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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21811 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Good points and I appreciate you bringing up the lore, I now understand better why people are repulsed by rationalists if this kind of thing is what they think of.

I still think this isn't real timeless decision theory though, this looks like a severe case of antifa syndrome with a heavy dose of being defective as a person. Timeless decision theory is about basilisks and multiple universes and real proper game theory not 'kill nazis'. The galaxy-brain version of antifa syndrome with all these weird blog posts about being an obnoxious creep and a weirdo that are hard to decrypt more specifically is still only antifa syndrome.

Gwen rediscovered debucketing. (A fact that had been erased from their mind long ago). Pasek was on the edge of discovering it independently, they both came to agreement shared terminology, etc.. I joined in. Intense internal conflict between Gwen’s and Pasek’s hemispheres broke out. I preserved the information before that conflict destroyed it (again.)

Pasek’s right hemisphere had been “mostly-dead”. Almost an undead-types ontology corpse. Was female. Gwen and Pasek were both lmrf log. I was df and dg. Pasek’s rh was suicidal over pains of being trans, amplified by pains of being single-female in a bigender head. Amplified by their left hemisphere’s unhealthy attitude which had been victorious in the culture we’d generated. They downplayed the suicidality a lot. I said the thing was a failed effort, we had our answer to the startup hypothesis, the project as planned didn’t work. Pasek disappeared, presumed to have committed suicide.

Like what is going on here? I think this is schizobabble, it sounds like schizobabble. Timeless decision theory is incomprehensible but seems vaguely meaningful in certain rare circumstances, like advanced science. Maybe wrong science, who can say? But there's something in it more than this. If you put weird inputs into a bad piece of software and it glitches out, it's not the fault of the input but of the software (in this case Ziz and gang).

I already dumped most of this schizo shit from my mental RAM so I can't be certain, but s/he does explicitly touch on this in the extended Undertale reference above:

Any choice you can be presented with, is a choice between some amounts of some things you might value, and some other amounts of things you might value. Amounts as in expected utility.

When you abstract choices this way, it becomes a good approximation to think of all of a person’s choices as being made once timelessly forever. And as out there waiting to be found.

<...>

If your reaction to this is to believe it and suddenly be extra-determined to make all your choices perfectly because you’re irrevocably timelessly determining all actions you’ll ever take, well, timeless decision theory is just a way of being presented with a different choice, in this framework.

If you have done do lamentable things for bad reasons (not earnestly misguided reasons), and are despairing of being able to change, then either embrace your true values, the ones that mean you’re choosing not to change them, or disbelieve.

Given this evidently failed to induce any disbelief, I parse e.g. the sandwich anecdote above as revealing one's focus to not actually be on the means (I am a vegan so I must not eat a cheese sandwich), but on the ends (to achieve my goals and save the world I need energy - fuck it, let it even be a cheese sandwich). Timeless ends justify the immediate means; extrapolate to other acts as needed. Sounds boring, normal even, when I put it this way, this is plain bog standard cope; would also track with the general attitude of those afflicted with antifa syndrome. Maybe I'm overthinking or sanewashing it, idk.

On the other hand, quoth glossary:

Timeless Gambit

What someone’s trying to accomplish and how in the way they shape common expectations-in-potential-outcomes, computations that exist in multiple people’s heads typically, and multiple places in time. Named from Timeless Decision Theory. For example, if you yell at someone (even for other things) when they withdraw sexual consent, it’s probably a timeless gambit to coerce them sexually: make possibility-space where they don’t want to have sex into probability space where they do have sex. In other words, your timeless gambit is how you optimize possibility logically preceding direct optimization of actuality.

...I admit I have no idea what the fuck that means but I do see related words...?

I think it’s describing a situation where you engineer a threatening environment so that you don’t need to use explicit force at the moment of decision. I think ziz is trying to say once you recognize that the environment was designed to corner someone into compliance, you can view it as morally similar to actually using violence, because the threat itself is doing the work of forcing their hand.

Why ziz didn't just say that- I may never know.

Man this is a very convoluted way of describing the concept of persuasion.

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