Gunnar_Zarncke comments on A Crisper Explanation of Simulacrum Levels

[Gunnar_Zarncke]

I think your post is necessarily on level 4 😉 but I agree that in practice it doesn’t matter.

In some contexts, recursion levels become effectively indistinguishable past recursion level 3.

There is an analogous reasoning in the (very short) essay What You (Want to)* Want by Paul Graham. It is about “wanting what you want” instead of “thinking about what you think,” but the domain is very related (introspection of subconscious processes instead of conscious processes), and the conclusion is the same:

We can get arbitrarily close to a true statement by adding more “want to”s [...] In practice three or four “want to”s must surely be enough. It’s hard even to envision what it would mean to change what you want to want to want to want, let alone actually do it.

[Thane Ruthenis]

I think your post is necessarily on level 4 😉

Yeah, I did consider a more ambitious version of this post, which would’ve included a bunch of examples and case studies. One of them would’ve been “why did I make this post?”, with the motivational range of:

• L0: “I want to marginally drive up the costs of running LW for some reason, so I’m uploading stuff to it.”

• L1: “I believe it’s true and it’ll improve others’ ability to model the world.”

• L2: “I believe it’ll have good-according-to-me consequences if other people thought in this framework.”

• L3: “This is an attempt to inveigle myself with the people who believe in this framework.”

• L4: “Tomorrow I’ll be speaking to someone I want to socially dominate, they or someone else who’d be present reads LW, and if the topic of Simulacra Levels is fresh in their mind, it’ll marginally improve my social positioning.”

There is an analogous reasoning in the (very short) essay What You (Want to)* Want by Paul Graham

Oh, nice! I don’t feel like I properly grok the recursion-limit thing and the cases when it applies, so it’s nice to get additional perspectives on it.