Was the sixth one a blank canvas?

(This is only going to make sense to a fairly small audience)

I know you're using "loser" in a non-Raoian sense, but those levels map really well onto the loser/clueless/sociopath trichotomy.

Level 0: Loser Level 1: Clueless Level 2: Sociopath

Future here: Yes. Yes we did see that. GPT-4o was a nightmare for it.

As it happened, it was August 7, 2025. Update your models accordingly.

I get that this was a joke, and don't agree with the "AGI doomers should push for faster development" part, but I actually do agree that e/acc would be better off accepting a slowdown now in order to get more powerful AI later.

It could do, but a represents the amount of utility remaining.

Maybe the more natural thing would be to have a be the effective tax rate, and have it be (z/x)^a.

x is the initial income, and I forgot to cancel it. Good point.

Turns out, it's far simpler than I had it as.

Pseudo-flat tax formula:

Assume utility is logarithmic in income, and the goal is to set the experienced tax burden to be constant.

Then, we have the formula that the average tax rate, where $a$ is a parameter controlling the experienced tax burden and $z$ is the break-even point, is as follows:

$x$ is the input income, and $f\left(x\right)$ is the average tax rate.

My assumption here would be, not that everyone I knew was evil, but that I was evil and was being told this as a level-2 means of getting me away from potential victims.

Thanks for the review!

I will start by saying that the odds and evens structure isn't especially original. I've seen similar things discussed in previous posts and comments, mostly as a dimension of a 2x2 grid. As such, your review seems like the classic quote, falsely attributed to Samuel Johnson: "this is both original and good, but the original parts aren't good and the good parts aren't original".

Of course, I disagree with that (if I thought the new levels weren't useful, I wouldn't have come up with them), and will try to explain why the original parts are good, or at least have some value.

To start with, level -1. This is pretty useless. I'm not sure it actually even exists, it's just a natural consequence of the structure. Inasmuch as it does exist, it is incompatible with the existence of an agent. Perhaps the view of a camera would be level -1.

However, I see levels 5 and 6 as real, useful, and importantly not the same as levels 3 and 4.

Specifically, I see levels 5 and 6 as ungrounded. Levels 3 and 4 are not grounded in object-level reality, but are at least grounded in something, namely signalling and tribal affiliation. While "there's a lion across the river" no longer means anything about actual lions, it still means something. It could not be replaced with "there's a foobar across the bazquux".

At the recursive tier, the words "lion" and "river" become irrelevant, and the system of references no longer roots itself in reality. Now this could presumably be considered "mask[ing] the absence of a basic reality", but I'm not sure it even masks it. Reality is just absent. This is Baudrillard's true level 4 of "pure simulacrum".

Part of me wants to renumber the entire system, given that this is allegedly Baudrillard's model. In this case, the political tier would all be level 3 and the recursive tier would all be level 4.