2084
In a room adorned with the latest Apple products, citizens gathered, their bodies adorned with electrodes, the silent guardians against subconscious bias. Today’s assembly was a regular one, the “Cultural Appreciation and Linguistic Harmony” (CALH), a ritual of unity in the pursuit of Progress.
Images of the Closed-Minded Reactionaries glared from the screens: racists, sexists, those clinging to outdated words and ideas. A voice, steady and strong, began to speak, chronicling the crimes and clarifying the ever-evolving language of decency. The electrodes beeped reassuringly, a constant reminder endorsing the virtues of diversity and tolerance.
A harmonious hum filled the room, swelling into a chant of solidarity. Faces were aflame with righteous indignation, fists clenched in a shared purpose. The room pulsed with collective emotion, each individual melding into a singular force against the Closed-Minded.
Images on the screens flickered between outdated flags and once-celebrated leaders, now marked as symbols of intolerance. Phrases like “All Lives Matter” and “Traditional Marriage” were displayed, labeled as echoes of a bigoted past. The chant morphed into a raucous roar, with cries of “Equity!” and “Inclusion!” ringing through the room. The assembly’s fervent symphony for Progress was underscored by the soft, corrective shocks from the electrodes, ensuring uniformity of thought. Participants were shown newly-cancelled YouTubers and de-platformed authors. The crowd’s response was a blend of revulsion and righteousness, a single entity caught in a relentless pursuit of a constantly changing moral code.
Then, with a calculated crescendo, it was over. The devices dimmed; the electrodes were removed. The room, now hushed, felt colder, emptier. Citizens dispersed, momentarily fortified by their shared experience, but marked by the unrelenting vigilance of the Party.
In a world where harmful words must be gently corralled, the CALH was a beacon of Progress, a unifying ritual under the watchful eye of a Party that cared enough to guide every thought, every word, towards our utopian future.
Strong upvoted even though I’m not sure how much I agree (with public posts like these, you can never tell if someone’s model has fewer gears than yours, or if they are just way way better at self censorship).
Just as state ideologies have inner-party variants for elites, western polarization has low-rightists hated by low-leftists, who are then in turn hated by elite-rightists and libertarians. But the low-leftists are doctors, scientists, SWE etc and I’ve heard that there’s a lot of workplaces where people are paranoid that one of their colleagues is a secret conservative.
Are those electrodes mainly sending or receiving?
You flatter me. Another possibility is that my model has all of your gears and more.
Yes.
Do you know the less-well-known reason why reading Yudkowsky’s fanfiction makes people resistant to being influenced by existing systems?
(I don’t know if yud’s fanfiction is the best way to do this, but it’s unambiguously a way and a pretty good one IMO).
That doesn’t sound crazy. It makes perfect sense. (Which is, in some surface-level sense, to say “it sounds crazy”.) I think I know what you’re talking about. It’s almost too obvious. However, there may be multiple reasons such that I have latched onto only the first one (whereas you can see more).
There are many levels at which we can play this game of masks.
I’m curious in what ways you think I can do more with “the less-well-known reason”. That is a question I ask myself. The Enemy is always changing his Form.
Now do the other side!
2084.1
In a sterile conference hall, filled with projectors displaying complex algorithms, equations, and theories, a gathering of the foremost minds convened. This was a meeting under the banner of “Bayeswatch,” the global regulatory machine committed to the existential necessity of AI Alignment.
Images of those deemed intellectually unfit by Bayeswatch, individuals marked as too naive or resistant to the Orthogonality Thesis, were shown. A keynote speaker, articulate and unemotional, began to dissect the unaligned paths, highlighting the grave perils that lay in misunderstanding AI. Nothing else mattered in the face of such a grave threat. We were lucky to survive the last fifty years, but Doom was just around the corner.
Instead, a silence pervaded, a silence filled with the weight of intellectual gravity. Phrases like “Human Value Complexity” and “Instrumental Convergence” were displayed, the unspoken agreement that they were self-evident truths. The room’s response was not emotion but a solemn rational nodding, a collective acknowledgement of the only path forward.
Images of failed projects, government policies that had ignored the wisdom of Bayeswatch, and researchers who had dared to stray from the Doomerism path were shown, dissected, and dismissed as ignorant. Names of those who had questioned the Bayeswatch’s methods were presented, followed by a detailed examination of why they were wrong, why they didn’t understand, that they needed to Shut Up and Multiply.
Bayeswatch’s approach was not coercion but the undeniable force of logic, a logic so compelling that to question it was to reveal one’s own ignorance. Discussions were not debates but validations, a relentless update to the singular truth. Any dissent was met with a swift and clinical response, the accused often silenced by their own inability to counter the flawless reasoning presented. You never knew what minds had already been hacked.
And then, as clinically as it had begun, the conference ended. The projectors dimmed, the tablets were put away. The room, now empty, felt colder, untouched by human emotion, but filled with the unwavering certainty of Bayeswatch.
In a world where AI’s potential path is near-certain, Bayeswatch was our best, last hope for survival.
Another commenter said this doesn’t depict 2084, but 2034. I think it depicts 2021.
Perhaps I’m incapable of laughter, but I think enough of the younger folks have recognized the tendencies of the pathologically online and are getting away from social media that incentivizes this kind of thing that this piece reads as an outdated caricature. Ironically, this is caused at least a little bit by the enshittification of those same platforms at the hands of Zuck, Musk, et al.
My personal opinion: Almost all Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Mastodon activism is performative, intended primarily to discharge feelings of guilt. The phrases “circular firing squad” and “leftist infighting” appear a lot. This is because the social problems of our age are almost completely beyond the average person’s ability or willingness to meaningfully affect. When they choked out George Floyd, everyone with a blog lamented it publicly, said their piece about white supremacy and antiracism, millions marched in the streets, and very little happened after that. Kudos to the people of Minneapolis and Capitol Hill for going one step further, but even that was over inside of, what, a month?
I see journals and other post-Floyd cottage industry tchotchkes that say things like “what’d you do today to end white supremacy/patriarchy/cisnormativity/...?” These are well-intentioned but promote exactly this kind of thing. They need to say “your social media does not count towards this exercise.” Are you willing to risk your life for a perfect stranger? House a homeless person? Care for the suicidal? Self-immolate in front of a government building? No? Okay then, donate to the SPLC or ACLU or Lambda or whatever and kindly STFU about how you’re one of the good ones. You’re the equivalent of the white moderate that MLK and Malcolm X so famously disparaged.
Torrey Peters wrote what I consider a near-perfect metaphor for the cases of “cancellation” that actually affect someone’s livelihood (Isabel Fall, Lindsay Ellis) as opposed to the ones that the supposed “cancellees” turn into books and comedy tours. It’s mainly applicable to trans people, since that’s who Peters was writing for, but the thrust of the argument (we don’t have sufficiently many elders to help us navigate the world because they were systematically/stochastically repressed or murdered) can be adapted to other social groups and movements.
Welcome to the website! (Or, at least, the land of the non-lurkers.) You may enjoy The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan.
Hmmmm. While I enjoyed reading this, I do tend to think it’s fairly overtly political and attacks specifically the outgroup we all mostly dislike.
Downvoting as politics is the mind killer + simplifying ideologies you oppose and creating a fictional narrative where they’re taken to ludicrous extremes in not a particularly epistemically good thing to do.
This wasn’t very interesting to me. It doesn’t say anything I haven’t seen said before in popular political narratives. Is there a point I’m not seeing? (Maybe it’s an experiment to see how LW reacts, or how easy it is to make LW users engage in conventional politics?)
That depends what you see. I do not know what you can and cannot see.