This is a brief follow-up to my post “Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method.” Since I wrote that post:

1. Scott Alexander boosted (not to be interpreted as endorsed) my post on Astral Codex Ten, which helped to give it more than typical reach.
2. In a flinchy spasm of post-SBF timidity, GiveWell explicitly told me they did not want to get their hands dirty with my donations of redirected taxes any more.
3. My tax arrears for 2013 ($5,932 original tax + ~$5,467 in interest & penalties) were annulled by the statute of limitations.
4. I made a $5,932 donation to Charity Entrepreneurship to celebrate.

According to Seigen Ishin (Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin):

"Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters."

(D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, 1926, London; New York: Published for the Buddhist Society, London by Rider, p. 24.)

1. We inhabit this real material world, the one which we perceive all around us (and which somehow gives rise to perceptive and self-conscious beings like us).
2. Though not all of our perceptions conform to a real material world. We may be fooled by things like illusions or hallucinations or dreams that mimic perceptions of this world but are actually all in our minds.
3. Indeed if you examine your perceptions closely, you'll see that none of them actually give you representations of the material world, but merely reactions to it.
4. In fact, since the only evidence we have is of perceptions, the "material world" is more of a metaphysical hypothesis we use to explain patterns in our perceptions, not something we can vouch for as actually existing.
5. Since this hypothesis is untestable, it is best put aside when we consider what actually exists. The "material world" is not a thing, but a framework and vocabulary useful for discussing regularities in what is really real.
6. What is really "real" -- what the word "real" means -- is our moment to moment perceptions and interpretations, which appear to us in the form of a material world that we inhabit. 
7. GOTO 1

How to best break out of this loop?

And then today I read this: “We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realize to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable, and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the Divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it.” (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)

In my fantasies, if I ever were to get that god-like glimpse at how everything actually is, with all that is currently hidden unveiled, it would be something like the feeling you have when you get a joke, or see a "magic eye" illustration, or understand an illusionist's trick, or learn to juggle: what was formerly perplexing and incoherent becomes in a snap simple and integrated, and there's a relieving feeling of "ah, but of course."

But it lately occurs to me that the things I have wrong about the world are probably things I've grasped at exactly because they are more simple and more integrated than the reality they hope to approximate. I think if I really were to get this god-like glimpse, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I probably couldn't fit it in with anything I think I know. It wouldn't mesh. It wouldn't be the missing piece of my puzzle, but would overturn the table the incomplete puzzle is on. I have a feeling I couldn't even be there, intact, in the way I am now: observing, puzzling over things, trying to shuffle and combine ideas. What makes me think I can bring my face along, face-to-face with the All?

I have the vague impression that in spite of getting some obvious (to the outsider) things wrong (fervently believing the preposterous), Mormons or LDS culture get some less-obvious things unusually right (relative to non-Mormons/LDS culture generally). I'm curious about those things, how they felt from the inside, and how the rest of us look in comparison from inside that culture. What are some things you think LDS culture does well that the rest of us might be able to emulate?

The reason I said "not funny" is not my sideways way of saying "I don't approve of that sort of thing" but is more related to the point in your second paragraph. You can't just state your opinion in the form of a joke and turn it into a joke that way. (Except perhaps in some rare edge cases: "Knock knock. Who's there? Epstein didn't kill himself.") It's like if I said "What do you call a ladder? An accident waiting to happen." Have I said anything funny, or have I just chosen a strange way to say "I think a ladder is an accident waiting to happen"?

And in the case of Bob, I can certainly imagine someone from another culture, or who is young and sheltered, etc. not being up on American stereotyping and for whom such innocence would not be merely affected innocence.

I've been in a long pause on adding to the sequence, although I've been quietly updating some of the existing pages behind-the-scenes. I hope to pick up the pace again at some point.

As for the floundering of SotF&E... I still think it's a good model, but getting something like that off the ground is hard work and requires that a lot of things go right. For one thing, it takes a critical mass of people who believe in the promise of it enough to put in the work; it's not something people can absorb passively. It's hard to find enough people who are willing both to stretch out of their comfort zones and to take time out of their already busy days to dedicate to an unproven eccentric project like this. When the early-covid isolation/quarantine stuff hit it really took the wind out of the sails of social projects like SotF&E, and I haven't felt confident enough to try to restart it.

You might also find some food for thought by ordering from these menus:

• Notes on Caution
• Notes on Prudence
• Notes on Temperance
• Notes on Self Control

I think I see where you're coming from on this, but there are a few things to consider:

First, a lot of your criticisms apply most strongly to my own particular idiosyncratic method, and when evaluating it solely as an effective altruism strategy. In fact, I chose the method I did largely as a variety of conscientious objection, not as effective altruism. My post here highlighted the possibilities of tax resistance as an effective altruism strategy, but my own motives for my resistance are more complicated and I did not choose my own method of resistance to optimize its charitable donation possibilities. If you judge it by that standard, it will admittedly look pretty weak. But it's also possible to choose tax resistance methods differently from how I have done, in a way that prioritizes effective altruism over conscientious objection, if your motives are different from mine.

Second, I think you exaggerate the precariousness of my position. I'm not impoverished. I'm actually doing pretty well. I put aside something like 35–40% of my income for retirement, and every year I put roughly the equivalent of my health insurance deductible into a Health Savings Account in case disaster (or distracted driver) strikes. I make about the median annual income for an individual in the U.S., and have saved up more than the median retirement savings for someone in my age bracket. I'm not "brutally curtailed" or living in "self-imposed poverty". I'm a reasonably well-off person living in the lap of luxury here in California and enjoying the fruits of the most fabulously prosperous time our species has yet experienced. I can't imagine feeling deprived like this.

Third, you underestimate the charitable impact of my resistance if you only include the $5k/year or so that I donate and ignore the hundreds of hours of volunteer work (not, perhaps, effective-altruistically optimized, but nonetheless good) my particular technique has helped me to put in.

Fourth, your argument that "if you wanted to fix any of this, you... couldn't pay off your existing $90k+ liability" is incorrect. If for some reason I changed my mind about all this and wanted to wipe the slate clean, if I were too poor to just pay the full amount, the IRS is like many debt collectors in this regard: it would rather get something than fail to get everything, so it's willing to bargain. It will ask you what you can afford (demanding that you fess up about your income and assets) and then come up with some figure that doesn't totally bankrupt you, telling you that you can eliminate your tax debt entirely if you can come up with this lower sum. It's called the Offer in Compromise program (https://www.irs.gov/payments/offer-in-compromise).

As I mention in my post: "There is a law on the books that makes willful failure to pay taxes a criminal offense. However it is almost unheard of for the U.S. government to criminally prosecute someone who files an honest and correct tax return but who will not voluntarily surrender the money."

American "war tax resisters" have been willfully refusing to pay taxes for decades, often going out of their way to make public declarations of their willful intent (sometimes in letters to the IRS itself). In the last 80 years, of the tens of thousands of American war tax resisters who have done this sort of thing, exactly two have been prosecuted merely for willful failure to pay. One was in 1942, and targeted the leader of an emerging war tax resistance movement (he was prosecuted for failing to purchase a war tax stamp to put on his car, so also this was not really an "income tax" refusal prosecution). The other was in 2005, and targeted an attorney who had two previous tax convictions and whose legal practice tended to get on the nerves of prosecutors by specializing in the vigorous defense of dissidents like Huey Newton, Judi Bari, Dennis Peron, etc.

Given this track record, I think it's accurate to say that criminal prosecution for willful failure to pay your income taxes is not the sort of thing the typical refuser has to worry about.

Thanks for the response. This goes far enough afield of my expertise that I don't think I can give very helpful answers to your specific questions. I don't have any experience with corporate tax refusal of this sort. In the very limited anecdotal reports I've seen, it seems like the IRS is most likely to crack the whip and potentially pursue corporate officers when 1) the corporate entity fails to pay employment taxes (payroll/social-security taxes) after withholding them from employees' paychecks, 2) when there's actual fraud/dishonest filing involved, 3) when there's no filing of required forms; in roughly that order of severity. I'm much less confident in anticipating the IRS's behavior here than I am in the case of individual tax-nonpayers.

As far as the 10-year limitations deadline, again here I have much less information to go on for corporate taxpayers than for individuals. I know in the case of individuals, once the tax debt passes the "collection statute expiration date" it just sort of vanishes from the system and so they stop bothering you about it.

Note that if the corporate entity formally files for bankruptcy that this suspends the ticking of the statute of limitations clock until six months after the bankruptcy is resolved.

Yeah, it's an imperfect first-stab calculation at best. But that doesn't mean that 1 in 12,000 is necessarily an underestimate because while the 8,143,000 denominator may be exaggerated for the reasons you suggest; the 699 numerator is too, for the reason I gave ("even if every one of those prosecutions had been of people who merely refused to pay"). In fact, few to none of those 699 prosecutions were of people who merely refused to pay. An appendix to their report shows how many indictments the IRS pursued in a variety of categories (this adds up to more than 699 because some non-tax crimes e.g. narcotics, money laundering are also prosecuted via the same unit). Non-payment doesn't even make the list:

• Abusive Tax Schemes: 35
• Corporate Tax Fraud: 23
• Financial Institution Fraud: 20
• Bank Secrecy Act: 338
• Employment Tax: 142
• Healthcare Fraud: 69
• Abusive Return Preparer Program: 112
• Identity Theft: 88
• Money Laundering: 701
• International Operations: 143
• Narcotics: 475
• Non-Filer: 115
• Public Corruption: 27
• Questionable Refund Program: 51
• Terrorism: 33

I believe it's not actually true that, if you merely repeatedly neglect to pay your taxes, the I.R.S. will inquire into your motives and intent in order to decide whether to come after you with both barrels blazing. As far as I can tell they do not have the resources or inclination to do that sort of investigation.

I base this largely on the experience of American war tax resisters. They are often loudly self-incriminating about their willful intent: sometimes going so far as to write letters to the I.R.S. explaining their motivation. Of the tens of thousands of Americans who have engaged in war tax resistance over the years, I know of only two in the past 80 years who have been criminally prosecuted merely for willful refusal to pay taxes (there have been others who have been criminally prosecuted or jailed for things like filing inaccurate forms or contempt of court, but those were cases in which they were defying the law in ways that went beyond merely not paying). The war tax resistance movement keeps pretty good records on its "martyrs" so if there were other cases like those two they would probably have come to my attention.

Last I heard, about 40% of U.S. citizens don't have passports to begin with, so I expect that at least for some readers, this isn't such a big deal. For the rest it is certainly a consideration to factor in. Note that it typically takes some time before it becomes a problem: you accumulate $59,000 (actually more, as this number is inflation-adjusted) in delinquent taxes, the I.R.S. notices you're over the limit and submits paperwork to the State Department, then somewhere down the line your passport expires and you're unable to renew it until you resolve the tax delinquency (and go through a State Department paperwork dance of your own).

FWIW, some tips on how to improve your resolve here: Notes on Resolve

Aesthetically, opera seems like it slots in well to a Very Gay modern niche, in that it is flamboyant, is dramatic to the point of histrionic, lends itself well to backstage scuttlebutt about prime donne and other such inside baseball dish, is nicely campy in its traditional overwroughtitude of costume and set design and vocal fireworks and Götterdämmerung, and is a good object to lavish conspicuous aficionado-points on. It's as gay as green is Irish.

I'd also like to see what work people have already done that I don't already know about.

See Notes on Attention for some possible leads.

I'd add "Covid" to the hypotheses. At the time it was difficult to sustain many varieties of coordinated grassroots activity, even something as banal as a book club, just because you didn't want to meet indoors in groups and because alternatives like Zoom were off-putting to some and suboptimal in many ways. People may have relished the opportunity to come out in the streets and protest a bit, or to engage in social media histrionics, but to sustain this sort of activism in a meaningful way requires the sort of organizing and group deliberation that was unusually difficult at that time.

This reminds me of a POV that I find perennially tempting, a sort of Buddhism verging on solipsism:

"Reality Itself" is already completely here and completely available to you. That indeed is the definition of Reality Itself: the actual subjective contents of the present moment, your (pre-"assessed") subjective experience. To discover Reality Itself, you don't have to assess your subjective experience as though it were merely evidence left behind by the real reality that you have to examine for clues. It's already the real deal. Our ideas about "objective reality" (atoms and quarks and fields, but even chairs and tables and people) are models and linguistic conventions we find helpful for discussing, finding patterns in, and predicting Reality Itself, but they are not themselves Reality Itself hiding behind our subjective experience. You can learn interesting things about Reality Itself by examining it and subjecting it to scientific analysis, but you can't get any realer that way: any closer to reality. You're as close as you can get already -- it's right here; you can't miss it.

See also: Notes on Resolve

This will probably be dismissed as glib, but: human alignment.

FWIW, here's how my "investment" strategy has been changing ("investment" considered broadly, in a time=money sense).

I'm weighting foreign language acquisition less than I used to, in part because advances in AI are making that a somewhat less-valuable skill than I had originally anticipated.

I'm googling for websites a lot less than I used to. This is partially because Google's web search has declined in quality (and while its competitors can roughly match it, none have really leapfrogged it) and partially because the web itself has become such a morass of crap. I'm correspondingly increasing my investment in particular sources of web content (these seem vulnerable as well, so I'm keeping my options open, but by the time AI starts writing LW content on the regular it might be worth reading). I'm long on the wisdom of the ancients, short on anything expressed in an op-ed.

I've given up on Twitter/Facebook, and am finding my long-shot investment of time in Mastodon to be paying off better than I'd hoped. I'm tentatively exploring other fediverse options.

I've been divesting from politics / political arguments broadly for a while, and shifting to a more-local focus on political action (meaning not just action involving governments & elections, but any organized efforts for social goals). This is I think in part motivated by an inchoate hunch that our ability to rationally observe and engage in useful discourse about events outside of our own back yards is going to be terribly disrupted by AI/bot-fueled disinformation.

My retirement portfolio is slightly more tech-heavy now, but I otherwise don't feel confident picking winners & losers among public companies or sectors and haven't made any galaxy-brained I-think-I'm-smarter-than-the-market moves.

So far, my policy of frugality has paid good dividends. My spending has been largely in sectors less-affected by inflation, and I have accumulated enough buffer savings that if my job gets automated away I'll have some time to pivot gracefully.

I continue to be long on health, and take steps to secure a vigorous longevity to the extent fortune allows. Whatever happens in the coming decades, I don't want to miss it.

Reduced it by ~43kb, though I don't know if many readers will notice as most of the reduction is in markup.

Since you've gone with the definition, are you sure that definition is solid? A reasoning process like "spend your waking moments deriving mathematical truths using rigorous methods; leave all practical matters to curated recipes and outside experts" may tend to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often than "attempt to wrestle as rationally as you can with all of the strange and uncertain reality you encounter, and learn to navigate toward worthy goals by pushing the limits of your competence in ways that seem most promising and prudent" but the latter seems to me a "more rational reasoning process."

The conflation of rationality with utility-accumulation/winning also strikes me as questionable. These seem to me to be different things that sometimes cooperate but that might also be expected to go their separate ways on occasion. (This, unless you define winning/utility in terms of alignment with what is true, but a phrase like "sitting atop a pile of utility" doesn't suggest that to me.)

If you thought you were a shoe-in to win the lottery, and in fact you do win, does that retrospectively convert your decision to buy a lottery ticket into a rational one in addition to being a fortunate one? (Your belief turned out to be true, your decision turned out to be good, you got a pile of utility and can call yourself a winner.)

LessWrong is a good place for:

Each of the following bullet points begins with "who", so this should probably be something like "LessWrong is a good place for people:"

A more rational reasoning process tends to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often than a less rational process.

It's not clear from this or what immediately follows in this section whether you intend this statement as a tautological definition of a process (a process that "tends to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often" is what we call a "more rational reasoning process") or as an empirically verifiable prediction about a yet-to-be-defined process (if you use a TBD "more rational reasoning process" then you will "tend[] to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often"). I could see people drawing either conclusion from what's said in this section.

Although encouraged, you don't have to read this to get started on LessWrong! 

This is grammatically ambiguous. The "encouraged" shows up out of nowhere without much indication of who is doing the encouraging or what they are encouraging. ("Although [something is] encouraged [to someone by someone], you don't have to read this...")

Maybe "I encourage you to read this before getting started on LessWrong, but you do not have to!" or "You don't have to read this before you get started on LessWrong, but I encourage you to do so!"

See also: Under what circumstances have governments cancelled AI-type systems? 

For some food for thought on this question, see:

• Notes on Wisdom and
• Notes on Rationality

from the LessWrong Notes on Virtues sequence.

California adopted a "Housing First" policy several years ago. The number of people experiencing homelessness continued to rise thereafter. Much of the problem seems to be that there just aren't a lot of homes to be had, because it is time-consuming and expensive to make them (and/or illegal to make them quickly and cheaply).

It seems to me that a major factor contributing to the homelessness crisis in California is that there is a legal floor on the quality of a house that can be built, occupied, or rented. That legal floor is the lowest-rung on the ladder out of homelessness and in California its cost makes it too high for a lot of people to reach. Other countries deal with this by not having such a floor, which results in shantytowns and such. Those have their own significant problems, but it isn't obvious to me that those problems would be worse (for e.g. California) than widespread homelessness. Am I missing something I should be considering?

Has anyone done an in-depth examination of AI-selfhood from an explicitly Buddhist perspective, using Buddhist theory of how the (illusion of) self comes to be generated in people to explore what conditions would need to be present for an AI to develop a similar such intuition?

Might be helpful:

• Notes on Ambition
• Notes on Industriousness

See also: Notes on Empathy

See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/35eEHAXis3jMqETod/notes-on-attention#How_can_you_improve_your_attention_

FWIW: I dropped out of high school a year early via the GED route. I am very glad I did, and recommend it. At the time this was not really an option that was discussed above-ground by e.g. guidance counselors: instead the assumption was that you'd either graduate from high school or "be a drop-out" with all sorts of bad connotations.

I enrolled in a community college and began taking my lower-division undergrad courses there (and some electives that I was curious about). This was far less expensive than taking the equivalent courses at a university, and by and large the lower-division courses I took at community college were of higher quality than those I later took at university (smaller class sizes, professors seemed to care more).

OTOH, my friends who stayed behind for their high school senior year described it as being a much better year than others: more collegiality, a better social scene in general. So if your high school social life means a lot to you, you ought to add that into the calculations.

Going off on a wild tangent here, but all this strikes me as eerily similar to what I recently read in Rob Burbea's "Seeing That Frees": a book about meditative approaches to Buddhist "emptiness" insight.

Burbea repeatedly insists on the "fabricated" nature of reality: that it doesn't appear to us in any raw form with an inherent nature of its own, but that any time it appears to us it does so by means of our own construction of it (and in a way that's always tangled up in our agendas: i.e. we don't see anything "as it is" but only "as it means to me").

This isn't anything I can vouch for, but it's something I've been trying to get my head around. Burbea's book is largely a catalog of exercises a meditator can undertake to try to get first-hand knowledge of this fabricated/constructed/inherently-empty nature of reality so he or she doesn't have to take Burbea's word for it.

Tangentially, FWIW: Among the ought/is counterarguments that I've heard (I first encountered it in Alasdair MacIntyre's stuff) is that some "is"s have "ought"s wrapped up in them from the get-go. The way we divide reality up into its various "is" packages may or may not include function, purpose, etc. in any particular package, but that's in part a linguistic, cultural, fashionable, etc. decision.  

For example: that is a clock, it ought to tell the correct time, because that is what clocks are all about. That it is a clock implies what it ought to do.

MacIntyre's position, more-or-less, is that the modern philosophical position that you can't get oughts from izzes in the human moral realm is the result of a catastrophe in which we lost sight of what people are for, in the same way that if we forgot what clocks did and just saw them as bizarre artifacts, we'd think they were just as suitable as objet's d'art, paperweights, or items for bludgeoning fish with, as anything else, and it wouldn't matter which ways the hands were pointing.

Now you might say that adding an ought to an is by definition like this (as with the clock) is a sort of artificial, additional, undeclared axiom. But you might consider what removing all the oughts from things like clocks would do to your language and conceptual arsenal. Removing the "ought" from people was a decision, not a conclusion. Philosophers performed a painstaking oughtectomy on the concept of a person and then acted surprised when the ought refused to just regrow itself like a planarian head.

Yeah, disturbing imagery like that can wake you right back up in a hurry. But at that stage of falling-asleep, that imagery is going to arrive whether you're using this method or not. This method just helps you get as far as that stage more quickly.

At this point I'm being extra-speculative, but it may be that above-normal levels of anxiety in ordinary waking life bleed over into the hypnagogic imagery and make it more likely that you'll be presented with disturbing images. It could be that more attention to pre-bedtime calming (pleasant nature videos, meditation, chamomile tea, turning off the phone, or whatever works for you to put aside the stresses of the day) could help.

And then there's my pet theory that the mind sometimes gives us nightmares to jolt us out of sleep when our sleep has become dangerous (e.g. tongue threatening to block the airway) so that we'll change sleeping position. If you find yourself frequently jolted into wakefulness in this way as you're falling asleep, maybe talk with a specialist about the possibility that you have obstructive sleep apnea or something like that.

Why do you think there will be heavy selection against things like made-up stories presented as fact, or fabricated/misrepresented medical baloney, when there doesn't seem to be much such selection now?

I'm one of those LW readers who is less interested in AI-related stuff (in spite of having a CS degree with an AI concentration; that's just not what I come here for). I would really like to be able to filter "AI Alignment Forum" cross-posts, but the current filter setup does not allow for that so far as I can see.

Two possible answers to this:

1. Maybe people are different in this way and my experience falling asleep doesn't match yours and so my advice won't be of much use to you.
2. The visualizations are somewhat subtle. They are, like dreams, hallucinations rather than visions of real-things-out-there. But they are also much less vivid than dreams. You may not notice some of them just because they're pretty subdued and uninteresting and so unless you're looking for them they won't jump out at you. Also: you may be used to categorizing some of these images not as hallucinations happening in your visual field but as "imagination" happening elsewhere. If you're accustomed to being able to visualize things when you imagine them in waking life, you may think about these hypnagogic hallucinations that they're not "visualizations" but "imaginations" and you may dismiss them for that reason.

Empathy might not work that way. See: Notes on Empathy.

For one thing, we seem to be wired to empathize more with people in the in-group than people in the out-group. For another, once we begin to see a conflict through the lens of empathy, we tend to adjust our interpretation of the evidence so as to share the interests and bias of whomever we first began to empathize with in the conflict. In short: empathy ought to be approached with caution.

FWIW, I'm trying to create something of a bridge between "the ancient wisdom of people who thought deeply about this sort of thing a long time ago" and "modern social science which with all its limitations at least attempts to test hypotheses with some rigor sometimes" in my sequence on virtues. That might serve as a useful platform from which to launch this new rigorous instrumental rationality guide.

Further reading: Notes on Honesty (particularly the Collateral damage of “harmless” dishonesty, Honesty about future commitments, and Oaths, pledges, and formal declarations of intent to honesty sections).

I'm working on an essay about "love" as a virtue, where a "virtue" is a characteristic habit that contributes to (or exhibits) human flourishing. I'm aiming to make the essay of practical value, so a focus on what love is good for and how to get better at it.

"Love" is notoriously difficult to get a handle on, both because the word covers a bunch of things and because it lends itself to a lot of sentimental falderol. My current draft is concentrating on three varieties of "love": Christian agape, Aristotelian true-friendship, and erotic/romantic falling/being in love.

Anyway: that long preamble aside, if you know of any sources I could consult that would help me along, I'd appreciate the pointers.

I notice that in notation form it’s just an extra ergo in the ordinary (p→q, p, ∴q) argument to yield (p→q, ∴p, ∴q). So maybe “ergotism” or “alter-ergo” for the name of the fallacy?

Google already pivoted once to providing machine-curated answers that were often awful (e.g. https://searchengineland.com/googles-one-true-answer-problem-featured-snippets-270549). I'm just extrapolating.

You're imagining that Google stays the same in the way it indexes and presents the web. What if it decides people like seeing magic answers to all their questions, or notices that consumers have a more favorable opinion of Google if Google appears to index all the answers to their questions, and so Google by default asks gpteeble (or whatever) to generate a page for every search query, as it comes in, or maybe every search query for which an excellent match doesn't already exist on the rest of the web.

Imagine Google preloads the top ten web pages that answer to your query, and you can view them in a panel/tab just by mouse-overing the search results. You mouse-over them one by one until you find one that seems relevant, but it's not one that Google retrieved from a web search but one that Google or a partner generated in response to your query. It looks just the same. Maybe you don't even look at the URL most of the time to notice it's generated (the UI has gone more thumbnaily, less texty). Maybe "don't be evil" Google puts some sort of disclaimer on generated content that's noticeable, but the content still seems good enough for the job to all but the most critically discerning readers (the same way people often prefer bullshit to truth today, but now powered by AI; "it's the answer I hoped I'd find"), and so most of us just tune out the disclaimer.