Hey! I reread this comment exchange and wanted to update my response. The crux of what I wanted to convey was that I value creative intellectual play and hold the belief that telling others what I see in my own creative writing might limit that (because I want people to make their own meaning without unnecessary bias from my perspective). I am now realizing my responses may have felt dismissive and/or counterproductive, and I regret that. If you're still interested, please feel free to shoot me a message and I'm happy to discuss/share more privately :)

As a "leftist" person, agreed! We're all pretty fragmented. I'm working on creatively writing about these dynamics through the medium of a narrativized self. Sometimes the message doesn't land as intended but all we can do is keep on trying to connect on the basis of shared consciousness (and faith in the goodness of everyone at their core).

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.