One of question I have about "the Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is "walk away to where?" I'd argue most societies cause more misery for less benefit.
I think I my empathy tends to be kinder because I used to be like nail-head.
Confused about the disagreements. Is it because of the AI output or just the general idea of an AI risk chatbot?
Here's a riddle: A woman falls in love with a man at her mother's funeral, but forgets to get contact info from him and can't get it from any of her acquaintances. How could she find him again? The answer is to kill her father in hopes that the man would come to the funeral.
It reminds me of [security mindset](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_mi_1.html), in which thinking like an attacker exposes leaky abstractions and unfounded assumptions, something that is also characteristic of being agentic and "just doing things."
In fact, Claude 3 Opus is still available.
Is Judaism not also based around disputation of texts?
I pretty much agree with this. I just posted this as a way of illustrating how simulacrum stages could be generalized to be more than just about signalling and language. In a way, even stocks are stage 4 since they cash out in currency, so that stuff can be one stage in one way but another stage in another way.
Simulacrum stages as various kinds of assets:
- Stage 1: Most assets. Apples are valued for their taste and nutrition. Stocks of apple-farming companies are claims to profit which comes from providing apples, which are valued. Shares in prediction markets eventually cash out.
- Stage 2: Assets held because the holder thinks others will, perhaps erroneously, think it has increased in stage 1 value. Includes Ponzi schemes and Enron stocks/options.
- Stage 3: Manifold Market stocks and some memecoins, which are associated with a thing, person, or concept, which is used as a Schelling point to determine their value. One only expects their value to correlate with the associated concept because everyone else thinks it'll correlate and buy and sell accordingly.
- Stage 4: Cryptocurrency and assets of pure speculation, where the price rises only because everyone expects it will rise and buys accordingly, mutatis mutandis for lowering. Also includes fiat currency, which is valuable because everyone agrees to use it as a medium of exchange.
I think the prior for aliens having visited Earth should be lower, since it a priori it seems unlikely to me that aliens would interact with Earth but not to an extent which makes it clear to us that they have. My intuition is that its probably rare to get to other planets with sapient life before building a superintelligence (which would almost certainly be obvious to us if it did arrive) and even if you do manage to go to other planets with sapient life, I don't think aliens would not try to contract us if they're anything like humans.