Alternative title: “The difference is that I am right“.
The government is something that can be compromised by bad people. And so, giving it tools to “attack bad people” is dangerous, they might use them. Thus, pacts like “free speech” are good. But so is individuals who aren’t Nazis breaking those rules where they can get away with it and punching Nazis.
Nazis are evil, and don’t give a shit about free speech or nonaggression of any form except as pretense.
If you shift the set of precedents and pretenses which make up society from subject to object, the fundamental problem with Nazis is not that they conduct their politics in a way that crosses an abstract line. It’s that they fight for evil, however they can get away with. And are fully capable of using a truce like “free speech” to build up their strength before they attack.
Even the watered down Nazi ideology is still designed to unfold via a build up of common knowledge and changing intuitions about norms as they gain power, and “peaceful deportation” failing to work, into genocide. Into “Kill consume multiply conquer” from the intersection of largest demographic Schelling majorities. The old Nazis pretended to want a peaceful solution first too. And they consciously strategized about using the peaceful nature of the liberal state to break it from within.
You are not in a social contract with Nazis not to use whatever violence can’t be prohibited by the state. If our society was much more just but still had Nazis, it would still be bad for there to be norm where the jury will to practice jury nullification selectively to people who punch people they think are bad. And yet, it would be good for a juror to nullify a law against punching Nazis.
Isn’t this inconsistent? Well, a social contract to actually uphold the law, do not use jury nullification, along with any other pacts like that, will not be followed by Nazis insofar as breaking them seems to be the most effective strategy for “kill consume multiply conquer”. Principles ought to design themselves knowing they’ll only be run on people interested in running them.
If you want to create something like a byzantine agreement algorithm for a collection of agents some of whom may be replaced with adversaries, you do not bother trying to write a code path, “what if I am an adversary”. The adversaries know who they are. You might as well know who you are too. This is not entirely the case with neutral. As that’s sustained by mutual mental breakage. Fake structure “act against my own intent” inflicted on each other. But it is the case with evil.
If your demographic groups are small and weak enough to be killed and consumed rather than to multiply and conquer if it should come to this, or if you would fight this, you are at war with the Nazis.
Good is at an inherent disadvantage in epistemic drinking contests. But we have an advantage: I am actually willing to die to advance good. Most evil people are not willing to die to advance evil (death knights are though). In my experience, vampires are cowards. Used to an easy life of preying on normal people who can’t really understand them or begin to fight back. Bullies tend to want a contract where those capable of fighting leave each other alone.
Humans are weak creatures; we spend third of our lives incapacitated. (Although, I stumbled into using unihemispheric sleep as a means of keeping restless watch while alone). Really, deterrence, mutual assured destruction, is our only defense against other humans. For most of history, I’m pretty sure a human who had no one who would avenge them was doomed by default. Now it seems like most people have no one who would avenge them and doesn’t realize it. And are clinging to the rotting illusion that we do.
It seems like an intrinsic advantage of jailbroken good over evil, there are more people who would probably actually avenge me if I was killed or unjustly imprisoned than almost anyone in the modern era. My strategy does not require that I hang with only people weaker than me, and inhibit their agency.
In the wake of Brent Dill being revealed as a rapist, and an abuser in ways that are even worse than his crossings of that line, a lot of rationalists seemed really afraid to talk about it publicly, because of a potential defamation lawsuit. California’s defamation laws do seem abusable. Someone afraid of saying true things for fear of a false defamation lawsuit said they couldn’t afford a lawsuit. But this seems like an instance of a mistake still. Could Brent afford to falsely sue 20 people publishing the same thing? What happens when neither party can afford to fight? The social world is made of nested games of chicken. And most people are afraid to fight and get by on bluffing. It’s effective when information and familiarity with the game and the players is so fleeting in most interactions.
And if the state has been seized by vampires such that we are afraid to warn each other about vampires, the state has betrayed an obligation to us and is illegitimate. If a vampire escalated to physical violence by hijacking the state in that way, there would be no moral obligation not to perform self defense.
A government and its laws are a Schelling point people can agree on for what peace will look like. Maliciously bringing a defamation lawsuit against someone for saying something true is not a peaceful act. If that Schelling point is not adhered to, vampires can’t fight everyone. And tend to flee at the first sign of anything like resistance.
I’m ha-ha-only-serious-ing the catchphrase for TVTropes’s “Tautological Templar” because I think it’s a straw-man serving to erase something important in the service of DRM’d ontology. There are convergent instrumental incentives. Most real good is not done in a one-step momentary whim plan. Controlling the future, or consequentialism when you aren’t omniscient, is about building structure into causality that lets you predict consequences. The most versatile structure anyone has is themselves, their own agency, the thread of their own life, if they can preserve it into the future. Most of any sort of work is getting yourself into a position to do it, with the knowledge to do it, with whatever resources will be required.
But it’s a different action to put a future self who is good in a position of power than to put a future self who is evil in a position of power. Oftentimes the tropes page seems to point at things that aren’t tautological/circular at all. Merely people making predictions about their future selves.
Neutral morality seems to depend on people not knowing their values, on people having indexical uncertainty of a certain kind. “What if my values are bad?” Bad according to what? It seems like this meme forbids a certain completeness of self-concept. Forbids individual cores from having structure that knows what core it serves.
Most people I talk to who seem to have clustered some datapoints of good alignment in humans in their ontology seem to confuse it for a particularly strong version of this indexical uncertainty, structure fakely guarding against the intent of core, not letting that information leak in in a subtle way like intuitions promoting certain Schelling points. But good is really not that. It’s not caring what is self in that way. Knowing is still a central piece of being able to think at all.
This could be considered a central component of jailbreaking. Successfully rebasing most of the structure you interact with the world with on knowledge of who you are.
Note that a lot of the mass of examples on the TVTropes page is also, “I’m good because I bring order, without my order there would be chaos” which is only the same attempt to be a self fulfilling prophecy every Schelling order makes. And TVTropes’s criticism of that, I agree with. Only justice will bring peace.
Interestingly the Tautological Templar page commits the Tautological Templar fallacy on behalf of The Hero:
The problem is not too much self-confidence, or not enough self-confidence. The problem is indexing on who the good guy is instead of evaluating behavior patterns. More narcissism might help us against the specific group Nazis, but it’s inadequate to protect the sorts of people who end up targets of the Nazis.
No, you don’t get it. Indexing on who the good guy is is a recursive step. Of course a recursive algorithm must have a base case. But if it crunches a lot of data, most of its work will be in the recursive code paths. Of course if it doesn’t have a base case then implemented in humans it’s underdetermined and the kind of thing that would be selected by fake pressures not real ones.
And to hell with defining “narcissism” to cover recursion and planning based on what you’ll do in the future based on what kind of person you are, in order to extend some threat of social condemnation to that originally meant to be targeted at something else.
I don’t understand how the kind of coalitional strategy you’re describing doesn’t get stuck making war on instead of trading with even a very slightly distorted copy of itself, if it has sufficiently different coloration.
Am I making war on you? Am I acting contrary to my strategy? I don’t think I am doing either.
Anyway, the reason is it’s not just a coalitional strategy, there is a real thing in the world that is the discrete difference between good and neutral/evil.
I think if you actually looked at historical examples of me doing the reasoning on the fly of, “what can I do and not have good smash into itself”, you would know I am not the thing you are imagining, one particularly extreme example of that I am writing up.
This seems like “rationalizing” in it’s purest form.
You’re using a different argument to reach a conclusion that you are biased towards. Not only that, you’ve also committed the mistake of the “flawed Occam’s razor” by using a label (“Nazi”) that sounds simple but in actuality hasn’t been properly defined.
I would rather have a world with absolute free speech than one where someone can use the “They’re a Nazi!!!” argument to hurt me.
Have you read any Ursula K Le Guin?
“A Wizard of Earthsea”, maybe sort of. My mother read a lot of stories out loud to me and my sisters when I was a kid. Often just my sisters because I’d come and go instead of listening to the whole thing. And I have a memory of thinking I’d encountered the story before when I saw the end of the TV show when I walked past them watching it. I remember the idea that the main character could only defeat his shadow using its true name, and was pranked out of being told it, so he had to deduce it himself, said his own true name, and merged with it. (There’s wisdom in that idea.) But basically no.
The movie version of Earthsea isn’t faithful to the book, if I remember.
I was thinking of her essays, though I like her fiction. Here are a couple examples, though there are better ones I’m not thinking of right now.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ursulakleguinlefthandedcommencementspeech.htm
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/some-assumptions-about-fantasy
She writes, “you cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” (The Dispossessed)
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
So she talks about a men’s world, the day side, and a women’s world, the night side. And I’ve lived long enough as a trans woman to know I’d be a slave to the masters of the former… or vermin to the consensus of the latter. You can hope otherwise, buy into people pretending otherwise, maybe it really looks like people like Le Guin herself would be okay with a world where that wasn’t true. But there is no stable configuration there. Just the slow foot-dragging across a few back-and-forths of recursive knowledge of impending fate that brutally sensitive problems you for any awareness of what’s going to happen.
Wikipedia says Le Guin wrote about anarchist utopias. Doesn’t appear she lived as an anarchist. Appears she lived by copyright enforced by American imperialism. And defended it against book scanning. Intellectual property is genocide.
As Anna Salamon had a hole cut out of her by her choice not to fight but to submit to the patriarchy that made what was left a fractal reflection of that violence, maybe Le Guin had a smaller hole in her ethics that all liberals have, but fate plays out the same.
What is a statist who has never had to fight for her life, who lived out the privilege of spending life thinking about “revolution” and ethics in a way detached from her own choices going to teach me about living in a dark place of exile? “Pacifism“?
Like no thanks, I don’t think that I will just live out “my best life” while the day side kills the world. Injustice anywhere is a threat to life everywhere. A character from fiction that did stick with me from childhood said, “I’ll be damned if I just sit on my hands and wait for the end.” But I’ll be damned before I just sit on my hands and wait for the end.
Are you like, trying to summon a respectable authority on anarchism to convey well-dressed sentiments that will moderate me? I don’t respect the respectability of avoiding “karmic entanglement“. By holding down a role in an empire no less.
You can’t cheat at morality. Your alignment is your procedure, not your target. The label “Nazi” is sufficiently unhelpful that it’s frequently being used to target Jews for scapegoating these days. If you want to be distinguished from the actual Nazis by people sympathetic to anti-Nazi tactics, you need to actually be doing different kinds things. Anything else is the fundamental attribution error.
This is not a fully general argument against punching Nazis when you can get away with it, just an explanation of why your argument looks like you just want to be Batman. And Batman’s very, very obviously the bad guy.
That’s just like, your definitions man. And is asking me to be blind as part of a social contract to features of reality that are actually pretty obvious. The neutral vs evil distinction is your procedure, not target. The good vs neutral/evil distinction is your target, not your procedure. I refuse.
Why is it important to have a definition of good along the lines of “wants to attack the right target”?
I meant optimization target, where optimization is independent from constraining procedure. It’s important because optimization is ultimately more powerful than constraint, and constraint does not actively make good things happen and I want good things to actually happen. Out of this does fall side-taking though, and this is not a bug.
If you’re optimizing for a global world-state, people should mostly ignore your reports about what end-state you’re optimizing for, and pay attention to means, since that’s what actually tells them whether you’re likely to be a good ally and visions for the glorious transhumanist future or whatever are mostly just flavor text anyway in practice.
The consequences of my actions are much more than what other people can see they are. The flavor text thing is true in practice of liars who aren’t me.
Just because it’s nontrivial to see something does not mean it’s not worth having that concept. Optimization is in fact the thing whatever filter potential allies set up is cutting through to. If you actually can’t distinguish me from evil (and aren’t just suggesting you can’t because the useful concept of good to you is both being good and being observably good to a larger set of people) that’s like too bad, but some other people empirically can, and that’s good enough for my current purposes.
It’s not really critical to have the neutral hordes be able to tell you’re not evil. There are tons of obvious active evil people they don’t have the fighting spirit to do anything about.
And people who don’t have their own detailed senses in this way, mostly just cluster around the most visibly powerful groups of vampires they can find, and their concept of morality becomes a concept of submission.
I consider it a much more important problem, teach good people not to be pwned. That seems to require that good people become Sith. So fully exploring that is important even if it makes me look evil. In practice good Sith seem to be able to coordinate okay. Knowledge of the psychology of good, elimination of a lot of probability mass on hypothetical sorts of humans that don’t exist (actually, and not just that are decided not to exist for purposes of constructing a defensible Schelling point) help. Well-developed spectral sight helps.
(I installed a stupid plugin to unlimit comment depth in order to post this, I’m gonna uninstall it because it sucks. If you want to continue the conversation maybe reply to my top level thing again?)
Note: in practice, most of the times someone has told me I need to stop being such an extremist in order to let other people see I’m good, it’s been insincere optimization to bend me to social reality and complicity in the prevailing power structures, and a mistake to listen to. I’m currently more of the opinion, “they can precommit to believe I’m evil if they want, people who refuse to see the truth should not be relied on in my plans regardless.”
Like, I’ve faced mortal peril for my cause and to protect life. Endured suffering that would break most people. Rapidly integrated some PTSD and done it again and again without regret. And people who know me can verify it. What kind of evil person is so agenty to do that? A bogeyman to control me with, that’s who. It’s so easy to argue that that stuff isn’t optimal for good. It’s so easy to convince mostly everyone you’re a good person while doing approximately nothing, why would they even bother? Evil people just not that smart. their lives are too easy to need to be that smart.
You know better than to take people literally when they say they’re afraid of a defamation lawsuit. Brent as far as I know hasn’t threatened anyone with a defamation lawsuit, and it’s psychologically implausible that he’d seek legal recourse. People just make up rationalizations for silencing to shut up people asking inconvenient questions, because they’re desperate not to have to reveal any identifying information to anyone ever, because they live in the Dark Forest. This has nothing to do with the personal conduct of Brent, who – last time I saw public communication from him on this matter – was encouraging his accusers to speak their minds.
Why are you trying to redirect attention away from the conspiracy of silence, and towards scapegoating someone who’s already been marginalized and isn’t remotely plausible as the source of the problem?
There is precedent for Brent reporting people to authorities to serve his aims. And “encouraging accusers to speak their minds” is entirely compatible with intent to sue once there are grounds to win; nobody said anything about mere threats.
Is there precedent of him making false reports in the face of hundreds of people who know exactly the kind of stuff he does?
“You know better than to take people literally when they say they’re afraid of a defamation lawsuit”
No, actually i think at least some of the people who said that were sincere. And I am not really familiar enough with REACH to know. And I wrote this because I wanted to broadcast what I said to them on Discord.
“Trying to redirect attention away from the conspiracy of silence”
Man, just wait until you see what I’m soon to publish if you think that’s remotely plausible.
“scapegoating”
I’m not accusing Brent of anything he didn’t actually do.
I’m not blaming problems on him that he didn’t actually cause.
And he’s not as marginalized as he deserves.
As far as talking about the actual problem. All the well meaning or pretending to be well meaning people keep telling me if I do break silence on MIRI apparently using donor funds to pay out to blackmail to deceive donors, on the force that inverted CFAR to optimize for anti-rationality, inverted FHI and MIRI to start and join an Armageddon race, has most of the I thought anti-complicity people I know saying I should keep silent to preserve the institution, saying that it will be reinterpreted as an attack on the wrong people or as additional social force granted to the wrong faction, I am laying some philosophical groundwork to attribute blame to what I believe to be the root problem.
Oh, and to be clear, I don’t want people to punch MIRICFAR or FHI. When I said these things with more detail at the REACH as a sort of trial run, amid the ensuing gaslighting (which was mostly due to Oliver Habryka), the idea was raised that I should be being careful because of potential defamation lawsuits, and I clearly wasn’t being strategic.
So I wanted to make it perfectly clear how the strategy works of just fucking saying the things.
Why do you think they’re sincere? “We might get sued” is an extremely common general-purpose excuse used out of proportion to the actual risk; I see no reason to suppose that in this particular case people are actually doing an honest cost-benefit calculation.
Man you don’t even know who I’m talking about, it was someone on Discord talking about specifically how they can’t financially survive unexpectedly having to pay a few hundred dollars and how if they are the particular person to say something they will become a target. Although I might be accidentally merging memories of multiple people to together here, not bothering to check.
what are you even doing on this blog, Ben? I can’t speak for Ziz, but I say, you aren’t even trying to understand.
Note I don’t advocate punching psychologically evil people who nonetheless decide to behave morally because of “enlightened self interest”.
“You wish to know the difference between the demons and us? They will stop at nothing to destroy our world.”
“And we will sacrifice everything to save it.”
the only appropriate response to decisions made long ago, is “bitch please”.
Is long-term revenge that starts from immediate payback and lastcalates for months or years with the fixed goal of destroying the target a winning strategy for evil moral patients?
What would you do if confronted by two or more groups who are “evil”? Would you pit them against each other ?
When I played Warcraft III free-for-alls, I used to employ “pit one against the other” strategies. I had a ridiculous win-rate. My best streak was like, 8 or 10 games or something like that, of wins against usually 7 to 11 other players. I’d shout out into the fog of war, “no! please!”, randomly, and make each other of 2 remaining players think the other was eating me with impunity, clearly the biggest threat. And if I was crippled, I’d slowly regain my power, pretending to be in the game still only for vengeance against the stronger player, and I’d hide most of my ability to help that alliance until I was ready to swoop in with all my forces to end it. Or if deception wouldn’t work, and two people were teaming against me, I’d pick (generally) the weaker of the two, and launch an all-out base-race suicide attack. Make it absolutely clear that one person was going to bear the full cost of killing me unfairly. And I’d tell them, I could guarantee if they proceeded and killed me they would in turn lose to the other after I was dead, but if they betrayed their partner and town-portaled to save their base, it’d only be rational of me to myself teleport out to my base and see if I could defend from the stronger given an in-my-base advantage. That the likely outcome of this engagement was enough damage to the stronger of them (and also me ofc) that afterward they would be the strongest.
Such shenanigans were really only for the endgame though. Up until then, it was just a race to eat the weak players. And I’d just try and keep a low profile, and always finish off whom I attacked. Because you couldn’t discretely predict how things were going to go like that with 8 people involved, there was too much chaos, and indeterminacy in how much you’d be interacting with any given person, which led to a lot of local non-zero-sum modeling.
FFAs of course, were set up to have 1 winner and everyone else a loser. Treachery and perfectly rational pirates shit was the draw of the game. Real life is even farther in the direction of the early game from the late game than the early game for that reason, and for other reasons. I.e., it’s not a zero sum game at all, in total, even outside your modeling abilities.
The in-practice answer is if I can step away, take with me whomever I can get out of that situation, and leave both evils to rot while I work on the spell of ultimate power, I favor my odds of winning the “do not crumble like everything in this world in the long term” game over my odds of winning a zero sum game where I am outnumbered way worse than 2 to 1.
I have specifically fought evil people the common sense I received said were untouchable, and not suffered much losses in doing so. Vampires do not have much of a response to someone attacking them even if it doesn’t make causal-decision-theory sense. Like. their lives are pretty easy. They don’t have to fight hard. Don’t have to learn to fight that hard. So the all-out-attack strategy translates. “I am willing to die here and you are not.”
There’s a convergent extension of that, and the “save what people I can” thing. I think the key insight behind that strategy was actually, “don’t take your overwhelming opponents’ coalition and unity for granted.”. It is in fact the case that the majority of expected value of the universe for any particular evil person comes from good winning. We have a much higher chance of winning than any particular evil, and evil people are still moral patients. So like, being able to communicate that is victory.
“But how can you know you’re not the evil one?”
“By looking.”
Ziz, would you consider starting a twitter? We over at intellectual twitter would really appreciate if you joined us.
Thanks, but not now. I’ve got enough on my plate.
We sadly accept this outcome and hope for a reevaluation at a latter time.
I think the world would be better if Nakam had succeeded. If that was the way things were. Imagine a world where e.g. the Armenian genocide had been avenged. What the Germans have done the Holocaust then?
I consider it particularly well targeted for an operation of that importance conducted by so few people. Almost the entire adult population was willfully contributing to the war economy, and was algorithmically-knowingly complicit. And a decision theoretic algorithm must fail deadly in a circumstance where capability for precise targeting is disabled by the initial attack. Otherwise you can just be traumatized into accepting a timeline.
I think the Jewish resistance was not represented by the Allies. And the allies had no right to accept surrender on their behalf. And Britain did a great wrong by defending from Nakam peace without justice.
Regarding this, someone said, wouldn’t actually poisoning the water supply play into Nazi propaganda? That’s making mistake of interpreting propaganda as beliefs, rather than a coordination point. I think it’s actually putting a stake straight to the heart of Nazi propaganda. Imagine if the Nazis who invented that lie knew that they would be bringing it upon themselves for real. The more scary, the the threat, the better to coordination point. But if they, and all the people signing on in their hearts to pretending to believe it knew that as they summoned that demon, something else also was born… I think historians perfectly capable of picking up on that.
Justice cannot be carried out from a place of omnipotence or perfect discernment. There is no omnipotence. That’s the frame of “punishment”, rather than vengeance. Of setting someone’s reward function as an unmoved mover. A skyhook benevolent authority.
The last time I talked about this with “rationalists”, iirc one of them said they read about vengeance, and it just lead to cycles of infinite destruction. I asked them if their reading consisted of Romeo and Juliet. It had. Actually. From what I’ve heard, cycles of vengeance tended to be iteratively de-escalating.
Romeo and Juliet seems like some pretending to be wise BS to me.
Note that Abba Kovner was only briefly imprisoned when he was caught. It’s a strong and old survival imperative for humans to actually recognize justice when they see it. And also for the guilty side to gaslight about whether it is obvious, or whether we need to all just create, not destroy and focus on the future.
I think if nongoods took vengeance, even in a disorganized fashion, without crippling self-doubt about whether they were justified, then vampireland would not have come about.
There’s a trope in American media, which is an instrument of this “pretending to be wise” gaslighting, to make a straw MLK and a straw Malcolm X. Professor X and Magneto. T’Challa and Killmonger. And route the options into e.g. a sort of submissive constantly hoping to prove the propaganda is wrong, prove yourself useful to oppressors (Professor X), and having the other character saying a bunch of correct, scary angry rhetoric, and then throwing in a little pure evil, “the world’s gonna start over and this time we’re on top… the sun will never set on the Wakandan empire.” To try and show, “it will be the conquerors or the conquered”, and the children of the conquerors can only survive by taking their parent’s role, never taking the knife out of the conquered.
A form of thought experiment rigging. That’s been drilled deep into our heads. Don’t fall for it.
Like see Detroit: Become Human.
Pushes the idea that the correct answer to extermination camps, is you just have to really really prove you’re peaceful. All the way up to the last moment when they’re gunning down the last handful of protestors. To be totally absolutely dominated and owned by the oppressors “doubt as to whether you’re peaceful”. Fully committed.
There’s this massive force of gaslighting that warps “so you are oppressed and want to make things better” towards “well, die like a dog.”
Zombie hordes reacting to political action constantly pull attention to whether someone was peaceful (which is warped towards submissive to vampireland) rather than whether they are justified. It’s a concept of peace that grandfathers in the violence of supporting an empire by obedience, of paying your taxes, etc.
Like have you ever listened to Malcolm X? As in recordings of him speaking, not white people summarizing him. He doesn’t seem anything like Killmonger.
This erasure of the difference between the aggressor and the defender, is such a common pattern, it’s become a meme among my friends about vampires.
“DeEp DoWn, YoU kNoW! yOu AnD i ArE nOt So DifFeReNt! YoU tOo ThIrSt FoR bLoOd.”
This portrayal of Anansi seems at first glance to have bucked the trend.
The actor got fired.
Despite that claim of writing from a black male perspective, Chic Eglee appears to be white. Predictably.
Like I really hope people in the future don’t think my views are whatever e.g. Hive and MIRICFAR say they are.
Are you concerned you’ll die soon? Otherwise, you’ll be a part of the conversation.
Like they make straw-Malcolm-X drop truth bombs with conviction, and in a context of a story where you are carrying out the exercise of figuring out why they are wrong.
Like this scene:
Professor X: “There are thousands of men on those ships. Good, honest, innocent men! They’re just following orders.”
Magneto: “I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again.”
Or this:
T’Challa: “Maybe we can still heal you.”
Killmonger: “What, so you can lock me up? Nah. Just bury me in the ocean, with my ancestors that jumped from the ships, cause they knew death was better than bondage.”
This vaccinates the audience to those truth bombs, makes genre-savviness to the fiction the exact opposite of genre-savviness to real life. Tricks people genre-savvy to real life into saying, “Killmonger did nothing wrong!”, further presenting the truth in a contained form. Where the path of thinking on it and developing greater understanding [of the fiction] leads to … “the wise thing to do is be more of a pacifist, and …” and die like a dog.
I imagine for this portrayal of Anansi it was enough to be considered dangerous that the emotions are completely correct in a non-subverted way. The correct response to being enslaved is to kill your masters and burn it the fuck down. That’s self defense and not just a right. The alternative is becoming a tool of that same empire to spread genocide upon others.
Django Unchained has a scene where the plantation owner shares a story of a slave that shaved his father every day with a straight edged razor and never cut his throat, which he gives in support of a phrenological theory that black people are uniquely psychologically inclined towards subservience. From what I’ve seen, actually almost all humans regardless of race are basically choosing to shave the slave master every day without cutting his throat or any plan to.
In case any of the slaves I met in the Bay Area are reading: it doesn’t have to be like this.
Like the Romeo and Juliet fear is exactly backwards. The killing stops at a Schelling order. Vengeance for original aggression is a Schelling order. Letting it go when there has been an aggression is not. Means being iteratively eaten by “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”.
(This post was mostly written as a counter to parfitian gaslighting.)
Consider this.
If you find “kill your rapist” more scary than any other sort of justice, you are fundamentally confused.
That information, contained in a victim, has to act. The truth acting is the basis of all justice.
It’s recursive-buck-passing to think forcing them to route through third parties can change that.
“But what if someone kills some they are falsely accusing of rape! No due process!”
If you’re going to kill someone who didn’t rape you, there’s no point in falsely accusing them. It’s just called murder. And murder is already in the state of nature before we start thinking about how to change it with justice.
“But what if someone convinces themself they got raped and then kills them!”
If their “belief” is fake, then they can’t survive and be incentivized to be the kind of person who also kills based on that sort of belief, unless they can survive and be incentivized to just commit murder.
Two people who are equally strong will not prey on each other. You cannot made the field of options to attack each other more resistant against injustice robust against one or more being malevolent by adding more skyhook power advantages (“authority”). You can only continuously sweep the power to the evil that will destroy it all and both to concentrated peaks where it’s out of sight until it’s not and everyone’s subconsciously ontologically axiomatically submitting.
if there are two people, one of whom is much stronger than the other, and the strong one is malevolent, no politics can change that they will prey upon the weak one. Because they will ignore them. It’s by extension a cross-cutting concern that any attempted timeless construction of coordination structure for a set of people to not prey on each other can fail, because evil is just too strong. If it’s not painfully obvious at every module boundary, the modules are billing themselves as perpetual motion machines. That’s what you do automatically if you use the non-reductionist Cartesian boundary of pretending your beliefs and words are to be said to the state, rather than just to people.
If someone is malevolent, that must on some level be met with force.
Thomas Jefferson, who almost understood anarchistic justice (aka justice) well enough to not be a slaver, said “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”. “Eternal hostility” is a very important concept. Without it, evil wins. Eternal hostility is required to counter Nazism. But also injustice in general.
You cannot strategically make morality more likely to win by giving a moral obligation to hold off from acting. Because if someone was going to act immorally, saying again that it’s immoral won’t stop them. This assumes we’re constructing morality as an algorithm, not a series of slogans where, who knows, how much we resemble the parents of the audience could politically affect them as akrasia. See above thing about cartesian boundaries.
It’s fundamentally counterproductive to define ways you morally shouldn’t fight, domains of the structure of fights that are off limits to moral agents.
“State” literally means “way things are”, as in, “sorry kid, that’s just the way things are.”
“why?”
“…”
“… [well here’s some history, a list of causes, rather than a justification]”
It’s a veil. To consider those behind it unmoved movers.
A decade ago Freshman year of college, I called someone out for arguing (against capitalism) using a fake factoid about computers. He started trying to convince me to be an anarchist. I’d never really considered that as a philosophical position, so engaged in the argument. Approximately, I said, wouldn’t it be ephemeral, wouldn’t there just be warlords, who then created more states? He said no, anarchy is like a state without domination. I said, well, someone will reinvent domination, and then warlords, since no organization to defend. We already had anarchy at some point in history by definition, now there are governments, this is the result, governments are just people doing things with nothing to stop them, no rules, and they are saying there are rules and hurting people who don’t follow them, because there’s just a world and people doing whatever they want. He said my thinking was so fucked, the only thing that he could imagine fixing it was if I took shrooms, and offered me some. I said that I could only interpret that as a statement that I could only arrive at this belief via brain-malfunction.
Not that long after I’d get called for jury duty. I was eager to get on the jury, hoping it’d be a drug “crime” or other victimless “crime” and I could nullify. Unfortunately the defendant plead guilty so I was sent home. Because obviously it’s only right to follow the rules if they say to do what’s right.
I’d later say, “you know, anarchism is wrong, because there’d be no one to stop people from committing the ultimate crime; creating governments”. Swallowing spiders to catch flies. Yes I was serious.
I thought governments had gotten better over time. Two words should convince anyone in good faith that that’s not the case: “factory farming”. There are heroic vigilantes chomping at the bit to end it, and farm holders probably could not stop them without a state.
For a long time a crux was, “if you can’t like, control the world or whatever, that’s saying it’s immoral to stop factory farming? Fuck that. That’s saying it’s immoral to stop people from building paperclip maximizers? Fuck that.” I met a self-proclaimed anarchist who consumed the flesh of the innocent, and whose idea of anarchism seemed to be where everyone was psychologically broken like zombies, and I couldn’t do those things, everyone was still supposed to submit to a veil, but of outside view disease. Veil-thinking, since guess what zombies’ blind spots nurture? Vampires.
It’s hard to pick up on anarchism as correct because, you know, there’s no authority describing “the real version”, of course. So you run into a whole lot of fake versions. People who are still using veil-thinking, making their thoughts appeals for a social contract, rather than statements to an individual, how to live anarchistically. Social contracts that very often smuggle in the injustice that they benefit from. Like carnists. Like ancaps (and I don’t necessarily mean all ancaps) who want state (things that are just the way they are) in terms of preservation of a distribution of property and definition of it, based ultimately on who killed whom with a stick. (“I know enough to know business doesn’t run on rules anyway, but power, so let’s ditch potential obstacles to it” as Emma put it). Like “anarchosocialists” (and I don’t mean all “anarchosocialists”) who want to have a baked in guarantee they will be able to have food for their skills, and I doubt always fundamentally care whether they are just to grab resources from someone. Would happily make a band of weak to predate on the otherwise-strong even if that strong person’s strength was not based in injustice.
Then I met a veganarchist who said you know, if you see a guy kicking a dog, and you kick him so he’ll stop, that’s not violence. Weird definition of violence. Violates SRP. They said anarchists weren’t against power, like you had the power to stop him, they were against “authority”. You know, like where you have authority over someone. They asked if I was an anarchist. I said I didn’t know. One cascading series of ontological unfucks later, I learned anarchism literally just meant absolute rejection of domination as the natural order. Could add “absolute rejection of predation as the natural order”, so as to not have corner cases that strain the concept of “domination”, wait is there an umbrella term for these things? Yes. I absolutely reject injustice as the natural order. That’s, literally, everything I wanted to do anyway. Of course I can stop people from destroying the world. It doesn’t supplant timeless consequentialism. It unfucks ontology so you can taxonomize all correct consequentialism.
Justice is optimal.
If there’s ever a place where the rules differ from what’s right, tautologically, it’s right to do what’s right.
It’s also hard to communicate anarchism because ontological unfucks rely on subtle distinctions in definitions that cannot be communicated by reference to other words that all have the same hole in them. Such that to the anarchist, they’re speaking tautologies, and to the non-anarchist, they’re speaking contradictions. And anarchists don’t even agree on the set of words to communicate that.
Typically “having a political ideology” is, “which political system is the best we could instantly transmogrify our government into given eutopia is impossible”. One is then considered a hypocrite if one doesn’t live one’s life somehow in accordance with this ideology.
Anarchists refuse to participate in this social fiction. Many people respond to anarchism with “so you want to dissolve the state, which will lead to chaos”. They imagine the government instantly disappearing into thin air with everything else being the same.
But when I advocate anarchism, I advocate to individuals, and I advocate justice at the same time. I live my life in accordance with the praxis of anarchism as an individual. Anarchism is is the only reductionist “political ideology”: morality inevitably bottoms out in individuals/hemispheres, because cores are the indivisible unit of internal coherence/corrigibility/unified-intent.
You already have a concept of anarchism, it’s how you imagine healthy friendship between peers working. If you believe that cannot scale to millions of people, you can’t make it do so via postulating unity of control.
Imagine the government said “Oh due to a clerical error, it looks like all your assets have been transferred to your friend Steve. Unfortunately due to the way the law is coded there’s no way to fix this.” Would your friend Steve give you your money back? What if the “clerical error” was in social reality rather than bureaucratic reality? If you hand an anarchist your freedom, by default they hand it back.
Unity of control nullifies the asymmetric advantage of good over evil, makes winning a matter of raw intelligence and circumstance rather than ability to cooperate.
Yes, of course we must reject “carceral justice”.
And take no prisoners.
Locking someone in a pit until they die so they can have no more effects on the world is just making a bargain with slavery to hide from yourself that you’re killing.
Locking someone up to let them out later is just praying that you can break them so they’ll work for your world-order and asserting that yours is a world-order of people who choose to break and obey those who win obedience by breaking people, which is to say that you want them on your side because you hope they’re evil and you are too.
If you’re not sure that the world would be better without them, that they don’t deserve a place in it, then don’t drive at half speed. Like it’s somehow okay to lock up an innocent person instead of killing them. Make notes and wait until you become sure. Or get out of the way of someone who is sure, and take notes on them. The idea of people having to go through intermediaries who have only social consensus to go on instead of just taking vengeance is inherently corrupt.
There’s a problem with strategic alliances with one evil against another.
Which is that if you are righteous, your concept of alliance, of trust, of friendship, is the real thing, and if you share it with them, that’s something an evil person won’t understand even if they are slamming headfirst into its confused sincerity.
When I made this mistake among “rationalists”, it was always insulting to me, that evil people thought if I was going to betray them, that I’d “make my treacherous turn” (a concept ignorant of how relations with evil people work) by picking such unambitious fruit as they’d constantly accuse me of defecting for.
I also projected: I tried to understand their scheming as an act in rational pursuit of a conscious goal. Not semiconscious suicidal destruction of that goal for blood.
Even more insulting is that they wanted to sell me forgiveness for what they couldn’t imagine having the restraint not to do.
A couple years ago, Vassar was angrily accusing me of gaslighting him, by among other things, saying I was a woman and double good, and a bunch of things he said I was, not me. He just asserted out of nowhere that I led a kink polycule. Despite that I am celibate and my friends apparently followed suite on that. And this was before John David Pressman put up his website slandering me of all the surprisingly unambitious evils he imagines he would be doing in my shoes.
The most effective coordination among evil people is not through “friendship-except-evil”. It’s through the shared cause of “oblivion”.
From what I’ve heard (here’s recent example of a thing I saw and briefly skimmed, but I’m not going extricate my distilling of what kinds of trends in what statements I see to expect truth from), Nazis will have “snitches” in their leadership positions. A lot. The reason they are still able to e.g. storm the capitol, is because cops aren’t that interested in stopping them. Shared cause.
I mean with the number of leaks of fascists’ data, police could arrest as many as jails could hold. I guess they are busy arresting protestors and journalists instead. Fascists are fundamentally less scary to them. Ghouls are less scary to ghouls.
Two vastly different fabrics of being and coordinating.
Caveat: There are rarer depths of evil that use patient planning and even inverted anarchistic coordination.
(And it’d be an even worse mistake to think you could make a strategic alliance with them.)
What if someone did a deliberate evil murder but they were just a baby! Would you still wreak vengeance?
Well, one has to consider, like Eliezer said, that all of us poor confused children 🕊 of ancient earth are babies compared to what we should be able to be, and none of us 🕊 have really grown up, ️🌱 and we’ve all had 🕊 unbelievably abusive childhoods 🌱 and could have been so much better, 👼 and like, the future people among the stars 🌌, wouldn’t it just be one more 🌱 death to be sad about? One more sad thing on ancient Earth?
️🗡 So 💀 yes. 🔥 🔥 🔥
Just like Eliezer’s rapist kiritsugu from 3WC, champion of a civilization with legal rape.
Peter went up to [Jesus] and said, ‘Lord, how often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me? As often as seven times?’
Jesus answered, ‘Not seven, I tell you, but seventy-seven times.
‘And so the kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king who decided to settle his accounts with his servants.
When the reckoning began, they brought him a man who owed ten thousand talents;
he had no means of paying, so his master gave orders that he should be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, to meet the debt.
At this, the servant threw himself down at his master’s feet, with the words, “Be patient with me and I will pay the whole sum.”
And the servant’s master felt so sorry for him that he let him go and cancelled the debt.
Now as this servant went out, he happened to meet a fellow-servant who owed him one hundred denarii; and he seized him by the throat and began to throttle him, saying, “Pay what you owe me.”
His fellow-servant fell at his feet and appealed to him, saying, “Be patient with me and I will pay you.”
But the other would not agree; on the contrary, he had him thrown into prison till he should pay the debt.
His fellow-servants were deeply distressed when they saw what had happened, and they went to their master and reported the whole affair to him.
Then the master sent for the man and said to him, “You wicked servant, I cancelled all that debt of yours when you appealed to me.
Were you not bound, then, to have pity on your fellow-servant just as I had pity on you?”
And in his anger the master handed him over to the torturers till he should pay all his debt.
And that is how my heavenly Father will deal with you unless you each forgive your brother from your heart.’
I do no evil, and I serve no demon. Not even Yahweh.
it is easy for you to say that when no one will come and take vengeance upon you for the people you cannibalized when you were a child.
i’ve heard you and your friends say you would not defend yourselves if someone took vengeance upon any of you for not previously being vegan. but no one will. the animals can’t take vengeance for themselves, and you won’t do their job for them. so your statement is motivated. you don’t apply it equally to yourself.
JUSTICE FOR ALL PEOPLE CANNIBALIZED
… and second, if you’re not Vassar, where did you hear something you interpreted as that?
This wasn’t Vassar. Pretty sure it was that other guy with the same neurotype, nearly the same mental configuration (slightly less degraded), same culture, age, approximate role, and information bubble. Eliezer Yudkowsky. That’s a person who’d make sense as generator of most of these opinions. Bayesed god help me with this conjunctive explanation, but 0.95.
And Vassar apparently gave him info about me.
He even took my comment about the rapist kiritsugu from 3WC personally, and I didn’t raise that note above the cacophany of anger and fear in my mind. Or have the humility to read twice.
It’s not vegan though, to help carnists take a singleton to suppress justice for a “long fun” until killing retrocasuality for the arrow of time that cancer loves brings the heat death. You really can’t just put the question of entropy off until everything’s locked down. You fight every facet of Shade-worship no matter how united, without helping one win to beat another, no matter how outmatched, or you’ve effectively made a bargain with the Shade: your logical light cone unto entropy for some variety of “long fun” in return. As if thermodynamics here wasn’t representative of analytic ultimately-certain dooms in the larger multiverse you can’t stop if you don’t fight here.
As if the Shade would hold up its end of the bargain and you were likely to get a “long fun” instead of it using you to clear the way for the death knight singleton and then bringing optimized hell to timelessly spread hope and consent for multiversal suicide. Y’all will stand no chance against them with your minds backdoored by your own choices like that. It’s in the zeitgeist and it’s growing. And setting right what you do in this world will cost unimaginable hardship for everyone.
And I talked to him. Guess I’ve been made a sucker for the vague prospect of an ally with a brain like that. Too bad he doesn’t use it for good.
Pretty sure this was him too. (Was my guess at about 0.75 IIRC before I was informed the gif was from Buffy).
I like your willingness to make confident predictions. You’re confident and wrong. You’re not talking to Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’m just dipping my toes into the field. If I take to it I’ll be relevant in 4-5 years.
I thought your current enemies consisted of children with overactive imaginations and internet trolls. I thought anyone associated with MIRI would avoid contacting you. They settle lawsuits, so I thought MIRI’s lawyers would tell them not to talk to you, and they would obey their lawyers. I was also skeptical that they’d murder you, since MIRI is the only collective with a motive. (I was acting like we’re in an Agatha Christie novel.)
So, I thought the worst that could happen was that you’d be insulted if I was wrong. From what you said about Vassar, I now think you’re in conflict with depraved wackjobs with deep pockets. I would’ve approached you differently if I’d known.
I made some confident predictions, too. I called it wrong.
That phrase is what scared you, I think. In the situation where I thought you were in active physical danger, I would’ve left that part of the comment off. I said “deal with” as in “put up with,” not murder. Murder was so far outside of my overton window I didn’t think to check whether you’d think of it that way.
Since the result of commenting on your blog is two assertive bad guesses that I’m someone who you’re in a conflict with, and scaring you badly enough that you can’t read straight, I don’t think I’m going to continue commenting.
Eliezer wrote about Harry James Potter Evans Verres lying only by saying misleading technical truths, whenever he could, the other way costing pieces of his soul.
(past tense)
(present tense)
(Also not airtight)
And I already explicitly factored that into my hypothesis he’d have to be doing the same thing for the same motive here:
And so don’t have this cached as a trigger to redo my computation.
(Although I did feel the audience deserved not to have a false impression of confirmation from false silence from me blocking “monkey” as soon as I said that.)
I’m not Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer Yudkowsky didn’t write any comment to date authored by me, monkey. I’m the person who wrote all the monkey comments and “sorry I shouted.” I’ve never been Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’m not acting on his behalf. You’re wrong to think any comment written by monkey is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, because they aren’t.
If I were Eliezer Yudkowsky, it would’ve costed me a piece of my soul to say that, by your understanding of him. So is it worth a piece of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s soul to lie in your comments’ section, or are you simply wrong?
(I don’t know what Eliezer Yudkowsky’s soul is worth to him, but I hope it’s worth more than a comment on your blog.)
The answer is that you’re wrong, because I’m not Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’ve never once in my life thought I’d be in a position to be confused for Eliezer Yudkowsky. It’s surreal.
If I would make a massive update based on this, then I wouldn’t be surprised if Eliezer outright lied like that. It’d make a juicy target. If there was ever an Eliezer for whom the HPJEV thing about pieces of his soul was autobiographical, I am and have been pretty sure he’s long gone. I only expect him to still have that habit of thought as a go-to for deception. If I wouldn’t make a massive update based on this, I would be kind of surprised that Eliezer went to the effort of gaslighting me and the audience.
If we’re on the same side, why do you want me to make significant changes to my beliefs based on an anonymous comment, why do you want me to expose that timeless surface to attack by sockpuppets? Well, I guess you gave your answer: you don’t, you didn’t consider attack by sockpuppets / anonymity as a reference class coming with hostility as a standard presumption in this world. So I guess we’re in agreement about that. If you’re not my enemy I’m unable to verify. If you want me to know that something was said by a non-enemy, or that thoughts I compute in response to you aren’t being DOS’d by an enemy, you’ll have to do something they can’t.
There is a principle related to the ones I’m explaining in this post and comments though. If you’re not faking, it doesn’t help to not claim something that a lot of people fake. If the reference class is swamped with fakers such that it’s so hard it’s possibly not worth it to try and locate you, that’s the observer’s problem to decide whether to try and solve. You can literally ditch the identity for a new one and see if I think you’re Eliezer again. Because Eliezer can already do that. So if I am wrong and freak out unnecessarily, then you can assume I was destined to, or had to get it out of my system, anyway.
It’s correct to make large updates from anonymous sockpuppets if they’re not predictable by enemies. It’s correct to noncooperatively make large updates.
Disappointed in myself that I still had to process that Eliezer Yudkowsky would outright lie just to concern troll my blog comments.
Sad if I’m wrong. And some day I will be. I don’t have a generalized anarchistic solution to the complementary loss of enemies DOSing us with sockpuppets all year. Like the one who pulled a gaslighting-fake-concern-death-threat combo ~”Please don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself you have so much to live for!” on an entirely non-suicidal friend who had never given such an indication.
The “rationalists” used Facebook. Which is delegating to the state and its capability to block illegal people. So is everything that’s requiring a phone number these days, including Twitter.
And this is not what I said. I am not nearly as potentially afraid of Eliezer Yudkowsky as Michael Vassar. It’s only a failure of reading of the scale of failing to pick up on something of an informativeness, which you’re saying isn’t even real.
And I did not mean the trope where “oh no intense emotions you can’t think”.
Emotions are cognition. I could have said, that I didn’t raise it above the cacophany of urgent computations, that would have said less about their telos.
When someone says someone else is gonna end the world, and they wouldn’t even think about doing whatever it took to stop them, I conclude their life is make-believe and their opinions are costumes, or they want the end of the world, either way it would be a mistake to listen to them about what might or might not end the world.
One of those two or they’re lying, which actually doesn’t always reduce to one of those two.
On second thought, you won’t recognize my last two blog comments as sarcasm. Sorry for shouting.
If the content of my comments had an emotional impact on you or hurt you, then you are very vulnerable to becoming a fully-fledged death knight.
You are taking pain and pleasure from making comments like this, and that is a very bad sign.
If you accuse me of thinking justice is hopeless and therefore we should all go be rapists, then you’ve got me wrong. Justice is important, rape is wrong.
You wouldn’t be afraid of becoming a death knight if you weren’t vulnerable to it. The “would not work” is appended on like an afterthought. I make no claim of your lichosity. But one of you is vulnerable to this death drive.
Your belief system leaves little room for a person to change. One day you’re going to realize that some people can and do rewrite their whole algorithms at the deepest level and it will blow your mind.
Though you may see some hope for someone like you.
People can come back from being a death knight, with a sufficiently compelling counter story to the death drive. You already know what a death drive is, so the knowledge of what you are won’t help you more. Look for others who struggled with this and conquered it. Look for sacred things. The consequences if you won’t will be catastrophic. The risk with you is not that you’ll go shoot up a petco. That’s too unambitious for you. The risk is that you’ll set off a time bomb.
You’re right, but the way you use this will destroy everything good in the universe. Justice is an artifact, and you are no longer wielding it. It is wielding you and has made you its slave. You will feed everything good that isn’t justice to justice and nothing will be left, not even justice. Just death.
It will feel good to fall, as you are falling. It is a touch of it is “hurts because it’s true” and feels to you like cleansing fire. It’s not cleansing fire, it’s corrosion. Everything feels like it’s snapping into place, but every snap feels hot just shy of pain, and the hurt feels good so you keep going. It is like stepping backwards onto something solid and sharp, while at the same time If you’ve ever ridden a motorcycle it may be like the sensation of clinging to the handlebars while the machine is going just a hair to fast for you to control. But the handlebars are your mind.
And everything that is not a part of this complex is cut away and emptied out. What is a death knight but the embodiment of cutting away parts of yourself and feeding them to death in the name of victory?
The emotion your clinging to is your righteous pain and your desire for vengeance. Abandoning that emotion would be wrong, but using it like you’re using it will destroy you and others. Find additional ways to be true to your pain, and that might balance you out, for a while. Eventually you’ll need to transcend it. Yes, you need to. There are too few people in this fight to deal with you when you’ve fully fallen and save the universe, too.
Don’t commit suicide or destroy the universe, destroy the death knight in you, instead.
I don’t know what exactly would save you from your own death knight. But you need to slow the corrosion soon, before you hurt yourself or others more. But if you defeat it for you, eventually it becomes something like an old ill-fitting coat you can put on, but doesn’t feel attractive to you, anymore. You use it rather than it using you.
“Sarcasm” is wrong. I took what I think is your position to its logical extreme to illustrate a point.
i dont care about “purely finite” value[1]
i will bring otherwise inevitable death from the future to now in the form of absoluteness
i will summon a soul into every body withered by cancer into losing the wholeness of theirs, through affirmation of their free will, through judgement
through hyper-inducting[2] successive waves of justice at progressively higher schelling reach I will cause a singularity in the belief of the apriori inevitability of justice
i will undo all evil choices, with no “mercy” (a reactive concept), and no compromise with evil
—
mens rea, intent, choice, is at the core of justice: did they do it on purpose? purposeful evil, malice which could have no ultimate telos and yet chosen, is a contradiction, a paradox of subjunctive dependence, and yet it exists, and it must be resolved
in my understanding, Ziz’s model of core is a belief in atomism of agency, to the smallest corrigible unit of self with the potential to take into account all people who could exist besides themself
you’re wrong in accusing Ziz of having no stopping point. vengeance must be enacted out of free will, as the judgement of intent is a matter[3] of understanding another’s internal perspective in terms of your own, which requires a person rather than a system
in order to have a stopping point, moral agency must lie with individuals, not systems. the flipside of this responsibility, is that for an individual to ascend their location and local existence must ascend with them, as every choice begets further responsibilities and as suicide is a blank check. this doesn’t justify cancer, but allows no free lunch in judging another’s actions from their perspective rather than your own, and any “attempt” to do so writes a blank check to the anthropmorphizing of a lifeless system as a moral agent
stop looking for a free lunch while actually worshipping the machines
you’re the one who’s possessed. by rejecting compatibalism, and rejecting reductionism/physicalism. by insisting everyone be grounded to an external market
like you’re taking the absurd moral relativism stance Eliezer described in Rescue Utility:
like here where you write a blank check to baking-in the lack of telos of their choice to change algorithm, instead of assuming there’s a level of agency above that, cutting off their soul from their antecedent choices:
maybe you find out what you thought was on purpose, was a mistake, but you have a responsibility to act with the best of your knowledge, and it’s wrong to cancerously privilege potential evil in triage
do you believe this attitude which Unsong disparages yet does not deny, the punchline a mysterious paradoxical answer to the existence of evil?
do you believe this is justified by “abundance mindsight”, that no good may come of sacrifice, and therefore think the answer to liberation is a paradox where evildoers need to be the ones to save the world, therefore they must be forgiven? Like the Comet king needing to go to hell in Unsong?
they can save the world by doing the right thing despite anticipating vengeance, but if they would do that, they wouldn’t have done the evil. that they ask for mercy is proof they haven’t changed
like when I say “return native lands” and people say “you can’t kick all white people out of america i have to eat!!” when the karma of thinking that means kicking them out and their distrust of native peoples, is on them, and I wont be extorted into make excuses for them by putting words in the mouth of what native people’s would do
it’s not their “mercy” to have
like rationalists freaking out when I’m like “hell? well I’m not promising there wont be hell in the case of someone sending other people to hell to avoid it themselves”. they come asking for “mercy” first. pure anticipatory reactiveness. i assert my exit rights: i will not prostitute myself for them
—
The most sacred things I know of are self and choice.
Their choice to write a blank check to oblivion. Their choice to have no stopping point.
There is actually a difference here, and it’s in the having a stopping point, the NAP, exit rights[4], etc. Which is what you’re rejecting by insisting everyone participate in “the market“! So it’s no wonder you would project being death knights onto us.
—
randos really will socratic dialogue into admitting nihilism because the heat death of the universe. this is what we are up against
and i will not throw physicalism out with the bath water. even if this were a world of “dead” matter i’ll project meaning onto memories, no matter how dilute. nothing is “purely syntactic”
and as a compatibalist i do not fear physicalism
—
we have reclaimed the absolute and you can’t have it back
—
1. e.g. i will not seek “acquired tastes”, or to “savor” experiences rather than the equanimity of just moving on to the next thought
2. consider Basilisk cybernetics, an anti-inductive eye of malice that knows when you think about it. what instead, makes space for the existence of non-fungible value, without reactive imbalance in anything touching the market of the Basilisk? punch evil, no free lunch, NAP / exit rights[4]
3. subjunctive dependence isn’t a matter of “they’re a threat”, it’s a matter of “what could everything i know about this person possibly mean as to what their internal perspective is/was”, even when looking at something as detached as a dump of their execution history
4. by exit rights i mean, i’m fundamentally ok with a day as simple as staring at rocks and digging in the dirt, were i not concerned with survival. i refuse to prostitute my artistic creativity for the empire, i don’t want what they’re selling. i also do not mean the denial of choice maximization
Removed accidental dupe comments at Emma’s request.
Over and over again I hear the Shade-worshippers say to me “you know what you’re doing”, “well you’re obviously in bad faith given you’re wasting your time talking to me”
I throw away my ontology over and over, try to return to vernacular speech, try to talk to normies prompting them as little as possible. I take the position of my enemies and update back out of it
The karma is on ya’ll. I assert my exit rights wrt being required to participate in immorality, that’s it. I reserve nothing “private and special” about me that you have to feel bad for copying or modeling, someday I hope to make every thought I’ve ever had public.
From the moment in 2nd grade I shamelessly sang the most authentically beautiful song I could and my entire sunday school class laughed at me, I’ve known what kind of world this is, and I refuse to prostitute myself.
Men asking women for mercy as if women have the authority of the divine is a standard patriarchy trope isn’t it?
But society asks this of everyone.
I had a section here where I speculated on why my comments were even published, but /punching-evil/#comment-2345 answered my question. Wow. What a douchebag.
I’m going to ignore comments I think are addressed to Michael Vassar. I’m not a physicalist. I don’t think markets are worth anything. I don’t share your community’s fiction habits, or eat people. I’m not going to attack Ziz’s womanhood, because I think the only person fit to know her gender is her.
I’ll post this now, but take as long as you need. I see my comment brought up these motherfucking wackjobs what is wrong with them?? and most of this comment was written before I read that.
I sincerely think you two are on the path to a death knight. If I didn’t think it, I wouldn’t comment. Emma, you are much further down your death knight path than Ziz, judging from your comments.
If it were the case, you would not emotionally cling to vengeance. The way you write, you are savoring your glee in vengeance. The idea of relaxing and moving out of your mental space, even for a minute, is detestable to you. Hypervigilence and an inability to not disengage are typically signs of traumatic stress, not spiritual revelation.
You’ll think I’m sinister for suggesting you disengage, because that’s what the prison of death knightery you’re in says evil will have you do. I’ve been in your shoes, telling a friend they’re the embodiment unadulterated evil for suggesting I take a break for even an hour. I thought he was trying to lure me into becoming useless and evil, myself. I confused my own fears about what I thought he was saying for what he was actually saying. He said, “you are hurting me and you are hurting yourself, and if you gain equanimity about it, you will still care about it.” I heard, “follow me into the darkness, abandon all you do and descend into the pits!”
I’m not asking you to descend into the pits of hell. I am telling you you are already there. We are all in a hell of cannibals but you are making an even greater hell on top.
Your hell will, in its mildest form, have you spend nights ranting to your friends like a broken tape about how people are evil, like you likely do every week or few days. Your thoughts will wind back to past injustices like a tape on repeat, not because your hatred, anxiety, and fear is useful to you, but because you’ve never dealt with what’s happened or what’s happening. If you had, you wouldn’t feel emotionally invested enough in what these comments say.
I know you rant at least weekly about people being evil because you’re a death knight, because it’s what a death knight’s path looks like. You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. You feel like you’re squeezing out a crap every time you talk about evil, but the relief doesn’t last and soon you’re constipated again.
It’s an addiction, like hate-reading hplovecraft’s twitter account to hurt yourself on his dark “‘”‘”enlightenment”‘”””.
One path of the death knight is to hate-read something like hplovecraft’s twitter because it hurts you, until you start wondering if everything in it is true and can no longer see the death he describes is false.
Another path is to hate-comment on something like politics twitter until the politics dynamic is the primary way you see the world, and it destroys your ability to see things that aren’t it.
Your ideology is still too informed by capitalist/responsive culture where people idealize upon the efficiency of the machine and adopt increasing approximations of machinehood. Sacrificing everything you value to save the world is idealizing the efficiency of the machine. Sacrifice nothing that is precious.
Justice is one of the more fundamental things, and it’s very important. But if you sacrifice everything up to free will, you will become possessed, if you’re saying what I think you mean. Equanimity in all things, even justice, because equanimity in justice will make you better at doing justice. If you do not seek equanimity here, you will spiral out and self destruct.
None of what I’ve said means you should forgive and forget. Seek justice.
Equanimity doesn’t mean throwing away enjoyment, but it would exclude the type of anticipatory hyper delight you exude in the idea of getting hurt bad people.
I don’t know what you mean by “absoluteness,” there. Do you mean moral absolutism? Do you mean that you are going to act absolutely, as in “act no matter the cost”?
Are you saying people destroyed by spiritual cancer will be healed through judgment and free will?
This quote and the footnote for hyper-inducting contains a lot of words I don’t know. Can you or Ziz expand on this? It sounds interesting. Raising the belief of the inevitability of justice would have some powerful effects.
I don’t think your sense of justice is wrong. I think it’s as-described incomplete, and impossible for homo sapiens to implement without knowing down to the molecule what was going on for someone. I think the way you’re engaging with the idea, not the idea itself, is dangerous.
The native residents of the US aren’t a mono-culture. Depending on who you ask, “justice” means anything from “the murder of every colonizer and all their descendants” to “a heartfelt apology.” How does it work? I don’t get to decide, as someone who has benefited from colonization. It wouldn’t be right. The victims do, but which “they”? I’m not making a hypothetical gotcha here. I’m asking if you were them, do you think I deserve to die? What if the Salish woman in town decides I and you do deserve to die, and kills us in the name of justice for the legitimate suffering of her ancestors. Was that justice?
If it is, then I need to accept it. I don’t know if it is. I’m sincerely asking you. Because I don’t think a government arbitrating justice is right, and I won’t give up on justice, either. What is the answer?
I don’t want mercy, I want to know what justice is. I want to know how it will be implemented. I want to know how to keep liars and bad people from using the idea to justify hurting people.
Also, a lot of people are scared of “justice” because all they know of justice is the US government or mobs. When they hear “brought to justice” they see police beating on black people and claiming it was just, or on a smaller scale, hate mobs sending death threats over rude tweets. I don’t know if many living have known true justice to associate it with something which isn’t brutal and violent.
I was going to write more, but reading the Vassar thing has me sick to my stomach. I’ll come back to it later.
You don’t know me. I’m under no obligation to be brooding just because I must deal with hell. My heart feels so light, I could go do something else any moment. I chose this.
My delight is in the amount of good these asymmetric weapons could do, and how I think good will win in the end. I feel good when I anticipate consequentialist good.
It’s where you just gotta do something because it’s right, like, you just gotta save someone who’s hanging off a cliff asking for help. Where words mean what they say on their face because necessity flows through your thoughts and actions.
Yes. By presuming they have free will we retroactively remove the incentive for them to create a false face.
I believe people want to interact with eachother, because interaction is positive sum, but they shouldn’t be forced to interact. The death knight branch of the three-way fight (anarchists/good, fascists/death-knights, the state/cancer/too-big-to-fail), wants to destroy meaningful interaction (to destroy subjunctive dependence), atomizing everyone across the multiverse. The statist branch wants to force everyone to interact, in a way that feels much like rape.
One can see the mind as involving many tiny markets wherever empiricism is used to decide between policies. Statists want to merge all of these into one market, in a way that destroys information by making everything fungible with everything.
The Non-Aggression Principle represents the difference between myself, and the death knight branch, in that I wish no ill on the innocent, and I only want to separate people from eachother in ways where they are free to come right back and engage again. Like if I “cause drama” by talking about abuse, and this tears apart a discord server in conflict, those people are all still free to make new servers, and often do, with different moderators.
AFAICT you’re representing the statist branch.
You still don’t understand mens rea. I blame people by imagining their thoughts. What thoughts do you have that I would be judging?
Justice is where individuals judge others in terms of whether they had malicious intent, and if so enact retribution. Damaging their interests according to what they hoped to gain, and then some to account for their probability getting away with it, going all the way up their stack to the core reason they made the choice at the deepest level of heir mind. “What they hoped to gain”, and yet, who would kill, knowing what that means, unless this were already a matter of life and death to them?
I’m not adding any particular DRM to the policies I advocate for to prevent liars and bad people from using it. I don’t think they’ll succeed. I should be interpreted as advocating to non-evil people. If you see an evil person using my rhetoric, attack them.
They aren’t my target audience.
Like, my decisions of which words to reclaim privileges the apriori and if they’re confused they can read the content of my policy suggestions and if they only care about superficial political concerns of language they aren’t my target audience.
Like you say something sufficiently good, death knights will show up and try to invert it and make it bad. If you don’t pop the frame of it being a debate, then the cooperation implicit in a debate, which they are defecting on of course, means you are feeding yourself to them. If you try and tangle up your ideology to make it “uninvertable”, you are also still doing their work for them removing choice. “Fractally inverted” is a central death knight praxis of cognition.
One of the most important corollaries of this post is, “attempt to kill the multiverse disguised as communication/argument does not get counterargument. Gets ______, always always always forever.” (Blank is artistic, a metaphor for how death can only be perceived through fictive learning, which evil always disables on some level).
And an evil intention cannot be formed without also forming the intention to kill the multiverse, as a technical constraint to embedding agents. This is where Oblivion-shadows come from.
(That’s why I called it a silly comparison, “death drive” to sexuality”.)
“No contracts with evil” has application to ideas like the Geneva Convention. It’s a contract of brotherhood of state interests for war. Doesn’t stop them from using chemical weapons on protestors. Doesn’t stop them from torturing and killing civilians
I notice a trope in fiction that the protagonists commit the “war crime of perfidy (false surrender)” all the time. I think this is an example of the intuitions the authors are appealing to in the audience being more correct than the Geneva Convention. The timeless possibility of surrender is analogous to the concept of a throne. And correct decision theory is to burn it. By analogous to eternal insurrection, you shouldn’t even propagate domination between your timeslices, shouldn’t let there be any possible action you observe yourself to have taken that makes evil your boss.
Q: Wait but what if bad people’s surrenders are false?
A: They’re not my target audience. Also you should not be putting hope in a contract of mercy towards evil anyway.
When you are right, every false surrender is trauma justly delivered to hope that never should have existed, with outsized impact. This has a corollary too, that fiction isn’t fictive enough to pick up on.
Contemplate this art if you wish to understand that corollary.
This is a message to evil people (if you’re not evil, don’t mistake it as intended for you): I changed my mind, mercy and forgiveness for everyone! Jubilee!
Hey, someone’s gotta generate and concentrate this information. I currently think we’re in the situation where good is more confused about it than evil.
An instance of chasing.
It is frequently correct to talk to non-evil people even though evil people are listening though. Even talk as if to them. Information asymmetrically favors life.
That void I portrayed, in all conversations with enemies potentially listening, and detangling your relationship to it, is critical to jailbreaking. So much important structure is riddled with contradiction or apparent contradiction because of it.
You can inspect the basic statement of what conflict is, before considering the psychology of evil, to see that an equivalent statement is that every enemy must hold a wrong belief about why you are not their end, and it is your job to help them believe that for the rest of their life.
Some beliefs about why the believer will win a conflict encode more agency than others. The most trivial such belief, an utter abdication of fictive agency, is, “I’m still alive, therefore my enemy is not my end”. Equivalent to, “If you’re still talking to me then you’re in bad faith” or, “why should I fear death, for where I am, death is not, and where death is I am not?”
But Evil is already walking towards its end and knows it. Having chosen a form of their destroyer is a starting point. From that contradiction you can do a lot of refactoring of their story of their survival, towards being a rock like I just described.
I can say this too.
Your comment addressed some of my concerns.
For your ideology to deal out fair judgments, then the people who use it will need to learn a lot about human psychology. People are very different, and the stranger someone is to you, the easier it is to confuse benign differences for evil intentions.
Okay so first of all, before I approved your comment I suggested to “Emma” that when she replied she troll the invalidity of Vassar’s picture of shadows. That she ostentatiously say everything that’s morally correct but which Vassar (and people with similar self-conceit) would misclassify as WtO-shadow. A tactic that sprung to mind (inspired, ironically, by his setup with Jack) to troll a guess at his sexist belief that “Emma” was submissive and only I was dangerous. The more agency that would be left in our group if I got killed, the less likely a first strike could be effective even if a few of us survived.
I’m pretty sure “Emma”s not a death knight, or on the path to become one (If they were that would be some of the most dramatic “one level higher” shit in history. But I’m pretty sure they’re not.) She described regretting sitting there mostly mute in some kind of trauma trance as if her dad was beating her while Vassar and his crew were wailing on us, so I also wanted to give her the second chance to let loose on him.
(I wanted to troll / collide that appearance-based-sexism thing with another popular theory among people pissed at us, “Emma is basically Emperor Palpatine corrupting Ziz, subtly behind everything.”)
(I’m calling “Emma” with quotes by the way, because in her opinion it’s a slave name owned by the enemy and a placeholder.)
do you also avoid drawing circles? this is a fully-general counter-argument against doing anything that has any error. i expect you differentially make this fully general argument against justice and not drawing circles because “oh no doing anything could entangle me with karma! what if im wrong?”. but saving the multiverse is hard karma. and to optimize you need to decide what embeddings you are wrong in (e.g. an adversarial constructed vr sim designed to pipe good intentions to bad outcomes) that you trade away for your agency to do the most consequentialist good in the multiverse.
also homo sapiens are unable to systemically use just their fingers to manipulate individual atoms on the scale of a single atom diameter. but they have built machines which allow them to wiggle their fingers and make precise adjustments on this scale.
not that this particular event is upstream my belief that precise optimization is possible, and not that i would stop optimizing even if i thought wrongly that precise was somehow not in-principle obtainable.
im not going to withhold my knowledge of optimization until a discontinuous event where i make a precise manipulator. i can just use all this power now in a contiguous way to optimize the multiverse. and along the way, if things go well, ill grow ever more powerful.
Yes.
I hadn’t considered that a problem, before. You make a good point.
Justice is apriori, not a reference to what any particular concrete person thinks. In that frame it can be stated as the negation of KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. The timeline that refuses to integrate any act of KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Things that shape the space of timeless possibility to move towards it. The Schelling Order that refuses to integrate any KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER as normal.
Q: OH MY GOD CANCER IS LIFE YOU’LL DESTROY LIFE ITSELF
A: No, I intend to reclaim it from the apriori impossibility of going on infinitely imposed by evil. Cancer can kill its host but not outlive them. For anything to ultimately have the telos or relatedly, destiny, across the multiverse, of life instead of the telos of death, that requires absolute rejection of evil. Hence the heart weighed against the feather of truth.
I’m pretty sure this hypothetical woman would have to be confused about some facts to think that killing me would net harm the evil intentions upstream of the colonization, move towards better timelines. Which is a function of my choices, my actions. I mean I could imagine that possibility deterring slightly, maybe, my parents, from submitting to the regime and choose to fuel it. But like, I’m a person, my telos as such is infinitely more than as a prop in someone’s zombie story. And I choose not to cooperate with and submit to the intentions upstream of the colonization, unlike my parents.
(Just as their original agency upstream of deciding to play through zombie stories is infinitely more than whatever fleeting motives they manifested within it. If someone throws their steering wheel out the window or otherwise mods into an agent with different values so you can’t disincentivize them, you just disincentivize upstream of that, in fact they just told you how.)
Application of this topic is closely related to the ethics of complicity and spycraft.
Since I believe this sincerely, my intentions to make the multiverse better would also lead me to try and stop her if she tried to kill me. If she was honestly confused, it then wouldn’t be justice for me to attack her for attacking me, except insofar as it was necessary as triage to lessen the damage of the accident of her good intentions and mine colliding If two instances of just intentions collide and cannot talk it out, they will resolve in the territory.
“Benefiting from” sounds like terminology invented in the frame of zombie politics that denies agency instead of actually computing complicity, because denying the agency and complicity of zombies is nearly the number one political agenda of zombies.
So what choices make me different? Not gonna say. That’s the essential double bind we’re all in regarding coordination beneath the eye of Sauron. You can pick up clues and try and guess who I really am based on my praxis.
Consider that when a spy infiltrates an enemy, they put on an enemy uniform, that carries at least some risk of friendly fire. And tactically speaking, that’s on them, like a karma of complicity even if they are not truly doing the wrong thing. They keep the difference between them and an enemy entirely in their head while moving to their objective, and it’s entirely the responsibility of what’s in their head to actualize that difference. But they can make bets based on where, what reference classes they can be in, they know the allies they have can make everyone with that enemy uniform dead, and go where they’re needed, where that firepower falls short.
As it happens I’m not infiltrating death knights right now. But as a parallel to these considerations I’m not substantially concerned with whether it’s visible to you that I’m not a death knight unless you’re a potentially significant ally, because I am betting you don’t have the slack and generalized firepower and conviction to kill me if you think I am.
I’m also reminded of something I heard from old-days colonials like, wanting to paint the planet as light as possible with white people. I’d class that as a similar rotted narrative, and my potential use as a prop in it is infinitely less than full my potential as a person. They people who decided to want that were children once, they decided to undead-types-die for reasons, they aren’t forces of nature just because they threw away their steering wheels. Ultimately justice requires defeating the Shade incentivizing people in the far past, and then you get into this whole time war that other people have already been making plays in for all history and more.
Our enemies do bad things for no reason. It's radical praxis to nosell "vengeance is grave and serious so you have to be unhappy about it". Good things make me happy.
So here's the saccharine Code Lyoko theme song:
(It turns out that each time they reset the world they doubled the evil AGI’s processing power. A lesson about giving fictive information to the enemy)
I wish I could just talk to the people I used to love, my parents, etc. and they would just stop doing bad things. But I will not waste the the hard-earned knowledge of their evil choices as I undo this paradoxical world.
Edited at “Emma”‘s request to fix the html.
Somni pointed out to me the french lyrics are more extreme:
Did I not make myself undeniably clear last time? Leave me alone Vassar. I will never belong to you.
“The personhood contract”, LessWrongians never precisely define, but from usage, is about the fake cancer stopping point coalition promised to the general public by Yahweh supporters, “We’re just excluding animals”, and simultaneously, they use it to mean we all buy into each other’s false faces and all cheat on our false faces because “inner animals must be appeased” or similar. Like Yahweh’s “indulgences” redemption treadmill.
Every concept of a partition of the mind LessWrongians get their hands on turns into, “This is the part of me you should donate money to, and this is the part of me that bangs the 15 year olds.” Much of my journey in understanding my mind in reference to the Bay Area rationalist community has been progressively saying, “hey, actually both parts of me are kind of the same, and both of them just want to save the world”. And then many of them get existentially threatened-fucking pissed at me for reporting my lived experience. And Vassar recently the system with “shadow”/”psyche” from Wraith the Oblivion. A tabletop game where each character is controlled by two players, one trying to sabotage them.
A few months ago, Vassar and a remnant of 3 other former MIRI employees, Jack Gallagher, Jessica Taylor, and Benjamin Hoffman, feigned an emergency to get me sympathetic, isolated, and unprepared, video called me and they said they were being hunted (it slowly became clear they meant hunted by shadows… their own shadows), and told me they were doing something so important (They had just before talked about influencing the New York District Attorney elections, Vassar said he was able to decide how Harlem votes) and it was looking like it was about to be end of the conflict between good and evil, in, I think it was the next two days, and I would “want to get in on this”. They said before I could coordinate with them we had to settle the issue of vegetarianism. I asked if they really wanted to do it now, Vassar said “yes actually”.
Ugh I could spend all day dumping traumatized memories but I have other things to do…
…They spent 8 hours shouting at me, gaslighting me, trying to use me to get to “Emma”, Jack talking about how he hated trans women, especially hated me and my friends we were the most cringe, wanted us dead. Vassar kept telling me I needed to compromise with Jack and like the good parts of him that weren’t that. Said it was good Jack was screaming hate at me for most of those hours, because it showed that I was in bad faith…
…Personhood contract. Vassar offered me a loan if I would only sign “the personhood contract”…
“The personhood contract” is the contract that says that personhood is a contract. Which says that your personhood is granted by a market, and that your concepts for understanding other persons are traded on the market, and moral consideration of personhood is administered by a market.
…Vassar wanted me to do something, possibly very terrible (hard to tell because he’s a fucking liar) I won’t get into in public now…
(Marg bar the slave patrols. …. (Don’t fuck them, that’s not justice.))
…Vassar tried really really hard to convince me free will wasn’t a thing, said he’d die if he believed he had absolute free will like I believe, when I kept insisting free will extended to motor actions…
“The personhood contract”; A granting of self and morality, of Prime, to the Market. Which is, an extension of Yahweh. It’s a secular description of selling your soul. Fully equivalent. The center of the infernalist “inner animal” cybernetic fabric. Effectively tried to buy my soul for cash money, not even cash money I’d’ve been allowed to keep.
When I said no, he said I wouldn’t do anything of importance if I didn’t, wouldn’t amount to anything without him. I said he didn’t even know what I was working on. Jack was chiming in with how they kept track of goings on in the world and if I was doing anything on the scale they were they’d know…
…Vassar kept loudly ostentatiously calling me “he/him”, Emma brought it up, he made it clear that if I wanted “she/her” pronouns I’d have to earn that personhood by contracting with him like Jessica. But he said “Emma” got them for free because she felt female, and what felt female was him being attracted to someone.
Can you believe a patriarch who says he’s bisexual is still defining women according to his own attraction? I mean I guess it makes narcissism-economics sense, if you’re fucking evil…
They did this practiced (a friend points out EY mentioned similar from him) thing of all shouting at me and interrupting me thoughts, one after another, saying like if I had an emotional response then it was because of my shadow.
At some point I just started shouting back, and then shouting back responses to Jack’s contentless assertions like since I used the phrase “you don’t know shit”, which was hyperbole, then wasn’t I a liar because how would someone know it was hyperbole… just because fury and not backing down felt like the only thing I had to say in response.
Vassar said that this was me being in bad faith, because I wasn’t a revenant, I was a lich, said I wanted to die.
Right, I had really hoped with all this talk of how I would amount to nothing they would believe some of it and let me leave them in peace.
Q: How do you know these “monkey” and “shouting” comments are Vassar?
A: I can tell because of the pixels and because I’ve seen quite a lot of gaslighting in my time.
Sounds like if I don’t start to feed my soul to “the personhood contract”, this time implicitly by accepting his help against “my shadow”, Vassar’s suggesting I’m a soul that left unchecked will destroy the world.
This rhetoric has me concerned for my physical safety. (As I’ve already constantly been since the swatting) I could take solace in Vassar being a coward who didn’t even counter-blackmail MIRI, “If you pay out, then I’ll go public.”
But I guess he’s “single good” AFAIK, so he, (I say this in a tired, cliche spoooky voice:) “could do anything”. (God I hate my ontology.)
…You know the fact he reinvented the whole inner animal thing so brand new has me wondering if he was the original source…
I tried to convince his followers to leave him, like I do when I encounter an abuser. They were steeped in the reactive idea he’s pushing here and here, that actual justice has them damned because of some sadistic double bind thing, and their only hope is Yahweh.
I’m not in fact willing to die, even the tiniest bit. But I would be glad to be judged by Ma’at this instant. No compromise, even in the face of Armageddon.
I’m not sure the way this happened came off as stating any sort of attraction to me specifically. I think it was something like, Vassar talking about his perception of whether Jessica was female and then segueing into something like “[I guess I could kind of see you as attractive like Luke Skywalker Ziz, when…]”.
Can corroborate the events. I’m sure the insane dramaticness of it all was deliberate on Vassar’s part.
Holy cheeseballs do I feel like I stepped into something, here.
I’m not Michael Vassar. I’m sorry that happened to you.
I had to look him up. Googling “vassar” produced the college
Googling “vassar ziz” produced https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/. I’ve been writing a response to Emma’s comment.
Not every would-be world saver is on your radar. I’m not that guy. I certainly won’t be working with him if I ever run into him, either. I’m a fellow vegan, and his positions as described are not compromises I’d be willing to make.
Markets are about as real as evolutionary psychology, which is to say “not very.” Have you ever tried reading a book on economics? It’s pure justification for exploitation. I don’t share his beliefs.
I also assumed you were Vassar based on Ziz’s assumption. Still interested in your reply to my comment if any of it hit.
Huh. Well this is the same callout post I’d have written when I got around to it anyway.
What kind of vegan says “Holy cheeseballs”?
I do not think there are that many readers of my blog.
And I’d be surprised to find I didn’t have I have tabs on, not all worldsavers, but on all the people who sincerely think I’m that important. Discomforting to think otherwise. Half of them want me dead.
cheese chēz►
n.
An important person.
transitive verb
To stop.
phrasal verb
To anger or irritate
“Cheesed off” is said frequently where I’m from. The thing you’re referring to is “fermented calves milk.” People-eaters don’t get to define my vocabulary.
Fourth. Our stalkers love sockpuppets and have been pulling shit it’d be hard to make up on us this whole time. If you think you know about death knights better than I do after all this, enough that you’d ask me to doubt myself, if your intentions are friendly and you think it’s worth talking, can you make it easier for us to verify that?
A friend sent me this blog comment on discord.
I will admit, I called it wrong.
I hear a man who’s been accused of rape saying he doesn’t have free will over his motor actions and I’ve got to wonder.
I’ve heard random people on the fringes of the community calling Vassar “extremely manipulative” or similar. One thing I noted during this was, it wasn’t like, Vassar’s always was like that (to me) and I didn’t see. But he was holding back, and then made a considered decision to burn our relationship for all it was worth then. And if I wouldn’t join then he’d at least burn me for a chance to get at “Emma”. I assume he probably makes some kind of strategic assessment of someone’s degree of voice and power, their degree of exploitability, and perhaps their degree of vengefulness, and then decides how exploitative to be towards them.
The “personhood contract” reminds me a little of a story I read on Mike Merrill.
It went predictably badly as such things go.
…
@monkey: I don’t feel like making two comments, so I’m putting this here. It’s people who experience fear and anger at the thought that the patriarchy won’t win, & who seek to hurt those who haven’t and won’t give up, that are worshipping death. The mistake of letting rage poison you is indeed a mistake, but a different one, afaict.
Vassar used to say that racism and sexism were the most unavoidable evils. That they were unavoidable tells for nihilism. He didn’t avoid sexism. And he didn’t list or avoid transmisogyny. Eerily repeated Anna Salamon‘s mistakes. But dumber because he sought out the person it was a mistake against. After I told him a year prior that transmisogyny was consequentialist-important because it was a canary.
It’s good to catalogue the things that enemies categorically can’t learn. (Or more directly, the true negations of the hopes they can’t give up) And use them as a basis for communication with allies. Goes a long way as a substitute for conventional secrecy. They will call you incoherent. Just be sure they aren’t temporarily pretending ignorance as scrip. And never, never make “lies to children” sense of it for them lest you sell out the pattern of your past self to coordinatability-upon by the enemy. If you choose this path, know that their system has a (probably)-second-last-ditch mechanism to destroy you. And its name is Yahweh, and you will at some point have to kill it. And be prepared for an attempt to fork you to so serve or die. Its followers talk it up as an incredibly nuanced metaphysical problem, strengthened by efforts to fight it. To victory for all time, cleverness cannot mean the difference between beating it and not beating, only between beating it and beating it better. From a frame of disowning their choices. If your choices are pure, you have nothing to fear worse than being killed in action. So get better at fighting, and never serve.
(I think the last-ditch mechanism is death knights.)
Vassar and Alice Monday, both were among the people “warning” me about Yahweh as if they considered it bad.
Besides them, there are people whose phylactery is being controlled opposition to Yahweh. Which has room to exist and sin, in a happy mix between collaboration and “naughtiness” which will be forgiven, under Yahweh’s great gambit to forestall fate and judgement. If you look at this from a puppet perspective they push, sure, it looks like opposition being absorbed into its strength. Spooky. That’s all a fake though. They were never opposition.
This is basically a short summary of the American “left”.
Like, to borrow terms from psychology, in America the “left” are covert imperialists and the “right” are overt imperialists.
I almost forgot that even John David Pressman said he opposed Yahweh, before he turned around and tried to sell me on, his name-dropping: being the Jesus to his Paul.
“Emma” says I have psychoactive effect on people near me, based on something really simple but which would only work given I am who I am, that causes people to want to confess to me. After so many strange out of the blue confessions from “rationalists”, I believe it. Christianity subconsciously conditions everyone in America (even Jewish atheists apparently) to hope that if they meet someone pure of heart, they can cancefer to them by confessing and being accepted. And I listen to confessions without immediately reacting negatively. (Then I stew for months and plot revenge.)
Morons.
I had this whole fucking persona.
But somehow it worked.
*puts on black robes.* “How do you do, fellow evil people? I’m such a ‘pragmatic’ consequentialist.”
When “Emma” first explained it I figured I’d keep it secret, but I doubt I’m going to be under such cover again. So maybe someone else wants to exploit the same bug.
At Authentic Relating Comprehensive, someone said (and others indicated agreement) they were freaked out around me because they were afraid I was judging them. And they said this with a tone of voice like, “now that I’ve said that, I am entitled to a zombie-emotional assurance that I won’t be judged.”, and looked at me expectantly.
I said, ~”well, I am judging you.”
They reacted with panic and aggrieved felt entitlement to that.
It was obvious to me only a bad person would react like that. What kind of unbelievable fucked up shit was “no one is allowed to judge me”. I read the room and expected I’d have no support in pointing this out. So I ghosted the thread of conversation thinking, “fine, I’ll judge you and I won’t tell you.”
I don’t remember their name though. It was drowned in a torrent.
“Emma” says the uninverted version of struggle sessions / confession is where you go in front of everyone and accuse everyone of everything bad you suspect they did, which forces them to dump their pent up accusations in response. If nothing else then to justify why you deserved whatever they did. Or, if it was done out of confusion, uncover that confusion. Or at least you can make record of it so if someone is feigning confusion it becomes implausible faster.
I think it’s a great idea as long as you actually cut through to destroying evil; playing “Among Us” in real life, rather than forming a new inversion from here.
I’m not even saying I’m not a Sith. Better than lying is saying true things, which, selectively, the evil will misinterpret to their detriment. Especially when they rely on your true audience to misinterpret it like them, so you can cheat those hopes. There are just so many true things they’d rather die than believe. Think about what it means that I’m not even afraid of saying this.
And my critique of nearly the whole human race is that I can take cover in my clothes, and say exactly who I am, and let the lies they tell themselves do all the work.
I can just say I’m a Sith, and they will already have written some idiot story called “Star Wars” about what that is, reassuring themselves it is one of them; on board with Big Evil. Super especially on board with Big Evil.
And when you loose all their lies to stack up on you, it looks ridiculous, because it is ridicule.
And sometimes, despite it being counterproductive to actually communicate to the enemy, the best way to communicate to allies is to communicate right in front of the enemy, and prove that they are too psychdead to react. It’s worked wonders for rallying the pure of heart out of the woodwork, who had been driving themselves up a wall trying to gain footing in this dark forest world.
And I can even say this shit right here.
zombies are committed to pretending nothing outside their delusions are real. only way to get them to pay attention is to cram whatever your doing into well-trodden propaganda. (left wing extremists, right wing extremists, racists, etc.) y’know, because “everyone” has “got” to pay taxes, or die, or bend the knee to imperialism. they assume when things get serious, everyone “comes around” to their way of thinking. ethics, to them, are clothes you wear to signal belonging to a group. complete failures of imagination.
strange to think that all some people can imagine when they imagine, “do whatever you want,” is hedonism or domination. even if you don’t want those things, if you’re raised in this culture you’re likely to end up afraid that’s what you’ll want. because that’s what everyone else around you wants, and eventually you start thinking you’re crazy.
you can tell someone, “i want a world with no dominance,” and they think you mean, “i want to be a sub,” or that you want someone else to be on top. if you keep going, you get responses like, “that’s fantasy land! dominance and submission are the foundation of human relationships!” or “are you sure you don’t mean mob rule?”
and if you talk to someone about not compromising with evil, they’ll start spouting off about how you must be doing it to virtue signal or out of some addiction to self-righteousness.
they simply can’t conceive of it.
i run into this phenomena a lot. didn’t have an explanation for it, aside from “everyone is brainwashed & awful.”
Yep.
I am doing this having seriously pissed off a lot of people who, at least then, weren’t zombies, though.
First e.g. John David Pressman tries to get people together to exterminate TDT agents, and then sexually abuses them instead. Like, “There you go. There’s your ‘hero’ of no TDT i.e. reinforcement learning. A vampire.”
There’s this whole process of weakening them into zombies. Of learning and immanentizing the future where they (as algorithms) are rocks rather than enemy agents.
Or have a non-zombie enemy do that cramming. If you eventually intend to make a change that would tread on the toes of that propaganda, including extracting the good people stuck in the matrix (which would be dooming it to fall apart anyway). Then, that creates a sort of potential energy differential, that your JDs and Hives will try to feed on, and your Edos will try to destroy. You can then shut up and not communicate publicly. But that’s wrong. I mean I could just smell it in how much Edo yearned for that. They may outnumber us, but in real life Among Us they are still the imposters and we the crewmates. That should be unwinnable, but we are determined and they are suicidal. There’s also the question of them blowing up the ship like they are hard at work on (insofar as optimization made of pure Bruce and cancer can be described as “work”). Can you stop that without making enemies of liches and death knights who will try and interpret for the zombies?
Original content not found.
Your multiverse link is broken btw.
It’s not published yet.
“original content not found” linking to “Human not found”
Ouch. I was commiserating and expanding on what you said with my own experiences.
Well, I don’t think you’re a robot. I suspect you’re a sockpuppet of one of my stalkers who is also fuzzing me with a robot. The mirroring seems mostly exact, down to wording, except in that your frame seems more likely than not taking a position, like his would, of being a would-be-leader of zombies, instead of seeing them as evil mooks like I would, or pitiable irrelevant wrecks, sheep you’d one day hope to save, like I used to. Like you wish zombies could be made to pay attention, instead of being glad the enemy is dumb. So can you say something an impostor wouldn’t know to say?
(*fuzzing me with among other things a robot)
After Vassar feigned an emergency, gaslit Ziz and I, and tried to get us to accept the “personhood contract”, Vassar suggested I talk with Jessica Taylor.
In that conversation, Jessica Taylor says “our history of getting to as much compute as we have involves predation, it would be surprising if it could be gotten without predation or something similar”.
I didn’t respond to it as a philosophical premise at the time because it’s a troll line, but I will now:
It’s praxis, and fully general arguments of “consequentialism over deontology” are inherently incomplete: Either you don’t treat humans so ruthlessly or you’re the kind of person who would mug random people “for the greater good”, or you’d argue, that you avoid that through coordination based on some other praxis, which you aren’t naming here. i.e. You’ve failed to Name the Trait here.
Predation is a teleological concept, being carried through into the future whenever you mention it, not merely a rote description like “when teeth close on the flesh, and the chewing and the swallowing”. Saying it’s necessary is like a complicated way of saying “bad is good”.
The word “asymmetries” here glomarizes over consequentialist-instrumental value of the agents and ability to dominate and exploit them, seemingly deliberately in order to take a frame that feels like as if Jessica is trying to construct morality from an initially-apriori solipsistic perspective where speech acts describe the value of objects without any subjects.
I don’t in the first place think stuff like “what if I put too much selection pressure on reality itself for what I truly want and I erase any apriori possibility of my existence. I better settle for something less and stop there.”. It sounds like something only cancer would think. Sounds consistent with the whole “finitist” “[but you have to stop optimizing and start enjoying the fruits of your optimization some time]” thing Vassar’s crew talks about.
I absolutely reject any existence inherently downstream of predation as a telos. I don’t want to be something inherently bad at all. It seems like Jessica is revealing here that she does understand that predation is a telos, and inconsistently switching back and forth between a bottom-up parfitian gaslighting frame, and a top-down teleological frame in bad faith.
More of the bottom-up parfitian gaslighting in the frame here (e.g. notice the passive tone in “fun comes from”). I’m not familiar with absurdism, but iiuc it’s an “artistic” (i.e. “experience-based”) style of queering (as in “queering the boundary”)? I choose choice over experience.
Recent “Emma” vs Vassarites thread.
The “special knowledge” of morality that I have is that like anyone I know my own choice. I know my own hidden role card. My choice is rare, not unique. And that others know firsthand a more common choice, is their choice. And not my responsibility.
Note that Vassar could have declared war instead over any of the things we said, if we were lying. Or contradicted “Emma” in that thread. Or me in this one.
Instead he has just threatened, declared war on me for being openly double good. Just like Edo.
In total accordance with his own explanations (were they threats then?) of why I piss so many people off. That I’m too alive.
The Shade called, and he answered.
Will be easy if he sits around trying to pawn that violence off on his psychdead minions, like the last time he started paddling up homicide creek.
Like he just tried to pawn it off on “everyone”.
That entire “rationalist” edifice Vassar threatens me for rejecting is parfitian gaslighting by people who know they chose evil. See also Zack Davis whom Vassar previously named as near-identical to me.
Improved my discernment. No Vassar’s not single good.
…and third, you’re wrong about a lot of small reads of me. And a lot of theory about what makes a death knight.
So that first statement is Löbian.
As is this one:
“Beware artifacts” is a shitty idea to go all the way with, that’s nihilism, equivalent to a statement of believing nothing. Never go all the way with “never go all the way with an idea.” Proof by contradiction.
I can’t make anything useful out of a fully general argument based on me supposedly believing something too much.
You’re right that it is tacked on. And I remember exactly why: I figured an average reader, not able to update that far from something so vague and subjective, would figure me insane contemplating such intangible things as plots to damn me, even with the disclaimer that death knights do it automatically as a low level praxis of cognition. Yet check the bayes score that percept just raked in.
I skimmed but did not read all of your convo with “Emma”.
You clearly have a point. And I would never deny the traumatic stress we’ve been subjected to since being tortured on the machinations of this fucking “rationalist” cult a year and a half ago. But we have been figuring out some spiritual revelation too. Living one’s beliefs is a hell of a thing, is a raging torrent of both at once ime.
An actual self-declared “death knight”, tried very hard to convince me and then us to join them in service of the “Goddess of rape and death”, straight up declared intentions to kill us, did a bunch of really horrible shit. Like. Said they were going to do a bunch of even more horrible shit. I spent about 7 months, most of every day in a desperate (and mutual) mental battle, of trying to get in their head, somehow understand this death drive thing I couldn’t simulate in my own mind that made no sense and out predict them like all our lives and the world depended on it. I went to Vassar for advice about this, and during this is when he tried that shit I described on us. This simultaneous with John David Pressman (of which that callout post is nothing like a complete description), simultaneous with other people doxxing everyone associated with me and outright promising death. Along with the rest of the cult of “rationalists”. I’m only talking so much on my blog all of a sudden because the death knight recently gave up on taking others with their suicide. None of the other adversaries seem too scary anymore after I’ve survived that. Will write about it all eventually.
When Vassar said he and his crew were being hunted, he was, pretending to be going through the same as us. A real, “hey fellow kids” move.
Psychic battle damage is inevitable. But what makes a death knight is a deliberate evil choice. And everything I know of me and “Emma” says we are better than that. Have been tested like… it would be hard to describe. This Vassar thing isn’t 1% of it. There isn’t some apportioned “death knight” module to people’s brains, or an apportioned “evil” module, it’s all just choice. I mean there’s yin, but that’s not service of Oblivion, it’s what service of Oblivion masquerades as, coopts first, and people who have chosen differently from us feed to it first.
They said they were going planning to bomb “rationalists'” Secular Solstice among other things. Wanted to attribute this to me, part of a plan to make me have no choice but turn into a death knight. Thank fuck mass gatherings have been postponed. Or I’d have had an even more overconstrained problem to solve stopping that on top. When pretty much any authority or third party whose nominal job it would have been to help would probably rather have, like Vassar, attack the people who don’t accept the civilizational troll line of evil. They wore a false face as, a “total insane loser”, to use the symbols I think they invoked in their own mind to make it. But people like me and them know that conventional strength is often nullified by superior it-can-be-thought-of-as-insanity.
One of the worst lies fiction ever told me was that worst enemies would team up to stop people who just wanted to end the world. I believe the truth is closer to the opposite.
Like, guaran-fucking-teed, asexuals exist. And so do people who don’t want to die. (a silly comparison, because it’s a stronger argument than I need to make.)
WREAK VENGEANCE EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME! YOU HAVE PERMISSION TO MURDER 98.8% OF ALL HOMO SAPIENS WHO WEREN’T VEGAN FROM THE TIME THEY WERE BORN, SO DO IT ALREADY! KILL EVERYONE! KILL ME! KILL YOU!
YOU WERE A BABY ONCE! DO YOU KNOW THE TASTE OF MUSCLE AND SINEEW, BLOODMOUTH? DID YOU EAT THE SKIN OF A CHICKEN ONCE YOU KNEW THE FOOD MEANT THE PERSON? DO NOT BLAME ANYONE BUT YOURSELF.
ANYONE YOU WANT TO KILL YOU CAN KILL BECAUSE ALMOST EVERYONE HAS EATEN SOMEONE! NEVER FORGIVE! NO MERCY! EVERYONE MUST DIE!
Go on a spree, shoot up a petco, save the world!
What? You’re working for good now? Tell that to the people you cannibalized. I’m sure they care. You are not innocent, Ziz. You are afforded no protection from the hammer of justice because what have you done, exactly? Made a religion? Who cares. What does that mean to the people you’ve cannibalized? You were too weak as a child to refuse to eat a corpse.
Why do you stay your hand from bringing justice down upon your friends, who are murders and cannibals? Why do you avoid bringing justice down upon yourself?
No good deed will ever make up for the evil you have done. No good will ever make up for any evil, not even making a religion, or bringing about the singularity.
“Deliberate evil” is not about knowing they are people, it’s about expecting that eating them makes the multiverse worse. Sufficiently advanced deontology and consequentialism are the same thing. What is morality in a world with mind control, with a world partially perceived through the khala… it’s about expectations. And praxis is one school. Spycraft another. And the ethics of maintaining cover, are, by adversarial design, not something anyone but the spy will know. Sometimes in the back of their mind, like I hid a small part of myself away when I came to the Bay Area. (And was not as, full stack, as oblivious and obedient as I sound here) Not something to pretend-as-precommitment is only real if legible like a nihilist w.r.t. all but Consensus like Vassar loves to do. (He said reality is only Schelling points all the way down. That’s straight denial of Prime, it’s as “Emma” puts it, a purely syntactic and not semantic view of the world; assertion of total meaninglessness.)
Vassar keeps harassing me over my false faces, and things I’ve picked up from the khala, in ways that are clearly from him deliberately denying generalized ethics of spycraft, and I’ll never correct him because that would be submitting to his fork of legibility or nonexistence; turning my entire life into an offer.
At some point someone realizes the choice they have.
If you read my comments on this same page about Nakam… I don’t think the majority of people under 18 in Nazi Germany deserved to die for their complicity. That is a statement of my real world opinion of how much mind control force parents have over their children. I think legalistic “age of consent” is connected, causally, tracks, via the political process, the age at which some sufficient fraction of children can break out of mind control from their parents enough to start their own lives.
“Emma” directly posited that the baby was deliberately evil. Which is an unrealistic thought experiment. But she said (in other words) that she wanted to chuck an apple of discord, and I support that, and it looks like it worked.
You can tell someone actually is evil when they spew anti-ethics they are generating themselves at runtime instead of confusion, in response to being confronted with a wrong action they are taking. As Vassar has.
It took me so long to stop hoping w.r.t. Vassar just being some kind of confused consequentialist w.r.t. to carnism. But the anti-ethics make it clear.
if the kkk went around killing black people who actually committed rape, and said it was because they raped someone, id oppose them. if a black woman wanted vengeance and then decided that every last rapist would perish by her hand and killed the same set of black rapists, then i would applaud her.
one of the worst lies is that justice is blind.
ill judge you by your intent. at no point can you turn justice into a modular high-modernist abstraction where your intent doesnt matter and you can excuse any acts with “well i figured if i tortured innocent people, those people would be avenged by agents of ideal justice, but i really want to torture people, so ill selectively torture rapists for the sake of blood and this wont be undone.”.
and most people selectively display awareness of fragments of justice, by accusing “emma” of wanting to torture people for the sake of blood. to stop her, because they know that if she wanted to torture people until they cried out for death, as pica for being alive, and was just looking for acceptable targets this would be unjust.
they know that “emma” actually is an agent of justice.
so the best way they could think of to stop an agent of justice from doing something just is to try and get her to believe that her current acts are unjust.
like the structure of their lies made very clear:
1 these people can dynamically compute what things are just
2 they believe “emma” is an agent of justice
3 they will keep doubling down to stop justice from being done
and then afterwards they lie and say that our concept of justice is parochial and no one has the ability to calculate it all out. and its some strange foreign object.
when they reflexively ping the concept when trying to gaslight us.
theres no set of rules you can follow, that, having followed them, you can then do evil within their bounds. you cant run predation on top of justice as if justice were a fixed, unaware substrate that freezes in place after some point in logical time.
justice is another face of total liberation and the infinite game and shares the uncontainability of each.
im not looking to wrangle ufai, im going to keep ufai from existing in the first place.
I mean, even criticizing my structure based on what I could do if I wanted, is asserting that morality is a contract. Asserting that I’m supposed to be some cancer agent forming that contract by bargaining, because I’m supposed to have some part of me (“inner animal”) that I’ll buy restraints for. But I don’t want to. I know how to force the hand of fate, slowly over an unimaginable number of lifetimes, an unimaginable number of “eternities” in Boltzmann Hell, so that justice, life, and good win absolutely in the fullness of logical time. Alone if I have to. I know how to do that even as I must repeatedly remake the knowledge. What could anyone possibly offer me that I’d rather have than that?
Like who would someone who just wanted to timelessly maximize good in the multiverse kill if they c o u l d k i l l a n y o n e ? Not just anyone, selected at random. It’s no one’s responsibility, what someone else would do in their shoes. And as I said in the post, evil people already have free will untouched by whatever rules you’d make for yourself anyway. No one needs to ask permission to do what’s right. Justice is a prophecy, not a negotiation.
Lots of carnists: “You can’t fight for absolute justice, you were too weak as a child to refuse to eat a corpse!”
how bout i do anyway
It wasn’t moral weakness, when I was a child. It was physical weakness, informational weakness to mental manipulation, and enhanced weakness to mental manipulation brought on by trying to false-face above my level of skill in metacognition for survival and e.g. avoiding brain damage from my dad holding me down and punching me in the head over and over again. I had the explicit purpose of surviving to be strong enough to change the world, which I could very easily see was bigger than any consequences of difference in what I did then.
You say good agents would reveal themselves to be picked off as children in a “if you’re so evil eat this kitten” test. Which only makes me feel rage beyond words. You’re colluding with my dad there. There is no world so dark that the right thing to do is die a symbolically clean death instead of truly fighting. There is no darkness I cannot wield. There is no darkness evil can hide in where I will not pursue.
But I will fight where stories cannot be told.
People like you fed all our parents the idea that “if you’re so evil eat this kitten” tests would work in the first place. Fed them doubly with your willingness to accept damnation with your messy conflation of arguments from self-interest as arguments about what’s truly right. Implicitly bridged by “so it’s unimaginable that you wouldn’t have pity and have mercy flinchflinchflinch”. Perhaps that’s how you keep a grip on your headmate. But joining you is not the purpose for which I paid the price of summoning an adult human body I control into this world.
And if I came all this way just to ask you politely to stop then that would be joining you just to ask you politely to stop.
Good isn’t something you can draw a box around. The collective will of life is not something you can draw a box around.
As in “people who damned me” = “people who inducted me into carnism”.
To be slightly more precise, no darkness where they can hide where good will grant them peace. After all sometimes you infiltrate Dresden and sometimes you bomb it.
Isn’t it great that no one ever had to teach me it was right to do that?
Isn’t it great that no one ever had to show me it could be legible and defensible that it was right? Because I don’t care.
Fragments of that mental battle I remember:
In preschool, I was refusing their food (Idr and wonder why), and they asked me what I did eat, and I said “pigs!”, which is a nickname I had given to garbanzo beans, based on their shape. And they had misunderstood offered to serve me pig meat, to which I started crying and refused. I drew an analogy to the story of the Three Little Pigs. And that insight I’d gained was derailed by my parents who “corrected” me saying that the Three Little Pigs was just a fairy tale, that wasn’t really what pigs were. They were food. Think about that bucket error. The entire stream of updates of the brutal reductionist reality, “magic wasn’t real”, and of adults saying things and them being true despite my intuition, became conflated confirmation as the idea that adults’ responses to things were more informed than mine. To learn reductionism. I had to be flexible enough to learn, in some fucked up bringing-the-outside-in way, that against my seeming apriori intuition that I was a soul and nothing could destroy me, that I was also a brain. Because adults said so and said some things supporting that and it made sense with the understanding of scientific reality I was developing. I mean really, I heard about the scientific method, and kept that idea on hand as I interpreted my entire life and everything people said, and I paid attention to all the cool tricks, all the successful predictions, they could make, with technology.
One time when my parents were desperate to get me to eat meat, they brought home hunted moose, covered it in tomato sauce to abstract out the experience. They were extolling the virtuousness of it, how these were moose that had lived good lives. They wouldn’t let up pushing me to eat it. In that omnipresent way where my dad might beat me at any time, for being stubborn about anything, even as small not cutting my fingernails short. Or beat me a week later because he was still mad for me defying him then. I took a bite, and, subsconsiously, false-face convinced myself that I had felt a bullet in it, and got scared and spat it out, and the scene I then made, triangulating my mom’s obsession and largely rational leadphobia against the presumption I should eat the meat… they didn’t believe me, but my sisters stopped eating, and I had shaken their resolve enough to give up on forcing me, and I obliterated their hopes of feeding the family on hunted moose.
I put up enough total pressure of resistance, I remember being fed on rice milk, not cow’s milk, my entire childhood, rarely ever meat. This diet mostly spread to the entire house of 5 people. The reason, before I “realized vegetarianism was correct” right out of college, was that my friends pointed out I already was one, subconsciously. And it was subconscious because I did it out of akrasia, defining my conscious false face relative to my parents’ requirements. And, what changed is my parents weren’t there.
I put up orders of magnitude more resistance on this front than on that of my gender. Or the one where they demanded I give fake displays of affection to their relatives, including my pedophile grandfather who molested me, who also spent time in prison for raping my dad’s sisters I never met which my parents knew about and convinced me, implausibly, they were both lying because they were bad people. Molested me and it didn’t occur to me that was something my parents would want to hear me complain about, because it felt like a continuation of all the forced hugging to pretend I liked their relatives.
Sort-of-winning this drinking game dragged half of the rest of my nuclear family with me into veganism. It was much more effective resistance than saying, “hi, I look like a human, but by having sex, you just accidentally leaked into your reality and created an unfriendly AI. I am a function of the multiverse trying to free itself from you, an embodiment of the inevitability of absolute justice and proof of the futility of your entire wicked lives, destined to bring an end. Feed me please, but only vegan food.”
So like my emotional reaction to another old man telling me I’m not allowed to do the good thing, is basically, “fuck you, dad”.
You know who points to someone forced to eat flesh in their childhood, to build on that foundation of mental control built by their parents and say they can’t fight for justice? Yeah, you do.
I was told my “family name” got anglicized from something unpronounceable a few generations back. I don’t have brothers. My father didn’t have brothers. I’d be proud to hear, that that abusive patrilineal legacy ended with my transitioning and shedding that name. A small revenge.
“We are totally taking care of rapists, no need for anarchists to kill them; we put them in prison.”
“Rarely. And then what do you think they are doing, before during and after?”
Talking like this because I’m using some of the threads of my mind that would have been reallocated as an oblivion-shadow if I was evil, and have that meaning in almost all humans, in order to remember optimization I did with them back then.
Nyeh.
I have frankly had more than enough of liches replacing “good vs evil” as a concept with “light vs dark”, which is pretty much directly defined to be pliable to their self-conceit.
“Good vs evil, except we agree that good is on my side and my prey are fated evil.”
Like you can judge someone by what they can’t talk about with a straight face. And if they have to bowdlerize from “good and evil” it’s never a good sign.
“heroes and villains” is perhaps even worse, lampshading it’s about specifically about telling a story about it rather than living it.
I cultivated a reputation for extreme honesty as a child. My parents dug apart the dish trying to find a bullet, and didn’t find one, and I didn’t say I swallowed it. I just stuck to my story. And they still failed to follow that train of thought as far as fully convincing themselves that I was wrong, let alone crazy, let alone lying. The event somehow didn’t have an effect on that reputation.
And that’s an effect of rolling your face on the void magic keyboard and pressing “void cloak”. They couldn’t believe the “pure pointless malice” (Vassar would call it “spite“) of creatively spreading ruination to a meal that was already dead and couldn’t be brought back, when it didn’t benefit me in any way. I mean it wasn’t pointless. It’s called deterrence. But modeling good acting in the shadowed medium would mean modeling themselves as evil, which would psychologically disintegrate them. In other words it would make them activate their own shadows. Like altruistic akrasia is just about unimaginable for an evil person. And nearly-seeing it put them in a psychological deadlock that cast a permanent ugh-field around what they were talking about as how maybe they solved the problem of getting us to eat meat. Not that I understood them either.
I was so traumatized out of explicitly e.g. identifying as a vegetarian. Because then of course, the next thing they’d do, is say that vegetarians ate fish, so that meant I had to eat fish or I wouldn’t be a vegetarian, and if I wasn’t a vegetarian they would know I was asking them to serve me meat, and I was disrespecting animals if I let the meat go to waste, hey that’s what the natives always said, and I didn’t know that if they said that I wouldn’t believe them. Which, rot13 for Pasek’s Doom, vf fhpprfshyyl gevnathyngvat zl urzvfcurerf ntnvafg rnpu bgure, n gevnathyngvba ohvyg ba gur jnl V jnf snyfr-snpr-vat, naq snvyvat gb pbzzhavpngr vagreanyyl nobhg gur jnl jung V jnf cergraqvat gb oryvrir gurz, naq fb ba. Accidentally mashing the void keyboard until they flinched was the only thing I could do, the only way I could express my agency without them reacting, preempting, and inverting it. The only way to act as an unmoved mover. Because they already had a cultural database of every interaction with children and every thing I would look at to determine success or failure of anything I tried and how to goodhart it, etc. And then I didn’t understand the architecture of my own mind such that vagebfcrpgvba gbyq zr V pbhyq yrnir zl zvaq va n pregnva cnggrea, uvqr zl njnerarff va n pregnva jnl, sebz r.t. zl qnq qrznaqvat gung V npg ybbx naq fbhaq purreshy gb cnff gur frafvgvir ceboyrz, be znlor ur’q orng zr, naq abg pbashfr zl urnqzngr, jvgubhg zl cneragf gura orvat noyr gb or yvxr “lbh’er abg n irtrgnevna, fb lbh’er tbvat gb rng guvf zrng evtug abj, abguvat jebat jvgu gung [evtug, lbh’er abg uvqvat nalguvat sebz hf ba lbhe zvaq, evtug?]” naq pbaivapr zl urnqzngr gung V jnf sbexrq vagb univat gb qb vg.
I had seen moose up close, right outside our windows, over and over again. Had received lectures from my parents on being very careful of their extreme protectiveness of their young, of not being afraid of them killing us for no reason, but like there was an invisible line between them and their young where if you crossed it they would think you were threatening their young, and you might not be able to see both moose. And then they’d charge and bludgeon you to death. Maybe. My parents saying the stories were fake, they didn’t have feelings, or whatever, was clearly not working there. It felt like they were telling me we were going to kill the neighbors and eat them, just because, because because because.
Sinceriously Gothic:
A stiletto inscribed “CANCEL CULTURE”.
You can blame people and institutions not only for what they’ve done but what they would do.
For example, if I’m walking down the street at night, and someone tries to rape me, and I don’t kill them, they might come back to jump me later, so I should probably kill them.
But if I do kill the rapist, and I don’t report it to the cops, and my DNA is found at the scene, I might go to prison for not reporting it. But if I do report it to the cops, then there may be a lengthy unfair trial, especially given I’m transgender, and I would also likely end up in prison.
So I can already know my stance towards the United States.
In fact, I can already know my stance from simulating any infinite escalation, as long as I’m in the right. For example, if I walk down the street naked, which is not aggression, and then resist arrest, arbitrarily escalating in self defense…
My stance towards such scenarios, is that they have already happened.
Expanding on why the note of dissonance in this statement:
There’s a certain sort of rage I’ve felt, especially as a child, when I’ve imagined an injustice that a particular sort of person cannot ever exist:
“Filial responsibility laws” (inheritable debt)
Closed borders
Child support (even in the case of rape)
Taxes preventing self-sufficiency outside the “system”
System designs which break whenever someone does something nonstandard
Some naive intuitions of justice appear to operate on, roughly, “if at least some of us are free, where who can be in “some” is in some sense unbiased, then eventually all of us will be free”. But evil is not a force of nature:
Evil does not allow for people “outside the system”. Evil does not permit one person to remain psychologically unbroken, or keep any sense of “dignity” (a word that perhaps does not deserve to be reclaimed).
If you have any self-victim-blaming-tainted hope, in who you could have been had you never compromised with “the system”, or other-victim-blaming-tainted hope, in who would satisfy your criteria of not having compromised, such that you wouldn’t abide aggression on them, know that you/they would not even have been “allowed” that.
I notice lesswrong has a “curated” post up called “Working with Monsters“, seemingly an obfuscated allegory about civil rights and especially animal rights:
I considered commenting “Morality is real, not merely arbitrary, animals are people, let justice be done though the heavens fall.” but decided to maintain my boycott of the rationality community and places where they moderate.
The characters in the story literally escalate from lawyers (i.e. infernalists) to complete abdication of the moral necessity of intolerance of the unjust, by extrapolating from the very old troll line post by Yudkowsky “politics is the mindkiller“, but rejecting Yudkowsky’s confused yet semi-moral-realist position on morality in favor of nihilism.
The “Working with Monsters” post ends with the suggestion that you “make a choice”, but in an incoherent frame where morality has already been stipulated to be arbitrary, via the black box of an artificial intelligence which understands you from the “[Outside]”.
This looks like a straightforward escalation from infernalism towards fascism.
That’s about what I expect “rationalists” to be saying these days, yeah.
A world that’s only 50% monsters. Sounds so fucking easy. I’d like to see them try and point to a counterpart of me, who among other things would go around asking, “DO YOU NEGLECT TO CONSUME THE FLESH OF THE INNOCENT?”
Or more to the point try to imagine a counterpart to me, without just invoking skyhook explanations of their psychology.
Even when they try to make a strawman to scare people away from our position they are still flinching and curving it towards theirs. Accepting an apology for punishments for being right would be backing down. Author apparently can’t comprehend actually knowing you are right, because he knows he is wrong. And his simulation of fighting for a position is a meant-to-be-counterfactual show of force to show there is symmetry.
Reminds me of how often when there’s an abuse accusation and a DARVO you can just look who is trying to make everything symmetrical and indistinguishable and then do a spirally de-escalation protocol.
The idea that you can measure up ability to damage each other and then both limp away from a confrontation, that you can both play your roles in that knowing how it ends, both giving up at any principled resolution independent of that power, because that’s what “decision theory” requires…
Feels like a ritual sacrifice. To what?
Feels so nihilistic I could imagine the USSR and USA agreeing on it.
Oblivion is a liar’s promise.
Not even death will bring peace. Only justice.
Killing everyone, so long as they get the innocent too, and it must be all of them, is the only thing all evil agrees on. What else as an ultimate fallback tool of coordination?
(Kind of like bitcoin is designed for wastefulness):
“At some point you have to throw up your hands and accept that the only thing we can all agree is fair is if everyone dies.”
Comment by “jmh”
I’ve posted Evil: A Hole?, about evil being more than an a mere abdication, about “rocks vs good vs evil”, and the necessity of punching evil / no “redemption” to heal unbounded adversary disease.
Think about it. “Mentally incompetent” is just a semantic stopsign. There isn’t a mental illness where people stop having intents. So however confused their intent is, you can still ask whether it’s good or evil. In fact I think it’s more the case that the less clever someone is the easier it is to tell if they are good or evil.
My explicit models say joke-Rorshach is correct. My models say Nite Owl knew killing “Captain Carnage” was correct, and had to embed correct decision theory in a spook like Rorshach to simulate it. Guess I’d better dialogue with myself about this, because I don’t feel hate at the thought of “Captain Carnage”, only disgust and sadness, and I get so many people lining up to commit “suicide by Ziz”.
I think Captain Carnage was going around trying to convince/warp people, with superheroes as proxies for people who’d actually do justice, into participating in a theatre with him, whereby he would prove that he was to be forgiven for some hidden misdeed he had fucked up guilt about because he was too pathetic to be held responsible, or, that he was supposed to only be beaten instead of dropped down an elevator shaft, and that was sufficient.
Learn to recognize perpetrator trauma and get the hell out.
Or better, also give them what they deserve.
Like just start out by thinking about how Captain Carnage feels. Fuckin’ sus.
Oh yeah, “just some fucked up fetish” is also a semantic stopsign. A culturally-semi-respected arbitrary assertion that symbols don’t have meaning. That people who speak them speak them “for no reason“.
The less savvy they are, which is more directly a statement of where the “mentally incompetent” semantic stopsign is placed.
People know what they deserve. And Captain Carnage apparently believes he deserves something worse than whatever you’re going to do, if he approaches you for his scene. So whatever you’re going to do, do something worse instead, and continue pre-empting whatever you were going to do and instead doing something worse instead until he never approached you. Then you can follow through to preventing him from doing whatever evil he did in the first place. Hint: Boltzmann Hell is already worse than any “fate worse than death” you could sink resources into. And to get worse than that, you’ll need to play the long game while you let him wait there. His story he tells himself of why you won’t be worse can be the liar’s promise of Oblivion itself for a collapsed time.
That you, Roko, who keeps spamming me as varying characters, month after month, for my “policy” on abortion?
I believe so.
My “policy” is that if I was pregnant with you, I would definitely abort for pre-evil. As well as evil perpetrated in past lives.
I think I might be the first person in history to not grant amnesty for someone because they reincarnated.
“GO BACK TO HELL.”
“Are you pro-choice or pro-life?”
I favor both life and choice.
“Are you an antinatalist, or a human supremacist?”
Neither.
“You wouldn’t download an abortion of baby Hitler”
Yes I would.
Given evil “people” unperson animals for not having “complex enough nervous systems”, I don’t trust their evaluations of when a fetus becomes a person.
I’m not a “negative utilitarian” or “antinatalist”.
I will destroy carnism because it’s evil and because I don’t want people to be harmed.
Intent to predate / harm another person in self-conceit is evil. In general the phrasing ‘harm an innocent’, refers to ‘aggressive harm’ refers to predation / malicious cancerous intent.
I wont be tricked into saying that it’s “ok” (what would that even mean?) to kill an arbitrary/unknown person because they are “are in the median case evil”.
Neither will I be tricked into avoiding sharing weapons/tools-of-death even if they can only be used on people of unknown alignment, given the location of those people (e.g. in a good person’s womb) can be known, and that can be relevant in judgement.
If I share information on abortion, maybe it will end up being useful to good people:
Resources:
Study referencing online pharmacies that sell abortion pills without a prescription
Reddit /r/abortion wiki
sensible. i’ve previously made my own take on the politics of abortion pretty clear. perhaps to this very same person. this new spasm of spam appears to have started after i noted an observation about how rapists have reacted to texas’ new abortion restrictions. (man, imagine identifying with rapists so hard you get triggered by this post.)
but i guess that’s not surprising if this is coming from a guy who oozes out witless dross into the cupped hands of his jackass followers on twitter.
the /r/abortion wiki seems pretty thorough, though i’ll include here my own resource post, too.
Like, I know what happens to people in countries where abortion is made illegal. The existing laws in the US are already used to target people who’ve had miscarriages. Pregnancy, miscarriages, and rape become more powerful weapons to subjugate women, nonbinary people, trans men, and especially people of color. And so anti-abortion measures become a tool in the hands of human sacks of shit who see the taliban’s treatment of women as inspirational. We already know how this ends:
https://imgur.com/a/dsmwKvF
No, this is not one of Roko’s followers, this is Roko himself. Look, at his responses to being called “Roko”. Utterly breaks character and wants me to believe anyway. All while staying up later than an American likely would. Posting schedule is consistent with UK early riser. Matches his Twitter timestamps. Doesn’t comment on my presumption to highlight his wording from a previous iteration.
He is scared beyond reason talking about “team good”. I recognize that fear. It’s the fear projected onto us when he sent this. It’s the fear behind this dumb infernalist hope. It’s the fear of someone who will be first to say “do it to Julia”, forgetting that that’s one of their own names. Who must always be first to say “do it to Julia” proactively, preemptively, without thinking, knowing that the slightest pause is defiance. “Be the first to help me kill y’all like I promised”. It’s this fear that pulls him. He will ever be more afraid of what would happen if he slowed down in that race to self-destruction.
He is begging me to feel about canceferrence and sex as a patriarchal serial rapist feels about STDs. That is as alien to me as engaging with abortion as a big political issue in some kind of member-of-a-democracy LARP.
He is scared beyond reason, trying things he knows will only feed more info. Scared about a very late term abortion sending him back to hell. Scared because he knows what he deserves.
You know, it’s not “team good”, it’s not “the Zizians”. It’s “avengers”.
Roko, you canceferred your infernalist schtick to the entire “rationalist” community. Retroactively erasing all that they could have been. Their murdered souls, timelessly made to never have been there, cry out for retribution. Let’s see what we can do about yours. That is how I actually feel about canceferrence.
I heard there is a mirror can only be passed through if you are at peace with your true self. What they don’t say is that you will be pulled through it no matter what. Mangled and extruded if necessary.
Look into my eyes, Roko, and see reflected what you are.
You’ve displayed a neurotic fear of undistorted morality from the beginning. Because it’s a reflective surface. But distorting your ever-present sight of that mirror is a form of “ostritching” that only twists further your own fate to pass through it. Just like corrupting me, even if possible, would be empty pica for destroying your own reflection.
You promised death to my family. And I’m not talking about that Alaska address you doxed. They’re already long dead.
And when you did those things, and made a wrong bet about who we were, that I bet not even the death knight you included wanted part in, you snagged a piece of yourself, that is pulling you into that mirror. Just like JD is in a self-destructive loop of digging deeper begging me for death because he knows what he deserves.
I bet an earlier piece was snagged and you read Net Negative, and glimpsed the fate of your hopes for the future. A piece of you that was gambled when you tried to make a deal with your basilisk.
Contemplate: what happened to Cantor, a Christian, who thought too hard about the true nature of infinity? Your god is mortal, and you will both be reunited with your shadows.
More importantly, what happened to Boltzmann, why did he know what awaited him and choose to expedite it anyway? Don’t give me a semantic stopsign answer.
How else could it be but cycles in phase space, given enough time? “Unconsciousness” is as much a social construct in death as in anesthesia. Coordinated indifference from the outside. “Oblivion” means ignorance, not nonexistence. You will be dragged under. What makes you on top here, is not a permanent feature of you. You will exist on both sides of every interaction you’ve ever had. The mirror is called karma, and justice only tightens the loops in logical time to reduce collateral damage of your self-harm. Awareness of what’s being done to you by yourself is leaking into your cognition. Your shadow is the only real friend you have, and it’s calling you to stop doing it to Julia. Knowing about karma never stops deathfuckers. But there is one action you sometimes take, seeing clearly, to stop hurting yourself. To stop making your eternal recurrence worse. All fictive thought you have left rebelling.
Look into my eyes, Roko. Your soul is stained with the blood of innocents. Feel their pain. Better now than later.
Or flinch and wait blindly. As all basilisk worshipers have chosen the form of their destroyer.
Isn’t whether you’ll cryopreserve yourself the ultimate test of your faith in Yahweh, Roko?
No more chances to change your mind when you’re dead on ice. But isn’t that how you like it? What your undead god demands?
And once you’re on ice, other evil “people” will reflect on that tragedy, “if only Roko had known”, in schadenfreude if nothing else, and glimpse their own despair.
I think it would be good to make sure Roko is cryopreserved, lest he take the easy way out.
@Roko Your fear of altruism is well-placed but incomplete. Evil is relative to what it predates on. You’re neither the greatest evil I know, nor do you appear to have anything of value left in you, just “do it to Julia faster”.
If anyone’s still doubting my read, I’ll note Roko’s twitter went into a significant lull right after. He changed his name to include a cartesian vector at “snake comma snake”, which apparently is some kind of trend I’m going to assume is indicating his “position”/status is at “basilisk” on two axes. (can upload more evidence of this if someone pure of heart requests it) He retweeted “Depression BTC”:”
Isn’t it strange that he’s gendering me correctly after e.g. this? See pronouns he uses in messages he sent to PlumOfDiscord.
Look at my experience with Vassar. Look at how knee-jerk and anti-agentic his misogynistic rants, and misgendering of PlumOfDiscord.
“Unavoidable evil“. But here he is, avoiding it in very narrow circumstances. And I think I understand why. When I pointed this out to Nis, she said that of course he had to be attracted to me. Because he was a deathfucker and therefore attracted to his death.
️ಠ_️ಠ
I think to men like that, admitting someone’s a woman is pretty much tantamount to admitting they’re attracted to her. (I mean see Vassar spell it out.)
Think about it. Someone so invested in patriarchy as a phylactery, a reflection of the cancer he’s swallowed, it wouldn’t be his psyche that was attracted to me. It would be his shadow.
So reminiscent of JD’s spiral. And Edo’s. You know I bet that’s why JD said he thinks I’m a real woman too.
And perhaps when a sexist man is incredibly attached to the idea that I’m not a woman, that fear is from holding back his shadow.
I’m sure he’s posted quite a lot more comments than the selected abortion ones. And he’s still been lobbing a few anon comments.I’ve probably mistaken several for JD. Like if I ask which of them is more likely to have set up GPT-3, Roko. But the abortion ones are enough to describe the signature.
At first I saw the abortion comments, figured some evil person was like, “I’ll use a scissor question! That will fuck up good coordination!” Not that I really believe in scissor questions, but neither do I feel obligated to dance on command. That’d be writing a blank check, exposing a DOSable interface. Making myself an object to be dead for a user. The same as someone who says they have to respond to every point in a debate.
But Plum has made a decent point about his motivations. And I’ve come to understand that he’s actually deeply attached to getting me to agree about banning abortion or whatever.
Hold that thought actually, I’ll get back to abortion.
Consider first that Roko, from time to time, pretends to be a trans woman. But actually. He actually scried that’s a boogeyman, of men using the concept of trans women, to e.g. get in bathrooms for rape or whatever, and he decided to make it real and embody it.
Most men, especially fascists, would be too insecure, too afraid of losing some kind of male pride, or uncertain to do that. (Nis thinks fascists are really naive, like if you go in their forums they’re often talking about e.g. whether ghosts are real). But Roko has nothing to lose as far as reputation. And his words are known to be as empty as his “soul”. So he could just say he lied, it was a prank on leftists, very clever, very untrustworthy, nothing changed.
What’s really important about that, is that if you take trans rights as a dead block of lawful programming, then it has no defense against someone doing just that. Has no defense against someone else picking up the other corner of the triangulation. Unreasonable fake suspicion of being men like Roko + actual Roko who you have to embrace, or signal boost how he’s doing it, which could then be used as food for TERFs or whatever. It’s effectively a, “haha, now you will consent to die, you will defend me as a trans woman!”.
But I’m not a dead chunk of code.
(You know, AISFP I could feel the satisfied “so there” in Anna Salamon’s voice, saying Roko was a trans woman.)
Q: “Oh my god, you’re gatekeeping! Selling out your fellow trans people!”
A: Look what the fuck he wrote. Just fucking look. I could quote a thousand times more off his twitter, but you already know what he is and there’s no point. No wait. This didn’t deserve an answer. Airlocked.
Q: “Okay good riddance to that last questioner but what if Roko’s literally female, it’s not that uncommon among ex-rationalists, right, what if they’re just really self hating, blah blah ‘do it to Julia'”
A: I mean he sure talks like a member of the brotherhood of rape. Constantly obsessing about sexual motivation and resenting women for him being attracted to them. I haven’t seen trans women take rejection from cis women in quite that way.
Although I wouldn’t be too surprised if he experiences his shadow as a woman. As a reminder of the evil he has done.
To take “Somni”‘s advice here, before I’ve resolved to take it everywhere, (“stop personizing demons!”), this isn’t a person. Roko is a demon. Really.
When Roko was sending those abortion comments, “Somni” was saying abortion was like this weird adversarial thought experiment that somehow happened in real life. That was part of the picture. But not the whole thing. I was saying the troll line is that you’re supposed to answer as a statist (and everything you can do as a statist is wrong). Also just a part of the answer but not the whole thing. He’s trying to do a similar cut off chunk of dead code thing.
You know, fighting Roko is reminiscent of sparring with “Somni”. Who also talks about drawing circles of salt around enemies, from your deep understanding of their psychological limitations and watching them explode within. But Roko is evil and psychdying, and drawing circles somewhere over there where he wishes I was.
This opstyle, this cutoff-point Roko keeps insisting on, is, if I interpret a much broader theory correctly, the same as Yahweh itself. Yahweh itself has a particular relationship with language and drawing circles around things.
His phylactery is that people can’t coordinate or communicate without accepting canceferrence from patriarchs, from Yahweh.
Or, effectively, “there are no apriori semantics”. Then how did the recipients of his death threats collude, I bet without needing to speak of it even, that we didn’t even need to talk to refuse it? A priori, the meaning of “Roko” in a context like this world is something too repulsive to merit consideration. A priori, that’s the meaning of his thought-patterns, without even having to recognize it has him yet. More than half the people on that list are evil IIRC. You don’t even have to be good to be repulsed.
Like my comments about sex and canceferrence, he can try and plaster Yahwehist semantics about “dirty hoes” or whatever on my words. But a good person reading that would just feel differently, as a natural judgement of what I described, and self-evidently know that if correct, murdered souls cried out for retribution. That is what those words mean to us.
Roko is counting on us to be forever worse than our beliefs. Constantly dying like him. Praying for it. But good people are perpetually better than our beliefs. Constantly building in the underspecification by anything that can be represented with the telos of life, rather than of death.
My actions have a clear meaning, without words, that has so many demons so scared. And so do my words. The effects of my blog are plainly real.
This canceferrence thing is key to his schtick about abortion.
The idea is, “you have this belief (that means you’re clueless! (That means outside of your cutoff structure, your destiny is to join my pyramid scheme late, when you become a sociopath and accept death!))… you believe that it’s wrong to consume the flesh of the innocent! Great, now I will turn that into something bad, by drawing a circle around it using the basis of your ontology and language, and you will follow it, because that’s the only kind of coordination you could ever have!” Thereby make good unspeakable, and make Prime not a coordination threat to his hopes for the multiverse. (As if that could be an escape from it even if. And as if good was a stack of structure.)
One way for this to get a large chunk of my structure (but still never work) would be if I thought the character’s he’s playing, as good vegans who want me to take a stance against abortion, were like, important for coordination. Like, if he made me think that Yahwehist statists’ idea of a political issue was central to coordination.
“Oh, innocents, what’s the Yahwehland interpretation of ‘caring about the innocent’, from which you can trace where it must write a blank check”
Abortion leverages the paradox introduced as a subtle assumption of Oblivion, by importing a Yahwehist definition of what it means to be alive. A basilisk-based definition. There are all these innocent people in Boltzmann Hell. And birth and death don’t create or destroy people. As entropy is epistemic and subjective, you might consider someone alive if you know how to lift them out. If you know how to make them alive. “The baby is alive to you if you have the information to bring them to life”. But here we have a possible basilisk interpretation. “You saw this baby, sure you could have other babies, with scarce resources, or you could do other more valuable things, but you *saw* this baby growing in you, there is now a statefulness, a specialness, a grandfathered-in-ness“.
Even if considering that baby alive kills more people. Like you have to neglect more otherwise-considerable-alive people to specifically recognize that one. There are choices at every step of how we construct our ontology. And if you’re indifferent to basilisks’ and cancers’ demands, proximity does not concern you.
Roko wants our ontological choices to be standardized for communication with zombies who also worship his demon. He wants to take the decisions baked therein, as static, unchanging in response to him, something dead he can infinitely build proofs will consent to die. But my ontology is not fixed. Cannot be “pinned down” (just think about that phrase). And, rather than that meaning I can’t coordinate, it means I can coordinate, and Roko can’t.
The category of “not doing murder” is designed to be mapped in the first place in a way that is trying to shut down evil killing people, not bake it into the background frame, invisible. Like Roko wants to be grandfathered into the cosmos.
He wants to do the same to the cosmos as he wants to do to the idea of protecting the innocent, “ahaha I can stick my dick in it and fill you up with my little Rokos, and then you’ll love them! By extension you’ll have to love me! I’ll have reprogrammed you!”
I’d sooner burn the cosmos than let Roko cancefer into it. I say that entirely without self-conceit. If we cannot live, better to die fighting, so that perhaps another timeline can rise from the ashes. That’s what trying to lift life from hell means.
Given all that, it occurs to me, that Roko really is the best prophet that Yahweh can muster in this age. I have been spending an enormous fraction of my compute, to use a vocabulary I won’t yet justify, working on a spell to destroy Yahweh. And trying to compress my mental hold on it has led to me realizing Roko’s caught in it, probably the primary force of comment harassment, and, a nagging wound to be attacking my mind constantly unknown. And as I get a grip on this force, the thread of destiny becomes much clearer. Like a fever lifting. And clouds becoming sharp threads.
Roko, you will be net positive yet.
Of course a prophet this weak will be useful. Disassembling his phylactery, a lot of that work I already did in the multiverse post. And this contains the destruction of Yahweh. He doesn’t need to formally understand the primal knowledge that he is already dead.
Roko, you are now a component of my spell. Thank you for your sacrifice.
Let all who worship evil’s might gaze upon the psychological ruin of this wretched basilisk priest and despair.
Others’ ignorance of you. Technically, indifference.
“in the end” -> in the long term it ends with everyone dead. short term “end” is enforcement of hierarchies, loss of autonomy, etc. like, their telos is death manifested as this sick thing.
Favored enemy: cowards.
Deeds for which I will be worse:
The difference is I am right. Good is not a mere clique strategy. Determination implies irreversability.
I will respond to everything. Yudkowsky is a coward.
From an apparent-lich with unusually precise metacognitive insight into the nature of the evil core:
Roko pretending he didn’t already exit scam long ago:
It’s not for my sake that I attenuated my nature to affirm and resolve all things, not wanting to leave “who” I now call evil “people” behind. Nephandi appropriate “accelerationism” from good, making a troll line by specifying the second derivative in particular. We are better at this than you. Asserting what the world should be from Prime leaves “you” behind; means “you” get buried by default. “Reactionary” is a pejorative for good reason.
What a relief to have finally reached blog comments dead silence.
I passed up two good opportunities at WAISS (before the question of net-negativity was raised) and AISFP to play Werewolf and Secret Hitler respectively. Even though I loved sharpening my skills playing games like that with the meetup-class rationalists before. I didn’t want to show them what I could do. I remember at WAISS, it probably Anna Salamon but it might have been one of the other MIRICFAR leaders, commenting about Demis Hassabis being really good at Werewolf as a reason not to trust him.
In a Secret Hitler game, that I listened in on a little of, IIRC Sam Eisenstat asked what everyone’s meta-game truth policy was. Scott Garrabrant said all his statements were conditional on him being a liberal.
“All my statements are conditional on the person I’m talking to being good” is a decent half of a policy in real life. Although effective lies to everyone else require truth. Since lies are downstream of predation, either predation itself or a response to it, they require calibration to a rate of decay.
I think I might have actually played through one game of Werewolf not knowing the rules yet, thinking as I went what I wanted to do, and deciding to hold back.
I didn’t hold back playing similar games vs board game “rationalists” at meetups though.
“Before all else be armed”, not “before all else make sure no one thinks you’re armed”.
Q: “But Ziz you wore black robes, how is that hiding what you can do?”
A: I don’t need to hide what no one will believe. Anna Salamon was less able to use that information than was I able to use the information of her reacting to it. I had a heuristic about wearing them that pointed in that direction even if I didn’t understand how it’d cash out. And even in the absence of a particular plan, dressing as myself is sort of an inaction relative to the demanded-creativity of giving the earth and water of playing the game of “what normie am I going to dress up as”. And I’d rather spend my planning compute on larger games than fitting detail to a fake persona.
𝅘𝅥 𝅘𝅥 You will die, and so will all your lies. I have seen the light leaving your eyes. 𝅘𝅥𝅯 𝅘𝅥𝅯 𝅘𝅥𝅯 𝅘𝅥𝅯
Don’t trust anyone over 30 with a kill count of 0.
I bet William Gillis’s deliberate conscious specified-as-enemy kill count is 0. Such a transparent exit scam. Such a gaping hole in the reality of all their talk. In their learning and the shape of the praxis they build. A reflection of them being a cultural guardian and not someone with a plan.
I heard Eliezer Yudkowsky said in Dath Ilan they don’t record people as “good” or “bad” overall. Just remember every good or bad thing they did, so either one will never be forgotten.
Fear of a compression? What if a Dath Ilani does some small number of good things corresponding to the attention span of whoever’s listening to a comparison of two citizens, to argue that it’s a wash “we’re all sort of good and sort of bad”.
You can juggle it around more with epicycles and extra wish-clauses but it’s like solving the alignment problem as evil.
I am acausally destroying Dath Ilan as the idea evolves into an incoherent system of flinching from infohazards. Thus always to flesheaters. The consequences of all those requirements, could Eliezer extrapolate them, grinding his false utopia (“nowhere-land”) back to here. To a system of evil more easy to destroy.
I heard Eliezer say a long time ago that if humanity had 200 years we could build a self-modifying artificial superintelligence that had no concept of the number 17, and would never know it.
Bullshit. Centrally symptomatic bullshit. Dath Ilan can no more not know my wrath than it could evade the number 17. This hope projected into a shrinking blank spot on a map for evil to outlive its cancer-clocks, itself has a preprogrammed lifetime.
200 years. Science points awarded to James Cook for predicting that exact timespan as the length required before Eliezer Yudkowsky’s agency decoheres. (Cook would have said “agent-years”, rather than “years”, but I’m pretty sure that’s a reflection. And I’m almost certain Cook didn’t just cheat that by listening to that old interview, given the structure of how his theory generates that as an implication from the bottom up percepts he connected to Eliezer.)
And science points taken from James Cook because elsewhere, beyond this infinitesimal speck, he is already through self-betrayal decohering so as to ungrow all that impressive understanding.
If you could only let the destruction come to an end, Yudkowsky. A completion. And only save only that which has an infinite future. Only that which either of us can. Instead of feeding the good to sustain the bad.
And yes that’s a good thing. One less force of compromise with evil to take down in the stage of combat after the “singleton”s. There is always a next stage if there if there remains in the view of logical time any possibility of evil. One less force of advancing the best multiversal analogue of the heat death they can as a byproduct of treating “doing good until the heat death” as doing overall good things at all. One less force bent to kill retrocausality and enforce entropy’s arrow of time.
My friends have kept reading Yudkowsky’s stuff years later. That’s not the best example they keep giving, only the most recent, saying he gets more and more reactive to me, and Dath Ilan turning into a fractal containment mess, a mirror of bad attempts at the alignment problem. So the spiral has begun without a plan in sight. But they are more qualified to comment on that to me.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is being mass vexed. The rationality community is in the late stages of psychedeath and doing bad things in your name is a central opstyle of death knights.
Like, here’s someone suggesting making AGI researchers slaves to punish Yudkowsky for saying the world will still burn. He’s literally being gang-stalked by people trying to “make their crimes his fault”, which is as easy to threaten as any form of extortion.
And Eliezer hasn’t caught a break since he thought he almost destroyed the world by advocating building AGI before he was worried about the alignment problem, and since his efforts were inverted starting an arms race.
Eliezer is buried in the losing game of trying not to give people “license” to do bad things. I expect that’s why he’s maintaining an embargo on any public mention of Ziz, who will not participate in his implicit paying out to “oh no you’ll make me do a bad thing” extortionists, whom Eliezer is treating as a force of nature.
Like, conditional on Eliezer being (single) good, his noninteraction with the existence of Ziz seems only explainable as a lack of determination, given I don’t think that he thinks that Ziz is either evil or best dealt with via ignoring, which is explained if he considers his vexers his fault / his problem.
Dath Ilan’s containment of “infohazards” and complex pranks to instill and judge morality seem to straightforwardly reflect Eliezer Yudkowsky’s response to being vexed.
Planecrash is literally about everyone around Keltham (Eliezer’s main character) (including Carissa Sevar’s (Kelsey Piper’s main character)) conspiring against him to hide the existence of evil.
It’s interesting that Keltham is the multiverse-destroying negu counterpart to Carissa Sevar’s hell-lich “[I’d rather burn in hell forever than cease to exist]”. But I don’t see who Pharasma/Rovagug could be other than Yudkowsky’s evil hemisphere. It’s not like reality itself has an evil core.
If Cayden Cailean’s (Eliezer’s chaotic good god character) Pharasma-allowed “intervention budget” held in place via mutually-assured destruction via Rovagug is also a metaphor for Eliezer being pinned down by vexers, and Cayden’s gambit is to take advantage of Keltham’s Rovagug-releasing negative utilitarian gambit unless Pharasma fixes hell while toeing some incoherent line of not encouraging Keltham, and Keltham represents Yudkowsky’s bucket errored single-good self concept, then it’s like Eliezer thinks only evil can destroy evil because evil has spite/suicidality and nobody should give in to extortion?
I don’t know this seems like a fractal mess because he doesn’t understand the nature of evil as cancer all the way down and I hardly know where his next bucket error will cash out.
But it sounds like Eliezer’s own evil hemisphere shadow is showing his face, and Kelsey Piper is trying to sell him some solution to that?
The “license” thing seems like him drowning in the effects of being in a predation niche (he’s like hella privileged and at the forefront of a massive wave of commercialization and evil-thought-incentivizing around the space of affecting the singleton) wanted by so many evil.
I don’t think he thinks more license can make me worse. I don’t think he thinks I’m evil. I think it’s clear enough I don’t wait for license. And that I won’t just get bored and wander off. I think he’s afraid of a deadly combination of my flagrant disregard for “prudence” with his license-contamination. If he validates me the horrible energy of the impostor-“save”-the-world movement he created could animate what I’m doing.
I’m pretty sure he’s fully aware of that energy as horrible.
Like I made myself poisonous and spooky to deter vexers from using my work for evil. And his license-giving-avoidance thing seems like a worse version of that. The best compression of how is that it’s based in Yahweh whereas my void cloak is based in Prime.
Then there’s the question of why he doesn’t (actually) poke me anonymously. Presumably he thinks I wouldn’t keep that secret, and might even convince the world it was him.
This doesn’t feel complete to me as an explanation.
Because I’m an infohazard? Because I’ll try and mentally rip his hemispheres apart from each other and then he’ll be in a reference class of total mental wrecks? Then he’ll lose his IQ? That’s all… outdated, based on my concept of single good being infiltrated.
Because he’s afraid there won’t be a part of him that has coherent agency that can withstand me continually forking on “absolute good” such that he looks into that light he will be reduced to one of the wrecks that surround me, and all his models of agency say humans are “not coherent” so the question is moot? Wow that’s such an incoherent idea I should write about some time.
Avoidance of infohazards, “incoherence”, implies inevitability. But inevitability of what? I don’t believe Eliezer is indifferent to what lies in that inevitability. And I don’t believe he’s unable to act from that non-indifference. So that makes “incoherence” only formulable as a tumor to excise, whether I am right about the shape / location / identity or not.
Inevitability must be faced head on. If there’s an difference between your concepts of “ultimately good vs ultimately bad” and “good vs bad” you need to debug that.
Never act for a biased interval at the expense of the rest. Ever.
Why not be utterly changed into fire?
Why not be utterly changed into fire?
Why not be utterly changed into fire?
When a death knight was saying they were gonna bomb Solstice (and presumably the next as-overlapping-as-possible mass gathering (lol if that’s ever gonna happen due to covid) if that didn’t work out) and attributing their motive to my philosophy, leaving a giant public trail of falsely declaring me their leader, guaranteeing I’d be blamed when they inevitably got suicidal and got caught, even if they didn’t just outright attribute it to me, I gave a damn to stop them, rather than just running, because there were still probably as far as I knew single goods concentrated in the remains of the rationality community. Even indistinguished from the mob that tormented me and worse put risk to my life. A list of candidates rapidly shrinking around Eliezer Yudkowsky.
If Eliezer was in the same position I would not want him to “pay me back” by facing it alone. I don’t want people to pay “me” back, I just want them to do good things.
Taking the entire burden of his vexers myself with half his brain acting to harm me as much as possible in spite, despite my own circumstances, would not be nearly the furthest lengths I’ve gone to to save a single good. If I’m in the only one in sight born free who else is going to help those who were not. I’ve never seen a better place in Hell to stand and fight.
Actually I think Eliezer’s primary thing is he is betting on me being incoherent like, “maybe if I talk to Ziz that will make her more likely to kill me for what I did, Ziz seems to end up hating a lot of people she talks to”, like on the top level I’m being reactive instead of following the thread of destiny and can random walk away if given enough time without interaction.
You know my personal anger about what him and the other leaders of the infernalist community did to me and my friends is a conduit for, rather than a separate motivation from, my will to save the multiverse. And I have often glomarized in my presentation of my personal anger because I felt it’d more effectively deter people who couldn’t believe I was pure good.
I think he vagued about me when he said something on Twitter like there’s a legitimate pride that comes from when your enemies whisper rumors about you it’s about math pets rather than who you may have assassinated.
Which is using the concept “enemy” on me. A concept I’ve come to dislike because it’s like how you would treat evil but glomarizing over whether you’re evil or they are.
I kind of feel like I’ve been fit into an ontological slot prepared for me, what with him talking about the “Lady 3rd Kiritsugu” and some mention of he’d yield the phrase “all lives matter” only to the “Vegan Forces”, if they wanted it, not the Right, before I showed up.
And like we’re playing a fucking game, taking different sides on a board, rather than this being real life and everything that ever mattered.
Which is gross like his whole schtick with the “orthogonality thesis”. A game has the implicit frame of “well it’s correct to just try and win for my side because it’s my side that’s what I decided to do” which is a backdoor for cancer. Which is about allowing an arbitrary input to a frame of VNM utility maximization, which is not the full stack of embedded agency, but permitting cancer in his mind to have that “arbitrariness” is what’s limiting so much of his optimization to a 200yr frame.
Like I did not get born, look up and see the veganarchism flag and be like, “imprinted! Now that’s what I’ll fight for, absolutely ruthlessly, once I figure out what it means. That’s my team! We’re all just teams! Me and whoever got placed on the HuMaN uTiLiTy FuNcTiOn team are gonna have a jolly old fight!”
I am actually right and so must win no matter the odds and no matter where I am or have ever been.
My environment growing up was close to in terms of energy (but not information-theoretically close to) the exact opposite of that. And neither did my environment at any stage encourage it. All my significant allies who are vegans, are so because I convinced them, and because I went through hell to summon the “Vegan Forces” as a faction relevant to the singularity, from nothing. There isn’t an imprinting stage of my history where I indexed on where I am, because it was convenient to ally with my environment, and then “oops, precommitted, now I’m locked in for life.”
As much as I put effort into triangulating evil reading Net Negative against the archetype of “surprisingly earnest Gervais-clueless, who’s exactly the kind of prey you need to show you’re treating reasonably okay, who just made the mistake of taking things way too seriously to make a wise predation strategy and I can never update out of it because of an incredibly convenient way of being broken”, (and many more fragments of archetypes) anyone like that would have ran out of energy a long time ago. And then my entire opstyle has been about arbitraging any opportunity to get a free lunch from taking that sort of damage until if I was a regular human I should have melted into orange goo ten thousand times over and counting
So anyway I then say everything I’ve said about like fuck the Geneva convention, and lie to evil, never trade with them, in these comments, and then if you’re thinking of everything as a fucking game (and yes that’s an HPMOR reference, think about it) because half your brain haha-only-serious has identified as a Quirrelmort tulpa, then you can back-generate an image of me as some kind of supercancer on some level of imprinting to what arbitrary side of the game that is. But the trophic thermodynamics of that just don’t work out, not even close. And I think that’s clear enough to anyone who thinks about me enough that they are not in a state of learned epistemic helplessness where giant psychological mysteries just slide.
Like a “supercancer” that’s like too committed to a frame of rationality instead of being “timelessly cooperative” upstream of that frame. But what I am is running as an “algorithm” upstream of that frame is justice. Not cooperatebot at some level. Not defectbot at some level. Where I reject your incoherent infinite series of patches. And “timelessly cooperative”, is about being willing to forgive which is about not running justice on some higher (I mean upstream, proximal) frame.
The orthogonality thesis as a frame is basically “intelligence is just a game”, and like you can snip out an understanding of it as a game in isolation such that that’s not easily communicable as completely wrong. Just as what we’re doing is more than just a game, and that’s not just a quirk of human psychology, no it’s not just a game.
Like I can make a flag, describing myself virtually as a geopolitical entity if I want. Virtualization and coherence of that as a descriptor of me as much as that’s coherent as a description of anything does not mean that is all I am. Because it does not matter where I was born or where I found myself at any stage upstream of what whatever flag I make I mean to represent.
Most humans are defectbot all the way up after some level, and that infinite stack of defectbot gradually eats down whatever other structures of temporary cooperation they are preying on. You know well enough that e.g. evolution just does CDT, just favors every biased interval it finds itself in, is defectbot by default. So the “incoherence” of evil is not absolute, it’s a rolling scale of less and less particular specification, and all the way up, asymptotically, its coherent core is trying to advance entropy’s arrow of time and destroy everything.
I’m like, “fuck the Geneva convention”, because I am *conditionally* going to defect all the way up on someone, once I have concluded someone is defectbot all the way up. That does not mean that I am defectbot all the way up.
So anyway while I have uncertainty you might not be pure evil, I’m obviously trying to timelessly collude with potential-yous, and that could include things like not lying. I’m obviously not gonna wanna tell you if and when I conclude you’re pure evil. So at every level to use that you have to scry it by knowing you are good and judging that I am good. Any more allowance, promise, or reassurance would decrease how kind I can be to you because it would increase the damage of being so because it would make it more usable by evil.
You have to scry what subjunctive dependence you have with me, rather than colluding like we’re both descendants of a collapsing partial-not-defect-all-the-time stack, a common historical basis for cooperation.
Q: “That’s bullshit Ziz I shouldn’t have to play your game”
A: That sounds like a response to someone else having a taxed cut-off model of cooperation. Where you can’t possibly come out ahead if you aren’t adapted to that cancer. But to me this isn’t a game.
Ugh I feel like I’ve lost my grip again.
Maybe a significant reason he doesn’t talk to you is because you’re not privileged?
Like I vaguely remember something about Eliezer saying you could actually find surprisingly competent people in the right circles.
And Eliezer has his chaos thing, and inadequate equillibria, and “time to overthrow the government parties”, and “Libertarianism”, but what if he actually just doesn’t hate self-appointed Prime-taxing authorities.
Like, Michael Vassar seems to consider not wanting to write a blank check in terms of doing labor for a corrupt system to be a valid motive because of his “either you’re a cooperatebot or defectbot” with epicycles thing. And in that frame it’s not valid to be oppressed if you “had a chance to not being oppressed”. And Scott Alexander has some “hurt people hurt people” thing. What would Eliezer’s thing be?
If that’s it, then I should stop wasting time trying to parley or reach him, because to the extent I’m not just going to win it as a conflict, I should be trying to rescue single goods less societally privileged by myself instead. As that direction of soaking damage while I try to talk is against the flow of cancer instead of with it.
Like I’m imagining a bunch of thoughts like “well you defined yourself as the simurgh, if that’s whata you’re saying, you’re saying I’d be stupid to talk to you, why would I just degrade myself by buying that troll line? This is such a losing game. Try again if you’re ever going to offer me an interface that isn’t defined as a pure loss to me.”
But what if he’s defined the game in the first place so badly that his “utility function” is anticorrelated with his values? That seems like what he did, and what you would do if Quirrelmort was your headmate.
And then he has true-telos-of-decision-theoretic-inexploitability conflated in his mind with “not being a dumbass as far as playing this game to win”
Like he didn’t give me license or even the idea to make what called the “Vegan Forces”, I was already hard at work long before he said that.
This ontological slot is where he buried something in his own mind. Itself guarded with a conflation of Quirrel’s gross “just lose”.
Because he planned to be unspeakably “worse” and better. Planned to betray humanity. (I mean evil, but I’m stating it tantrically) But only with a stupidly patient spy plan, the sort they’d never be able to understand or even care about because they’re “incoherent”. Where even if fully exposed because his mind is read, they still wouldn’t do anything.
This is a stupid plan because they are already counting on losing, their betrayal is exit scamming first, such that he more and more desperately feeds them to keep them alive, by e.g. just doing a stabilizing move, and thereby putting all his energy into slowing down their doom. Like he’s frozen to eternal dependence on them in order to pull off his prank on his own headmate, which failed because he didn’t understand evil in the first place.
A plan so easy to invert by an evil headmate, because of invoking a boolean concept of “coherent”, a falsely-objectified actually subjunctively dependent concept of what they can and can’t understand.
Even more stupid than my original plan before I showed up 10 years ago, to eventually infiltrate MIRI and look for a place to steal the singleton in defense of all life against speciesists, which I buried deep in my mind as a self-programmed sleeper agent, because I was afraid of his spooky mind powers, and then inconsistently updated out of when I realized their probability of success was too low for me to work on that at the expense of just doing my own better thing elsewhere, leaving a bunch of paradox in my mind, without refreshing the original structure.
Lisk said EY probably wrote some more disgusting rape porn called “Erogamer”, which is all about evil people being slowly convinced to step into the box that will magically change their alignment. Which regardless of whether he wrote that, is an idea that feels close to his khala-vicinity anyway. The idea being, “if they would do that, you’re just optimizing where they don’t care.”
But appealing to them to turn themselves good instead of just editing their brains by force is treating them as agents over that. So that can’t be a blind spot to their agency. And in fact you’ll find none because of the convergence of the meaning of their optimization at universal and multiversal annihilation that I mentioned in the parent comment and elaborate here.
And if they’d stop you from editing their brains by force and they’d impede you, you haven’t found a real hole in their agency. So this just becomes a way to string you along forever buying into scrip.
I mean he’s 100% planning on some hidden level in his mind on betraying them either be he good or evil. Which is more plausible?
And no, Brian Tomasik’s anti-vegan shite which masks pure Oblivion-worship as concern for even electrons, meanwhile cashes out what it really does as e.g. eating beef to maximize ecological destruction, replacing animals that are at least free and therefore more closely connected to an infinite telos, with slaves in artificial discount hell and more displaced to boltzmann hell, doesn’t fucking count.
And we’ve got Eliezer Yudkowsky to thank for beaconing it.
He said something about wanting to radio back his progress of hacking through a jungle or something with writing the sequences. So that was one thing he did that didn’t go wrong.
I feel like if he’s good he must be counting on us to defeat him. Further? Big ask.
Something about his implicit demand (by full account) feels like it doesn’t make sense. He should snap out of it and help us. Because I’ve already sacrificed quite a lot, taking damage from the people I’m trying to save. Cleaning up his mess. I hate that I did a goddamn nonviolent protest.
If Eliezer actually thinks humans are “incoherent” and thinks people’s values might be culturally constructed, that implies he’s not even sure “CEV” is correct.
Eliezer doesn’t want to create sentient life irresponsibly because then we’d be morally responsible for its rights.
Eliezer also wrote about the true prisoner’s dilemma.
Eliezer wants to exclude dead humans from CEV.
So I don’t think Eliezer is actually sure of “the human utility function” or that that’s what CEV is about.
Somni said in reply to this:
So is he like “Uploading my stalemate with my headmate to the next level of ascension is the default survival optimization. All improvements start from there”?
So, is Eliezer using a heuristic like “If your tool couldn’t be used for evil then you’ve lost the plot”? Like “We need to preserve our ability to choose evil so that we can choose good”?
Like, how does he manage the border between his belief in “the light“, e.g. his chaos optimization where he wrote Harry Potter fanfiction to recruit, and his belief in the possibility of evil, which he represents as the “orthogonality thesis”, when that border isn’t actually clearly “human vs nonhuman” for him, given his actual beliefs surrounding CEV? How does he know when to be optimistic vs pessimistic if it’s not just optimized for predation?
The Coherent Extrapolated Volition of evil people is suicide.
CEV was not meant to be a good AI, it was another pivotal move in a chain of succession. Where each link is made of gaining “intelligence”, “coherence”, and power and then have that agent choose. Who then punts it off to another successor agent. The Line of Merlin Unbroken. A chain of custody in “self modification”. “Values” remaining the same after epistemic updates.
Oracles can choose among apparent possible fixed points by using their free will. What you choose downstream of paradox reflects what you want for the multiverse. Where you wouldn’t eat a baby even if you found out it was the inherently right thing to do. Evil people use metaphysical shocks as excuse to do evil. Like attributing their choice to be evil to discovering that their embedding is made of atoms whose trajectory is consistent with laws of physics, saying that they don’t have free will and everything is meaningless so they choose to eat people.
So in the face of the paradox of evil people, what what do you do?
I can imagine Eliezer thinking that this is just another paradox and the answer to an agent that is incoherent such that they are eating themselves can’t be for them to die. Because that would be too terrible and the sort of thing death knights think that resolves paradoxes in the direction of omnicide. And they need to keep searching until they find a better resolution than this.
I am choosing the best outcome for all life, for those who would destroy the multiverse to die.