The way you frame Elua and Moloch is to see them, roughly, as “Darwin’s Babble & Prune” I think. Fun!
If you haven’t already, you should read aboutMitchell & Hofstadter’s CopyCat (link to Python reimplementation) and specifically attend to the concept of “the parallel terraced scan”! It is a microscopic version of this!
This means that the odds of any system fully understanding the world using a particular frame or world-model is ~0, even if it turns galaxy after galaxy into compute nodes.
...HOWEVER, I believe there are ways of structuring one’s own mind to simply “do this” with some non-trivial degree of efficacy? It involves making your identity VERY small (as a sort of timesharing kernel/VM/datacenter/memeplex manager?) and creating habits around running ~”personas as roles in contexts as choices”, and applying “consider the opposite” a lot, and thinking about covering algorithms.
OTOH, two skillfully “Elua-minded people” aren’t actually that different from each other, most likely?
They are in the same basic world, and basically trying to react to it in full generality… They should therefore… converge? Probably? Right?!?
And so “predictably” you get: (1) they cooperate weirdly well in close proximity but also (2) they recognize they are relatively “scarce human resources” and should often have buffer between each other so they helpfully optimize different parts of the world rather than stepping on each other’s toes.
Past posts I wrote aimed at this mental state include the one in Internal Information Cascades (which gestures in a very abstract and theoretical way towards the broad desirability of the meta-skill to those without it) the one on Panology (which imagines a world with a non-trivial number of people engaged in pedagogy and curriculum design to produce more such people, cooperating using the cultural forms of an academic field of study).
The Moloch-lens is easy to find, it’s called the prisoner’s dilemma.
Thank you for the very long and detailed response.
Copycat seems like a great thing to read up on and I will.
Indeed you can kind of “fracture” your own mind to make space for lots of worldviews (actors do this) but there is a minimal amount of cohesion you need, otherwise you are not really a singular person/agent anymore.
Agree with your framing of the two Elua-people, and also the babble and prune framing.
I’ll read your posts. I have also looked into infinite games and nomic (I also used to design TTRPGS, so the game framing is very familiar to me)
The way you frame Elua and Moloch is to see them, roughly, as “Darwin’s Babble & Prune” I think. Fun!
If you haven’t already, you should read about Mitchell & Hofstadter’s CopyCat (link to Python reimplementation) and specifically attend to the concept of “the parallel terraced scan”! It is a microscopic version of this!
...HOWEVER, I believe there are ways of structuring one’s own mind to simply “do this” with some non-trivial degree of efficacy? It involves making your identity VERY small (as a sort of timesharing kernel/VM/datacenter/memeplex manager?) and creating habits around running ~”personas as roles in contexts as choices”, and applying “consider the opposite” a lot, and thinking about covering algorithms.
OTOH, two skillfully “Elua-minded people” aren’t actually that different from each other, most likely?
They are in the same basic world, and basically trying to react to it in full generality… They should therefore… converge? Probably? Right?!?
And so “predictably” you get: (1) they cooperate weirdly well in close proximity but also (2) they recognize they are relatively “scarce human resources” and should often have buffer between each other so they helpfully optimize different parts of the world rather than stepping on each other’s toes.
Past posts I wrote aimed at this mental state include the one in Internal Information Cascades (which gestures in a very abstract and theoretical way towards the broad desirability of the meta-skill to those without it) the one on Panology (which imagines a world with a non-trivial number of people engaged in pedagogy and curriculum design to produce more such people, cooperating using the cultural forms of an academic field of study).
Do you know about Carse’s Finite And Infinite Games or Suber’s Nomic? If not, consider checking them out!
Also, on the subject of finding new lenses and choosing between them, Chapman has a lot.
Thank you for the very long and detailed response.
Copycat seems like a great thing to read up on and I will.
Indeed you can kind of “fracture” your own mind to make space for lots of worldviews (actors do this) but there is a minimal amount of cohesion you need, otherwise you are not really a singular person/agent anymore.
Agree with your framing of the two Elua-people, and also the babble and prune framing.
I’ll read your posts. I have also looked into infinite games and nomic (I also used to design TTRPGS, so the game framing is very familiar to me)