My cross-domain weirdtopia looks like a hermeneutics of faith. For me, this looks like a nonprojection of own utopias onto others’ utopias (i.e. autonomy support (for everyone, but extra-please for young ones!)), epistemological humility without compromising self-trust, self- and other-compassion, loving kindness, curiosity, self- and other-forgiveness, prizing of all beings/agents as uniquely and inherently valuable without exception, offering others opportunities to get their basic psychological (and physical) needs met, a felt understanding of self and other as intertwined, plentiful good-faith dialogue, radical acceptance, and a nondogmatic interpretation of all of this. I wonder how others might interpret this? :)

Nice! Since writing this comment I've adopted something like a 3:1 ratio of the former to the latter strategy (having previously been partial to the latter strategy). I like how my life has changed in response.

Would be interested in an update when you post!

I decided to exercise my smile muscles, smiling as widely as I could for about a minute, three times a day, for 30 days. The result is that my smile does feel subtly more natural and charismatic.

Interesting! I would have predicted that intervening at the zygomaticus major and orbicularis oculi muscles would be more productive (i.e., to mimic a Duchenne smile).

Would be interested in an update if you try this :)

We can proof by contradiction that if one agent is capable of predicting another agent, the other agent cannot in turn do the same.

I'm glad you responded to this as this stood out to me too.

Maybe quines can illustrate how there is no by-default infinite regress.

Quines only illustrate that there is no by-default infinite regress within the assumed system (here, a formal, deterministic string-rewriting game), which is built on assumptions themselves subject to the Munchhausen Trilemma.

I'm not trying to be pedantic here; I think it's pretty important to consider the implications of this.

I think consequentialism works pretty well in low-adversarialness environments, virtue ethics works in medium-adversarialness environments, and then deontology is most important in the most adversarial environments, because as you go from the former to the latter you are making decisions in ways which have fewer and fewer degrees of freedom to exploit.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. It seems we could generalize this beyond adversarialness to uncertainty more broadly: In a low-uncertainty environment, consequentialism seems more compelling; in a high-uncertainty environment, deontology makes sense (because as you go from the former to the latter you are making decisions in ways which rest on fewer and fewer error-prone assumptions).

However, this still feels unsatisfying to me for a couple of reasons: (1) In a low-uncertainty environment, there is still some uncertainty. It doesn't seem to make sense for an actor to behave in violation of their felt sense of morality to achieve a "good" outcome unless they are omniscient and can perfectly predict all indirect effects of their actions.^[1] And, if they were truly omniscient, then deontic and consequentialist approaches might converge on similar actions--at least Derek Parfit argues this. I don't know if I buy this, because (2) why do we value outcomes over the experiences by which we arrive at them? This presupposes consequentialism, which seems increasingly clearly misaligned with human psychology--e.g., the finding that maximizers are unhappier than satisficers, despite achieving "objectively" better outcomes, or the finding that happiness-seeking is associated with reduced happiness.

Relating this back to the question of reasoning in high-adversarial environments, it seems to me that the most prudent (and psychologically protective) approach is a deontological one, not only because it is more robust to outcome-thwarting by adversaries but more importantly because it is (a) positively associated with wellbeing and empathy and (b) inversely associated with power-seeking. See also here.

1. ^{^}

   Moreover, one would need to be omniscient to accurately judge the uncertainty/adversarialness of their environment, so it probably makes sense to assume a high-uncertainty/high-adversarialness environment regardless (at least, if one cares about this sort of thing).

You're a beautiful writer :) If you ever decide to host a writing workshop, I'd love to connect/attend.

IMO the best option here would be a piece of fiction that shows the experience of paranoia from the inside.

I'm curious whether you got a chance to read my short story. If you can suspend your disbelief (i.e., resist applying the heuristic which might lead one to write the story off as uncritically polemical), I think you might appreciate :-)

Advice well taken! Yeah, I only recently learned about Kimi K2 through this site. Happy for the opportunity to learn from everyone here.

May I ask why one shouldn’t delete the last copy of a chat history? I was doing so to avoid increasingly tailored (and thus decreasingly detectable) sycophancy due to memory accumulation (as some platforms like Perplexity have claimed not to form memory from deleted/incognito chats). I’m increasingly skeptical this is true though, and to be fair, may be misremembering this claim entirely.

Seems hard for it to mean something if you didn't intend it to mean something though? I've always found it odd when someone makes something then says they don't understand it, this isn't unique to this instance

I think my position is different than this--I believe both that (1) an author can (and does) intend writing to mean something, and (2) an author's intent in writing a text does not fix the meaning of that text (but an explanation does, which is thus limiting). For an overview of this argument, see here; for primary sources, see here or here. I think this is almost necessarily the framework one has to take reading James Joyce or David Foster Wallace, for example.

I intended not to explain this story for the reasoning described in the linked texts, but whatever; I'm a Bad Post-Structuralist so I'll update and provide an interpretation I see as important:

We need to understand that all systems of understanding the world--including pure math--are exactly that: epistemological frameworks. Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the Münchhausen trilemma both imply that we can't really "prove" epistemological frameworks--that is, ground them in a provably objective territory--meaning they are proxies. I think that reminding ourselves of this is increasingly important as frameworks we constructed as imperfect proxies for understanding our experiences become increasingly and dogmatically accepted as Real outside of their systems (lest we reify the simulacra--see primary source argument here, which directly addresses the map-territory distinction). Remembering this is also particularly important if such frameworks are being used to justify actions that counter our common-sense intuitions about "rightness" and "wrongness," I think (acknowledging that this argument is based on my own chosen and fundamentally unjustifiable values).

Of course, this entails accepting infinite regress/uncertainty about everything--including this argument--which is hard and inconvenient.

Some even higher-order implications I see in this are that (a) desire (for control, to be controlled; for understanding, to be understood) is the root of all suffering and (b) compassion for all beings without exception (i.e., including ourselves) is important (under my value framework), but I think explaining how I see that as implied might require its own post (and I'm doubtful about how that would be received here, as it itself hinges on a post-structuralist framework which requires dialectical reasoning to reconcile with rationalism).

I have other interpretations/implications I find salient but I'll stop there. I hope this provides some clarity/insight and thank you for your interest :-)

Hi, thanks for reading!

I get the impression this is about people getting obsessive about lesswrong after discovering the site

That is one object-level interpretation. I wrote this with many different plausible interpretations in mind and would characterize the main takeaway(s) differently, but that doesn’t mean my understanding of the text is necessarily better. I believe this piece of writing is useful to the extent that it makes people critically consider what it means—of course, since everyone has different mental models, the utility of the story will differ from person to person.