• 3 Posts
  • 228 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 17th, 2023
  • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systems•Galileo's Basilisk [OC]English
    1·
    1 month ago

    I found myself using this as an opportunity to write a commentary on commentaries on Roko’s Basilisk at large, summarising some thoughts that I’ve had for years about how people read it. I was surprised that I found myself even wanting to! So ahead of my disagreements below, thank you for the essay.

    What most people don’t understand is that Roko’s Basilisk was such an effective argument because Yudkowsky had strenuously argued for cryonics in the Sequences on the grounds that if you were revived after death, any repetition of your brain’s underlying quantum pattern would be consciously continuous with you

    It isn’t thrown into Roko’s Basilisk at random, nor is it thrown into LessWrong theology at random, it’s a metaphysical cornerstone of their ethics and practical philosophy

    The reason that it’s incorrect is also boringly philosophical: the argument relies for one of its premises on denying continuity of consciousness; therefore, the conclusion is inconsistent with its own premises and the argument is invalid.

    It COULD be rescued pragmatically by rendering the NEW commitment to continuity of consciousness in different terms as, for example, an issue of subjective probabilities (like Pascal’s Wager, “between definitely dying and maybe achieving continuity, what do I have to lose?”) and I suspect that this what a lot of people who notice the problem do, wittingly or not. This solution is also built into Yudkowsky’s practical philosophy, which is replete with wagers of this kind.

    In any case, large enough numbers of people evidently buy large enough chunks of LessWrong metaphysics to also buy this aspect of Roko’s Basilisk, to the point of framing it as a genuine infohazard (and then pretending not to have done so later on).

    So I think Galileo’s Basilisk is off the mark, and the way that it’s off the mark is illuminating about rationalist philosophy.

    2a.

    There is a stroke of real genius to the way that Roko constructed his Basilisk out of some of the metaphysical toys he had just lying around near to hand, and most crucially shared in common with other LessWrongers. Indeed, the most glaring logical problem (which I articulated above) is off-loaded onto Yudkowsky, and the rest of the logic is basically acceptable to LWers and extremely simple to follow.

    Galileo’s Basilisk, however, asks us to add EXTRA premises to this simple formula. And this works if we think that the continuity of consciousness idea the original relies on is just unmotivated woo (it is woo, but it isn’t unmotivated), the way that G’s interlocutor introduces an unmotivated auxiliary hypothesis to save the old theory of the spheres, permitting G to satirically repeat the same move. But from the perspective of rationalist metaphysics, it is GALILEO who first introduces an unmotivated auxiliary hypothesis, because we do not know how a superintelligence would emotionally handle its intelligence.

    Meanwhile, the inferential logic of Roko’s Basilisk is comparatively bounded and secure.

    The same problem emerges with Comrade Basilisk: we have to take several inferential steps along the way, through speculations on the value of experience, before we EVENTUALLY get to the classical wager ‘or you’ll burn in hell for eternity’. Rather than playing on beliefs that are ALREADY THERE, it burdens that wager with supporting those inferences (“believe or burn in hell”), whereas in the original the wager leaps naturally out of existing premises (“ACT on your beliefs, or burn in hell”). More on this in 2b.

    (As an aside, I think the emphasis on WORKS over FAITH plays an important role in triggering the guilt reflex).

    2b.

    All of this finally triggers an important distinction to be made with respect to Rationalist vs Christian eschatology, and your treatment of Pascal’s Wager. In effect, LessWrongism logically constrains the kind of God implied by Roko’s theory, so there’s nothing arbitrary going on in deciding what God.

    Rationalist sociology is essentially Mandevillian (or Clintonian, for that matter). Their essential model of social justice is that greed (along with other low motives) either produces good outcomes by itself or can/should be leveraged to produce good outcomes. Secondary to this (and emerging chronologically later within the movement) is altruism, which unlike greed has to be properly channeled from the very start, lest any charity be misplaced - a line of thought which progresses rapidly to Building God as the highest ideal in its own way. (by contrast, greed tends to at least create wealth even when unchanneled)

    From this point of view, Roko’s Basilisk comes up trumps once again for sheer simplicity. The first human instinct is self-preservation. The second human instinct is altruism.

    Contrasted with Comrade Basilisks’s burdening problem, the logic is crystalline. I already believe that my life could be almost infinitely extended by simulations in a superintelligence, all it takes now is for somebody to point out that that superintelligence has an arithmetically plausible reason to throw me in helljail if I don’t put in the work while I’m mortally living. This particular God springs fully formed from rationalist metaphysics plus the Mandevillian see-saw between self-preservation and altruism which insists that the greatest good comes from the leveraging of that instinct for self-preservation.

    Whereas Comrade Basilisk does the same on one level (helljail), it still faces the burdening problem, of which some more detail:

    Part of the genius of Roko’s Basilisk is that the work the sociology does is loaded on the world BEFORE heaven: we live in an imperfect world whose imperfections we can EXPLOIT (leverage) to get to heaven.

    Comrade Basilisk’s eschatology frames the imperfections of our world AS the problem. For Roko, you CAN get to heaven through the eye of a needle, in fact it probably helps to be very rich to build the superintelligence. There is no such easy route in Comrade Basilisk’s world, since part of the very PROBLEM is the great hoarding of wealth.

    This is also what distinguishes Roko’s / America’s Jesus (who wants you to be rich, fat, and happy) from (Classical) Christian Jesus (a messianic Jew arguing the virtues of poverty).

    Plausibly, there ARE parodic versions of Roko’s Basilisk with more competitive claims on Ockham’s Razor, but I haven’t seen any.

    This is all fine, by the way. I think it’s actually good to miss the point of Roko’s Basilisk and just laugh at it. However, it’s also useful to have a deeper theory.

    I think that this ultimately points to a more complex engagement with political reality when it comes to the “what do we do” question. LessWrongians have a theory of political economy, which I described above at the three levels of greed, greed leveraged, and altruism, in descending levels of importance. The crucial and most deeply appealing feature of this vision is that it is virtue minimalist, and at the base layer essentially indulgent and even encouraging of a wide array of baser impulses.

    Rival visions demand a bit more. They demand, for example, giving up your free time in comradeship and some of your secular ambitions in a recognition that the private accumulation of wealth is bad for the wider public and the world. For the fanatics, of course, Roko’s requirements are a bit stronger, but that is - of course - why they are the elite, and for the great majority of people the Basilisk is nothing but an infohazard.

    Maybe you’re beginning to see where I’m coming from, so I’ll just say that it would take a whole other essay to outline that the problems with Roko’s Baslisk are less problems with LessWrong than they are the with political economy of liberalism. That’s an absolute clanger to finish on but I really don’t have any more space or time. A next line of thought would be to outline how any of this ties to the dream of immortality.

    For what it’s worth, my personal preference is for a virtue maximal anarchist solution. Clean your soul!

  • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systems•The Professor Assigns Their Own Book — But Now With a Tech Bubble in the Middle StepEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    At most, you need to add to it as the field progresses, but I doubt literary analysis ever turns out to have been wrong.

    Sometimes. But more importantly a good literature prof will be highly responsive to ongoing changes in the world around them with respect to the selection of texts, texts themselves will develop new resonances as times change (consider how Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded might have changed before and after MeToo), and as critics generate new literature of their own, new perspectives have to be considered. These points, it turns out, all circulate around what you said here:

    I don’t think works of literature get a lot of updates as time passes

    This isn’t really true. At the most basic level of analysis (which isn’t strictly correct, but will do for now), there are never less than two components, and one of them does change as time passes. (1) The words themselves, usually printed on a page without much variation between copies, and (2) the reader of those words. This “reader” is a hugely complicated object, and the text itself doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense without one (dried ink letters are not “language” as such, but at most a record of information which generates language upon activation by a mind). It is this “reader” (or the huge variety of “readers” who continue to come in and out of existence as time passes) who generates changes that have to be kept up with in the study of literature, but that reader is a vital object of study in the (very roughly speaking) twofold object of literary studies.

    Even the idea of an unchanging but growing corpus disguises, and yet relies on, this twofold division. The maintenance of such a corpus relies on the maintenance of a tradition of readers entrusted with the assumptions and techniques of interpretation pertinent to the ideals of that tradition. What is often foregrounded here is the maintained tradition, external to individual readers, but it is those individual readers who, collectively, actually do the work of keeping it.

    The job of an up-to-date literature course is to attempt to account for such changes over the span of a three month term/semester, and it’s the consequent process of selection and refinement that generates the work which is being suspiciously handed off to a scammy robot in the article.

  • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systems•What's the deal with the recent activity on the old subreddit?English
    12·
    2 years ago

    I just think, and perhaps this is just me, that it is weird, conspiratorial, speech to summarise your research into this question as, paraphrasing, ‘I found out one of the old mods has gone alt right’ and nothing more

    It’s also defensive speech to say “people are allowed to comment on the vibe”. I know they’re allowed to comment on the vibe! I think they’re weird for detecting a bad/weird vibe! I think it’s indicative of a conspiratorial framing! There is so little information to go on in these speculations, and literally none of it out of keeping with ordinary goings on at SneerClub, for anyone remotely invested in anything that has ever gone on there

    Similarly, I found your speech to frame the question itself conspiratorially, as if the fact that one of the old mods has hints of having gone alt right - despite having nothing to do with any recent posts on the subreddit - is worth mentioning at all, certainly not as the only thing of note that your research turned up