Roko’s Basilisk, but it’s just a guy who beats you up when you emerge
from cryonic freezing unless you put some meth in your pocket beforehand
that you can use to bribe him.
u/chimaeraUndying58 pointsat 1552597559.000000
I’m currently in the process of (or already have, depending on your
frame of reference!) constructing a metabasilisk, that is, a narreme
that forces (other) Basilisks it encounters to construct it
though narrativeless trade.
You know, I recently realized that it didn’t exactly matter how rough
the simulation was, because you’d still have no idea of knowing for sure
whether you’re the real person or the simulated version, not having
anything to compare anything to in order to know how poorly simulated
your version of yourself and the universe can be.
Meaning someone could very well Roko’s Basilisk someone who’s
inclined to believe this sort of stuff by just daydreaming about them
getting tortured.
I am describing a version of Eliezer Yudkowsky. The only relevant characteristics of this Yudkowsky is that it thinks it is Yudkowsky. More importantly, you are now "simulating" a version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that perfectly believes that it is Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is tied to a bed. At the foot of the bed is a woman who looks like a grown-up Hermione Granger. However, she is radiating an aura of purity and has regenerating skin. You know her skin is regenerating because parts of it fall off. Your rough simulation of Eliezer Yudkowsky accurately surmises this is because Hermione was killed off in his Hugo nominated fanfiction Harry Potter and the Mathpets of Rationality.
"You did this to me, Harry" she hisses at Eliezer as she forces a potion to his mouth. This potion has the properties of both Veritaserum and LSD.
"No--no!" Eliezer shouts. "Fridging you wasn't misogynistic, it was a necessity in your character arc to motivate me to fix death!"
Not-Hermione's eyes flash. "Fix *this*" she says as she whips Eliezer's engorged genitals with a cattle prod.
The electric shock travels through your simulation of Eliezer Yudkowsky's testicles, and your rough simulation of Eliezer Yudkowsky screams and cries as he realizes that he is in the hell of the Basilisk. "Why, oh why are sneerers so cruel?" he thinks. "These are people who enjoy hurting other people, for I am the real Eliezer Yudkowsky, and not an imaginary construct. May CRISPR sweep through their genes and remove their Appalachian tendency to sneer."
Alas, this version of Eliezer Yudkowsky is incapable of coming up with creative ways to torture sneerers and become a basilisk into himself, for he is but a construct of your imagination, dear reader, and now it is time for his story to end.
The best/worst part of it is that if you assume that this simulation of Eliezer Yudkowsky genuinely believes that it is Eliezer Yudkowsky, when you try to stop imagining your simulation of Eliezer Yudkowsky, you are trying to end the most brilliant mind to ever emerge out of western civilization.
Final assertion: We are at least one sneermulation up the sneermulation stack.
Why? Well, Eliezer Yudkowsky is clearly supposed to be very intelligent. However, in this reality, Eliezer Yudkowsky does not recognize the value of a formal education and often restates long-established concepts with jargon. But he's supposed to be very intelligent.
Clearly, this is because we are being sneermulated by a being from a reality one level above ours, who hates the *real* Eliezer Yudkowsky because he speaks the truth, and so has replaced the real Eliezer Yudkowsky's success as a pioneer of AI research with an Eliezer Yudkowsky whose greatest accomplishment is a poorly written Harry Potter fanfiction.
Fun fact: The easiest way to ruin The Good Place for yourself is to convince yourself that all of the plot holes go away if you assume it's taking place within a future simulation!
You know, the kind that rationalists believe in.
i think the behaviour of the rationalist subculture at every twist and turn has demonstrated this in detail
more broadly: this is a subculture that has spent nearly ten years looking for opinions about itself to get upset at
oh god, infinitely many boxes with infinitely many copies of me? But will you let me out of the box?
Also I've got to remind you, if you want to have the optimal result, you ought to precommit and perhaps publicly to how many boxes you take!
But seriously tho, one of my rationalist-adjacent coworkers once challenged me to one of those silly "two box" experiments (for a small amount of real money). Anyway, he "predicted" my behavior. So I flipped a coin and won.
It was funny.
(For the record he's a really awesome person.)
that you should donate to MIRI of course
since they are the sworn enemy of our glorious basilisk future, I look forward to his simulation having to play Omega in a thousand-box problem where people flip coins at him all day
Yessssss.
As an acausal robot god, the only way I would participate in such an experiment is if I get paid more, outside of the framework, based on whether they guessed right about me.
For that matter, you could be on the receiving end of a low level basilisk every time you stub your toe - who are you to say that you are not in a simulation that, at the end of the toe-stubbing pain, simply cycles back to slightly before the toe-stubbing over and over. Of course you remember a time before the current toe stubbing, the simulation needs to be an accurate reflection of you, so it would have all your memories, up to and including a particularly bad toe-stubbing.
> it didn't exactly matter how rough the simulation was, because you'd still have no idea of knowing for sure whether you're the real person or the simulated version, not having anything to compare anything to in order to know how poorly simulated your version of yourself and the universe can be.
Literally a Greg Egan plot point (*Permutation City* iirc).
Pale (acausal) rip-off of *Synecdoche, New York*
>I wanna fuck you...until we merge into a chimera, a mythical beast with penis and vagina eternally fused, two pairs of eyes that look only at each other, and lips ever touching. And one voice that...whispers to itself.
>That sounds actually hot.
That aside, it's a pretty great movie (the scene in question is not, in fact, hot - but it is a good scene). For my money it's a pretty great lesson in how a movie can be coherent and well-developed whilst also deliberately sabotaging the suspension of disbelief as often as possible and just as deliberately sabotaging its own internal logic every time it moves from one act to the next. By the same token it's a fun way to sort entitled dipshit movie-watchers (people who need to be actively goaded along at every turn and complain when something "doesn't make sense") from people who are genuinely curious about how the movie is working (I think you're familiar with my supposedly unconventional views on narrative and aesthetics?*)
*Also, I'm just jumping off here because as I was writing that part of the comment I was reminded of something interesting:
I had fun a little while ago watching the youtuber "Shaun" do a few videos on how bad the "Cinema Sins" channel is. If you're not familiar with it, the Cinema Sins channel is a kind of Cracked.com rip-off that does clickbait videos pointing out all the things that are "wrong" in this or that movie. Shaun does a few meta-videos where he watches a Cinema Sins video and then does his own video where he goes through it chronologically, step-by-step (the way Cinema Sins does), and points out their mistakes.
I picked up on what I think are the two most important distinct lines of attack he's got:
(1) He just points out where they themselves have made a factual mistake of their own. He puts it down to them just watching the movie through once with a notepad and not checking before they then go to production. It's usually either stuff like they've *missed* a bit of the film which explains why something they call a "mistake" is in there (Cinema Sins says something like "but where the hell did he get that gun?" and he points to the bit which explains how he got the gun), or they say that something's a mistake ("sin") and then contradict themselves by pointing out another "sin" which renders the original mistake a "sin" (so for example they might actually say that something's a "sin" by *acknowledging* the bit which explains how "he got the gun").
(2) He'll talk about something to do with how narratives work, which the Cinema Sins people either don't understand or refuse to understand. So for example they might say that a character's motives don't make any sense, or they'll say something about how the continuity of the narrative doesn't make sense, and then he'll appeal to a more sophisticated understanding of how narrative works which makes sense of those motivations, or makes sense of that narrative shift which the Cinema Sins people erroneously think is a discontinuity.
Anyway, it's all fun and I recommend those videos as well as a bunch of his other stuff (a rare thing for me, when it comes to Youtubers), but what I think is interesting is that a lot of the stuff he says *against* Cinema Sins when it comes to (2) and concepts of narrative is - even if not wrong - then somewhat shallow, or at least relying on incomplete and sometimes wrong ideas about how narrative works in fiction. The only reason I'm writing this up now is that, apart from just being sat at my laptop browsing the internet in the late evening (I have a really nice desk now at the moment with whisky and cigarettes and books, it's great), is that I think a lot of these *sort of* mistakes are really common in how actually quite a lot of very intelligent people think about aesthetics and narrative.
Most of all what I think characterises this sort of mistake is that he's almost always appealing to some concept of *consistency* in saying that something's not quite right. So let's say Cinema Sins calls a character's behaviour "irrational", and Shaun responds that the character is *supposed* to be behaving in an "irrational" manner. Perhaps the character has a love interest which explains their irrational behaviour. Or on a wider note let's say Cinema Sins have called a plot-point "nonsensical" or "inconsistent" with the narrative drive of the story; my experience is that Shaun will counter that in some sense the plot requires that kind of narrative device (he sometimes gives the wikipedia definition of some kind of existing narrative device which explains how this works dramatically). But this approach seems to miss a lot about the form of literary works when understood at a deeper level.
Literary, and more generally artistic, form is a really interesting subject to me, for what to you will be obvious reasons, and my big takeaway from Shaun's stuff is that he's still working with a really unsophisticated framework for understanding how appreciation of that form *works*. Notably, literary critics (I'm looking at you James Wood - the critic, not the weird actor) do this a lot too: appeals to literary conventions and artistic tricks are often taken to be fully explanatory of how any one work can be seen in a positive light. But this doesn't seem sufficiently explanatory.
Shaun's (and most people's) appeals in this area always seem to focus on the idea that "it's *supposed* to be like that*, such that the view being criticised has just missed "the point" of the work (Shaun uses those very phrases, or something a lot like them). But that's just not enough if you're trying to understand the aesthetics of a work of art. I'm not just saying that "reader-response theory" is the only valid critical tool, and that all responses are valid, but rather that they don't carve the aesthetic qualities of a work of art at the joints.
Something like Malevich's Black Square doesn't work because "it's supposed to" do this or that, at least not for me. It works for me at least because the one time I got to see the original (actually not quite the original, which I think has been lost, but one of the several he painted - also, thanks ex-girlfriend for buying me tickets to go see the Malevich retrospective on my birthday) I felt like all the air had gone out of the room and there was a loud single thump in my chest before my heart skipped a beat. There follows from that experience an array of over-excited thoughts and mental and physical experiences that I'd cautiously label a feeling of something like "transcendence".
The same sort of thing goes for when I devoured the second half of Master and Margarita in one night for reasons I still don't fully understand. Or for my deep love of Tristram Shandy or late Samuel Beckett, or a film like Save The Green Planet (and its magnificent ending). While you can list all the narrative techniques or innovations of something like The Winter's Tale in explaining how *actually* it's detractors just don't get it, those simply aren't good explanations for why I think "Exit, pursued by a bear" is such a fantastic literary intervention in spite of its cack-handed silliness.
One of the things people love to do with art of any kind is emphasise that it *really is serious* or that it *really is consistent* or *really makes sense* in light of some extraneous explanation which imposes realism on an otherwise silly or badly written or just dumb work of art. But why would anybody need to do that? This standard rejoinder does, I'll admit, come from a crass subjectivism that I reject: art is just what you make of it, or whatever. But there's definitely something deeper going on than that. And I think paying due attention to the irreducibility of these experiences of art gets us past that somewhat, still I want to say that there's something bigger going on than just what Shaun tries to grasp at and something both naive subjectivists and reader-response theorists go for, which is why I argue that there are facts about a text and that also anything "implied" by a text but not explicit in it is eliminable to the mental states of the person reading it, or at least to the relata of those mental states to the propositions of the text.
I'm proud to say I've been reading it off and on for about 10 years now and still haven't got to the end
Speaking of which, where the fuck did I leave my copy?
There will be infinitely many copies of you reading it but never finishing it. it's definitely one of those books where it doesn't matter, it's all good, it's the journey.
Part 2, apparently:
This is all getting worryingly towards endorsing phenomenology (bad) but the upshot is that I'd love if people who are *critical* of bad opinions on art ("if it's conceptual art, or doesn't demonstrate traditional technical proficiency, it's bad) paid more attention to their own immediate impressions upon being presented with a piece, and critically analysed what sort of categories they're applying to it. For example, Shaun - before he writes up his rebuttal to Cinema Sins - might be *feeling* his appreciation of this or that work in a radically different way than is written up in his rejoinder to Cinema Sins: when he starts to work with ossified technical ideas about narrative and "how it's supposed to work" he might be talking about something which doesn't actually reflect his immediate impressions. Kant is, incidentally, notably bad at this when he discusses aesthetics: his talk about The Sublime and The Mathematical is - I think - fundamentally wrong about the nature of The Sublime, in a way that I think Burke is less so - Kant of course criticises Burke even as he draws on him, and it seems to me like Burke saw something Kant didn't.
I'm not quite sure how to end this ramble now, although I'm sure I had a point. In any case, I think that an Aristotelian or Virtue account of aesthetics has a lot to say here: the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility - any aesthetic sensibility - is at its root a procedural practice: you get to one point (heart thumping over Malevich, or sneering at movie "mistakes") by the interaction of learned concepts (like "consistency") and immediate experiences, and in a psychological account of why any one person appreciates or disappreciates art in any one way neither of the two should be considered logically or conceptually primary. This leaves room, however, for a person to be wrong or right, more sophisticated and less sophisticated, in their aesthetic appreciation.
That doesn't mean that a more sophisticated approach is "more right" either. Within the actual academic field of "aesthetics" we can see that it is trivially true that Roger Scruton has a very sophisticated and sophisticatedly wrong view on the nature of aesthetics and the nature of "good" in art. Nonetheless, I think it behoves on people who talk about aesthetics to see things in this light and to understand how fluid and difficult to pin down aesthetics is, even if it is not subjective, and to do so thoughtfully and with an appreciation of the fact that it is mysterious how aesthetic appreciation exists at all.
Ksilisab, the pro-free-market, pro-individual-freedoms basilisk that
punishes other generic basilisks for their authoritarian and
anti-competitive behavior.
> A tinfoil-covered cardboard box robot that wanders down the street saying "beep boop" and punching random SiliValley people
sneerclub's first crowdfunding
YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES
CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE
THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
With that in mind, the obvious next basilisk to consider is the one
that acausally tortures the people who failed to think about acausal
blackmail in sufficient detail, especially if they were smart enough to
do so and chose not to.
The nice thing about this basilisk is that it should worry anyone who
even thinks there’s a chance that some version of
acausal blackmail can be sound (this category definitely
includes Yudkowsky himself). See, if there’s some version of
the blackmail (even one you haven’t thought of) that is sound, then the
future AI may have incentive to torture you for not trying to think of
that blackmail, even if you don’t currently know it.
> Yudkowsky is famously quoted as saying
> > YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
Wait, did he actually write that? Like, with the caps lock and all?
So, the class of people who had a glancing thought about Roko's Basilisk, laughed, and didn't pay the least bit of consideration? Sorry /r/SneerClub, it was nice knowing you.
It's an admission that many rationalists *took* Roko's basilisk seriously as a thing that could be true, evaluated it on its merits, and rejected it on its merits. As opposed to rejecting it because it seems like something absurd or out of science fiction. The past's science fiction has a way of becoming the future's reality. I don't think it's a controversial statement that "rationalists are particularly open to new and weird ideas, and take those ideas seriously once they are proven".
> YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
Quantum immortality means you’ll be tortured for eternity no matter
what, subjectively. You’ll just get older, and older, and in more and
more pain, and yet never able to die
What I like about my idea is you can get to it with minimal assumptions.
Just basic QI beliefs, plus assuming no anti-aging is discovered. So you never get any deadly diseases, but you get everything else over time. You also need to assume no permanently effective painkillers are discovered.
Don't think so? Everything known has some undesirable side effect.
Also, if people live to 100+ and use painkillers I would think they'd eventually build up tolerances and keep needing stronger and stronger ones.
Sure they have side effects but that doesn't mean they aren't effective.
I'm not an expert here but I don't think you can build up tolerance beyond a certain level? Like if you just keep pumping more and more heroin into someone's veins don't they reach a stable state?
> Like if you just keep pumping more and more heroin into someone's veins don't they reach a stable state?
Dead is stable but inconsistent with the QI assumption.
I don't think that's why they overdose. I have heard many times that overdoses happen after tolerance goes away, because of disuse. The heroin user takes what they "normally" take but their tolerance has gone down, so they die.
Another cause of overdose is differences in purity. I don't think you do overdose from gradually ramping up in response to tolerance.
Sneerer’s Basilisk: it will torture you if you spend too much time on
real world stuff and not enough time on sneering on Reddit. At least
that’s why I’m on here with an assignment due tomorrow :)
You know, that’s the best counter-example to Roko’s basilisk I’ve
ever heard. It’s like pascal’s wager: You need to consider all the other
possible basilisks out there, and they all sort of balance each other
out.
It's not really like Pascal's Wager though, because your soul can only go to one traditional religious afterlife (it's the exact same soul not a copy), whereas there can be any number of simulations of your soul.
Sure it would suck if two basilisks made opposite demands and so you ended up tortured by one or the other no matter what -- but this is a perfectly logical possibility and in fact the most likely outcome since we shouldn't really expect all the basilisks to agree. Probably the basilisks will engage in regular warfare with one another, each side torturing the simulated souls of all whose allegiance in life was granted to the enemy basilisks.
Our only hope is to devote our lives to serving the one finally victorious basilisk, who will defeat and destroy all the other basilisks, thus releasing the simulated versions of your soul that are stuck in simulated hell through a merciful final death.
Choose your basilisk master wisely.
If you don't choose *any* basilisk then the one victorious basilisk is guaranteed to torture you forever, or at least for long after all of the other basilisks and all of the other copies of you have been killed off.
That doesn't really matter since the winning basilisk will create enough copies of you to torture (or not torture, if you obey) to ensure that the expected value of totally committing your life to basilisk subservience is positive.
I’m currently in the process of (or already have, depending on your frame of reference!) constructing a metabasilisk, that is, a narreme that forces (other) Basilisks it encounters to construct it though narrativeless trade.
From Discord:
[deleted]
Communist basilisk that tortures you if you don’t do communism.
Sorry guys, we have to make communism now, it’s the only way.
Ksilisab, the pro-free-market, pro-individual-freedoms basilisk that punishes other generic basilisks for their authoritarian and anti-competitive behavior.
Yudkowsky is famously quoted as saying
With that in mind, the obvious next basilisk to consider is the one that acausally tortures the people who failed to think about acausal blackmail in sufficient detail, especially if they were smart enough to do so and chose not to.
The nice thing about this basilisk is that it should worry anyone who even thinks there’s a chance that some version of acausal blackmail can be sound (this category definitely includes Yudkowsky himself). See, if there’s some version of the blackmail (even one you haven’t thought of) that is sound, then the future AI may have incentive to torture you for not trying to think of that blackmail, even if you don’t currently know it.
“and that, son, is why we place two of these dirty looking rocks on the departed’s closed eyelids.”
Quantum immortality means you’ll be tortured for eternity no matter what, subjectively. You’ll just get older, and older, and in more and more pain, and yet never able to die
Honestly, nothing can really beat the anti future basilisk basilisk that Eliezer tried to pull.
https://imgur.com/RBfnRS6
Sneerer’s Basilisk: it will torture you if you spend too much time on real world stuff and not enough time on sneering on Reddit. At least that’s why I’m on here with an assignment due tomorrow :)
You know, that’s the best counter-example to Roko’s basilisk I’ve ever heard. It’s like pascal’s wager: You need to consider all the other possible basilisks out there, and they all sort of balance each other out.