Read on Twitter
In a network of competing agents, each agent has a growth strategy. No matter what resource the agents are competing for, if they can recognize and remember each other, they are also implicitly competing for a meta-resource called reputation.
A curious property of the resource called reputation is that, if you are perceived to be competing for it explicitly, you will lose reputation
As a result of this, it is necessary for agents playing reputation games to find ways to conceal their reputation growth strategies. Like breathing or metabolizing food, reputation management is a function of the body, pre-conscious and automatic
The goals of reputation games are
1) improve your reputation
2) donât get caught doing it
The necessity to play reputation games is the main evolutionary impetus that causes agents to develop intelligence. Hunting is the other
1) improve your reputation
2) donât get caught doing it
The necessity to play reputation games is the main evolutionary impetus that causes agents to develop intelligence. Hunting is the other
aside: The octopus is the incel of the animal kingdom, solitary and puzzle-oriented, it evolved intelligence to solve the riddles of its prey. It goes insane and dies shortly after it gets a GF https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/science/animal-intelligence-octopus-cephalopods.html
Intelligence is an aptitude for winning games, primarily reputation games, and primarily by lying. Intelligence is a faculty for deception
Every man is at war within himself: in his right hand is a faculty to detect deception, in his left is a faculty to deceive. The evolutionary arms race between these capacities has produced the human condition https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1037330250961575936
What we end up with are agents who are very skilled at lying, and very skilled at believing they are honest.
The inside view: I am an honest truth-seeker
The outside view: I am a liar who is immovably convinced he is an honest truth-seeker https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1023550713811501057
The inside view: I am an honest truth-seeker
The outside view: I am a liar who is immovably convinced he is an honest truth-seeker https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1023550713811501057
So the upshot of all this is that whatever you think you're doing, you're probably doing something else. A lot of arguments happen because you call someone out based on the outside view of what they're doing and the inside view doesn't line up with your observation
When you develop a strategy for playing iterated games, the thing that makes the strategy successful is often an unintended consequence of the actions that you think comprise the strategy in question
The Deliberate Or Emergent Strategy of an agent is what that agent DOES. Most actions that feel selfless from the inside have selfish benefits when seen from the outside. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1019264435595108357
The inside view is the naive view, the outside view is truer. You can always tell someone is laboring under the delusion of the inside view because they speak as if their personal moral philosophy is objectively correct (maybe even self-evidently so)
Common objection: But you just made a statement about moral philosophy as if it were objectively correct! No, my statement did not have a moral dimension because it did not project the inside/outside view distinction into a moral space.
In fact people who cleave to the naive/inside view are often better at taking action in the real world than people who have experienced the paradigm shift into the outside view. Neither is morally better, it's just that inside-view-takers are insufferably bad at philosophy
Common objection: you are in the middle of your journey.
Broke: inside view
Woke: outside view
Bespoke: inside view again, but now powered by Jesus (tm)
Yes, it is much easier and cozier to do what you evolved to do.
Broke: inside view
Woke: outside view
Bespoke: inside view again, but now powered by Jesus (tm)
Yes, it is much easier and cozier to do what you evolved to do.
It's possible for two people to develop two irreconcilable matrices of words and ideas in their respective heads, and yet behave in ways that are entirely compatible and sympathetic to each other https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025737938682822656
For us who live in the world of signifiers, there can be no final, ultimate, correct philosophy. Philosophies are made of words, and philosophies are dissolved by words. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1103347088639778816
The only thing that matters is whether you take actions that perpetuate your existence. Any philosophy can be subjugated to this purpose, because philosophies are artifacts of reputation management games, which, recall, are sophisticated forms of lying
Agents cooperate with each other to make the pie bigger. Agents defect from each other to secure a bigger slice of the pie than their rivals. Moral philosophy is a set of strategies for convincing other people to cooperate more. It only succeeds if you have a good reptutation
The most successful agents in reputation games are those who can convince everyone else to cooperate while they themselves covertly defect. The best way to do this is to deceive your own self about your capacity for defection. All moral ideation follows.
The mistake that internet autists make, and that normal people don't make, is worrying if their actions are consistent with their philosophies, or for that matter, worrying if their moral philosophies are consistent
It's not so much that there is no truth as that the truth is ungraspable, because you are built from the bottom up to believe whatever ideas best serve you in playing reputation games
Words are treacherous; they are always a quantization of the real. We live in the library of babel, where the one true philosophy is always hidden in a a nearby book, as is its refutation, and the refutation of the refutation, ad infinitum
This is not a license to believe anything you want; itâs not a justification for relativism, it is an indictment of all human cognition. It is miraculous and incomprehensible that something as feeble as the human mind could invent microchips and superconductors
Truly, one can understand why, in older times, when belief in god was more comfortable, the machinations of a genius were regarded as manifestations of the divine https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1086444935144861696
A man who swears allegiance to a principle will act in direct opposition to that principle, and he more fervently he teaches it, the more likely he acts against it. There is no secret sin in his heart; he honestly believes in his ideal. Likely he doesnât notice his hypocrisy
Any sufficiently alien philosophy is indistinguishable from nihilism, and the teachings that bring despair to one man might bring joy to another. We reveal our true preferences through our actions, in spite of our philosophies, but only to others, never to ourselves
