I know you’re using “loser” in a non-Raoian sense, but those levels map really well onto the loser/clueless/sociopath trichotomy.
Level 0: Loser Level 1: Clueless Level 2: Sociopath
Jerdle
Karma: 38
Future here: Yes. Yes we did see that. GPT-4o was a nightmare for it.
As it happened, it was August 7, 2025. Update your models accordingly.
I get that this was a joke, and don’t agree with the “AGI doomers should push for faster development” part, but I actually do agree that e/acc would be better off accepting a slowdown now in order to get more powerful AI later.
It could do, but a represents the amount of utility remaining.
Maybe the more natural thing would be to have a be the effective tax rate, and have it be (z/x)^a.
x is the initial income, and I forgot to cancel it. Good point.
Turns out, it’s far simpler than I had it as.
Pseudo-flat tax formula:
Assume utility is logarithmic in income, and the goal is to set the experienced tax burden to be constant.
Then, we have the formula that the average tax rate, where is a parameter controlling the experienced tax burden and is the break-even point, is as follows:
is the input income, and is the average tax rate.
My assumption here would be, not that everyone I knew was evil, but that I was evil and was being told this as a level-2 means of getting me away from potential victims.
Thanks for the review!
I will start by saying that the odds and evens structure isn’t especially original. I’ve seen similar things discussed in previous posts and comments, mostly as a dimension of a 2x2 grid. As such, your review seems like the classic quote, falsely attributed to Samuel Johnson: “this is both original and good, but the original parts aren’t good and the good parts aren’t original”.
Of course, I disagree with that (if I thought the new levels weren’t useful, I wouldn’t have come up with them), and will try to explain why the original parts are good, or at least have some value.
To start with, level −1. This is pretty useless. I’m not sure it actually even exists, it’s just a natural consequence of the structure. Inasmuch as it does exist, it is incompatible with the existence of an agent. Perhaps the view of a camera would be level −1.
However, I see levels 5 and 6 as real, useful, and importantly not the same as levels 3 and 4.
Specifically, I see levels 5 and 6 as ungrounded. Levels 3 and 4 are not grounded in object-level reality, but are at least grounded in something, namely signalling and tribal affiliation. While “there’s a lion across the river” no longer means anything about actual lions, it still means something. It could not be replaced with “there’s a foobar across the bazquux”.
At the recursive tier, the words “lion” and “river” become irrelevant, and the system of references no longer roots itself in reality. Now this could presumably be considered “mask[ing] the absence of a basic reality”, but I’m not sure it even masks it. Reality is just absent. This is Baudrillard’s true level 4 of “pure simulacrum”.
Part of me wants to renumber the entire system, given that this is allegedly Baudrillard’s model. In this case, the political tier would all be level 3 and the recursive tier would all be level 4.
What, Dimir Bastard?
I’m not entirely sure my use of that example as level 5 was accurate, it might actually be levels 3 and 6, because the goal of the slogan is to change people’s maps to include a recursive statement rather than merely to express a belief in a recursive statement.
I have found a separate post that firms up the dodgy second paragraph. I would have linked to it, but while there’s a time loop involved in the theory, there wasn’t enough of one to link to a post written in 2024 in my post in 2022.
This is very closely related to a discussion in my post on simulacra levels, but I think this is importantly false.
Yes, mathematics refers to nothing outside itself, but that is not to say that things within it cannot prove other things within it. It is a highly abstract field (my simulacra level 5, which is a form of Baudrillard’s 4), but that is not why it hasn’t been solved.
Take the question “what is 2 + 2”. This is made up of pure abstraction (calling this abstraction simply “1s” is not actually correct—“1” is a quantity defined in this abstraction), and does not directly apply to reality, except through a translation layer where the symbol “2″ is equated to * *. However, the answer is still 4.
It’s a shame I wasn’t able to use a time loop to have this exist when I wrote my post on Newcomb’s problem being an iterated PD.
This concept is exactly what I needed, and it’s explained far better than I did.
Expanding on the Y>W=Z>X and X>W=Z>Y, I would split Abundant Commons at Y=Z, into Abundant Commons above the line and Deadlock below it. Then, the games equated are Deadlock and the PD, and those form a natural continuum.
Loosely and non-rigorously, x/0 is infinite, and so all games with W=Z are extreme forms of the corner games (unless X=W=Z or Y=W=Z). X~Y>W=Z gets you an anti-coordination game and W=Z>X~Y gets you a pure or relatively pure coordination game (Let’s Party).
Y>W=Z>X and X>W=Z>Y are interesting, because they equate games as different as the PD (or Too Many Cooks) and Abundant Commons. I would describe this game as more similar to the Abundant Commons than the PD, as Flitz/Flitz is a perfectly acceptable equilibrium. The value transfer here is neither hyperefficient nor inefficient, but merely efficient.
The triple equalities here are equivalent under name change, so, WLOG, let’s take X=W=Z. Then, there are two games: Y>X and Y<X. Looking at the diagram, X=W=Z>Y should resemble Studying for a Test, while Y>X=W=Z should resemble the Farmer’s Dilemma.
The former game has a primary theme of avoiding Y, and so, while Flitz/Flitz is an equilibrium, I would expect to see more Krump/Krump, as it is never beneficial to play Flitz when there’s any risk of Krump.
The latter game is more complex, but the equilibrium you actually see is Flitz/Flitz, because the only way to get Y is if you play Flitz.
Finally, with all four equal, there is no longer much of a game. All strategies are equilibria, the payoff is identical in each case. This is the trivial game.
I think your 5% figure of KABOOM given retaliation fails to condition on kaboom.
I would estimate an 8% chance of kaboom (broadly following prediction markets, going by a 10% chance of the order to nuke Ukraine and an 80% chance of it actually happening) and an 80% chance of retaliation. For KABOOM, either the West or Russia would drop the first strategic nuke. For the West, the probability is somewhere around 0.1% given kaboom. For Russia, while the probability of KABOOM given escalation is probably less than 5% (more like 1%, I’d guess), kaboom has happened, and so the probability of Russia dropping a strategic nuke is closer to 12.5%. And so, the final probability of KABOOM is closer to 0.9% than 0.25%.
While the author here has been credibly accused of abuse, and so I have no desire to raise his social status, I see this concept as valuable. In fact, it is a good model of at least one element of the vaguely-defined concept of privilege.
Take general social assertiveness. Men are generally Bob, while women are more often Carol. However, it appears that women look at all the B men are getting away with without suffering Y, and see men as Adam. On the other hand, men see the amount of B women can afford not to do without suffering X, and see women as Alice. Therefore, women talk about the male privilege of being able to do B, while men sometimes talk about the female privilege of being able to not do B (only sometimes, because an element of B is not complaining about it).
However, this does not change the fact that Bob is genuinely in a better position than Carol.
It is half of an iterated PD, and the other half is invisible to you.
Was the sixth one a blank canvas?
(This is only going to make sense to a fairly small audience)