I really appreciate your list of claims and unclear points. Your succinct summary is helping me think about these ideas.
There is no highly viral meme going around right now about producing tons of paperclips.
A few examples came to mind: sports paraphernalia, tabletop miniatures, and stuffed animals (which likely outnumber real animals by hundreds or thousands of times).
One might argue that these things give humans joy, so they don’t count. There is some validity to that. AI paperclips are supposed to be useless to humans. On the other hand, one might also argue that it is unsurprising that subsystems repurposed to seek out paperclips derive some ‘enjoyment’ from the paperclips… but I don’t think that argument will hold water for these examples. Looking at it another way, some amount of paperclips are indeed useful.
No egregore has turned the entire world to paperclips just yet. But of course that hasn’t happened, else we would have already lost.
Even so: consider paperwork (like the tax forms mentioned in the post), skill certifications in the workplace, and things like slot machines and reality television. A lot of human effort is wasted on things humans don’t directly care about, for non-obvious reasons. Those things could be paperclips.
(And perhaps some humans derive genuine joy out of reality television, paperwork, or giant piles of paperclips. I don’t think that changes my point that there is evidence of egregores wasting resources.)
Almost everything in this post sounds right to me.
It doesn’t seem that way to me; but then, what everywhere are you talking about?
I can see those patterns in argumentation online—a lot—and in a few dysfunctional people I know, and indeed in my own past in some places. Regarding my real-life modern friends, family, and coworkers, it doesn’t seem like anyone relates to each other through those roles (at least not often enough to describe it as ‘utterly everywhere’).
Could the pattern be general enough to match very many circumstances? For example, one can act combative, or cooperate, or not react at all, to what happens in one’s life. Thus any interaction can be mapped to the triangle.
Perhaps I’m missing something. If it’s just that few of the people in my life regularly have the victim mindset, I feel very fortunate.
I thought that Void was something different, but I also feel like I shouldn’t try to explain the difference in my conception of the Void.
At any rate, I agree strongly with the idea that we need to prune our mental processes and otherwise reduce the effort/cost from our attempts to be more rational. Mental noise is the source of much confusion. But I don’t agree that Truth is the only thing that matters, or the ultimate thing that matters.
Which is something people always say right before they tell you to stop trying to find the Truth—and that’s not my point at all! Keep pushing toward Truth! Nothing that you want is going to be accomplished without it. And if what you want changes as you learn more, so be it.
All I mean is that, in a technical sense, Truth is the penultimate value. It is fine to want things more than you want the Truth. The mistake is thinking you can get those things while discarding the Truth.
But that seems like a basic lesson… so what did you mean? It may be that every single time someone thinks what they want is at odds with the truth, they are wrong—is that what you meant?
Or perhaps, did you simply mean that getting at the truth requires unwavering devotion, far stronger than what people normally apply toward anything they want? I think that’s also true.
I feel like I’m missing something again.