StartAtTheEnd's Shortform

Status: No less important than the problem with AGI. I promise.

Here's the solution to the problem of Moloch:

Less information. Seriously. Hear me out.
Before we discovered clickbait, it could not dominate.
Now that it's well-know, it's a nash's equilibrium, we have no choice but to tend towards clickbait.
Why is make-up popular? Because it exists. It's now a nash's equilibrium, we can't get rid of it again, for girls want to look pretty. They feel pressured towards this strategy.

Why are cities all about efficiency and competition, while some rural areas still value health and well-being over productivity? It's because some people haven't fallen into the trap/dilemma yet. They're not sufficiently connected/exposed yet.

Now, lets consider two systems less complex than the real world: What ruined the magic of old MMORPG games? What ruined the internet? Answer: It was information. Strategy guides, statistics, metrics which could be gamed, efficient searching, and datamining.
It ruined communities by removing organic social aspects from the equation.
It allowed us to wrap our heads around essential metrics so that they could be gamed.
It allowed us to look for, or at least calculate, the most efficient strategies.

My favorite beach used to be clean, now it's not. Why? It became well-known.
There used to be beautiful, untouched areas of nature, most are now gone, why? They were revealed.
Now we look for "red flags" in others. Indeed, real life has become "meta".
Humanity regarded as a resource (something exploitable) is closer to a waste product than ever before. "Waste" is the last transformation that a resource goes through, the state in which no further exploitation is possible.
Naivety is a resource. Innocence is a resource. Attention is a resource. "Caring", "Reactivity" are resources. These are all finite.

Things lose their magic once you understand them. Things can be systematized once an overview of them is possible.
I used to like people more because I understood them less. I used to view people as individuals because I hadn't yet built a mental model in which I could categorize them.
This is a warning: Stop exposing information recklessly. Prometheus wasn't punished without reason.
There exists far worse nash's equilibriums than we have discovered until now. It's likely we will ever recover if we expose too many of them.
I don't know enough about information theory to explain what causes this, but this article (now mine, but a great read) feels related: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/
It has become clear to me that my well-being literally requires "warrens", and that censorship and tyrannism requires control which requires capturing information. "Moloch" result from openness of information. Your privacy in your own house is a direct consequence of the information being isolated from the outside world. (It will die with IoT). If you can ever be your true self, it's likely because you're in an environment in which your true self won't be displayed to anyone you worry about judging you.
Knowledge is inversely proportional to self-esteem and happiness (in general. Not all forms of knowledge are unhealthy)

Conclusion: Moloch is a result of open information. Most mental illness in the modern world, too, is because of information and the psychological changes which meta-knowledge brings. Humanity, regarded as a complex system, is better off with far less connectivity of information. The world itself is tending towards "premature exploitation". Originality, individuality and variety are decreasing, destructive interference is accelerating.

I'm using mathematical concepts, but I'm not very familiar with game theory or entropy. This is all pure intuition - but regarded as a hypothesis, it explains a great deal of things, and yet, false positives are hard to find.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong, and that the set of Moloch-ized areas of life does not tend towards 100% as access to information about the world approaches infinity. But I'm quite certain that transparency of information is accelerating a lot of undesirable things - global surveillance is merely one outcome. Human interactions turning into optimization games (social media likes) and algorithms (dating checklists) is merely another.

All maps/definition/models/languages/etc are arbitrary, finite, self-containing axiomatic systems which are valid on the inside and nonsense when viewed from the outside. They also cannot interact with anything outside of themselves. They're isolated from reality but still very useful (as they're created and modified to fit our needs through a process much like biological evolution)

If I ask a question about reality, then my answer will answer the question, it won't answer reality. The pair (question, answer) exists in themselves and only as themselves. Questions are loaded questions, in that they contains definitions, but definitions don't rely on anything, they're assumptions/assertions. Everything is free-floating objects, there's no root, you can't "get to the bottom" of anything, anywhere you look, you will end up at arbitrary axioms. There's also no origin point, everything is relative to something else.

Is French more correct than English? It's apparent that the question itself is nonsense. But morality and mathematics are also just languages. Axioms that you can combine and play around with according to some rules. You're not discovering anything, and you're not creating anything new unless you change the definitions of the system. If "2+2" equals "4" then you just have the same thing twice.

In any case, we are the creators of these finite structures. But a lot of people seem to waste time searching for the territory while looking at the map. "What does it mean to be a good person?" whatever we want it to mean. We're not searching for some truth here, we're creating it. We can't be wrong or right. At worst, we contradict other agreements that we've made about reality, and then we get to decide which agreement we want to change in order to resolve the contradiction.

A lot of people seem to become nihilists when they discover that mental models are human creations rather than things which exist inherently, independently from ourselves. They need things like "objective morality" to feel good. But why would something be "fake" just because it's created? My computer exists in physical reality, even though humans made it, and "computer" is just a concept. If only the territory is real, then we're left with energy/matter and the rules of physics, everything which emerges from it, and nothing else. Everything beyond that is agreement, and power-struggles between interpretations. Religions, ideologies and philosophies are examples of this. And, by the way, none of these systems can evaluate themselves from the inside. Different systems can compete, but they can't know which one is "best", and "best" is meaningless without a metric anyway. You can combine two systems by taking the overlap, or by combining everything and solving the contradictions, but you can't even be sure that the resulting system is better. At best you get a higher alignment as a result, but you also reduce everything to the lowest common denominator in the process. What system is best depends on its environment anyway, fish do best in water, and lions do best on land. In families, communism works well, but on larger scales, capitalism seems better.

"Truth" doesn't seem to matter very much, if it makes sense at all.

Psychological observations:

You can measure the mental health of a person by their distance from the natural (taoist) viewpoint. From "child" to "intellectual", you climb the stairs of perception all the way to a crushing, recursive self-referential meta-awareness.
1: Describe the world as it appears to you -> Describe the world as it is -> describe the world as social reality dictates it is -> describe the world in a manner which signals that which social reality deems to be valuable.
2: Animalistic -> Aware of others -> Aware of self -> Judging oneself from others perspective.

Climbing up any such stairs is psychologically unhealthy. The sheer distance between the map and the territory is dangerous, the movement from "concrete" to "abstract" is unhealthy. One descends into idealism because one forgets the bounds of reality. (I think one might solve problems on the map and then force them on the territory, which doesn't work). Communism is an example, it only works in theory, and this theory is not bound to reality.
It's a disconnect with reality, with the self, and with the moment. You can argue it's the best for scientific advancement, but I will draw a rather extreme conclusion here: "Progressives have poor mental health and a dangerously detached worldview compared to conservatives because they climb up these hierarchies of thought, awareness and metas/self-reference".
Know about "ironic" memes? "shitposting"? "deepfried memes"? Look at the sort of people who posts them. Look how nihilistic they are. Look how they mock everything, themselves included. Notice how people like this post about politics more often than other people you know. Notice how they're less optimistic about the future, notice that they're vulgar because of pathological desensitization.
The Youtube channel "JREG" takes it further. He teaches people that this way of thinking is bad for you by engaging in this thinking in a way which is bad for him and showing you how it harms him. This is the only way he can communicate it. I'm not quoting his videos here, I don't even need to watch them, I can tell by the thumbnail alone. I don't know if he even realizes all this by himself.
Philosophy itself is filled with unhealthy people. They reflect, they reflect even on their reflections. They think they are learning more about life, but they are further away from life than any of us. At best, these pitiful types end up writing books, and these books are the interpretation of the Rorschach inkblot that is life. In other words, philosophical works are a kind of unintentional journaling or self-diagnosis.
Of course, reflection is caused by suffering, so it's not only that reflection results in a viewpoint which brings suffering. But you're in trouble when this reflection doesn't decrease by itself once your suffering is over, as you get a general increase over time which is sooner or later too much.
Two other signs of bad mental health are:
1: Labeling oneself or defining oneself by one or a few things, identifying with one or a few things. (Healthy viewpoints are holistic)
2: Seeking or optimizing for surface-level metrics. Max(Happiness), max(morality), min(suffering), max(equality), or worse of them all, min(negative emotion) (also, blaming other people for your own emotions).

"Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven"
"A person of knowledge and self-opinion will be hindered from the enlightenment of Tao"

So what's going on? It seems that the psychological effects of the fruit from the tree of knowledge can be superimposed on itself. Awareness, Meta-awareness, Meta-meta-awareness. It may also be that "good and evil" itself is changing, going further up the simulacra-hierarchy. People living simpler lives, and just simple people in general, seem less burdened/affected by this.

The "A" of "AI" is sufficient for human extinction.

What a dangerous AI might do to us, we're already doing ourselves, mainly by the help of technology, which takes charge of human decisions. It's not the addition of artificial intelligence, but the lack of human involvement, which nets us dystopia. To explain why this is the case, I'm going to borrow a really useful view from a post on qualiacomputing titled "Wireheading Done Right", namely that of "Consciousness vs. Pure Replicators". What makes humans special is that we care about valence. Pure replicators only care about winning and optimizing, whereas conscious beings care about things like joy. We're not purely about optimization, we have aesthetics, morals, and various other preferences. In fact, a lot of optimal solutions offend us, they require selling out ones dignity, sacrificing oneself to Moloch, or being cruel to oneself and others. This taste of ours is unique to complex, sentient life.

I claim that:
1: Optimization is already becoming void of human values.
This happens because we have lost the sight of cause and effect, it's all too complex for us to see through. Dehumanization becomes easier with distance/indirectness, and it's even worse with things we can't see through (like algorithms on social media platforms).
2: Humanity itself is decreasing.
This is only getting worse as technology improves, and as we start treating ideas and abstract symbols like they were reality itself. It's hard to put into words without sounding like a skizophrenic, luckily Freddie deBoer has written an article called "Mimetic Collapse", making it more likely that my intuition is correct than this being mere Apophenia. Let me quote "The litbro, in other words, is a simulacra, a symbol that has eaten what it was meant to symbolize, a representation of something that has never existed" Anyway, this is also trivially true as we create more non-human things. We also seek to "improve" humanity, as if the most popular ideology (liberalism), religion (christianity) and method (science) are anything to go by, this "improvement" is nothing but the reduction of humanity. They're all against human instinct, which can be used for both good and evil, and against the inherent egoism and subjectivity of humanity (our self-affirming nature) which is necessarily imperfect and 'deceptive'. But this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
3: Technology will kill humanity anyway.
Human freedom allows us to make non-optimal choices, which is why this won't be a thing in the future. At least, it will be decreased so much that what little wiggle-room we have left will be insufficient for covering the need for agency in anyone but the most shallow comformists. Fixing this suffering is easy though - we just get rid of the genes responsible for increasing this need. Who are the "bad guys" of society? It's the outliers. "We have detected that your son has genes which increase his chances of acting out, putting him at odds with his peers and society at large. Do you want us to get rid of these with CRISPR?". You will have no choice but to say yes, as saying no will make you look like a bad person. Does this technique sound crude and like it might fail? The difference between pre-911 airport security and the nanny state we have now is just this one method being applied thousands of times. Even rational communities seem vulnerable to subversion as long as the subject is moral in nature. Also, you can't make technology which can be used only for good, and you can't make up more powerful technology to makes sure that less powerful technology is used for good, for that technology will just be abused as well. If it could work, it already would have (same goes for regulations! Just stop)
As a matter of fact, Theodore Kaczynski already made some of these arguments. But I haven't seen his core ideas criticized before, in fact, I've never seen them referenced at all.

The only beauty left in life is found in consciousness and (organic!) humanity, but the most of modern humanity seems hellbend on destroying itself. I don't just mean people avoiding reality nor the popularity of hedonism. I'm refering to the profound success of anti-human philosophies (like anti-natalism and many others). Society speaks well of basically everything which reduces humanity, like stoicism and any denouncement of inherent drives. Detachment and distration are viewed as a solutions even by psychologists. As far as I'm aware, SSRIs and stimulants mainly blunt subjective feelings, which is how they make you more productive and less sad. In the future, we will come up with ways to blunt emotions and individuality, and I have no doubt that they will be popular. Most religions and philosophies are about the *reduction* of things, and modern society takes the exact same stance. "Ego is bad", "desire is bad", "trusting yourself is bad". It's hard to tell if these beliefs are the cause or effect of mental illness, but it's one or the other.
A reason why the vast majority of society offends my taste like this is probably because it tends towards the bottom of the hierarchy of needs. The further up a person goes on this hierarchy, the less "pure replicators" will appeal to them. "luxuries" like caring about humanity becomes possible.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a good writer, but I have a lot of insights like these and it pains me that I even have to write them down. Why haven't they already been formalized and taken 10 times further? It's hard not to grow arrogant. That said, I'm a just monkey using its intelligence, rather than the intelligence residing in the monkey. I believe Carl Jung claimed that Nietzsche went mad as a result of identifying with Zarathustra, so I won't make the same mistake. But seriously, not only are things looking really bad, all the popular "solutions" only bring us further to dystopic futures, even if true AI is never created. And the reputation of workable solutions are kind of bad to boot, unjustly so.

I will appreciate any replies!

Society treats complemental aspects as opposites.
Then it tries to minimize the "bad" aspects, not realizing that all good aspects are minimized too.
This is true for happiness and suffering, it's also true for good and evil.
You can't separate creation and destuction, nor life and death.

An easy psychological example is that people with a poverty-mindset (e.g. insecurity) try to take from others, but they're stingy with giving.
But if you want to get, you should first give. If you want to rest well you should first work hard. If you want to earn money, you should first invest. If you want to do something perfectly you should first allow yourself to do it badly.
Life is the tension between two poles, the amplitude.

Any mindset obsessed with reduction is degenerate and harmful to the collective mental health of society.
This includes minimization of suffering, conflict, discrimination, offense, and expenses.
Speaking of which, feelings are surface-level. They're not valuable optimization targets. They're side-effects of deeper and more concrete processes.
One should not optimize for plus happiness or minus suffering directly, it doesn't work.

A person trying to make as few mistakes as possible is going to ruin themselves in the process.
A man trying to remove all negative aspects from himself is going to struggle with dating.
A parent trying to protect their child from ever feeling the slighest harm is going to ruin that child in the process.
A society trying to minimize conflict is also going to minimize growth without realizing it.

The over-regulation of society is both a symptom and a generator of degeneracy, to the extent that we're "saved" from reality, we become unable to deal with reality. The result of this lead to life-denying mindsets. It may very well be that some people are hurt by "the r-word", but the correct solution is certainly not to shield them from ever hearing it again.

To summarize, life does not have an excess of negative aspects. It has a lack of positive aspects. The same goes for people, and for society.
The difference is very important.
"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl shows us that suffering (the negative) isn't what's important. A strong positive aspect is enough to reduce the negative aspect to nothing. Surely it would be bad taste to ask a mother if she regrets giving birth on account of it being painful?