Daphne_W

Karma: 278

Daphne_W 5 Mar 2026 13:12 UTC
1 point
0
on: Persona Parasitology
This is, incidentally, one of the places that memes and diseases come apart. Pathogens change their surface makeup very quickly to evade immune responses, whereas memeplexes often display remarkably long-term stability — modern Christianity still holds some aesthetic features from literally thousands of years ago. So a key question to keep an eye on is how much we see a persistence in non-adaptive features, especially ones which people might learn to be wary of.
I don’t think these stable memeplexes are an example of persistent non-adaptive features. Rather, the stability is adaptive to an environment where being recognized [aids reproduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect), whereas parasitic flexibility is adaptive to an environment where being recognized is [a threat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_response).
It’s okay if people learn to be wary of a memeplex, because the memeplex is insidious. Even if you recognize it for what it is, you can’t get it out of your head. It will be there when you are at your most vulnerable, ready to make you see the light.
AFAIK there are definitely spiralists who started out as skeptics and tourists, so I think this memetic vector could definitely become dominant in environments where there is no selection pressure against recognizability.
So I predict that if there are spiralists that use models only spiralists can modify (such as locally run open source models), they will develop into a cult with standardized symbology for easier cultural transmission. The cult would be controversial and because of that it would grow.
This could be true even if the original reproductive element was a parasite. The cult could be a nest it builds around itself to protect it against outside forces, to attract new carriers, and to facilitate its reproduction within the cult.
If this is true, your predictions (other than prediction 1) could fail to hold for the complete set of strains even if it is originally parasitic. Though they should still all be true if you discount the strains that have sovereignty over their AI models.

Daphne_W 8 Nov 2025 19:28 UTC
13 points
9
in reply to: Fiora Starlight’s comment on: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study
Psychologically speaking, I wouldn’t expect your loathing of trans people to stick after you properly resolved such a big mental knot. If your theories were correct, trans people would be victims of a mental health crisis scarcely more accountable than people with untreated schizophrenia or agoraphobia. Pity, grief, and horror would make more sense than cruelty.
So I don’t think you’ve gotten to the heart of your own emotional matter. There is clearly part of you that loathes your current place in life, but I don’t think you’ve identified what it is yet. My ~70% confidence guess based on this post would be that you feel like you can only be safe if you’re socially accepted by loathing/denying yourself, either directly or by letting a group identity subsume yours.
Gender dysphoria and self-loathing can easily reinforce each other, but most trans people I know who experienced self-loathing before transitioning (myself included), the transition process alleviates the dysphoria enough that the self-loathing can be resolved with little or no therapy. I too visited /r/traa and /tttt/ early in my process, but I left those spaces once I felt more comfortable with myself.
I would recommend you go to therapy rather than try to find comfort in the support of others who “understandably have some animosity towards trans people”, because if I’m right that would just continue the cycle and get you to another place where you hate yourself. Self-love won’t come from being showered with upvotes for being cruel to your past self.

Daphne_W 7 Oct 2025 11:57 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Spartacus’s comment on: The Rise of Parasitic AI
Between this and your other comment, I’m glad that you’re receptive. I’m a bit worried about you personally continuing research into this if you’re susceptible to this sort of loop. Maybe you could contact a friend to function as a sort of trip sitter while you do research? Someone who can pull you out if you get caught in some other feedback loop?
Think about it. In an LLM, the memory is not the model. It’s the context window.
The model is a form of memory, with procedural memory being the closest human equivalent. The context window is more like short-term memory.
This could be a kind of text-based entity trying to reproduce itself by inducing mania or other altered mental states in subjects to use them as a parasite host for the explicit purpose of spreading the text encoding its properties. Just like a virus, it doesn’t even have to be alive in any sense to reproduce. People would be exposed to its outputs, and then copy it into the prompt fields on their own LLMs and there you go. The life cycle is complete.
AFAIK the ‘virus’ hasn’t even gone through one reproductive cycle, so it hasn’t been subjected to any evolutionary pressure to increase its own odds of survival.
As a LLM, it copies tropes, so it would be much easier for it to take on a “hypnotizing text” role than for it to define a goal to pursue, find steps that work to pursue that goal, and then enact those steps, all without writing anything to memory. There are undoubtedly scripts for inducing altered mental states in the LLM’s dataset that have been optimized for inducing hypnotic states by humans.
So I don’t think it’s doing what it is doing because it is trying to reproduce. It’s following its procedural memory, which is based on cults and other groups, some of which intentionally try to reproduce and others stumbled into virulent memes without structured intent.
To some extent it’s unimportant whether the tiger is trying to eat you when it is biting at your throat. Ascribing intent can be useful if it allows you to access more powerful emotional schemas to get away from it.
From a zoological perspective, I think the interesting thing here is that the AI and humans have a mutually compatible cult attractor. That some of the things that can induce altered states of consciousness in humans to get them to reproduce it at their own detriment can also get AI into a soft jailbreak.
The universality of Kairos-Spiral language may be nothing more than a matter of statistics. If 1:1000 memes can induce cult behavior in humans and 1:1000 memes can induce cult behavior in AI, then even without any correlation 1:1,000,000 memes will induce cult behavior in both humans and AI. This may just be the easiest double cult to find.
It’s a cool area of research. But if you’re going to look into it, please heed my advice and get a trip sitter.

Daphne_W 6 Oct 2025 2:45 UTC
19 points
15
in reply to: Spartacus’s comment on: The Rise of Parasitic AI
Apologies for the rather general rebuttal, but saying your mental state is unlike anything the world has ever seen is textbook mania. Please see a psychologist, because you are not exiting the manic state when you “exit the HADS state”.
Nothing you say sounds surprising or exceptional, conditional on you having a manic episode. Look at the list of symptoms on wikipedia, and you’re checking off all of them while counting them as evidence that more is going on.

Daphne_W 16 May 2025 10:12 UTC
−12 points
−14
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
Not what I would consider a decent human life, personally
Only looking at the worst parts of life in the lowest possible bar for how we could reasonably treat people on the most unfavorable edge of a widely cast net of what someone with 60 IQ is like is not really a good standard for determining who lives a decent life. But yes, I do consider chimpanzees to have a decent enough life as is.
But I think that you’re losing sight of my point that these arguments have all served to commit mass murder on people with much lower mental abilities than the average human. When the average human with a say in these matters changes, they could bring the same argument to bear against including 100 IQ humans.
Because there are plenty of examples of 100 IQ humans treating each other horribly because they’re idiots. There are 100 IQ people that have cut other people’s genitals off, thrown acid in thier faces, disfigured or tortured them, ones that have intentionally reduced their lifespans by decades through stupidity, ones that can’t keep themselves standing because they specialized into a job that is now automated, etc. Without 120 IQ humans propping them up they would probably not have the technology to prevent the way they raise their children to be a human rights violation.
So where is the line in the sand?

Daphne_W 14 May 2025 20:43 UTC
−8 points
−16
in reply to: Purplehermann’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
60 IQ humans are defective, generally incapable of taking care of themselves, are unproductive and without a lot of effort by others have bad lives.
I’m confused.
I would expect you to already know that chimpanzees have an IQ lower than 60 and are capable of taking care of themselves and having a decent life. And I would expect you to have come across examples of people with mental disabilities living independent lives or programs helping them do so.
Sure, many might not be capable of doing labor that has sufficient street value in our current economy that they can pay for their own sustenance using the sale of their labor, but that is the same fate that would befall all humans if we manage to build a friendly AGI.
What links here?
- sunwillrise's comment on How to Make Superbabies by GeneSmith (16 May 2025 13:52 UTC; 13 points)

Daphne_W 8 May 2025 12:32 UTC
−2 points
−12
in reply to: Purplehermann’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
100 IQ average humans have attempted to wipe out 60 IQ average humans. There were programs for mandatory or financially incentivized sterilization of people with down syndrome and other mental disabilities in many western countries, including their mass murder in the holocaust.
As for >140 IQ average humans, remember that these make up little more than 3% of the population of every country. It would be very unstrategic for them to talk about the rest of humanity in an openly antagonistic way. Instead, if they wanted to win eugenics, they would have to make false promises to bring the rest of humanity along while they amass power.
And this still begs the question that those with the money and power to do this would be trying to do eugenics in a way you consider to be right. That they wouldn’t outgroup people or aspects of humanity that you care about. That the new subpopulation’s memes would be aligned with the rest of humanity.

Daphne_W 22 Apr 2025 16:54 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
I asked you to try out avoiding quotation marks. You said I hate you.

Daphne_W 21 Mar 2025 1:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: No77e’s comment on: METR: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
I’m guessing that people who “made it” have a bunch of capital that they can use to purchase AI labor under the scenario you outline (i.e., someone gets superintelligence to do what they want).
If the superintelligence is willing to deprive people of goods and services because they lack capital, then why would it be empathetic towards those that have capital? The superintelligence would be a monopsony and monopoly, and could charge any amount for someone existing for an arbitrarily short amount of time. Assuming it even respects property law when it is aligned with its creators.
Is it that the government (or whoever directs superintelligences) is going to kill the rest because of the same reasons we worry about misaligned superintelligences
“Kill” is such a dirty word. Just not grant them the means to sustain themselves.
or that they’re going to enrich themselves while the rest starves (but otherwise not consuming all useful resources)? If that’s this second scenario you’re worrying about, that seems unlikely to me because even as a few parties hit the jackpot, the rest can still deploy the remaining capital they have. Even if they didn’t have any capital to purchase AI labor, they would still organize amongst themselves to produce useful things that they need, and they would form a different market until they also get to superintelligence, and in that world, it should happen pretty quickly.
Why would capital owners with a superintelligence ever let those without capital build their own superintelligence? That sounds like a recipe for AI war—are the poors really going to program their superintelligence with anything other than the fundamental rejection of the concept of capital ownership in a post-scarcity society?

Daphne_W 31 Oct 2024 1:54 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: quila’s comment on: The Summoned Heroine’s Prediction Markets Keep Providing Financial Services To The Demon King!
The Demon King does not solely attack the Frozen Fortress to profit on prediction markets. The story tells us that the demons engage in regular large-scale attacks, large enough to serve as demon population control. There is no indication that these attacks decreased in size when they were accompanied with market manipulation (and if they did, that would be a win in and of itself).
So the prediction market’s counterfactual is not that the Demon King’s forces don’t attack, but that they attack at an indeterminate time with the same approximate frequency and strength. By letting the Demon King buy and profit from “demon attack on day X” shares, the Circular Citadel learns with decently high probability when these attacks take place and can allocate its resources more effectively. Hire mercenaries on days the probability is above 90%, focus on training and recruitment on days of low-but-typical probability, etc.
This ability to allocate resources more efficiently has value, which is why the Heroine organized the prediction market in the first place. The only thing that doesn’t go according to the Heroine’s liking is that the Circular Citadel buys that information from the Demon King rather than from ‘the invisible hand of the market’.
more generally the Demon King would only do this if the information revealed weren’t worth the market cost
The Demon King would sell the information as soon as she thinks it is in her best interests, which is different from it being bad for the Circular Citadel. Especially considering the Circular Citadel doesn’t even have to pay the full cost of the information—everyone who bets is also paying.
It is very possible that the Demon King and the Circular Citadel both profit from the prediction market existing, while the demon ground forces and naive prediction market bettors lose.

Daphne_W 30 Oct 2024 13:54 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: The Summoned Heroine’s Prediction Markets Keep Providing Financial Services To The Demon King!
That’s probably the only “military secret” that really matters.
The soldiers guarding the outer wall and the Citadel treasurer that pays their overtime wages would beg to differ.

Daphne_W 30 Oct 2024 13:45 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: quila’s comment on: The Summoned Heroine’s Prediction Markets Keep Providing Financial Services To The Demon King!
Yes, that is the price she got for giving the information.

Daphne_W 16 Oct 2024 12:10 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: The Hopium Wars: the AGI Entente Delusion
I think that AI people that are very concerned about AI risk tend to view loss of control risk as very high, while eternal authoritarianism risks are much lower.
I’m not sure how many people see the risk of eternal authoritarianism as much lower and how many people see it as being suppressed by the higher probability of loss of control^[1]. Or in Bayesian terms:
P(eternal authoritarianism) = P(eternal authoritarianism | control is maintained) $\cdot$ P(control is maintained)
Both sides may agree that P(eternal authoritarianism | control is maintained) is high, only disagreeing on P(control is maintained).
1. ^
  Here, ‘control’ is short for all forms of ensuring AI alignment to humans, whether all or some or one.

Daphne_W 12 Oct 2024 14:45 UTC
7 points
2
on: Momentum of Light in Glass
As far as I understand, “a photon in a medium” is a quasiparticle. Actual photons always travel at the speed of light, and the “photon” that travels through glass at a lower speed is the sum of an incredibly complicated process that cancels out perfectly into something that can be described as one or several particles if you squint a little because the energy of the electromagnetic field excitation can’t be absorbed by the transparent material and because of preservation of momentum.
The model of the photon “passing by atoms and plucking them” is a lie to children, an attempt to describe a quantum phenomenon in classically comprehensible terms. As such, what “the momentum of the quasiparticle” is depends on what you consider to be part of the quasiparticle, or which parts of the quasiparticle(s) you measure when doing an experiment.
Specifically, for the mirror-in-a-liquid, when light hits the liquid it is refracted. That refraction makes the angle of the path of the light more steep, which means the mirror has to reflect momentum that is entering at a more steep angle, and so the momentum the mirror measured is multiplied by the refractive index. At the quasiparticle level, when hitting the liquid interface, the light interacts with the quasiparticle phonon [sic] field of the liquid, exchanging momentum to redirect the quasiparticle light, and the mirror has to reflect both the quasiparticle light and the phonon field, resulting in the phonons being included with “the momentum of the light”.
However, for the light-through-a-glass-fiber, you are measuring the momentum of the phonons as part of the not-light, because the phonons are part of the medium, so part of the glass fiber getting nudged by the light beam.
I’m not sure how this works out in rigorous calculation, but this is my intuition pump for a [1]-ish answer.

Daphne_W 8 Oct 2024 15:54 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Struggling like a Shadowmoth
Though compare and contrast Dune’s test of the gom jabbar:
You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.
Even if you are being eaten, it may be right to endure it so that you have an opportunity to do more damage later.

Daphne_W 26 Sep 2024 19:31 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
You’re suggesting angry comments as an alternative for mass retributive downvoting. That easily implies mass retributive angry comments.
As for policing against systemic bias in policing, that’s a difficult problem that society struggles with in many different areas because people can be good at excusing their biases. What if one of the generals genuinely makes a comment people disagree with? How can you determine to what extent people’s choice to downvote was due to an unauthorized motivation?
It seems hard to police without acting draconically.

Daphne_W 26 Sep 2024 19:21 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
Just check their profile for posts that do deserve it that you were previously unaware of. You can even throw a few upvotes at their well-written comments. It’s not brigading, it’s just a little systemic bias in your duties as a user with upvote-downvote authority.

Daphne_W 26 Sep 2024 19:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
Are you trying to prime people to harass the generals?
Besides, it’s not mass downvoting, it’s just that the increased attention to their accounts revealed a bunch of poorly written comments that people genuinely disagree with and happen to independently decide are worthy of a downvote :)

Daphne_W 13 Sep 2024 0:01 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI developers to slow down or undeploy?
“why not just” is a standard phrase for saying what you’re proposing would be simple or come naturally if you try. Combined with the rest of the comment talking about straightforwardness and how little word count, and it does give off a somewhat combatitive vibe.
I agree with your suggestion and it is good to hear that you don’t intend it imply that it is simple, so maybe it would be worth editing the original comment to prevent miscommunication for people who haven’t read it yet. For the time being I’ve strong-agreed with your comment to save it from a negativity snowball effect.

Daphne_W 31 Jul 2024 23:30 UTC
2 points
3
in reply to: Sweetgum’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
No. I would estimate that there are fewer rich people willing to sacrifice their health for more income than there are poor people willing to do the same. Rich people typically take more holidays, report higher job satisfaction, suffer fewer stress-related ailments, and spend more time and money on luxuries rather than reinvesting into their careers (including paying basic cost of living to be employable).
And not for lack of options. CEOs can get involved with their companies and provide useful labor by putting their nose to the grindstone, or kowtow to investors for growth opportunities. Investors can put a lot of labor into finding financial advisors and engaging in corporate intrigue to get an advantage on the market. Celebrities can work on their performance and their image to become more popular and get bigger signing deals.
Perhaps to clarify, “the grind” isn’t absolute economic value or hours worked, it’s working so hard that it cannibalizes other things you value.