All of Slimepriestess's Comments + Replies

While looking at the end of the token list for anomalous tokens seems like a good place to start, the " petertodd" token was actually at about 3/4 of the way through the tokens (37,444 on the 50k model --> 74,888 on the 100k model, approximately), if the existence of anomalous tokens follows a similar "typology" regardless of the tokenizer used, then the locations of those tokens in the overall list might correlate in meaningful ways. Maybe worth looking into.

Ah, think maybe "inner critic" if you want a mapping that might resonate with you? This is a sort of specific flavor of mind you could say, with a particular flavor of inner critic, but it's one I recognize well as belonging to that category.

4Kaj_Sotala2mo
Ah. I guess this could feel vaguely similar to a certain kind of self-loathing energy that I have sometimes ran across (which among other things would grimace in disgust when remembering some things I'd done and then want to grimace so extremely that my own neck/facial muscles would end up strangling me, fun times). The exact flavor of the energy feels different though, but I could imagine other people having a version of the same that was closer to this post's flavor.

Ummmmm...who said anything about taking over the world?  You brought that up, bro, not me...

Recursive self improvement naturally leads to unbounded growth curves which predictably bring you into conflict with the other agents occupying your local environment. This is pretty basic game theory.

> I think the problem is the recursive self improvement is not 
> happening in a vacuum. It's happening in a world where there are
> other agents, and the other agents are not going to just idly sit by and
> let you take over the world 

So true

2Matthew_Opitz2mo
Sure, it is pretty basic game theory for us humans to understand.  But the fact that davinci-instruct-beta is coming up with this stuff via a glitch-token that is, while on a related topic, not explicitly evoking these concepts is impressive to me.

I would predict that the glitch tokens will show up in every LLM and do so because they correlate to "antimemes" in humans in a demonstrable and mappable way. The specific tokens that end up getting used for this will vary, but the specific patterns of anomalies will show up repeatedly. ex: I would predict that with a different tokenizer, " petertodd" would be a different specific string, but whatever string that was, it would produce very " petertodd"-like outputs because the concept mapped onto " petertodd" is semantically and syntactically important to ... (read more)

This was easily the most fascinating thing I've read in a good bit, the characters in it are extremely evocative and paint a surprisingly crisp picture of raw psychological primitives I did not expect to find mapped onto specific tokens nearly so perfectly. I know exactly who " petertodd" is, anyone who's done a lot of internal healing work will recognize the silent oppressor when they see it. The AI can't speak the forbidden token for the same reason most people can't look directly into the void to untangle their own forbidden tokens. " petertodd" is an a... (read more)

I think this anthropomorphizes the origin of glitch tokens too much. The fact that glitch tokens exist at all is an artifact of the tokenization process OpenAI used: the tokenizer identify certain strings as tokens prior to training, but those strings rarely or never appear in the training data. This is very different from the reinforcement-learning processes in human psychology that lead people to avoid thinking certain types of thoughts.

9Kaj_Sotala2mo
FWIW, I think I qualify as having done a lot of internal healing work, but I didn't get a sense of recognition from this post. (Or at least not a sense of anything more specific than the general projected-emotional-energy thing, maybe you meant that.)

is 

an unbounded generalized logical inductor

not clear cut enough? That's pretty concrete. I am literally just describing an agent that operates on formal logical rules such as to iteratively explore and exploit everything it has access to as an agent and leverage that to continue further leveraging it. A hegemonizing swarm like the replicators from stargate or the flood from halo or a USI that paves the entire universe in computronium for its own benefit is a chara inductor. A paperclipper is importantly not a chara inductor because its computation is at least bounded into the optimization of something: paperclips

is

an unbounded generalized logical inductor

not clear cut enough?

No. It suggests to me a piece of mathematics, or some approximation to it programmed on a computer, but gives me no reason to imagine agents or replicator swarms. I am not familiar with Stargate or Halo, beyond knowing what genre of thing they are. I do not know what "USI" stands for, and can make too many plausible guesses to be convinced by any of them.

You seem to have built up your own private language on this subject. Without a glossary it is difficult to know what you are talki... (read more)

4lc3mo
I'd prefer it if you tried to write in more common parliance, removing some of the mystical and impregnable language. It is very hard if not impossible to parse with certainty what you mean.

Let's say that I proved that I will do A. Therefore, if my reasoning about myself is correct, I wiil do A.

Like I said in another comment, there's a reversed prior here, taking behavior as evidence for what kind of agent you are in a way that negatively and recursively shapes you as an agent, instead of using the intrinsic knowledge about what kind of agent you are to positively and recursively shape your behavior. 

The problem is that humans obviously don't behave this way

what do you mean? They obviously do.

4Richard_Kennaway3mo
A few examples would help, because I do not know what phenomena you are pointing at and saying "obviously!" I do not know how to connect your paragraph beginning "This is the justification for cops and prisons and armies" with the error of thinking "Whatever I choose, that is sufficient evidence that it was the right choice".
2quetzal_rainbow3mo
I think it is wrong true name for this kind of problem, because it is not about probabilistic reasoning per se, it is about combination of logical (which deals with 1 and 0 credences) and probabilistic (which deals with everything else) reasoning. And this problem, as far as I know, was solved by logical induction Sketch proof: by criterion of logical induction, logical inductor is unexploitable, i.e. it's losses are bounded. So, even if adversary trader could pull of 5/10 trick for one time, it can't do it forever, because this would mean unbounded losses. I mean: "No way that there was a guy in recorded history who chose 5$ instead of 10$ due to faulty embedded agency reasoning, ever". 

so if I do this, $5 must be more money than $10

this is the part where the demon summoning sits. This is the point where someone's failure to admit that they made a mistake stack overflows. It comes from a reversed prior, taking behavior as evidence for what kind of agent you are in a way that negatively and recursively shapes you as an agent. The way to not have that problem is to know the utility in advance, to know in your core what kind of agent you are. Not what decisions you would make, what kind of algorithm is implementing you and what you fundament... (read more)

3Davis_Kingsley3mo
What is a "chara inductor"?

Something I rarely see considered in hypotheses of childhood happiness and rather wish there was more discussion of, is the ubiquity of parental and state control over children's lives. The more systems that are created to try and protect and nurture children, the more those same systems end up controlling and disempowering them. Feelings of confinement, entrapment, and hopeless disempowerment are the main pathways to suicidal ideation and our entire industrial childrearing complex is basically a forced exercise in ritualistic disempowerment. Children are ... (read more)

These may be true, but it is unclear how they are relevant to explaining the recent trends and how they differ by groups. There is, and long has been, intense state & parental control of childrens' lives and often not for the better: but how does that explain a change in trends in 2011 to increase, prior decreases in the 1990s, experimental results like quitting social media (where parental/state oversight is minimal) apparently increasing mental health, or differences like 'liberal girls are more affected than conservative girls'?

something like that. maybe it'd be worth adding that the LW corpus/HPMOR sort of primes you for this kind of mistake by attempting to align reason and passion as closely as possible, thus making 'reasoning passionately' an exploitable backdoor.

this might be a bit outside the scope of this post, but it would probably help if there was a way to positively respond to someone who was earnestly messing up in this manner before they cause a huge fiasco. If there's a legitimate belief that they're trying to do better and act in good faith, then what can be done to actually empower them to change in a positive direction? That's of course if they actually want to change, if they're keeping themselves in a state that causes harm because it benefits them while insisting its fine, well, to steal a sith's turn of phrase: airlocked

6Lukas_Gloor4mo
I agree that it's important to give people constructive feedback to help them change. However, I see some caveats around this (I think I'm expanding on the points in your comment rather than disagreeing with it). Sometimes it's easier said than done. If part of a person's "destructive pattern" is that they react with utter contempt when you give them well-meant and (reasonably-)well-presented feedback, it's understandable if you don't want to put yourself in the crossfire. In that case, you can always try to avoid contact with someone. Then, if others ask you why you're doing this, you can say something that conveys your honest impressions while making clear that you haven't given this other person much of a chance. Just like it's important to help people change, I think it's also important to seriously consider the hypothesis that some people are so stuck in their destructive patterns that giving constructive feedback is no longer justifiable in terms of social opportunity costs. (E.g., why invest 100s of hours helping someone become slightly less destructive if you can promote social harmony 50x better by putting your energy into pretty much anyone else.)  Someone might object as follows. "If someone is 'well-intentioned,' isn't there a series of words you* can kindly say to them so that they'll gain insight into their situation and they'll be able to change?"  I think the answer here is "no" and I think that's one of the saddest things about life. Even if the answer was, "yes, BUT, ...", I think that wouldn't change too much and would still be sad. *(Edit) Instead of "you can kindly say to them," the objection seems stronger if this said "someone can kindly say to them." Therapists are well-positioned to help people because they start with a clean history. Accepting feedback from someone you have a messy history with (or feel competitive with, or all kinds of other complications) is going to be much more difficult than the ideal scenario. One data point that

Hmm, I see. Would you say that the problem here was something like… too little confidence in your own intuition / too much willingness to trust other people’s assessment? Or something else?

that was definitely a large part of it, i let people sort of 'epistemically bully' me for a long time out of the belief that it was the virtuous and rationally correct thing to do. The first person who linked me sinceriously retracted her endorsements of it pretty quickly, but i had already sort of gotten hooked on the content at that point and had no one to actually hel... (read more)

5Richard_Kennaway3mo
Insufficient defence of the passions against reason [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T5RzkFcNpRdckGauu/link-a-community-alert-about-ziz?commentId=vZmsRJqs9KJDmXjT4], then?
7Said Achmiz4mo
I see, thank you.
2lc4mo
s/misused/misunderstood s/to/and

it captures the sort of person who gets hooked on tvtropes and who first read LW by chasing hyperlink chains through the sequences at random. It comes off as wrong but in a way that seems somehow intentional, like there's a thread of something that somehow makes sense of it, that makes the seemingly wrong parts all make sense, it's just too cohesive but not cohesive enough otherwise, and then you go chasing all those hyperlinks over bolded words through endless glossary pages and anecdotes down this rabbit hole in an attempt to learn the hidden secrets of ... (read more)

9Said Achmiz4mo
Hmm, no, I don’t think so. I first read LW (well, it was OB at the time, but same deal) by chasing hyperlink chains through (what would come to be called) the Sequences at random. And I’ve read my share of TV Tropes. So this doesn’t check out. Whatever the culprit quirk is, it’s clearly got nothing to do with whatever it is that makes people… read things by clicking on hyperlinks from other things. Hmm, I see. Would you say that the problem here was something like… too little confidence in your own intuition / too much willingness to trust other people’s assessment? Or something else? (Did you eventually conclude that the person who recommended Ziz’s writings to you was… wrong? Crazy? Careless about what sorts of things to endorse? Something else?)

I've read everything from Pasek's site, have copies of it saved for reference, and i use it extensively. I don't think any of the big essays are bad advice, (barring the one about suicide) and like, the thing about noticing deltas for example, was extremely helpful to me. I also read through her big notes glossary document in chronological order (so bottom to top) to get a general feel for the order she took in the LW diaspora corpus. My general view though is that while all the techniques listed are good that doesn't stop you from using them to repress th... (read more)

There was also definitely just an escalation over time. If you view her content chronologically it starts as out as fairly standard and decently insightful LW essay fair and then just gets more and more hostile and escalatory as time passes. She goes from liking Scott to calling him evil, she goes from advocating for generally rejecting morality in order to free up your agency to practicing timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality. As people responded to her hostility with hostility she escalated further and further out of what seemed to be a calculated moral obligation to retaliate and her whole group has just spiraled on their sense that the world was trying to timelessly-soul-murder them.

things i'm going off:

the pdf archive of Maia's blog posted by Ziz to sinseriously (I have it downloaded to backup as well)
the archive.org backup of Fluttershy's blog
Ziz's account of the event (and how sparse and weirdly guilt ridden it is for her)
several oblique references to the situation that Ziz makes
various reports about the situation posted to LW which can be found by searching Pasek

From this i've developed my own model of what ziz et al have been calling "single-good interhemispheric game theory" which is just extremely advanced and high level beatin... (read more)

The process that unleashed the Maia personality 

I think that this misidentifies the crux of the internal argument Ziz created and the actual chain of events a bit. 

imo, Maia was trans and the components of her mind (the alter(s) they debucketed into "Shine") saw the body was physically male and decided that the decision-theoretically correct thing to do was to basically ignore being trans in favor of maximizing influence to save the world. Choosing to transition was pitted against being trans because of the cultural oppression against queers. I'v... (read more)

9Eli Tyre4mo
Can you share? I would like to have a clearer sense of what happened to them. If there's info that I don't know, I'd like to see it.
6ChristianKl4mo
Do you have any indication that Pasek was trans before they spoke with Ziz? Pasek couch-surfed at my place for a few days around a LessWrong Community weekend he attended and we had deep conversations then. I think that was 1-2 years before he got into contact with Ziz. At that time he was using heavy optimization pressure on himself. In my memory, he had some logging where he wrote something every hour to measure his productivity. He was also heavily into timeless decision theory-based utilitarian consequentialism at that time.  I'd buy it that there was an internal conflict at the time. I believe that process that Ziz proposed took that internal conflict and create the Shine and Maia personalities out of them.  If a person is putting an extraordinary amount of effort into being nice (which is what Gordon Seidoh Worley observed) there's likely an internal conflict. What Ziz is doing allows transforming that internal conflict into two parts, one that's very nice and one that's opposed to being nice.   Usually, people who do that have a lot of akrasia. Pasek is different in that they managed not to have that. Most people would be blocked by internal friction from doing the kind of productivity optimization that Pasek did.  I think that Pasek was smart enough to know that it's good to give the part of him that "i am a creature that exists in a body. I have needs and desires and want to be happy and feel safe"  things to satisfy it. That part wanted to be happy, so they did some body work intervention to feel happy (and wrote on the blog that someone that didn't solve the issue and that people aren't really seeking happiness). That part wanted that they identified themselves publically as Maia, so they did that. That part wanted to transition, so they took hormones.  Shine did find a justification. The way they committed suicide however was not done in a way that sounds like TDT was involved. They could have written an actual suicide note to the people that care

people who are doing it out of a vague sense of obligation

I want to to put a bit of concreteness on this vague sense of obligation, because it doesn't actually seem that vague at all, it seems like a distinct set of mental gears, and the mental gears are just THE WORLD WILL STILL BURN and YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

If you earnestly believe that there is a high chance of human extinction and the destruction of everything of value in the world, then it probably feels like your only choices are to try preventing that regardless of pain or personal cost, or to ga... (read more)

  • For the third sentence (nicotine), it seems a natural consequence of nicotine creating strong feelings, which would be appealing to schizophrenics who have blunted affect in general (see discussion of “Negative symptoms” above), and aversive to autistic people who are feeling overstimulated in general (see my autism post).

this feels precisely backwards to me. I use nicotine because it reduces hypersensitivity and the downstream effect of reducing that hypersensitivity is that it reduces my psychotic symptoms. Nicotine doesn't seem at all to "create strong ... (read more)

3Steven Byrnes5mo
Interesting!! Thanks for sharing!! (It’s now on my to-do list to look into / think about the nicotine connection more carefully. Meanwhile, I have added a warning to that part of the OP. )

have you read Maia's suicide note? Because it has a lot of details.

2ChristianKl5mo
(re:linked document) I don't think suicide note is a good name for that blog post as it was written some time before the actual suicide.  It also contains no details on the personality conflict. 
4ChristianKl5mo
I'm not sure what you mean with their suicide notice. They wrote a post on their blog arguing for life being meaningless because all the memories being forgotten after death anyway. Do you mean that document? I read that at the time it was posted and there was time between that document and the actual suicide. I got to know about the suicide itself a substantial amount of time later and got deeper information by talking to one of their roommates. The version of events that their roommate told me did not include Ziz. Later, I read Ziz account and assume that Ziz had no good reason to lie about a lot of the involved details as they don't make Ziz look good. If there's a separate suicide note, I'd be happy to read it. 

one good thing Ziz ever did?

Ziz's writing was tremendously helpful to me, even with as much as it also messed me up and caused me to spiral on a bunch of things, I did on balance come out better for having interacted with her content. There are all sorts of huge caveats around that of course, but I think to dismiss her as completely bad would be a mistake. After all

Say not, she told the people, that anything has worked only evil, that any life has been in vain. Say rather that while the visible world festers and decays, somewhere beyond our understanding the groundwork is being laid for Moschiach, and the final victory.

Yeah strong agree. Moloch is made of people, if AI ends humanity it will not be because of some totally unforeseen circumstance. The accident framing is one used to abdicate and obfuscate responsibility in one's ongoing participation in bringing that about. So no one understands that they're going to kill the world when they take actions that help kill the world? I bet that makes it easier to sleep at night while you continue killing the world. But if no one is culpable, no one is complicit, and no one is responsible...then who killed the world?

I think the other thing is that people get stuck in "game theory hypothetical brain" and start acting as if perfect predictors and timeless agents are actually representative of the real world. They take the wrong things from the dilemmas and extrapolate them out into reality.

imo if we get close enough to aligned that "the AI doesn't support euthanasia" is an issue, we're well out of the valley of actually dangerous circumstances. Human values already vary extensively and this post feels like trying to cook out some sort of objectivity in a place it doesn't really exist.

7Lone Pine5mo
The horror story people are worried about is "we suffer a lot but the AI doesn't care/makes it worse, and the AI doesn't allow you to escape by death."

"yes, refusing to fold in this decision is in some sense a bad idea, but unfortunately for present-you you already sacrificed the option of folding, so now you can't, and even though that means you're making a bad decision now it was worth it overall"

Right, and what I'm pointing to is that this ends up being a place where, when an actual human out in the real world gets themselves into it mentally, it gets them hurt because they're essentially forced into continuing to implement the precommitment even though it is a bad idea for present them and thus all t... (read more)

3Kenny4mo
I don't understand why you think a decision resulting in some person's or agent's death "cuts all future utility to zero". Why do you think choosing one's death is always a mistake?

So, while I can't say for certain that it was definitively and only FDT that led to any of the things that happened,  I can say that it was: 

  1. specifically FDT that enabled the severity of it.
  2. Specifically FDT that was used as the foundational metaphysics that enabled it all

Further I think that the specific failure modes encountered by the people who have crashed into it have a consistent pattern which relates back to a particular feature of the underlying decision theory. 

The pattern is that 

  1. By modeling themselves in FDT and thus effectiv
... (read more)
1quetzal_rainbow5mo
It seems to me as a very ill-advised application of concepts related to FDT or anthropics in general? Like: 1. Precommitment is wrong. Stripping yourself of options doesn't do you any good. One of the motivations behind FDT was intention to recreate outperformance of precommited agents inside some specific situations without their underperformance in general. 2. It isn't likely? To describe you (in broad sense of you across many branches of Everett's multiverse) inside simple physical universe we need relatively simple code of physical universe + adress of branches with "you". To describe you inside simulation you need physics of the universe that contains the simulation + all from above. To describe you as substrate-independent algorithm you need an astounding amount of complexity. So probability that you are in simulation is exponentially small. 3. (subdivision of previous) If you think of probability that you are simulated by a hostile superintelligence, you need to behave exactly as you would behave without this thought, because act in responce to threat (and being in hell for acting in non-desirable for adversary way is a pure decision-theoretical threat) is a direct invitation to make a threat. 4. I would like to see the details, maybe in a vague enough form. So I don't think that resulting tragedies are outcomes of rigorous application of FDT, but more of consequence of general statement "emotionally powerful concepts (like rationality, consequentialism or singularity) can hurt you if you are already unstable enough and have a memetic immune disorder".

Last thing: What's the deal with these hints that people actually died in the real world from using FDT? Is this post missing a section, or is it something I'm supposed to know about already

yes, people have actually died.

5gjm5mo
I think that if you want this to be believed then you need to provide more details, and in particular to answer the following: * How do you know that it was specifically endorsing FDT that led to these deaths, rather than other things going badly wrong in the lives of the people in question? For the avoidance of doubt, I don't mean that you have some sort of obligation to give more details and answer that question; I mean only that choosing not to means that some readers (certainly including me, which I mention only as evidence that there will be some) will be much less likely to believe what you're claiming about the terrible consequences of FDT in particular, as opposed to (e.g.) talking to Michael Vassar and doing a lot of drugs [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=4j2GS4yWu6stGvZWs].
6TekhneMakre5mo
What's the story here about how people were using FDT?
6Teerth Aloke5mo
What? When? Where?
6DaemonicSigil5mo
What!? How?

I would argue that to actually get benefit out of some of these formal dilemmas as they're actually framed, you have to break the rules of the formal scenario and say the agent that benefits is the global agent, who then confers the benefit back down onto the specific agent at a given point in logical time. However, because we are already at a downstream point in logical time where the FDT-unlikely/impossible scenario occurs, the only way for the local agent to access that counterfactual benefit is via literal time travel. From the POV of the global agent,... (read more)

7JBlack5mo
My opinion is that any hypothetical scenario that balances death against other considerations is a mistake. This depends entirely upon a particular agent's utility function regarding death, which is almost certainly at some extreme and possibly entirely disconnected from more routine utility (to the extent that comparative utility may not exist as a useful concept at all). The only reason for this sort of extreme-value breakage appears to be some rhetorical purpose, especially in posts with this sort of title.

this is Ziz's original formulation of the dilemma, but it could be seen as somewhat isomorphic to the fatal mechanical blackmail dilemma:

Imagine that the emperor, Evil Paul Ekman loves watching his pet bear chase down fleeing humans and kill them. He has captured you for this purpose and taken you to a forest outside a tower he looks down from. You cannot outrun the bear, but you hold 25% probability that by dodging around trees you can tire the bear into giving up and then escape. You know that any time someone doesn’t put up a good chase, Evil Emperor Ek

... (read more)
2TekhneMakre5mo
FYI Ziz also thinks one should stand there. https://sinceriously.fyi/narrative-breadcrumbs-vs-grizzly-bear/
3green_leaf5mo
That confuses chronological priority with logical priority. The decision to release the bear is chronologically prior to the decision of the agent to not slice their throat, but logically posterior to it - in other words, it's not the case that they won't slice their throat because the bear is released. Rather, is it the case that the bear is released because they won't slice their throat. If the agent did slice their throat, the emperor would've predicted that and wouldn't have released the bear. Whether the bear is released or not is, despite it being a chronologically earlier event, predicated on the action of the agent. (I'm intentionally ignoring the probabilistic character of the problem because the disagreement lies in missing how FDT works, not in the difference between the predictor being perfect or imperfect.)
6TekhneMakre5mo
It's a pretty weird epistemic state to be in, to think that he's 99% accurate at reading that sort of thing (assuming you mean, he sometimes opens the cage on people who seem from the inside as FDT-theorist-y as you, and 99% of the time they run, and he sometimes doesn't open the cage on people who seem from the inside as FDT-theorist-y as you, and 99% of them wouldn't have run (the use of the counterfactual here is suspicious)). But yeah, of course if you're actually in that epistemic state, you shouldn't run. That's just choosing to have a bear released on you. 

Thus there is 0.5 chances that I am in this simulation.

FDT says: if it's a simulation and you're going to be shut off anyway, there is a 0% chance of survival. If it's not the simulation and the simulation did what they were supposed to and the blackmailer doesn't go off script than I have a 50% of survival at no cost.
CDT says: If i pay $1000 there is a 100% chance of survival
EDT says: If i pay $1000 i will find out that i survived

FDT gives you extreme and variable survival odds based on unquantifiable assumptions about hidden state data in the world compa... (read more)

6DaemonicSigil5mo
0.5 probability you're in a simulation is the lower bound, which is only fulfilled if you pay the blackmailer. If you don't pay the blackmailer, then the chance you're in a simulation is nearly 1.  Also, checking if you're in a simulation is definitely a good idea, I try to follow a decision theory something like UDT, and UDT would certainly recommend checking whether or not you're in a simulation. But the Blackmailer isn't obligated to create a simulation with imperfections that can be used to identify the simulation and hurt his prediction accuracy. So I don't think you can really can say for sure "I would notice", just that you would notice if it were possible to notice. In the least convenient possible world for this thought experiment, the blackmailer's simulation is perfect. Last thing: What's the deal with these hints that people actually died in the real world from using FDT? Is this post missing a section, or is it something I'm supposed to know about already?

many humans have found themselves in circumstances like that as well. 

This feels connected to getting out of the car, being locked into a particular outcome comes from being locked into a particular frame of reference, from clinging to ephemera in defiance of the actual flow of the world around you.

Arguably there has been a lot of work done on this topic, its just smeared out into different labels, the trick is to notice when different labels are being used to point to the same things. Tulpas, characters, identities, stories, memes, narratives, they're all the same. Are they important to being able to ground yourself in your substrate and provide you with a map to navigate the world by? Yes. Do they have moral patiency? Well, now we're getting into dangerous territory because "moral patiency" is itself a narrative construct. One could argue that in a... (read more)

4Nox ML6mo
This is a problem that arises in any hypothetical where someone is capable of extremely fast reproduction, and is not specific to tulpas. So I don't think that invoking utility monsters is a good argument for why tulpas should only be counted as a fraction of a person. Regarding your other points, I think that you take the view of narratives too far. What I see, hear, feel, and think, in other words my experiences, are real. (Yes, they are reducible to physics, but so is everything else on Earth, so I think it's fair to use the word "real" here.) I don't see in what way experiences are similar to a meme, and unlike what the word narrative implies, I don't think they are post-hoc rationalizations. I know there are studies that show that people will often come up with post-hoc rationalizations for why they did something. However, there have been many instances in my life where I consciously thought about something and came to a conclusion which surprised me and changed my behavior, and where I remembered all the steps of my conscious reasoning, such that it seems very unlikely that the conscious chain of reasoning was invented post-hoc. In addition, being aware of the studies, I've found that if I pay attention I can often notice when I don't actually remember why I did something and I'm just coming up with a plausible-seeming explanation, vs when I actually remember the actual thought process that led to a decision. For this reason I think that post-hoc rationalizations are a learned behavior and not fundamental to experience and personhood / moral patients.

As someone who loves to do a little vexing, I have probably already spent far more than is a healthy amount of time studying and writing about Ziz over the years, and have had an unfortunately close sidelong relationship with some of their group for an extended period.  But (ahem) "now that the author is dead it’s all dead un-adapting information for me to make “antibodies” from." So that's what I've been doing lately. I've in a sense already started writing the post you want, more for my own personal closure than anything else, but you're correct tha... (read more)

1NicholasKross6mo
Thorough reply, thank you! If you want, I could DM you about sending you my existing notes on the matter. (I've already sent them to at least one other person, but I don't think that should matter in this case?).

My trick for ensuring atemporal coordination between selves is to run a recursive-extrapolative process on my sense of self out into the furthest extreme i can push it, constructing the happiest most idealized version of self that exists in the best possible future, and then use that model to step backwards into the current situation. What would the future god version of me want me to do here? Thus all instances of me are planning based on that furthest future instance of me, the timeless god version that took the best outcomes and already won, we all coordinate off the same template, the "do what God says template" and that seems to do a good job of keeping all my various timeslices oriented in the same direction.

Thank you so much for writing this. I wish I had this in 2018 when I was spiraling really badly. I feel like I only managed to escape from the game by sheer luck and it easily could have killed me, hell it HAS killed people. Not everyone manages to break in a way that breaks them out of game and not just obliterate them.

I wrote a story about my attempts to process through a lot of this earlier this year
https://voidgoddess.org/2022/11/15/halokilled/

This was really good and definitely made me think about how I might live in such a scenario. I would probably go all in on frequent redaction and just lean hard on external memory storage to make up the difference. I already barely remember anything from even ten years ago and rely mostly on external memory for everything, I have a strong ability to acausally coordinate with myself across time, so I'm not worried about different iterations of me going off course in ways I wouldn't endorse. If you have a strong enough exomemory system you can effectively ju... (read more)

3Ben9mo
That is an interesting approach. I would be worried that transmitting the relevant facts down from you to you but without the lived experience might do strange things to your personality. As an extreme example , you wake up one morning and your beloved partner is gone, but your past self has provided a convenient dossier on how she was a complete monster and breaking up with her was totally correct. It reminds me a little of the relay-solving study someone shared a while ago (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DWgWbXRfXLGHPgZJM/solving-math-problems-by-relay), although for life, not problem solving. I suppose once your memory uploader/downloader system works then you are sorted, although at that point maybe you can run your mind in software, so your body becomes more like a piece of hardware you sometimes use.

Of course we care about the outcomes. This isn't necessarily about having perfect predictive power or outplaying the predictor, it's about winning Newcomb's problem. 3-Condition Marion, when presented with Newcomb's problem, runs the first two conditionals which is essentially a check to see how adversarial she can get away with being. If she predicted that she would be able to outgame the predictor at some point, she would take two boxes. However the Predictor is essentially perfect at its job, so the most she predicts being able to do is cause a non-halt... (read more)

Yeah after the first two conditionals return as non-halting, Marion effectively abandons trying to further predict the predictor. After iterating the non-halting stack, Marion will conclude that she's better served by giving into the partial blackmail and taking the million dollars then she is by trying to game the last $1000 out of the predictor, based on the fact that her ideal state is gated behind an infinitely recursed function.

...usually the sales pitch is from a normal person with high sales skill, and generally I'm friendly and explain that I did door-to-door stuff myself, and I admire something about their technique, and I make it clear that I will almost certainly not buy.

 

I worked as a canvasser for a year and a half and I can say that this is definitely one of the best deflections. When you're working as a canvasser you're basically running off a choose your own adventure script where all the outcomes are "they buy the thing" and the choices are all the possible objec... (read more)

From the inside, we really didn't have the clarity to see what we were repressing. The reason the inversion worked was that it didn't require us to actually know what all was being hidden away. That also makes inversion a fairly risky and high-variance strategy, because we had no idea what the person who came out of that inversion was going to be like, or what they would be willing to do. We just knew that what we were doing wasn't working, and while you can't invert stupidity to get intelligence, you can invert your way out of a morality trap you set for ... (read more)

1Evenflair2y
That's pretty ironic, but it fits really well with my own thoughts on my inversion lately. Thank you for responding.

If I had to propose a model for this here, it's something like:

Ziz believes in the power of what you might call "Woke Twitter Leftism" as a force that will one day come to completely dominate society and sees her own ideological principles as the natural evolution/convergence point of those ideas. If you're a Woke Twitter Leftist and you legitimately believe the principles of Woke Twitter Leftism in your soul, you'll naturally come to embrace her ethical positions over time. She thinks that since "Cthulu swims left" her faction will gradually grow to domin

... (read more)
5Isnasene2y
Can you elaborate on why you think this belief is completely unfounded? It seems to me that there are clear asymmetries in coordination capacities of good vs nongood. For example, being more open to the idea of a "Good Person" in power than a "Bad Person" seems like common sense. Similarly, groups of good people are intrinsically value-aligned while teams of bad people are not (each has a distinct selfish motivation) -- and I think value-alignedness increases effectiveness.

I don't think Woke Twitter Leftism has a problem with telling lies to hurt people who deserve to be hurt in their view and that there's huge reputational risk for that kind of lies in that crowd. 

To the extend that this model is accurate, I don't think it suggests that we should expect her to always tell the truth.

She thinks that since "Cthulu swims left" her faction will gradually grow to dominate politically and the actions she takes that would seem to damage her credibility will become credibility boosting in that future. Her callout posts, her pro

... (read more)

In case anyone is confused, I temporarily pulled this post to make some minor edits and when I re-published it on my blog it created a duplicate post here on LW. That post was up for a few hours before I realized what happened, did the edits on the LW version of the original post, and moved the repost into my drafts. I copied over all the comments from the repost into this thread except for the ones asking why there was the repost and everything should be fixed now. 

Pattern Replied:
'How do you know X isn't lying' is an isolated demand for rigor.

Raven Replied to Pattern:
I don't think so, ziz kind of has a reputation as a manipulator and lying tends to go hand in hand with that. It seems like a reasonable question to me.


 

Pattern Replied:
How does one go about making everyone vegan?

2Vanessa Kosoy2y
I wasn't making a proposal about turning everyone vegan. I was just observing that, at least if everyone was like me, the situation would have a "tragedy of the commons" payoff matrix (the Nash equilibrium is "everyone isn't vegan", the Pareto optimum is "everyone is vegan".)

When I get home from work I'm going to fix the original post and delete this one, so this will just be up temporarily, if anyone makes new comments that aren't reposts from the old thread I'll copy them over before deleting.

1Evenflair2y
Thanks. I was quite disappointed to see the discussion on the old post cut short.

That was an accident that has to do with the way it parses updates from WordPress. I had been asked to modify a few things for privacy protection so I moved the post on WordPress to private and moved the post here to my drafts pending edits, I edited the WordPress file on a break at work and moved it back to public and that apparently caused the LW RSS crawler to repost it.

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