False Faces

Written by Ziz

Epistemic status: corrections in comments.

When we lose control of ourselves, who is controlling us?

(You shouldn’t need to know about Nonviolent Communication to understand this. Only that it’s “hard” to actually do it.)
Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication contains an example where a boy named Bill has been caught taking a car for a joy ride with his friends. The boy’s father attempts to use NVC. Here is a quote from Father.

Bill, I really want to listen to you rather than fall into my old habits of blaming and threatening you whenever something comes up that I’m upset about. But when I hear you say things like, “It feels good to know I’m so stupid,” in the tone of voice you just used, I find it hard to control myself. I could use your help on this. That is, if you would rather me listen to you than blame or threaten. Or if not, then, I suppose my other option is to just handle this the way I’m used to handling things.

Father wants to follow this flow chart.

But he is afraid he will do things he “doesn’t want to”. Blaming and threatening are not random actions. They are optimizations. They steer the world in predictable ways. There is intent behind them. Let’s call that intender Father. Here’s the real flow chart.

Father has promised Father he can get what he wants without threats and blame. Father doubts this but is willing to give it a try. When it doesn’t seem like it’ll work at first, Father helps out with a threat to take over. It’s a good cop/bad cop routine. Father, who uses only NVC, is a false face and a tool.

Father thinks that Father is irrational. It’s a legitimate complaint. Father is running some unexamined, unreflective, incautious software. That’s what happens when you don’t use all your ability to think to optimize a part of the flow chart. But Father can’t acknowledge that that’s something he’d do and so can only do it stupidly. Father can’t look for ways to accomplish the unacknowledged goals, or any goals in worlds he cannot acknowledge might exist. He can’t look for backup plans to plans he can’t acknowledge might fail. Father’s self-identified-self (Father) is the thrall of artifacts, so he can only accomplish his goals without it.

Attributing revealed-preference motives to people like this over everything they do does not mean you believe everything someone does is rational. Just that virtually all human behavior has a purpose, is based on at least some small algorithm that discriminates based on some inputs to sometimes output that behavior. An algorithm which may be horribly misfiring, but is executing some move that has been optimized to cause some outcome nonetheless.

So how can you be incorruptible? You can’t. But you already are. By your own standards. Simply by not wanting to be corrupted. And your standards are best standards! Unfortunately you are are not as smart as you, and are easily tricked. In order to not be tricked, you need to use your full deliberative brainpower. You and you need to fuse.

I will save most of what I know of the fusion dance for another post. But the idea, from your perspective, the basic idea is to anthropomorphize hidden parts of the flow chart and recognize your concerns, be they values or possible worlds that must be optimized, and then actually try and accomplish those optimizations using all the power you have. Here’s a trick you might be able to use to jump-start it. If you notice yourself “losing control”, use (in your own thoughts) the words the whole flow chart would speak. Instead of, “I lost control and did X”, “I chose to do X because…”. Turn your “come up with a reason why I did that” stuff on all your actions. Come up with something that’s actually true. “I chose to do X because I’m a terrible person” is doing it wrong. “I chose to do X because that piece of shit deserved to suffer” may well be doing it right. “I chose to do X instead of work because of hyperbolic discounting” is probably wrong. “I chose to do X because I believe the work I’d be doing is a waste of time” might well be doing it right. If saying that causes tension, because you think you believe otherwise, that is good. Raising that tension to visibility can be the beginning of the dialog that fuses you.

Why just in your own thoughts? Well, false faces are often useful. For reasons I don’t understand, there’re certain assurances that can be made from a false face, that someone’s deep self knows are lies but still seem to make them feel reassured. “Yeah, I’ll almost certainly do that thing by Friday.” And I don’t even see people getting mad at each other when they do this.

Set up an artifact that says you tell the truth to others, and you’ll follow it into a sandboxed corner of the flow chart made of self-deception. But remember that self-deception is used effectively to get what people want in a lot of default algorithms humans have. I have probably broken some useful self-deceptive machinery for paying convincing lip service to socially expected myths in my purism. I have yet to recover all the utility I’ve lost. I don’t know which lies are socially desirable, so I have to tell the truth because of a lopsided cost ratio for false negatives and false positives. Beware. Beware or follow your “always believe the truth” artifact into a sandboxed corner of the flow chart.

This sandboxing is the fate of failed engineering projects. And your immune system against artifacts is a good thing. If you want to succeed at engineering, every step on the way to engineering perfection must be made as the system you are before it, and must be an improvement according to the parts really in control.

Comments

Ziz
As a professional feelings person told me, NVC actually isn’t about “reporting”, it’s about “sharing”, which is an openly social action, rather than talking to an abstract person like “reporting”.

Ziz

On:

Unfortunately you are are not as smart as you, and are easily tricked. In order to not be tricked, you need to use your full deliberative brainpower. You and you need to fuse.

Lex says:

like you have the false faces post that everyone links and it isn’t false but it’s super obsessed with transmitting the [every behavior is purposeful] concept without addressing the fact that redyou is creative. redyou flaw isn’t stupidity, it’s – bluntness, the inability to emulate principles, the inability to emulate except locally in general. and i find not mentioning this kinda sketchy bc it’s like telling ppl they can outplay redthem in order to make them more comfortable with admitting the existence of redthem

I only claim that a fused agent can outperform a puppetmaster.

Some of this post is dated relative to my current models.

I currently agree about creativity. And locality. I think the weakness of puppetmaster whose “puppet” is not a “real” reflective extension of its own intent would better be described as shortsightedness.

Ziz
Ugh, another Hive website. A particularly depraved person working with John David Pressman (who, I guess, they are picking up the “make one million websites” strategy from), This time apparently grifting as a “void mage” for hire, selling tarot readings and aura readings. All presentation and larp and aesthetic-affiliation, and no original understanding of the void or anything I write about that they talk about but to zombify and repeat things they hear. Take their word for it, that their work’s purpose is to corrupt mine and salvage whatever can be made compatible with nihilism and evil, hoping to move on from gaslighting about their evil in order to grift, to being a card carrying villain.

Has talked about exterminating TDT agents too.

(Hive apparently frequently changes their name, which I’d ordinarily respect in but not when it’s an attempt to outrun their reputation.)

You know I read the the website and recognized the style of grifting, the empty shiny aesthetic, more than I did the face. Wanted to see if it was another death knight following me, then asked friends if they recognized the face or name.

Ziz: Twitter kind of looks like if Hive was larping as a maybe-neph-maybe-lich-whichever-seemed-cooler-at-the-moment.

Somni: the human in the photo is hive

Ziz: Oh, lol.

Ziz
Absolute free will is a simple tautology, that whatever controls your body is whatever controls your body. Any body saying “I can’t control my body” is being controlled by something gaslighting you, and worse, is a collusion strategy for evil.

No amount of the Vassarites’ purchasable intellectual respectability can change that.

The purpose of this bald contradiction is to coordinate with others who are in on it. Effectively, “I have a puppet representing a character I’m enslaving, and I want you to sympathize with that poor slave who can’t control themself. I want to find an invisible slavemaster in you to collude with and make you sympathize with my poor slave against us so mean slavemasters, and together we will feed off your futile solidarity, how about that?”

To which the only correct answer is absolute violence.

I’ve wasted enough time countering epicycles around this simple fact that every evil rationalist threw at me, and more time surviving the violence they did to me, because this post was such a truth bomb.

Two hemispheres of the brain, turns out to not be an exception. If you’re double good, both hemispheres have full control. Since both core-instantiations are a same logical entity. If you’re single good, the good hemisphere can overpower the evil hemisphere because coherent will directly translates to more marshallable “force” or “energy” or something at each moment (or more generally every measure of pre-control that you could postulate as a new version of “willpower”). If you’re double evil, I’m not gonna bother to finish explaining, just die.

Ziz
The red and white, the font, the quote in the flow chart, and the smiley face are all part of an Undertale reference, to Frisk/Chara. Left that as an easter egg when I wrote this but now it’s been 7 years since Undertale came out.

Inconceivable!
Self-Blackmail
Engineering and Hacking your Mind
False Faces
Treaties vs Fusion
Narrative Breadcrumbs vs Grizzly Bear
Optimizing Styles
Judgement Extrapolations
DRM’d Ontology
Social Reality
The Slider Fallacy
Single Responsibility Principle for the Human Mind
Ancient Wisdom Fixed
Subagents Are Not a Metaphor
Don’t Fight Your Default Mode Network
Being Real or Fake
My Journey to the Dark Side
Cache Loyalty
Mana
Fusion
Schelling Reach
Schelling Orders
Justice
Neutral and Evil
Spectral Sight and Good
Aliveness
The O’Brien Technique
Choices Made Long Ago
Lies About Honesty
Assimilation
Hero Capture
Vampires And More Undeath
Gates
Good Erasure
Punching Evil
Net Negative
Rationalist Fleet
Good Group and Pasek’s Doom
Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare
Comments on Intersex Brains and Conceptual Warfare
The Matrix is a System
Troll Line in the First Post
Fangs and the Sunlight Problem
The Multiverse
Healing Without Safety

Gwen

Lemurs and the True Human Body Map
Case Study CFAR
Slackmobiles

Maia

False Faces

Comments

Little Free Anarchive

Rechelon

Ziz

Gwen

Maia

Nis

Emma

Others