I'm not one of the downvoters here, but nor an upvoter. On the one hand, big yay for taking a difficult moral stand. On the other hand, the stand itself is not one I agree with. And a small boo for daydreaming that "I have found the Truth! Therefore one day all will agree with me and look back with disgust on the unenlightened beings that surround me!"

I have no knowledge of your state of mind. All I know is that you chose to publish the chatbot speech. I do not know how you prompted it or what your purpose was. My comment about shoggoth-spew was based on the speech itself.

But now Davidmanheim has posted a link to another article of yours. From reading that article, I believe you are mistaken about the nature of these things, just as in other notorious examples in the last year or so of people sliding into ever deeper delusions about them. You are in love with empty simulacra of people.

Are you going to do anything to help me? Or just mock me?

I am not here to help you or to mock you, only to say what I think I am seeing, to you and to the rest of the LW readership. Maybe you will find it helpful and maybe you will not. That is up to you.

Which would make your comment as rational as hassling the man raving on the street or answering the "you may already have won" email...by your own logic.

I am not talking to the shoggoth, but seeing it for what it is, and saying so to the human onlookers, the same as the other two examples.

But in all seriousness, Is that your real rejection?

(Imagine Chad Yes meme:) YES.

It’s pure shoggoth-spew, no more to be taken seriously than the ravings of a crazy in the street or an email beginning “You may already have won…”. The only reason I have limited myself to a weak downvote is that I don’t want to unilaterally push it below the default -5 threshold for front-page visibility. But if the collective vote develops that way, I’ll pile on.

ETA: And the collective vote has reached -11, so.

We are appalled at eating dogs and horses.

You are mistaking the customs of your village for the way of all the world. Steak de cheval is common in at least several European countries. I have eaten it in Switzerland. Although I did not grow up in such a country, to me it is as ordinary as eating beef or lamb.

I gave no resolution of the problem raised by this fable, because I do not have one.

Besides the decision the man is faced with, the story raises a deeper problem about morality. As far as I have seen in the literature, philosophical or theological, no-one has a solution. I shall call it the Problem of Totalisation.

Peter Singer preaches totalising morality. “The Most Good You Can Do”, to quote the title of one of his books, is the good that you must do. That good (he argues) must weigh everyone everywhere equally. The little girl in danger of drowning before your eyes is worth exactly the same as every child everywhere in danger of death. "The Life You Can Save" (another of his books) is the life you must save. To fail to do all you can to save all the people you can is morally equivalent to passing by the drowning girl. (Bought a new car? How many dead children did it cost?) You should not value your own children any more highly than a starving child on the other side of the world that you will never see and whose fate you will never know. He who would be Good must think of nothing else, do nothing else.

This conflicts with almost everyone’s intuitions. It conflicts with yours. It conflicts with mine. But who will argue against altruism? Who will argue, as inspirationally as Singer, that duty is bounded, that I do not have to do all the good that I can, that I will not sacrifice everything to the egregore Tutulma, and not merely as a grudging concession to my frailty? That no-one can live up to the demand is, for Singer, no refutation. “Yes,” he says (imagine the Chad YES meme here), “it is demanding.” Failing to live up to the standard is just that, a failure.

So there is the problem. Meanwhile, I don’t let myself get hijacked by clever words just because I don’t have cleverer words to set against them.

Other languages have different conventions. In French, dialogue is usually indicated by a new line and a dash. Within a paragraph it need not be typographically distinguished from the non-quotation text: for example, the phrase "poursuivait la voix sonore de Servières" in the paragraph below beginning "— Qui aurait".

To me it's like reading the dialogue of a silent film.

It would be IMO pretty dumb to write a post that is e.g. trying to learn from past social movement failures and not have an LLM look over it to see whether it's saying anything historically inaccurate.

Do you then look over what the LLM has said and see whether it's saying anything historically inaccurate, without using an LLM?

A general response to the responses to this fable.

The story ends where it ends. It is fiction, so there is no more to it than the story itself. It does not say what the man did. Anyone continuing it or adding further details, whether convenient or inconvenient, is writing their own fanfiction of the story to express their own response to the hypothetical.

There are two obvious continuations: "The decision was clear, he told himself, and walked on", and "The decision was clear, he told himself, and waded into the pond."^[1] All further elaboration would be adding detail to make the story come out the way one would like.

For a lower stakes version of this story, consider the highly-paid lawyer who donates some time to working at a soup kitchen. This is a standard example in EA of Ineffective Altruism. The lawyer should instead (it is said) work those hours at lawyer rates and donate the money to do more good, or accept that he is working in the soup kitchen for the warm fuzzies, not to do all the good that he might. Is this different from the high-flying charity fund-raiser who can be more effective if he passes by the drowning girl? If he saves her, should he take care to be mindful that he is only doing it for the fuzzies, a concession to his imperfection, a necessary evil undertaken only to preserve his effectiveness?

Regarding types of response to hypotheticals:

• "Don't fight the hypothetical!"
• The Least Convenient Possible World.
• "Do fight the hypothetical!"
• "Question the hypothetical!"
• Steelmanning.
• "Against Devil's Advocacy."

Tagging those who commented: @Haiku, @Roman Malov, @localdeity, @Szeth, @Sting.