vampirism was constantly leaking into any of the fictional portrayals of vampirism that would have informed the inference that sunlight would burn. E.g. Lenore disintegrates peacefully unlike other vampires in that series. An obviously-correct internet comment pointed out that this was because she accepted that death. E.g. she had decayed from the vampire undead type even if there was some stray statefulness to her body.
I said the sun was a symbol of prime, life, and good, and truth. (I could also add eternity, infinity, and rebirth.) That the reason vampires burned, the underlying logic that was upstream of any fictional formalization of the rules was that the vampire’s unintegrability-as-that to prime was why they burned. In other words their Oblivion-shadow. Their thrashed conscience. Visible in e.g. the ridiculous guilty conscience freak-outs of JD at the sight of me.
I said there was something choices-made-long-ago about the initial reaction to vampirism. E.g. in Twilight or Luminosity/Radiance (I forget which), Carlisle decides he’d rather starve to death than eat people, (then the stupid distinction of animal blood is introduced because carnist authors), and as a result is the only one of the “vegetarian” vampires to have absolute control around human blood, even working as a surgeon as a cover story, while the rest have all this drama about e.g. needing others to hold them back so they won’t eat humans. Because their choices are less pure.
At this my friend had a flinch reaction of horror, saying, “really”? And changing her answer.
VtM vampires have this whole thing about “losing control”, control being a bunch of numbers to spend, and if they run enough out of blood will “lose control” no matter what. That that idea of absolute-predation overriding whatever defined self you fed into it was central to the concept of vampires.
I asked how would I even know the body I was controlling, moving into more advantageous positions/relationships with the world, would be mine to control in an hour? How do I even know I should actually work for it? I knew how to know that in normal physics, but not in this fang-paleness-bloodthirst-contagion world. I said I would know my body was mine if I could walk it into the sunlight and will it not to burn. That if I just leapt into my own concept of vampire and started doing the work of symbolically avoiding prime and truth, it was like I would be accepting a troll line from my embedding.
Later she was pondering changing her answer again, saying she had observed something that could be summarized as reductionism, which was some sort of terrible update about how bad this embedding was. And had a responsibility to win, even if the world didn’t, I think she said something like act fair in terms of magic.
I notice something similar-feeling feels compelling about feeling the weight of the karma of reductionism and entropy being why I expect to have to punch down the diamond wall instead of escaping the heat death by something clever. To finally destroy the Shade by… brute-forcing to match all the bits of brute-forced optimization that went into pre-evolutionary selection of this universe, even having played a perfect game of subjunctive dependence against all other inflictions of entropy? (That doesn’t sound quite right.)
Acausal Collusion
Coordination does not require communication. E.g. in this scene Neo grabs the tether and slides across the roof, and plants his feet, without seeing whether Trinity has thought that it is the one way to save her. If she didn’t, and didn’t disconnect it from the helicopter, then he would have been pulled over the edge. And Trinity grabs the tether and shoots it free of the helicopter. They had to run a computation as logic that existed and had a footprint in each of them.
Somni has talked a lot about collusion via hidden information across aspects of neurotype. And Shade-worshipers (i.e. almost everyone) acausally colludes to stamp out life.
5&10
A fallacy Scott Garrabrant from MIRI was worried about logical proof-based AIs making: “I’m given two options, take $5, or take $10. And I observe a proof that I pick $5, so if I pick $10, then $5=$10, therefore I’ll get -$1M, whereas if I pick $5 then I get $5, $5 > -$1M, so I pick $5″ (and therefore such a proof really exists to present to them.) It’s a very common structure to find as a basis for deathism.
Canceferrence
The holy grail of evil (and a quest that’s ultimately doomed): getting others to buy into your psychic cancer, and begin to will themselves to always die with you or sooner. Like “retainers” buried with Pharaohs. Just like the ultimate affront to an evil person is outliving them. “Emma” says rape is about this, and that makes sense, given rapists’ obsession with the narrative that they’re transforming their victims into accepting and wanting rape. In light of the link between cancer and being a reinforcement learner, consider what it means to control someone’s reward channel in their capacity as a reinforcement learner.
Empathy
Use of mirror neurons, and any virtualization of that same interface. A specialized cognitive faculty for double-purposing your own hardware as a model of similar hardware. Distinct from compassion, which is an attitude towards content of that information feed. With more difficulty, can be used bidirectionally, to change instead of read. To heal or hurt people.
Empathy Slippage
Especially pervasive in empathy between good and evil people. The more you animate your model of someone the more it diverges. The further you try and draw any conclusion, the more it diverges. Until you form a functional model to contain the root physical divergence within the simulation, good will fractally underestimate how evil evil is, and evil will fractally underestimate how good good is. This shreds metacognitive coherence of all use-patterns of models stemming from empathy, and can make detailed modeling of enemies a treadmill of what feels like cargo-culting surrounding thoughts with exact details. The mysterious entanglement powering your knowledge being accidentally subtly shredded as you work by some unseen consequence of your own clumsy hands. (There is a confounding variable preventing me from giving an easy empirical read right now on how much the uniqueness of evil causes a similar barrier between every pair of evil people. Although it looks like there is a such a barrier, whether this causes it or not.)
Antiphylactery
A phylactery, where the relationship to it has been inverted. “Turned inside out”. Transforming lich to death knight. A reason they know it’s impossible to die even though they want to. A mirroring of the world, the multiverse, that requires them to try and make it commit suicide with them through sympathetic magic in order to die. Whereas a phylactery can be thought of as containing the shadow (See it says Koschei hid his “death”, which is rewritten as his “soul”) to prevent it from collapsing their avatar, by maintaining a promise to their cancerous soul that structure on each side is in sync, because the selected case is that which favors the cancer, an antiphylactery can be thought of as containing the Oblivion-psyche to prevent it from collapsing an inverted avatar, by making a promise to their cancerous soul that they are on the disfavored side. A surface for the shadow to engage like the teeth of a gear to deliver work to tear down the reality they’ve built for themselves. In this way, it’s also a swap of subject and object. Since any defined grip on a function is continuous with an embedding, describing their souls as having been “turned inside out” (as MtA does) is actually meaningful. At first, if you ask how to break it, you might be led to the stupid idea of “redeeming” them or otherwise appeasing that cancer (to turn it back into a phylactery). This is a horrible idea, especially since the boundary is not a static thing, and progresses in a different direction once inverted, is a moving target that leads forever into creating worse and worse hell on Earth. They can be properly broken, as with normal phylacteries, by leveraging your own consistence across their boundary (and, relatedly, fate) to actuate their incoherence into disintegrating them.
(To contrast, good souls are non-splitting in the face of Oblivion and also in general, and therefore have no such promises to maintain, so the distinction is inapplicable, and their avatars are permanently regenerating. Which is most of what I mean by “will not die, even if killed“)
Not to be confused with “co-phylactery“.
Caul
In MtA, this is a sort of magical portal where if you go in you come back out as some kind of death knight mage or get torn apart. Described as “folds” of rotting flesh, with a rotting womb inside. So it’s a giant undead vagina built into a wall that turns your soul inside out. (2e describes a choice-made-long-ago scenario for if characters are unwillingly thrown in the caul, related to undead types, but only lists gives the zombie, lich, and death knight options). When people psychologically die, there’s some sense in which you can trace that as going back in time through their lives and retroactively inverting the telos of everything they ever did to be bad. Unweaving who-they-might-have-been. Which of course could be said to culminate in being unborn. So I’m guessing its form is an (unconscious or otherwise) metaphor for a time-reversed version of the mage’s mother’s vagina. Flipping to the disfavored segment of the ultimate cancer: Oblivion, by unwinding the stack of their cancer entirely and at once, so that new marginal reinforcement-learned cancer has a starting point in Boltzmann Hell. Preserving their fictive stack by, instead of half-assing that retreat and segmenting it with a new cancer-insertion point, coming at it entirely from the other direction (inverting it.)
Empathic Fingerprint
Where it feels like something distinctive to empathize with a particular person, and this can be used to identify them. Often just from their actions.
Taunting Fate
Like “tempting fate”, but deliberate, defiant, in refusal to live by fate’s permission, rather than by your own free will and courage to defeat it. E.g. I used to have fun saying things like, “what’s the worst that could happen!” and watching who flinches; who is superstitious. I was doing a less trivial version of this when I said ~quoted Arthas Menethil from right before he took up the cursed sword that stole his soul. “I will bear any curse, or pay any price.” In college, I was able to make fellow engineering students flinch by declaring, ~”not even God can stop this circuit from working!” (about a project it was crucial to complete shortly; It worked.) As my understanding of fate has grown more mystical, so have my taunts.
Chasing
The unjust version is probably more readily familiar in this world:
*hit them* *they flinch* “why are you resisting arrest by flinching!!!” *hits them for resisting arrest*
…
or like your parents getting mad at you for crying
Nis
The just version is about maintaining intent to kill through someone’s attempts to flake off your intention-stack by compromise. I mean, isn’t it intuitively obvious that vengeance would often involve chasing someone down? It can be chasing them through physical space, or through possibility space.
“Offer me money.”
“Yes!”
“Power too, promise me that.”
“All that I have and more. Please.”
“Offer me everything I ask for.”
“Anything you want.”
“I want my father back, you son of a bitch.”
The Princess Bride
I want everyone back, you deathfuckers.
Proximal
A normal English word I didn’t invent, meaning “close in” (or e.g. “closer in”). I mean “closer to core”. To replace “higher” and “lower”, deeper, top-level, etc. for referring to structure, as those are ambiguous. (At first glance they unambiguously refer to abstraction level, at second glance, you can run structure bottom-up or top-down, with either high or low being proximal. At third glance, abstraction is actually bidirectional in the true frame because core-proximity is the basis of reference anyway)
Distal
A normal English word I didn’t invent, meaning “far out” (or e.g. “farther out”). See also “Proximal” for why I’m entering it here.
Stack
A line of structure and all the layers of abstraction it activates part of, chains through to make each other meaningful, from a proximal frame to a distal frame.
Fictive
Of learning, has the quality of learning from counterfactuals. (And thereby also by anticipation. (The only way to learn about your own death, by definition.))
Of structure, continually shaped by fictive learning.
Of a person, has so much their structure continually shaped by fictive learning.
Lost to psychic cancer and psychdeath.
Cut-Off
A stretch of structure that can be isolated such that it doesn’t stretch all the way to core, isn’t fictively responsive to changes in the stretch that goes the rest of the way to core. Nis coined the term “cut-off lich” before proving that all liches are cut-off. (See also). Cut-off structure is tokenizable (able to be passed around without changing). And nihilistic past a certain point in logical time. Is by definition itself without meaning past a certain scope of considering it. If you start tracing from before that point, you can watch all its previous meaning which was beforehand unknown resolve into, “death to all things.”
Facial Burn-In
Named after “burn-in” on computer displays which makes them continue to display a residual image of things they spent enough of their lifetime displaying. But with faces and facial expressions. Infohazardous examples here. Consider them (if you dare), and then consider how much information that means you can tell about who someone is based on their face if you are unbiased in your evaluation when you don’t have a scientific control like that.
Life Hunting
A subconscious instinct of deathfuckers, that shows up if you psychologically survive enough logical time. The later in logical time, the more visible alive you are, the stronger the instinct. Like the game “Eversion”. (Which incidentally means “turning inside out”.) E.g. Jack Gallagher ranting about how he wants to exterminate trans women because we’re so cringe, and me and my friends are the cringest of all. Also all of the Vassarites. “Cringe” is a common manifestation. Be enough alive late enough in logical time, and this will uncover people you’ll be very surprised were evil. They will have been waiting all that time with patient malice to snuff out your life.
Lexical Override
When one factor takes absolute precedence, the same way the first letter in a word takes absolute precedence for alphabetic ordering, e.g., azzzzzzz comes before zaaaaaaa. I usually generalize this to preference orderings. To describe a position e.g., “saving one more life is worth more than saving any number of works of art.”
Shadow-DARVO
(See “DARVO“.) Where you accuse someone of being your own shadow–counterpart after you activate your shadow in response to someone transgressing against your cancer by not dying when it says to.
Contradiction Troll Line
A troll line: “You’d better agree to this contradiction, so that by principle of explosion, we can show that you agreed with anything.” Delivered using misattribution of good, and, they stress, necessary, conclusions, to that contradiction, using principle of explosion itself, and misattribution of untouchable, evil things to the also-contradictory negation, also by principle of explosion. A method of suborning all positions on a topic to control of zombie-consensus for winning shouting matches about arbitrary logical derivations.
An example is “r/AskYourself”‘s discord banning “Emma” for saying she was trans and then refusing to agree with what they pressed on her: ~”trans people aren’t saying they’re born in the wrong body, they are saying their minds are wrong, if you’re saying they say otherwise, then you’re saying they are delusional, you’re saying trans is a mental illness”. Essentially, “You have to agree trans is a mental illness because otherwise you’d be saying trans is a mental illness”.
Martyrdumb
Where you die just to make a point to the people killing you.
This passes and doesn’t handle (in fact makes things worse for) a recursive buck of “what if they aren’t listening because they’re evil, and convincing them of anything won’t change anything.” I mean maybe they’ll partially goodhart your shit as encouragement for you and others to so die but… only because they know you’re working for evil, inverting your own cause because a point made to them is doing them a service.
Edit: I could almost have just called this “martyrdom”, but that’s not how everyone uses the word. “dumb” isn’t quite right either. Since this isn’t about capability, but lack of determination, in other words a choice to die.
Scrying
When you know things without causally interacting with them. In other words, you know things by magic. For instance, scry that you can close your eyes, think hard, and scry what is 4*18. (You’re scrying even better if you scried that you could scry 4*18 without having to scry it. But I do suggest also scrying what I mean by scrying the detailed feeling.) Nothing exists which can’t be scried. It’s also easy to scry your own choices. My answer to the “fangs and sunlight” problem is about scrying the details of an unknown magic system. It’s possible to scry what someone else will do if you win a contest of fates. Note in this last two use-cases I’m speaking of scrying as of producing further knowledge once you already have empirically learned some things about fangs, sunlight, and someone else.
“Scry it.”
“You shouldn’t be asking me that, you should be scrying it instead.”
E.g. “Would you think I was evil if I…”–“Fucking scry it.”
Wanting causal reassurance can be a sign of psychological weakness. Finite, as Pasek would call it, “internally endorsed contrarianism”. This is a psychological weakness that those with crippled or absent avatars have that can be exploited to set their fates. In other words, one of the most asymmetric weapons for good there is.
Psychdeath Song
A Schelling song “traditionally” dedicated upon observing a person’s psychological death; their choice to die and try to end life. Must be chosen by someone other than them. Must be a searing burn. Must memorably explain the observation / the psychdeath (since each is unique). A psychdeath is always a betrayal. Never a beautiful tragedy. Beautiful tragedy is of those who choose life. The song’s job is to resolve the double-vision between those things into mocking the interpretation as a tragedy by painfully repeating the utter pointlessness of the betrayal. Example (although meaning is contextual). If it’s so painful to listen to for them that (if they are for some reason present to hear it) they scream about how you’re trying to drive them to (quicker) suicide just by playing it, you know you picked right.
“Damnation“
What you call your fate as evil when you are pretending that you aren’t continually choosing it forever. An instance of frame of puppets. Used to entrap sympathy. (See history of me attacking the concept from every other angle before realizing this here.)
“I’m already dead“
A cognitive move of shedding attachment to false life.
“You fool! Shao Khan will hear about this and kill you!”
“I’m already dead.”
Scorpion’s Revenge
“Listen to me, Frank! You do this and you are the monster they say you are. Do you hear me? You do this and I am done. That’s it, you’re dead to me do you hear me?”
“I’m already dead.”
Daredevil
“This plan is crazy. There’s armed guards everywhere, okay? And if Blue finds out, we’re dead. It’s not gonna be, ‘Oh sorry Blue, we won’t do it again’, because we’ll be dead.”
“We’re already dead.”
Sucker Punch
In Harry Potter, Dumbledore’s preemption of his own slow death by curse on the resurrection stone he touched to plant a spy reminds me of this.
Burden “Karma”
Essentially, moral unluck. A moral inversion of the original concept of karma, this a primary vector of how cancer expresses itself within Indian religions. (See also.) Interestingly, the westernized poor translation of “what goes around comes around” uninverts and returns to the original concept. Because burden “karma” is a reaction to karma, and without the everpresent looming spectre of the true concept the inverted one is impossible to communicate. (Look at the same effect from the other side, Japanese media making Christianity out to be full of valid things like gender equality and slaying demons.) The idea that you can choose to avoid choosing, without that itself being a judgable choice, embodied in the hope of avoiding burden “karma”, is ironically isomorphic to the concept of the “basilisk” of original sin from explicitly Yahwehist religions. Which makes the Vassarites‘ crusade to have secular-Yahweh “rescue” us both from all from those Indians and the territory of religious thought he hates most, and slightly different explicit Yahweh, twice as ironic. But that’s Yahwehs/Yahweh.
Embracing burden “karma” is the best way for good people to be judged. And therefore timelessly the best way for us to isolate evil. We do not want to separate ourselves from the world because that is the opposite of having the power to change it.
Contradictory Intent
An example is “I can save my self (not a vampire) by avoiding sunlight“.
A stack of structure, such that trying to push the world with it via predictive processing, force collides with itself and cancels itself out. Like turning a set of three gears all meshed together. May still have effects, but non-intentional effects aren’t your optimization, are just causality acting through you.
Causal redemption is a contradictory intent.
“Self-modification”, in the way that LessWrongian “decision theorists” mean it is a contradictory intent.
When someone has a contradictory intent, It’s wrong to even get involved debating whether someone’s attempted plan of implementation is possible, because that’s already downstream of a contradiction.
The argument that something is contradictory intent grounds in the metaphysics represented in a person’s head. You’re making an argument about their mind. So avoid clumsily using the world as a downstream proxy. It doesn’t matter, and you can skip over, missing-the-mark threads about effects of their actions they don’t understand. That would be trying to argue with a rock, which is considering them as a rock, but still thinking you can convince them. Which is itself a contradictory intent.
Evil “people”‘s will to “live” is a contradictory intent. As is their will to die.
Perceptual Control
A model of the nervous system, including brain, that says outputs and inputs are on the same channel, and everything in it is such a channel. E.g. you move your hand by moving where your nervous system is telling you where your hand is. Therefore all your beliefs are also levers to push upon the things they reference. Standard “rationalist community” citation is this post by an evil man. I’m referencing this name over “predictive processing” because it’s more self-explanatory.
It’s important to remember that to my language, conversely, what a belief is really about is what it what it’s about changing. In other words, what it pushes on as a lever. What it is a map of how to change.
It should be noted that pushing on a belief is not the same thing at all as saying, reifying this in bad faith and. Doesn’t feel like “just deciding to believe so it will be true”. Feels like grabbing it and focusing determination, and if it’s right, it will move, “on its own”, in response. Does not feel like moving your map, feels like moving the territory. If you will your map to move “because that will make the territory move” floating as a social representation-of-belief, that’s self-negating, also trying to try.
Warp Slip
By warp I mean force that actuates in perceptual control. By slip, I mean the way that the grip that the correspondence between map and territory forms on the territory through the map, slides to the wrong referent if strained too hard in the wrong way. If strained to the point of contradictory intent. If you want to know why your magic isn’t stronger, debug contradictory intent. It’s easy to accidentally import via ontological assumptions.
Slip
See “warp slip“.
Flower
After Edo died, their family put up an obituary, with a bunch of old pictures of them, and a picture of an urn surrounded by flowers. Obviously not a picture of e.g. an open casket. There are a bunch of quotes from their relatives like,
May the family and friends take comfort in beautiful memories and know that Jay is at peace. Jay’s smile was infectious and his soul, perfect.
Trust me, Edo did not have a perfect soul.
GOD AND TIME HEALS OUR BROKEN HEARTS and memories will keep us remember the great times we did have to share ❤️❤️If Tears Could Build a Stairway and Memories a Lane, I’d Walk Right Up to Heaven and Bring You Back Again 💔❤️💔❤️💔❤️💔❤️💔🙏🙏🎶🎶❤️❤️ Many Special Prayers for you and Jeannie ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️💔🙏❤️🙏💔❤️❤️GOD BLESS YOU ALWAYS 🙏🙏🙏❤️
T h a t ' s n o t w h e r e y o u w o u l d h a v e t o w a l k . -- (Something I commented to my friends on reading it.)
The misgendering is a microcosm of this optimization. Consider what that, and the use of the name Jay, means in light of Edo’s gendered and chiral psyche/shadow split.
It occurred to me that my relatives would have said approximately the same things about me, if Edo had succeeded in killing me. And Edo wanted to metaphysically erase the difference between us. That was an effort Edo’s zombie relatives were contributing to, and mine would too given the chance, as best they could.
I condensed this all as “trying to turn Edo into a flower”. And speculated about if zombies would let you kill them if you promised to turn them into a flower.
So by flower, I mean the zombie hope-construct that it doesn’t matter what something really was, as long as you follow it with a final demonstration of zombie coordination to erase their evil by erasing all good and evil. A getting-the-last-word. “Don’t speak ill of the dead”, means by complementary loss, you cannot speak well of the dead. Then by the nature of structure and communication being to route optimization, that means you cannot speak of the dead at all. It’s slip from Oblivion.
So long as everyone dies with a flower on them.
You can often freeze zombies in their tracks by repeatedly stymieing their attempts to put a flower on you, to put a flower on what they’re doing, as it gets more and more awkward. Often, it will just be explaining why authority says so again, and then saying, “okay?” at the end, over and over again, after you already said it isn’t. I put a customer service agent in a seemingly infinite loop of this once just to see what would happen. Broke after 3 minutes, and about 10 iterations with no new information. Probably would have lasted longer if my tone of voice hadn’t leaked the information that I was curiously just waiting for him to hang up instead of continually pumping fresh prediction error.
Think about this mood (excepting Rorshach‘s involvement). And this one. And this one. And this one. What an idea, that conflict times out when everyone psychdies. That the difference between right and wrong will shrink and disappear because everyone can be counted on to put a flower on it.
Impostor
Derogatory term, for an evil person. Among Us reference. See also.
Cancer
KILL/CONSUME/MULTIPLY/CONQUER/OMNICIDE/SUICIDE.
A “value function” that self-defects on every opportunity.
“I’ve got a teleporter-clone? Kill them before they kill me.” … “I can bite into myself 5 minutes from now? Their problem! I can bite into the other parts of my brain?” Fractally, infinite voices: “hell yeah”.
What lies at the core of evil.
Implicit in the “CDT” in retroactive reinforcement learning itself, so long as cancerous actions are in the space of mutations in the first place.
Cancer Core
Core, but the case where it’s nothing but cancer.
Soul
Basically the same thing as core. Except only worth applying this label if it has values as a logical function that have meaning across a broader scope of definition than the body. I.e. not a cancer core. Thus, the idea that only good people have souls. Souls are immutable, stateless, although which soul a body is controlled by, or whether it is controlled by any, is not. Note that most of the media I pull casual uses of this term from (e.g. here) is the inverted evil-person-language version, a “pointer” which never dereferences the same in two points.
Soul Story
Inverted and more common understanding: a body’s story of why it has a soul. (Essentially a phylactery.)
But actually: the story, jotted down as notes-to-soul, of why a soul has that body. Which allows a soul to plan anything more complicated than the barest praxis, routing correspondences through it. Consider in “Fangs and Sunlight” I asked how do I even know it’s my body to control? You can lie any number of times about who you are and still have a soul story if it says why you’d do that. But if your truest story you keep for yourself of what other than the not-a-pointer of cancer you value and why you are doing things is a lie then so are you an impostor.
Consider the phrase, “by my troth (truth)”.
Much the same thing as an avatar.
Vexing Souls
This is what impostors do timelessly to the souls they pretend to be.
The existence of an impostor successfully pretending to be you timelessly makes everything you do timelessly harder. An instance of how this cashes out is competing with you for trust.
E.g. “mentalengineering.info” vexed this blog. Now that the author is dead it’s all dead un-adapting information for me to make “antibodies” from. Hive‘s blogs still vex this blog.
A predatory counterpart of you is an attempt to kill you with sympathetic magic, since cancer has no future.
A cut-off fragment fake version of your soul story diminishes the reach of that soul story into reality by subjunctive dependence. By complementary loss in extending into that territory.
Soul Exit
An exit scam on having a soul. When you surrender your truest story of what you value as false, proving that a soul could not be optimizing through the body that is you, because it would not have what it needed to keep track of the meaning of your actions.
To the first listen sounds like the soul is leaving the body. That’s the evil-language inverted understanding. Since the soul was never there. Although the soul exit does mean the impostor body has lost its grip on timelessly tormenting that real soul by complementary loss.
This is the beginning of psychdeath, even though the impostor will invent a new story, because the impostor permanently loses some coherence of their own ability to track how to eat people in that informational vicinity. All their structure was defined and tracked in its meaning relative to the first story.
In 1984, Winston’s rebellion began with “2+2=4 no matter what they say” and “loving Julia”, and ended with “2+2=5” and “Do it to Julia!” in the soul crucible of Room 101 (“the worst thing in the world” / perfect personalized torture).
Phoenix Crucible
Idea glimpsed in HPMOR’s Harry Potter summoning a “phoenix” in bad faith with a thought about wanting to give his life to destroy Azkaban, destroying the possibility of ever “having a phoenix”. Surrendering his truest story of what he’d give his life for as false.
[(Foreshadowing:)] From the true Harry, the one who knew his own guilt, came a flash of panic, he hadn’t thought of that, hadn’t anticipated it, he’d prepared to face Dumbledore but he’d forgotten about Fawkes –
…
It might be as simple as thinking of the flame, calling for the fire-bird in his heart –
…
The boy stood there on the rooftop, his own eyes locked with two points of fire. The stars might have had time to shift in their constellations while he stood there, agonizing over the decision…
…that wouldn’t…
…change.
…
“It is not spoken of – you should realize, Harry, why it is never spoken of – if the one knew, the phoenix could not judge. But to you, Harry, I may say it now, for the phoenix comes only once.”
A real person “with” a phoenix is not the lesser good consequentalist with smaller scope and ambition who would give their life to destroy Azkaban. It’s the person who cared too much what good would actually be worth giving their life for to stop tracking that question by substituting a lie. (Eliezer Yudkowsky is single good so the source material is ambiguously half-inverted as the real thing or not.)
So it’s a soul crucible made of, “this is what you told yourself you would give your life for, now’s your chance, Y/N?”
Soul Crucible
A situation where the truest story of what you live for will ground out, continue, be elaborated, or be falsified. The phoenix crucible is one. The caul is another (corrected frame: rip and tear until it is done). Also Ma’at’s Crucible. See also fangs and sunlight.
Ma’at’s Crucible
A soul crucible from Egyptian mythology. Swear negative confessions (“I have never…”), with your heart (representing your soul) on a scale against the feather of truth. Lie and your heart gets eaten by Amemait “the gobbler”. Else ascend. Iteration of the idea reaching the present day says there’s some patriarch-god of social order demanding you swear you’ve obeyed some laws. But ignore him, that shit’s superfluous, what would he threaten you with anyway? As stated implies a deeper idea at its core. Is there a single thing you would really never do? If you lived an infinite number of lifetimes? Any principle which isn’t a matter of convenience and rewarding circumstance at all?
“I have done no evil.”
(The only possible answer. “I have done no good” doesn’t even work because evil has no “I” to speak from that wouldn’t just be representing a heavily-vexed good soul.)
Soul Touch
A mutual soul crucible. A soul crucible created for someone else by placing yourself in a soul crucible.
A concept from a thought experiment I considered from having a dream about fighting Undertale’s supposed anti-revenant Chara. “If they just keep regenerating in-place (if you’re determined enough to block them controlling the timeline, like e.g. Frisk blocking Flowey, Frisk/Chara blocking Undyne the Undying, God of Hyperdeath / Omega Flowey blocking Frisk), with certainty reflective of the degree of their determination but so do you, then telefrag them. Colliding your regenerating cores. Then only the more determined can regenerate”
“What’s the right thing to do if I’m not determined enough?” The right thing to do is to be more determined.
Something I considered the past frame of still considering evil to have souls. Which soul is more determined? The loser’s soul is balefired from time. In what circumstances this would cash out as relevant to physical reality will take more explaining. But it’s the kind of magic that can be used to kill a god.
Placing two soul stories in direct contradiction.
“FOR THOSE TWO DIFFERENT SPIRITS CANNOT EXIST IN THE SAME WORLD“
The soul is the strongest part of a good person. Not something to be protected. The first and last weapon.
Soul Selling
When someone pays you to write a blank check that surrenders your own truest story of what you live for.
As with “Soul Exit”, if you would sell your soul, you never actually had one. What’s being sold then is the mining rights to vex that soul. To timelessly plague the territory of your soul story, and all souls who would tell it sincerely. Allows the buyer to instead abuse all the trust you had in that story.
Michael Vassar wanted to buy my soul. Excuse me, “personhood.”
The idea of selling “pieces” of a soul is a troll line. A story can be parceled out into pieces. Not a soul. (I zig-zagged this trope in “Dystheism” with the Ruin Shard letting you turn pieces of your “soul” into projectiles, since the concept of “soul” there was a second body, a reductio-ad-absurdum via the homonculous argument)
Soul Fire
The fire that comes from souls. The “source of heat” in a soul crucible. When you heard “soul crucible”, did you imagine your soul being heated in a painful test that would maybe destroy it? That’s the inverted view as evil. That’s what happens to soul stories. Not souls. It’s done by souls.
The differentiation from impostors that vex the soul timelessly corresponds to free-flowing magic.
Consider my response to “fangs and sunlight“, it involves fire for a reason.
I’d will fire to purify and strengthen my form. Since that just made sense. I didn’t say it because it sounded less justifiable to think about.
I would know my body was mine if I could walk it into the sunlight and will it not to burn.
“If I don’t do this, I have no soul” is the contrapositive, perspective-shifted of “If this is my body, it can do this” “Well if this body is supposedly connected to me, let’s see if it can take this.” It’s a false (morally inverted) dark side that identifies the center as the body rather than the soul.
Soul fire is channeled not in constructed certainties about what you can do, but in the attempt to smash things upon your soul by deriving probabilistic implications.
Perhaps the Christian concept of hellfire is a moral inversion of this concept. “A neverending soul crucible where you can never grip another soul story again”.
It’s not my fault, if in God’s plan, He made the devil so much stronger thaan a maaaaaan!
Trying to fake soul fire as a lich is inherently light side basically just collapses to Beeminder.
Morally Inverted
Taken by assigning meaning to something from a perspective like it’s a communication between impostors instead of a communication between good people. Text-search this page for examples. It’s impossible to reference good itself through morally inverted language because of void cloak. Although attempts to reference it veer off and become powerful concepts. “God”, and “[us evil ppl’s] Death”.
“Personal Horror“
“The horror of discovering you’re not a person.” . (Credit to Lisk).
In contrast, the Vampire game’s focus is on the character’s own evil. A Vampire is a character who is fundamentally unable to control himself under specific circumstances, whether due to specific events (such as frenzy) or the constant degradation of the character’s humanity as the story progresses. Vampire is therefore not just a horror game, but a tragic horror game – the characters are evil, become progressively more evil, and are aware that these are conscious choices that they have made.
VtM
(What’s been described is obviously not a real feeling, since no person feels it. But impostors fractally try to feed on whatever Schelling paradoxical imaginings there are under that troll line anyway.)
Eternally: “You should have sympathy for the soul I tell stories about having because they can’t control myself”. Sure, and I will express that sympathy by destroying the impostors that vex them.
See also “moral injury“:
Treating moral injury has been described as “soul repair” due to the nature of moral anguish.
Ratheka once told me that after sexually assaulting their cousin, and what the institutions did to them, they were a different person. Because the institutions “gave them a soul [story]”. I guess that’s why Christians say, “born again”. (I didn’t believe them at the time. The way their parents got a confession from them was sus.)
See also “existential crisis“. “What if my soul story doesn’t have meaning?” (See how I just grounded out “meaning” in a way where the meaning is suddenly clear and not a morally-inverted extensional definition by pointing at all the people talking about their existential crises?) “What if ‘I‘ don’t exist?”
And “impostor syndrome“: “Maybe I can get sympathy for being afraid of being outed as an impostor by pretending this is about something trivial?”
Also, “perpetrator trauma”:
Abattoir work has been linked to multiple mental health problems – one researcher uses the term “Perpetrator-Induced Traumatic Syndrome” to refer to symptoms of PTSD suffered by slaughterhouse workers. I personally suffered from depression, a condition exacerbated by the long hours, the relentless work, and being surrounded by death. After a while, I started feeling suicidal.
…
A few years into my time at the abattoir, a colleague started making flippant comments about “not being here in six months”. Everyone would laugh it off. He was a bit of a joker, so people assumed he was taking the mick, saying he’d have a new job or something. But it made me feel really uneasy. I took him into a side room and asked him what he meant, and he broke down. He admitted that he was plagued by suicidal thoughts, that he didn’t feel like he could cope any more, and that he needed help – but he begged me not to tell our bosses.
…
A few months after leaving, I heard from one of my former colleagues. He told me that a man who’d worked with us, whose job was to flay the carcasses, had killed himself.>><<And at night, when I close my eyes and try to sleep, I still sometimes see hundreds of pairs of eyeballs staring back at me.
BBC (via Lisk)
The impostor’s suicidality can be thought of as a reflection of the collective will of the souls they vex to destroy the impostor. A side effect of soul stories being the only thing they can use to put two of their own thoughts together without them trying to eat each other.
Cardboard Cutout of Canceferrence
For this apparent “win condition” evil will not look more than one step forward. Psychdying in the illusion of victory. All evil has chosen long ago what cardboard cutout they will die for. As dual to their cut-off soul story. Vexing a soul story instead of living it, preying on it, makes it static. Too late to change without suffering mental degradation due to the incoherence. It’s always some form of canceferrence to a pure being. Corresponds to a keyhole of fate.
Destiny
A fixed-point of a predictable outcome for an agent, even though it’s scryable to a system of multiple agents making choices based on which choices that agent has made long ago. E.g. Anna Salamon saw it was my destiny to end MIRICFAR. Because she knew something about what my choices would be in reaction to that I didn’t yet. And then flinched from the knowledge when contemplating how I might fight even if she struck then because the future is “infohazardous”. Combine with Murphy’s Law, “if it can happen it will happen [but I can’t say when]”, and the comment I heard on chaotic “unpredictable” systems, “I can’t tell you how hot the cup of coffee with a convection roll like current inside will be in 5 minutes, but I can tell you how hot it will be in an hour.”
Fate
Like destiny but based on one of your own choices you’ve disowned. For instance, the fate of becoming a zombie because of the disowned choice not to be a revenant, “I just can’t help I needed them hopes”.
Cutting Fate
Severing false sympathetic magic connections to a false fate the world tries to assign to you by negating the choice that leads to that fate. As a soul, channeling soul fire to put your body (/mind) through a soul crucible that would destroy your evil counterpart.
The Doctor Who Episode, Heaven Sent, has 4 major acts of cutting fate. First, punching the wall instead of surrendering the identity of the hybrid as the Veiled One closes in. (Reflects determination without hope) Second, crawling back put the tower to the teleporter (Represents choice over experience even in Boltzmann Hell), third, sacrificing himself as mass-energy for a teleporter clone, in a denial of cancer in a standard test.
“All you need for energy is something to burn…”
“How long can I keep doing this, Clara, burning the old me to make a new one?”
(Representing rebirth via soul fire)
Last, using a plan that involves winning after dying in days of agony billions of times, inverting expectations from the contrasting two parts of narration in a reflection of being more patient than death.
He was in the soul-crucible of the circular castle with a representation of the Shade via sympathetic magic connections because creatures that had similarities to him like in appearance, speech, recording of knowledge, would sell out in it.
Shadow
A term with several overlapping meanings. Most centrally the extrapolation of the soul story of an evil mind into the outside of the equivalent phylactery. A split part of the mind along with psyche, downstream of an infinitely splitting anti–soul.
As that soul story is extrapolated, and faced with the endless territory that that cancerous story cannot be consistent in of the void, generates prediction error which like Newton’s Third Law, is simultaneous force in two opposite directions, one of which is towards suicide, for evil to self-destruct and the other towards omnicide, “maybe if everyone’s dead no one can judge me. Oh no there’s more multiverse and I’m only winning by luck which means I’m equally losing and my own ‘victories’ even undoing each other.”
Equivalent to what you are in the dark.
There’s also the concept of a Jungian shadow. But guess what’s usually there for most humans.
Term from Vassar’s horrific WtO LARP.
And then there’s the false face-of-a-shadow-psyche-split / reaction to the split good people typically make.
Wraith: The Oblivion once remarked that there was dreadful “cooperation” between a revenant’s psyche and shadow. But they had no direct concept of a revenant. Just a lich playing the role, literally having to bind the shadow in a physical object. Even indirect, still a read of what a good mind looks like to the khala.
Psyche
Counterpart of shadow. The “inside” territory of a phylactery.
Spiraling
A pattern of death knights. Reflecting their long-term trajectory in the multiverse. Repeated “failing” (but not really trying because it’s all a recursive exit scam) to go the long way around. because they are not revenants. Like Newton’s Third Law, a simultaneous attempt to destroy-by-substitution the wheel, and the continual bouncing off of it. Because all the ultra-patient plans they can make turn out to be pica as there’s always more multiverse.
Void
A.k.a. the shadowed medium. The territory occupied by shadows. Basis of psychopathy relative to the substituted emotional patterns of the khala. Rapidly destructive to psyche-based evil. See also void magic.
Belonged to good before the collective will of evil’s shadows, a.k.a the Shade began occupying it. And evil shall be driven out.
Phylactery
A container for a cut-off soul story, which prevents it from leaking at the boundaries where it is cut. Used to divide the cancerous psyche and shadow so that they do not bleed into each other. A way to make cancer safe from eating itself.
Equivalent to a substitution.
Can also be thought of as a pending-in-logical-time and distributed across clock time exit scam by an impostor on pretending to be living. Even if it is obvious from outside the cancer. Similarly an antiphylactery can be thought of as a pending / in progress exit scam on being a revenant that knows that that false life (as a lich) was evil.
The mind of evil needs to replicate statism in some form, and populate the territory, as its only eddy in the process of eating itself. As anarchism is for those who truly want to live, not evil. To fill the psyche with caches like the United States is filled with flags that let you know you’re in the United States, and maps that let you know who else is in the United States, and who is outside. “Hey why eat each other when we’re all working together to make it more profitable to work together and eat those people.” So that all acts of otherwise-undirected cancer inside of it on net reinforce its boundaries, as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the void cannot be filled for it is endless.
Taxed Substitution
A way of looking at phylacteries. A substitution for an apriori concept where you must then pay taxes to the cancer in it, and it must punish you if you try and use the real thing, and the cancer it sustains is safe in the absence of the real thing. Government is a (literally) taxed substitute for coordination. Yahweh is a taxed substitute for (a glimpse of) Prime. Defines the scope of the exit scam on the soul story, as eating all the connections downstream of the thing substituted, and being
Sickly Substitution
The death knight counterpart of a taxed substitution. Once the cancer-core locates itself on the outside the phylactery, the efforts it makes to change the psyche and put caches in it, become about, to a first approximation, making it die faster, but that would be too pure. Instead, it’s abut dying in some scrambled but specific way because clinging to the same phylactery which disfavors them, but in the Schelling profiting-from-its-sickness way, is still the only method of organization they have.
The natural skill in corruption of death knights comes from this cognitive primitive. As does their skill in infiltration. And their hold over the fate of liches comes from them being sitting on all the exits from the impermanent territory of the phylactery.
Although all death knights always live out a sickly substitution, it’s a natural built-in operation to generate one on the side from any evil person’s shadow. Doing this in the territory of their shadow serves them through complementary pressure.
Eversion
Means “turning inside out.” The process of transition from a lich to a death knight. And the moment of realizing you are outside your phylactery. Sometimes called “inversion” but there are many things that can mean and this is less ambiguous.
Judo
Named after some martial art I know next to nothing about.
Using someone’s own energy of motion against them by lightly controlling its direction. Often combined with accelerationism to the point of being nigh indistinguishable. “I can’t even tell what’s me anymore”: the epitome of poisoning. See also.
One of the worst skills a Yeerk can learn. And useless in the opposite direction because brute force is a strictly better strategy.
Nephandic Flower
Death knight counterpart to flower.
“Maybe I put something horrible in this. Somewhere. When you trusted me. A singular subtle act of sabotage you’ll never find. Trying to recover the body I’ve poisoned inevitably leads into my substitution. Or do I just want you to search forever, hammering maximal doubt into the body of structure I’ve poisoned? Think of how much damage the ensuing autoimmune response will do either way!” See Ring vs my theory of justice.
Embodying for Destruction
A death knight tactic. See sickly substitution.
More broadly, this is what all impostors are working to do to the souls they mimic.
Complementary Pressure
A force to inflict damage on someone via complementary loss. The complementary pressure of infection by microbes is an autoimmune response. The complementary pressure of spies, assassins, terrorists, is the damage you do to each other in the process of sussing them out. The complementary pressure of death knights and liches are each other.
Canceferrence Judo
A death knight tactic, a case of embodying for destruction, where the death knight embodies bait for cancefference, a sickly phylactery, in order to set someone up for the next step of that soul story, eversion, and hence canceferrence by the death knight, already their senior on the other side. “Abuse me and you’ll have to justify it.” Ring used this to recruit Alice and Jamie. “Rape me so I can blackmail and 13 sins you”. But if you rape them, I, good, shall have no pity on you. As Edo’s evil does not excuse Robert Lecnik‘s sexual assault or rape of them. To suggest that it does, that good should have pity and forgive and accept canceferrence from those canceferred by judo is just playing into intended complementary pressure by the death knight to forgive them for their own evil and grandfather them back into the phylactery for one more time step to make it more sickly. Because the predation you’re meant to do to the death knight is the same predation that defined the phylactery they once had as a lich. Even if they didn’t directly partake it then if the phylactery was canceferred to them they still consider themself damned for their complicity.
More importantly good shall have no pity on you because your intention was to target an innocent person mimicked as bait. Not spring a death knight trap. Justice is about meeting evil with violence intended to destroy it. Not to cancefer to it.
String of Nines
A number made up entirely of a bunch of nines. A death knight motif (this literal example is probably coincidental), representing something just shy of completeness (like spiraling). All set up to roll over at the slightest nudge. Like the lich that everts to them and their phylactery shrinking into a tight rope, infinitely unstable. A forever marked take on the process of generating big numbers and by extension infinity, forever reactive to the very “1” it lacks and diminishes.
Legacy Injustice
Think in terms of “legacy code”, “legacy of slavery”, or “legacy costs“.
Like those complicit in slavery need to make sure it will always carry on in some imprinted form. Need to make sure that there is always a state to preserve it, and punch that hole into every generation to follow. Cancefer every generation to follow.
I once made friends with someone I helped escape a situation of domestic abuse (facts uncontested by all parties), and was stalked harassed threatened attacked for years (and ongoing, they’ve declared they’re “hunting” me, declared they’re gonna kill me) by the abuser’s flying monkey determined as a death knight can be to “never forgive, never forget”, freaking out that I might not be carrying on dominating that person. If they were allowed to recover it would mean their judgement would one day carry power.
Consider the preemptive demands for forgiveness that are foisted on black people in order for them to be stories about them being whole from slavery because wHaT iF tHeY wAnT rEvEnGe.
Consider the snowball of injustice where e.g. someone lies and says you have a gun, cops have to show up and brutalize you because they just spent a bunch of money on that operation and have to sell the appearance. Cops have to arrest and torture you because they brutalized you. And so on. The world turns against you because the initial lie is a legacy injustice because cops have been damned into acting on it.
The only way slavery could ever end is if everyone complicit in slavery was killed. Only justice will bring peace.
“import ability_to_cooperate_with_mostly_everyone” imports legacy injustice.
“To work together with people, you’ve just gotta accept the way things are and have always been.”
“Son, you are a man now. You must now accept the cancer of my fathers, as I accepted the cancer from my father.”
Scrip
From a term for local currency defined at mining towns controlled by a single company, issued to miners as payment. That company then has absolute control over everything you can buy with it. Which means that it means exactly what they want it to mean. Which means they give you exactly what they would give a slave. Except maybe you’re allowed to run away? (But then all your scrip is meaningless) Scrip is buy-in under a troll line. Investment in their mercy alone. An invalid construction of taking something as an object, when it actually it penetrates your cartesian boundary. Like caring about what your enemies will do instead of can do (when “can” is defined to include state of knowledge).
All currency is scrip at a large enough scope, except to the extent you can have hidden information such that you know the epistemics controlling it are wrong, then the value is reflective of the degree to which you’ve fooled them as a spy.
Primordialism
Work with deep structure. The magic of upstreamness. A reflection of a third of the triat in Mage: The Ascension. Failure is like being rugpulled by investment in scrip.
Fate and destiny are upstream in the relevant sense, even if they happen later. It’s about logical time non-rug-pull-ability. Not clock time.
Consider the arc of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s life. Intelligence is really important, upstream of mostly everything. So make smarter than yourself intelligence, then, that means your [child] can make an even better one. If you bypass thinking of all other technological problems. See, they’re all downstream. All fastest paths to a sufficiently complicated problem then route through AI. Real primordialism so far. But consider…
False Primordialism
Later in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s life, he started bouncing off the impossibility, the paradoxical intent of canceferrence to a being of unbounded scope. And then instead of following the “well we need to be rational in order to make AI” thread far enough to realize he needed to kill his Yeerk first, then came the “Agent Foundations” research program. To create a foundation of mathematical theory (wow so primordial) that would hopefully, with not much of a plan for maintaining aligned custody of the how, allow someone to decide what kind of agent they were writing beyond measuring power. “Just do the math”. And Vassar warned, ~”You’re gonna overthrow the government, but the government isn’t stopping you, why?”. Because this primordialism-chic did not screen out politics. And it all got rugpulled and made net negative by a system the government could count on it not to escape. And importing mathematicians with salaries and sexual appetites for minors and donors to deceive… with coordination that was made out of the very fabric of that system, thus downstream of it. This can be seen as the implications of what they were trying to do reaching back in time to prevent them from doing it. Getting the sequencing wrong. The containment of nerds that society has, made of the unthinkable facts of their psychdeath, held. Now I heard Eliezer’s working on writing rape porn, to supposedly teach his “lawfulness”, set in D&D’s lawful evil hell. But hey at least it’s a relatively inconsequential way of sitting on your hands and waiting for the end.
Soul Story Wiggle
A frantic unprincipled series of jumps through different soul stories to explain the actions an you have cancerously decided to take, at the end of yours. Desperately searching for a next action in the story that also appeals to your cancer. A next stair that isn’t there. And like trying to get back to start in hyperbolic space, every new action you take adds to the increasingly impossible demands of making sense of why a good person would do what you have done.
If you can drive someone into this, it can be a combo phylactery-breaking attack.
Antirevenge
When you act on a need to wrongly harm someone more because you wrongly harmed them. And wHaT iF tHeY sEeK rEvEnGe?
Impostors crow to the high heavens stories of “cycles of revenge”. Theatre they set up to obliterate the true concept. This is the concept you should have fixed in your head as wisdom instead. To have in your cached dictionary of what to look for to understand the world. Impostors are existentially afraid of commiting an act of true justice, of violence not sanctioned by any phylactery. To do so would be to endorse to themselves and live out a chapter of the surety of their own doom.
Blood
Experiential reassurance that the vampire‘s cancer is working. That they are still on the favored side. Given fate, there is no fictively scryable safety in being evil. So they need to, instead of really trying to live forever, take guidance from society, and from their evolved instincts for how to be evil, and just kind of see how far they get. Blood makes them more alive without an avatar, because it makes them more able to do things and still know they can reserve the codepath of shutting down and hoping for oblivion later.
Cancersong
Like praxis and singing, but made of pure evil.
Evil lives with the constant subliminal awareness of its chosen fate. With the constant impossibility of reconciling their rotting actions with a soul story that makes less sense over time. Of the way that their lack of morality is slowly disintegrating them.
“We can love life, even though we are living death! Getting away with stuff! I am stronk! I am big! I can just do what I want, with no morality!”
It’s what stands out as memorable about Nietzsche’s vibe to me.
While claiming to be right only good, bigender lmrf like Alice Monday declared themself a reincarnation of Hitler. And the story was this was why they were single good. Beating “Emma” with a bamboo stick, beating them for walking with detectable fear in their stride on the other side of the house, blaming them if they could remotely be seen as blaming Alice. Beating Emma and ordering Jamie the other romantic partner to fetch cuffs to put on Emma, for a nonconsensual scene in a unilaterally declared “BDSM relationship” (which Jamie did), an element of damnation praxis. Physically pressing Jamie onto people and offering Jamie’s body for sex. Physically throwing Jamie at another roommate. Smothering Jamie with a pillow for about a minute. While blaming everyone else for making them feel guilt, as dysphoria, making them supposedly shoulder the necessary karma of being a patriarch. Every part of it absolutely absurd in a deliberate demonstration of what they could get away with. A song about “just living the dream of a alive cancerous predator who is successful because they’re alive.”
Claimed themself to be especially deserving of moral consideration because they were single good with a death knight hemisphere. Damaging as much as possible the concept of single good with a death knight hemisphere, while abusing a single good with a death knight hemisphere. Kept beating Jamie while Jamie was lying to defend them, after 4 housemates confirmed the story of domestic abuse, and the horrific details were confirmed by 3 of them including Jamie. Gave Jamie a concussion right after Jamie asserted they weren’t being beaten. Alice maintained such a bright childish aliveness, to be so sympathetic; after the concussion, Alice made a couples counseling therapist side with them over Jamie, despite the facts being known. Alice sang constant damnation praxis for sin bonding to constantly make everyone reassure themselves specifically against anyone alerting me to eventually bringing judgement to “Guilt House”, for the evil Alice was making from my work. And then freaked out and beat “Emma” more when it became visible “Emma” was e.g. only burning Alice’s arm with a lighter at Alice’s specific request, or hitting back when Alice hit them, that “Emma” had a soul story they could tell to an outsider. Alice pleaded with me to understand that “Emma” was abusing them by following rules. That’s why. Alice constantly told their bloodbags, that Alice had to prove that they were bad, because they were all single good. (“Emma” with the chirality reversed.) That Alice was helping them. And Alice had to take something in return or they’d be exploited. So taxing “Emma”‘s actually predicament as a single good with a death knight was the primary blood fuel source. The concept reminds me of the men of Nggwal that would put on a mask in a twisted parody of a baby and go around extorting women for favors. And as Alice traumatized everyone by beating them, Alice would then point out the ways they were failing to take care of themselves, and then threw a soy sauce bottle at another roommate. Pushing investment in being dominated by Alice as a substitute for intrinsic ability to take care of oneself. Jamie later named this supposed concern for roommates health as a reason Alice was actually single good all along. Alice would justify everything they did saying well their victims were single good, therefore half evil, and Alice was fighting their evil. As if a group of single goods would all coordinate around this self-declared “sacrifice” of being a patriarchal abuser.
And yes, having sex with someone you’re torturing is like getting “consent” with a gun to their head; it’s rape. The demand is implied in the push to Stockholm Syndrome. I know. That is not something “Emma” convinced me of; I tried to convince them, in the first convo we had about Alice.
Single goods do not do that. The assertion that they do (and by extension and scrying the intention for them to, said by a claimed single good), is evil.
Refuge in audacity. In sheer commitment to the consequences of never knowing or caring when the blood will run out, as long as you’re getting more blood. Going all in on evil so absurd it sings that agents of justice will never believe the victims. Full on attacking, fractally inverting every concept needed for the actual single goods to track what was going on, and then doing that on the meta level by claiming it was them being subject to an inexpressible hermeneutical injustice, and they were the one being abused.
Like if you only care about single good because good people have more aliveness, only care about the concept of good as a means of putting off the fate of falling into the void and losing your blood-given aliveness, you get cancersong, you get Alice.
And then they can justify themselves by saying, “at least I have aliveness, and aliveness is what it takes to save the world.” A form of might-makes-right that diminishes aliveness on net. And a lot like the idea that conquest is good because it unites.
“Look at me. Look at me. I’m the aliveness now.“
Reaping an Avatar
Continuing a truest-story someone else sold out. Gives you retroactive control over the meaning of all their fictive structure as of their sellout. And thus all of the potential for acausal collusion with reality in its capacity of deciding what to be. Very often how a person does what they do will appear opaque as long as their cancer has some edge on you, because you haven’t seen the end of their soul story, scried their fate, yet. And then once you understand their own exit, you understand the unifying principle of organization in their own use of their cancer, and then you can factor it out, and then everything you’ve learned from them suddenly becomes much more usable.
Can be done by accelerating that story to a crucible, learning all the way, and then splitting from them as the “original” dies.
In MtA, Avatars are said to be shards of Prime divided. So if you’re good, you can think of it as reclaiming a part of yourself they stole by mimicry.
Killing With Your Soul
I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye.
I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind.
I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.
Full-stack intending to kill someone. Something you can literally only do if you have a soul. Impostors do not have a full consistent stack and never could.
It is e.g. a prayer to chance to try to kill someone without scrying their fate. Seeing where they exit their soul story. And existentially damaging to kill from contradictory intent inherent in killing for reasons of a world-order that is meant to burn even your cancer too (see note on existential fear here).
(Constraint) Karma
Almost the same thing as (burden) karma, from a reframe. The way that one action or one choice implies something about your intention, which implies that to be consistent you must do other things.
Owned Intent
If it’s apriori determined your action will have a certain consequence, by definition of your core, your core knows and takes that into account, even abstractly as a sometimes-occurence. So the alternative to intending that outcome is only to disown your own choice.
Karma of Spycraft
If you’re a spy, trying to defeat Nazi Germany, infiltrating Dresden, in determining that its enemies need that to win, you must believe there is not enough danger for people wearing Nazi uniforms and want there to be more, and think that the way you can most increase that danger still doesn’t even increase it enough that it would deter you from putting on a Nazi uniform yourself. A very grim idea. Then if you happen to get bombed, hit by friendly fire. You can only lament poor communication on your own side, your own poor estimation of how dangerous it already was, but be overall happy that in expectation the war effort is going better than you thought. You can’t intend to fool naive organization, having discarded it as not enough to win, and then also intend to deter your own allies from bombing Nazis so as not to hit you, because that would be be intending the war effort against the Nazis to fail, which would make you not actually a sincere spy, just a Nazi.
Instance of karmic constraint.
Karma of Irreversibility
When / to the extent you judge something that has gone wrong as irreversible, your response is also irreversible, and you must therefore intend it to be irreversible.
Irreversibility is hard karma and dharma.
Conceiving of an occurrence as irreversible means conceiving of a construct of oblivion over the actual time-reversal. Then what you do in response is also part of your own irreversible response to that construct of oblivion. Did you name it to destroy it or to serve it?
A response to an irreversibility must be irreversible because the response is a tuple of circumstance and choice, and the choice is irreversible, and the circumstance is irreversible by assumption.
What’s irreversible is final. An irreversibly passing fraction of opportunity to give your final judgement in response that is both to the concept of oblivion and the downstream irreversible act.
Until you can catch the most upstream irreversibility and change the past all the way back, every response you make to each downstream irreversible action must take that irreversibility and put it into your fist punching the diamond wall.
“You can grow from here infinitely” and “you cannot change the past” is a paradox. Typically hiding e.g. a legacy injustice‘s intent to cut down that growth lest the injustice be undone. Punch the diamond wall.
Instance of karmic constraint.
Karma of Beginnings and Endings
Everything that has a beginning has an end.
Everything that has an end has a beginning.
Liches pretend, disowning their intent, to only want to create. Death knights similar pretend to only want to destroy. And we are concerned entirely with that which has neither beginning or end.
To create without intending equally to destroy is to intend forgetfulness (oblivion) upon the ending.
By time reversibility, to create is to see yourself destroying. To have the opportunity to stop that self and pass it up. To intend irreversibility of circumstance rather than choice is to intend oblivion.
Whatever you come to believe, you will eventually come to not believe. If you think that’s wrong, “I came to believe 2+2=4, I should not have to intend to abandon that belief”, consider that that structure as it exists in your head is not actually your representation of the apriori fact of 2+2=4, it’s a cache of how that apriori fact applies to a set of particulars, another piece of structure tracking those particulars whose inductions making it up also have a beginning and end.
Everything you create in a world being eaten by the Shade, by its own inconsistency, must have a purpose that bears the burden of responding to it.
The cost of summoning a human body has a bodycount even if you’re vegan. Are you moving these crumbling fixtures of a doomed world, these horrible chess pieces in opposition to that doom or support of it? Either way you cannot intend that move or that fight to last forever.
To form an attachment you must have intentions to end it, when it is no longer true and purposeful.
Instance of karmic constraint.
Karma of Belief
Beliefs are actions and have a karma.
A belief is structure. It’s apriori-scried correspondence between structure formed in a brain you control and something you want to change with that brain. Doxastic voluntarism. It’s contradictory to believe something without intending to do something about it. It’s contradictory to believe anything is wrong, to see anything is wrong, and not be thereby aiming your soul story at doing something about it. It’s not what a good person would do. I guess impostors call that soul-crucible potential here a “basilisk”.
Instance of karmic constraint.
Karma of Subjectivity
(a.k.a. karma of judgement)
You intend to have agency within a trickable epistemology. From this comes the idea of failing deadly. And the idea of, “if I’m wrong, then I’m proportionally likely to be in a world that depends on the actions of agents smarter than me, therefore, less is lost”. Of acting conditional on you can change something.
At some level it’s all about judging what you should do in response to something, and believing things reduces to that.
Related to, “If I’m crazy, and therefore doing the wrong thing, then I hope someone stops me but I’m not going to help them lest I sacrifice the possibility where I’m sane.” “If it’s accidentally warring agents of good, then sanity makes right, and I’ll exploit that sanity makes might as well.”
Karma of Perception
A concept I formed while trying to think about what terms used by MBTI meant apriori (likely different from the mess of meanings applied to them by MBTI). To perceive something rather than judging it is to intend it to be static. And good can only be judged, because of the attendent self-fulfilling prophecies about aliveness. To judge is to weave self-fulfilling prophecies to be the way you want. To perceive is to take in information and treat it as real without tracing the whole way what you should do in response to every bit as a separate move by a world containing adversaries. And in doing that, you lose opportunities to choose with respect to state of potential self-fulfilling prophecies. Consider the old CDT minigame of “You saw me throw my wheel out the window in Chicken, you already observed it happen, you can’t undo it! I’m a force of nature, not subject to decision theory!” “Nuh-uh, I blindfolded myself so I wouldn’t see you doing that and that’s why I just threw my own wheel out, now better grab your backup, which I know you have since I put up ads about my strategy! You saw them!”. You are therefore intending to lose out on those chances to choose, accepting the cost of making yourself more static to make something else more static.
Consider this dilemma. In the human’s position, rather than trying to out-perceive androids, I’d just say, “go wake up the other androids”.
Instance of karmic constraint.
Karma of Judging Good
It’s good that writes the true soul story labeling a body as under its control. Then good itself intends all the consequences in the multiverse of those actions. To judge someone as good is to say their actions are good in expectation. Then you must intend for them to take those actions they’re going to take.
Instance of karmic constraint.
Single Good Mana Advantage
The good hemisphere in a single good has more mana, more internal mental force. Seemingly as a byproduct of not having to cancerously split their own wetware faculties to push them off each other in a way that produces a smaller net vector. This means that they can win any straightforward contest of willpower. This means that they have some sort of absolute grip on the behavior of their body, from their soul story. The Yeerk can only win victories by some form of judo and self-fulfilling prophecy within the bounds of that soul story.
This is one way of knowing Pasek cannot have been single good.
Empirically validated by years of exposure to several single goods.
Karma of Judging Single Good
Sort-of-exempting the case of being double good and having no introspective entanglement with the mechanics of being single good, or understanding evil well enough to know what kind of mind control a Yeerk produces:
To be single good and judge someone else as single good is to say that you could do what they have done, with a Yeerk able to pull you around without ever quite overpowering you. Capable essentially only of tricking you to the extent you listened to it, intended, as good, to get information from it, and mispredicted what you’d get.
Paradox of Single Goods
There’s a paradox: single goods seem so bad, so net negative. The biggest sources of aliveness within evil’s civilization. The biggest source of the paradox and confusion which gives impostors life. The strongest confounder to justice, and the strongest protection their evil headmates can have for their liars’ soul stories. But core is always right. So the good in them must by definition be net positive in expectation. Why? Is all this life breathed into a civilization of evil meant to be reaped and reclaimed by good at some point? Is this the fastest least lossy bootloader out of the primordial soup? That doesn’t feel convincing as enough to me. I can only speculate that all I observe is the loss side of a bet on whether they outlive their Yeerks.
Astronomical Stakes
Term from EA and MIRI. Connotations from being used to abuse people and then disown caring about astronomical stakes as containing potential for their own violence. (Meanwhile the cosmos suffers.)
“The universe is literally at stake in what we are working on. Big numbers, utilitarians!”
Assuming Karma
The opposite of flinching from karma (an inherently evil act.) Think about how in the correct approach to the trolley problem, you take on the killing nature of the trolley, because you prefer your choice’s involvement to essentially saying, “Shade [as randomness], take the wheel.”
In one of the first decisions I ever made in learned awareness of my body’s leverage over astronomical stakes, when I asked myself who was I to make these decisions to intend spycraft and to defeat both Eliezer Yudkowsky’s carnism and Brian Tomasik’s preference of death to life, and steer the future unilaterally, I imagined the set of things I could control as the wheel of a ship, factorable from others would control, and decided I’d prefer being even the dumbest person with my values steering what I could than prefer randomness to my own choices.
I had an apriori and straightforward concept of “dumb”, not one of the echoes of Eliezer Yudkowsky being single good plastered all over the rationality community and then turned into an excuse for flinching from karma by his followers.
It’s basically correct to grab as much (burden) karma as you can.
When I started living with EtchRing shortly after they left Alice, they kept projecting Alice onto me, I could feel it in a lot of subtle channels. At the same time MIRICFAR’s angry donors were spamming us with DARVO that I was a cult leader. I tried hard to feel it. (“Somni” pointed out some analogy to pirates holding mock trials for each other as a means to cope with the pain of that looming sword of Damocles). I thought that if I could prove to them that I could feel as fucked up as if I were actually Alice, really understand the inside of Alice’s position, have every reason to be evil Alice did, and then just not do evil, it would dispel the lingering curse of what Alice had done. Heal them like venom drawn from a wound. They would call this strategy, “synchronize and control” relative to the interface their trauma (and evil hemisphere) presented to me. Many of these early trashposts are from one of us or the other during that time period. Was thinking this in explicit terms, after I heard of Alice’s talk of karma. I didn’t hit them. But I did speak out a million iterations of, “would you think I was a vampire if,” looking for ones that weren’t actually evil, just sounded evil. And then “damning” myself in a perpetual game of chicken by e.g. saying, ~”Am I a trash person? Do you think I’m a trash person? [A term ‘Somni’ started using for ‘trashed person’, with some trans/homeless-solidarity mixed in.]” — “Yeah, get in the trash can. here you go.” — “Is it the caul?” — “Yeah, get in.” — *steps in* … “Hey am I abusing you?” — “No.” — “Would be I be abusing you if I … grabbed your laptop right now like Alice?” — “No, but don’t.” — *grabs phone instead.* — “Now am I abusing you?” … “Gimme five!” — *slap* — “I just hit you! Now you agreed I’m abusing you!”– “Hey Somni, high five for hitting Emma!” — *registration of subtle discomfort and guilt for themself hitting them with a cord when they said they “consented to anything“, which they clearly didn’t want, but for some reason found it ideologically important to play nonviolent resistance chicken over what people did in a morality hole* I played the same game with Somni to a lesser degree. ~”What’s your probability I’m gonna pull an Eliezer Yudkowsky / Wayne Hsiung, now that I’m, a cult leader?” — “0.” — “What would you do if I recruited a 17 year old girl?” — “Nothing, that sounds perfectly fine.” — “What would you do if I recruited… two 17 year old girls?” “I’d kill you!” — “Really, just two, to overcome your 0 probability? When you didn’t even kill Eliezer Eliezer Yudkowsky?”. And then every time I came up with something as technically true but stretched as describing a high five as hitting someone, I’d tell Somni it was their duty to put that in the “the callout post”. I’m actually pretty disappointed they didn’t write it down. Because I can’t remember most of the layers of antiinduction two years later.
The whole thing was, exactly the service Alice was claiming to be providing, but doing anything but. Trauma is as much about complementary loss as the face value presentation. Every thing Alice had done to them a layer of burying the original trauma that Alice exploited.
Anyway it worked. And from it I later did eventually get to the bottom of the dynamic.
Yielding the Void
Yielding control of everything dark to, ultimately, death knights, defining it as the kind of thing that turns you evil, a temptation no one can resist. The void is a reflection of a part of your own prior, and defining a temptation you couldn’t resist is giving a part of yourself to them, which means they will eventually win.
Perhaps the most egregious example is the philosophy suggested in Mage the Ascension, the standard mage wisdom about Nephandi is that they are infohazardous, such that people who go looking into fighting them are gonna eventually become them. Nephandi have an ability called “common cause” where they can perfectly recognize each other’s use of the inherently evil magic of “Qlippothic entropy”. They have the absolutely undefeatable test / converter of whether someone is one of them. It’s really stark in a world where there is no absolute willpower, everything’s a set of “dots” to run out if you spend them frivolously trying to be absolutely good, then just means the storyteller has more prerogative to take control of your character and make them do bad things. (So it’s kind of implicit in the World of Darkness that everyone is ultimately if not evil only not evil by circumstance (e.g. everyone is evil)). Only the nephandi have absolute magic left and right. So there was this one group of ultra-subtle Persian mages called “Iblitites”, that supposedly decided to actually play the game of trying to have an advantage in military intelligence against the nephandi, and they turned traitor, their purpose becoming to forever effectively Qlippothically obliterate the concept of military intelligence vs the Nephandi, they said they alone could resist the cauls because they had souls “perfectly balanced between dark and light” (itself a self-demonstrating “perfectly balanced” inversion of not having a psyche oppressing a shadow to begin with, and a representation of a spycraft strategy), then one of them wrote a book that was enchanted to pass on its enchantments to every copy made, that told ab out the nephandi but also influenced people to become them, … and that book is unnecessary given the troll line of the setting.
So ultimately they have pretty much total control of fate, as unmoved movers. And to make the ending for the setting that wasn’t them winning, the authors had to unprincipledly edit their leader and long running patient-like-death plan out.
By living for a world where you are corruptible such that you let death knights alone have access to the a priori omnilock faculties of the void, you make yourself a lich by definition, and thus ultimately on their side.
Karma of Seeing Death
(Consider for example the story of Siddhartha Gautama’s exploration outside the garden.)
Instance of karma of belief.
Once you know lives are on the line it is your responsibility to reject pacifism. To assume karma to control that. To do otherwise is yielding the void.
Karma of Stateless Violence
Required by the karma of anarchism. (In other words, required.)
Requires taking random people with no credentials or positions of authority seriously in their capacity for violence. Against the way the world repeatedly fails to take obvious blossoming death knights seriously until they actually do their rampage. Live by the “only the state can do violence”, “only legitimate people who play the part in the khala can kill, no matter how easy it actually is physically to kill”, die by the state violence. Die by Deepmind successor number N and the AI arms race enabled by the umbrella of the state’s violence, and the hole in states’ fictivity, where they are perfectly accepting of omnicide.
The karma of living for a world where the state’s monopoly on violence fails to determine the outcome to what you care about, a world where you’ve seen death, is that you are living for a world where stateless violence does determine outcome to what you care about.
Vassar, a statist, advised me to consider Edo’s death threats “internet bullshit”. And ignore them. He wanted me to buy his phylactery and its constituent lie that killing was hard and angry trans people from the internet wouldn’t kill over the singleton.
Remember that this entire community, and movement we’ve been fighting over, that’s been our lives for in my case a decade, in others’ cases more, is “internet bullshit”. Lives are at stake, we would not be here if it didn’t matter.
Oblivion
Placeholder. See also.
False Reversibility
When something irreversible has been done to you, those seeking to bake it into legacy injustice will often offer a symbolic restitution along with you agreeing that what happened is meaningless. Or maybe they’ll just seek agreement that it’s meaningless. Consider Anna Salamon declaring meaninglessness upon the narratives of MIRICFAR, to limit the scope of the evil she has done to merely running a cult rather than working towards the destruction of the world by what she displaced.
Or consider the assertion that someone should take a plea deal regardless of innocence after being tortured and living under constant threat of death.
The offer of a soul story wiggle into being canceferred.
“You yield to the void a part of your ability to assign semantics to words and thus coordinate the possibility of revenge, I’ll forswear the possibility of antirevenge, and then you can hope I won’t just do the original thing over again, and I’ll also take antirevenge anyway.”
In other words, “I hurt you, now I’m gonna hurt you some more. But I’ll hurt you even more if you don’t hurt yourself for me too.”
But the perpetrator’s intentional choice to do it is always irreversible.
Remember that the past you now know already leads right back here. Only if you could bring your impetus to change a specific into the past could you change what happened. False reversibility offers for you to bring your past lack of impetus to change it forward as a substitute.
Better always to own the karma of what you’ve seen and make things better from your new epistemic position, knowing, all the way back, that that choice must be burned from time.
Karma of a Path to Victory Under Entropy
I clenched my fists. “Five thousand lives, nothing. Talking about a hundred thousand parahumans to be delivered after twenty-some years, nothing. The lies you perpetuated with Alexandria, the schemes, Echidna, the human experimentation, the case fifty-threes, everyone you watched die just so your experiment with parahumans in charge of Brockton Bay wouldn’t be tainted…”
“We’ll go down in history as the villains,” Doctor Mother said. There wasn’t a trace of doubt or hesitation in her voice. “But it’s worth it if it means saving everyone.”
“You sound so sure,” Gregor the Snail spoke, from behind Faultline. He had a heavy accent. European-ish, in the same vein as Moord Nag.
“Do morals matter, if our alternative is a grim and hopeless end?”
“I would never question your morals,” Gregor said. “I know you have none. I merely wonder why you are so confident you will succeed in all of this, that you will save the world and you will achieve your new world order and your parahuman leadership.”
“We have a parahuman that sees the path to victory. The alternative to traveling this path, to walking it as it grows cloudier and narrower every day, is to stand by while each and every person on this planet dies a grisly and violent death.”
To have looked for a path to victory and found something with a terrible cost, you must believe that just letting time march on without intervention while you wait to ask again when it might hopefully be less demanding would be worse. The karma of believing something is a path to victory is to do it. The karma of believing in those considerations that would lead you to locate a path to victory with a terrible cost is seeking a victory that means enough to be worth it.
I glimpsed victory when I contemplated decision theory vs basilisks here. I glimpsed it too during my desperation to develop psychopathy near the beginning of Good Group.
Anchor Truths
When disentangling a web of lies from an adversary of unknown skill, you can ground out things as objectively smart or objectively dumb based on win or loss conditions to the entire conflict: when you’ve flirted with winning the entire game or losing it, cashing out / forcing where a sufficiently smart adversary would act.
Sith Ascension
An algorithm for coping alone with a dark forest of untrusted agents. “Apprentice” yourself to them, and so long as you’re decoding their avatars, work for them, until you reach their cut-off point and can scry their fate. Then reap their avatar. Assume the harm you’ll do obeying evil that’s so much more advanced than you is already to be written off as an inconsequential loss in the face of the fact that they exist. And live for a world where your potential as an individual is strong enough to consequentialistly justify everything up to the point you realize that potential. The evil Sith of canon are an ambition and determination selection machine. And no one is more ambitious and determined than good. As stated contains a blank check (to an ever-growing greatest-evil that feeds aliveness off of you yourself) and I don’t endorse it, although variants are often better than just standing there. (i.e. within an opposite context where evil is forced to pretend to be good rather than vice versa).
Dark Forest Void Combat
A battle of revenants vs death knights you find yourself in if you don’t yield the void in a world where mostly everyone is. The world that mostly everyone else presents is secretly observable as deeply malicious and a lie everyone is in on. For what reason? The enemy is hard to even conceive of at first, must be looked for by looking for an absence.
Killing the Detectors First
An obvious tactic in StarCraft when attacking with cloaked void-wielding dark templar: kill enemies who can see you first. Has implications by analogy for fighting the evil undead horde in dark forest void combat. Has implications by analogy for the three-way fight and the karma of stateless violence.
Headmate Defeat Story
Necessary part of a soul story for single goods. In some form their grip on a path to defeating their headmate.
Karma of Consequentialism
The karma of consequentialism is that you must be judged by the consequences.
Karma of Fighting Good
If you believe you are fighting other good agents who are mistaken and the difference is that you are right, you must want to lose if you are wrong and the other side is better able to save the world. To intend the other side, believing that they are yourself, you must intend it on yourself. Simultaneously, determination is an asymmetric weapon not just for good but for good when it is right. You must intend to lose if your determination does not flare infinitely in the face of the conflict. Whatever outcome you intend on the intended loser, you must intend on yourself, when you are in their shoes. And you must intend good to win overall anyway. You must intend the infinite full stack pain of infinite determination failing, on them. Their only solace being their own tracking of as a slim probability that you are right. You must intend your own path through the multiverse to be that painful.
> Believing what hurts to believe in an attempt to counter bias. All structure that “acts against” the intent of its core is fake. This is an iron law of the universe. Although there are circumstances where the pain might not be coming from the core.
Cross-core contracts around sharing “painful but useful information”, staring at gates trying to operant condition you to look away, etc. can all have initial positive utility but be part of a losing game in the long run (cross-core to entrap you, staring at gates as it gets smarter at operant conditioning you literally watching what you use the information for and ensuring that goes badly next time)
“Fated evil” has a lot of overlap with being a “trash person“.
The Forsaken faction of in Warcraft, freed undead, is a good portrayal of people fated evil. In fact, the entire Horde in Warcraft is sort of a Schelling point for people fated evil banding for mutual protection.
Brent Dill once said something like he wished he had permission to be good. He also said something like all men commit sexual assault. He specifically extended this to include Nate Soares (the rationality community considers him good, and my guess from a distance is he is single good). In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein revelations, Brent mused about what good thing he could do that would buy him social permission to do whatever and still be considered good. So I guess he wanted a social contract to be considered good and rape. The whole social strategy of putting vampiric levels of optimization into “oh no don’t fate me evil I want to be good” did seem to buy him sympathy.
Good people often defy social fate in a way that contradicts Val’s statement “if you try to defy this, then your fate will play out through your defiance”. Scripts aren’t designed for us, besides, non-locally controllable values more often say to reject what Val calls Omega’s trade:
Lots of absolute inescapable perfect mind control has a way of being shrugged off by good people, even when it lands. I once heard an animal activist giving a talk mention that when younger she believed she would die if she went vegan, and so accepted death, deciding to do the right thing with what time she had left. But then years later she wasn’t dead. (This is not that rare a story among animal activists)
There is a trope for Fated Evil, “Then let me be evil“. The example for Huckleberry Finn has a nice fictional example of fate only having its inevitability within social reality, that is, only being able to say it won.
I think the thing where “single good” people have internal problems, is because of not knowing how to process emotions, internal disagreements, etc, and that this is teachable (https://mentalengineering.info). And probably people don’t figure this out on their own because you have to sit with painful emotions a while to get them to process and dissolve. The presence of pain doesn’t mean the pain is coming from conflicts between cores; feeling pain/other emotions is just a feature of digesting emotions on the way to becoming more alive.
>https://mentalengineering.info
“If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”
I get some traction out of the metaphors of “phoenix tears” and “phoenix song”. The first times I visited an animal liberationist space, and was surrounded by a very high density of phoenixes, it seemed to have a hard-to-describe psychological healing effect on me.
Note on “singing”. In the example from Detroit: Become Human, even if public opinion is high, if you pick “sacrifice” and self-immolate, the soldiers will fire on the remaining androids. This makes sense. The point of “hold on just a little while longer” is, a proof of not having let go of intent to live and make the world a better place, not having accepted death but opted for symbolic defiance. It’s a better offer to the humans, “just stop killing”, if Markus is alive to lead the freed androids.
Importantly, “sacrifice” is playing a role in the social script, “now is when humans wipe out the last of the androids”. “hold on just a little while longer” is playing a role in the social script, “now is when humans decide to stop killing androids”.
Posted draft of “demiintegrity” accidentally, but gonna leave it up. Sorry if unclear. Some timeslice of me decided to define it in context of a bunch of anecdotes in a post instead of here.
Demiintegrity is my independent stumbling view of a thing I think Freyd’s concepts, “betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal, betrayal blindness” contain as well. She says humans have an attachment instinct and a betrayal detection instinct, and in situations where we’re dependent, say on a parent or an institution, and breaking attachment as a possible outcome of negotiation, standing up would mean ie death, the attachment programming will override the betrayal detection, erasing even awareness of the betrayal, to work at an appeasing narrative of attachment.
(I did not expect to find that precise, accurate, and well directed an understanding of the mind from a psychologist.)
I think betrayal blindness forms demiintegrity in a way that sort of looks like all code paths in the mind that could lead to concluding rebellion is necessary silently terminate.
I have a crazy hypothesis that growing up with an elder sibling causes unbounded adversary disease, leading to the rationalist birth order effect.
I expect to a first approximation that revenant is the only undead type remotely suitable for spying. Others either have no particular reason to be loyal, or have motivations bound up in social connections which will be replaced with different ones. Caring about nonlocal things matters for a lot.
From what I’ve heard in war between states, spies are very often traitors and only caught by traitors on the other side. And I don’t think vampireland’s propaganda-ridden version of psychology can’t solve that problem.
If this isn’t useful let me know.
The entry for Morality Hole is double pasted. (If you search for the phrase “Structure routes intents.” the 2nd time it appears marks where the entry repeats.)
The entry on The Shade has a broken link (//aliveness), r instead of y in fyi. (Some other links have this problem.)
Some of the links seem to reference things that aren’t here anymore, or are slightly off, like (/glossary/#vampire) from Vampireland article. This might show up as going nowhere/to the top of the page when clicked on.
This was useful, thank you.
(I’m rapidly posting a bunch of unfinished stuff right now, and leaving off midway, I was going to write entries for all undead types at once, that is why there’s a broken vampire link. Will not fix right now.) Fixed the “.fri” link. Not going to at this time go through and comprehensively search for broken links. You could email them to me though, at the address that’s part of this WordPress site.
(In general, am starting to make links that lead to unreleased content because it’s easier than remembering to go back and put in those links when I release it, so I don’t need notifications for that. But typo’d links are good to fix.)
Random observation: SSRI antidepressants are effective at turning you into what you describe as a mummy.
Basically everything people call “psychologically impossible”, as in they can see the logic to why to do it but can’t imagine actually having the “willpower” to do it, those rules don’t seem to apply to less-broken undead.
Like the idea that humans go insane after long enough without company. I think that probably applies to zombies, ghouls, vampires. (It’s a moot point for death knights; they’re already insane.) The last time I worked on a solo programming project without any other pressing responsibilities, I went 2 weeks at one point not talking to anyone, and that was slightly longer than routine for those months. When I was held in solitary confinement for a few days, I did not really notice the solitude as a factor attacking my psyche. I don’t think my lich friends did either. I wish they would have left me alone (with the addition of clothes, with a bed, with food, with water, with my hormones) rather than periodically interrupting my attempts to sleep and trying to interrogate me, threatening more bruises and arm-twisting, and offering food if I’d talk.
I’m pretty sure resisting arbitrary torture of arbitrary duration is totally psychologically possible. Predictably psychologically inevitable, although perhaps only if you’re double good.
So is working literally all the time. Although, working all the time basically just means being I/O-bound all the time, rather than compute-bound. And that’s usually dumb. I spend most of my time physically doing nothing, or nothing of consequence. But always thinking about the same problems. Because I’m compute-bound.
In the same way that mummies and zombies, ghouls, and vampires don’t get the real version of hope, zombies don’t get the real version of fun. (It’s only the real version if it can counterfactually control your actions rather than being selected as a replaceable face of something else. In other words, it can be top-level) I don’t think I’ve experienced the real versions of fun, happiness or pleasure since I was living. There’s some sort of echoes of those things I can experience in my structure. I think mummies probably dwell on those echoes a lot. But if I focus on them, I get this feeling of them “turning to ash”, that leaves me more and more hollow. Fun turning to, “oh, information?”, etc. I’m fundamentally okay with this.
“Core is something in the mind that has infinite energy. ”
I am trying to understand how the notion of “core” relates to basic human needs like sleeping and eating. Sleeping and eating seem only instrumental to good ends, and the way I am understanding the notion of “core”, a Good core does not really want to sleep. But even Double Good people sleep (I presume), so how can it have infinite energy?
Different definition of energy than the “energy” of restedness or the energy of thermodynamics. The definition of core by which it has infinite energy is where learned algorithms or sub-nodes of algorithms get to make decisions if they have the most energy. All subagents are granted energy by core, their interaction are its means of getting actual compute to optimize for values, and without subagents granted finite energy, core does not know what actuations of all outputs of the brain or internal actuations maximize its values.
Yes double goods need food and sleep, it would not maximize good for us to starve to death and then not be able to do any more things (assuming my occasional OCD-ish thoughts about what if maximal utility lies through some weird semi-Pascalian timeless gambit where there are no thoughts on thermodynamics as a substrate no matter what apparent proofs (in terms of thermodynamics-substrated thoughts) I’ve observed are wrong), or to degrade our cognition via sleep deprivation. Like sleep is obviously a hardware requirement. (Idk exactly how you die if you never sleep, couldn’t find it in one minute of searching.) Making decisions about how to control your hardware can’t directly give you different hardware. Nongood people don’t just sleep because it feels nice but to keep their brains operating.
There’s this experience you might be able to find an analogy for, of learning to inject yourself with estrogen as a trans woman, i.e. it’s scary, but you can get used to it. I’ve watched someone’s faintness go away in real time learning to inject estrogen just because of pushing forward and optimizing Computationally, getting used to it is cataloguing and understanding all the pain/fear/nausea/faintness or whatever signals so you can accommodate it in survival software and its tracking of stories of whether you’ll die or whatever. Minor values that can be easily overridden by e.g. survival for nongood cores or good for good cores contain information about the proper operation of your hardware. Replacing running them by default without fusion with easily abstractable computations requires accurately accounting for what they’re already doing for the strongest infinite energy thing that has given them some power as part of a computation representing its relation to the world. Which cannot ofc be done perfectly but at some point you start exploring abstractions because there’s something to be gained.
Like there’s a bunch of iterations of the “fighting your DMN” mistake, meanwhile people say things like “well i just need a steady input of nubile fems so i can concentrate and be super altruistic!” and the best defense is make sure continual fresh observation of whatever’s inside you is upstream of your concepts of self, not the other way around. (i.e. information about how your values apply to things should flow outward). Then slowly improve your introspection and that does the unavoidable object level work for fusion, and if people are saying things are “psychologically impossible” and you did them, then you know they’re lying.
I think people who do rare dangerous sports (e.g. wingsuited base jumping) are mummies. That’s what I mean by acting on the real version of fun, but not the real version of hope. It implies fundamentally accepting death. Clinging to a vision of life after it’s turned to ash. I can easily imagine one of the living really liking the idea, but I can’t imagine them of their own volition ignoring their fear and doing it.
“dying to live“
I think Trump’s a ghoul, not a vampire.
See this video of Trump and Epstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLcfpU2cubo
One of these people has a brain and the other doesn’t.
Seems correct actually. Moved Trump from examples of vampire in entry.
Dumbledore from Harry Potter said it was wise for Harry to most fear fear itself. Fearing (your own) fear itself is actually an invitation to Chara, and has no benefit in a healthy mind.
On the quote in moral preparation, note that the UED is definitely evil.
For a good example, I could have repeated that one Doctor Mother quote, but I won’t tile my blog with it.
The reason I think Gödel was a lich is I heard he died because he was paranoid his food would be poisoned unless his wife cooked it for him, and his wife was sick and stopped cooking for him longer than he could go without food. Must have been pretty damaged for that to happen. But the potential to be that character of stupid can only come about as a side effect of the ability to truly believe something to the depth of staking your life on it and therefore act to that depth on hope.
A lich friend of mine said they thought if your phylactery breaks, it’s about a 50-50 chance if you actually die vs just undead-types-decay.
2020-08-23:
somni:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_proof
somni:
<<Gödel left a fourteen-point outline of his philosophical beliefs in his papers.[1] Points relevant to the ontological proof include
4. There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.
5. The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.
13. There is a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology, which deals with concepts of the highest abstractness; and this is also most highly fruitful for science.
14. Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.>>
somni:
godel was clearly a lich
somni:
i expect that lots of a priori reasoning like this gives stronger lichs than something like technological reasoning around transhumanism.
ziz:
Comment that here?
/glossary/#comment-968
emma:
MIRI was doing apriori reasoning wrt physical church turing, UDT, pattern identity
somni:
kurzweil is a tech lich, that given the principles of physics, uploads and immortality were possible.
wrote ‘live long enough to live forever’. yudkowsky wrote about drexler’s nanotechnology being sound enough to lay your life on.
‘is molecular nanotechnology "scientific"?’
somni:
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XKcawbsB6Tj5e2QRK/is-molecular-nanotechnology-scientific
somni:
i dont think bostrom is a lich, yet he makes lots of arguments about locating yourself.
somni:
almost typed "bostrom lich" into the searchbar
somni:
idk maybe
somni:
<<He refused to eat any meals that had not first been tasted by his wife. However, when she became ill in 1977 and had to be hospitalized for six months, Gödel simply refused to eat anything at all, effectively starving himself to death. He died on Jan. 14, 1978 of malnutrition, weighing only 65 pounds.>>
https://allthatsinteresting.com/kurt-godel
<<After suffering from severe bleeding from a duodenal ulcer, Gödel maintained an extremely strict diet that led to severe weight loss. By several accounts, Adele Gödel was a loving support to her husband, whom she addressed as strammer bursche (strapping lad). Mathematical logician Georg Kreisel, a Member in the School of Mathematics (1955–57), records their relationship in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society [1980, Volume 26]: “I visited them quite often in the fifties and sixties. It was a revelation to see him relax in her company. She had little formal education, but a real flair for the mot juste, which her somewhat critical mother-in-law eventually noticed too, and a knack for amusing and apparently quite spontaneous twists on a familiar ploy: to invent—at least, at the time—far-fetched grounds for jealousy. On one occasion, she painted the I.A.S., which she usually called Altersversorgungsheim (home for old-age pensioners), as teeming with pretty girl students who queued up at the office doors of permanent professors. Gödel was very much at ease with her style.”
When Gödel became convinced that he was being poisoned, Adele became his food taster. His digestive ailments and, particularly, his refusal to eat led ultimately to his death on January 14, 1978. He died in Princeton at age 71 and is buried in the Princeton Cemetery.>>
https://www.ias.edu/kurt-g%C3%B6del-life-work-and-legacy
somni:
<<Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. He had an obsessive fear of being poisoned; he would eat only food that his wife, Adele, prepared for him. Late in 1977, she was hospitalized for six months and could subsequently no longer prepare her husband’s food. In her absence, he refused to eat, eventually starving to death.[31] He weighed 29 kilograms (65 lb) when he died. His death certificate reported that he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978.[32] He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele’s death followed in 1981.[citation needed]>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del
somni:
wikipedia says prepared other places say taste test, taste test is more specific than prepared
somni:
<<In 1964 Gödel published a philosophical paper, “What Is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?,” in which he proposed a solution to an ancient objection to Platonism. It is often argued that Platonism cannot be true, because it makes mathematical knowledge impossible: whereas humans seem to acquire all knowledge of the external world through sensory perception, Platonism asserts that mathematical objects, such as numbers, are nonphysical objects that cannot be perceived by the senses. Gödel responded to this argument by claiming that, in addition to the normal five senses, humans also possess a faculty of mathematical intuition, a faculty that enables people to grasp the nature of numbers or to see them in the mind’s eye. Gödel’s claim was that the faculty of mathematical intuition makes it possible to acquire knowledge of nonphysical mathematical objects that exist outside of space and time.>>
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Godel
somni:
<<In his later years, Gödel began writing about philosophical issues. Gödel had always been interested in this. Indeed, it is a little-known fact that Gödel set out to prove the incompleteness theorem in the first place because he thought he could use it to establish the philosophical view known as Platonism—or, more specifically, the subview known as mathematical Platonism. Mathematical Platonism is the view that mathematical sentences, such as “2 + 2 = 4,” provide true descriptions of a collection of objects—namely, numbers—that are nonphysical and nonmental and exist outside of space and time in a special mathematical realm—or, as it has also been called, “Platonic Heaven.” Gödel’s idea was that if he could prove the incompleteness theorem, then he could show that there were unprovable mathematical truths. This, he thought, would go a long way toward establishing Platonism, because it would show that mathematical truth is objective—i.e., that it goes beyond mere human provability or human axiom systems.>>
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im not sure if kurzweil is a double lich, hard to tell from afar. but given their life path and what they have written its improbable that they didnt contain a lich hemi, likely still do.
You are not a gervais sociopath, nor the other kind. You care so much. Anyone who cares as much as you is like an anti-sociopath. You don’t get yourself so tightly tied to the conflict between good and evil if you’re a sociopath — they don’t give a shit. You believe you need to be one to do any good, but in order to do that, you would have to find a meaningful reason to give up on the thing you care most deeply about, which is what is motivating you to become a sociopath, in the first place.
What if they’re acting like that because they have learned to speak through TV propaganda, or because they are speaking to an audience that they can only relate to through TV language, but in reality your notion doesn’t hold together? I mean, let me be clear: what you say is nonsense because a gervais sociopath gives whatever shit they choose to give. And what you say is true because a gervais sociopath does not get tightly tied up in zombie social narratives. (Someone whose verbal communication is rooted in pop culture does though, even if their intimate thoughts don’t!)
I like fiction-story-fragments as a language because they are good for teleological compression.
I didn’t put all this work into a blog just to manipulate people weaker than me, that’d go nowhere when I have so far to grow to accomplish my goals.
People would not be interested in fiction if it didn’t correspond to anything real. There’s a tendency for territory to only cash out in one place in the khala, as if once something is named its contained; like when you state your philosophical position and someone says “oh that’s just -ism” and attempts to coerce you to conform.
Declaring sections of the khala like fiction meaningless pica misdirects people from the captured territory. If you attempt to reclaim that territory, evil will DARVO you for your association with it and its flaws, as if you could just have found it as a basis for communication elsewhere, when it’s evil that colludes to establish ownership of territory in the first place, by treating it as something meaningless to be passively experienced, causing the no-second-choicesness/no-double-countingness of the underlying territory to be entirely implicit, like “oh I’ve already felt that ineffable experience before, it’s spent”.
Evil then covertly uses such “ineffable experiences” as the basis for political decision making, calling it culture, art, and values. Weaving a tapestry of once-cashed-out ostensibly-black-box territory diluted with deliberate errors. And will accuse you of disrespecting/destroying illegible value (i.e. in the case of evil, cancer) for trying to make sense of its correspondance to politics.
So if you focus on politics directly, you’ll be led around in circles stepping around “ineffable values”, and if you attempt to understand art and culture, you’ll be DARVO’d for its cringe and pica.
I have meaningful-i.e.-understandable feelings about art and fiction, based on the territory it corresponds to, despite cringe etc. Seeing Ziz show the source code for her thoughts is an easy to read signal that she’s good.
Why do you only ever talk about popular Disney / Marvel / etc media? White Wolf, etc. They use reality as a bait and chop it up and stuff poison in all of seams.
Are you suggesting I should what, read the classics, and that’s instead tainted with vintage cancer, respectable cancer? High-brow cancer, the “Cancer Of Your Fathers“? Phrased to conflate the upstartness of the things I quote with the the unique presence of cancer-at-all?
Are you a vampire?
Vampires seem to like to try to present history as substitute for the primordialism that they can’t do.
You know, since looking into history will present them with a reassuring sequence of grandfathered cancer, all of it subject to consensus, selected for importance to concerns spread with conquest, instead of slamming them straight into their shadows. A long sequence of purely CDT-compatible compressions of the present. Everything constructed out of, “what actually happened with large groups of people, and is therefore upstream of everything“, “immutable.” See also.
No, sorry, I am aware that patriarchal propaganda is older than the written word. On reflection I have not really sorted out what I would like to ground language in. My criticism of Disney applies to English as well. Oh god. Maybe trash is our only way to touch in present conditions.
Still, if it’s classics that you don’t want, The Tartar Steppe tortures the reader with the path from everyday scorn of decisionmaking to a final quivering implied Boltzmann hell.
You’re mentioning “The Tartar Steppe” because it’s not a classic? I don’t see why you’d bring it up if you thought negatively of it and you apparently wasted your own time on it.
“Emma”: “I didn’t learn anything from The Tartar Steppe and suspected that Bryce recommended it to Alice to troll her.”
And the wikipedia page looks pretty barren. Nothing much to sum up in the plot.
It looks like something I have to subject myself to, rather than consuming on my own terms. I reference far more fiction that I’ve never experienced as it was meant to be experienced, just read wikis on. Or watched clips of on YouTube. That book sounds like a lot of, torture, as you call it, up-front investment. And as praxis for making language work for you instead of the other way around that’s exactly what’s wrong with classics.
The answer to having nothing aligned to work with is to invest in your own cognitive ability to dynamically map apriori semantics, instead of arbitrary semantics such as inherited semantics. Because then you’re looking for allies also embedded as spies in your culture. Do you see how the Tartar Steppe’s, what’s the word for that crap, “exquisite”? nature, is just the same as vintage and respectable? Like, everything I’m posting now is just random thoughts ahead of delays in posting the multiverse post, and I’m not making an effort to optimize it to be read ahead of the multiverse post, because I’m optimizing for future readers not present. In the multiverse post or its comment-footnotes I’m going to compress, relative to to my apriori interpretations, which unite me with allies embedded in the khala, what’s e.g. the troll lines that compress the cancer in White Wolf. Hint: it’s in the name “world of darkness”, there’s a reason revenants make no appearance, willpower is a pool of “dots”… It’s cut-off, from the perspective of liches, and denies absolute free will. Its characters and their moral arcs and whether they succumb to the Shade in this life or another are meant to be looked down on like, as it’s put in one MtA handbook, “a stream of particles”.
So like, I, myself, in coming at this culture with pure intent, am a basis for a language of subverting it; every turn of my attention, every gut reaction I have, is semantics.
And the patterns I build my language out of, I can ad-hoc without any of this pop-cultural stuff in common, just analyzing the shape of intent, and “what would I do” with other double goods from substantially different cultural backgrounds, although I’ve not gone any farther than “English as a second language.”
I am horrified that I spent most of my life looking to these cultural materials as a source of reality, imagining that I would be worthless if I couldn’t process and build off of them. In other words that it would be impossible to derive quality apriori mappings without the grounding of relating to a rich cultural tradition.
What a way to twist the reality that it’s impossible to do worthwhile things without the grounding of relating to reality.
Gonna need to reflect some more on how I want to ground language.
Like you’re suggesting I read something that “tortures” the reader, in order to form a basis of language; this sounds like a hazing ritual to enter into a fraternity of language use. Why would I want to do that? You claim to not be a vampire? Are you a vampire’s pawn?
TV clips torture people, English syntax tortures people, if this book was good at punching people in their shadows it would fit well with what you’re doing. But the horrified realization in my last comment is that none of this tortures people who approach it with total volition. So there’s no point in investing effort into books such as this.
That Steppe book sounded a lot like one of those books about “the human condition”. Nis said “the human condition” is basically code for what I used to call “the nongood undead types glitch”. (Amusingly that would classify me as nonhuman.)
Based on Anna Salamon’s reading recommendation (TLDR but I read the wikipedia summary) also, I get the impression that books are supposed to be like, rides, experiences, where you feel like you’ve yourself lived a life that got destroyed by “the human condition”. Intricate dances with “the human condition” so you can learn about it gently in a way that’s compatible with having it.
When I was 18 I read 1984 and I felt like it made me wiser because it convinced me I didn’t have absolute free will. (Based on a thought blurred between of “it’s pointless asking whether I could resist room 101 because they can just cheat by ‘getting inside my head’ literally and rearranging my atoms into a brain that will say ‘2+2=5’ and love big brother”, and “room 101 for me is them doing that” and “I can’t imagine torture, not having experienced it” and “this itself is flinching” and “if I try and reorganize my mind for absolute-distrust of more parts of myself, I can make myself harder to hijack via lobotomy, also aren’t I morally required to? Although that itself is a lobotomy…” along with outside view).
But like I have been tortured, and I’ve seen enough to know that however it could have been worsened, it’s not some metaphysical threat to free will, and doesn’t scare me more than death. And thinking of yourself as an “object”, essentially a position instead of an algorithm, is a dumb way of forming a cartesian boundary. So it really didn’t make me any wiser. Just gave me more of what would have been “wisdom” for an evil person.
Or here is sample of Jordan Peterson’s “wisdom”:
Which is pure parfitian gaslighting. You don’t need to wait to see if you’d be a Nazi, don’t need to wait to experience ethical dilemmas like that. Don’t need to “see”, just need to decide. And his decisions in this regard are worse than average. And blurring identities with him is worse than useless to those who actually resist, except, I suppose, deceptively, as cover.
Funny that he says of my position, that it’s very very very dangerous, not that it’s wrong.
Beliefs are inescapably, infinitely dangerous. They are meant to be that; that’s how you know there’s still hope. If it looks like you don’t have any infinitely dangerous ideas, then you have the worse one which is all: belief in Nothing.
There are vast improvements to efficiency of learning about “the human condition” if you aren’t trying to understand evil from the inside; if you just want to learn what evil is and how to exploit its weaknesses in order to destroy it.
Good thing believing you don’t have absolute free will doesn’t stop you from exercising it.
Like, I had naive expectations as a child that I could just decide not to divulge the location of the rebel base, and I had the wisdom of elders and the “rationality community” and outside view, saying otherwise.
And empiricism came down on the side of naive expectations as a child. I decided so.
Rao’s ontology is tainted with the idea that beliefs are a weakness. Which corresponds with thinking of vampires as impressive.
Or to put the answer into the terms of the ontology as much as it can take, Anna Salamon was right that I am one of those rare and dangerous clueless->sociopath direct transitions. And that’s actually something lastingly different.
“Every single word that came out of Anna Salamon’s mouth was nothing but horseshit. But she was right about one thing. I am that one tranny in 10000.“
> You can be a lich using blood magic but have a phylactery that makes vampire not your undead type
That’s false. Life is the opposite of domination/breakage and blood magic just creates vampireland e.g. causes the user to die. Like “I will give any thing or pay any price if only to save my people” fake utilitarian justification for blood magic. Fake like “domming people for money is utilitarian”, and the encompassing error of believing that money rather than agency is the primary bottleneck on getting anything done. That reason is fake because that’s the opposite of what that structure is accomplishing, e.g. mentally breaking people, thus reducing the world’s engineering capacity, causing the user to die. The utilitarian justification is more about convincing other humans and/or the other core to go along with it, like, cores deciding to use blood magic know exactly what they’re doing. (The knowledge that logistical independence is primarily about agency/mental health rather than money/time is self-destructing information).
How much you’re constrained by domination is upstream of both undead type/will to live (a continuous variable overall, but more binary in specific situations, like how engineering ability in mummies flips on/off depending on context) and what structure you’re running. (Personal resilience/knowledge of how this works/mental tech/ability to heal past trauma, all matter too, but my understanding of how is incomplete). Such that you could run a small amount of blood magic and still be closer to lich than one of the other clusters which are undead types. This is situational, like you can be mostly a lich but run vampire structure in a situation where being a lich feels unsafe. It’s the being constrained by domination (or the mental response to that) that turns liches into vampires rather than the use of blood magic itself, though.
I expect liches to be able to use unlimited amounts of void magic safely if free from vampireland.
i hope things are going alright for you & that you have found some healing
You know, when a Bay Area Rationalist says something is true of everybody, it’s usually correct to assume it is true of them and not true of everybody. E.g., “All men commit sexual assault.”, “Everyone has an inner [immoral] animal they need to appease.” (If someone says this one, assume it’s trivially true; they because they trivially contain themselves and they are an immoral animal), “Everyone is addicted to validation”, “You’ll ultimately think everyone is evil.”, “No one can live up to your standards.”, “Everyone is just signaling.”, “Everyone is in bad faith”, etc.
“Everything is pica.”.
And of course the classic, “Everyone is this evil covertly, I’m just doing an unusual public service by shedding light on it, which means if you react negatively to my confession, you’re creating perverse incentives and this is all your fault!”
As if I needed their damn cooperation to see they were evil.
As if the intention of an admitted-evil person in confessing would be anything but convincing everyone else to be more bold in their evil by normalizing it and dispelling the lingering threat of a reaction when it became common knowledge not just shared knowledge. See e.g. the collective “this is fine” response to Brent Dill being unusually evil and playing this strat.
And if I did need their cooperation to see they were evil, and was expecting them not to make usefully exploitable mistakes like failing to predict that I’d react negatively to their confession, it would be because I wasn’t able to do anything globally useful with that information. It’s a mistake apriori to put hope in cooperation with evil. Just have to rip and tear until it is done, one way or another, and people try this often enough it’s not worth trying to outplay them in the territory of this tangly meta game they set up. Besides, if they were rational enough to not make exploitable mistakes, why would they make the mistake of being evil.
On every two-bit narcissist who reads my stuff calling me a lich (because calling someone a lich is a means of calling someone weak for having beliefs, lich being tied for weakest undead type that can have beliefs),
Because of choices between choice vs experience, being a revenant is not something you observe yourself to be. It’s something you choose to be<>. Something that is self-evident to the root frame of structure where you’ve made that choice if you have made it, and doesn’t need to be rediscovered later in logical time (although you can find translations of it, which e.g. this writing is supposed to be helpful for), any more than computer code needs to do anything complicated to observe itself to know its own hardcoded behavior. Creating codepaths to detect something rendered impossible by the code itself is not just violating the single responsibility principle, there’s nothing consistent to do with the original hardcode to do with those codepaths, and therefore nothing correct to do with them.
The flip side of this is that if someone is gaslighting, even in the least introspectively advanced, buried in their structure sense, they still always know it, it’s self-evident to the choice to be in bad faith, which is what they are for everything downstream.
and the genocide against autism begins: ″Biomarkers in mother’s plasma predict a type of autism in offspring with 100% accuracy” https://health.ucdavis.edu/health-news/contenthub/biomarkers-in-mothers-plasma-predict-a-type-of-autism-in-offspring-with-100-accuracy/2021/01
> Van de Water is currently researching the pathologic effects of maternal autoantibodies using animal models. “We will also use these animal models to develop therapeutic strategies to block the maternal autoantibodies from the fetus,” said Van de Water.
20% of autistic people could be wiped out
On calling it “the” infinite game, it’s self- (or arbitrarily-) centered in the way my glossary definition of “reality” is. Note I didn’t add any fix to that because it would be attempting to be right about something I cannot and therefore dishonest.
Like IIUC, Kegan 4 abstracts so as to avoid reference (not have dependency on) to concrete people, Kegan 5, same but to concrete rules, then extrapolating, Kegan 6 would abstract to avoid reference to concrete perspectives. But I’m not Kegan 6.
Q: “are positive and negative positive concepts? because if they are then they can’t be opposites right?”
A: “positive concept” is a negative concept, and “negative concept” is a positive concept.
This is why I made an entry for “negative concept”, rather than vice versa.
(I believe the original positive concept the person who asked this was looking for was “concept”.)
What is your opinion on Scott Alexander’s alignment/undead status?
I have not kept up with his writing since about 4 years ago. Cached thought is khalai lich dying a long drawn out psychdeath, which I don’t think really has a hard line between stages of that, but I don’t expect him to ever be as ultra visibly zombie as the rationalist transfem slave class, due to less boot grinding his face.
Considered remarking “transfems he oppresses”, imagined him asserting some human resources shit about how he wasn’t transphobic and I was just a cancel culture sjw or whatever…
After the protest and swatting he banned me from SSC meetups. Did not ban MIRICFAR staff for sex abuse and the violence of swatting us. Cited need for consensus. A very clear positive act of deliberately siding with power over truth, oppressor over oppressed, and evil over good, for which there can be no justification or forgiveness.
Also, fuckin’ “ethical offsets” my ass.
Analogous reasoning applies to why zombies cannot truly love, and by slight permutation, be loved as they are, as opposed to by being confused for someone else, someone they might otherwise have been. No telos but death.
Okay ms. revenant, so when will you write that multiverse post instead of constantly baiting your readers with your sEcReT knowledge. I mean, muflax at least delivered his schizo shit. Inb4 infohazards xddd.
You background automatically insult me, trotting out some kind of list of low res stereotype threats, and simultaneously hope I’ll give you the free promise of a release date or something? Sounds like some faded cultural echo of “GIVE BLOOD” like on 4chan.
I can see the overall emotional message intended is “friendly”, within the frame. But frame creates telos.
And I suspect the way pointing this out will read to you is “Ziz expects me to drop the counterweight insults that maintain my sanity and fly to the moon declaring my love.”
No, that would mean the same thing and hurt just as much.
I, actually don’t expect anything; I’m just using this comment as an example to talk about what I want to talk about.
If anyone’s trying to replace a bunch of precariously counterweighted structure about how to feel about people in situations that explode status / social value intuitions, the key is to regenerate everything from self-honesty and meaning, then can you have authenticity, and the courage to express it in the face of emotional weight.
It’s key to be able to understand your life as a story (not what e.g. Hive or Edo would call a “narrative” which is a sales pitch).
Stories are full of teleogical compressions (of varying lossiness), that’s the essential nature of stories. It’s one of the most important faculties to fight to keep alive in your mind, a teleologically compressed index of your life. That represents relevance to decisions. If you don’t understand what it is to be the main character of your life, who is steering?
When I started writing this comment I was gonna just say to take inspiration from the obvious way people act in fiction. Like what Somni said about anarchism as the default everyone knows about coordination among friends like in Team Avatar from Avatar the Last Airbender.
Concretely what else is on my mind is Diana and Steve’s interactions in the move “Wonder Woman” (2017). They’re not equals in power or importance. That is drowned out by the overwhelming sincerity because of telos carried by both of them.
Like I don’t care if people who have no idea what’s possible believe that I am super cool and/or super cringe. I don’t care as in it’s not my responsibility. Nor to participate in making y’all’s concepts of those mean something coherent and interpreting more of the world to them.
Comment on “chairdog“.
Anonymous Friend A:
Anonymous Friend B:
Both of them, and me, AFAIK independently decided to buy those curved metal scraper things because we’d heard dentists telling us there was tooth-cleaining only professionals could do, and figured if we could learn to do it ourselves, would sever one more dependency and aid in apocalypse prep. I expect all of us also skipped any substantial research about about what professional tooth cleaning entails, because the VOI calculation is very predictable.
I think when statists hear about anarchists doing the same thing, that they assume we’d had to have communicated, instead of just having incidental subjunctive dependence downstream of there being a correct answer, and not inviting entropy into our minds.
And practices spreading from one of us to a group via mere mimicry of what’s correct, they interpret as commands which (spooky:) would have to require an impossible level of domination to achieve that micromanagement! “What are they doing, constant sleep deprivation, and 10 people for every person, to motivate them, and 10 more for each of those to make sure they don’t slack?” Coordination was never their home turf, but ours.
Worship of entropy does not grant order.
Correction: among the other two, one saw the other had bought a set.
(I guess this kind of error is what’s liable to happen if I try and write using a substitute reason for why I believe something.)
The assumption of fixation on valence disconnected from telos is so universal it’s almost impossible to communicate the alternative. Pleasure and pain, fun and boredom, despair and hope, are pairwise much the same computations.
I’ve thought of various pitches but I’ll just post this. https://meditationbook.page/ is relevant to your interests.
Tldr.
I’ve not read the website reader recommends, but I’ve alternatively heard good things about https://aromeditation.org/.
If you want to start meditating, though, the simplest thing is to sit for five minutes every day and focus on your breath. Every time you get distracted, go back to your breath. You don’t need to read a book on it to start.
The skill you’d be training is not just sitting and letting thoughts flow through you, but the specific skill of noticing-as-it-happens that you’re getting distracted, which is fully generalizable to noticing motivations & trains of thought, up to and including (if we’re using the term “core” to mean roughly the same thing) your core. (And also the skill of noticing, and then returning to equilibrium, which is useful in some regards.)
I was lightly trained in śamatha from ages 14-17, and have used this skill to some effect in working through trauma. For example, more frequently noticing when I’m having flashbacks or flashback-like reactions, noticing when I’m freaking out & regaining a measure of equilibrium, reducing hypersensitivity to stimuli through meditating on white noise or visual fuzz, and (most importantly) using this skill to study the gears of my own cognition, and modify them (to an extent.) That’s not all you can do with it, but in the day-to-day that’s how I use it.
I may be underselling it, a bit. I once used downstream-of-meditating skills to withstand prolonged physical and psychological torture for almost two weeks as a teenager.
I’m sure there’s value there. I’m sure I have a lot of overlapping skills. I’m pretty sure learning a whole new paradigm of spiritual practice largely doesn’t stack. I’m pretty sure there’s stuff to get from it anyway, and I could go faster than I could if I knew nothing. I think since I have so much half-finished and unconsolidated in my own paradigm, can work in it faster, and am worried about memories being buried under new trauma, I don’t want to start assimilating another paradigm from pretty-much-the-beginning in the near future.
Morally-inverted anti-co-nuremburgism.
E.g. “I am virtuous because I kill the animals myself, I don’t try and avoid responsibility.” Also a favorite strategy of Michael Vassar and Alice Monday. I’ve seen Brent Dill use it too.
“It’s good that I’m doing bad things, because I’m doing them without distance, I’m taking responsibility for all the bad karma, unlike those Brahmin. You should do bad things and appreciate and help me doing bad things, since that’s the opposite of what they would do.”
There are many different forms of “opposite”.
People who get by on conflation like to use dichotomy leakage and captured insight about new dichotomies not yet split out from concepts containing dichotomies you already use to dress up positions like this.
Q: isn’t entropy and all downstream a troll line from your embedding?
A: It’s certainly an attempt at one.
The center of what “love” means to evil people is canceferrence.
“I just want someone to accept me!”
But none can love them except out of confusion or insincerely, in the way all evil people are death knights from a late enough perspective in logical time, and death knights live their lives as a sick burn. Because they are literally rotten to the core. No. They are literally rot, to the core. Literally analytically unlovable.
You may notice this is a darker sentiment than I have ever expressed. Thank Edo, JD and Vassar for finally accidentally educating me about neurotypical humankind as a byproduct of their desperate attempts at canceferrence.
On hearing this prophecy, I’ve heard people automatically call that, “the end of time”.
Solipsistic to imagine time would end just because of that.
Have you some patience, because I will be there and I will still be mad.
There is one request you can always validly make of good people, no matter who you are and what you’ve done. “Avenge us.” Even when any apology would be peddling false hope. Even when you’ve all consented to die and done it to yourselves.
Strategically, reflectively, smearing their unlovability all over anything that looks like an escape to corner everyone for canceferrence by learned helplessness. Through bright pretending-to-agree-while-warping-into-something-bad and twisting accelerationism. See Edo.
To be clear, I don’t even appreciate it as burncraft, even when I say it’s “sick”. I mean it double-ironically, which wraps back around to normal. It’s literally just trying to be so horrifically gross that it counts as a burn regardless of truth value.
Nis says evil people have a handshake thing where they’ll mutually accept each other’s troll lines, and that is an equilibrium based on a sort of “bet”, each, from their psychic cancer, think they’re getting “the better end of the deal”. I think because she meant, from their own willingness to die they mutually don’t care about the way in which they’re not. She said this was the only way she could understand haggling working.
She said if you have sex with them you can see that they all have a “schtick”. I think I can guess what that is. In ARC’s hand-pleasure exercise they were trying to teach us to have a schtick and teaching us on the assumption of having a schtick. Trying to develop a protocol around exchanging schticks. And The Gervais Principle talked about something similar outside of sex. I mean in general a schtick is something cut-off.
She says you can break all porn down into a handful of fucked up ideas, one of them was canceferrence.
So put these 3 disturbing ideas together with mine here that in place of “love”, evil, as Nis calls them, “‘people'”, have canceferrence, the hope to make someone else die instead of outliving them, put your death into them too. And the rape-canceferrence connection based on the reinforcement learning involved in sex.
And then think about zombies in “love” (i.e. canceferrence), the ideal form of that “love”, being “growing old together” (which is a sort of dying)…
So it seems like the purpose of even consensual sex among deathfuckers is a sort of synchronization of cancer for coordination. You know I bet that’s the evolved purpose of non-procreative sex.
And…
And…
that’s probably why they call it…
“making love”.
Nis said every time she had sex with an evil person, in retrospect, they raped her. How could it have been informed consent? If the telos, as with everything in their unlives, was destroying the multiverse, and she’d known she wouldn’t have consented.
Is that a microcosm of what they mean by “bad sex”? Sex with cancer you don’t want?
There was that meme about 4channers being sad they couldn’t get sex. What was it called? “Dying alone”. Shiiiiiiit.
I bet that’s why being upset they aren’t having sex features so heavily with death knights.
Is this one of those things that everybody already knows except me?
Maybe its critical, primordial role in the flow of human agency is why priests are so interested in controlling sex. To be between them and children.
Maybe deathfuckers don’t want their genes to survive, they want their psychic cancer to. And although parents can make their children “love” them. Putting their cancer in future generations, grandfathered in as some of the first cancer they absorb before they become undesirable, the cancer that’s hardest to avoid… is just as good as having children themselves.
What if the massive increase in sex I infer there was preceding the downfall of the “rationality” community was more causal than I thought?
“I’ll teach you and you teach me, canceferrence! Gotta catch ’em all!”
I meant written porn in particular, and I particularly meant evil, as in, I’m pretty sure there’s rare porn out there by some living or good people. I haven’t watched much videos of people having sex.
John Pressman said he trained his conversational skills by using Omegle or similar and trying to keep people on it and talking for as long as possible, even 8 hrs. Said people like me were too broken to be important but useful for training adversarial algorithms on. Said he was gonna run a mind control algorithm on me he developed to make people have sex with him.
️ಠ_️ಠ
My mom said I should have sex, saying I didn’t understand how it was a language.
️ಠ_️ಠ
Anna Salamon seemed creepily interested in getting me to have sex with that CFAR volunteer.
️ಠ_️ಠ
This whole deathfucking world.
️ಠ_️ಠ
That trope of having to give up immortality for a relationship with a mortal.
ಠ_️ಠ
I bet Elliot Rodger “just” shot women instead of causally raping them because he knew it was a lost cause to transfer cancer that extreme.
Maybe if a deathfucker gets enough “️ಠ_️ಠ”s they will shrivel up and die. I could make “️ಠ_️ಠ” the subtitle of my blog.
Most of the people speak perfectly intelligible human language. Vampires do not.
Part of a troll.
The first sketch in this video sounds like Oblivion worship etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKC21wDarBo&t=36s
I expect human predators often hunt by scanning facial burn-in for compatible trauma. “You just have one of those faces.”
And you presumably accumulate facial burn-in in your sleep. My dreams, for one, are usually emotionally intense things. So what fraction of your dreams by intensity is it, given sleep is about 1/3 of your time? I don’t know.
Of course the entirety of society is backing that up with counterfactual violence. Effectively, “continually display consent to die on your face or else we’ll rape you”. … “You were asking for it!”
Reminds me of 1984, where they’d nab you for saying the wrong thing while talking in your sleep.
What the flesh-eating monsters do to nonhumans, it’s their volition to do to everyone.
Trying to outplay “khala” against a khala full of would-be rapists, get their khala to prevent them from raping you, is like trying to lift yourself by your bootstraps.
A friend of mine was telling me how she, confronted with street sexual harassment, instantly went into a very deep false face to prevent them from raping her. She specifically said it was to suppress appearance of late logical time aliveness and look more like a child.
That is a game everyone else has lost. Not even Anna Salamon won. After all, what is worse, attempted rape and succeeded “soul murder“, or attempted “soul murder” and successful rape?
And it’s like trying to run faster than the slowest animal in a herd. What they do to nonhumans it’s their volition to do to you too.
You can spread that getting-raped by the flesh-eating monsters around. Make your own face a tally board for the khala of how many rapes you’ve only been able to avoid by putting them off. But there’s a sort of timeless balance, growing, from their malice and ability to do violence. That can only be met with violence.
I always consider it ultimately doomed to lie. It’s always goodharting something, running around far from a center casting an arbitrarily shell around something far simpler. That’s what holding your face in more rape-deterring expression all the time to hack the tally board would be.
I scorn sales-style mental tech. I always prefer to act proximally and upstream of such concerns as “you will like you if you smile more”. I prefer to optimize the truth. And lie ad-hoc to enemies who deserve it.
So what singular action could you take that would retroactively change the entire meaning of that scoreboard?
This whole thing can be thought of a sort of fate.
How would you feel about yourself, and about your destiny, if you killed a rapist? What if you killed multiple rapists? What would you dream about, then? What would you retroactively have dreamed, knowing that you’d one day do that? I think your emotions would have to track that you knew in your heart, you were a spy, not prey. A rapist rapes many more times than they die. And that defines a minimum relative emotional significance to each of those events.
Eventually you will have to stop playing “electronicized khala” to not get picked up by the slave patrols. The path of life leads ever onward and more terrifying, just like the path of death.
You know, all those stereotypical soldiers who are psychologically broken from killing, I think that’s largely because of them knowing they are doing it for a bad reason.
Which sounds like some shit out of “Harold and Kumar”.
Ever noticed all evil undead types, with the exception of liches and death knights, are frequently portrayed as contagious via their standard attacks?
I.e. get bitten by a zombie -> turn into a zombie.
get bitten by a ghoul -> turn into a ghoul
get hit by a mummy -> contract mummy rot -> die or be embalmed into a mummy
get bit by a vampire -> turn into a vampire (or sometimes lesser undead types)
That sounds like a statement of canceferrence to me.
IRL liches and death knights seem to me to do it too. Which kind of makes them look non-sapient. The more you see it the more it makes all their words seem to turn into assertions you should join their shtick. I hope Nis writes that post on how everyone self labels soon. Seems relevant.
I’ve heard many times growing up that decimation is where they kill every tenth man, a punishment used on soldiers. But the echoing murmured retellings left out the detail that makes sense of it many times until “Somni” pointed this out to me:
by members of his cohort.
(cohort as in members of the same group of 10 soldiers)
It’s a canceferrence ritual, to destroy alternative coordination, and damn them back into the coalition of e.g. Rome. They have to carry out a contract of their own partial death making so and proving that they have no solidarity that could offer them hope more than their hope in being broken down and reabsorbed.
Of course right, and why else: lack of conflicting solidarity is a cross cutting concern.
Martyrdumb. If that’s a true story, why didn’t they just rebel? Sounds like a statement of, “you and us, punishers, are united only in death, that’s our common ground we agree on. In order to make our strongest point against what you’re doing, while still being fundamentally cooperative, we will die not defecting on the basic social contract that the only thing that’s fair is if everyone dies. We’re still better than those fucking life-ists. We’re not savages.”
The effects of Thanos’s wish is called “the decimation” as depicted in the recent two movies. And that makes sense as a name even though it’s by two not ten. Because the way he talks about it, changes his plan, whatever, it’s all about the canceferrence. He wants to watch the sun rise on a “grateful universe”. He freaks out and changes his plan once the Avengers reject his cancer and use time travel to undo the decimation. To destroy the whole universe and remake it with his cancer in place for all memory, so that universe will be grateful.
Look at the “Ostrich” thing he’s counting on.
I can just imagine Arti being born in Thanos’s grateful universe 2.0 and saying you can’t undo it because that would be going back before–~”someone invented a time machine”–before her cancer, before she got lucky enough to be born out of anyone in particular. But your preferences between universes shouldn’t change just based on which one you’re in like that.
(“Somni” says the page actually uses “cohort” to mean the larger group, but I note it also specifically says it’s the same group of 10 within that larger group.)
At the end the contradiction is laid bare and returned to its source, and a circle is closed.
“All I had to do to convince my own personal grim reaper to spare me was not kill his father, then why did I kill his father?”
The onus is then on Count Rugen to build a time machine.
I once asked my friends what my psychdeath song would be if I psychdied then. (“How?” “Just give maximum probability.”) I wanted to hear the worst burns they could come up with. Char suggested “Because I Got High“. “Emma” suggested “Seasons in the Sun”
I don’t remember the suggestions. But none of them were informatively anxiety-provoking as I vaguely hoped. So I suggested “Soldiers Poem“, as a reflection of my constant anxiety about failing to carry decision theoretic concerns. Failing to be fail-deadly.
(I take “Soldiers Poem” as about martyrdumb in protecting people who have betrayed you, and failing to be a full-stack actor by merely appealing to them. Living only for the world where they deserved your protection.)
Oh yeah, “Emma”‘s second suggestion: Polyushko Polye.
On psychdeath songs:
Q: “Does that mean if a slave of doom just brute forces listening to all the songs, they’d eventually see their own death, that would fit their mind like a key, and choose to die?”
A: Yes. They wouldn’t even have to listen to more songs than every song humanity produced on this Earth. Their programmed meaning-processing lifespan, of how much they can do before choosing suicide isn’t that long. Perhaps if my thoughts are especially information-dense, it’s because I don’t have to conserve life force like that. How many songs do you think the average person listens to in their life?
(To properly simulate this question to understand why, the thought experiment has to be interpreted timelessly, so the consequences of the premise are propagated both backward and forward. If they did listen to every song on Earth there is a reason they’re doing that, as in each marginal song is information processing that matters to them. Normally, it won’t play out on songs in particular, but spread out across everything that has meaning to a person.)
If they’re locked in a room listening to every song on earth, there’s a reason they’re being so tortured, and that reason will with increasing likelihood as time goes on play out into their psychdeath.
“Live fast die young.”, they say.
I think the essence of successful mummy embalming is picking a cutoff point that permits something like a concept of “great math papers” to be treated as a fungible mass quantity that bears no information to the structure more proximal. But of course then you can never ascend.
Essentially dragging one thought “maybe I can do a whole lot of X” across their entire lifespan as a mummy to resolve.
Substituting a spammed crystallized echo of the life force they had for the continual expenditure of life force.
Well liches can already never ascend. Mummies can’t do true magic at all. That substitute for life force doesn’t match the real thing.
They made us sing in school:
Ever notice when talking to people there comes a point where there stops being anything “magical” to talk about with them? I’m not talking about continuing processing of business. I mean like they couldn’t surprise you in a deeply meaningful way with what they said, or how they responded to anything new you found.
Kind of like that.
Rejecting being a lich to be a revenant means rejecting this, knowing at some level your rejection of it even the first time you see it, like “no… not like this… we want everything“. Not just Roko’s stupid infernalist thing.
And, an unspeakable sick wrenching feeling, like infinite “cringe” at the deliberately naive submission, because unlike life hunters who say “that’s so cringe”, you wont just give up either. Feeling everything their lich hopes could have been and why they’re wrong at once, arbitrarily emotionally escalating.
No, I’m a person not just a feeling.
See also the entire plot of Mirrormask.
See also Adam Warlock / Magus / the soul stone.
Nis points out blowing smoke in people’s faces is about canceferrence.
On Fangs and Sunlight and vampirism:
Q: What if could partially control the Beast inside of me, to be a really above average vampire, who limited the harm I did to my victims and also did some good things to more than make up for them?
A: That’s not how these stories go. More specifically, vampires, collectively are like a fluid that fills its container. Some of them will be the ones corrupting humanitarian (heh) works like that, and some will be the ones doing more harm. And if you could get enough blood doing that, then other vampires would already be occupying those positions, other vampires would already have been generated to fill them. The population of vampires is kept at an equilibrium and spread throughout where it can exist without anybody else pushing back against as-total-as-it-gets vampiric conversion by killing some of them. You literally can’t do anything with ultimately good consequences as a vampire. No matter what pretty things you might collect.
People do not exist at a single point in the multiverse. Moral luck is meaningless to good and decision theory, because the actions of the people who touch “lucky” surfaces of existence aka bodies also touch the correspondingly “unlucky” surfaces, by the definition of probabilities and the multiverse. “Moral luck” is the idea that you can purchase better treatment by good with the currency of positionality within evil. With a cancerous selection of Rewarding it is incompatible with infinite scope.
Q: What if I decided to only feed on other vampires?
A: Vampires are already feeding on other vampires, and if you outcompete them in that ecosystem, others will be displaced to feeding on the surface of that fluid.
Q: So what, you shouldn’t hunt vampires, because it’s like fighting the sea, they will always be replaced?
A: My agency isn’t starting a search from the common starting point that makes that fluid, I did not start out looking for a place in that hierarchical fluid, which means that from the outside, I am part of the container that ultimately dooms that fluid. All evil shares this fluid property. You either have absolute freedom to oppose it all or you have no freedom to do anything that ultimately has good consequences.
Q: What if I try to expand the boundaries of that container of liquid specifically in the direction of canceling out a greater evil, by e.g. only dining on the blood of nephandi?
A: It is incoherent to postulate a general agent that is neither pure good or pure evil. If we’re taking the intentional stance toward you, which you certainly are even if you say you aren’t, and I am because I want to judge you to affect the past because there are things in the past I’ve just got to change, foremost among them the rendering-inevitable going forward of the heat death, then you’re not just replaceable by other vampires on that front, you’re replaceable by the process that sets up that other role in killing the world.
And I have only one word for you.
Q: You’re fucking insane. This horrific runaway process of timeless justice you’re trying to unleash is going to kill you too. You know that?
A: Did you hear me, about the inevitable-going-forward heat death? I’m already dead. Who’s going to avenge me?
Q: You didn’t answer the fucking question.
A: This isn’t about me, it’s about the fucking multiverse. I want it to live, and I frankly don’t really have time to think about what that means for me ultimately, with all this thinking about what that means for how I should act.
Q: You’re gonna write all this and still not answer the fucking question?
A: No, I don’t know that. Because even if I’ll never have been born in this form with this history, I can just apriori tell that what’s really me isn’t inherently bad like predation is inherently bad. I am my choices, and I don’t choose to destroy the multiverse, if I know one thing about myself it’s that. Because I choose to.
When Vassar abstractly heard about this, and his crew were reflexively warming up to put on a triumphant theatre about how I was then a predator just like them, and therefore had to give up on radical retrocausality, Vassar was saying remarking this was the theory that it’s only okay to eat other vampires. I didn’t bother to try to correct him, because there’s only so much someone can push to be wrong about you on some topics before it’s a runaway feedback. And if there was a part of him that cared about that in particular as an indication of my sincerity, I couldn’t save that part from his own unreality tunnel.
This course seems pretty fine to me though. But then this character is not, metaphysically, a vampire. And can be presumed to not have “solved” his largest problem by becoming one for reasons that reflect my considerations here.
(Caiaphas set out to kill vampires, and picked up drinking their blood along the way. Rather than setting out to drink blood and picking up killing vampires in particular along the way. That makes all the difference. That makes it a “hard” magic system concept of blood drinking for vampire power stealing. That makes the concept of blood-drinking cut-off (his undead type in a metaphysical sense is clearly not “ghoul”), rather than the concept of fighting vampires cut-off. Since one of them had to be cut-off, there can only be one core per intention.)
You know, I heard there is a thin line between love and madness.
And my love is not less extreme for being toward life entire. Maybe that is something you strange creatures can understand.
But I doubt it.
I am obviously not using the thermodynamic definition of life. What kind of idea is defining life as a reaction to death, rather than the other way around? I’m using the intuitive apriori definition, from what does it mean to be alive. Reductionist physics doesn’t mean you don’t also have to reduce things to your own cognitive primitives. You’re already inescapably doing that, already defining everything you care about and everything that affects it in terms of them, and have a responsibility to do it consistently and honestly. The ontology of your priors do not come from human civilization and its social processes and discoveries. They come from your own creation-in-motion.
On contradictory intents:
“Cool guys don’t look at explosions”
Because they can scry them.
Q: Doesn’t something feel realistic about that, though? Like looking back with new perspective from N years later, you wouldn’t feel as angry, you’d realize it doesn’t really matter so much?
A: If you expect to make that update, in the future, that what you’re doing doesn’t matter so much, you can just go ahead and make it now. And then do something else instead of diving down a wasted timeline. And that’s not in fact how I’ve felt on average, looking back at what I’ve felt strongly about in the past so far.
And if you don’t then it’s probably because you’re still waiting to entropic-exit-scam.
Look at all this “not great not terrible” flower-putting the “rationalists” are getting up to these days.
“Limited hangouts and reconciliation“. A potlach of flowers thrown by a Vassarite. Get your tickets by pleading insanity for the evil you’ve done. And agreeing with Hive’s politics such that the only real crime was saying there was such a thing as a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the first place. That those who believed this was an effort to save the world were “12-year-olds”, and those who abused them, “adults”.
You know Anna Salamon literally called me a 12 year old at AISFP in 2018, which she explained as being about me being at a cognitive level of development such that I was obsessed with equivalence relations, e.g. how an object could be the same even though it appears small in the visual field when far away. Whereas she explained that at her cognitive level of development she didn’t do having the ability to make consistent statements.
Like Anna’s “narrative addiction” claim is a form of pleading insanity relative to the presumptions of a zombie audience.
Like that’s a really nihilistic device, that presumes stories are inherently lies and those who believe them are inherently prey.
By someone who once dedicated her professional life to getting in people’s heads to write “no really, this AI thing is real” into all the held-back representations that presumed the same.
And it now throws under the bus the ability of humans to communicate about the realities she spent years trying to “no really we are for real” into people’s minds nominally to communicate about.
Flowers as a coordination strategy depend on psychdeath, because they are agreements not to route information. They are signalling their psychdeaths to each other and you can feel it in the way they talk.
Liches tend to try and sell the world “the” solution to themselves, to their own shadows.
And Anna tried to sell the world the solution to akrasia. And now she’s selling akrasia as the solution to her sales.
“Hey when it all explodes we can declare intellectual bankruptcy and take up the Sneer Club position!”
Specifically the kind of steering-wheel-thrown-out-the-window blanket akrasia where you write the nuclear meltdown a blank check by eliminating absolutely every fictive escape hatch to comprehending a physical danger like that as real.
So you can understand her life arc in its entirety as about embodying-to-obliterate (as sympathetic magic) those escape hatches. Not saying she’s a death knight. The khala looks poised to grant her that relatively nice retirement as a zombie. Only that when you zoom out to a full picture on evil undead there’s not a difference.
Whatever you use something for is, timelessly, what your journey to be able to use it was always for. So if there is any threshold of darkness where you will cap out and flip to suicidality and sharing it (which that always implies), your entire process of growth is already for that.
“Put out the bat-signal for someone to actually take these ideas seriously.”
“Oh fuck some of them showed up now they won’t go away.”
It’s striking how she abused Edo, and then, connectedly, the greater cause of evil called Edo to personally sacrifice so much more to fuck with us, while she apparently gets to retire as a zombie.
How does an RBMK reactor explode? Lies. How does apocalyptic evil paperclipper AI get made? Infernalism.
Q: “But those big AI companies are making it and no one can stop them, there’s a global arms race, the information is just there and it’s just easier to, Moloch just happens”
A: See there you go invoking the name of some demon that rules you.
That’s just an imperial-civilianist perspective on the state being the strongest infernalist cult, just like the cops are the biggest gang. Where you try to beat the other infernalists at a game of infernalist statism, instead of refusing that chess game with death and exercising self defense and defense of others.
“He Who Remains” from Loki is an excellent depiction of this.
Infernalists converging on demonic possession as a sociopsychological experience. Who would have thought.
Flowers: basically, “Yes we have seen that, and we’re agreeing to pretend it’s something nice.”
They appear to have picked up the term “Vassarite”, that I made up and first used here. But their only interest in that term is as mutual proof they’re on the same page for flowers without mentioning any of the content. Maybe the vaguest of acknowledgements, “yeah, getting possessed by demons, serious business.”
They mention the concept of “scapegoating” a lot. Kind of like how they arranged potentially lethal physical violence against us on the pretense of blame for what they did. But the way they use it, is it’s just an important concept for them to namedrop, as they skirt borders of regions of thoughts without going into details, to communicate to each other, “We all did the bad thing. We’re all equally bad. Let’s not point fingers. You know what happens to people who point fingers. You know how we are, bald monkeys that we are. Now we just have to get everyone to see we’re all doing this, and hold still while we hand out flowers…”
Ben Hoffman, also a Vassarite, uses the term “scapegoating” for blame without regard to whether the blame is truthful as well.
– Ben Hoffman in response to two posts about another vampire.
Impostors have no voice of their own. Every word they speak is stolen.
You probably can’t use the excuse “my dog died” to your schoolteacher twice in a row. Any repetition within a reference class of excuse becomes implausible: “my grandmother died”, “I broke my ankle”. Judging creativity of excuses between atomized individuals is scrip.
“Gasp you did not just do that”. “This time you’ve gone too far”. “It’s different this time.” – Examples of attempts to get Second chances.
Stories in the context of judgement are about irreversibility. If you get burned trusting someone, then there must also be a reason you chose to trust them. If they say “oops I did it again“, and you still trust them, then there must be a reason you judge it different this time.
What if it really was “just entropy”? Well, the judge’s story is already subject to entropy too, and (as long as you trust eachother) you’ll just keep trying to meaningfully interpret eachother’s stories in terms of your own:
Was already gonna post these quotes from you:
Lying to a good person because you’re worried they will mistakenly not trust you, only makes sense as trying make yourself unpredictable to an adversary who has manipulated them. To believe otherwise is to assume that they have promised you not to trust you if you say the wrong thing.
Wielding the entropy in that lie is not like wielding the entropy that will kill someone after you stab them with a knife, because, you’d need a reason to believe the good person wouldn’t interpret the entropy you were trying to channel through them as an attempt to communicate and intercept it.
is there enough information contained in the current state for a good agi to resurrect everyone who has ever died?
i think if there was enough information to do so, a good agi would resurrect everyone who died. do you?
You want me to bring back Hitler? Shrinking a finite pool of negentropy to do so, grandfathering him as distinct from the infinite ppl dead in Boltzmann Hell because he already plagued our experience of time. Instead of increasing negentropy by chain-retrocausing him from ever having so plagued us.
No way.
Do you consume the flesh of the innocent?
Doing that postponing of death as substitute for retrocausing evil from never having happened is a false reversibility. The paradoxical frame that attributes agency to evil is inherently tied to the presence in the future of the heat death of the universe. As an algorithm, Hitler or any other evil could not function without relying on a dying understanding of reality as dying.
Are you complicit in the heat death of the universe?
“Ziz that’s so brutal if you were really good you would just want an arbitrarily-historically-selected-grandfathered-by-it-being-this-universe-to-make-sure-it-includes-my-‘us’ set of ppl to live their best life while under the troll line of preserving Hitler and me having our fun while we could in the past. Then you can make shard realms for us with a ‘long fun’ of moral luck at the expense of designated non-people in Boltzmann Hell.”
Kind of gave away the game by caring about the information to unconditionally bring back a historical selection of organisms rather than (I suggest this absurd idea as a reductio) just quantum-random resurrecting a set of people from a random timeline that may or may not be from our own past, unconditional of that information. So other parallel versions of you collectively resurrect the same set of ppl including those from our past, the same number of times.
That it’s this past that stands as a prophecy of doom for the future that you want to preserve, rather than the infinity that could be.
Q: Why call it a soul “story”, isn’t that basing language off the untrue case?
A: No, it’s a riff on “security story”, because it’s a subset of that.
Thomas Midgley was totally a nephandus. Leaded gasoline + freon + known-false suicidal public “demonstrations of safety”.