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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37391 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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They called it timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality theory on lesswrong

I'm pretty sure that's not how it works, since almost anything to do with timeless decision theory is basically incomprehensible and could never be dumbed down into something as concrete as stabbing your landlord with a sword. If you're killing someone in the name of Wittgenstein or Derrida, you're doing something wrong (on several levels). Maoism on the other hand smiles upon executing landlords.

could never be dumbed down into something as concrete as stabbing your landlord with a sword.

As the meme goes, you are like a little baby. Watch this.

The government is something that can be compromised by bad people. And so, giving it tools to “attack bad people” is dangerous, they might use them. Thus, pacts like “free speech” are good. But so is individuals who aren’t Nazis breaking those rules where they can get away with it and punching Nazis.

<...>

If you want to create something like a byzantine agreement algorithm for a collection of agents some of whom may be replaced with adversaries, you do not bother trying to write a code path, “what if I am an adversary”. The adversaries know who they are. You might as well know who you are too.

Alternatively, an extended Undertale reference that feels so on the nose it almost hurts (yes, fucking Chara is definitely the best person to mentally consult while trying to rationalize your actions).

Once you make "no-selling social reality" your professed superpower, I imagine the difference in performing Olympic-levels mental gymnastics to justify eating cheese sandwiches and coming up with legitimate reasons to stab your landlord is negligible. (I know the actual killer is a different person but I take the patient zero as representative of the "movement".)

Alternatively, an extended Undertale reference that feels so on the nose it almost hurts (yes, fucking Chara is definitely the best person to mentally consult while trying to rationalize your actions).

I'm not very well versed in Undertale lore, so can you point out how this is an extended Undertale reference?

[cw: spoilers for a 10 year old game]

In brief, Chara is the most straightforwardly evil entity in all of Undertale and the literal embodiment of soulless "number go up" utilitarian metagaming. One of the endings (in which your vile actions quite literally corporealize it) involves Chara directly taking over the player avatar, remarking that you-the-player have no say in the matter because "you made your choice long ago" - hypocrite that you are, wanting to save the world after having pretty much destroyed it in pursuit of numbers.

Hence the post's name and general thrust, with Ziz struggling over having to do evil acts (catching sentient crabs) to fund a noble goal (something about Bay Area housing?):

In deciding to do it, I was worried that my S1 did not resist this more than it did. I was hoping it would demand a thorough and desperate-for-accuracy calculation to see if it was really right. I didn’t want things to be possible like for me to be dropped into Hitler’s body with Hitler’s memories and not divert that body from its course immediately.

After making the best estimates I could, incorporating probability crabs were sentient, and probability the world was a simulation to be terminated before space colonization and there was no future to fight for, this failed to make me feel resolved. And possibly from hoping the thing would fail. So I imagined a conversation with a character called Chara, who I was using as a placeholder for override by true self. And got something like,

You made your choice long ago. You’re a consequentialist whether you like it or not. I can’t magically do Fermi calculations better and recompute every cached thought that builds up to this conclusion in a tree with a mindset fueled by proper desperation. There just isn’t time for that. You have also made your choice about how to act in such VOI / time tradeoffs long ago.

So having set out originally to save lives, I attempted to end them by the thousands for not actually much money.

I do not feel guilt over this.

It really can't be more explicit, I took it as an edgy metaphor (like most of his writing) at first reading but it really is a pitch-perfect parallel: a guy has a seemingly-genuine crisis of principles, consciously picks the most evil self-serving path imaginable out of it, fully conscious of each individual step, directly acknowledging the Chara influence (he fucking spells out "override by true self"!), and manages to reason himself out of what he just did anyway. Now this is Rationalism.

I just can’t imagine being so much of a loser that I’m going to base my moral convictions on characters in a video game. That’s the thing that really strikes me here, not the murder and the consequentialism or even the rationalism, it’s that this is a person of obvious intelligence who has founded their entire worldview on video games and the Matrix movies.

I don't think they're founding their moral convictions on video games, only using video games and their connotations to smooth communication. It's no different than HPMOR, in my view.

I think you're underselling the phenomenon by just rounding all this off to crazy. I think it's entirely possible that Ziz and their accolytes have, among them, some significant neurological abnormalities. But it's hard to escape the impression that they're not losing their minds so much as intentionally throwing them away. They are actively taking concrete, premeditated action to undermine and compromise their own sanity, because they've bought into enough reasoning convolutions that they've committed to it being a good idea. I have some minor personal experience with cult shit, and this is definitely cult shit.

It's no different than HPMOR, in my view.

Yeah, and I also think HPMOR is very silly and shouldn't be treated as serious. Harry Potter fanfiction is not the means by which serious people discuss or disseminate philosophical treatises; it insults Harry Potter by trying to make it something it isn't, and insults philosophical treatises by trying to make them something they're not. That Yudkowsky used Harry Potter fanfiction to distribute his ideas indicates to me an unwillingness to choose the right register in which to communicate, a bit like TYPING IN ALL CAPS LIKE YOU'RE A BOOMER WITH A BROKEN CAPS LOCK or refusng 2 us propper gramar to rite yur txt bc its to hard 2 rite n propr inglish. It indicates a disrespect to your content and your audience, while also implying you don't believe your work is strong enough to stand on its own without adding a gimmick.

And that's exactly what I charge our cultists here are doing: they're disrespecting themselves by describing extremely significant and important themes in metaphysics and social reality through video game references, which aren't reality, indicating that either they can't justify their views in more complex terms or don't have the patience, lucidity, and self-control to choose to do so, both of which are damning.

I have some minor personal experience with cult shit, and this is definitely cult shit.

Sure, maybe. But I don't see "cult shit" as meaningfully distinguished from crazy; by crazy I don't simply mean schizophrenia or something along those lines, but simply that these are people whose reasoning and behavior are separated from reality and whose ramblings are therefore fruitless and best to be ignored. I don't really care, Margaret, whether the delusions came from neurological abnormalities or from manipulation as part of a cult.

Harry Potter fanfiction is not the means by which serious people discuss or disseminate philosophical treatises; it insults Harry Potter by trying to make it something it isn't, and insults philosophical treatises by trying to make them something they're not.

It worked. I have a personal philosophy of never looking down on a method that yields results; I may choose not to use it but I would rather succeed in a manner that's undignified than fail like a serious person.

More to the point, writing didactic fiction is as old as time, as @coffee_enjoyer will be happy to tell you. The idea that good philosophy is only communicated through complex essays is just untrue, although complex essays certainly have their charm. Look at GK Chesterton, whose happy conviction was that truly solemn ideas can only be communicated through laughter.

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

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