jbash

Karma: 2,893

jbash Feb 7, 2025, 2:16 PM
10 points
12
in reply to: frontier64’s comment on: Wired on: “DOGE personnel with admin access to Federal Payment System”
Because of the “flood the zone” strategy, I can’t even remember all the illegal stuff Trump is doing, and I’m definitely not going to go dig up specific statutory citations for all of it. I tried Gemini deep research, and it refused to answer the question. I don’t have access to OpenAI’s deep research.

Things that immediately jump to mind as black letter law are trying to fire inspectors general without the required notice to Congress, and various impoundments. I would have to do actual research to find the specific illegalities in all the “anti-DEI” stuff. I would also have to go do research before I could tell you what made it illegal to fire the chair of the FEC.^[1]

For DOGE specifically, here’s a list that happened to cross my eyes this morning. It’s in an interview format, so it’s probably incomplete.

https://www.vox.com/politics/398618/elon-musk-doge-illegal-lawbreaking-analysis

The bottom line is that the “unitary executive” idea is dead in law. If there’s a statute that says “the President shall establish a Department of Cat Videos, which shall promote cat videos [however], whose director shall be a calico cat which may not be dismissed once appointed, and here’s $10,000,000 to do it”, then the president is obligated to have a Department of Cat Videos, and find a cat to run it, and keep the cat on, and spend the money as directed. This is not a close call. Statutes have been passed, they’ve been litigated against, they’ve stood, other statutes have been passed relying on those precedents, there’s been litigation about those, and a whole edifice of well-established law has been built up. That’s what “black letter law” is.

It’s true that the current Supreme Court seems to have essentially no respect for precedent, and an, um, extremely idiosyncratic way of interpreting the actual text of the Constitution. It’s entirely possible that this whole blitz is meant, at least in part, to generate test cases to tear down that structure. But that’s more about the Court abandoning its job than about the established law.
1. ↩︎
  … and I suppose I can’t claim trying to change the Fourtheenth Amendment by executive order as an administrative law violation.

jbash Feb 7, 2025, 12:16 AM
4 points
2
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Wired on: “DOGE personnel with admin access to Federal Payment System”

Why do you believe that DOGE is mostly selected for personal loyalty? Elon Musk seems to say openly says whatever he wants even if that goes against what Trump said previously.

You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that, at least not without elaboration.

I don’t think most of the people at the “talks to Trump” level are really picked for anything you could rightly call “personal loyalty” to Trump. They may be sold to Trump as loyal, but that’s probably not even what’s on his mind as long as he’s never seen you to make him look bad. I don’t think disagreeing with Trump on policy will make him see you as disloyal. He doesn’t really care about that.

I do think many of the people in the lower tiers are picked for loyalty. In the case of DOGE, that means either personal loyalty to Musk, or loyalty to whatever story he’s telling. I don’t know whether you count the latter as “personal loyalty”.

The DOGE team brought their beds to the office to basically work nonstop.

Well, I’m guessing Musk got them the beds as a “team building” thing, but yes.

If personal loyalty is your main criteria you don’t get a bunch of people who never leave the office and work non-stop

You do, though. Personal loyalty, or ideological loyalty, or both, are exactly how you get people to never leave the office.

with high IQs.

They’re not acting like they have high IQs. Or at least not high “G”.

Start with sleeping in the office. If every single thing they say about the facts and their reasons for being there were 100 percent true, it’d be dumb to burn yourself out trying to make such massive changes on that kind of work schedule.

It’s also dumb to ignore the collateral damage when you go around stopping Federal payments you may not understand.

And Marko Elez just had to resign because he wasn’t effective enough in scrubbing his past tweets. Wall Street Journal says he “advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act, backed a ‘eugenic immigration policy,’ and wrote, ‘You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.’”. I actually would have thought they’d let him skate, but apparently you still can’t get quite that blatant at this point. Smart people don’t post stuff like that, for more than one reason.

jbash Feb 6, 2025, 10:35 PM
15 points
7
in reply to: robo’s comment on: Wired on: “DOGE personnel with admin access to Federal Payment System”
And, I just don’t think that’s the case. I think this is pretty-darn-usual and very normal in the management consulting / private equity world.
I don’t know anything about how things are done in management consulting or private equity.^[1] Ever try it in a commercial bank?
Now imagine that you’re in an environment where rules are more important than that.
Coups don’t tend to start by bringing in data scientists.
Coups tend to start by bypassing and/or purging professionals in your government and “bringing in your own people” to get direct control over key levers. It’s very standard. The treasury is a big lever. It doesn’t matter what you call the people.^[2] And DOGE is far from the only thing along those lines.
Sowing chaos is another fairly common coup tactic.
Assembling lists of all CIA officers and sending them emails
That’s a bit garbled. What they did was request a list of CIA employees, including covert employees, and specifically demand that the list be sent in email on an unclassified system. Why that demand was made is unclear thus far, but yeah, it’s a problem. It puts your people at risk for no clear reason.
So that’s one example. They also asked for a list of FBI agents. Also at least threatened to mass-fire FBI agents. And did fire US Attorneys, explicitly for doing their jobs by charging criminal activity… in cases that they won in many different courts because they were legally in the right. Also purged military officers. Also sent a bunch of people into OMB and had them, plus White House staff, issue a bunch of memos freezing random government activities and demanding sudden disruptive changes at crash priority in the name of rooting out a very broad interpretation “DEI”… which, even if it were a problem, would definitely not be an emergency demanding Shutting. Down. Everything.
or trying to own the Gaza strip, or <take your pick>
The Gaza thing hasn’t involved any actual action, and is the sort of thing Trump has always said. Same for the Greenland grab. He sounds a bit more serious now, but he still hasn’t done anything. The worst of the tariffs were suspended after Trump got properly stroked by the right foreign leaders.
… and anyway those are all foreign policy things, and all within the purview of the Presidency. They’re spectacularly bad ideas and would harm huge numbers of people. And they definitely could be part of a “flood the zone” strategy. But Trump has statutory authority to do the tariffs, even if he’s abusing it. What he did there wasn’t illegal. And Presidents have always been allowed to opine, and even negotiate, on foreign policy issues in general, even if the policies they advocate are stupid and even if they make foolish threats that alienate allies and damage US soft power. They usually don’t do quite so many dumb things in such a short time, but it’s not qualitatively new.
Some of this other stuff, including DOGE being at Treasury and trying to get into the DOL, involves actual action. Some of that action is clearly illegal under black letter law. And it’s the kind of action that would suggest of a real attempt to fundamentally rework how the whole US Government works. At a minimum, it’s definitely and openly trying to shift power to the executive and concentrating power within the executive in the office of the President and a few agencies. At least one of them brand new and created with no congressional buy-in with actual action behind it.
It’s the difference between loudly threatening to misuse the US system and taking illegal actions that look like they might be attempts to fundamentally alter the US system.
We’ll see how far that goes. The court orders have been coming in to stop a lot of this stuff. I don’t actually expect those orders to be defied… at least not at this point. In fact, the best reason I can come up with for them wanting to do all this stuff so fast has been to do as much damage as possible before the orders come in to stop them. But Trump has surprised me before.
The USAID thing is a weird case. I’m not even sure what made USAID such a target. I’ve heard speculations, and none of them are very good, but they’re also just that: speculations.
I’m far mode on these, have less direct experience, but they seem much more worrying. Why did this make the threshold?
I imagine it’s the one Raemon happened to hear about. But it’s also pretty typical of the truly fundamental things that are going on.
1. … and honestly neither of those has a very good reputation. Management consultants are not infrequently used in the corporate equivalent of coups. Private equity, well… not known for preserving value, let’s say? ↩︎
2. In terms of whether they’re acting or qualified as “data scientists”, I’ll quote a tweet from one of them (Luke Farritor) on December 10: “Are there LLMs made specifically for parsing things like documents/forms/PDFs/json/html/excel/etc and converting them from one format to another?”. ↩︎

jbash Feb 6, 2025, 1:32 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: artifex0′s Shortform
This sort of tactic. This isn’t necessarily the best example, just the literal top hit on a Google search.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/pam-bondi-ban-sanctuary-cities-funding-b2693020.html

The tactic of threatening to discriminate against uncooperative states and localities is getting a lot of play. It’s somewhat limited at the federal level because in theory the state and local policies they demand have to be related to the purpose of the money (and a couple of other conditions I don’t remember). But the present fashion is to push that relation to the absolute breaking point.

jbash Feb 5, 2025, 11:12 PM
9 points
3
in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: Wired on: “DOGE personnel with admin access to Federal Payment System”
Technically anything that’s authorized by the right people will pass an audit. If you’re the right person or group, you can establish a set of practices and procedures that allows access with absolutely none of those things, and use the magic words “I accept the risk” if you’re questioned. That applies even when the rules are actually laws; it’s just that then the “right group” is a legislative body. The remedy for a policy maker accepting risks they shouldn’t isn’t really something an auditor gets into.

So the question for an auditor is whether the properly adopted practices and procedures legitimately allow for whatever he’s doing (they probably don’t). But even if somebody with appropriate authority has established policies and procedures that do allow it, the question to ask as a superior policy maker, which is really where citizens stand, is whether it was a sane system of practices and procedures to adopt.

The issues you’re raising would indeed be common and appropriate elements for a sane system. But you’re missing a more important question that a sane system would ask: whether he needs whatever kind of administrative access to this thing at all.

Since another almost universal element of a sane system is that software updates or configuration changes to critical systems like that have to go through a multi-person change approval process, and since there is absolutely no way whatever he’s doing would qualify for a sanely-adopted emergency exception, and since there are plenty of other people available who could apply any legitimately accepted change, the answer to that is realistically always going to be “no”.

jbash Feb 5, 2025, 9:51 PM
42 points
7
on: Wired on: “DOGE personnel with admin access to Federal Payment System”
I haven’t looked into this in detail, and I’m not actually sure how unique a situation this is.

It’s pretty gosh-darned unheard of in the modern era.

Before the civil service system was instituted, every time you got a new President, you’d get random wholesale replacements… but the government was a lot smaller then.

To have the President,
- creating task forces of random people apparently selected mostly for personal loyalty, and
- sending them into legislatively established agencies,
- with the power to stop things from getting done or change how things are done, including things central to the missions of those agencies,
- as an intentional way of getting around the chain of command,
- explicitly because of systemic distrust in the civil service,
- actively tasked to suddenly and radically disrupt the prevailing procedures,
- without thinking about legislative mandates, let alone established regulations, that assume the normal chain of command in describing how things are to be done and who’s allowed to do them,
- justified by an at-best-controversial view of what powers the President actually has?
Yeah, that’s beyond unusual. It’s not even slightly normal. And it is in fact very coup-like behavior if you look at coups in other countries.

On edit: Oh, and if you’re asking about the approach to computer security specifically? That part is absolutely insane and goes against the way everything is done in essentially every large organization.

jbash Feb 5, 2025, 9:23 PM
7 points
2
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: artifex0′s Shortform

If you’re really concerned, then just move to california! Its much easier than moving abroad.

I lived in California long enough ago to remember when getting queer-bashed was a reasonable concern for a fair number of people, even in, say, Oakland. It didn’t happen daily, but it happened relatively often. If you were in the “out” LGBT community, I think you probably knew somebody who’d been bashed. Politics influence that kind of thing even if it’s not legal.

… and in the legal arena, there’s a whole lot of pressure building up on that state and local resistance. So far it’s mostly money-based pressure, but within a few years, I could easily see a SCOTUS decision that said a state had to, say, extradite somebody accused of “abetting an abortion” in another state.

War in the continental US? No, I agree that’s unlikely enough not to worry about.

Civil unrest, followed by violent crackdowns on civil unrest, followed by more violent civil unrest, followed by factional riots, on the other hand...

jbash Feb 5, 2025, 9:13 PM
5 points
2
in reply to: artifex0’s comment on: artifex0′s Shortform
I think that what you describe as being 2 to 15 percent probable sounds more extreme than what the original post described as being 5 percent probable. You can have “significant erosion” of some groups’ rights without leaving the country being the only reasonable option, especially if you’re not in those groups. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve by leaving, I guess.

Although if I were a trans person in the US right now, especially on medication, I’d be making, if not necessarily immediately executing, some detailed escape plans that could be executed on short notice.

jbash Feb 5, 2025, 6:49 PM
2 points
−9
in reply to: artifex0’s comment on: artifex0′s Shortform

My gut says it’s now at least 5%, which seems easily high enough to start putting together an emigration plan. Is that alarmist?

That’s a crazy low probability.

More generally, what would be an appropriate smoke alarm for this sort of thing?

You’re already beyond the “smoke alarm” stage and into the “worrying whether the fire extinguisher will work” stage.

jbash Feb 1, 2025, 9:44 PM
10 points
−10
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform

But it’s very unclear whether they institutionally care.

There are certain kinds of things that it’s essentially impossible for any institution to effectively care about.

jbash Jan 28, 2025, 8:44 PM
2 points
0
on: DeepSeek Panic at the App Store
I thought “cracked” meant “insane, and not in a good way”. Somebody wanna tell me what this sense is?

jbash Jan 27, 2025, 12:25 AM
7 points
0
on: “If I win the AGI race, I promise I won’t make you regret not racing hard enough against me.”
Can you actually keep that promise?

jbash Jan 20, 2025, 1:37 PM
19 points
14
on: It is (probably) time for a Buterlian Jihad

As a final note: the term “Butlerian Jihad” is taken from Dune and describes the shunning of “thinking machines” by mankind.

In Dune, “thinking machines” are shunned because of a very longstanding taboo that was pretty clearly established in part by a huge, very bloody war. The intent was to make that taboo permanent, not a “pause”, and it more or less succeeded in that.

It’s a horrible metaphor and I strongly suggest people stop using it.

the Culture ending, where CEV (or similar) aligned, good ASI is created and brings us to some hypothetical utopia. Humanity enjoys a rich life in some manner compatible with your personal morals.

santa claus to 11 ending: ASI solves our problems and human development stagnates; ASI goes on to do its own thing without killing humans—but without human influence on the lightcone

Um, humans in the Culture have no significant influence on the lightcone (other than maybe as non-agentic “butterfly wings”). The Minds decide what’s going to happen. Humans opposed to that will be convinced (often via manipulation subtle enough that they don’t even know about it) or ignored. Banks struggled to even find reasons to write stories about the humans, and sometimes had to cheat to do so.

I have come to accept that some people have an attachment to the whole “human influence” thing, but how can you believe that simultaneously say the Culture is a good outcome?

jbash Jan 20, 2025, 12:46 PM
6 points
3
on: What are the chances that Superhuman Agents are already being tested on the internet?
If you had a really superhuman agent, and you wanted to hide it, why would you blow your cover by playing silly games or making obvious GitHub commits? It’s already SOP for social media bots to hide behind many accounts (and use many styles). So unless you have access to a lot of investment information that’s typically kept confidential...

Even in stuff like cracking into other people’s computers, you’d want to avoid being extremely obvious.

jbash Jan 18, 2025, 6:37 PM
10 points
0
on: How likely is AGI to force us all to be happy forever? (much like in the Three Worlds Collide novel)
would you see that as a possible outcome?

Sure. Not the most likely outcome, but not so improbable as all that.

Reservation: ASI (what you’re suggesting is beyond mere AGI) will still exist in the physical world and have physical limitations, so you will eventually die anyway. But it could be a very long time.

If so, do you see a way to somehow see that happening in advance?

Not really, no.

Not beyond obvious stuff like watching what’s being built and how, and listening to what it and its creators say about its values.

And as not living forever may be seen as a form of killing yourself, AGI may quite well not let you have a finite lifespan. That places you in the uncomfortable situation of being trapped with AGI forever.

Yes, that’s one of many kinds of lock-in of present human values that could go wrong. But, hey, it’d be aligned, I guess.

The no-killing-yourself rule isn’t completely universal, though, and there’s dissent around it, and it’s often softened to “no killing yourself unless I agree your situation sucks enough”, or even the more permissive “no killing yourself unless your desire to do so is clearly a fixed, stable thing”.

I actually think there’s a less than 50-50 chance that people would intentionally lock in the hardest form of the rule permanently if they were consciously defining the AI’s goals or values.

We do not know what peak happiness looks like, and our regular state may be very different from it. And as EY outlined in Three Worlds Collide, letting us live our miserable lives may be unacceptable.

That seems like a very different question from the one about indefinite life extension. Life extension isn’t the main change the Supperhappies make in that story^[1].

This change may not align well with our understanding of life’s purpose. And being trapped to live that way forever might not be that desirable.

Pre-change understanding, or post-change understanding? Desirable to pre-change you, or to post-change you?

If you see your pre-change values as critical parts of Who You Are(TM), and they get rewritten, then aren’t you effectively dead anyway, with your place taken by a different person with different values, who’s actually pretty OK with the whole thing? If being dead doesn’t worry you, why would that worry you?
1. ↩︎
  In fact, the humans had very long lives going into the story, and I don’t remember anything in the story that actually said humans weren’t enforcing a no-killing-yourself rule among themselves up to the very end.

jbash Jan 18, 2025, 4:15 PM
4 points
4
on: [Exercise] Four Examples of Noticing Confusion
What confusion?

I originally thought this song was about a new romantic partner, which is a great guess based off priors of pop songs w/ the word “Baby” in it.

… but based on you having presented it as an “exercise”, the obvious prior is that it’s anything but that. Otherwise it wouldn’t be interesting.

Unless you’re being tricksy, of course, so we have to leave some probability for it being that.

I find it hard to see how you feel about me

Hmm. A baby? That’s fairly common in songs.

“Oh you are yet to learn how to speak”

Oh, OK, it’s about a baby. Unless, of course, it’s more tricksiness.

But from there on it’s just looking for confirmation.

When we first met [...] We were bound together then and forever

Oh, it’s totally a baby. Although that may be more obvious if you’re a parent.

And then more and more gets piled on.

jbash Jan 18, 2025, 3:02 PM
7 points
5
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: What’s Wrong With the Simulation Argument?

They simulate the whole history of the earth incorporating all known data to return to live all people ever lived.

Some of those people may be a bit cheesed off about that, speaking of ethics.

It can also simulate a lot of simulation to win “measure war” against unfriendly AI

Assuming it believes “measure war” is a sane thing to be worrying about. In which case it disagrees with me.

and even to cure suffering of people who lived in the past.

There seems to be a lot of suffering in the “simulation” we’re experiencing here. Where’s the cure?

Any Unfriendly AI will be interested to solve Fermi paradox, and thus will simulate many possible civilizations around a time of global catastrophic risks (the time we live). Interesting thing here is that we can be not ancestry simulation in that case.

That sounds like a remarkably costly and inefficient way to get not that much information about the Fermi paradox.

jbash Jan 18, 2025, 2:53 PM
15 points
2
on: What’s Wrong With the Simulation Argument?

It is physically possible to simulate a conscious mind.

… but it’s expensive, especially if you have to simulate its environment as well. You have to use a lot of physical resources to run a high-fidelity simulation. It probably takes irreducibly more mass and energy to simulate any given system with close to “full” fidelity than the system itself uses. You can probably get away with less fidelity than that, but nobody has provided any explanation of how much less or why that works.

There are other, more interesting and important ways to use that compute capacity. Nobody sane, human or alien, is going to waste it on running a crapton of simulations.

Also, nobody knows that all the simulated minds wouldn’t be p-zombies, because, regardless of innumerable pompous overconfident claims, nobody understands qualia. Nobody can prove that they’re not a p-zombie, but do you think you’re a p-zombie? And do we care about p-zombies?

The universe is very big, and there are many, many other aliens.

If that’s true, and you haven’t provided any evidence for it, then those aliens have many, many other things to simulate. The measure of humans among random aliens’ simulations is going to be tiny if it’s not zero.

Some aliens will run various simulations.

Again, that doesn’t imply that they’re going to run enough of them for them to dominate the number of subjective experiences out there, or that any of them will be of humans.

Future humans, or human AI successors, if there are any of either, will probably also run “various simulations”, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to dump the kind of vast resources you’re demanding into them.

The number of simulations that are “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own experience far outnumbers authentic evolved humans.

Um, no? Because all of the premises you’re using to get there are wrong.

(By “subjectively indistinguishable,” I mean the simulates can’t tell they’re in a simulation. )

By that definition, a simulation that bounces frictionless billiard balls around and labels them as humans is “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own, since the billiard balls have no cognition and can’t tell anything about anything at all. You need to do more than that to define the kind of simulation you really mean.
What links here?
- What’s Wrong With the Simulation Argument? by AynonymousPrsn123 (Jan 18, 2025, 2:32 AM; 6 points)

jbash Jan 17, 2025, 3:32 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Zero Contradictions’s comment on: The Mathematical Reason You should have 9 Kids
A purpose is a goal. “Purpose” implies volition and value.

Nothing ever said “I’m going to create this organism because I want effect X”, not even “I’m going to create this organism because I want it to reproduce.”. Organisms just happened.

Not only weren’t organisms created to reproduce, but most organisms don’t even themselves exercise any volition to reproduce. Most of them have no idea that their reproductive behavior results in reproduction… assuming you can even identify anything you can call “behavior” to begin with. So it’s not only not their “external” purpose, but it’s not even their “internal” purpose.

You wouldn’t (I hope) say that the purpose of a rock is to lie around and be composed of minerals. That’s just what the rock does. Organisms just do what they do. They exist because certain structures tend to reproduce themselves, and those structures can occur naturally. Evolution happens because things that reproduce with errors under selection happen to evolve. That doesn’t give either one a purpose.

You can get away loosely saying that various phenotypic features have “purposes”, and maybe even go from their to claim that genes have “purposes”, but it’s dangerous to do even that. You have to be careful to remember that the word “purpose” there is a metaphor. It doesn’t refer to a real volitive choice made to achieve a goal. If you don’t watch out, you can start thinking that there’s a purpose to the whole thing, and there isn’t, and it’s led people to a lot of nasty teleological errors. And even that much doesn’t work for whole organisms.

jbash Jan 17, 2025, 1:36 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: sloonz’s comment on: In Defense of a Butlerian Jihad
Mostly some self-description, since you seem want a model of me. I did add an actual disagreement (or something) at the end, but I don’t think there’ll be much more for me to say about it if you don’t accept it. I will read anything you write.

I have the feeling that you have pretty much lost the “enjoy the game” shard, possibly because you have a mutant variant ” enjoy ANY game”.

More like “enjoy the process”. Why would I want to set a “win” condition to begin with?

I don’t play actual games at all unless somebody drags me into them. They seem artificial and circumscribed. Whatever the rules are, I don’t really care enough about learning them, or learning to work within them, unless it gives me something that seems useful for whatever random conditions may come up later, outside the game. That applies to whatever the winning condition is, as much as to any other rule.

Games with competition tend to be especially tedious. Making the competition work seems to tends to further constrain the design of the rules, so they’re more boring. And the competition can make the other people involved annoying.

As far as winning itself… Whee! I got the most points! That, plus whatever coffee costs nowadays, will buy me a cup of coffee. And I don’t even like coffee.

I study things, and I do projects.

While I do evaluate project results, I’m not inclined to bin them as “success” or “failure”. I mean, sure, I’ll broadly classify a project that way, especially if I have to summarize it to somebody else in a sentence. But for myself I want more than that. What exactly did I get out of doing it? The whole thing might even be a “success” if it didn’t meet any of its original goals.

I collect capabilities. Once I have a capability, I often, but not always, lose interest in using it, except maybe to get more capabilities. Capabilities get extra points for being generally useful.

I collect experiences when new, pleasurable, or interesting ones seem to be available. But just experiences, not experiences of “winning”.

I’ll do crossword puzzles, but only when I have nothing else to do and mostly for the puns.

Many video games have a “I win” cheatcode. Players at large don’t use it. Why not, if winning the game is the goal ?

Even I would understand that as not, actually, you know, winning the game. I mean, a game is a system with rules. No rules, no game, thus no win. And if there’s an auto-win button that has no reason to be in the rules other than auto-win, well, obvious hole is obvious.

It’s just that I don’t care to play a game to begin with.

If something is gamified, meaning that somebody has artificially put a bunch of random stuff I don’t care about between me and something I actually want in real life, then I’ll try to bypass the game. But I’m not going to do that for points, or badges, or “achievements” that somebody else has decided I should want. I’m not going to push the “win” button. I’m just not gonna play. I loathe gamification.

Creating an ASI-driven UBI paradise is discovering that the developer created a “I Win” button.

I see it not as an “I win” button, but as an “I can do the stuff I care about without having to worry about which random stupid bullshit other people might be willing to pay me for, or about tedious chores that don’t interest me” button.

Sure, I’m going to mash that.

And eventually maybe I’ll go more transcendent, if that’s on offer. I’m even willing to accept certain reasonable mental outlooks to avoid being too “unaligned”.

This is the split between Personal Agency and Collective Agency.

I don’t even believe “Collective Agency” is a thing, let alone a thing I’d care about. Anything you can reasonably call “agency” requires preferences, and intentional, planned, directed, well, action toward a goal. Collectives don’t have preferences and don’t plan (and also don’t enjoy, or even experience, either the process or the results).

Which, by the way, brings me to the one actual quibble I’m going to put in this. And I’m not sure what to do with that quibble. I don’t have a satisfactory course of action and I don’t think I have much useful insight beyond what’s below. But I do know it’s a problem.

One : if there is no recognizable Mormons society in a post-ASI future, something Has Gone Very Wrong.

I was once involved in a legal case that had a lot to do with some Mormons. Really they were a tiny minority of the people affected, but the history was such that the legal system thought they were salient, so they got talked about a lot, and got to talk themselves, and I learned a bit about them.

These particular Mormons were a relatively isolated polygynist splinter sect that treated women, and especially young women, pretty poorly (actually I kind of think everybody but the leaders got a pretty raw deal, and I’m not even sure the leaders were having much of a Good Time(TM)). It wasn’t systematic torture, but it wasn’t Fun Times either. And the people on the bottom had a whole lot less of what most people would call “agency” than the people on the top.

But they could show you lots of women who truly, sincerely wanted to stay in their system. That was how they’d been raised and what they believed in. And they genuinely believed their Prophet got direct instructions from God (now and then, not all the time).

Nobody was kept in chains. Anybody who wanted to leave was free to walk away from their entire family, probably almost every person they even knew by name, and everything they’d ever been taught was important, while defying what at least many of them truly believed was the literal will of God. And of course move somewhere where practically everybody had a pretty alien way of life, and most people were constantly doing things they’d always believed were hideously immoral, and where they’d been told people were doing worse than they actually were.

They probably would have been miserable if they’d been forcibly dragged out of their system. They might never have recovered. If they had recovered, it might well have meant they’d had experiences that you could categorize as brainwashing.

It would have been wrong to yank them out of their system. So far I’m with you.

But was it right to raise them that way? Was it right to allow them to be raised that way? What kind of “agency” did they have in choosing the things that molded them? The people who did mold them got agency, but they don’t seem to have gotten much.

As I think you’ve probably figured out, I’m very big on individual, conscious, thinking, experiencing, wanting agents, and very much against giving mindless aggregates like institutions, groups, or “cultures”, anywhere near the same kind of moral weight.

From my point of view, a dog has more right to respect and consideration than a “heritage”. The “heritage” is only important because of the people who value it, and that does not entitle it to have more, different people fed to it. And by this I specifically mean children.

A world of diverse enclaves is appealing in a lot of ways. But, in every realistic form I’ve been able to imagine, it’s a world where the enclaves own people.

More precisely, it’s a world where “culture” or “heritage”, or whatever, is used an excuse for some people not only to make other people miserable, but to condition them from birth to choose that misery. Children start to look suspiciously like they’re just raw material for whatever enclave they happen to be born in. They don’t choose the enclave, not when it matters.

It’s not like you can just somehow neutrally turn a baby into an adult and then have them “choose freely”. People’s values are their own, but that doesn’t mean they create those values ex nihilo.

I suppose you could fix the problem by switching to reproduction by adult fission, or something. But a few people might see that as a rather abrupt departure, maybe even contrary to their values. And kids are cute.