I’ve tried to publish this in several ways, and each time my karma drops. Maybe that’s part of the experiment: observing what happens when I keep doing what feels most dignified, even when its expected value is negative. Maybe someday I’ll understand the real problem behind these ideas.
Yudkowsky admitted defeat to AI and announced his mission to “die with dignity.”
I ask myself:
– Why do we need a 0% probability of living to “die with dignity”?
I don’t even need an “apocalyptic AI” to feel despair. I have felt it for much of my life. Rebuilding my self being is expensive, but.
Even when probabilities are low, act as if your actions matter in terms of expected value. Because even when you lose, you can be aligned. (MacAskill)
That is why I look for ways to debug, to understand my despair and its relation to my values and satisfaction. How do some people manage to keep satisfaction (dignity, pride?) even in situations of death?
Posible thoughts of Leonidas in 300 :
“I can go have a little fuck… or I can fight with 10,000 soldiers.”
“Will I win?”
“Probably not.”
“Then I’ll die with the maximum satisfaction I can muster.”
When I try to map my despair I discover a concrete pattern: it is not that I stop feeling satisfaction entirely; it is that I stop perceiving the satisfaction of a value: adaptability.
Satisfaction provides signal; values provide direction. When the signal no longer points to a meaningful direction, the result is a loss of sense.
There was a moment when something gave me real satisfaction; my brain recorded it and turned it into a target. The positive experience produced a prediction and, with it, future seeking.
If I repeat an action without checking whether it generates progress (if I don’t measure evolution) the seeking becomes ritual and the reward turns into noise. I often fool myself with a feeling of progress; for a while now I’ve been looking for more precise ways to measure or estimate that progress.
A lot of dopamine without a current value signal becomes compulsive: anxiety, addiction, or despair. The system is designed to move toward confirmed rewards; without useful feedback it persists in search mode and the emptiness grows.
Acting aligned with my values — even when probabilities are adverse — tends to produce longer-lasting satisfaction. Coherence reduces retrospective regret: at least you lose having acted according to your personal utility function. Something like:
Dignity ≈ Satisfaction × Values / Despair
I’ve spent years with an internal notebook: not a diary, but notes of moments that felt like “this was worth existing for.”
To make those notes actionable, I built a process inspired by Bayesian calibration and information/thermodynamic efficiency:
Quantitatively, this reduced the noise in my background; my monthly despair thoughts dropped considerably.
I see people are afraid of AI-driven despair, but avoiding it in myself is not an easy task, and perhaps many should already be working on it, searching for ways to align values with satisfaction.