Baudrillard's language seems quite religious, so I almost feel that a religious example might relate directly to his claims better. I haven't really read Baudrillard, but here's how I'd explain my current understanding:

Stage 1: People pray faithfully in public because they believe in God and follow a religion. Those who witness this prayer experience a window into the transcendent.

Stage 2: People realise that they can gain social status by praying in public, so they pretend to believe. Many people are aware of this, so witnessing an apparently sincere prayer ceases to be the same experience as you don't know whether it is genuine or not. It still represent the transcendent to some degree, but the experience of witnessing it just isn't the same.

Stage 3: Enough people have started praying insincerely that almost everyone starts jumping on the bandwagon. Publicly prayer has ceased to be an indicator of religiosity or faith any more, but some particularly naive people still haven't realised the pretence. People still gain status from this for speaking sufficiently elegantly. People can't be too obviously fake though or they'll be punished either by the few still naive enough to buy into it or by those who want to keep up the pretence. While in level 2, the lie was that people claimed to be faithful when they weren't, in level 3 the lie is the very existence of the congregation of the faithful.

Stage 4: Praying is now seen purely as a social move which operates according to certain rules. It's no longer necessary in and of itself to convince people that you are real, but part of the game may include punishments for making certain moves. For example, if you swear during your prayer, that might be punished for being inappropriate, even though no-one cares about religion any more, because that's seen as cheating or breaking the rules of the game. However, you can be obviously fake in ways that don't violate these rules, as the spirit of the rules has been forgotten. Maybe people pray for vain things like becoming wealthy. Or they go to church one day, then post pictures of them getting smashed the next day on Facebook, which all their church friends see, but none of them care. The naive are too few to matter and if they say anything, people will make fun of them.

I'll admit that I've added something of my own interpretation here, especially in terms of how strongly you have to pretend to be real at the various stage

There are two aspects of this post worth reviewing: as an experiment in a different mode of discourse, and as a description of the procession of simulacra, a schema originally advanced by Baudrillard.

As an experiment in a diffferent mode of discourse, I think this was a success on its own terms, and a challenge to the idea that we should be looking for the best blog posts rather than the behavior patterns that lead to the best overall discourse.

The development of the concept occurred over email quite naturally without forceful effort. I would have written this post much later, and possibly never, had I held it to the standard of "written specifically as a blog post." I have many unfinished drafts. emails, tweets, that might have advanced the discourse had I compiled them into rough blog posts like this. The description was sufficiently clear and compelling that others, including my future self, were motivated to elaborate on it later with posts drafted as such.

I and my friends have found this schema - especially as we've continued to refine it - a very helpful compression of social reality allowing us to compare different modes of speech and action.

As a description of the procession of simulacra it differs from both Baudrillard's description, and from the later refinement of the schema among people using it actively to navigate the world.  I think that it would be very useful to have a clear description of the updated schema from my circle somewhere to point to, and of some historical interest for this description to clearly describe deviations from Baudrillard's account. I might get around to trying to draft the former sometime, but the latter seems likely to take more time than I'm willing to spend reading and empathizing with Baudrillard.

Over time it's become clear that the distinction between stages 1 and 2 is not very interesting compared with the distinction between 1&2, 3, and 4, and a mature naming convention would probably give these more natural names than the numbering we're using now, but my later attempt to name them was forced and premature.

Let me check I'm following with some simple claims:

• If it's common knowledge that we're in world 3, then we're in world 4.
• If it's common knowledge that we're in world 2, then we're in world 4.
• The key value to being in world n+1 is that you can outplay all the people in world n.
• To move back from world 2 into world 1, one can punish inaccurate job titles
• To move back from world 3 into world 2, one can punish not treating workers according to their titles
• You can't move back from world 4 to world 3.

This came out in April 2019, and bore a lot of fruit especially in 2020. Without it, I wouldn't have thought about the simulacra concept and developed the ideas, and without those ideas, I don't think I would have made anything like as much progress understanding 2020 and its events, or how things work in general. 

I don't think this was an ideal introduction to the topic, but it was highly motivating regarding the topic, and also it's a very hard topic to introduce or grok, and this was the first attempt that allowed later attempts. I think we should reward all of that.

Note: awhile ago I added this to our "potential things to curate" list.

I don't really feel good about curating it as-is because a) it's not super optimized to be a clear introduction to the topic, b) I don't think the terminology as it currently is is that good, c) I think it could be a bit more clear about what it's epistemic status is. (Or rather, the epistemic status here is clearly 'random un-distilled conversation", but if it were distilled, it'd then become necessary to be more clear about what people are supposed to take away from it)

The ideas here have been brought up in other related discussions, enough such that I think there'd be value in putting the work into clarifying things better. I think it's valuable for "Curated" to be the place people read to keep up with "new building blocks" for current discussion, but another important characteristic is clarity.

None of this is meant to be an obligation, just a note that "if Ben (or perhaps Jessica) were to put the time into optimizing this to be a good introduction to the medium-term discourse, I'd be interested in curating that." (I checked with Habryka before posting this, did not run this particular comment by him but he indicated a similar viewpoint)

This seems to be where simulacra first started to appear in LW discourse? There doesn't seem to be a polished general post on the subject until 2020, but I feel like the concepts and classification were floating around in 2019, and some credit probably belongs on this post.

This seems like a useful frame.

I notice myself feeling somewhat frustrated that there aren't currently names for the 4 stages that are succinct but meaningful (lies/bullshit/power-games doesn't feel like it cleaves it in a way that parses for me). But this is perhaps indicative of the intrinsic difficulty in communicating about this class of problem (because it doesn't want to be easily communicated about)

I'm generally in favour of including posts containing concepts which have seen regular use. Given the different ways this concept has been used, I'd love to see this post expanded in order to address these.

I think Raemon’s comments accurately describe my general feeling about this post-intriguing, but not well-optimized for a post.

However, I also think that this post may be the source of a subtle misconception in simulacra levels that the broader LessWrong community has adopted. Specifically, I think the distinction between 3 and 4 is blurred in this post, and tries to draw the false analogy that 1:2::3:4. Going from 3 (masks the absence of a profound reality) to 4 (no profound reality) is more clearly described not as a “widespread understanding” that they don’t mean anything, but as the lack of an attempt to promulgate a vision of reality in which they do mean something. In the jobs example, this means a title like “Vice President of Sorting” when your company doesn’t sort, but sorting is a viable job is level 3. In this case, the sign attempts to be interpreted by interviews as a kind of fabrication of a profound reality, masking the absence thereof. In my mind, this is pretty clearly where Trump falls: “successful businessman” is not a profound reality, but he’d like it to be interpreted as one. On the other hand, SL4 refers to a world in which titles aren’t designed to refer to anything at all: rather, they become their own self-referential ecosystem. In this case, all “Vice-president of laundering hexagons” means is that I was deemed worthy of a “vice-president of laundering hexagons,” not that I’m attempting to convince someone that I actually laundered hexagons but everyone knows that that’s not true.

ETA-as strongly implied above, I do not support upvoting this post.

I very much like that this topic is being explored, but I fear you're on the wrong track in thinking that these worlds are distinct. Jessica doesn't go far enough in the critique that this is assuming uniformity of use and knowledge of such. In fact, all these worlds are simultaneously overlaid on one another, among different people and often among different parts of the same conversation. Sometimes people are aware of the ambiguity or outright misleading use of words, sometimes they're not, and sometimes they think they are but it still has emotional impact. And we should probably add world 0: brutal honesty where titles are conservative estimates of value rather than broad categories of job, and world -1 where labels don't exist and people are referred to by the sum total of what they've done in their life.

It should be clearer that language is _ALWAYS_ a mix of cooperative and adversarial games. Everyone is trying to put ideas into each other's heads that benefit the speaker. Some of them also benefit the listener, and that's great. But it's impossible to separate from those times when the goals diverge.

On the object level of your example, I do a fair bit of interviewing, and I guarantee you that competent recruiters know what different company's titles generally mean, and even then take them with a grain of salt. Competent hiring managers focus on impact and capability in interviews, not on titles. Agreed that titles and self-described resume entries carry a lot of weight in getting and framing the interview. But outright lies won't get you anything, even if a small amount of puffery likely gets you a small improvement in success rate and initial offer.

This feels like it needs some context or background. What’s a “good job”, a “bad job”, a “good title”, or a “bad title”? Could we get examples of these things?

This is not the clearest or the best explanation of simulacrum levels on LessWrong, but it is the first. The later posts on the subject (Simulacra and Subjectivity [LW · GW], Negative Feedback and Simulacra [LW · GW], Simulacra Levels and Their Interactions [LW · GW]) are causally downstream of it, and are some of the most important posts on LessWrong. However, those posts were written in 2020, so I can't vote for them in the 2019 review.

I have applied the Simulacrum Levels concept often. I made spaced-repetition cards based on them. Some questions are easy to notice and ask, in simulacrum level terms, and impossible to ask otherwise: What things drive it higher or lower? What level is my conversational partner at? Can I make things more object-level? These questions were hard to notice before, but I think I've been able to answer them, in contexts where I wouldn't.

For someone who reads the Best of 2019 Review books, I think failing to mention the simulacrum levels would be a grave disservice, both because they're a really key concept for understanding the conversations that happened on LessWrong, and for understanding the world in general.

So I'm voting for inclusion. It's not the best of the explanations, but it's good enough, and it's the one we've got.

This concept has definitely proven to be a meaty topic. It is interesting in that it has already been the subject of some ongoing discussion/review in 2020, and I'm not entirely sure how the 2019 Review should work for evaluating Simulacra.

I'm nominating this post in particular, but I think it'd be good during the Review Phase to do some meta-thinking on how to process Simulacra in light of later posts by Zvi. 

Given all of the discussion around simulacra, I would be disappointed if this post wasn't updated in light of this.

When I was halfway through this and read about the 4 stages, they immediately seemed to me to correspond to four types of news reporting:

1. Accurate reporting
2. Misleading reporting (i.e. distorting real events, and fooling many people)
3. Fake news (i.e. completely made up, but still pretending to be news, and fooling some people)
4. Obviously false or 'pure fiction' (i.e. not even pretending to be news, and fooling no-one). You do get this kind of thing in the crappiest tabloids like the UK's Sunday Sport or maybe the US's National Enquirer. A well-known example in the UK was the front-page headline 'Freddie Starr [a TV comedian] ate my hamster'. (Such absurd stories evade the UK's strong libel laws if no reasonable person would believe them, so the more outrageous, the better.)

Which isn't exactly what the post is about, but might be a useful analogy, or source of terminology.

Simulacra as free-floating schelling points could actually be good if they represent mathematical truth about coordination between agents within a reference class, intended to create better outcomes in the world?

But if a simulacrum corresponds to truth because people conform their future behavior to its meaning in the spirit of cooperation does it still count as a simulacrum?

It feels like you're trying to implicitly import all of good intent, in its full potential, stuff it into the word "truth", and claim it's incompatible with the use of schelling points via the distortions:

1. the idea that the symbol had an original meaning and any change involving voluntary conformance to the new meaning would inherently be malicious
2. using an example (job title) which is already a simulacrum, but initially used cooperatively
3. assuming that people lagging in stage 1-3 would be exploited/arbitraged by people in stage 4
4. cooperative simulacrum (e.g. maps) are less contentious and so not salient examples of the word

In other words I think you're assuming:

good intent = truth = in-principle CDT-verifiable truth (fair)