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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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You love this... hard-to-pin-down pattern of reasoning, and I don't love to have to keep asking you not do it. Nevertheless here we go again.

Quokka is "rationalist who doesn't question progressive ideas like universal love and tolerance, gender and race equality, .....", not "rationalist who argues with trolls because they might be good faith".

The explicit definition of quokka as a mental archetype is the guy who does not account for bad faith of other parties. It's not about wasting time on trolls on anonymous forums, per se. But it absolutely is about a robust mode of engagement with bad actors.

Here's the original thread by 0x49fa98. Here are the most relevant parts:

The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up

In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate. ...

The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect"

Rationalists = quokkas, this explains a lot about them. Their fear instincts have atrophied. When a quokka sees a predator, he walks right up; when a rationalist talks about human biodiversity on a blog under almost his real name, he doesn't flinch away ...

The main way that you stop being a quokka is that that you realize there are people in the world who really want to hurt you. There are people who will always defect, people whose good will is fake, whose behavior will not change if they hear the good news of reciprocity

I think Bostromgate is a good illustration.

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