Well, those are my best arguments. I hope I’ve been helpful in some way. 

So go back. Why is it unlikely that an ASI would reward those that help create it, rather than punish those that don’t? You dismissed angels, but this seems to me the far more-likely scenario. It’s basically the default, otherwise what’s the point of building them in the first place? Now that doesn’t mean the angel doesn’t kill us all too, but it doesn’t engage in all this torture causal trade nonsense. 

I just don’t understand why this particular scenario seems likely. Especially since it’s unlikely to work, given how most people don’t give it much credence. 

I’m just not about to change my life and become a supervillain henchman, but if some ASI slid into my DM’s and said, “Yo, Jason. I’ll give you $2 million dollars to write some software for me. He’s proof I’m sincere,” I’d at least listen and ask about the benefits package. 

There is no thought trap, other than what you create for yourself. 

Let’s consider a functionally equivalent ASI scenario to a Basilisk. Let’s call it Jason’s Hobgoblin. An ASI comes into existence decides to ultra-torture everyone, with maybe some small chance of a reprieve based on whether it likes you or not. No acausal trade. It just sees who helped it exist, and chooses to make some of them its pets. The Hobgoblin takes up a bunch of space of the Basilisk futures. 

Now, do you change your life to try to get on its good side before it even exists? I don’t think so: it’s crazy. How can you really understand why the Hobgoblin likes you, or does what it does?

I think that a chance for a reward from a Basilisk is equally inscrutable. You’re already considering cooperating with it, so it doesn’t have to actually cooperate with you. You have no way of knowing if it will cooperate with you it’s not actually incentivized to. 

Why cooperate when you have no idea what the actual effect will be? Well, other than the damage you might do as its henchman. And the cost to your mental health as you go around the anxiety loop. 

Even if you believe the Basilisk is a likely future, there’s no reason to cooperate with it, or give it further thought than any other possible future. 

If the Hobgoblin splits the Basilisk probability space, then it’s it likely that there are other similar scenarios that do as well. Maybe an Angel is a Hobgoblin in disguise? Doesn’t this lead us back to the Basilisk not being a particularly likely possible future given all of the alternatives? 

If the Basilisk is just a story, then is not worth worrying about. If the Basilisk is just one of any number possible futures, then there is no reason to give it special attention. If the Basilisk is the future, then there is no point is cooperating with it. 

“Moreover so much more than what could exist does”

Why would that be?

Pure combinatorics. You could potentially have children with everyone you encounter. Now some of those are exceedingly unlikely, but even if 1/100 of them had a significant probability, that’s likely at least on order of magnitude or more than the people that you do wind up having kids with. For every potential coparent, there are a lot more children that you could have, but won’t. There are just too many factors that determine the outcome of a pregnancy. Again, we’re talking orders of magnitude more potential children than actual children. when we talk about all of the possible states of the world, versus the actual state of the world, the difference in orders of magnitude is simply astronomical. 

Most things that could exist, don’t exist. There are far more possible worlds that have no Basilisk than ones that do. Now, you’re right to include how likely a particular potential world is, but even if we say in all worlds with AGI, humans are worse off, the likelihood of a Basilisk is vanishingly small, compared to all of the ways things could go wrong. Even in the worlds where there is a Basilisk, given variation in population, and AGI timelines, the chance of you being targeted is minuscule. 

I don’t think that the nature of the torture matters. I think that I could think of a scenario where it would be worth enduring. It’s hard to balance torture against the welfare of others, but once we are in the billions, that feels pretty clear to me. The negative value of being tortured for 10,000 years can’t possibly be lower than the torture and deaths of billions of people. There is always a scenario where it is worth enduring. The risk is always finite. 

But let’s take a step back, and presume that a Basilisk scenario is possible. What harms are you willing to do to make sure it is created? Would you create such a monster? Even in a world where a Basilisk is inevitable, what harms would you cause? Would they be worth it? What if it decides to just go ahead and torture you anyway?

There is no reason to cooperate with something so horrible: it can’t be reasoned with nor negotiated with—causally or not. 

It’s astronomically unlikely to happen; and if it did there is no value in cooperating. If you create it, then you are the monster, whether you were inspired by Rosco or not.

Rosco’s Basilisk is an intellectual trap of your own making. It’s delusion: a rationalization of the irrational. It’s not worth thinking of, and especially not worth buying into. 

It might make a good novel though. 

6/7 seems to me a continuation of a pattern that I think has gone on since the birth of humanity or before: kids like to annoy/confuse adults. Growing up, that’s where “dude” came from: it was taken from surf culture, and it annoyed our parents. Now I find it as a regular part of my speech. For my son’s friends, bruh, and bro got regular use because to Xers like me, it was associated with sounding dumb and insincere. 

Now my nephew says 6/7.  The fact that it confuses and annoys adults is just totally the point. 

Nothing can make it go away faster than us using it. Once adults are in on the joke, it loses all meaning. 

I’m not saying that there is no need to optimize for performance for REST-like servers, instead I am saying that it’s very dependent on the specific use case, which is difficult to predict. Often it can be more economical to scale up when there isn’t sufficient throughput, and to focus engineering optimization efforts on only those queries that are low-performing. Even then, there are typically optimizations to be made long before one reaches for assembly. Optimizing SQL queries, and efforts to increase parallelization are often sufficient. 

For instance, the server that I work on is a GraphQL API written in Typescript. I have a few million users, and it runs without problems. When I have had slow queries, I typically need to optimize the SQL/Prisma queries, two times I needed to optimize parallelization. We’re not particularly computer-bound. So I haven’t yet even needed to offset processing to even a compiled language. NodeJS is simply fast enough. 

You’re missing the reason why most code isn’t hand-optimized: it doesn’t matter. If you’re writing a server, most of the time waiting for a request, or waiting for a database query, or waiting on a file to read, or whatever. There is no point in optimizing these further. The only place where that matter is for high compute-bound processes. If you aren’t processing more than 10k records at a time, you’re unlikely to see much a difference. Even still, you can likely optimize your high-level code to get most of the gains you’d get from jumping down to asm. 

Pre-mature optimization is a waste of time. That’s time that can better be spent working on a new problem. It’s better to use observability to know where your code is actually taking the most time in production, and then optimizing those places, if they need it at all. 

I can’t tell you what you should do, but I can tell you about my experience. My son was born when I was 33. My (then) wife and I had been trying to convince for a few years, and we were about to seek fertility treatments. He was very much wanted. We talked about having more, but we felt pretty lucky to have the one. We divorced when he was about 8. 

I had a great role model for a father: mostly in the positive sense, but also with a few negative features that I intended to improve upon. He told me I taught him a lot. I can say my son has done the same for me. 

I got really lucky with my son. He’s enough like me when I was a kid that I was able to really relate to him. From an early age I have called him wiggle-monkey, because he could never sit still. Early on, he was diagnosed with ADHD. As a part of him getting evaluated and diagnosed, I found I did too. 

It re-contextualized a bunch of my childhood. I thought back to all of those times that I got in trouble for being lazy, or forgetful, or because I just couldn’t complete a task. My dad would get really frustrated with me. He was never abusive, but it was still traumatic because I really was trying. I had a lot of negative self-talk and self-image that extended into adulthood because of that. 

Knowing that these symptoms and struggles are common, despite our best efforts, I promised myself to not pass on that trauma to my son. I adopted a free-range and gentle parenting style. It taken a lot of patience at times, but learning that skill has improved my life. Since he’s now 15, and a great kid, I think I’ve been largely successful. 

Raising him has also brought me even closer to my father. Nights where my son was sick, and I sat with him to comfort him, I would think of all the times my dad did the same for me. When my son would have a deadline with school, and crammed too much in, I’d help him and think about how my dad had done the same for me. When money was really tight, and I had to make tough decisions, I thought about how my parents struggled and still managed to give me a happy childhood. 

Being a parent taught me responsibility and resilience. When  we both got the flu, I couldn’t just hide in bed because he needed me. When I was depressed and could barely will myself to get out of bed he still needed to get to school. When my feet and back were hurting from walking all day, I still managed to carry him as he slept on my shoulder. 

Being a parent isn’t that different than I expected it to be. All of those assholes that say, “unless you are a parent, you just wouldn’t understand” are wrong. Still, when I think about how much I love him, it makes me understand how my parents feel about me. 

It’s hard though, and expensive. It was really socially limiting for the first few years. I’m sure you’ve heard all that stuff before though. 

Since my divorce, I’ve shared custody of my son. We do a 2-2-3 schedule. It means that I have plenty of time away from my duties as a father. I love that freedom too. It’s really my one bit of advice I’ll give. If you have a child with someone/others, even if they live with you, divide up your days of responsibility. Of course you’ll both/all be parents on your days off, but that gives you time away to be you, and preserve your own identity. It makes planning easier. It makes friends easier. If you live with a partner, make time for them too. Being a full-time single-parent is pretty rough without support. 

Just also remember if you share custody with someone, you’ll be pretty tied to them for about 20 years. My partner is moving across the country in April, and I can’t go with her without my son losing access to one of his parents. If you do choose someone you like, try to think how you might feel in two decades. 

Another idea is maybe do fostering? Then you can try it before you buy it. That might even lead to adoption, which is yet another option.

Before thinking about starting an orphanage, why not look for programs where you can be in the lives of kids who need a good role model? Or volunteer at the local library to read to children. Heck, you might wind up finding someone you ultimately would want to have your own with.

So that’s it. Parenting is worth it, but not being a parent has lots of perks too. I got lucky with an easy (for me) kid. YMMV. Whatever you decide, whenever you decide it, it’ll be the right decision. 

This brings to mind a post, On Stance, by Screwtape, and my comment relating the mental stances I use to remind myself in the moment of how my brain consistently fails. In the past few years I have been trying to take this more seriously. Especially as I’ve become more aware of how my inattentive ADHD makes certain things difficult.

I’m coming up on my first full year of journaling, I’ve been doing that for about 1.5 years now, but I’m a little proud/excited to finish out 2025 with a journal entry for every day. I’m 47, and I really wish I had started earlier. Not only does this help me with analysis and memory augmentation now, but as I get older and really start experiencing mental decline I hope it will help me reconnect with who I used to be. Maybe once I’m dead it’ll help my son connect with me too.  

It sounds like you’re coming to some of the same realizations as I have. “Is this true?” is a great general-purpose mental stance. “Later is a lie,” is how I remind myself that I’m not likely to remember something in the future. While we can’t do much about the underlying problems, we can create systems to compensate, and mitigate our failures. 
 

The real question is whether it is equally effective to lie and say you meditate without the hard work. Then, does it matter if the other person knows it’s untrue? Does it still work if you lie and know the other person doesn’t believe you. Then does it matter if you know that they know why you’re lying? 

Hey, y’all, this post was very meditative.