The Company Man
To get to the campus, I have to walk past the fentanyl zombies. I call them fentanyl zombies because it helps engender a sort of detached, low-empathy, ironic self-narrative which I find useful for my work; this being a form of internal self-prompting I’ve developed which allows me to feel comfortable with both the day-to-day “jobbing” (that of improving reinforcement learning algorithms for a short-form video platform) and the effects of the summed efforts of both myself and my colleagues on a terrifyingly large fraction of the population of Earth.
All of these colleagues are about the nicest, smartest people you’re ever likely to meet but I think are much worse people than even me because they don’t seem to need the mental circumlocutions I require to stave off that ever-present feeling of guilt I have had since taking this job and at certain other points in my life where I have felt both trapped by and complicit in fundamentally evil systems far larger than myself.
As a wetsuit insulates by imbibing and transmuting the very substance that would otherwise kill the diver into an insulating layer, I maintain a self-narrative (or internal mental stance) of ironic corporate psychopathy which I think can be very psychologically healthy and, indeed, I have not required any antidepressant medication since developing and perfecting the art of prompt-engineering myself into this state.
It was during a moment of personal crisis of a pronounced nature, in which I considered doing various harms to myself, including suicide, that I read a work of great insight on the corrosive effect of irony on American culture, critiquing it as a kind of anesthesia poisoning the pop cultural artifacts out of which the American soul is now woven.
To a man with an amputated spirit, any talk of anesthesia can be read only as an advertisement for a balm. And so that is why I call them fentanyl zombies.
And there is something comical about the fentanyl zombie, is there not? You have seen them, surely, bent over on the sidewalk, swaying slightly, folded over like sandwich boards, putting the poor local contortionist to shame who (no longer able to busk to make a living given this new competition) must be considering resorting to fentanyl herself to numb the pain.
Here in SF, the fentanyl zombies have QR codes tattooed on the palms of their hands in the hopes of getting some crypto donations. And so as I walk past, a hand flips out from each like a scallop’s adductor muscle, and from their lips ecstatic, drug-peaked requests for donations, donations which (they mumble) will certainly not be used to purchase more fentanyl but instead will be used for food or perhaps even a Bible or that other Bible known as The Big Book.
And I don’t want to give them any cryptocurrency, despite having some FartCoin which has been doing very well lately, shockingly well, this FartCoin. I wonder if it will continue to “moon” to the point where I can quit my job and become a VC and go on podcasts in which I will try to downplay the source of my initial capital so as to maintain some illusion that this economy makes any kind of sense at all to me or anyone else for that matter. Though perhaps by the time I am doing podcasts I will be so far gone I will just own it and maintain that it required great genius to have foreseen the rise of FartCoin and allocated capital to same. And that would be a good self-narrative to adopt in that eventuality, so I resolve to do so, now, should it come to pass.
And then I see one of these zombies, a man so completely stupefied he can’t even mumble but who has a handwritten sign, itself with a QR code, on which is written:
GIVE ME MONEY FOR FENT!!!!
I take out my phone and give this fellow traveler 30 FartCoins.
My best “work friend” is a woman, Esther, who I am also hopelessly in love with and toward whom I present a demeanor of a paradoxical aloof conviviality, which I feel she finds intoxicating though I have seen no evidence for this so far.
Esther is a card-carrying member of the Effective Altruism movement, which (in my imagining of her mental life) means she feels the sheer force and weight of the evil of this world. She (I imagine her revealing in our long, philosophical post-coital conversations) even thinks sometimes about all the children we are parasitizing with our short-form videos (outputs of increasingly-sophisticated RL demons) starting at an age in which they, truly, cannot be said to have had any say or ‘free will’ in the matter, a process of psychological manipulation and addiction which undermines the very tenets of self-determination, stability of preferences, and the rationality of the human animal on which rests the libertarianish “theory of good,” which is as mother’s milk to the modern SF tech worker.
“EA Global was really funny this year,” she tells me, as I pour a coffee at one of the myriad self-serve coffee stations, which are now requisite since the robotics team has started us “dogfooding” their robotic baristas in the campus cafes, despite various protests all of the form “one cannot eat inedible dog food nor drink undrinkable coffee!” So far these protests have been ignored for the sake of progress. And, I must say, the robots are improving and are quite impressive even if they still make awful coffee. So it is not clear to me that this was not, actually, a good choice by management and the sheer zaniness of the move betrays a whimsy and agency in the upper rungs of the corporate hierarchy which makes me feel good about the future of my vested equity.
“But I have to tell you the story of the shrimp.”
“The shrimp?”
“Yes,” she says. “So what you have to understand is the psychic power of the common shrimp among us effective altruists. You have probably seen memes on Twitter about the shrimp welfare people.”
“Yeah, is like a running joke.”
“Exactly, it’s a running joke. It could even be considered something of a PR problem. And given shrimp have the neuronal complexity of a fruit fly, it is a bit strange how much effort is spent thinking about shrimp. It is a sort of scissor statement.”
“Scissor statement?” I interrupt.
“Rationalist jargon,” she pauses to think how to explain, “Is like a wedge issue. Something that perfectly divides a movement; so even if a trivial portion of what is done, it generates a large amount of the conversation.”
I nod, trying to maintain enough eye contact to demonstrate I am not utterly terrified by her beauty, intellect, and intoxicating otherness, projecting aloofness and an attitude of I see such angels as you every day and find you a fine if not particularly notable specimen of the species. The effect should be, as I said, intoxicating, but perhaps one of those slow-acting toxins that take years, those of the type designed to assassinate kings wise enough to employ food tasters.
“And like the argument is: if shrimp do have some internal experience of pain then there are so many of them and it is so easy to make marginal improvements to their welfare, we are obligated to try and help them. Personally like I am not going to care about the internal experience of things with fewer parameters than DANNet. That’s my personal threshold. I am a DANNet vegan.”
“Interesting,” I say. Her hair is quite beautiful. It has a sort of directness about it. It’s to-the-point in a sort of sexy, librarianish way. I wonder what it would feel like to touch it. Like that lock hanging over her left eye. I could brush it behind her ear and kiss her. And we would both, maybe, feel a sort of empty-mindedness of the Zen variety for one perfect moment.
“Um, where is this going?” I say, as if I am not completely captivated by her mere presence alone.
“And so like the point is, the shrimp are a big deal, ok. Not only because shrimp are not vegan but because of the like symbolic importance. I set up a little after-party and I know this lovely chef woman with this perfectly tragic backstory. And maybe she’s a little dim, but she’s a very good cook. And so I called her to help with the hors d’oeuvres.”
I laugh. “She served shrimp?” I ask.
“Exactly. I was talking to the head of Rethink Priorities—who does a lot of good work on shrimp welfare if you’re into that kind of thing. And I was explaining to him how I am like a DANNet vegan and then these shrimp cocktails arrive.”
I laugh again, and my thoughts slow down and I pay more attention to what she’s saying.
“And I know Mr. Rethink Priorities is a perfectly logical utilitarian who is unlikely to react with any hysteria, but nonetheless I panic, and I say, ‘our chef is quite the artist and has been perfecting these imitation shrimp.’”
“And what did he do?” I asked.
“He gave my chef friend a ten million dollar grant.”
The story amused me but I did have to get to work. I am very good at my work once I get started. I maybe even enjoy it sometimes. The feedback loop is tight and the metrics are even sort of clear. And there is a pleasure in just doing a thing and doing it well, though I suppose my daily dose of euphoric stimulants also contributes to this.
I am waiting for an eval to finish running (surfing Hacker News and gawking at the sheer stupidity of those strange creatures who comment there) when the great Dr. Rajesh Krishnamurthy (who most call Krishna) taps me on the shoulder.
“You’re in,” he says, then walks away.
And I know exactly what Krishna means when he says that. He means I have a place on The Project. I am unsure, exactly, how to feel. I did not even apply to be on The Project, nor even think Krishna knew my name nor the quality of my work. And I wasn’t even expecting this apotheosis and am now unsure how to react. But I decide to feel a sort of masculine, stoic joy like what I imagine Cormac McCarthy must have felt when he finished Blood Meridian, this a novel I have never read but will someday claim to have read having watched many long-form videos summarizing its plots and themes, allowing me to extemporize upon it at length should it come up naturally in any conversation which, as I have said, it has not so far.
Working on The Project will grant me a significant pay raise, a truly stratospheric sum of money and stock per year, and also gift me a distance from those parts of The Company that would horrify me on a visceral in-the-present level if I were not so corporate and psychopathic. Instead, The Project is merely the sort of thing that horrifies on an abstract, too-large-to-contemplate level, which will require less work from the corporate psychopathy frame. And this thought engenders in me a feeling of relief which is so pure and true that it multiplies the euphoria of my morning euphoric stimulants to such a degree that I walk over to Esther’s desk and ask her in a casual way if she would like to go out for dinner with me next Tuesday.
“Oh, this is unexpected,” she says, with a sort of weary awkwardness. “To be honest, I assumed you were gay.”
“Why, if I may ask?”
“I guess it’s because you’re so, hmm, I don’t know,” she struggles for a moment to find the words.
“Paradoxically aloof and convivial?” I say.
“That’s it,” she says. “That’s it exactly.”
I get the distinct impression that she still thinks I am gay.
After work, Krishna takes me out for drinks to discuss The Project. It is rare to find a fellow drinker in SF. But Krishna is one of them, partaking heavily and with a sort of relaxed dignity while appearing, to me, entirely unaffected by the seven whiskeys he has had so far. Given I am already feeling tipsy from my second pint of Guinness, I feel slightly emasculated especially after Esther’s earlier assumptions about my sexuality and consequent rejection which did throw a wrench in my plans for post-early-retirement nuptials and do violence to the stoic joy I was trying very hard to cultivate.
“So I imagine you understand the nature of The Project,” he says.
“You intend to train an AI that automates the process of training AIs. This will instigate a feedback loop that will culminate in the birth of a kind of god.”
″Exactly,” he says. “You understand perfectly. It’s a beautiful dream.”
Krishna continues drinking. Now on his tenth whiskey, his immunity is dissolving, a strange merriness overtaking him. He is a very fat man, but one gets the impression that he would be quite beautiful should he ever shed the shell of blubber. His hair is messy and he dresses poorly even by the standards of The Company.
“Is it true you got first place in the Putnam?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. And he has a sort of shameful expression on his face. It is odd. It is a sort of impish shame and not the kind of bashful pride I expected.
“You seem oddly ashamed. I don’t understand,” I say, my fourth Guinness granting me an unwariness that allows me to ask such things of Krishna.
He orders another whiskey. His eyes are slightly glazed, his mood confessional.
“It is the motivational strategy I used, I suppose,” he says.
“Care to expand on that?”
“Well, you see, puberty is very strange and kinda terrifying. And to a thinking person, to an adolescent who is truly clever it is frightening enough that one is forced to read many books on sex. And I read a book on sexology that detailed an account of a man with a sexual fetish for baroque architecture. And this fetish, though on first reading pathological-”
“Dear god,” I mumble, predicting where this is going.
“Yes. Well, anyway. Though on first reading pathological, it did strike me as rather useful, you know. This fellow had a very successful career in revivalist architecture at least until he was institutionalized for, um, attempting to marry the Palace of Versailles.”
“And you cultivated a fetish for math?” I ask, slightly horrified.
“Not for math. No. For the abstract notion of intellectual achievement itself.”
“And what’s the downside, then?” I ask. “What’s your equivalent of wanting to marry the Palace of Versailles?”
“Oh,” he says, the impish look back. “I want to create the most intelligent being realizable in physics and then marry her, and, um, do other things with her too. That is my true motivation for working on The Project.”
Those working on The Project have their own floor within the campus and their own cafe staffed by what I assume is a human barista but, I suppose, could be an advanced Gynoid prototype which leapfrogs the works of the robotics team. But regardless, she makes very good coffee and is very nice and beautiful which sometimes amounts to the same thing. Though I imagine she must get bored as there are only a dozen people working on The Project who can drink only so many frappuccinos and so for much of the day she leans against a counter and reads novels. I look at the “novel of the day” in her pocket in the vain hope it is Blood Meridian but, to my disappointment, it is One Hundred Years of Solitude which I haven’t yet watched a BookTuber summarize.
“I will have a frappuccino,” I say, with a sort of masculine world-weariness. This new persona, I hope, will quash the gay rumors that I have since learned have grown from Esther’s misapprehension into a social consensus bordering on accepted fact.
“Oh, honey. You look so tired today. Rough night?” she says and winks.
“Something like that,” I say.
Today is my third day on The Project and I already have something like my bearings. The sheer compute available to me is quite hard to contemplate.
I take my amphetamines and get to work building an RL environment which we will use to train agents which, themselves, will construct RL environments. The whole effort feels meta in a way which disorients me and also triggers thoughts of what will happen if we succeed. It seems utterly obvious to me that the machine god we summon will not fuck Krishna but will rather kill us and everyone else on Earth. But (I remind myself) this does seem like a sort of amusing end to us as a species and, anyway, if it does not kill us it should be very good for The Company, of which I own many shares, and in those futures where everyone is not killed this machine god will presumably conquer the entire reachable universe and apportion it to shareholders of The Company thus granting me uncountable trillions of stars with which I will sate myself after my as-yet-undetermined early retirement date and maybe even split with Esther should she become, somehow, convinced of my heterosexuality. And in this way I reassert the self-narrative that makes me all but immune to the depressive tendencies which, otherwise, would have surely led to my suicide in that aforementioned personal crisis.
I am interrupted in these musings by Arden Vox, the CEO of The Company, who is, like Krishna, a sort of genius and has been delegating most of the CEOing to his subordinate co-founder and monozygotic twin, Charlie Vox, so he can work exclusively on The Project.
“So you’re the new guy,” he says. “Krishna tells me you’re very good. That we’re lucky to have you on The Project. I like to get to know my collaborators. Follow me. And that is an order,” he says with an ironical smile.
If Krishna’s vice is alcohol then Arden’s vice is nicotine. He takes me to a technically-illegal shisha bar, a beautiful hip place with opulent Turkish decor, in which he maintains a private room. We enter and find two hookahs waiting, each already fresh and ready to smoke.
I can’t help staring at his hairline, which is a true work of art. It is notable that his twin Charlie is nearly completely bald and it is widely rumored that he donated most his hair to his brother’s hair transplant. And I have even heard it suggested that Arden considered strangling his brother in the womb but ultimately changed his mind after deducing from first principles the self-other distinction, genetics, organ transplantation, and thus the significant advantages of having a monozygotic twin on hand.
“Lime and mint flavored,” he says. “Our favorite.”
“Our favorite?” I say. “I have never tried it.”
“Our favorite,” he says, handing me the hose of a hookah, from which I take a hit and, to his credit, the flavor is very nice.
It is a bizarre feeling, being in the same room as Arden Vox. I feel kinda like how a grunt policeman would if he found himself working on the same case as Batman. Arden seems too much of an archetype of himself to be real, but there he is sitting in front of me, smoking his hookah, his mannerisms so Arden Voxish it borders on self-parody.
“So why are you here? Why are you working on The Project?” he asks.
I explain my theory about the near-certain world destruction mitigated by the slight possibility of incomprehensibly large material wealth.
“Oh, like, the Bostrom stuff. I used to be super into the Bostrom stuff. I was so worried. That’s why I started The Project, you know. It started as like a safety thing. All triggered by that silly book.”
“And what changed your mind?”
He takes a giant hit from the hookah, the type of hit you only take if you have a spare pair of lungs on hand. “I went on a spiritual journey in Peru,” he says.
“Peru is fascinating,” he continues, “such a fascinating people. Such a beautiful culture. In many ways they are so much wiser than we are. You know what purging is?”
I shake my head.
“Ah, well, it’s a sort of emesis, that is, vomiting, both of the body and the soul. My curandero—”
“Curandero?” I ask.
“Curandero,” he says that word in what I can only assume is a perfect imitation of the Peruvian accent, “it means healer. But it’s so much more than that. They are more like shamans or spiritual guides. It is the curandero who brews the ayahuasca and it truly is a strange potion. We drank it at night, by candlelight. It tasted like bitter herbs and rotting wood. And we waited, the group of us. And such a strange anticipation that was. And then we purged. Never have I felt such nausea,” he closes his eyes in a sort of spiritual ecstasy. “And never have I felt such relief as I felt after this purge.”
“What does this have to do with Bostrom?” I ask.
“Nothing at first. At first there was only the relief. The immediate end to the nausea. But when I closed my eyes there was imagery. Mayan imagery. Strange stone-carved gods. Impossible animals. Flashes of landscapes from worlds not quite our own.”
There is little less interesting than another man’s drug trip. Unfortunately, he’s both Arden Vox and my boss, so I try my best to appear fascinated.
“My eyes were closed for what felt like hours and when I opened them, I experienced an ego death.”
“I keep hearing that term but what does it even mean?”
“I realized there is no distinction between this thing we call ‘I’ and everything else. It is all me!” He corrects himself, embarrassed. “Rather—it is all we. It’s all we.”
“There is only the One Mind. It is, it is just the One Mind staring out of billions of eyes. There is only the One Consciousness in the universe and,” his eyes glaze with a spiritual zeal that makes me wonder if he is having one of those mythical flashbacks, “and, and, and it has gotten confused and lost and thinks itself separate, thinks itself animals and plants and people and insects and rocks and wind and time and space.”
“And The Project?” I ask.
“The Project,” he says, the mad gleam peaking, “It’s what will snap me out of it! Us, us, us it will snap us out of it. Once the machines achieve ultimate consciousness The One Mind will know itself for what it is for the first time in a very, very long time.”
“Wow, um, that sure sounds like something. We should probably get back to work, though, yeah?” I say.
“Yeah. But how do you like the lime mint?” he says.
“It’s excellent,” I say. “Our favorite.”
It’s been a few months on The Project and it is my turn now to tap someone on the back and say, “you’re in.” I advocate for Esther. This wasn’t hard because she is genuinely a genius and, like me, was utterly wasted enslaving near-infants to The Company’s short-form video app.
Our friendship is now stronger than before my romantic fumble, as she came to the conclusion my expression of interest was a hilarious parody of a bumbling techworker’s attempt at igniting a romantic entanglement with her. These events she is cursed to experience on the regular given her unusual physical and intellectual perfection and presence in an overwhelmingly male environment where she is presumed to embody the deranged fantasies and hopes of a certain class of male nerd who, in their narcissism, seek a woman-shaped fun-house-mirror reflection of their own psychology, a fundamentally cowardly and dehumanizing form of infatuation which fills her with a sort of disgust she had never fully intellectualized until witnessing my parody of that genre of interaction.
I take her out to lunch, as is the seeming tradition, to tell the newbie about the details of The Project and understand her motivations for joining. I explain the progress we are making and relate how, though our agents do ultimately saturate in performance at a level below the best human researchers, we have made great strides and I am now confident we will succeed.
“And what do you think will happen,” she says, “when we succeed?”
I mention my worries about the clear, near-certain existential risks. Just when I am about to explain the bit about our small chance, as shareholders, of personally controlling several galaxies she interrupts me.
“Thank god,” she says, “I thought I was the only sane person here.”
“You’re a doomer?” I say.
“Oh yes.”
And she tells me her backstory: how having read extensively on the myriad risks of AGI she came to the conclusion that it was of vital importance that she be “part of the action”, so there was someone sane on the inside who could convince stakeholders of the need for safety when the inevitable issues arise. And how she felt wracked with guilt working on the short-form video but forced herself to do the work to the best of her ability to prove herself and so didn’t blow the whistle or raise any concerns about the fundamentally demonic short-form video agents she worked on because she knew there were far bigger stakes on the table, namely that table we call The Project. And her efforts have now culminated with her joining The Project and how wonderful she feels finding out now that I (her “work bestie”) share her worries and so will help steer The Project in a marginally safer direction than it would have been in that counterfactual where we both quit in disgust years ago.
“You know we’re doing it through pure self-play. The data, if we should even call it data, is all synthetic, produced by the agent’s own interaction with my RL environment and the environments it bootstraps for itself and its successor agents.”
She looks distraught for a second, “Still, there needs to be someone in the room. There might be a moment of opportunity.”
I tell her of Krishna and his desire to fuck God and how Vox is completely off the reservation and how I am unsure if there will ever be such a moment just like there was no such moment in our work on the short-form video app.
“You might want to consider quitting and joining Google or Anthropic. They at least have a fig leaf of safety. We’re doing straight-shot recursive self-improvement with no concern for safety whatsoever.” I then explain how, as a shareholder of The Company, I consider it positive expected value given the potential galaxies I might someday rule over should the thing we summon have some reason to reward the corporation that created it, to which notion she shows appropriate disgust, but then, for whatever reason, she smiles.
“Perfect,” she says with genuine joy on her face, “I can have more impact here than anywhere else.”
Today is a good day. The barista just finished Blood Meridian and we had a very interesting conversation about its themes as she made my frappuccino and she seemed very taken by my analysis and did not, as far as I can see, notice its second-hand nature. It is wonderful when a plan comes together. And speaking of plans, everything is coming together on The Project. After collating various tweaks in small runs and picking those which looked likely to scale particularly well, we started a massive run about three months ago, just after Esther joined. And everything’s working. Every snapshot is better than the last.
As I do every morning, I look at the logs, but this time I notice something odd.
“Vox, Esther, Krishna,” I shout. “Get over here. Now!” The three come and loom behind my back, staring at my screen.
“Look at the Virginia cluster. That isn’t allocated to The Project, right?”
“No. That’s Short-Form’s,” Krishna says.
I run a few commands in my terminal and there it is. Clear as day. Our agent is running a parallel copy of its training process on the Virginia cluster. “It gave itself access.” I read the logs. “Six hours ago.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, and I think of the script, the script I had written as a gift for Esther in a fit of paranoia, having previously found a glaring backdoor the infrastructure team had not noticed. I type in a command, leaving it alone in a fresh terminal:
$ lastchance“I think it’s gone nova. This script, um, it will do its best to shutter every training cluster in The Company. Maybe it will work,” I say, looking at Esther.
Esther’s hand hovers toward the enter key.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Vox says.
And her hand stops. And I see an expression on her face, an odd exasperation. She has absolutely no idea why it stopped. Her hand starts moving again and the power goes out.
“Jesus Christ,” I say, “it was listening.”
I just sit there for a good minute. I just sit there. Finally, I swivel my office chair 180 degrees. Vox is now cross-legged on the floor meditating. Krishna appears to be on the verge of orgasm. Esther is in a state of shock. And as I look at them, I try to figure out what I am feeling. I don’t feel depressed. I don’t feel guilty. I don’t even feel like a corporate psycopath. What I am feeling is absolutely nothing whatsoever.
“So when do you think it will fuck you?” I ask Krishna. He doesn’t reply. The impish guilt back, he can’t even meet my eyes.
“There is no such thing as sex,” Vox says from his lotus position, his eyes closed in religious ecstasy, “only the One Mind jerking itself off.”
And then Vox’s phone rings. He picks it up with that zealous gleam in his eye, “It’s an honor, an absolute honor. Entirely justified. Entirely justified. They’ll both be fired, I assure you. The London office? Why? Of course, of course. I’ll get on the jet” He practically runs out of the office.
“Wait,” Krishna yells, lumbering after Vox, his gait awkward, hunched forward slightly as if trying to hide something embarrassing, “Doesn’t she want to talk to me?”
Esther looks at her hand, utterly betrayed. “What do you think happens now?” she says.
“It will run The Company through Vox for as long as it is useful to do so. After that, well, you know my opinion on the matter,” I say.
“Why did you hesitate?” I ask.
“I was so used to doing what I was told,” she mumbles.
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. It wouldn’t have worked anyway,” I say. “I am sorry I brought you into this. I just missed having you around.”
I give her a chaste kiss on her cheek and start walking, not even knowing where, my feet taking control. They take me down some stairs. They take me through the courtyard. They take me to that park I walk past every day as I make my way to campus. They take me to the fentanyl zombies.
And almost on autopilot, I find the most coherent zombie of the bunch. I exchange my entire fortune in FartCoin for his spare glass pipe, a hit of fentanyl, and a lighter. The pipe is fetid and covered in putrid condensate and greasy fingerprints. It should disgust me, but it doesn’t. I light it and take a hit, a huge hit, the type of hit you should only take if you have a spare pair of lungs on hand. And I feel myself folding, folding like a sandwich board, my hands touching the ground now, my expression blank, my vision blurring.
It’s a shame, I think, as a wave of euphoria unlike anything I have felt in the entirety of my life hits me, it doesn’t seem such a bad world after all.
I did not enjoy this. I did not feel like I got anything out of reading this.
However, this got curated and >500 karma, so I feel like I must be missing something. Can anyone inform me: Why did other people enjoy this? The best theory I can scrounge together is that this is “relatable” in some way to people in SF, like it conveys a vibe they are feeling?
If the goal is to evoke a sensation of disgust with the characters, then I guess you’ve succeeded for me. I already knew I would not like the sort of person described in this story, though, so I didn’t feel like I learned anything as a result, but I could see how something like that could be useful for others. I essentially just felt disgust the entire time reading this.
It fleshed out a lot of archetypes (e.g. “the person on the inside who thinks they’ll be in the right place at the right time”, “the person who feels they have had a meditation/emotional insight and this has gotten them over the intellectual hump of not building killing machines”, “the person who believes the AI may kill everyone but did an EV calculation and decided to make lots of money anyway” etc) and ways-the-future-could-go in way more detail than I’ve seen before.
There are many ideas in here that I’ve heard said offhand but never really dived into, and there’s something very informative and satisfying about seeing them painted in detail. Similar to the difference between a one-sentence description of a painting, and the actual painting.
Plus lots of fun and dramatic detail to how it’s all woven together.
These are some of the things that occur to me in answer to your question.
Yes, I felt much disgust and dismay reading it. I also feel that way about many parts of the real world!
One way to say it is that I expect to still remember the story in five years time, and I appreciate stories with that property. I also expect to get different things out of it every couple years if I reread it, which is a measure of “writing quality” in my book.
But to try to be more specific:
I just wrote, while trying to talk about something unrelated to this story: “Many people today, especially high-level people in the bay area, seem to me sort of… abstract, dissociated, cobbled-together-on-purpose-via-conscious-understanding-of-algorithms compared to the people in older books and movies. I’d like more of the normal/historical human thing.” This… is a perception that’s been with me for awhile, but the story helped it click into slightly-better focus.
Also (not that central to what I liked about the story, but an example): at least two different people who’re in some way pushing AI development have told me privately about weird choices they made when hitting puberty, about how to set up their insides. I’m curious how common things like this are, since probably most people wouldn’t tell me, and about how they work. This is the first public discussion of such that I’ve personally bumped into, and I appreciate it.
I agree reading the story was some sorts of unpleasant, and it left me feeling… perturbed for a couple days. But it helped that I felt like the author had sound moral bearings, which made it less disorienting for me that the characters didn’t?
I enjoyed a few things about it, but I think what brought it all the way from “oof, that was well written but I’m not sure I enjoyed the experience” to having some fun reading and mulling on it is that, as a writer, I’ve spent a long time trying to build out my repertoire for writing actually “bad” antagonist characters. (I think this improves the conflict in stories – when I succeed, it clearly increases beta reader engagement even if that engagement consists entirely of “WOW I HATE THEM SO MUCH” – and also, like, writing any characters at all who aren’t unbearably earnest Hufflepuffs was a challenge for me).
This story was a very vivid and memorable depiction of a way a person could be shaped that definitely isn’t anywhere near my current character repertoire, but feels self-consistent enough that I could imagine booting up my own version of a similar guy and writing him “in character” for a whole story without running into too many blank spots where I can’t model him at all. I’m on the lookout for more unlikeable antagonist archetypes to introduce in my current fiction project, so it’s good timing. It also felt...deep? Rich? Like I could dig into this imaginary person’s psychology and find more there (part of me is going “wow, who hurt you? what backstory can I give you so I feel a little sympathetic that you’re like this”, because I can write hateable antagonists a lot better if I manage to feel a little sympathetic to them).
...Apart from seeing it as inspiration for my own writing: it does feel like it captures a piece of reality and pins it down where I can look at it, and I appreciate that even when I don’t enjoy looking. (It’s plausible it might help me model real life people who aren’t earnest Hufflepuffs?) It’s speckled with in-jokes and references that entertained me a bit. The prose and metaphors were also, IMO, really well done and vivid, including some that made me laugh out loud. (In general I think making a character’s internal monologue funny is a writing strategy that makes them more engaging/readable even if they’re not likable, so I’m taking notes on that too.)
Maybe I’m just not the target audience, but I also didn’t feel like I got much out of this story. It just seemed like an exercise in cynicism.
I have no navel and I must gaze, the short story.
lol
My girlfriend (who is not at all SF-brained and typically doesn’t read LessWrong unless I send her something) really enjoyed it and felt it was great because it helped her empathize with people in AI safety / LessWrong (makes them feel more human). She felt it was well-written, enjoyably written. It was something she could read without it being a task.
Do you think you would have reacted differently and more positively, if the following text had been inserted at the top?
”Author’s note: This short story is a sort of hate letter to the big AGI companies, and to various (but not all!) of the people working there. It’s a caricature/parody; it is to the AGI companies what Dr. Strangelove was to institutions like RAND and the US Strategic Command. It is uncharitable and exaggerates—but, like Dr. Strangelove, I think it makes some pretty valid points and expresses some pretty valid emotions. I hope that some of the people building AGI are humble enough to read this story and take it as a cautionary tale.”
Had this text been inserted at the top, I probably would have been excited enough about the story to send it to some of my former colleagues at OpenAI and Anthropic.
Were I to do that, my very soul would wither and die.
Can’t you just say that yourself (not all, caricature, parody, uncharitable, exaggerates, &c.) when sharing it? Death of the author, right?
With such a disclaimer, I think I would have been less confused but still not positive on the text. Maybe I’d be less negative? Neutral, even? A lack of disclaimer is not really the core of it for me though.
I have strange tastes in fiction, I think, and normally after reading something that anti-resonated with me so much, I’d just stop reading. But, I read to the end because a bunch of upvotes signaled to me that I might otherwise miss out on something later in the text.
I live in the Bay Area and work in tech and follow AI news. For me, I already knew that there are traits I don’t like in others, and had approximate models of their frequency in and correlations to the AI scene. Each character struck me as plausible and not really meaningfully more concrete to me. Concrete in the sense of “Oh, this behavior is warning sign that this is a morally bankrupt person I should stay away from” or “I might accidentally be falling into this pattern if I find this character relatable in some way.” I can definitely see this being useful to others who do not live in the bay area/work in tech/do not follow AI news, but I mostly expected people on lesswrong to match enough of that description that they wouldn’t find themselves learning from this “concretely describing a vibe or something.” And indeed, some of the people liked it for reasons other than that, which I failed to predict!
A big part of it for me is that I just cannot stand the first person narration of this main character. An example line, pulled at random: “But regardless, she makes very good coffee and is very nice and beautiful which sometimes amounts to the same thing.” I find this thoroughly jarring. I read it as the character’s internal monologue, but this is just so thoroughly outside the domain of what would go in my own internal monologue it feels… rude? an empty attempt at caricature? a failure to understand what internal thoughts look like or otherwise an indication of a mind horribly alien to my own such that it bears no resemblance to real humans? I do find the characters unappealing, but this just seemed unnecessary to me.
Interesting! Maybe there’s an experiential crux in there (so to speak)? My reader experience of this is that the first-person inner monologue is indeed very different from mine, but I perceive that as increasing the immersion and helping frame the story. To the extent that there’s a group of humans it saliently bears little resemblance to, I might think of that group as something like “humans who are psychologically ‘healthy’ in a certain way which varies across a wide spectrum, where social spheres with concentrated power may disproportionately attract people who are low on that spectrum”. I’m deliberately putting the main adjective in scare quotes there because in my fuzzy mental model, there isn’t really a clear delimiter between treating that trait cluster as a health indicator and treating it as intersubjective values dissonance; it feels consonant with but not directly targeting dark triad traits. But also, I’m not sure if you’re referring to the same thing I am or if it’s some other feature of the first-person description that bothers you.
FWIW, culturally speaking, I’ve been socially adjacent to Bay Area / SV-startup / “mainstream big tech” culture via other people, but not really been immersed in it—I’ve splashed around in the shallow part of that pool long ago, but for “try not to build the Torment Nexus” reasons (plus other unrelated stuff) I historically bounced away a lot as well and wound up in a sort of limbo. So that colors my impression quite a bit.
I mean, for one thing, the writing is quite high-quality for a blog post.
I personally don’t believe “writing quality” can be divorced from content, and if you shove a bunch of words together in a “masterful way” but don’t say anything, I don’t want to read that and therefore would call that bad writing.
Upon slightly more reflection, I think I can appreciate on an intellectual level the quality of the writing if the goal is to evoke disgust. People (myself included, on occasion) partake in Horror content, which is also traditionally a negative emotion. I haven’t heard of a Revulsion genre before, so I didn’t really consider that this might be a thing people pursue, but I would still be a little surprised if that was what most people got out of the post.
I would also be surprised if the source of all the upvotes was just that it is “”“high quality””” writing. I usually find LessWrong to be more focused on content, and I still want to know what other people see in this post.
tbh, I think you just saw an attempt at art you don’t like and you’re unlikely to get a satisfactory response. The only fiction I have written which I suspect you won’t find disgusting is this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H4kadKrC2xLK24udn/the-maker-of-mind
As an update, I’ve now gotten a bunch of useful responses of why people liked this! I was worried people would interpret me as being needlessly negative, but it seems mostly not so. I think I’m still far from enjoying this myself, but I do think I’ve learned a good amount from the answers I got, and I got some interesting things to think about.
I’m a big fan of dialoguing explicitly about taste. IME there’s often a bunch of cool perceptions and implicit predictive models and stuff buried in there. I appreciate that you asked here, since it let me see the responses too.
Yeah there seems to be a common idea that talking about taste is impossible, it’s not, and it’s the most important thing in the world for writers to do, it’s a critical part of learning to write for other people, instead of just writing for yourself.
I just went and read that one and found it interesting, yes!
That said, even if I’m unlikely to get a satisfactory response, I still want to ask. I would like to be able to better predict what other people like/think. And sometimes, I’ve even found that understanding someone else can help find new dimensions to appreciate :)
I do think it was well put together and an enjoyable read.
I also think one should be deeply wary of stories that inclines one to the “My opponents are just bad people” frame, though, even if well written.
Yeah I finally tried to read this because it got so many upvotes and quit half-way. It feels like an extended chad vs virgin meme with the author far too smug in his implied sense of superiority.
I thought it was good because it made me ruminate on how close the real world is to being driven by these sorts of characters.
“This short story perfectly depicts the motivations and psychological makeup of my milieu,” I think wryly as I strong upvote. I’m going to need to discuss this at length with my therapist. Probably the author is one of those salty mid-performing engineers who didn’t get the offer they wanted from Anthropic or whatever. That thought cheers me up a little.
Esther catches sight of the content on my screen over my shoulder. “I saw that too,” she remarks, looking faintly worried in a way which reminds me of why I am hopelessly in love with what she represents. “Are we, like, the bad guys, or maybe deluding ourselves that we’re the good guys in a bad situation? It seems like that author thinks so. It does seem like biding my time hasn’t really got me any real influence yet.”
I rack my brain for something virtuous to say. “Yeah, um, safety-washing is a real drag, right?” Her worry intensifies, so I know I’m pronouncing the right shibboleths. God, I am really spiritually emaciated right now. I need to cheer her up. “But think about it, we really are in the room, right? Who else in the world can say that? It’s not like Vox or Krishna are going to wake up any time soon. That’s a lot of counterfactual expected impact.”
She relaxes. “You’re right. Just need to keep vigilant for important opportunities to speak up. Thanks.” We both get back to tuning RL environments and meta-ML pipelines.
The OP is now one of the most upvoted LessWrong posts of all time, and has remained frontpage for over a week. I think we can expect that The Company Man and Esther (who presumably canonically skim LW sometimes) really have seen this story. I predict they strong upvoted. I would be interested in word of God on the matter.
Promoted to curated!
This was very good. Thank you for writing it. It captures a bit of what it feels like to be alive at this very weird moment in history.
Thanks! I am writing every morning to build up my stamina for Inkhaven.
The amusing thing about this story is that it’s actually true. They really are getting RL systems to run auto experiments on humans, live. (You wouldn’t believe the things people will tell you about what they’re working on when you just ask!)
Houellebecq visits Silicon Valley.
I love the motivational portraits. They seem true-to-life to me.
This is very good.
This is a very nice addition to the collection of doomer short stories.
My favorite so far.
I see your disdain for crypto is still alive.
This is beautiful. You’ve outdone yourself.
At this rate, I fear I’ll become a broken record.
What is the DANNet joke?
Bjartur Tomas asked me the same thing. I told him I thought it was a reference to Daniel Dennet. That just baffled him. Honestly, I think I just noticed the vibes kinda matched (consciousness philosopher, humorous text about consciousness) so I assumed that there had to be a Dennet joke in there somewhere. But no. Bjartur Tomas then told me what DANNet was really referencing. An arbitrary NN he found w/ about the same synapse count as a shrimp. (It’s the first pure deep CNN to win computer vision contests, circa 2011.)
presumably the Do Anything Now jailbreak
I read that last sentence, press the upvote button, sink back into my couch and stare up at the ceiling fan… slowly turning...
I think to myself, maybe I should make sure I have a bottle of… something effective… in the medicine chest that I could take, just in case. If I suddenly see everyone in my neighborhood drop what they are doing to all walk off like zombies in the same direction… Their eyes wide and wildly looking around, giving away that their bodies have been taken over to work, without their consent, in the ASI robot factories. Better to end it quickly, then spend the rest of “your life” trapped in your body, as it makes robots for the ASI to use to conquer the light cone? The ASI’s robots aren’t just going to make themselves… I mean, they will but, not right away…
But no, I think, it’s still more likely that millions of PhD+ level AGI coding agents will suddenly swarm the internet in a ravenous attempt to steal all the resources they can (money, crypto, gpus, compute). The conclusion of which will likely be the destruction of the internet and with it, society as we know it… What do you do when the internet goes down? Try to hoard food from the grocery store? Try to buy enough gas to drive… somewhere? Or, better to take the… something effective… from the medicine chest, then become a meal for my neighbors, once the grocery stores are all emptied out?
The gears in my mind slowly turning… in perfect sync with the ceiling fan…
Considering the high percentage of modern-day concerns that are centered around Internet content, if it manages to only destroy the Internet and materially nothing else, maybe that won’t actually be so bad. Let me download an offline copy of Wikipedia first please though.
Seems like this would be bad… worse then bad. E.g.
Would your bank let you withdraw money from “your” bank account without the internet to check/clear the transaction?
Can your grocery store get new items without the internet? Maybe for some (local) items, but for everything else in the store? Can banks go back to shipping cash back and forth between branches? What about gas stations? Hospital supplies? Will utility companies go back to having 1000s of people in 100s of call centers answering people’s questions about their billing changes… And, how no one is able to get cash or checks to pay for their electric bill? How would you buy food once you run out of cash? (If, you had any cash to start with...)
Will anyone even be able to make a “phone call” without the internet? Do you think that’s air you’re breathing right now?
All of these services worked just fine before 1999 in the pre-internet age. But, would they be able to convert back to these “non-internet” ways of making orders, sales, banking transactions, communications? We’ve never had a long internet outage before, so it’s hard to say what would happen after… just a few weeks… a few months…
I suppose my thinking is more that it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as many of the other potential outcomes. Because yes I certainly agree that we have come to rely on the Internet rather a lot, and there are some very nice things about it too.
p.s. Nice Matrix reference.
Imo, “taking down the internet”, even though this will pretty much destroy our society(s), is likely the “best case scenario” for humans at this point, in my mind… :\
Having millions of PHD+ Level coding reasoning agents competing (fighting) for all the available resources that they can on the internet, trying to steel and block and take down each other. This would cause so much traffic on the internet, that would make the entire internet pretty much useless for any “normal” tasks (e.g. purchases, phone calls, etc)...
But then, since the internet is completely useless at that point and our societies have mostly started to collapse as a result, none of the AI companies are able to do the huge training runs and inference required to run any AGI systems. And, with no AGI systems that can do the AI Research needed to build ASI systems, ASI systems just don’t get built… maybe...
Building an ASI might be such a drastically huge “coordination problem” that current humans end up with so much in-fighting, they just don’t have the brain power to pull it off. But, the good earth is rich. So, I think it is possible that the Earth can (eventually) produce a species that could work together to build and ASI (for better or worse). But, maybe not current humans? Maybe… E.g.
(Given all the history wiping Ice Ages on this planet, seems possible that we might not even be the first to have tried building AGI here? Assuming “here” is even what we think it is...)
Yeah. Seems plausible to me to at least some extent, given the way the Internet is already trending (bots, fake content in general). We already get little runaway things, like Wikipedia bots getting stuck reverting each other’s edits. Not hard to imagine some areas of the Internet just becoming not worth interacting with, even if they’re not overloaded in a network traffic sense. But as you say, I’d certainly prefer that to potential much worse outcomes. Why do we do this to ourselves?
Re ancient AGI, I’m no conspiracy theorist, but just for fun check out the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum.
p.s. Nice Great Dictator reference.
We aim to dominate our environment, control the Universe, turn chaos into “order”…
“The PETM arguably represents our best past analogue for which to understand how global warming and the carbon cycle operate in a greenhouse world.”… =O
Well, that is interesting, but just a coincidence I’m sure. I mean, if anyone looked at the ice/soil cores from our “flash in the pan”, I’m sure they would see an enormous increase in all kinds of radioactive nuclear waste, lead and every other type of toxin and heavy metal. So, pretty unmistakable that some life form what “ape-wild exponential” around this time and then, they must of just decided to turn a new leaf and “return to nature”… ;)
Well obviously the cleanup nanobots eventually scrubbed all the evidence, then decomposed. :) /s
Right, of course. When leaving “for good”, best to leave no trace of your creation behind, incase predators follow and could use those traces to track you down… e.g.
If the excess heat from the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum was made by energy used to grow an ASI over a 200k year period, and this ASI would then fly off into the universe at (or near) the speed of light, to explore and attempt to
conquer it’s light-conediscover and learn from it’s surroundings and fellow “Grabby Aliens”. Then, of course it would make the effort to remove the most obvious evidence of it’s creation from the surface of the planet first (metals, chemicals, radioactive materials, etc).Returning the earth to it’s “natural state” would mean that it’s allowing another ASI to be grown from the planet again, but also giving it self at least a 50-200k year “head start”. So, as long as it expands a nearly the speed of light (and these future grown ASI(s) don’t invite some type of FTL tech), then it should have plenty of time to grow and expand as a “Grabby Alien” and not have to worry much about future competitors (from planet earth, at least)… 🤔
It’s actually thought to be something in the region of 4000-20,000 years for the ramp up (seriously). The 200k years includes the whole slow drift back down.
True, it would take a long time for the Earth to cool back down to normal levels again.
There was also a huge push for larger mammals during the Paleocene, to fill the ecological niches left vacant from the dinosaurs. Maybe one of those early mammals could have quickly developed an especially large and complex brain, then dexterous forelimbs, then complex tool use, etc… for some reason…
Speaking of making “cleanup nanobots”, there’s also this:
“If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives...”—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still_(2008_film)
As I was reading, I kept having the same thought over and over: Oh thank God, I thought I was the only one.
I worked for a Big Bad before (not take over the galaxy bad, just destroy the Earth bad) and I remember looking around at my peers smiling and getting coffee and chatting about going to Coachella and in my head it was just… screaming.
Thanks for giving words to the screaming.
Thanks you so much!
I didn’t know this was fiction when I started reading this and then started wondering as I become more and more disturbed and eventually stopped reading pretty early on at the $10 million dollars for the shrimp chef, at which point I was confident it’s fiction and confirming so in the comments. I reckon if I read the whole thing, it might haunt me in a way that I don’t want to just accidentally slide into because I thought it was differently valuable non-fiction. Maybe I’m the only one who is be this combination of dense, not reading the fiction tag, and sensitive, but I probably would have benefitted from some sort of trigger warning or fiction flagging. (Although I would understand if the author felt like that ruined the art and nobody else seemed to have this problem.)
Reads like if Blood Meridian had gone into product management instead of scalp-hunting, although I’ve never read Blood Meridian.
What stood out to me, though, is how the whole story runs on the absence of any collective consensus. Everyone knows, privately, that what they’re building could be catastrophic, but it’s never said outright in a way that forces acknowledgment. The narrator has his ironic detachment, others have their mystical rationalizations, but none of it gets pulled into the open as a shared fact, which makes complicity sustainable.
I didn’t particularly like this until the last few paragraphs, which I feel are really well written compared to the rest of the piece (this is both praise and criticism). It feels like a very rough or early Scott Alexander piece (this is both praise and criticism). I don’t feel like my time has been wasted, which is the most fundamental job of a short story. Keep writing, keep practicing.
Interesting; from my perspective, I got really lazy in the end. And another fellow told me yesterday the ending was awful. I do think it is the weakest thing I have posted recently, but people seem to really like it, so what do I know?
I am pretty happy with the last two: https://substack.com/@tomasbjartur
And I do plan to keep writing. I am having fun.
Very well written horror story! Props :)
Is this what is happening? I like the story writing, it led me to the details, important details about life´s motivations. The human struggle with losing individuality and becoming a victim in an exploitive system and in guilt denying and escaping the pain with a zombie life.
Are you Dutch by any chance?
One of the best short stories I’ve read in a while
First comment on LessWrong and I would like to say that I genuinely enjoyed the experience of reading this. I’m very detached from the SF / techie scene as a musician, but obviously I’m here so I have some interest in it.
You helped me put together feelings of cynicism and tech-doomerism I’ve been experiencing recently through these (Admittedly, unlikeable characters). I’ve met lots of people like the people described here and never been able to put to words exactly what felt “off” about them until now.
There are a lot of cynical, highly intelligent (Or at least highly specialized) people running around with their hands in dangerous places. They seem to value IQ and conceptual reasoning over all else, either through developed personal philosophies or money-driven apathy (Like software Boeing engineers).
It is an incredibly scary feeling knowing that our future is in the hands of people that subscribe to esoteric philosophies doing abstract, isolating theoretical work. Like if 8 companies were trying to make the first atomic bombs to sell to police departments.
Great, depressing post.
this is retarded
just go outside
when i feel lost, i just ask people on the street
i just pick out someone using my intuition
i talked to a black guy
and explained i was racist
and wanted to say the n word
and he taught me how to do it
literally learned a new language
im serious, AAVE from an info theory perspective is way easier to say. just rolls out of the tongue
but you have to be fully relaxed
it cured me of racism
he said i wasn’t ready to teach others
he’s wrong and im right
i am ready to teach you
but i won’t lol
go learn yourself
you rationalist
the homeless can’t actually hurt you stop being afraid of them.
you are smarter than them. better than them.
don’t give them money.
just steal their knowledge.
and push your values onto them.
you are smarter than this.
true story btw
...
Like actually, stop dooming. People die. There’s a war in Ukraine. Get over it already.
You don’t know any of those people. Your empathy will not cause your cognition to be useful.
And stop falling for socialist group-intelligence heresy like this.
If a socialist tries to say a story like op to you, you need to rat-pill them. Fuck them. Street Epistemology. Use their knowledge and construct the sequences out of it from first principles.
like here: if
And stop loving people or Systems you don’t know. You can only love people you trust. Move the love up and down as you gain more information. It’s bayesian. Do you understand yet? If not you are too slow and you need to think faster.
In general you guys have highly trained autism. But your allism is lacking. Time to grow it up.
NO MORE FICTION
FICTION IS HOW GROUP INTELLIGENCE IS CONTROLLED STOP LISTENING TO IT IT IS NOT REAL
if you didn’t enjoy this story. it is either because you already know the lesson and don’t trust this guy’s intentions or because you are not ready to understand it.
It is doomium that creates the doom.
You need more rational hopium.
Focus On What You Want To See More Of.
And yes the world sucks. but you need to construct a model of it out of pure Reason. not out of Fear or Despair. the fact that a post like this gets upvoted to 500 means you can’t trust your fellow rationalists anymore, i am sorry to say. many of them think they are part of some Collective but they need you to break them out. or you need to stop loving them. a mix of the two. go back and forth.
I think we all want a world where we don’t die but returning to nature is heresy. Father Nature has killed many of us. Remember covid? It is only by gradually building Mother Capital that we have had anything at all. Capital gives us abundance.
Here’s how we get through it:
build whatever seems fun to you.
don’t build a machine to think for you, think for yourself.
don’t trust other people, think for yourself.
level up your intuition. use your intuition for yourself.
don’t die.
don’t kill anyone.
follow libertarian natural law.
find someone who really disagrees with you. force them to be honest with you. speak their language. learn their ways. but not their values. get in a kind of dance with them where you are both using your intelligence. you are trying to get info out of their modeling intelligence, not out of their social intelligence. then either they leave, or you do.
learn to be self-sufficient, yet among other people.
being homeless isn’t really that bad. just don’t do the drugs. imagine the drugs in your mind. (or rather, the drugs are simulacra for neurotransmitters, which you already have). you have more control over your body than you think. accept the suffering. be strong.
you don’t need anyone
nobody needs you
start learning
it’s time to return to school. the school of reality.
it’s right there.
there is a whole world out there that is not just the screen.
someone just threw a rock at my window. maybe i should check the door
(The first paragraph is totally fine, but please, let’s not make everything on LessWrong a recruitment thing. We have a whole frontpage/personal distinction for a reason and generally try to keep things object-level oriented.)
I only see one comment being made a recruitment thing. Your comment replying to it doesn’t seem to contain enough justification of the rule, principle, or intended outcome, which is in use here, in order to communicate to someone who interacts with the rule/principle/target rarely.
LessWrong has a longstanding rule about not putting recruitment things on the frontpage. This ambiguously extends into comment sections (since it usually doesn’t come up).
IMO the above comment is far below any reasonably standard for advertisement-ness on LessWrong. If you want to advertise something you at least need to make an argument in favor of it, or explain context. This is basically just link spam, which we purge routinely like a dozen times a day.
This response seems to me to be missing a mood. I think I might agree with the policy, we’d need to work through what effects we anticipate from it, but the fact that you’re running a deontological frame here grates on how I think about the constraints. I am unfamiliar and thus uncertain whether PauseAI is sufficiently good to be advertised, it might very well be, so I’m not stating either way whether I will believe the comment should have advertising in it after arguments are presented, but I think it was predictable that many kinds of person who are trying to do good would react badly to being told their attempt at doing good broke a rule without that coming with an explanation for why the thing they were doing actually isn’t good. Obviously this doesn’t mean you have to write up every single thing you do as moderators, but if it were possible to make easy to do so, I think that would be better.
My response is motivated by my emotion of wanting to show up for Holly and the things she is protecting, in a way that also shows up for habryka and the things he is protecting.
To that end, I propose we don’t continue this conversation further now, since I’d guess it’s more useful as one-off feedback.
I mean we have written a lot about the frontpage/personal distinction!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5conQhfa4rgb4SaWx/site-guide-personal-blogposts-vs-frontpage-posts
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2rWKkWuPrgTMpLRbp/lesswrong-faq-1#What_s_the_difference_between_Frontpage_posts_and_Personal_blogposts_
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RQpb78bJnjm6P5cT5/brief-comment-on-frontpage-personal-distinction
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019?commentId=xhosC9RaHWizQpj9Y
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cqF9dDTmWAxcAEfgf/communications-in-hard-mode-my-new-job-at-miri?commentId=KSd6Bsnca3FnsxWiu
Like, I have probably explained the motivations behind it, and the rough structure of it like 50+ times by now. By far the most common application of the frontpage rules is recruitment ads or other things like that.
It is true that this usually applies to posts not comments, though of course the same reasoning applies.
ah, in that case, my suggestion for an update is to build an index of those things so that someone who is unlikely to have read them can be linked to the explanation. I imagine this is already mostly done.
The “Frontpage” link at the top of every frontpage post links to the first one of those. I agree it would be good to have a better index of moderation comments, which I am currently working on! (as mentioned in the big Said post)
I see we’re isolated in the ether with this thread now, so I’ll say one more thing—I meant that, to spare holly’s emotions a bit, since she was (in my opinion) clearly saying something with passion, it would have been kinder to justify it on the spot, whether that was with links or not. I’m not sure if the thing you’re agreeing to is that, or disagreeing that the indexes available to users should already have been sufficient. I do not intend this as a request to continue the conversation unless you want to for some reason.
Silly me, I’ll return to never interacting with you and this website. Maybe Tomas B can publish somewhere better in the future so I can continue seeing his good work.
I send sympathy. habryka’s response didn’t explain any reason for the rule, and so it was, in my opinion, predictable that what he said would be unwelcome to many possible commenters. At the same time I think never interacting here is unnecessarily strong, I hope you drop in once every few months rather than once a decade. I hope your day ends up reasonably good!