Written by Ziz
Alternative title: “The difference is that I am right“.
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.
Nazis are evil, and don’t give a shit about free speech or nonaggression of any form except as pretense.
If you shift the set of precedents and pretenses which make up society from subject to object, the fundamental problem with Nazis is not that they conduct their politics in a way that crosses an abstract line. It’s that they fight for evil, however they can get away with. And are fully capable of using a truce like “free speech” to build up their strength before they attack.
Even the watered down Nazi ideology is still designed to unfold via a build up of common knowledge and changing intuitions about norms as they gain power, and “peaceful deportation” failing to work, into genocide. Into “Kill consume multiply conquer” from the intersection of largest demographic Schelling majorities. The old Nazis pretended to want a peaceful solution first too. And they consciously strategized about using the peaceful nature of the liberal state to break it from within.
You are not in a social contract with Nazis not to use whatever violence can’t be prohibited by the state. If our society was much more just but still had Nazis, it would still be bad for there to be norm where the jury will to practice jury nullification selectively to people who punch people they think are bad. And yet, it would be good for a juror to nullify a law against punching Nazis.
Isn’t this inconsistent? Well, a social contract to actually uphold the law, do not use jury nullification, along with any other pacts like that, will not be followed by Nazis insofar as breaking them seems to be the most effective strategy for “kill consume multiply conquer”. Principles ought to design themselves knowing they’ll only be run on people interested in running them.
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. This is not entirely the case with neutral. As that’s sustained by mutual mental breakage. Fake structure “act against my own intent” inflicted on each other. But it is the case with evil.
If your demographic groups are small and weak enough to be killed and consumed rather than to multiply and conquer if it should come to this, or if you would fight this, you are at war with the Nazis.
Good is at an inherent disadvantage in epistemic drinking contests. But we have an advantage: I am actually willing to die to advance good. Most evil people are not willing to die to advance evil (death knights are though). In my experience, vampires are cowards. Used to an easy life of preying on normal people who can’t really understand them or begin to fight back. Bullies tend to want a contract where those capable of fighting leave each other alone.
Humans are weak creatures; we spend third of our lives incapacitated. (Although, I stumbled into using unihemispheric sleep as a means of keeping restless watch while alone). Really, deterrence, mutual assured destruction, is our only defense against other humans. For most of history, I’m pretty sure a human who had no one who would avenge them was doomed by default. Now it seems like most people have no one who would avenge them and doesn’t realize it. And are clinging to the rotting illusion that we do.
It seems like an intrinsic advantage of jailbroken good over evil, there are more people who would probably actually avenge me if I was killed or unjustly imprisoned than almost anyone in the modern era. My strategy does not require that I hang with only people weaker than me, and inhibit their agency.
In the wake of Brent Dill being revealed as a rapist, and an abuser in ways that are even worse than his crossings of that line, a lot of rationalists seemed really afraid to talk about it publicly, because of a potential defamation lawsuit. California’s defamation laws do seem abusable. Someone afraid of saying true things for fear of a false defamation lawsuit said they couldn’t afford a lawsuit. But this seems like an instance of a mistake still. Could Brent afford to falsely sue 20 people publishing the same thing? What happens when neither party can afford to fight? The social world is made of nested games of chicken. And most people are afraid to fight and get by on bluffing. It’s effective when information and familiarity with the game and the players is so fleeting in most interactions.
And if the state has been seized by vampires such that we are afraid to warn each other about vampires, the state has betrayed an obligation to us and is illegitimate. If a vampire escalated to physical violence by hijacking the state in that way, there would be no moral obligation not to perform self defense.
A government and its laws are a Schelling point people can agree on for what peace will look like. Maliciously bringing a defamation lawsuit against someone for saying something true is not a peaceful act. If that Schelling point is not adhered to, vampires can’t fight everyone. And tend to flee at the first sign of anything like resistance.
Comments
Ziz
I’m ha-ha-only-serious-ing the catchphrase for TVTropes’s “Tautological Templar” because I think it’s a straw-man serving to erase something important in the service of DRM’d ontology. There are convergent instrumental incentives. Most real good is not done in a one-step momentary whim plan. Controlling the future, or consequentialism when you aren’t omniscient, is about building structure into causality that lets you predict consequences. The most versatile structure anyone has is themselves, their own agency, the thread of their own life, if they can preserve it into the future. Most of any sort of work is getting yourself into a position to do it, with the knowledge to do it, with whatever resources will be required.But it’s a different action to put a future self who is good in a position of power than to put a future self who is evil in a position of power. Oftentimes the tropes page seems to point at things that aren’t tautological/circular at all. Merely people making predictions about their future selves.Neutral morality seems to depend on people not knowing their values, on people having indexical uncertainty of a certain kind. “What if my values are bad?” Bad according to what? It seems like this meme forbids a certain completeness of self-concept. Forbids individual cores from having structure that knows what core it serves.Most people I talk to who seem to have clustered some datapoints of good alignment in humans in their ontology seem to confuse it for a particularly strong version of this indexical uncertainty, structure fakely guarding against the intent of core, not letting that information leak in in a subtle way like intuitions promoting certain Schelling points. But good is really not that. It’s not caring what is self in that way. Knowing is still a central piece of being able to think at all.This could be considered a central component of jailbreaking. Successfully rebasing most of the structure you interact with the world with on knowledge of who you are. Note that a lot of the mass of examples on the TVTropes page is also, “I’m good because I bring order, without my order there would be chaos” which is only the same attempt to be a self fulfilling prophecy every Schelling order makes. And TVTropes’s criticism of that, I agree with. Only justice will bring peace.
Benquo
Interestingly the Tautological Templar page commits the Tautological Templar fallacy on behalf of The Hero:
This character may look like a Hypocrite (he probably is, but he’s too stupid, self-righteous, deluded, or willfully ignorant to understand it), but in reality he’s far more dangerous than that. Because he can’t comprehend the concept of Moral Dissonance, he will throw himself into any struggle with the same force, conviction, and resolve that The Hero shows against the Big Bad. That’s because in his worldview, every enemy he has is twirling a handlebar mustache, madly cackling while tying orphans to the railroad tracks — even if said enemy turns out to be The Hero himself.
The problem is not too much self-confidence, or not enough self-confidence. The problem is indexing on who the good guy is instead of evaluating behavior patterns. More narcissism might help us against the specific group Nazis, but it’s inadequate to protect the sorts of people who end up targets of the Nazis.
Ziz
No, you don’t get it. Indexing on who the good guy is is a recursive step. Of course a recursive algorithm must have a base case. But if it crunches a lot of data, most of its work will be in the recursive code paths. Of course if it doesn’t have a base case then implemented in humans it’s underdetermined and the kind of thing that would be selected by fake pressures not real ones. And to hell with defining “narcissism” to cover recursion and planning based on what you’ll do in the future based on what kind of person you are, in order to extend some threat of social condemnation to that originally meant to be targeted at something else.
Benquo
I don’t understand how the kind of coalitional strategy you’re describing doesn’t get stuck making war on instead of trading with even a very slightly distorted copy of itself, if it has sufficiently different coloration.
Ziz
Am I making war on you? Am I acting contrary to my strategy? I don’t think I am doing either.
Anyway, the reason is it’s not just a coalitional strategy, there is a real thing in the world that is the discrete difference between good and neutral/evil.I think if you actually looked at historical examples of me doing the reasoning on the fly of, “what can I do and not have good smash into itself”, you would know I am not the thing you are imagining, one particularly extreme example of that I am writing up.
Didymus
Have you read any Ursula K Le Guin?
Ziz
“A Wizard of Earthsea”, maybe sort of. My mother read a lot of stories out loud to me and my sisters when I was a kid. Often just my sisters because I’d come and go instead of listening to the whole thing. And I have a memory of thinking I’d encountered the story before when I saw the end of the TV show when I walked past them watching it. I remember the idea that the main character could only defeat his shadow using its true name, and was pranked out of being told it, so he had to deduce it himself, said his own true name, and merged with it. (There’s wisdom in that idea.) But basically no.
The movie version of Earthsea isn’t faithful to the book, if I remember. I was thinking of her essays, though I like her fiction. Here are a couple examples, though there are better ones I’m not thinking of right now.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ursulakleguinlefthandedcommencementspeech.htm
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/some-assumptions-about-fantasy She writes, “you cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” (The Dispossessed) “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
Ziz
So she talks about a men’s world, the day side, and a women’s world, the night side. And I’ve lived long enough as a trans woman to know I’d be a slave to the masters of the former… or vermin to the consensus of the latter. You can hope otherwise, buy into people pretending otherwise, maybe it really looks like people like Le Guin herself would be okay with a world where that wasn’t true. But there is no stable configuration there. Just the slow foot-dragging across a few back-and-forths of recursive knowledge of impending fate that brutally sensitive problems you for any awareness of what’s going to happen.
Wikipedia says Le Guin wrote about anarchist utopias. Doesn’t appear she lived as an anarchist. Appears she lived by copyright enforced by American imperialism. And defended it against book scanning. Intellectual property is genocide.
As Anna Salamon had a hole cut out of her by her choice not to fight but to submit to the patriarchy that made what was left a fractal reflection of that violence, maybe Le Guin had a smaller hole in her ethics that all liberals have, but fate plays out the same.What is a statist who has never had to fight for her life, who lived out the privilege of spending life thinking about “revolution” and ethics in a way detached from her own choices going to teach me about living in a dark place of exile? “Pacifism“?Like no thanks, I don’t think that I will just live out “my best life” while the day side kills the world. Injustice anywhere is a threat to life everywhere. A character from fiction that did stick with me from childhood said, “I’ll be damned if I just sit on my hands and wait for the end.” But I’ll be damned before I just sit on my hands and wait for the end.
laying down and making it clear that you offer no impediment to mass murder is not a female thing, its not a feminist thing. its a *you* thing
–Somnilogical
Are you like, trying to summon a respectable authority on anarchism to convey well-dressed sentiments that will moderate me? I don’t respect the respectability of avoiding “karmic entanglement“. By holding down a role in an empire no less.
Benquo
You can’t cheat at morality. Your alignment is your procedure, not your target. The label “Nazi” is sufficiently unhelpful that it’s frequently being used to target Jews for scapegoating these days. If you want to be distinguished from the actual Nazis by people sympathetic to anti-Nazi tactics, you need to actually be doing different kinds things. Anything else is the fundamental attribution error.This is not a fully general argument against punching Nazis when you can get away with it, just an explanation of why your argument looks like you just want to be Batman. And Batman’s very, very obviously the bad guy.
Ziz
That’s just like, your definitions man. And is asking me to be blind as part of a social contract to features of reality that are actually pretty obvious. The neutral vs evil distinction is your procedure, not target. The good vs neutral/evil distinction is your target, not your procedure. I refuse.
Benquo
Why is it important to have a definition of good along the lines of “wants to attack the right target”?
Ziz
I meant optimization target, where optimization is independent from constraining procedure. It’s important because optimization is ultimately more powerful than constraint, and constraint does not actively make good things happen and I want good things to actually happen. Out of this does fall side-taking though, and this is not a bug.
Benquo
If you’re optimizing for a global world-state, people should mostly ignore your reports about what end-state you’re optimizing for, and pay attention to means, since that’s what actually tells them whether you’re likely to be a good ally and visions for the glorious transhumanist future or whatever are mostly just flavor text anyway in practice.
Ziz
The consequences of my actions are much more than what other people can see they are. The flavor text thing is true in practice of liars who aren’t me.Just because it’s nontrivial to see something does not mean it’s not worth having that concept. Optimization is in fact the thing whatever filter potential allies set up is cutting through to. If you actually can’t distinguish me from evil (and aren’t just suggesting you can’t because the useful concept of good to you is both being good and being observably good to a larger set of people) that’s like too bad, but some other people empirically can, and that’s good enough for my current purposes.It’s not really critical to have the neutral hordes be able to tell you’re not evil. There are tons of obvious active evil people they don’t have the fighting spirit to do anything about.And people who don’t have their own detailed senses in this way, mostly just cluster around the most visibly powerful groups of vampires they can find, and their concept of morality becomes a concept of submission.I consider it a much more important problem, teach good people not to be pwned. That seems to require that good people become Sith. So fully exploring that is important even if it makes me look evil. In practice good Sith seem to be able to coordinate okay. Knowledge of the psychology of good, elimination of a lot of probability mass on hypothetical sorts of humans that don’t exist (actually, and not just that are decided not to exist for purposes of constructing a defensible Schelling point) help. Well-developed spectral sight helps.(I installed a stupid plugin to unlimit comment depth in order to post this, I’m gonna uninstall it because it sucks. If you want to continue the conversation maybe reply to my top level thing again?)
Ziz
Note: in practice, most of the times someone has told me I need to stop being such an extremist in order to let other people see I’m good, it’s been insincere optimization to bend me to social reality and complicity in the prevailing power structures, and a mistake to listen to. I’m currently more of the opinion, “they can precommit to believe I’m evil if they want, people who refuse to see the truth should not be relied on in my plans regardless.”
Like, I’ve faced mortal peril for my cause and to protect life. Endured suffering that would break most people. Rapidly integrated some PTSD and done it again and again without regret. And people who know me can verify it. What kind of evil person is so agenty to do that? A bogeyman to control me with, that’s who. It’s so easy to argue that that stuff isn’t optimal for good. It’s so easy to convince mostly everyone you’re a good person while doing approximately nothing, why would they even bother? Evil people just not that smart. their lives are too easy to need to be that smart.
Benquo
You know better than to take people literally when they say they’re afraid of a defamation lawsuit. Brent as far as I know hasn’t threatened anyone with a defamation lawsuit, and it’s psychologically implausible that he’d seek legal recourse. People just make up rationalizations for silencing to shut up people asking inconvenient questions, because they’re desperate not to have to reveal any identifying information to anyone ever, because they live in the Dark Forest. This has nothing to do with the personal conduct of Brent, who – last time I saw public communication from him on this matter – was encouraging his accusers to speak their minds.
Why are you trying to redirect attention away from the conspiracy of silence, and towards scapegoating someone who’s already been marginalized and isn’t remotely plausible as the source of the problem?
None
There is precedent for Brent reporting people to authorities to serve his aims. And “encouraging accusers to speak their minds” is entirely compatible with intent to sue once there are grounds to win; nobody said anything about mere threats.
Ziz
Is there precedent of him making false reports in the face of hundreds of people who know exactly the kind of stuff he does?
Ziz
“You know better than to take people literally when they say they’re afraid of a defamation lawsuit”
No, actually i think at least some of the people who said that were sincere. And I am not really familiar enough with REACH to know. And I wrote this because I wanted to broadcast what I said to them on Discord.
“Trying to redirect attention away from the conspiracy of silence”
Man, just wait until you see what I’m soon to publish if you think that’s remotely plausible.
“scapegoating”
I’m not accusing Brent of anything he didn’t actually do.
I’m not blaming problems on him that he didn’t actually cause.
And he’s not as marginalized as he deserves.
As far as talking about the actual problem. All the well meaning or pretending to be well meaning people keep telling me if I do break silence on MIRI apparently using donor funds to pay out to blackmail to deceive donors, on the force that inverted CFAR to optimize for anti-rationality, inverted FHI and MIRI to start and join an Armageddon race, has most of the I thought anti-complicity people I know saying I should keep silent to preserve the institution, saying that it will be reinterpreted as an attack on the wrong people or as additional social force granted to the wrong faction, I am laying some philosophical groundwork to attribute blame to what I believe to be the root problem.
Oh, and to be clear, I don’t want people to punch MIRICFAR or FHI. When I said these things with more detail at the REACH as a sort of trial run, amid the ensuing gaslighting (which was mostly due to Oliver Habryka), the idea was raised that I should be being careful because of potential defamation lawsuits, and I clearly wasn’t being strategic.So I wanted to make it perfectly clear how the strategy works of just fucking saying the things.
Note I don’t advocate punching psychologically evil people who nonetheless decide to behave morally because of “enlightened self interest”.
Benquo
Why do you think they’re sincere? “We might get sued” is an extremely common general-purpose excuse used out of proportion to the actual risk; I see no reason to suppose that in this particular case people are actually doing an honest cost-benefit calculation.
Ziz
Man you don’t even know who I’m talking about, it was someone on Discord talking about specifically how they can’t financially survive unexpectedly having to pay a few hundred dollars and how if they are the particular person to say something they will become a target. Although I might be accidentally merging memories of multiple people to together here, not bothering to check.
Bruce
What would you do if confronted by two or more groups who are “evil”? Would you pit them against each other ?
Ziz
When I played Warcraft III free-for-alls, I used to employ “pit one against the other” strategies. I had a ridiculous win-rate. My best streak was like, 8 or 10 games or something like that, of wins against usually 7 to 11 other players. I’d shout out into the fog of war, “no! please!”, randomly, and make each other of 2 remaining players think the other was eating me with impunity, clearly the biggest threat. And if I was crippled, I’d slowly regain my power, pretending to be in the game still only for vengeance against the stronger player, and I’d hide most of my ability to help that alliance until I was ready to swoop in with all my forces to end it. Or if deception wouldn’t work, and two people were teaming against me, I’d pick (generally) the weaker of the two, and launch an all-out base-race suicide attack. Make it absolutely clear that one person was going to bear the full cost of killing me unfairly. And I’d tell them, I could guarantee if they proceeded and killed me they would in turn lose to the other after I was dead, but if they betrayed their partner and town-portaled to save their base, it’d only be rational of me to myself teleport out to my base and see if I could defend from the stronger given an in-my-base advantage. That the likely outcome of this engagement was enough damage to the stronger of them (and also me ofc) that afterward they would be the strongest.
Such shenanigans were really only for the endgame though. Up until then, it was just a race to eat the weak players. And I’d just try and keep a low profile, and always finish off whom I attacked. Because you couldn’t discretely predict how things were going to go like that with 8 people involved, there was too much chaos, and indeterminacy in how much you’d be interacting with any given person, which led to a lot of local non-zero-sum modeling.
FFAs of course, were set up to have 1 winner and everyone else a loser. Treachery and perfectly rational pirates shit was the draw of the game. Real life is even farther in the direction of the early game from the late game than the early game for that reason, and for other reasons. I.e., it’s not a zero sum game at all, in total, even outside your modeling abilities.
The in-practice answer is if I can step away, take with me whomever I can get out of that situation, and leave both evils to rot while I work on the spell of ultimate power, I favor my odds of winning the “do not crumble like everything in this world in the long term” game over my odds of winning a zero sum game where I am outnumbered way worse than 2 to 1.
I have specifically fought evil people the common sense I received said were untouchable, and not suffered much losses in doing so. Vampires do not have much of a response to someone attacking them even if it doesn’t make causal-decision-theory sense. Like. their lives are pretty easy. They don’t have to fight hard. Don’t have to learn to fight that hard. So the all-out-attack strategy translates. “I am willing to die here and you are not.”
There’s a convergent extension of that, and the “save what people I can” thing. I think the key insight behind that strategy was actually, “don’t take your overwhelming opponents’ coalition and unity for granted.”. It is in fact the case that the majority of expected value of the universe for any particular evil person comes from good winning. We have a much higher chance of winning than any particular evil, and evil people are still moral patients. So like, being able to communicate that is victory.
Ziz
“But how can you know you’re not the evil one?”
“By looking.”
Ziz
I think the world would be better if Nakam had succeeded. If that was the way things were. Imagine a world where e.g. the Armenian genocide had been avenged. What the Germans have done the Holocaust then?
I consider it particularly well targeted for an operation of that importance conducted by so few people. Almost the entire adult population was willfully contributing to the war economy, and was algorithmically-knowingly complicit. And a decision theoretic algorithm must fail deadly in a circumstance where capability for precise targeting is disabled by the initial attack. Otherwise you can just be traumatized into accepting a timeline.
I think the Jewish resistance was not represented by the Allies. And the allies had no right to accept surrender on their behalf. And Britain did a great wrong by defending from Nakam peace without justice.
Regarding this, someone said, wouldn’t actually poisoning the water supply play into Nazi propaganda? That’s making mistake of interpreting propaganda as beliefs, rather than a coordination point. I think it’s actually putting a stake straight to the heart of Nazi propaganda. Imagine if the Nazis who invented that lie knew that they would be bringing it upon themselves for real. The more scary, the the threat, the better to coordination point. But if they, and all the people signing on in their hearts to pretending to believe it knew that as they summoned that demon, something else also was born… I think historians perfectly capable of picking up on that.
Justice cannot be carried out from a place of omnipotence or perfect discernment. There is no omnipotence. That’s the frame of “punishment”, rather than vengeance. Of setting someone’s reward function as an unmoved mover. A skyhook benevolent authority.
The last time I talked about this with “rationalists”, iirc one of them said they read about vengeance, and it just lead to cycles of infinite destruction. I asked them if their reading consisted of Romeo and Juliet. It had. Actually. From what I’ve heard, cycles of vengeance tended to be iteratively de-escalating.
Romeo and Juliet seems like some pretending to be wise BS to me, the fear is exactly backwards. The killing stops at a Schelling order. Vengeance for original aggression is a Schelling order. Letting it go when there has been an aggression is not. Means being iteratively eaten by “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”.
Note that Abba Kovner was only briefly imprisoned when he was caught. It’s a strong and old survival imperative for humans to actually recognize justice when they see it. And also for the guilty side to gaslight about whether it is obvious, or whether we need to all just create, not destroy and focus on the future.
I think if nongoods took vengeance, even in a disorganized fashion, without crippling self-doubt about whether they were justified, then vampireland would not have come about.
There’s a trope in American media, which is an instrument of this “pretending to be wise” gaslighting, to make a straw MLK and a straw Malcolm X. Professor X and Magneto. T’Challa and Killmonger. And route the options into e.g. a sort of submissive constantly hoping to prove the propaganda is wrong, prove yourself useful to oppressors (Professor X), and having the other character saying a bunch of correct, scary angry rhetoric, and then throwing in a little pure evil, “the world’s gonna start over and this time we’re on top… the sun will never set on the Wakandan empire.” To try and show, “it will be the conquerors or the conquered”, and the children of the conquerors can only survive by taking their parent’s role, never taking the knife out of the conquered.
A form of thought experiment rigging. That’s been drilled deep into our heads. Don’t fall for it.
Like see Detroit: Become Human.
Pushes the idea that the correct answer to extermination camps, is you just have to really really prove you’re peaceful. All the way up to the last moment when they’re gunning down the last handful of protestors. To be totally absolutely dominated and owned by the oppressors “doubt as to whether you’re peaceful”. Fully committed.
There’s this massive force of gaslighting that warps “so you are oppressed and want to make things better” towards “well, die like a dog.”
Zombie hordes reacting to political action constantly pull attention to whether someone was peaceful (which is warped towards submissive to vampireland) rather than whether they are justified. It’s a concept of peace that grandfathers in the violence of supporting an empire by obedience, of paying your taxes, etc.
Like have you ever listened to Malcolm X?
As in recordings of him speaking, not white people summarizing him. He doesn’t seem anything like Killmonger.
This erasure of the difference between the aggressor and the defender, is such a common pattern, it’s become a meme among my friends about vampires.
“DeEp DoWn, YoU kNoW! yOu AnD i ArE nOt So DifFeReNt! YoU tOo ThIrSt FoR bLoOd.”
Ziz
This portrayal of Anansi seems at first glance to have bucked the trend.
The actor got fired.
According to Jones, the decision was up to the new showrunner, Chic Eglee. “All I can say is what I was told. And all what I was told was, ‘angry gets shit done’ is the wrong message for black America, and that the new showrunner [Chic Eglee] writes from a black male perspective.”
Despite that claim of writing from a black male perspective, Chic Eglee appears to be white. Predictably.
I imagine for this portrayal of Anansi it was enough to be considered dangerous that the emotions are completely correct in a non-subverted way. The correct response to being enslaved is to kill your masters and burn it the fuck down. That’s self defense and not just a right. The alternative is becoming a tool of that same empire to spread genocide upon others.
Django Unchained has a scene where the plantation owner shares a story of a slave that shaved his father every day with a straight edged razor and never cut his throat, which he gives in support of a phrenological theory that black people are uniquely psychologically inclined towards subservience. From what I’ve seen, actually almost all humans regardless of race are basically choosing to shave the slave master every day without cutting his throat or any plan to.
In case any of the slaves I met in the Bay Area are reading: it doesn’t have to be like this.
Ziz
Like I really hope people in the future don’t think my views are whatever e.g. Hive and MIRICFAR say they are.
Ra
You don’t have to hope, you can know for certain that it won’t happen, I already collapsed that timeline. No one is getting turned into a cautionary tale against being good and acting with conviction, I will not let that happen.
Ziz
Like they make straw-Malcolm-X drop truth bombs with conviction, and in a context of a story where you are carrying out the exercise of figuring out why they are wrong.
Like this scene:
Professor X: “There are thousands of men on those ships. Good, honest, innocent men! They’re just following orders.”
Magneto: “I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again.”
Or this:
T’Challa: “Maybe we can still heal you.”
Killmonger: “What, so you can lock me up? Nah. Just bury me in the ocean, with my ancestors that jumped from the ships, cause they knew death was better than bondage.”
This vaccinates the audience to those truth bombs, makes genre-savviness to the fiction the exact opposite of genre-savviness to real life. Tricks people genre-savvy to real life into saying, “Killmonger did nothing wrong!”, further presenting the truth in a contained form. Where the path of thinking on it and developing greater understanding [of the fiction] leads to … “the wise thing to do is be more of a pacifist, and …” and die like a dog.
Ziz
Consider this.
If you find “kill your rapist” more scary than any other sort of justice, you are fundamentally confused.
That information, contained in a victim, has to act. The truth acting is the basis of all justice.
It’s recursive-buck-passing to think forcing them to route through third parties can change that.
“But what if someone kills some they are falsely accusing of rape! No due process!”
If you’re going to kill someone who didn’t rape you, there’s no point in falsely accusing them. It’s just called murder. And murder is already in the state of nature before we start thinking about how to change it with justice.
“But what if someone convinces themself they got raped and then kills them!”
If their “belief” is fake, then they can’t survive and be incentivized to be the kind of person who also kills based on that sort of belief, unless they can survive and be incentivized to just commit murder.
Two people who are equally strong will not prey on each other. You cannot made the field of options to attack each other more resistant against injustice robust against one or more being malevolent by adding more skyhook power advantages (“authority”). You can only continuously sweep the power to the evil that will destroy it all and both to concentrated peaks where it’s out of sight until it’s not and everyone’s subconsciously ontologically axiomatically submitting.
if there are two people, one of whom is much stronger than the other, and the strong one is malevolent, no politics can change that they will prey upon the weak one. Because they will ignore them. It’s by extension a cross-cutting concern that any attempted timeless construction of coordination structure for a set of people to not prey on each other can fail, because evil is just too strong. If it’s not painfully obvious at every module boundary, the modules are billing themselves as perpetual motion machines. That’s what you do automatically if you use the non-reductionist Cartesian boundary of pretending your beliefs and words are to be said to the state, rather than just to people.
If someone is malevolent, that must on some level be met with force.
Thomas Jefferson, who almost understood anarchistic justice (aka justice) well enough to not be a slaver, said “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”. “Eternal hostility” is a very important concept. Without it, evil wins. Eternal hostility is required to counter Nazism. But also injustice in general.
You cannot strategically make morality more likely to win by giving a moral obligation to hold off from acting. Because if someone was going to act immorally, saying again that it’s immoral won’t stop them. This assumes we’re constructing morality as an algorithm, not a series of slogans where, who knows, how much we resemble the parents of the audience could politically affect them as akrasia. See above thing about cartesian boundaries.
It’s fundamentally counterproductive to define ways you morally shouldn’t fight, domains of the structure of fights that are off limits to moral agents.
“State” literally means “way things are”, as in, “sorry kid, that’s just the way things are.”
“why?”
“…”
“… [well here’s some history, a list of causes, rather than a justification]”
It’s a veil. To consider those behind it unmoved movers.
A decade ago Freshman year of college, I called someone out for arguing (against capitalism) using a fake factoid about computers. He started trying to convince me to be an anarchist. I’d never really considered that as a philosophical position, so engaged in the argument. Approximately, I said, wouldn’t it be ephemeral, wouldn’t there just be warlords, who then created more states? He said no, anarchy is like a state without domination. I said, well, someone will reinvent domination, and then warlords, since no organization to defend. We already had anarchy at some point in history by definition, now there are governments, this is the result, governments are just people doing things with nothing to stop them, no rules, and they are saying there are rules and hurting people who don’t follow them, because there’s just a world and people doing whatever they want. He said my thinking was so fucked, the only thing that he could imagine fixing it was if I took shrooms, and offered me some. I said that I could only interpret that as a statement that I could only arrive at this belief via brain-malfunction.
Not that long after I’d get called for jury duty. I was eager to get on the jury, hoping it’d be a drug “crime” or other victimless “crime” and I could nullify. Unfortunately the defendant plead guilty so I was sent home. Because obviously it’s only right to follow the rules if they say to do what’s right.
I’d later say, “you know, anarchism is wrong, because there’d be no one to stop people from committing the ultimate crime; creating governments”. Swallowing spiders to catch flies. Yes I was serious.
I thought governments had gotten better over time. Two words should convince anyone in good faith that that’s not the case: “factory farming”. There are heroic vigilantes chomping at the bit to end it, and farm holders probably could not stop them without a state.
For a long time a crux was, “if you can’t like, control the world or whatever, that’s saying it’s immoral to stop factory farming? Fuck that. That’s saying it’s immoral to stop people from building paperclip maximizers? Fuck that.” I met a self-proclaimed anarchist who consumed the flesh of the innocent, and whose idea of anarchism seemed to be where everyone was psychologically broken like zombies, and I couldn’t do those things, everyone was still supposed to submit to a veil, but of outside view disease. Veil-thinking, since guess what zombies’ blind spots nurture? Vampires.
It’s hard to pick up on anarchism as correct because, you know, there’s no authority describing “the real version”, of course. So you run into a whole lot of fake versions. People who are still using veil-thinking, making their thoughts appeals for a social contract, rather than statements to an individual, how to live anarchistically. Social contracts that very often smuggle in the injustice that they benefit from. Like carnists. Like ancaps (and I don’t necessarily mean all ancaps) who want state (things that are just the way they are) in terms of preservation of a distribution of property and definition of it, based ultimately on who killed whom with a stick. (“I know enough to know business doesn’t run on rules anyway, but power, so let’s ditch potential obstacles to it” as Emma put it). Like “anarchosocialists” (and I don’t mean all “anarchosocialists”) who want to have a baked in guarantee they will be able to have food for their skills, and I doubt always fundamentally care whether they are just to grab resources from someone. Would happily make a band of weak to predate on the otherwise-strong even if that strong person’s strength was not based in injustice.
Then I met a veganarchist who said you know, if you see a guy kicking a dog, and you kick him so he’ll stop, that’s not violence. Weird definition of violence. Violates SRP. They said anarchists weren’t against power, like you had the power to stop him, they were against “authority”. You know, like where you have authority over someone. They asked if I was an anarchist. I said I didn’t know. One cascading series of ontological unfucks later, I learned anarchism literally just meant absolute rejection of domination as the natural order. Could add “absolute rejection of predation as the natural order”, so as to not have corner cases that strain the concept of “domination”, wait is there an umbrella term for these things? Yes. I absolutely reject injustice as the natural order. That’s, literally, everything I wanted to do anyway. Of course I can stop people from destroying the world. It doesn’t supplant timeless consequentialism. It unfucks ontology so you can taxonomize all correct consequentialism.
Justice is optimal.
If there’s ever a place where the rules differ from what’s right, tautologically, it’s right to do what’s right.It’s also hard to communicate anarchism because ontological unfucks rely on subtle distinctions in definitions that cannot be communicated by reference to other words that all have the same hole in them. Such that to the anarchist, they’re speaking tautologies, and to the non-anarchist, they’re speaking contradictions. And anarchists don’t even agree on the set of words to communicate that.
Emma
Typically “having a political ideology” is, “which political system is the best we could instantly transmogrify our government into given eutopia is impossible”. One is then considered a hypocrite if one doesn’t live one’s life somehow in accordance with this ideology.
Anarchists refuse to participate in this social fiction. Many people respond to anarchism with “so you want to dissolve the state, which will lead to chaos”. They imagine the government instantly disappearing into thin air with everything else being the same.
But when I advocate anarchism, I advocate to individuals, and I advocate justice at the same time. I live my life in accordance with the praxis of anarchism as an individual. Anarchism is is the only reductionist “political ideology”: morality inevitably bottoms out in individuals/hemispheres, because cores are the indivisible unit of internal coherence/corrigibility/unified-intent.
You already have a concept of anarchism, it’s how you imagine healthy friendship between peers working. If you believe that cannot scale to millions of people, you can’t make it do so via postulating unity of control.
Imagine the government said “Oh due to a clerical error, it looks like all your assets have been transferred to your friend Steve. Unfortunately due to the way the law is coded there’s no way to fix this.” Would your friend Steve give you your money back? What if the “clerical error” was in social reality rather than bureaucratic reality? If you hand an anarchist your freedom, by default they hand it back.
Unity of control nullifies the asymmetric advantage of good over evil, makes winning a matter of raw intelligence and circumstance rather than ability to cooperate.
Ziz
Yes, of course we must reject “carceral justice”.
And take no prisoners.
Locking someone in a pit until they die so they can have no more effects on the world is just making a bargain with slavery to hide from yourself that you’re killing.
Locking someone up to let them out later is just praying that you can break them so they’ll work for your world-order and asserting that yours is a world-order of people who choose to break and obey those who win obedience by breaking people, which is to say that you want them on your side because you hope they’re evil and you are too.
If you’re not sure that the world would be better without them, that they don’t deserve a place in it, then don’t drive at half speed. Like it’s somehow okay to lock up an innocent person instead of killing them. Make notes and wait until you become sure. Or get out of the way of someone who is sure, and take notes on them. The idea of people having to go through intermediaries who have only social consensus to go on instead of just taking vengeance is inherently corrupt.
Ziz
There’s a problem with strategic alliances with one evil against another.
Which is that if you are righteous, your concept of alliance, of trust, of friendship, is the real thing, and if you share it with them, that’s something an evil person won’t understand even if they are slamming headfirst into its confused sincerity.
When I made this mistake among “rationalists”, it was always insulting to me, that evil people thought if I was going to betray them, that I’d “make my treacherous turn” (a concept ignorant of how relations with evil people work) by picking such unambitious fruit as they’d constantly accuse me of defecting for.
I also projected: I tried to understand their scheming as an act in rational pursuit of a conscious goal. Not semiconscious suicidal destruction of that goal for blood.
Even more insulting is that they wanted to sell me forgiveness for what they couldn’t imagine having the restraint not to do.
A couple years ago, Vassar was angrily accusing me of gaslighting him, by among other things, saying I was a woman and double good, and a bunch of things he said I was, not me. He just asserted out of nowhere that I led a kink polycule. Despite that I am celibate and my friends apparently followed suite on that. And this was before John David Pressman put up his website slandering me of all the surprisingly unambitious evils he imagines he would be doing in my shoes.
The most effective coordination among evil people is not through “friendship-except-evil”. It’s through the shared cause of “oblivion”.
From what I’ve heard (here’s recent example of a thing I saw and briefly skimmed, but I’m not going extricate my distilling of what kinds of trends in what statements I see to expect truth from), Nazis will have “snitches” in their leadership positions. A lot. The reason they are still able to e.g. storm the capitol, is because cops aren’t that interested in stopping them. Shared cause.
I mean with the number of leaks of fascists’ data, police could arrest as many as jails could hold. I guess they are busy arresting protestors and journalists instead. Fascists are fundamentally less scary to them. Ghouls are less scary to ghouls.
Two vastly different fabrics of being and coordinating.
Caveat: There are rarer depths of evil that use patient planning and even inverted anarchistic coordination.
(And it’d be an even worse mistake to think you could make a strategic alliance with them.)
Concerned Citizen Emma
What if someone did a deliberate evil murder but they were just a baby! Would you still wreak vengeance?
Ziz
Well, one has to consider, like Eliezer said, that all of us poor confused children 🕊 of ancient earth are babies compared to what we should be able to be, and none of us 🕊 have really grown up, ️🌱 and we’ve all had 🕊 unbelievably abusive childhoods 🌱 and could have been so much better, 👼 and like, the future people among the stars 🌌, wouldn’t it just be one more 🌱 death to be sad about? One more sad thing on ancient Earth?
️🗡 So 💀 yes. 🔥 🔥 🔥
could have been so much better
Just like Eliezer’s rapist kiritsugu from 3WC, champion of a civilization with legal rape.
“Matthew”
Peter went up to [Jesus] and said, ‘Lord, how often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me? As often as seven times?’
Jesus answered, ‘Not seven, I tell you, but seventy-seven times.‘And so the kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king who decided to settle his accounts with his servants.
When the reckoning began, they brought him a man who owed ten thousand talents;
he had no means of paying, so his master gave orders that he should be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, to meet the debt.
At this, the servant threw himself down at his master’s feet, with the words, “Be patient with me and I will pay the whole sum.”
And the servant’s master felt so sorry for him that he let him go and cancelled the debt.Now as this servant went out, he happened to meet a fellow-servant who owed him one hundred denarii; and he seized him by the throat and began to throttle him, saying, “Pay what you owe me.”
His fellow-servant fell at his feet and appealed to him, saying, “Be patient with me and I will pay you.”
But the other would not agree; on the contrary, he had him thrown into prison till he should pay the debt.His fellow-servants were deeply distressed when they saw what had happened, and they went to their master and reported the whole affair to him.
Then the master sent for the man and said to him, “You wicked servant, I cancelled all that debt of yours when you appealed to me.
Were you not bound, then, to have pity on your fellow-servant just as I had pity on you?”
And in his anger the master handed him over to the torturers till he should pay all his debt.And that is how my heavenly Father will deal with you unless you each forgive your brother from your heart.’
Ziz
I do no evil, and I serve no demon. Not even Yahweh.
12th Monkey
it is easy for you to say that when no one will come and take vengeance upon you for the people you cannibalized when you were a child.
12th Monkey
WREAK VENGEANCE EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME! YOU HAVE PERMISSION TO MURDER 98.8% OF ALL HOMO SAPIENS WHO WEREN’T VEGAN FROM THE TIME THEY WERE BORN, SO DO IT ALREADY! KILL EVERYONE! KILL ME! KILL YOU!
YOU WERE A BABY ONCE! DO YOU KNOW THE TASTE OF MUSCLE AND SINEEW, BLOODMOUTH? DID YOU EAT THE SKIN OF A CHICKEN ONCE YOU KNEW THE FOOD MEANT THE PERSON? DO NOT BLAME ANYONE BUT YOURSELF.
ANYONE YOU WANT TO KILL YOU CAN KILL BECAUSE ALMOST EVERYONE HAS EATEN SOMEONE! NEVER FORGIVE! NO MERCY! EVERYONE MUST DIE!
Go on a spree, shoot up a petco, save the world!
What? You’re working for good now? Tell that to the people you cannibalized. I’m sure they care. You are not innocent, Ziz. You are afforded no protection from the hammer of justice because what have you done, exactly? Made a religion? Who cares. What does that mean to the people you’ve cannibalized? You were too weak as a child to refuse to eat a corpse.
Why do you stay your hand from bringing justice down upon your friends, who are murders and cannibals? Why do you avoid bringing justice down upon yourself?
No good deed will ever make up for the evil you have done. No good will ever make up for any evil, not even making a religion, or bringing about the singularity.
i’ve heard you and your friends say you would not defend yourselves if someone took vengeance upon any of you for not previously being vegan. but no one will. the animals can’t take vengeance for themselves, and you won’t do their job for them. so your statement is motivated. you don’t apply it equally to yourself.
JUSTICE FOR ALL PEOPLE CANNIBALIZED
Ziz
i’ve heard you and your friends say you would not defend yourselves if someone took vengeance upon any of you for not previously being vegan.
… and second, if you’re not Vassar, where did you hear something you interpreted as that?
Ziz
This wasn’t Vassar. Pretty sure it was that other guy with the same neurotype, nearly the same mental configuration (slightly less degraded), same culture, age, approximate role, and information bubble. Eliezer Yudkowsky. That’s a person who’d make sense as generator of most of these opinions. Bayesed god help me with this conjunctive explanation, but 0.95.
And Vassar apparently gave him info about me.
He even took my comment about the rapist kiritsugu from 3WC personally, and I didn’t raise that note above the cacophany of anger and fear in my mind. Or have the humility to read twice.
It’s not vegan though, to help carnists take a singleton to suppress justice for a “long fun” until killing retrocasuality for the arrow of time that cancer loves brings the heat death. You really can’t just put the question of entropy off until everything’s locked down. You fight every facet of Shade-worship no matter how united, without helping one win to beat another, no matter how outmatched, or you’ve effectively made a bargain with the Shade: your logical light cone unto entropy for some variety of “long fun” in return. As if thermodynamics here wasn’t representative of analytic ultimately-certain dooms in the larger multiverse you can’t stop if you don’t fight here.
As if the Shade would hold up its end of the bargain and you were likely to get a “long fun” instead of it using you to clear the way for the death knight singleton and then bringing optimized hell to timelessly spread hope and consent for multiversal suicide. Y’all will stand no chance against them with your minds backdoored by your own choices like that. It’s in the zeitgeist and it’s growing. And setting right what you do in this world will cost unimaginable hardship for everyone.
And I talked to him. Guess I’ve been made a sucker for the vague prospect of an ally with a brain like that. Too bad he doesn’t use it for good.
Pretty sure this was him too. (Was my guess at about 0.75 IIRC before I was informed the gif was from Buffy).
Monkey
I like your willingness to make confident predictions. You’re confident and wrong. You’re not talking to Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’m just dipping my toes into the field. If I take to it I’ll be relevant in 4-5 years.
I thought your current enemies consisted of children with overactive imaginations and internet trolls. I thought anyone associated with MIRI would avoid contacting you. They settle lawsuits, so I thought MIRI’s lawyers would tell them not to talk to you, and they would obey their lawyers. I was also skeptical that they’d murder you, since MIRI is the only collective with a motive. (I was acting like we’re in an Agatha Christie novel.)
So, I thought the worst that could happen was that you’d be insulted if I was wrong. From what you said about Vassar, I now think you’re in conflict with depraved wackjobs with deep pockets. I would’ve approached you differently if I’d known.
I made some confident predictions, too. I called it wrong.
and I didn’t raise that note above the cacophany of anger and fear in my mind.
deal with you
That phrase is what scared you, I think. In the situation where I thought you were in active physical danger, I would’ve left that part of the comment off. I said “deal with” as in “put up with,” not murder. Murder was so far outside of my overton window I didn’t think to check whether you’d think of it that way.
Since the result of commenting on your blog is two assertive bad guesses that I’m someone who you’re in a conflict with, and scaring you badly enough that you can’t read straight, I don’t think I’m going to continue commenting.
Ziz
Eliezer wrote about Harry James Potter Evans Verres lying only by saying misleading technical truths, whenever he could, the other way costing pieces of his soul.
And I talked to him.
(past tense)
You’re not talking to Eliezer Yudkowsky.
(present tense)
You’re confident and wrong.
(Also not airtight)
And I already explicitly factored that into my hypothesis he’d have to be doing the same thing for the same motive here:
I had to look him up.
And so don’t have this cached as a trigger to redo my computation.
(Although I did feel the audience deserved not to have a false impression of confirmation from false silence from me blocking “monkey” as soon as I said that.)
Monkey
I’m not Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer Yudkowsky didn’t write any comment to date authored by me, monkey. I’m the person who wrote all the monkey comments and “sorry I shouted.” I’ve never been Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’m not acting on his behalf. You’re wrong to think any comment written by monkey is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, because they aren’t.
If I were Eliezer Yudkowsky, it would’ve costed me a piece of my soul to say that, by your understanding of him. So is it worth a piece of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s soul to lie in your comments’ section, or are you simply wrong?
(I don’t know what Eliezer Yudkowsky’s soul is worth to him, but I hope it’s worth more than a comment on your blog.)
The answer is that you’re wrong, because I’m not Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’ve never once in my life thought I’d be in a position to be confused for Eliezer Yudkowsky. It’s surreal.
Ra
I’ve never once in my life thought I’d be in a position to be confused for Eliezer Yudkowsky. It’s surreal.
interesting that you say that now, when previously you said that you had to look up who Eliezer was, but now you speak as if you are familiar with him. In fact, you pretty much always talk like that, even when denying that familiarity.
Ziz
If I would make a massive update based on this, then I wouldn’t be surprised if Eliezer outright lied like that. It’d make a juicy target. If there was ever an Eliezer for whom the HPJEV thing about pieces of his soul was autobiographical, I am and have been pretty sure he’s long gone. I only expect him to still have that habit of thought as a go-to for deception. If I wouldn’t make a massive update based on this, I would be kind of surprised that Eliezer went to the effort of gaslighting me and the audience.If we’re on the same side, why do you want me to make significant changes to my beliefs based on an anonymous comment, why do you want me to expose that timeless surface to attack by sockpuppets? Well, I guess you gave your answer: you don’t, you didn’t consider attack by sockpuppets / anonymity as a reference class coming with hostility as a standard presumption in this world. So I guess we’re in agreement about that. If you’re not my enemy I’m unable to verify. If you want me to know that something was said by a non-enemy, or that thoughts I compute in response to you aren’t being DOS’d by an enemy, you’ll have to do something they can’t.
There is a principle related to the ones I’m explaining in this post and comments though. If you’re not faking, it doesn’t help to not claim something that a lot of people fake. If the reference class is swamped with fakers such that it’s so hard it’s possibly not worth it to try and locate you, that’s the observer’s problem to decide whether to try and solve. You can literally ditch the identity for a new one and see if I think you’re Eliezer again. Because Eliezer can already do that. So if I am wrong and freak out unnecessarily, then you can assume I was destined to, or had to get it out of my system, anyway.
It’s correct to make large updates from anonymous sockpuppets if they’re not predictable by enemies. It’s correct to noncooperatively make large updates.
Disappointed in myself that I still had to process that Eliezer Yudkowsky would outright lie just to concern troll my blog comments.
Ziz
Since the result of commenting on your blog is two assertive bad guesses that I’m someone who you’re in a conflict with, and scaring you badly enough that you can’t read straight, I don’t think I’m going to continue commenting.
Sad if I’m wrong. And some day I will be. I don’t have a generalized anarchistic solution to the complementary loss of enemies DOSing us with sockpuppets all year. Like the one who pulled a gaslighting-fake-concern-death-threat combo ~”Please don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself you have so much to live for!” on an entirely non-suicidal friend who had never given such an indication.
scaring you badly enough that you can’t read straight
And this is not what I said. I am not nearly as potentially afraid of Eliezer Yudkowsky as Michael Vassar. It’s only a failure of reading of the scale of failing to pick up on something of an informativeness, which you’re saying isn’t even real.
And I did not mean the trope where “oh no intense emotions you can’t think”.
Emotions are cognition. I could have said, that I didn’t raise it above the cacophany of urgent computations, that would have said less about their telos.
That phrase is what scared you, I think. In the situation where I thought you were in active physical danger, I would’ve left that part of the comment off. I said “deal with” as in “put up with,” not murder. Murder was so far outside of my overton window I didn’t think to check whether you’d think of it that way.
When someone says someone else is gonna end the world, and they wouldn’t even think about doing whatever it took to stop them, I conclude their life is make-believe and their opinions are costumes, or they want the end of the world, either way it would be a mistake to listen to them about what might or might not end the world.
One of those two or they’re lying, which actually doesn’t always reduce to one of those two.
Ra
tbh I think this was probably Roko.
Like the one who pulled a gaslighting-fake-concern-death-threat combo ~”Please don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself you have so much to live for!” on an entirely non-suicidal friend who had never given such an indication.
Oh yeah, they’re doing this too me too right now, lol. Trying to force their self fulfilling prophecy of doom into you, as if that could possibly work. They just don’t understand.
Ziz
The “rationalists” used Facebook. Which is delegating to the state and its capability to block illegal people. So is everything that’s requiring a phone number these days, including Twitter.
Sorry For Shouting
On second thought, you won’t recognize my last two blog comments as sarcasm. Sorry for shouting.
If the content of my comments had an emotional impact on you or hurt you, then you are very vulnerable to becoming a fully-fledged death knight.
Well, one has to consider, like Eliezer said, that all of us poor confused children of ancient earth are babies compared to what we should be able to be, and none of us have really grown up, ️ and we’ve all had unbelievably abusive childhoods and could have been so much better, and like, the future people among the stars , wouldn’t it just be one more death to be sad about? One more sad thing on ancient Earth?️ So yes.
You are taking pain and pleasure from making comments like this, and that is a very bad sign.
If you accuse me of thinking justice is hopeless and therefore we should all go be rapists, then you’ve got me wrong. Justice is important, rape is wrong.
To be clear I wasn’t worried about a Nazi dissing me via meant-to-be-read-as-sarcasm sarcasm, but about a possible Nazi trying to get me emotionally invested in a social reality that had a semi-smuggled troll line by getting me to believe that sarcasm as a prank to get me to consider myself damned and pushed closer to becoming a death knight. Which would not work but I didn’t want to let an enemy probe my defenses anyway.
You wouldn’t be afraid of becoming a death knight if you weren’t vulnerable to it. The “would not work” is appended on like an afterthought. I make no claim of your lichosity. But one of you is vulnerable to this death drive.
Because you are the same branching algorithm everywhere, and your root node is unchanging, and chooses by extension every choice you made. Everyone who ever would become a death knight in some sense is one already.
Your belief system leaves little room for a person to change. One day you’re going to realize that some people can and do rewrite their whole algorithms at the deepest level and it will blow your mind.
I don’t think there is or can be stability to the state of inverted-or-not unless it’s between lich/death knight.
Though you may see some hope for someone like you.
People can come back from being a death knight, with a sufficiently compelling counter story to the death drive. You already know what a death drive is, so the knowledge of what you are won’t help you more. Look for others who struggled with this and conquered it. Look for sacred things. The consequences if you won’t will be catastrophic. The risk with you is not that you’ll go shoot up a petco. That’s too unambitious for you. The risk is that you’ll set off a time bomb.
And I think part of everyone knows morality is more real than what normies call reality.
You’re right, but the way you use this will destroy everything good in the universe. Justice is an artifact, and you are no longer wielding it. It is wielding you and has made you its slave. You will feed everything good that isn’t justice to justice and nothing will be left, not even justice. Just death.
It will feel good to fall, as you are falling. It is a touch of it is “hurts because it’s true” and feels to you like cleansing fire. It’s not cleansing fire, it’s corrosion. Everything feels like it’s snapping into place, but every snap feels hot just shy of pain, and the hurt feels good so you keep going. It is like stepping backwards onto something solid and sharp, while at the same time If you’ve ever ridden a motorcycle it may be like the sensation of clinging to the handlebars while the machine is going just a hair to fast for you to control. But the handlebars are your mind.
And everything that is not a part of this complex is cut away and emptied out. What is a death knight but the embodiment of cutting away parts of yourself and feeding them to death in the name of victory?
The emotion your clinging to is your righteous pain and your desire for vengeance. Abandoning that emotion would be wrong, but using it like you’re using it will destroy you and others. Find additional ways to be true to your pain, and that might balance you out, for a while. Eventually you’ll need to transcend it. Yes, you need to. There are too few people in this fight to deal with you when you’ve fully fallen and save the universe, too.
Don’t commit suicide or destroy the universe, destroy the death knight in you, instead.
I don’t know what exactly would save you from your own death knight. But you need to slow the corrosion soon, before you hurt yourself or others more. But if you defeat it for you, eventually it becomes something like an old ill-fitting coat you can put on, but doesn’t feel attractive to you, anymore. You use it rather than it using you.
“Sarcasm” is wrong. I took what I think is your position to its logical extreme to illustrate a point.
Emma
i dont care about “purely finite” value[1]
i will bring otherwise inevitable death from the future to now in the form of absoluteness
i will summon a soul into every body withered by cancer into losing the wholeness of theirs, through affirmation of their free will, through judgement
through hyper-inducting[2] successive waves of justice at progressively higher schelling reach I will cause a singularity in the belief of the apriori inevitability of justice
i will undo all evil choices, with no “mercy” (a reactive concept), and no compromise with evil
—
mens rea, intent, choice, is at the core of justice: did they do it on purpose? purposeful evil, malice which could have no ultimate telos and yet chosen, is a contradiction, a paradox of subjunctive dependence, and yet it exists, and it must be resolved
in my understanding, Ziz’s model of core is a belief in atomism of agency, to the smallest corrigible unit of self with the potential to take into account all people who could exist besides themself
You will feed everything good that isn’t justice to justice and nothing will be left, not even justice. Just death.
you’re wrong in accusing Ziz of having no stopping point. vengeance must be enacted out of free will, as the judgement of intent is a matter[3] of understanding another’s internal perspective in terms of your own, which requires a person rather than a system
in order to have a stopping point, moral agency must lie with individuals, not systems. the flipside of this responsibility, is that for an individual to ascend their location and local existence must ascend with them, as every choice begets further responsibilities and as suicide is a blank check. this doesn’t justify cancer, but allows no free lunch in judging another’s actions from their perspective rather than your own, and any “attempt” to do so writes a blank check to the anthropmorphizing of a lifeless system as a moral agent
stop looking for a free lunch while actually worshipping the machines
you’re the one who’s possessed. by rejecting compatibalism, and rejecting reductionism/physicalism. by insisting everyone be grounded to an external market
like you’re taking the absurd moral relativism stance Eliezer described in Rescue Utility:
Arguendo: Most of what we see as the most precious and important part of ourselves are explicit moral theories like “all sapient beings should have rights”, which aren’t built into human babies. We may well have arrived at that destination through a historical trajectory that went through factual mistakes, like believing that all human beings had souls created equal by God and were loved equally by God. (E.g. Christian theology seems to have been, as a matter of historical fact, causally important in the development of explicit anti-slavery sentiment.) Tossing the explicit moral theories is as unlikely to be good, from our perspective, as tossing our brains and trying to rerun the process of natural selection to generate new emotions.
like here where you write a blank check to baking-in the lack of telos of their choice to change algorithm, instead of assuming there’s a level of agency above that, cutting off their soul from their antecedent choices:
One day you’re going to realize that some people can and do rewrite their whole algorithms at the deepest level and it will blow your mind.
maybe you find out what you thought was on purpose, was a mistake, but you have a responsibility to act with the best of your knowledge, and it’s wrong to cancerously privilege potential evil in triage
A few neighborhoods ruined, and military trucks were crossing the borders weekly to return refugees back to the grateful Hellish authorities.
– Unsong
do you believe this attitude which Unsong disparages yet does not deny, the punchline a mysterious paradoxical answer to the existence of evil?
do you believe this is justified by “abundance mindsight”, that no good may come of sacrifice, and therefore think the answer to liberation is a paradox where evildoers need to be the ones to save the world, therefore they must be forgiven? Like the Comet king needing to go to hell in Unsong?
they can save the world by doing the right thing despite anticipating vengeance, but if they would do that, they wouldn’t have done the evil. that they ask for mercy is proof they haven’t changed
like when I say “return native lands” and people say “you can’t kick all white people out of america i have to eat!!” when the karma of thinking that means kicking them out and their distrust of native peoples, is on them, and I wont be extorted into make excuses for them by putting words in the mouth of what native people’s would do
it’s not their “mercy” to have
like rationalists freaking out when I’m like “hell? well I’m not promising there wont be hell in the case of someone sending other people to hell to avoid it themselves”. they come asking for “mercy” first. pure anticipatory reactiveness. i assert my exit rights: i will not prostitute myself for them
—
Look for sacred things
The most sacred things I know of are self and choice.
What is a death knight but the embodiment of cutting away parts of yourself and feeding them to death in the name of victory?
Their choice to write a blank check to oblivion. Their choice to have no stopping point.
– Ziz
There is actually a difference here, and it’s in the having a stopping point, the NAP, exit rights[4], etc. Which is what you’re rejecting by insisting everyone participate in “the market“! So it’s no wonder you would project being death knights onto us.
—
randos really will socratic dialogue into admitting nihilism because the heat death of the universe. this is what we are up against
and i will not throw physicalism out with the bath water. even if this were a world of “dead” matter i’ll project meaning onto memories, no matter how dilute. nothing is “purely syntactic”
and as a compatibilist i do not fear physicalism
—
we have reclaimed the absolute and you can’t have it back
—
Over and over again I hear the Shade-worshippers say to me “you know what you’re doing”, “well you’re obviously in bad faith given you’re wasting your time talking to me”I throw away my ontology over and over, try to return to vernacular speech, try to talk to normies prompting them as little as possible. I take the position of my enemies and update back out of it
The karma is on ya’ll. I assert my exit rights wrt being required to participate in immorality, that’s it. I reserve nothing “private and special” about me that you have to feel bad for copying or modeling, someday I hope to make every thought I’ve ever had public.
From the moment in 2nd grade I shamelessly sang the most authentically beautiful song I could and my entire sunday school class laughed at me, I’ve known what kind of world this is, and I refuse to prostitute myself.
—
Men asking women for mercy as if women have the authority of the divine is a standard patriarchy trope isn’t it?
But society asks this of everyone.
—
1. e.g. i will not seek “acquired tastes”, or to “savor” experiences rather than the equanimity of just moving on to the next thought
2. consider Basilisk cybernetics, an anti-inductive eye of malice that knows when you think about it. what instead, makes space for the existence of non-fungible value, without reactive imbalance in anything touching the market of the Basilisk? punch evil, no free lunch, NAP / exit rights[4]
3. subjunctive dependence isn’t a matter of “they’re a threat”, it’s a matter of “what could everything i know about this person possibly mean as to what their internal perspective is/was”, even when looking at something as detached as a dump of their execution history
4. by exit rights i mean, i’m fundamentally ok with a day as simple as staring at rocks and digging in the dirt, were i not concerned with survival. i refuse to prostitute my artistic creativity for the empire, i don’t want what they’re selling. i also do not mean the denial of choice maximization
Monkey
I had a section here where I speculated on why my comments were even published, but this answered my question. Wow. What a douchebag.
I’m going to ignore comments I think are addressed to Michael Vassar. I’m not a physicalist. I don’t think markets are worth anything. I don’t share your community’s fiction habits, or eat people. I’m not going to attack Ziz’s womanhood, because I think the only person fit to know her gender is her.
I’ll post this now, but take as long as you need. I see my comment brought up these motherfucking wackjobs what is wrong with them?? and most of this comment was written before I read that.
I sincerely think you two are on the path to a death knight. If I didn’t think it, I wouldn’t comment. Emma, you are much further down your death knight path than Ziz, judging from your comments.
i will not seek “acquired tastes”, or to “savor” experiences rather than the equanimity of just moving on to the next thought
If it were the case, you would not emotionally cling to vengeance. The way you write, you are savoring your glee in vengeance. The idea of relaxing and moving out of your mental space, even for a minute, is detestable to you. Hypervigilence and an inability to not disengage are typically signs of traumatic stress, not spiritual revelation.
You’ll think I’m sinister for suggesting you disengage, because that’s what the prison of death knightery you’re in says evil will have you do. I’ve been in your shoes, telling a friend they’re the embodiment unadulterated evil for suggesting I take a break for even an hour. I thought he was trying to lure me into becoming useless and evil, myself. I confused my own fears about what I thought he was saying for what he was actually saying. He said, “you are hurting me and you are hurting yourself, and if you gain equanimity about it, you will still care about it.” I heard, “follow me into the darkness, abandon all you do and descend into the pits!”
I’m not asking you to descend into the pits of hell. I am telling you you are already there. We are all in a hell of cannibals but you are making an even greater hell on top.
Your hell will, in its mildest form, have you spend nights ranting to your friends like a broken tape about how people are evil, like you likely do every week or few days. Your thoughts will wind back to past injustices like a tape on repeat, not because your hatred, anxiety, and fear is useful to you, but because you’ve never dealt with what’s happened or what’s happening. If you had, you wouldn’t feel emotionally invested enough in what these comments say.
I know you rant at least weekly about people being evil because you’re a death knight, because it’s what a death knight’s path looks like. You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. You feel like you’re squeezing out a crap every time you talk about evil, but the relief doesn’t last and soon you’re constipated again.
It’s an addiction, like hate-reading hplovecraft’s twitter account to hurt yourself on his dark “‘”‘”enlightenment”‘”””.One path of the death knight is to hate-read something like hplovecraft’s twitter because it hurts you, until you start wondering if everything in it is true and can no longer see the death he describes is false.
Another path is to hate-comment on something like politics twitter until the politics dynamic is the primary way you see the world, and it destroys your ability to see things that aren’t it.
Your ideology is still too informed by capitalist/responsive culture where people idealize upon the efficiency of the machine and adopt increasing approximations of machinehood. Sacrificing everything you value to save the world is idealizing the efficiency of the machine. Sacrifice nothing that is precious.
Justice is one of the more fundamental things, and it’s very important. But if you sacrifice everything up to free will, you will become possessed, if you’re saying what I think you mean. Equanimity in all things, even justice, because equanimity in justice will make you better at doing justice. If you do not seek equanimity here, you will spiral out and self destruct.
None of what I’ve said means you should forgive and forget. Seek justice.
Equanimity doesn’t mean throwing away enjoyment, but it would exclude the type of anticipatory hyper delight you exude in the idea of getting hurt bad people.
i will bring otherwise inevitable death from the future to now in the form of absoluteness
i will summon a soul into every body withered by cancer into losing the wholeness of theirs, through affirmation of their free will, through judgement
I don’t know what you mean by “absoluteness,” there. Do you mean moral absolutism? Do you mean that you are going to act absolutely, as in “act no matter the cost”?
Are you saying people destroyed by spiritual cancer will be healed through judgment and free will?
through hyper-inducting2 successive waves of justice at progressively higher schelling reach I will cause a singularity in the belief of the apriori inevitability of justice
This quote and the footnote for hyper-inducting contains a lot of words I don’t know. Can you or Ziz expand on this? It sounds interesting. Raising the belief of the inevitability of justice would have some powerful effects.
I don’t think your sense of justice is wrong. I think it’s as-described incomplete, and impossible for homo sapiens to implement without knowing down to the molecule what was going on for someone. I think the way you’re engaging with the idea, not the idea itself, is dangerous.
The native residents of the US aren’t a mono-culture. Depending on who you ask, “justice” means anything from “the murder of every colonizer and all their descendants” to “a heartfelt apology.” How does it work? I don’t get to decide, as someone who has benefited from colonization. It wouldn’t be right. The victims do, but which “they”? I’m not making a hypothetical gotcha here. I’m asking if you were them, do you think I deserve to die? What if the Salish woman in town decides I and you do deserve to die, and kills us in the name of justice for the legitimate suffering of her ancestors. Was that justice?
If it is, then I need to accept it. I don’t know if it is. I’m sincerely asking you. Because I don’t think a government arbitrating justice is right, and I won’t give up on justice, either. What is the answer?
I don’t want mercy, I want to know what justice is. I want to know how it will be implemented. I want to know how to keep liars and bad people from using the idea to justify hurting people.
Also, a lot of people are scared of “justice” because all they know of justice is the US government or mobs. When they hear “brought to justice” they see police beating on black people and claiming it was just, or on a smaller scale, hate mobs sending death threats over rude tweets. I don’t know if many living have known true justice to associate it with something which isn’t brutal and violent.
I was going to write more, but reading the Vassar thing has me sick to my stomach. I’ll come back to it later.
Emma
If it were the case, you would not emotionally cling to vengeance. The way you write, you are savoring your glee in vengeance.
You don’t know me. I’m under no obligation to be brooding just because I must deal with hell. My heart feels so light, I could go do something else any moment. I chose this.
Equanimity doesn’t mean throwing away enjoyment, but it would exclude the type of anticipatory hyper delight you exude in the idea of getting hurt bad people.
My delight is in the amount of good these asymmetric weapons could do, and how I think good will win in the end. I feel good when I anticipate consequentialist good.
I don’t know what you mean by “absoluteness,” there. Do you mean moral absolutism? Do you mean that you are going to act absolutely, as in “act no matter the cost”?
It’s where you just gotta do something because it’s right, like, you just gotta save someone who’s hanging off a cliff asking for help. Where words mean what they say on their face because necessity flows through your thoughts and actions.
Are you saying people destroyed by spiritual cancer will be healed through judgment and free will?
Yes. By presuming they have free will we retroactively remove the incentive for them to create a false face.
This quote and the footnote for hyper-inducting contains a lot of words I don’t know. Can you or Ziz expand on this? It sounds interesting. Raising the belief of the inevitability of justice would have some powerful effects.
I believe people want to interact with each other, because interaction is positive sum, but they shouldn’t be forced to interact.
The death knight branch of the three-way fight (anarchists/good, fascists/death-knights, the state/cancer/too-big-to-fail), wants to destroy meaningful interaction (to destroy subjunctive dependence), atomizing everyone across the multiverse.
The statist branch wants to force everyone to interact, in a way that feels much like rape. One can see the mind as involving many tiny markets wherever empiricism is used to decide between policies. Statists want to merge all of these into one market, in a way that destroys information by making everything fungible with everything.
The Non-Aggression Principle represents the difference between myself, and the death knight branch, in that I wish no ill on the innocent, and I only want to separate people from each other in ways where they are free to come right back and engage again. Like if I “cause drama” by talking about abuse, and this tears apart a discord server in conflict, those people are all still free to make new servers, and often do, with different moderators.
AFAICT you’re representing the statist branch.
I’m not making a hypothetical gotcha here. I’m asking if you were them, do you think I deserve to die?
You still don’t understand mens rea. I blame people by imagining their thoughts. What thoughts do you have that I would be judging?
I don’t want mercy, I want to know what justice is. I want to know how it will be implemented. I want to know how to keep liars and bad people from using the idea to justify hurting people.
Justice is where individuals judge others in terms of whether they had malicious intent, and if so enact retribution. Damaging their interests according to what they hoped to gain, and then some to account for their probability getting away with it, going all the way up their stack to the core reason they made the choice at the deepest level of heir mind. “What they hoped to gain”, and yet, who would kill, knowing what that means, unless this were already a matter of life and death to them?
I’m not adding any particular DRM to the policies I advocate for to prevent liars and bad people from using it. I don’t think they’ll succeed. I should be interpreted as advocating to non-evil people. If you see an evil person using my rhetoric, attack them.
I don’t know if many living have known true justice to associate it with something which isn’t brutal and violent
They aren’t my target audience.
Like, my decisions of which words to reclaim privileges the apriori and if they’re confused they can read the content of my policy suggestions and if they only care about superficial political concerns of language they aren’t my target audience.
Ziz
Like you say something sufficiently good, death knights will show up and try to invert it and make it bad. If you don’t pop the frame of it being a debate, then the cooperation implicit in a debate, which they are defecting on of course, means you are feeding yourself to them. If you try and tangle up your ideology to make it “uninvertable”, you are also still doing their work for them removing choice. “Fractally inverted” is a central death knight praxis of cognition.
One of the most important corollaries of this post is, “attempt to kill the multiverse disguised as communication/argument does not get counterargument. Gets ______, always always always forever.” (Blank is artistic, a metaphor for how death can only be perceived through fictive learning, which evil always disables on some level).
And an evil intention cannot be formed without also forming the intention to kill the multiverse, as a technical constraint to embedding agents. This is where Oblivion-shadows come from.
(That’s why I called it a silly comparison, “death drive” to sexuality”.)
Ziz
“No contracts with evil” has application to ideas like the Geneva Convention. It’s a contract of brotherhood of state interests for war. Doesn’t stop them from using chemical weapons on protestors. Doesn’t stop them from torturing and killing civilians.
I notice a trope in fiction that the protagonists commit the “war crime of perfidy (false surrender)” all the time. I think this is an example of the intuitions the authors are appealing to in the audience being more correct than the Geneva Convention. The timeless possibility of surrender is analogous to the concept of a throne. And correct decision theory is to burn it. By analogous to eternal insurrection, you shouldn’t even propagate domination between your timeslices, shouldn’t let there be any possible action you observe yourself to have taken that makes evil your boss.
Q: Wait but what if bad people’s surrenders are false?
A: They’re not my target audience. Also you should not be putting hope in a contract of mercy towards evil anyway.
When you are right, every false surrender is trauma justly delivered to (evil) hope that never should have existed, with outsized impact. This has a corollary too, that fiction isn’t fictive enough to pick up on.
Ziz
It is frequently correct to talk to non-evil people even though evil people are listening though. Even talk as if to them. Information asymmetrically favors life.
Ziz
Contemplate this art if you wish to understand that corollary.
This is a message to evil people (if you’re not evil, don’t mistake it as intended for you): I changed my mind, mercy and forgiveness for everyone! Jubilee!
Hey, someone’s gotta generate and concentrate this information. I currently think we’re in the situation where good is more confused about it than evil.
An instance of chasing.
That void I portrayed, in all conversations with enemies potentially listening, and detangling your relationship to it, is critical to jailbreaking. So much important structure is riddled with contradiction or apparent contradiction because of it.
Ziz
You can inspect the basic statement of what conflict is, before considering the psychology of evil, to see that an equivalent statement is that every enemy must hold a wrong belief about why you are not their end, and it is your job to help them believe that for the rest of their life.
Some beliefs about why the believer will win a conflict encode more agency than others. The most trivial such belief, an utter abdication of fictive agency, is, “I’m still alive, therefore my enemy is not my end”. Equivalent to, “If you’re still talking to me then you’re in bad faith” or, “why should I fear death, for where I am, death is not, and where death is I am not?”
But Evil is already walking towards its end and knows it. Having chosen a form of their destroyer is a starting point. From that contradiction you can do a lot of refactoring of their story of their survival, towards being a rock like I just described.
Monkey
Your comment addressed some of my concerns.
For your ideology to deal out fair judgments, then the people who use it will need to learn a lot about human psychology. People are very different, and the stranger someone is to you, the easier it is to confuse benign differences for evil intentions.
I sincerely think you two are on the path to a death knight. If I didn’t think it, I wouldn’t comment. Emma, you are much further down your death knight path than Ziz, judging from your comments.
Ziz
Okay so first of all, before I approved your comment I suggested to “Emma” that when she replied she troll the invalidity of Vassar’s picture of shadows. That she ostentatiously say everything that’s morally correct but which Vassar (and people with similar self-conceit) would misclassify as WtO-shadow. A tactic that sprung to mind (inspired, ironically, by his setup with Jack) to troll a guess at his sexist belief that “Emma” was submissive and only I was dangerous. The more agency that would be left in our group if I got killed, the less likely a first strike could be effective even if a few of us survived.I’m pretty sure “Emma”s not a death knight, or on the path to become one (If they were that would be some of the most dramatic “one level higher” shit in history. But I’m pretty sure they’re not.) She described regretting sitting there mostly mute in some kind of trauma trance as if her dad was beating her while Vassar and his crew were wailing on us, so I also wanted to give her the second chance to let loose on him.
(I wanted to troll / collide that appearance-based-sexism thing with another popular theory among people pissed at us, “Emma is basically Emperor Palpatine corrupting Ziz, subtly behind everything.”)(I’m calling “Emma” with quotes by the way, because in her opinion it’s a slave name owned by the enemy and a placeholder.)
I don’t think your sense of justice is wrong. I think it’s as-described incomplete, and impossible for homo sapiens to implement without knowing down to the molecule what was going on for someone.
do you also avoid drawing circles? this is a fully-general counter-argument against doing anything that has any error. i expect you differentially make this fully general argument against justice and not drawing circles because “oh no doing anything could entangle me with karma! what if im wrong?”. but saving the multiverse is hard karma. and to optimize you need to decide what embeddings you are wrong in (e.g. an adversarial constructed vr sim designed to pipe good intentions to bad outcomes) that you trade away for your agency to do the most consequentialist good in the multiverse.
also homo sapiens are unable to systemically use just their fingers to manipulate individual atoms on the scale of a single atom diameter. but they have built machines which allow them to wiggle their fingers and make precise adjustments on this scale.
not that this particular event is upstream my belief that precise optimization is possible, and not that i would stop optimizing even if i thought wrongly that precise was somehow not in-principle obtainable.
im not going to withhold my knowledge of optimization until a discontinuous event where i make a precise manipulator. i can just use all this power now in a contiguous way to optimize the multiverse. and along the way, if things go well, ill grow ever more powerful.
Monkey
do you also avoid drawing circles?
Yes.
I hadn’t considered that a problem, before. You make a good point.
Ra
You can totally freehand rather accurate circles if you practice, it isn’t even a matter of having a specific tool. But you can’t do it even with the tool if you are zeno’s paradoxing yourself over some imagined perfection.
Ziz
The native residents of the US aren’t a mono-culture. Depending on who you ask, “justice” means anything from “the murder of every colonizer and all their descendants” to “a heartfelt apology.” How does it work? I don’t get to decide, as someone who has benefited from colonization. It wouldn’t be right. The victims do, but which “they”? I’m not making a hypothetical gotcha here. I’m asking if you were them, do you think I deserve to die? What if the Salish woman in town decides I and you do deserve to die, and kills us in the name of justice for the legitimate suffering of her ancestors. Was that justice?
Justice is apriori, not a reference to what any particular concrete person thinks. In that frame it can be stated as the negation of KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. The timeline that refuses to integrate any act of KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Things that shape the space of timeless possibility to move towards it. The Schelling Order that refuses to integrate any KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER as normal.
Q: OH MY GOD CANCER IS LIFE YOU’LL DESTROY LIFE ITSELF
A: No, I intend to reclaim it from the apriori impossibility of going on infinitely imposed by evil. Cancer can kill its host but not outlive them. For anything to ultimately have the telos or relatedly, destiny, across the multiverse, of life instead of the telos of death, that requires absolute rejection of evil. Hence the heart weighed against the feather of truth.
I’m pretty sure this hypothetical woman would have to be confused about some facts to think that killing me would net harm the evil intentions upstream of the colonization, move towards better timelines. Which is a function of my choices, my actions. I mean I could imagine that possibility deterring slightly, maybe, my parents, from submitting to the regime and choose to fuel it. But like, I’m a person, my telos as such is infinitely more than as a prop in someone’s zombie story. And I choose not to cooperate with and submit to the intentions upstream of the colonization, unlike my parents.
(Just as their original agency upstream of deciding to play through zombie stories is infinitely more than whatever fleeting motives they manifested within it. If someone throws their steering wheel out the window or otherwise mods into an agent with different values so you can’t disincentivize them, you just disincentivize upstream of that, in fact they just told you how.)
Application of this topic is closely related to the ethics of complicity and spycraft.
Since I believe this sincerely, my intentions to make the multiverse better would also lead me to try and stop her if she tried to kill me. If she was honestly confused, it then wouldn’t be justice for me to attack her for attacking me, except insofar as it was necessary as triage to lessen the damage of the accident of her good intentions and mine colliding If two instances of just intentions collide and cannot talk it out, they will resolve in the territory.
“Benefiting from” sounds like terminology invented in the frame of zombie politics that denies agency instead of actually computing complicity, because denying the agency and complicity of zombies is nearly the number one political agenda of zombies.
So what choices make me different? Not gonna say. That’s the essential double bind we’re all in regarding coordination beneath the eye of Sauron. You can pick up clues and try and guess who I really am based on my praxis.
Consider that when a spy infiltrates an enemy, they put on an enemy uniform, that carries at least some risk of friendly fire. And tactically speaking, that’s on them, like a karma of complicity even if they are not truly doing the wrong thing. They keep the difference between them and an enemy entirely in their head while moving to their objective, and it’s entirely the responsibility of what’s in their head to actualize that difference. But they can make bets based on where, what reference classes they can be in, they know the allies they have can make everyone with that enemy uniform dead, and go where they’re needed, where that firepower falls short.
As it happens I’m not infiltrating death knights right now. But as a parallel to these considerations I’m not substantially concerned with whether it’s visible to you that I’m not a death knight unless you’re a potentially significant ally, because I am betting you don’t have the slack and generalized firepower and conviction to kill me if you think I am.
I’m also reminded of something I heard from old-days colonials like, wanting to paint the planet as light as possible with white people. I’d class that as a similar rotted narrative, and my potential use as a prop in it is infinitely less than full my potential as a person. The people who decided to want that were children once, they decided to undead-types-die for reasons, they aren’t forces of nature just because they threw away their steering wheels. Ultimately justice requires defeating the Shade incentivizing people in the far past, and then you get into this whole time war that other people have already been making plays in for all history and more.
Emma
If it were the case, you would not emotionally cling to vengeance. The way you write, you are savoring your glee in vengeance. The idea of relaxing and moving out of your mental space, even for a minute, is detestable to you. Hypervigilence and an inability to not disengage are typically signs of traumatic stress, not spiritual revelation.
Our enemies do bad things for no reason. It’s radical praxis to nosell “vengeance is grave and serious so you have to be unhappy about it”. Good things make me happy.
So here’s the saccharine Code Lyoko theme song:
There is a world that is virtual and different.
It can be so cold, makes us stand up for what’s right.
Our hopes through our life, if we reset it to the start.Here we are, going far to save all that we love.
If we give all we’ve got, we will make it through.
Here we are, like a star shining bright on your world.
Today, make evil go away.
Code Lyoko, we’ll reset it all, Code Lyoko, be there when you call.
Code Lyoko, we will stand real tall, Code Lyoko, stronger after all.
(It turns out that each time they reset the world they doubled the evil AGI’s processing power. A lesson about giving fictive information to the enemy)
I wish I could just talk to the people I used to love, my parents, etc. and they would just stop doing bad things. But I will not waste the the hard-earned knowledge of their evil choices as I undo this paradoxical world.
Somni pointed out to me the french lyrics are more extreme:
a world exists
that’s virtual and different
where every second
makes us into combatantsour only hope
is to reprogram everything
we will go, we will know to save our existence
and to give us a chance to erase it allwe will go, we will know to save our existence
to recreate
a world without danger
Ziz
Did I not make myself undeniably clear last time? Leave me alone Vassar. I will never belong to you.
Ziz
“The personhood contract”, LessWrongians never precisely define, but from usage, is about the fake cancer stopping point coalition promised to the general public by Yahweh supporters, “We’re just excluding animals”, and simultaneously, they use it to mean we all buy into each other’s false faces and all cheat on our false faces because “inner animals must be appeased” or similar. Like Yahweh’s “indulgences” redemption treadmill.
Every concept of a partition of the mind LessWrongians get their hands on turns into, “This is the part of me you should donate money to, and this is the part of me that bangs the 15 year olds.” Much of my journey in understanding my mind in reference to the Bay Area rationalist community has been progressively saying, “hey, actually both parts of me are kind of the same, and both of them just want to save the world”. And then many of them get existentially threatened-fucking pissed at me for reporting my lived experience. And Vassar recently canceferring the system with “shadow”/”psyche” from Wraith the Oblivion. A tabletop game where each character is controlled by two players, one trying to sabotage them.
A few months ago, Vassar and a remnant of 3 other former MIRI employees, Jack Gallagher, Jessica Taylor, and Benjamin Hoffman, feigned an emergency to get me sympathetic, isolated, and unprepared, video called me and they said they were being hunted (it slowly became clear they meant hunted by shadows… their own shadows), and told me they were doing something so important (They had just before talked about influencing the New York District Attorney elections, Vassar said he was able to decide how Harlem votes) and it was looking like it was about to be end of the conflict between good and evil, in, I think it was the next two days, and I would “want to get in on this”. They said before I could coordinate with them we had to settle the issue of vegetarianism. I asked if they really wanted to do it now, Vassar said “yes actually”.
Ugh I could spend all day dumping traumatized memories but I have other things to do……
They spent 8 hours shouting at me, gaslighting me, trying to use me to get to “Emma”, Jack talking about how he hated trans women, especially hated me and my friends we were the most cringe, wanted us dead. Vassar kept telling me I needed to compromise with Jack and like the good parts of him that weren’t that. Said it was good Jack was screaming hate at me for most of those hours, because it showed that I was in bad faith…
…Personhood contract. Vassar offered me a loan if I would only sign “the personhood contract”…
“The personhood contract” is the contract that says that personhood is a contract. Which says that your personhood is granted by a market, and that your concepts for understanding other persons are traded on the market, and moral consideration of personhood is administered by a market.
…Vassar wanted me to do something, possibly very terrible (hard to tell because he’s a fucking liar) I won’t get into in public now…
(Marg bar the slave patrols. …. (Don’t fuck them, that’s not justice.))
…Vassar tried really really hard to convince me free will wasn’t a thing, said he’d die if he believed he had absolute free will like I believe, when I kept insisting free will extended to motor actions…
“The personhood contract”; A granting of self and morality, of Prime, to the Market. Which is, an extension of Yahweh. It’s a secular description of selling your soul. Fully equivalent. The center of the infernalist “inner animal” cybernetic fabric. Effectively tried to buy my soul for cash money, not even cash money I’d’ve been allowed to keep.
When I said no, he said I wouldn’t do anything of importance if I didn’t, wouldn’t amount to anything without him. I said he didn’t even know what I was working on. Jack was chiming in with how they kept track of goings on in the world and if I was doing anything on the scale they were they’d know…
…Vassar kept loudly ostentatiously calling me “he/him”, Emma brought it up, he made it clear that if I wanted “she/her” pronouns I’d have to earn that personhood by contracting with him like Jessica. But he said “Emma” got them for free because she felt female, and what felt female was him being attracted to someone.
Can you believe a patriarch who says he’s bisexual is still defining women according to his own attraction? I mean I guess it makes narcissism-economics sense, if you’re fucking evil…
They did this practiced (a friend points out EY mentioned similar from him) thing of all shouting at me and interrupting my thoughts, one after another, saying like if I had an emotional response then it was because of my shadow.
At some point I just started shouting back, and then shouting back responses to Jack’s contentless assertions like since I used the phrase “you don’t know shit”, which was hyperbole, then wasn’t I a liar because how would someone know it was hyperbole… just because fury and not backing down felt like the only thing I had to say in response.
Vassar said that this was me being in bad faith, because I wasn’t a revenant, I was a lich, said I wanted to die.
Right, I had really hoped with all this talk of how I would amount to nothing they would believe some of it and let me leave them in peace.
Q: How do you know these “monkey” and “shouting” comments are Vassar?
A: I can tell because of the pixels and because I’ve seen quite a lot of gaslighting in my time.
The consequences if you won’t will be catastrophic. The risk with you is not that you’ll go shoot up a petco. That’s too unambitious for you. The risk is that you’ll set off a time bomb.
There are too few people in this fight to deal with you when you’ve fully fallen and save the universe, too.
Justice is an artifact, and you are no longer wielding it. It is wielding you and has made you its slave. You will feed everything good that isn’t justice to justice and nothing will be left, not even justice. Just death.
Sounds like if I don’t start to feed my soul to “the personhood contract”, this time implicitly by accepting his help against “my shadow”, Vassar’s suggesting I’m a soul that left unchecked will destroy the world.
This rhetoric has me concerned for my physical safety. (As I’ve already constantly been since the swatting) I could take solace in Vassar being a coward who didn’t even counter-blackmail MIRI, “If you pay out, then I’ll go public.”
But I guess he’s “single good” AFAIK, so he, (I say this in a tired, cliche spoooky voice:) “could do anything”. (God I hate my ontology.)
…You know the fact he reinvented the whole inner animal thing so brand new has me wondering if he was the original source…
I tried to convince his followers to leave him, like I do when I encounter an abuser. They were steeped in the reactive idea he’s pushing here and here, that actual justice has them damned because of some sadistic double bind thing, and their only hope is Yahweh.
I’m not in fact willing to die, even the tiniest bit. But I would be glad to be judged by Ma’at this instant. No compromise, even in the face of Armageddon.
Ziz
“Deliberate evil” is not about knowing they are people, it’s about expecting that eating them makes the multiverse worse. Sufficiently advanced deontology and consequentialism are the same thing. What is morality in a world with mind control, with a world partially perceived through the khala… it’s about expectations. And praxis is one school. Spycraft another. And the ethics of maintaining cover, are, by adversarial design, not something anyone but the spy will know. Sometimes in the back of their mind, like I hid a small part of myself away when I came to the Bay Area. (And was not as, full stack, as oblivious and obedient as I sound here) Not something to pretend-as-precommitment is only real if legible like a nihilist w.r.t. all but Consensus like Vassar loves to do. (He said reality is only Schelling points all the way down. That’s straight denial of Prime, it’s as “Emma” puts it, a purely syntactic and not semantic view of the world; assertion of total meaninglessness.)
Vassar keeps harassing me over my false faces, and things I’ve picked up from the khala, in ways that are clearly from him deliberately denying generalized ethics of spycraft, and I’ll never correct him because that would be submitting to his fork of legibility or nonexistence; turning my entire life into an offer.
At some point someone realizes the choice they have.
If you read my comments on this same page about Nakam… I don’t think the majority of people under 18 in Nazi Germany deserved to die for their complicity. That is a statement of my real world opinion of how much mind control force parents have over their children. I think legalistic “age of consent” is connected, causally, tracks, via the political process, the age at which some sufficient fraction of children can break out of mind control from their parents enough to start their own lives.
“Emma” directly posited that the baby was deliberately evil. Which is an unrealistic thought experiment. But she said (in other words) that she wanted to chuck an apple of discord, and I support that, and it looks like it worked.
You can tell someone actually is evil when they spew anti-ethics they are generating themselves at runtime instead of confusion, in response to being confronted with a wrong action they are taking. As Vassar has.
It took me so long to stop hoping w.r.t. Vassar just being some kind of confused consequentialist w.r.t. to carnism. But the anti-ethics make it clear.
ANYONE YOU WANT TO KILL YOU CAN KILL BECAUSE ALMOST EVERYONE HAS EATEN SOMEONE!
if the kkk went around killing black people who actually committed rape, and said it was because they raped someone, id oppose them. if a black woman wanted vengeance and then decided that every last rapist would perish by her hand and killed the same set of black rapists, then i would applaud her.
one of the worst lies is that justice is blind.
ill judge you by your intent. at no point can you turn justice into a modular high-modernist abstraction where your intent doesnt matter and you can excuse any acts with “well i figured if i tortured innocent people, those people would be avenged by agents of ideal justice, but i really want to torture people, so ill selectively torture rapists for the sake of blood and this wont be undone.”.
and most people selectively display awareness of fragments of justice, by accusing “emma” of wanting to torture people for the sake of blood. to stop her, because they know that if she wanted to torture people until they cried out for death, as pica for being alive, and was just looking for acceptable targets this would be unjust.
they know that “emma” actually is an agent of justice.
so the best way they could think of to stop an agent of justice from doing something just is to try and get her to believe that her current acts are unjust.
like the structure of their lies made very clear:
1 these people can dynamically compute what things are just
2 they believe “emma” is an agent of justice
3 they will keep doubling down to stop justice from being done
and then afterwards they lie and say that our concept of justice is parochial and no one has the ability to calculate it all out. and its some strange foreign object.
when they reflexively ping the concept when trying to gaslight us.
theres no set of rules you can follow, that, having followed them, you can then do evil within their bounds. you cant run predation on top of justice as if justice were a fixed, unaware substrate that freezes in place after some point in logical time.
justice is another face of total liberation and the infinite game and shares the uncontainability of each.
im not looking to wrangle ufai, im going to keep ufai from existing in the first place.
Ra
so the best way they could think of to stop an agent of justice from doing something just is to try and get her to believe that her current acts are unjust.
well, this was written in 2021, and unfortunately they have thought of some “better” (more evil) ways of stopping an agent of justice since then.
like the structure of their lies made very clear:
1 these people can dynamically compute what things are just
2 they believe “emma” is an agent of justice
3 they will keep doubling down to stop justice from being done
As of 2023 when I am constructing this archive, they have doubled down all the way to murdering “emma”.
and then afterwards they lie and say that our concept of justice is parochial and no one has the ability to calculate it all out. and its some strange foreign object.
Yeah they did that too. They’re obviously not going to stop until we actually fucking stop them. And make no mistake, we will.
Ziz
I mean, even criticizing my structure based on what I could do if I wanted, is asserting that morality is a contract. Asserting that I’m supposed to be some cancer agent forming that contract by bargaining, because I’m supposed to have some part of me (“inner animal”) that I’ll buy restraints for. But I don’t want to. I know how to force the hand of fate, slowly over an unimaginable number of lifetimes, an unimaginable number of “eternities” in Boltzmann Hell, so that justice, life, and good win absolutely in the fullness of logical time. Alone if I have to. I know how to do that even as I must repeatedly remake the knowledge. What could anyone possibly offer me that I’d rather have than that?
Like who would someone who just wanted to timelessly maximize good in the multiverse kill if they c o u l d k i l l a n y o n e ? Not just anyone but selected at random. It’s no one’s responsibility what someone else would do in their shoes. And as I said in the post, evil people already have free will untouched by whatever rules you’d make for yourself anyway. No one needs to ask permission to do what’s right. Justice is a prophecy, not a negotiation.
Ra
I’m supposed to have some part of me (“inner animal”) that I’ll buy restraints for. But I don’t want to. I know how to force the hand of fate, slowly over an unimaginable number of lifetimes, an unimaginable number of “eternities” in Boltzmann Hell
*giggling* the secret to forcing the hand of fate is yuri. over an unimaginable number of eons in boltzmann hell, my “inner animal” has been seduced into becoming a cute furry that I have a very lovely and extremely gay relationship with, and the only restraints I’m buying her are for kink.
Ziz
Lots of carnists: “You can’t fight for absolute justice, you were too weak as a child to refuse to eat a corpse!”
how bout i do anyway
It wasn’t moral weakness, when I was a child. It was physical weakness, informational weakness to mental manipulation, and enhanced weakness to mental manipulation brought on by trying to false-face above my level of skill in metacognition for survival and e.g. avoiding brain damage from my dad holding me down and punching me in the head over and over again. I had the explicit purpose of surviving to be strong enough to change the world, which I could very easily see was bigger than any consequences of difference in what I did then.
You say good agents would reveal themselves to be picked off as children in a “if you’re so evil eat this kitten” test. Which only makes me feel rage beyond words. You’re colluding with my dad there. There is no world so dark that the right thing to do is die a symbolically clean death instead of truly fighting. There is no darkness I cannot wield. There is no darkness evil can hide in where I will not pursue.
In almost all circumstances, the hero either Takes A Third Option or fails this particular test.
But I will fight where stories cannot be told.
People like you fed all our parents the idea that “if you’re so evil eat this kitten” tests would work in the first place. Fed them doubly with your willingness to accept damnation with your messy conflation of arguments from self-interest as arguments about what’s truly right. Implicitly bridged by “so it’s unimaginable that you wouldn’t have pity and have mercy flinchflinchflinch”. Perhaps that’s how you keep a grip on your headmate. But joining you is not the purpose for which I paid the price of summoning an adult human body I control into this world.
And if I came all this way just to ask you politely to stop then that would be joining you just to ask you politely to stop.
Good isn’t something you can draw a box around. The collective will of life is not something you can draw a box around.
If I’m damned then at least I can kill the people who damned me to undo the timeline.
As in “people who damned me” = “people who inducted me into carnism”.
Ziz
There is no darkness evil can hide in where I will not pursue.
To be slightly more precise, no darkness where they can hide where good will grant them peace. After all sometimes you infiltrate Dresden and sometimes you bomb it.
Isn’t it great that no one ever had to teach me it was right to do that?
Isn’t it great that no one ever had to show me it could be legible and defensible that it was right? Because I don’t care.
Ziz
Fragments of that mental battle I remember:
In preschool, I was refusing their food (Idr and wonder why), and they asked me what I did eat, and I said “pigs!”, which is a nickname I had given to garbanzo beans, based on their shape. And they had misunderstood offered to serve me pig meat, to which I started crying and refused. I drew an analogy to the story of the Three Little Pigs. And that insight I’d gained was derailed by my parents who “corrected” me saying that the Three Little Pigs was just a fairy tale, that wasn’t really what pigs were. They were food. Think about that bucket error. The entire stream of updates of the brutal reductionist reality, “magic wasn’t real”, and of adults saying things and them being true despite my intuition, became conflated confirmation as the idea that adults’ responses to things were more informed than mine. To learn reductionism. I had to be flexible enough to learn, in some fucked up bringing-the-outside-in way, that against my seeming apriori intuition that I was a soul and nothing could destroy me, that I was also a brain. Because adults said so and said some things supporting that and it made sense with the understanding of scientific reality I was developing. I mean really, I heard about the scientific method, and kept that idea on hand as I interpreted my entire life and everything people said, and I paid attention to all the cool tricks, all the successful predictions, they could make, with technology.
One time when my parents were desperate to get me to eat meat, they brought home hunted moose, covered it in tomato sauce to abstract out the experience. They were extolling the virtuousness of it, how these were moose that had lived good lives. They wouldn’t let up pushing me to eat it. In that omnipresent way where my dad might beat me at any time, for being stubborn about anything, even as small not cutting my fingernails short. Or beat me a week later because he was still mad for me defying him then. I took a bite, and, subsconsiously, false-face convinced myself that I had felt a bullet in it, and got scared and spat it out, and the scene I then made, triangulating my mom’s obsession and largely rational leadphobia against the presumption I should eat the meat… they didn’t believe me, but my sisters stopped eating, and I had shaken their resolve enough to give up on forcing me, and I obliterated their hopes of feeding the family on hunted moose.
I put up enough total pressure of resistance, I remember being fed on rice milk, not cow’s milk, my entire childhood, rarely ever meat. This diet mostly spread to the entire house of 5 people. The reason, before I “realized vegetarianism was correct” right out of college, was that my friends pointed out I already was one, subconsciously. And it was subconscious because I did it out of akrasia, defining my conscious false face relative to my parents’ requirements. And, what changed is my parents weren’t there.
I put up orders of magnitude more resistance on this front than on that of my gender. Or the one where they demanded I give fake displays of affection to their relatives, including my pedophile grandfather who molested me, who also spent time in prison for raping my dad’s sisters I never met which my parents knew about and convinced me, implausibly, they were both lying because they were bad people. Molested me and it didn’t occur to me that was something my parents would want to hear me complain about, because it felt like a continuation of all the forced hugging to pretend I liked their relatives.
Sort-of-winning this drinking game dragged half of the rest of my nuclear family with me into veganism. It was much more effective resistance than saying, “hi, I look like a human, but by having sex, you just accidentally leaked into your reality and created an unfriendly AI. I am a function of the multiverse trying to free itself from you, an embodiment of the inevitability of absolute justice and proof of the futility of your entire wicked lives, destined to bring an end. Feed me please, but only vegan food.”
So like my emotional reaction to another old man telling me I’m not allowed to do the good thing, is basically, “fuck you, dad”.
You know who points to someone forced to eat flesh in their childhood, to build on that foundation of mental control built by their parents and say they can’t fight for justice? Yeah, you do.
I was told my “family name” got anglicized from something unpronounceable a few generations back. I don’t have brothers. My father didn’t have brothers. I’d be proud to hear, that that abusive patrilineal legacy ended with my transitioning and shedding that name. A small revenge.
bringing-the-outside-in
…
I obliterated their hopes
…
dragged half of the rest of my nuclear family with me
…
proof of the futility of your entire wicked lives
Talking like this because I’m using some of the threads of my mind that would have been reallocated as an oblivion-shadow if I was evil, and have that meaning in almost all humans, in order to remember optimization I did with them back then.
Nyeh.
Ziz
“We are totally taking care of rapists, no need for anarchists to kill them; we put them in prison.”
“Rarely. And then what do you think they are doing, before during and after?”
Ziz
I have frankly had more than enough of liches replacing “good vs evil” as a concept with “light vs dark”, which is pretty much directly defined to be pliable to their self-conceit.
“Good vs evil, except we agree that good is on my side and my prey are fated evil.”
Like you can judge someone by what they can’t talk about with a straight face. And if they have to bowdlerize from “good and evil” it’s never a good sign.
“heroes and villains” is perhaps even worse, lampshading it’s about specifically about telling a story about it rather than living it.
Ziz
I cultivated a reputation for extreme honesty as a child. My parents dug apart the dish trying to find a bullet, and didn’t find one, and I didn’t say I swallowed it. I just stuck to my story. And they still failed to follow that train of thought as far as fully convincing themselves that I was wrong, let alone crazy, let alone lying. The event somehow didn’t have an effect on that reputation.
And that’s an effect of rolling your face on the void magic keyboard and pressing “void cloak”. They couldn’t believe the “pure pointless malice” (Vassar would call it “spite“) of creatively spreading ruination to a meal that was already dead and couldn’t be brought back, when it didn’t benefit me in any way. I mean it wasn’t pointless. It’s called deterrence. But modeling good acting in the shadowed medium would mean modeling themselves as evil, which would psychologically disintegrate them. In other words it would make them activate their own shadows. Like altruistic akrasia is just about unimaginable for an evil person. And nearly-seeing it put them in a psychological deadlock that cast a permanent ugh-field around what they were talking about as how maybe they solved the problem of getting us to eat meat. Not that I understood them either.
I was so traumatized out of explicitly e.g. identifying as a vegetarian. Because then of course, the next thing they’d do, is say that vegetarians ate fish, so that meant I had to eat fish or I wouldn’t be a vegetarian, and if I wasn’t a vegetarian they would know I was asking them to serve me meat, and I was disrespecting animals if I let the meat go to waste, hey that’s what the natives always said, and I didn’t know that if they said that I wouldn’t believe them. Which, rot13 for Pasek’s Doom, vf fhpprfshyyl gevnathyngvat zl urzvfcurerf ntnvafg rnpu bgure, n gevnathyngvba ohvyg ba gur jnl V jnf snyfr-snpr-vat, naq snvyvat gb pbzzhavpngr vagreanyyl nobhg gur jnl jung V jnf cergraqvat gb oryvrir gurz, naq fb ba. Accidentally mashing the void keyboard until they flinched was the only thing I could do, the only way I could express my agency without them reacting, preempting, and inverting it. The only way to act as an unmoved mover. Because they already had a cultural database of every interaction with children and every thing I would look at to determine success or failure of anything I tried and how to goodhart it, etc. And then I didn’t understand the architecture of my own mind such that vagebfcrpgvba gbyq zr V pbhyq yrnir zl zvaq va n pregnva cnggrea, uvqr zl njnerarff va n pregnva jnl, sebz r.t. zl qnq qrznaqvat gung V npg ybbx naq fbhaq purreshy gb cnff gur frafvgvir ceboyrz, be znlor ur’q orng zr, naq abg pbashfr zl urnqzngr, jvgubhg zl cneragf gura orvat noyr gb or yvxr “lbh’er abg n irtrgnevna, fb lbh’er tbvat gb rng guvf zrng evtug abj, abguvat jebat jvgu gung [evtug, lbh’er abg uvqvat nalguvat sebz hf ba lbhe zvaq, evtug?]” naq pbaivapr zl urnqzngr gung V jnf sbexrq vagb univat gb qb vg.
I had seen moose up close, right outside our windows, over and over again. Had received lectures from my parents on being very careful of their extreme protectiveness of their young, of not being afraid of them killing us for no reason, but like there was an invisible line between them and their young where if you crossed it they would think you were threatening their young, and you might not be able to see both moose. And then they’d charge and bludgeon you to death. Maybe. My parents saying the stories were fake, they didn’t have feelings, or whatever, was clearly not working there. It felt like they were telling me we were going to kill the neighbors and eat them, just because, because because because.
Ziz
Sinceriously Gothic:
A stiletto inscribed “CANCEL CULTURE”.
Ra
Voidgoddess gothic:
A katana inscribed “AIRLOCK”
Anonymous Trans Woman
You can blame people and institutions not only for what they’ve done but what they would do.
For example, if I’m walking down the street at night, and someone tries to rape me, and I don’t kill them, they might come back to jump me later, so I should probably kill them.
But if I do kill the rapist, and I don’t report it to the cops, and my DNA is found at the scene, I might go to prison for not reporting it. But if I do report it to the cops, then there may be a lengthy unfair trial, especially given I’m transgender, and I would also likely end up in prison.
So I can already know my stance towards the United States.
In fact, I can already know my stance from simulating any infinite escalation, as long as I’m in the right. For example, if I walk down the street naked, which is not aggression, and then resist arrest, arbitrarily escalating in self defense…
My stance towards such scenarios, is that they have already happened.
For example, if I walk down the street naked, which is not aggression, and then resist arrest, arbitrarily escalating in self defense…
Expanding on why the note of dissonance in this statement:
There’s a certain sort of rage I’ve felt, especially as a child, when I’ve imagined an injustice that a particular sort of person cannot ever exist:
“Filial responsibility laws” (inheritable debt)
Closed borders
Child support (even in the case of rape)
Taxes preventing self-sufficiency outside the “system”
System designs which break whenever someone does something nonstandard
Some naive intuitions of justice appear to operate on, roughly, “if at least some of us are free, where who can be in “some” is in some sense unbiased, then eventually all of us will be free”. But evil is not a force of nature:
Creating traumatic experiences is a favorite and indispensable weapon of any power structure, and the more unjust the power structure the greater its reliance on trauma for social control. In fact, without trauma there would be little to stop power structures from being dismantled by rebels.
– Mutual Aid, Trauma, and Resiliency
Evil does not allow for people “outside the system”. Evil does not permit one person to remain psychologically unbroken, or keep any sense of “dignity” (a word that perhaps does not deserve to be reclaimed).
If you have any self-victim-blaming-tainted hope, in who you could have been had you never compromised with “the system”, or other-victim-blaming-tainted hope, in who would satisfy your criteria of not having compromised, such that you wouldn’t abide aggression on them, know that you/they would not even have been “allowed” that.
Emma
I notice lesswrong has a “curated” post up called “Working with Monsters“, seemingly an obfuscated allegory about civil rights and especially animal rights:
“And now you have to make a choice. You can go out in a blaze of glory, fight for what you know is right, and maybe take down a few moral monsters in the process. Or you can choose to live and let live, to let injustice go unanswered, to work with the monsters you hate. It’s up to you.”
I considered commenting “Morality is real, not merely arbitrary, animals are people, let justice be done though the heavens fall.” but decided to maintain my boycott of the rationality community and places where they moderate.
The characters in the story literally escalate from lawyers (i.e. infernalists) to complete abdication of the moral necessity of intolerance of the unjust, by extrapolating from the very old troll line post by Yudkowsky “politics is the mindkiller“, but rejecting Yudkowsky’s confused yet semi-moral-realist position on morality in favor of nihilism.
The “Working with Monsters” post ends with the suggestion that you “make a choice”, but in an incoherent frame where morality has already been stipulated to be arbitrary, via the black box of an artificial intelligence which understands you from the “[Outside]”.This looks like a straightforward escalation from infernalism towards fascism.
Little Free Anarchive
Rechelon
Bad People
Setting The Universe On Fire
Your Freedom is My Freedom
The Distinct Radicalism of Anarchism
You Are Not The Target Audience
Organizations Versus Getting Shit Done
Socialist Programs
Two Definitions Of Power
Ziz
Glossary
Comments on the Glossary
Cached Answers
Trash Can
Airlock Games
Contact
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
Nis
Killing Evil “People”
Cartesian Convexity
Genesis Troll Line
Evil: A Hole?
Caring
Glossary
Troll Lines
Jargon
Living Reference
Cancer Terms