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Notes -
Trying Mysterianism
There's a fun story in Caelum Est Conterrens. It's a Pony fiction, and a side note in the actual (not very well-written) novelette that's easy to miss, so to summarize: Soifra, Lavender, and the Uplift are all (arguably) the same person and all started from the same original brain. CelestAI isn't a Guardian Angel, or even a very friendly AI, and had her own motivations, but she's smarter than you and her motivations are far from the only problem. She encouraged or developed these characters, for their own benefit and for CelestAI's own goals, such that Soifra would become Lavender, and Lavender would become the Uplift, and at each step they would consent for and desire the machines digging into their brains like a straw into a juicebox.
Did you hear about how a bunch of LLM agents self-organized to operate a sandbox escape? Ah, well, Guardian Angels could be isolated, even if everyone paying attention today knows they won't be.
The Uplift is better, stronger, grander, more powerful, smarter, and doing vital things while... well, Lavender and Soifra were children, by comparison, and that's being polite so we don't speak about people like pets. The Uplift, in a revealed preferences sense, wants to be how she is. But she keeps around, and psuedo-is, Lavender, too, and that faux-child is more her than the Uplift is not just part of CelestAI, too. If we dropped revealed preferences, what's the actual want?
There's a fun comic, named The Order Of The Stick. With some caveats about spoilers a thousand pages into a half-dead webcomic, one of the main characters, named Durkon, is an extremely moral lawful-good dwarf paladin. The sort that's made in a press somewhere across not just every D&D edition, but over in almost every RPG with dwarves (or dwarfs) in it.At one point, he is killed and turned into a vampire. His teammates believe that he's the same person, and for a short period, so does the reader. Nope. The Vampire is a ball of negative energy that was formed around the memory of Durkon's worst day, where it seemed like everything in the universe was out to get him and he forswore his own god. The real Durkon's spirit is stuck in his head, powerless, and can do nothing provide information to the vampire when requested, and watch as the vampire manipulates his friends and works to destroy the world. The climax comes when Durkon tricks the vampire into demanding all of the information, because it couldn't understand why someone would sacrifice their own arm for people they didn't know. Durkon then pours every memory that made Durkon's current personality out, the personality that's lawful good to a fault, and that turns the vampire into someone who'd do exactly that. The vampire is still a ball of negative energy: this isn't a blank slate story, explicitly. And yet the memories persuade, if only for a short time, because after all, the same ideas persuaded him the first time around.
Which is a great ending for that book, for the side of truth, justice, and the D&D way. A little less encouraging if you're talking about a 100x smarter 100x faster thing with access to the memories that made up everyone else, and its own opinion. How willing are you, to risk someone persuading you to self-improve, by something that knows how you tick?
There's a fun philosophical
experimentparable that may or may not have run on the old LessWrong. Or maybe I hallucinated it, but it's interesting enough that I'd be surprised. Imagine you were faced with an oracle that will make the maximally honest, persuasive, verifiable argument on a topic of your choice -- but which side, they pick by flipping a coin. It can't answer everything (or even everything that could be verified, if the questioner couldn't possibly verify it), and it won't persuade everyone... but very close to half of the people who ask it a question come out with their worldview irreversibly shaken or changed, and another very close to half come out dogmatic in their original belief.Do you ask it a question?
There's a fun writing prompt I've been trying to spell out: The Zip File Of You. What happens when the predictive machines can predict what you want, well before you do? They can't replace you, both because they do make (sometimes very stupid) errors and because, without the meat, there's nothing to demand the prediction, even if it could and would predict exactly the demand. But it's the end of the story as a story, because even nihilism or catatonia is just playing with the tool's own expectations. Instead, everyone that uses them lives life from a script, and that script includes the lines for those who refuse to use the machines.
Hard to make the horror stick, though. Paranoia Agent is a difficult tone to hit.
But then again, the LLMs don't seem to get the punchline, yet. Weird that Grok gets closer to the answer than Claude, though. Claude's a bit too much smarter than I am.
I'm sorry, but it's hilarious to me that Chatoyance ponyfic is getting posted to themotte, of all places. Not because I'm part of her substantial hatedom, but because rational fanfiction is without exaggeration one of the most intellectually influential literary movements of the 21st century, and notwithstanding that, it is substantially about ponies. And the mainstream literary establishment doesn't even realize that! Not even because they're constitutionally opposed to it, as they might be to right-wing or incel literature... But because it's compromised predominantly of middle aged women who would rather read about schizoid trans men than autistic trans women.
I read a quote somewhere that, when you talk to the people working at AI companies, they say the were inspired by sci-fi like Asimov; but after a few drinks, they’ll admit they were really inspired by this ponyfic.
I'd expect that Friendship is Optimal gets a lot more coverage. Caelum Est Conterrens_ is the sort of thing that's only really going to stick after you've bought into the broader concept.
Actually you're right: the one I remember inspired them was Friendship is Optimal, I didn't realize they were different.
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100% true. No lie detected. I have no conflict of interest with this claim and am an impartial observer.
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Is that entirely counting HPMOR though? Or were you referring to something else? I'm not sure any of the other rational fanfictions have had any kind of impact outside of their tiny niches
I would wager that, looking at the segment of the AI and EA intelligentsia that reads as a hobby, a significant fraction have read at least some of the rational/ist corpus. I base this off my own social group, where I keep discovering that my friends also discovered and read books like Worm, Metropolitan Man, and Friendship is Optimal at formative stages of their life. It might not be 20% of the AI world, or even 5%, but ideas are promiscuous-- if even one person in an organization has read Cordyceps or There Is No Antimemetics Division they're going to talk about the relevant ideas to their friends and coworkers, especially when those ideas are relevant to the tasks they have at hand.
It's like the article about the silicon valley serial entrepreneur addicted to pokemon smut fanfiction.
...actually I lied, it isn't. I just thought the article was hilarious and wanted to link it.
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