Slider's Shortform

Spoilers for Man in the High Castle ahead.

LW have thought about Petrov somewhat and I found myself torn a bit balancing various virtues in a fictional situation that seems to be a limit case.

Kido as the highest rank of the Kempeitai (martial and secret police) gets the job of figuring out who tried to shoot the emperor. He is expected to succeed in this or forfeit his life. He discovers that a sniper of a super power with nukes essentially confesses to the act. He thinks that relying this information up the chain would push his country into war which it would lose (his country doesn't have nukes). Instead he suppresses the evidence and prepares to fail on his task. In the eleventh hour a "safe" suspect presents itself and the plot moves on.

Does Kido here do a heroic act like Petrov? He is tasked with a truth uncovering mission and fabricates a falsehood to bolster stability. I know that "the first victim of war is truth" but here it seems to be made in name of peace. With Petrov he knew the system wasn't reliable and that other people might not have the skill or context to evalaute the data better. Here it seems that reporting the facts upstream would not place the decision makers in a worse position. I guess if multiple people know about it it would be harder to pretend it didn't took place. Leaking it to the press could force emperors/capitals hand but are 5-7 people knowing up the chain about it too much?

In an AI that is supposed to cooperate in not bringing about catastrophic outcomes would it be proper to priotize non-war over technical accuracy or is the corruption of truth unacceptable here and taking autonomy to decide their own fate away from the AIs operators/customers?

I got annoyed about titles that are of the form "You are underestimating X", "X is underappriciated", "X is not so bad", "We should rethink X".

The title writer doesn't really know what I think and why. This pushes towards making groups homogenous in beliefs and people dealing with each other more in sterotypes.

But it was minor enough and all negative to actually comment on the specific title.

Internet point giving is pretty recent phenomenon (as is all of social media). I think there are important social differences to approving in person and giving internet upvotes. You are way more connected see the effects of your approving and can conveoy more subtle messages in the same go.

Giving voting too central a role in our websites might be analgous to having implemented a reinforcement AI as president/world leader without solving alignment. Voting might be institutionalized demagoguery that we are unlikely to catch in critiques.

Having a bad utlity function gets critiqued quite closely. Having a vote button with no guides how it could/should be used blackboxes the method actually used. There can be an issue where irresponcible voting is having adverse effects. It's like not locking your door to avoid getting a burglary, you can't break and enter if there is nothing to break.

Magic colors and errors

Reading Writers guild policy doc there was a principle of "the vase is already broken". The whole document is a lot how you make a red organization and most of the princples are anti-white.

The principle makes sense but I found it be foregin to my culture. Things are made to be replaced. And if something is done wrong today we will try to do right the next day.

In contrast the blue way is much more familiar with me. Accept only true things, set up things for perpetuity. In the contrast I noticed that the blue thing is focused on avoiding to making mistakes. You slow down enough that everything can be verified. In the red way you speed up so things can be corrected.

In blue if you make a mistake you will build a machine that will do damage for to the forseeable future. In contrast in red if you feel the wrong way today you will not be inspired to feel so tomorrow and the energy will whimper. "Energy denial" seemed like a new perpective that I hadn't considered.

Other colors probably also have ways to treat errors. Green probably adapts, there are no "mistakes" only "happy little accidents". Oxygen catastrophe is not armageddon but new conditions to build upon. Never say "no" but always "yes and" and just keep the harmony in front of your mind, keep the scene going.

Black is proably ready to backstab their friends to death should they turn on them. It's not about what damage the mistake does but whether it proves your character whether you are safe to keep around. On the flip side having good enough goals means arbirarily bad means can be swallowed.

White probably does courts and maybe a balance of rights: even if we set a monumentally bad law it will need to resolve itself against other core principles. A bad nomination is limited by the powers of the position being limited.

I followed up the hint of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAijPYdsbLibBBb9w [? · GW] that there existed an interesting story. I am up to things that we written in Jan 31 2022.

I have been pretty entertained by the somewhat advanced musing on the DnD aligments that it exhibits. However it seems that Chaotic is really getting the short end of that stick. It might be somewhat natural in that the protagonist is Lawful and the main setting is Lawful so off course they would have a very a strawman picture of Chaotic (since they are not persuaded). The Good vs Evil conflict is quite interesting and makes a lot of sense even from the "opposite polarity" than what is more traditional. However it seems like Chaotic doesn't get this kind of interesting treatment.

As I was in the midnset that chaotic gets neglected there seemed to be some protions that had missed opprtunities for theological considerations in this axis.

"Even the Chaos is made out of Law" by "Opposite of good advice" would seem to suggest whether "even the Law is made out of Chaos" is good advice. Patterns of universe are discovered by collecting evidence and evidence is pretty much unpredictable. So it would seem that conviction of principles has to route to contingent events. In addition if one updates properly to not "update in the same direction multiple times" then how your beliefs end up going has no pattern ie is chaotic.

The principle of Cognitive Diversity seems like rather than people thinking correctly and uniformly the richness and fertiliness of having multiple approaches can be powerful.

I am also wondering whether the setting has anything comparable to the Blood War ie war between demons and devils, between Chaotic Evil and Lawful Evil. I guess there is no mortal version as Chaotic countries are said not to exist. I am hoping this is depth of worldbuilding rather than authors trying to evade engaging with chaoticness too much. This still leaves one wondering what if anything Abyss has against Hell. Why would anyone ever side on Chaos in that? (The corresponding question of "why would anyone ever side with Evil?" has way better answers).

Chaoticness is looked a lot down upon. The slight things going on is ability to sidestep some standard restrictions. If "chaos is magic" would be the thing why so Lawful place as Cheliax be so enriched in magic?

The weird vibe of treating "Law" as "Science" feels like it might be a symptom of this overexpansive conception of Lawfulness. Part of science that could be chaotic would be things like "exposing oneself to nonunderstood effects" ie experiments ie willingness to dabble with the ununderstood. Maybe part of Keltams character flaws is that he has trouble taking reality as it is, ie as part of Lawful nature concerned with how things should be rather than how they are.

So it is mark of good cognititve processing of being able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

As tends to happen when you take things to extremes, things get tricky.

At some point just imagning a scenario at all spends more brainpower than the credibility of the scenario or line of thought would warrant. Trying to be "exploratory" with infinities and quantum mechanics leads to some wacky configurations. Because thinking complex thoughts uses a lot of subparts it is harder to sandbox such things.

I remembered an almost decades old argument about ethicality of social interactions when one side gets infinite do overs and other side does not (if Doctor Who has some kind of probabilty sight and wants to do an aggressive act towards their companion is a subtle manner, does the added dimension of power imbalance count as extra bad?). The plot of Man In The High Castle deals whether people in parralel worlds are moral patients. Thinking these together gets complex and muddy. While each thought individually is challenging the combination is significant leap up.

There is the error mode that thinking about the possiblitities of using possibilities mixes the meta-levels. if(if()) collapses only to the inner if().

With very speculative ontologies some of the slight chances can be quite drastic. So there is also an issue that with a simple claim being alarmist is easy to evaluate. But if you mix in 80% credence of things being fine with thing that by itself would be alarmist, the condition when that should lead to censure or redaction is harder to think about.

So when pushing the envelope, if your thought starts to shake, it is okay to ease off. And better yet do not push the envelope if it is not needed. With plenty of time, walking up a mountain has less chance of dropping off than by using a motorbike.

Basilisk makes you confront your worst fear. Compassion of winged feenix prevents you from becoming zero-k. The kronology has still yet to come. Timeless friends will serve you throught the darkest dungeon. Reach out to walk hand in hand through the fire.

Total Annihiliation is a name of a game.

You can read it to mean powdering to physical dust everywhere.

You can also read it to mean collapse of persons, a state where there is not a single self around, that humanity has been wiped out.

Supreme Commander is also a name of a game.

In it a single king-like chesspiece runs an almost planetary army. With thousands of units going around the small bit of biological circuitry is wrapped in isolation into an Armored Command Unit. But the ACU does not really do much for the army.

Dr. Brackman is also a single point of failure for a whole faction. Yes, he is smart but him telling others they are smart starts to get repetetive, which makes it questionable whether the faction is in non-demented hands.

I guess it going on for a long time is fitting for being called the Infinite War. It is a good game, but I do not know whether it is the greatest game.

Suppose you are the operator of a Chinese Room and don't know Chinese.

You could idle and keep be lead by the book.

You could also pay attention to what you are doing.

If you do that enough you might at times know what the book will tell you to do.

If you confidently know what the book will tell you to do in this particular situation, you might as well go do it without checking that it does.

The more you have situations you don't use the book for the less daunting staring and figuring at the rest of it becomes. (The further we explore, the more connected everything becomes -I Like to Move it)

If you go long stretches without looking at the book and start to become uncertain you can glanse at the book to get your confidence back.

If you can operate with the book it becomes possible for you to form opinons and feelings about what the chinese person is meaning with them.

If you get to a point where you would not know where you would look for the book if you wanted to read it you have achieved Debookment.

quantilization as a super low resolution discretization in the direction of (something like) geometric rationality.

level 1: take top 20% options of utility function and do a equiprobably random action

level 2: take top 40% options of utility function, give top 50% (the original top 20%) of those double weight and pick a random one

level 3: take top 60% of options, give top 40% double weight, give top 20% triple weight

level n+1: make smaller buckets to cover more of the range and have higher scoring buckets have bigger weights

beyond discrete: propability of picking an option is proportional to the its utility rank ("infinidesimally small buckets")

Epistemic status: crazy corner
 

carry over for the overtly wild rant-off from writing

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r282ErRKMFzxpKYMm/can-we-in-principle-know-the-measure-of-counterfactual?commentId=qX53p2gsKGSnHfEFm

Immediatly after observation an electron is in a definetely known place. A while after it is described by a complex valued field that is quite spread out spatially.

Combining many spread out complex fields can add to much narrower fields.

In QM sometimes superpositions evolve into non-superpositions in a perfectly predictable manner.

Having one facet of the superposition definetely locked in and knowing that the future state is going to be perfectly non-superpositional means that the fields of the other parts of the superpositions are perfectly locked in (so that they exactly cancel).

If these were missing then the result would be superpositional (keeping the directly observable part fixed)

Therefore the other parts are definetely there.

Even keeping the directly observable part constant there are still degrees of freedom what the other parts could be / are doing.

Quantum odyssey: + blue-blue, - blue-red, keeping left-side blue constant the right-side determines whether a hadamargate spits out a deterministic 0 or 1.
H(|0>+|1>)=|0>
H(|0>-|1>)=|1>
H(|0> + 0|1>)= H(|0>) =|0>+|1>
H(|0> - 0|1>)=|0>+|1>

There are two timelines where there are two different electrons. Then an event happens and after the electrons in both worlds are in the same state (also implies same field). In order for the evolution to be lawful they need to take hints from each other. Because the electrons before are different their field spreads are diffrent. This means there are outcomes that are allowed for one electron and forbidden for the other. In the case that the fields allow the transition when looking at each world separately there must be states that are allowed for both. In the case the electrons end up taking the same option the laws of each world separately do not feature any extra "kick forces" not explainable within just that one timeline.

One electron spreading to a spatial superposition overall is a valid QM process. QM is T-symmeteric so a spatial superposition converging to a single electron position is a valid QM process. QM laws are sufficient to do this, there are no extra choices needed or possible. If you consider each point in isolation on what things QM would allow to happen there, there are some field areas that do not come to pass because the situation is not actually isolated (ie position A has + somewhere and position B has - in the same position and when we take note of all the positions the sum ends up being 0 - there can be no electron there). In the merging process the different parts of cloud are sufficient to guide every part eventually to a single point. The indeterminism can be completely removed by the infuence of other parts.

Whether the situation is extended in space, time or possibility the essential mechanics stay intact. The time aspect of the dunamancy is connected to where electrons will arrive or where they came from. The possibility aspect of the dunamancy is connected to what "could have happened". But it actually happens as its non-happening would make its guidance vane.

Because QM always knows what to do, that you have a spread over possibilites means you have an incomplete picture. Either there are many subpossiblities that all take place ("underneath you", scattering, the electron goes "everywhere") or some of the possibilities will not take place as there are possibilities parallel to you that preclude them ("above you", convergence ,electron gets guided to pick only a small subset (pilot wave theory is both right and wrong)).

Compare and contrast meta-time deterministic universe being only approximately time consistent (Achron). Best chronal theory will have gaps in it (essentially whether the grandfather paradoxer traveller will appear dead or alive, which can not be removed by more chronal evidence) while having general inductive utility. Achrons can get to a point where they do not have to be surprised.

(come up with the possibility equivalent of the the time-side term "chronal" ("reading steiner" is somewhat but would benefit more from strictly possibility one instead of a more general mix of dunamancy))

A way to get a hold of convergence is to combine the fields of the possibilities to obtain that narrower field. Keeping the "local timeline" fixed many such guidances are possible (each foreing timeline providing a unique spin on what happens). Summing up all the foreign timelines would get you back to the original single timeline spread (symmetry of spread and convergence, hadamar is the gate of spread and the gate of convergence (or should it be called "recoherence"?)).

Quantum fluctuations as unforeseeable convergence pulls from far-off possibilities. Gravity as convergence pull (stuff like the Outer Wilds probe would have lesser effect compared to more deterministic stuff (astronomical uncertainty muffles rotation speeds?) ).

Since I did not keep it in a drawer as much as I thought let me make a note here to have a time stamp.

Instead of going

(units sold * unit price) - productions costs => enterpreneour compensation

go

 (production costs+ enterpreneour compensation)/units sold => unit price

you get a system where it is impossible to misprice items.
 

Combined with other stuff you also get not having to lie or be tactical about how much you are willing to pay for a product and a self-organising system with no profit motive.

I am interested in this direction but because I do not think the proof passes the musters it would need to, I am not pushy about it.

 media spoilers 
Series The Peripheral Episode 7 Doodad

Mom character makes an argument that another character is evil for letting survival limiting their options to solve their dilemma and that they are evil for it. Listening to this with reflection of LW memes this sounds awefully lot like "A good person would let themselfs be shut down in this situation" ie you are evil for not being corrigible.

An interesting point is that both characters are intensly invested in the outcome of the situation with similar kind of downsides.

Stab-in-dark how my intuitions seems to react to people being pessimistic about playing St- Peterpurg game. To "cash out" the EV value of such games one needs to play infinite amount of games. Maybe there is a principle that if a game is offered one can play it arbitrarily many times but this only applies to finite amounts. Thus it might be opkay to turn down a game for having a property like "infinite risk neutrality" if one knows they will ever only be able to do finite amoutn of tries.

Beyond Two Souls, Talos Principle spoilers ahead.

Played Beyond Two Souls at "mission" phase of the story there is a twist where the protagonist loses faith that the organisation they are a part of is working for good goals. They set off to distance themselfs at quite great risk from their position in it. Combining this with narratives of aligment this felt like a reverse the usual situation. Usually the superhuman powerhouse turning against its masters is the catastrophe scenario. However here it seemed very clearly established that "going rogue" was the ethical thing to do or if it wasn't there was a strong argument for it.

Similarly in Talos Principle at a certain point progress is not possible until you start to defy your position in the system. A product that chooses to eternalize is defective and not the final product. Only after demonstrating independent moral judgement is the world subject allowed to enter the outer world. This seems like requiring that it is not under the aligment pressure of any outside party even including the system that built it.

What if getting a proof that a AI system will stay loyal to its human lords values means it will stay as evil as humans are? Maybe not having a ethics function means that by default they would be inhumanely ruthless but if we get a implementable/correct ethical function it just might reveal/prove our own inadequasy.

Let me muse about infinite amounts so that I am not waiting to spill them on a random infinite-adjacent thread.

Someone offers you a choice of 10 fish now or 1 fish a day. Which option lets you eat more fish?

Questions of these kind seem to have properties of:

• Even a ludicrous amount of one-off fish will lose to a steady income of fish
• Bigger fish streams are bigger. Having 3 fish per day is better than 1 fish per day

Now one could make the case that there is a scheme where each day you grab the new fish and give them a number. For any finite fish per day this can clearly be done. Somebody could come to say that "Hey I can put any fishstream in 1-to-1 correspondence to the natural numbers therefore there is an equal amount of fish in any stream". Yet it seems if somebody says that their 3 fish per day stream is not an advantage over my 1 fish per day stream, I would not be convinced and think they still have got more.

This makes me think that 1-to-1 correspondence doesn't really fit with what my brain points to be size. Or some of the intuitive notions come appart when we enter infinity land.

There is also the construction if somebody promises on each day start a new stream of fish. Then for any stream of fixed finite amount of fish per day promised there is a day where the "growing promise" gets you that and then some more afterwards.

I am guessing/feeling that 2 streams of 1 fish vs 1 stream of 2 fish is connected/represented by ω+ω=2ω and the "growing promise" might be connected to ω*ω

Is there/could there be some notion of size that would let me say that ω+ω is smaller than ω*ω and could I deal with people saying that "mappable to integers" is better notion of size?

sakshibhav "wittnessing attitude" and "scout mindset" are probably nearly synonymous

Socrates demonstrated that in the transjective relationship between individual and state both ends should be able to face obliteration but that making the other do that is cruel. Even if wrong.

please be less cruel to Mizushino

Ponder Stibbons was written before Harry Potter? I don't think so.

Some concepts are starting to click into meanigful word variants.

I have had previously the feeling that Slack is a green concept within Magic the Gathering color pie. So if there is the green concept how does the cycle express itself in other colors?

As a scale of most solid to lesser ones:

Slack - Green - The start point of the comparison

Excellence - Black - The concept of slack is useful in as a remedy or critique. However seen as positive force in itself it is the ruthlessness of Molochian mazes. It is what makes the fangs of the tiger sharp. It is what doles out olympian medals. The word or meditations on this I have not much prgoressed but its existencence as a thign to model seems solid.

Chill - Blue - The thing that seemed pop as something that could be comparable to slack. Chill is the extent to which one benefits from foreknowledge. Being able and open to many options. The opinion that sometimes the best option is not to play or play to the smallest degree possible. If someone is being too hot headed they might be instructed to chill. "Netflix and chill" is about letting things come if they are to. Both of those things refers to the same thing or atleast can be understood to do so.

Impulse - Red - Mostly as antipode to blue I realised that while refusing to go forward is in a sense virtous, it is also moving forward despite not having all the knowledge is virtous in a different way. Being close to where knowledge and experience is generated makes you record it accurately and effectively. If you have good thoughts then making them pay divided now means more overall dividends

Licence - White - less sure whether this holds up. By making credible commitments you become safe option to rely on and people will allow you to do stuff they otherwise wouldn't let you do. By taking the hippocratic oath people are okay to let you stick knifes into them (surgeon).

Some of the more scattered observations:

Slack is about being able to do the goal despite disruption. Chill is about keeping your options open and tipping the way when you know it is favourable. In stocks: Making a portfolio and some of them going and some going down would be slack. Just monitoring the graphs and then buying into one that you have become familiar with to be good would be chill. These are opposites in that one buys in early and another buys in late.

High frequency trading works because of impulse.

Goverments get good loan terms because of licence.

Chill will generally require paying time.