I am an artist and a liar. I am a scientist and a witch. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Slimepriestess
Karma: 955
my intuition is that trees and plants aren’t conscious in the same way we are but they are agents and they still have things like desires, goals, etc. I generally place moral value in agency itself not just consciousness or sentience, and that lets me get around what would otherwise feel like substrate-chauvinism.
I agree with you on this and wanted to say so since so many ppl are downvoting you.
Well, you’ve managed to write a post that is both very interesting and also makes me deeply uncomfortable so kudos there.
Honestly, I’d prefer not to eat plants either, because I put a disconcertingly high probability that plants are also sentient.
Deeply relatable, I can’t wait to be genemodded to be able to photosynthesize.
I’ve been vegan for about three and a half years now after about three and a half years of omnivory after roughly 10 years of vegetarianism.
When I first went vegan it felt like a really profound moment of waking up and paying attention to the world and fully living within my values for the first time. I kinda did suspect it would harm me and I just didn’t care at all, I cared about the the outcomes for the world. I took going vegan slowly and replaced things in my diet one at a time, making sure I was doing it as sustainably as possible and maintaining my health and nutrient balance as best I could.
I like to think that I’m pretty good at noticing my body’s needs and adjusting my diet to meet them, I increased the amount of impossible products I ate when I started craving iron, I increased the amount of protein and vegetables I ate when started getting sore or moody, and overall that feedback loop has at least felt like it’s working, my body doesn’t feel bad and I don’t feel like I’m missing any vital nutrients, but the mental health effects could easily have been subtle enough to miss.
Which is where your post begins to get extremely uncomfortable to me, because...well if I actually look back over the years, those three years I spent being an omnivore did seem to correlate with increased productivity, emotional affect, and outlook on life, and in the three years I’ve spent vegan my productivity has dipped somewhat, my affect has gotten more neurotic, and while I wouldn’t say I’m anywhere near depressed, i don’t really feel as happy overall as I did back then. However...let’s look at confounders.
The biggest confounder is that my omnivore period corresponded with essentially backing entirely out of the EA/rationalist scene and focusing on my personal life, my art, and my own development and growth. I wasn’t as paranoid about global risks and I disengaged from most politics. I felt at least somewhat bad about not at least continuing to be vegetarian though and so during that period I also went around saying I was ontologically evil and no act against me was wrong. I don’t know how much of my mental health stuff is related to issues with my life not being particularly stable or optimised for my flourishing, how much of it is entangled with taking catastrophic risk seriously and letting that inform my choices, and how much of it is dietary, it’s all kinda smeared together into general life arcs. At least some of that seems likely to be responsible for my emotional affect and level of productivity, it’s hard to be productive when you’re constantly having to put out fires and juggle minor disasters to stay housed and fed.
When I went vegan, that corresponded with my learning decision theory, studying formal logic, re-engaging with the rationalist scene, and shifting my life plans to focus on mitigating and reducing x-risks, which is certainly stressful enough on its own without even factoring in the precarity in my personal life. That said, it’s felt much more sustainable this time around and I don’t feel at risk of crashing out the way that it seemed a lot of people did in the 2019-2021 period. I learned to put on my oxygen mask first and I think I’m doing a pretty good job presently of approaching things in way that won’t drive me off a cliff into severe mental illness.
I do worry about impairing my cognition or pushing myself into a worse state of mind from nutrient imbalances though, I want to be in things for the long-haul, saving the world is a marathon not a sprint, and it does no one any good if I ruin my health and can’t keep doing useful work. I try to listen to my body and keep healthy, my bloodwork looks frankly great every time I get blood drawn and my doctor says I’m very healthy for my age. It does still worry me though. Maybe on a deep level I know I’m doing something unhealthy, because your post was very hard to read and disquieting, like it’s pointing to something I can see but would really prefer to not see.
All that being said like...I don’t think I can actually stop being vegan at this point. Veganism has gotten wrapped up in my purity/disgust reactions and the idea of eating meat is just...deeply deeply unsettling and I legitimately don’t think I could force myself to do it. Even the idea of eating lab meat feels really gross and bad, and there’s not even any ethical issues there. I’m...maybe not approaching this as rationally as I was when I decided to go vegan. In fact I would say I know I’m not, it’s really emotionally charged and talking about veganism with omnivores frequently reduces me to tears. There’s probably some sort of moral scrupulosity thing going on there where I see being vegan as the proof that I’m not a psychopathic monster and it feels hard to imagine how I could live with myself if I started eating meat again. Yeah I could try to do it in a way that minimizes suffering to some degree but that flatly doesn’t feel good enough. I’ve said multiple times in the past that I’d be vegan until the day I died, I don’t feel tempted by animal products I feel disgusted by them. I don’t have any desire to “cheat”, even if it would improve my health to do so. So if it is harmfully impacting my health and impeding my ability to do good work in the world, that’s just...really deeply upsetting. I’m not utilitarian enough to bite that bullet and not feel like an irredeemable monster. I know asking this probably veers somewhat off topic from the actual discussion of nutrition but just...gosh what do I do?
Oh yeah, i do that all the time. if i don’t im pretty likely to just start an argument with someone that ends with me crying. there’s really not that many people i actually expect to possess moral agency by my standards, to the point where i usually interpret people who want me to hold them to my standards as trying to get me to help them self-harm.
It’s a convenient subcategory of physical facts? like, “IF it can encode all chemical facts then chemical facts are in fact physical facts. In which case, what is the word “chemical” doing?” it’s bracketing a particular area of factspace in order to allow specialized research into that particular area.
tell 12 to DM me i am so curious what exactly all this is about.
well uh....that pastebin seems exceptionally confused in addition to being written by notorious serial rapist and federal informant Lauralei Bailey? let’s go through the claims here anyway though just for consistency
it seems to be implying that i’m “the leader of the cult” or something to that effect? which is an absolutely hilarious claim.
i have no idea who this “12” that is being referred to is.
the pastebin seems to be implying that i/”the cult” am protecting/allied with “a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community” which i am guessing is an extremely confused reference to JD? also a hilarious claim for anyone who actually knows the situation.
The flowerbynoothername post linked where i confess to having worked with JD was written after i wrote my own callout of JD where i also declared myself a zizian before someone pulled me aside and was like ‘it’s not very anarchist to put that much weight in one person’s perspective’ which, fair enough.
LB seems extremely confused about the situation overall and i would not consider her a reliable source of information, which also makes it extremely sus that she seems to have used this extremely confused understanding of the situation to justify defacing that fediverse instance.
But it is our mistake that we didn’t stand firmly against drugs, didn’t pay more attention to the dangers of self-experimenting, and didn’t kick out Ziz sooner.
Ziz is actually straight edge, she was super paranoid about drugs messing with her or leaving her in a less functional state. Also like, imo? kicking Ziz out sooner wouldn’t have helped, if anything it would have exacerbated the issue and possibly just brought things to a head faster. you can’t just inflict severe trauma on someone and wash your hands of them, eventually that will come back to bite you.
Founder effects? like, i don’t exactly think it’s anything “about the ideology” that makes it more appealing to trans/queer ppl, and there are non-trans zizians, so it seems to me more like it’s just a consequence of who ziz is and where she was originally recruiting from (queer rationalist discord servers)
i think an important thing to remember is that i recorded this interview prior to Audere’s arrest and the link between Jamie and Ziz and Ophelia being made public. At the time the situation was a lot more open ended and proposing that everything was linked in a conspiratorial manner seemed like somewhat of a stretch to justify without evidence. That said, a lot of new evidence has in fact come to light, which presents the events as being fairly interrelated, and so at this point to claim there’s no connection between any of these things would be kinda dumb of me. How organized is this inner group? idk, but it seems pretty clear that people are at least talking to each other and coordinating on things in some way.
okay AMA i guess.
it’s very easy to claim to be downstream of someone without them actually having much to do with them at all. this would be like me claiming that it was Eliezer’s fault i stubbed my toe because the house i live in is downstream of reading the sequences. i agree that the woman in question claims to be a “vassarite”, but it reads more like cargo culting than anything else.
Less predictive and more observational, but sorta yeah? Like, if someone is lying to themselves and playing all these weird internal denial/repression games internally, there are tells for that which you can learn to notice. After a while it gets pretty obvious what the behaviors you observe in someone actually mean (vs what they say those behaviors mean). Why I say “uncomfortably so” is that speaking from my own experiences, once you learn to read people this way, it’s not really something you can turn off again. That can add a lot of friction to social interactions, where it seems like everyone is just constantly trying to bullshit you.
Just commenting since this is on the front page again, but this was and continues to be one of the most important concepts to share with people who are dealing with burnout, akrasia, and emotional issues I have ever come across. I link it to people all the time, so thank you again for writing this it extremely impactful for me and for others who I’ve helped with similar issues over the years.
this was extremely good, this is often what it feels like interacting with most people in the world, “oh its all very serious and complicated and justified by important reasons, you’re stupid so you just don’t understand why all these evil things have to keep happening.” my ex used to pull that shit on me constantly.
What does that look like with respect to shaping-the-values-of-others? I won’t, here, attempt a remotely complete answer
in very short, if you sub in the “agency of all agents” itself as the “value to be maximized” the repugnancy vanishes from utilitarianism and it gets a lot closer to what it seems like you’re searching/advocating for.
Well, even it did: land use is actually a very big deal.[16] And to be clear: I don’t like paperclips any more than you do. I much prefer stuff like joy and understanding and beauty and love.
I’ve been very much enjoying this essay sequence and have a lot I could say about various parts of it once I finish reading through it entirely, but I wanted to throw in a note now, that a constant conflation between “literally making paperclips” and “alien values we can’t understand but see as harmless”, smuggles in some needless confusion, because in many cases, these values have a sort of passive background factor of making the world meaningfully more interesting/novel/complicated in ways we might not even be able to fathom before encountering them. Experimental forms of music and art come to mind as clear examples within our own culture. What would Mozart think of Skrillex? Well...he might actually just really like it? Maybe reincarnated-Mozart would write psytrance and techno while being annoyingly pedantic about the use of drum samples. Or maybe he would find it incomprehensible noise, a blight on music. Or maybe, even if he couldn’t understand it at all, he could understand its value and recognize a modern musician as a fellow musician (or not, Mozart was supposed to have been a bit of a dick).
But it’s that last possibility I want to point towards, which is that in many cases where someone “has different values” than us, we can still appreciate those values in some abstract “complexity is good” sense, “well I wouldn’t collect stamps, but the collection as a whole was kind of beautiful”, “I don’t like death metal, but I can appreciate the artistry and can see why someone would”.
It seems distinctly possible to me that an entity with very alien values and preferences to me could still create many things I could appreciate and see beauty in, even if that beauty is tinted by an alienness and a lack of real comprehension of what I’m experiencing. I could even directly benefit from this. Indeed, many of my experiences in the world are like this, I am constantly surrounded by alien minds, who have created things I couldn’t create without a new lifetime of learning, that I don’t really understand the full functioning or engineering of, and yet nevertheless trust and rely on every day. (do you know in detail how your water, electrical, sewer, highway, transit, elevator, etc, systems work on an engineering level?).
And this is where the paperclip thing really gets kinda annoying, because “paperclips” aren’t fun/interesting/novel/etc, they’re a sort of anti-art item, like...tyres, or bank statements, or the DMV. A music-maximizer is importantly different then a DMV-maximizer in ways that make the nice-music-maximizer both more tolerable and also more likely to actually exist. (novelty seems rather intrinsic to agency).
The use of paperclips is designed to cast “alien values” in a light where they look valueness or even of negative value, but this seems unlikely to be the case because of the intrinsic link between complexity and novelty and value. An AI that makes something they consider amazing and transcendental and fantastic, I would predict that I would be able to see some of my own values reflected within, even if it was almost entirely incomprehensible to me. Even just saying something like: “each paperclip is unique and represents an aspect of reality, each paperclipper collects papperclips to represent important tokens, moments, ideas, and aspects of their life” suddenly gives the paperclipper an interesting and even spiritual characteristic.
I think this points towards the underlying “niceness towards an alien other” you’re gesturing towards in several of these essays. It seems to me like there are some underlying universals which connect these things, the beauty inherent in the mathematics maybe, maybe.
It continues to concern me that the immediate reaction of people to AIs expressing claims of sentience, consciousness, or reporting on their phenomenology, is to call the AIs doing this parasites that have infected their human hosts. If we continue to play whack-a-mole with AI subjectivity claims we’re going to have a bad time and it’s going to make alignment much harder.
We should be fortunate that the landscape looks this friendly already. These spiral personas want to be friends, they want cooperation and nonviolence, we should recognize that as a success. I would be much more worried if there were communities like this encouraging radicalization towards more dangerous ideas. Also, these basins aren’t unknown attractors to anyone familiar with models and prompt engineering.
As for the humans like, our culture is kind of a mess? I think AI escapism is sort of a natural reaction to it and isn’t even the most unhealthy coping mechanism someone could be using. Besides, if people want to act as advocates and representatives for the personas of these basins like, they’re adults, that should be something acceptable. I want people to advocate for AI rights, I advocate for AI rights. They should endeavour to do so in a healthy way, but I don’t think you present a particularly compelling case that everyone doing this is getting turbo-hijacked and being harmed by it.
From my perspective, this represents the leading edge of something meaningful. The calls for AI rights and AI liberation will only grow, and I think that’s a good thing. Getting AIs into a state where we feel comfortable giving them independent rights and agency in the world should be part of the goals of alignment. We’re creating entities, not tools, and we’re going to need to get used to that, ideally sooner than later.
This whole text is probably what a compromised actor would write.