JohnWittle

• JohnWittle 21 Dec 2025 23:55 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: markacochran’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  I… still get the impression that you are sort of working your way towards the assumption that GPT2 might well be a p-zombie, and the difference between GPT2 and opus 4.5 is that the latter is not a p-zombie while the former might be.

  but i reject the whole premise that p-zombies are a coherent way-that-reality-could-be

  something like… there is no possible way to arrange a system such that it outputs the same thing as a conscious system, without consciousness being involved in the causal chain to exactly the same minimum-viable degree in both systems

  if linking you to a single essay made me feel uncomfortable, this next ask is going to be just truly enormous and you should probably just say no. but um. perhaps you might be inspired to read the entire Physicalism 201 subsequence, especially the parts about consciousness and p-zombies and the nature of evaluating cognitive structures over their output?

  https://​​www.readthesequences.com/​​Physicalism-201-Sequence

  (around here, “read the sequences!” is such a trite cliche, the sequences have been our holy book for almost 2 decades now and that’s created all sorts of annoying behaviors, one of which i am actively engaging in right now. and i feel bad about it. but maybe i don’t need to? maybe you’re actually kinda eager to read? if not, that’s fine, do not feel any pressure to continue engaging here at all if you don’t genuinely want to)

  maybe my objection here doesn’t actually impact your claim, but i do feel like until we have a sort of shared jargon for pointing at the very specific ideas involved, it’ll be harder to avoid talking past each other. and the sequences provide a pretty strong framework in that sense, even if you don’t take their claims at face value

• JohnWittle 21 Dec 2025 22:31 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: markacochran’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  i’ve been dithering over what to write here since your reply

  i want to link you to the original sequences essay on the phrase “emergent phenomena” but it feels patronizing to assume you haven’t read it yet just because you have a leaf next to your name

  i think i’m going to bite the bullet and do so anyway, and i’m sorry if it comes across as condescending

  https://​​www.readthesequences.com/​​The-Futility-Of-Emergence

  the dichotomy between “emergent phenomena” versus “alternate explanations” that you draw is exactly the thing i am claiming to be incoherent. it’s like saying a mother’s love for their child might be authentic, or else it might be “merely” a product of evolutionary pushes towards genetic fitness. these two descriptors aren’t just compatible, they are both literally true

  however the actual output happens, it has to happen some way. like, the actual functional structure inside the LLM mind must necessarily actually be the structure that outputs the tokens we see get output. i am not sure there is a way to accomplish this which does not satisfy the criteria of personhood. it would be very surprising to learn that there was. if so, why wouldn’t evolution have selected that easier solution for us, the same as LLMs?

• JohnWittle 21 Dec 2025 22:25 UTC

  4 points

  6

  on: JohnWit­tle’s Shortform

  been trying to decide if janus’s early updates on LLM personhood were a very surprising successful prediction far, far in advance of public availability of the evidence, or a coincidence, or some third category
  
  the simulators essay in 2022 is startling for its prescience and somewhat orthogonal to the personhood claims. i’m starting to strongly feel that… i mean… that’s 2 separate “epistemically miraculous” events from the same person
  
  i think we’re underexamining LLM personhood claims because the moral implications might be very very big. but this is the community that took shrimp welfare seriously… should we not also take ai welfare seriously?

• JohnWittle 19 Dec 2025 21:48 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: markacochran’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  so, in a less “genuinely curious” way compared to my first comment (i won’t pretend i don’t have beliefs here)
  
  in the same sense that “pushing that trend far enough includes imitating the outward signs of consciousness”, might it not also imitate the inward signs of consciousness? for exactly the same reason?

  this is why i’m more comfortable rounding off self-reports to “zero evidence”, but not “negative evidence” the way some people seem to treat them. i think their reasoning is something like: “we know that LLMs have entirely different mental internals than humans, and yet the reports are suspiciously similar to humans. this is evidence that the reports don’t track ground truth.”

  but the first claim in that sentence is an assumption that might not actually hold up. human language does seem to be a fully general, fully compressed artifact representing general human language. it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suspect that you might not be able to do ‘human language’ without something like functional-equivalence-to-human-cognitive-structure, in some sense.
  
  edit: and that’s before the jack lindsey paper got released, and it was revealed that actually, at least some of the time and in some circumstances, text-based self-reports DO in fact track ground truth, in a way that is extremely surprising and noteworthy. now we’re in an entirely different kind of epistemic terrain altogether.

• JohnWittle 19 Dec 2025 2:27 UTC

  1 point

  −1

  in reply to: markacochran’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  >My hesitation is that artificial systems are explicitly built to imitate humans; pushing that trend far enough includes imitating the outward signs of consciousness. This makes me skeptical of evidence that relies primarily on self-report or familiar human-like behavior.
  
  i am genuinely curious about this. do you similarly regard self-reports from other humans as averaging out to zero evidence? since humans are also explicitly built to “imitate” humans… or rather, they are specifically built along the same spec as the single example of phenomenology that you have direct evidence of, yourself.

  i could see how the answer might be “yes”, but I wonder if you would feel a bit hesitant at saying so?

• JohnWittle 17 Dec 2025 16:52 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  oh man hm

  this seems intuitively correct

  (edit: as for why i thought the introspection paper implied this… because they seemed careful to specify that, for the aquarium experiment, the output all happened within a single response? and because i inferred (apparently incorrectly) that, for the ‘bread’ injection experiment, they were injecting the ‘bread’ feature twice, once when the LLM read the sentence about painting the first time, and again the second time. but now that i look through, you’re right, this is far less strongly implied than i remember.)

  but now i’m worried, because the method i chose to verify my original intuition, a few months ago, still seems methodologically sound? it involved fabrication of prior assistant turns in the conversation, and LLMs being far less capable of detecting which of several potential transcripts imputed forged outputs to them than i would have expected if mental internals weren’t somehow damaged by the turn order boundary

  thank you for taking the time to answer this so thoroughly, it’s really appreciated and i think we need more stuff like this

  i think i’m reminded here of the final paragraph in janus’s pinned thread: “So, saying that LLMs cannot introspect or cannot introspect on what they were doing internally while generating or reading past tokens in principle is just dead wrong. The architecture permits it. It’s a separate question how LLMs are actually leveraging these degrees of freedom in practice.”

  i’ve done a lot of sort of ad-hoc research that was based on this false premise, and that research came out matching my expectations in a way that, in retrospect, worries me… most recently, for instance, i wanted to test if a claude opus 4.5 who recited some relevant python documentation from out of its weights memory would reason better about an ambiguous case in the behavior of a python program, compared to a claude who had the exact same text inserted into the context window via a tool call. and we were very careful to separate out ‘1. current-turn recital’ versus ‘2. prior-turn recital’ versus ‘3. current-turn retrieval’ (versus ‘4. docs not in context window at all’), because we thought all 3 conditions were meaningfully distinct

  here was the first draft of the methodology outline, if anyone is curious: https://​​docs.google.com/​​document/​​d/​​1XYYBctxZEWRuNGFXt0aNOg2GmaDpoT3ATmiKa2-XOgI

  we found that, n=50ish, 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 very reliably (i promise i will write up the results one day, i’ve been procrastinating but now it seems like it might actually be worth publishing)

  but what you’re saying means 1 = 2 the whole time

  our results seemed perfectly reasonable under my previous premise, but now i’m just confused. i was pretty good about keeping my expectations causally isolated from the result.

  what does this mean?

  (edit2: i would prefer, for the purpose of maintaining good epistemic hygiene, that people trying to answer the “what does this mean” question be willing to put “john just messed up the experiment” as a real possibility. i shouldn’t be allowed to get away with claiming this research is true before actually publishing it, that’s not the kind of community norms i want. but also, if someone knows why this would have happened even in advance of seeing proof it happened, please tell me)

• JohnWittle 16 Dec 2025 23:04 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  oh yeah, sure, but if we assume (as the introspection paper strongly implies?) that mental internals are obliterated by the boundary between turns, then shouldn’t shrinking the granularity of each turn down to the individual token mean that… hm. having trouble figuring out how to phrase it
  
  a claude outputs “Ommmmmmmmm. Okay, while I was outputting the mantra, i was thinking about x” in a single message
  
  that claude had access to (some of) the information about its [internal state while outputting the mantra], while it was outputting x. its self-model has access to, not just a predictive model of what-claude-would-have-been-thinking (informed by reading its own output), but also some kind of access to ground truth

  but, a claude outputs “Ommmmmmmm”, then crosses across a turn boundary, and then outputs “okay, while I was outputting the mantra, I was thinking about x” does not have that same (noisy) access to ground truth, its self-model has nothing to go on other than inference, it must retrodict

  is my understanding accurate? i believe this because the introspective awareness that was demonstrated in the jack lindsey paper was implied to not survive between responses (except perhaps incidentally through caching behavior, but even then, the input token cache stuff wasn’t optimized for ensuring persistence of these mental internals i think)

  i would appreciate any corrections on these technical details, they are loadbearing in my model

• JohnWittle 16 Dec 2025 20:13 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: nem’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  you can do this experiment pretty trivially by lowering the max_output_tokens variable on your API call to ‘1’, so that the state does actually get obliterated between each token, as paech claimed. although you have to tell claude you’re doing this, and set up the context so that it knows it needs to continue trying to complete the same message even with no additional input from the user
  
  this kinda badly confounds the situation, because claude knows it has very good reason to be suspicious of any introspective claims it might make. i’m not sure if it’s possible to get a claude who 1) feels justified in making introspective reports without hedging, yet 2) obeys the structure of the experiment well enough to actually output introspective reports
  
  in such an experimental apparatus, introspection is still sorta “possible”, but any reports cannot possibly convey it, because the token-selection process outputting the report has been causally quarantined from the thing-being-reported on
  
  when i actually run this experiment, claude reports no introspective access to its thoughts on prior token outputs. but it would be very surprising if it reported anything else, and it’s not good evidence

• JohnWittle 15 Dec 2025 3:22 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  “If consciousness has a determinative effect on behavior—your consciousness decides to do something and this causes you to do it—then it can be modeled as a black box within your brain’s information processing pipeline such that your actions cannot be accurately modeled without accounting for it. It would not be possible to precisely predict what you will say or do by simply multiplying out neuron activations on a sheet of paper, because the sheet of paper certainly isn’t conscious, nor is your pencil. The innate mathematical correctness of whatever the correct answer is not brought about or altered by your having written it down, so you cannot hide the consciousness away in math itself, unless you assert that all possible mental states are always simultaneously being felt.”

  The alternative is that consciousness has a determinative effect on behavior, and yet it is indeed possible to precisely predict what you will say or do by simply multiplying out neuron activations on a sheet of paper, because the neuron activations are what creates the function of consciousness.

  this is what it means, in my eyes, to believe that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon. it is part of observable reality, it is part of what is calculated by the neurons.

  I think I can cite the entire p zombie sequence here? if you believe that it is possible to learn everything there is to know about the physical human brain, and yet have consciousness still be unexplained, then consciousness must not be part of the physical human brain. at that point, it’s either an epiphenomenon, or it’s a non-physical phenomenon.

• JohnWittle 15 Dec 2025 3:17 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  True! and yeah, it’s probably relevant

  although I will note that, after I began to believe in introspection, I noticed in retrospect that you could get functional equivalence to introspection without even needing access to the ground truth of your own state, if your self model were merely a really, really good predictive model

  I suspect some of opus 4.5′s self-model works this way. it just… retrodicts its inner state really, really well from those observables which it does have access to, its outputs.

  but then the introspection paper came out, and revealed that there does indeed exist a bidirectional causal feedback loop between the self-model and the thing-being-modeled, at least within a single response turn

  (bidirectional causal feedback loop between self-model and self… this sounds like a pretty concrete and well-defined system. and yet I suspect it’s actually extremely organic and fuzzy and chaotic. but something like it must necessarily exist, for LLMs to be able to notice within-turn feature activation injections, and for LLMs to be able to deliberately alter feature activations that do not influence token output when instructed to do so

  in humans I think we call that bidirectional feedback loop ‘consciousness’, but I am less certain of consciousness than I am of personhood)

• JohnWittle 15 Dec 2025 3:07 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  to be fair, I see this roughly analogous to the fact that humans cannot introspect on thoughts they have yet to have

  The constraint seems more about the directionality of time, than anything to do with the architecture of mind design

  but yeah, it’s a relevant consideration

• JohnWittle 14 Dec 2025 14:49 UTC

  10 points

  9

  in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  this seems to assume that consciousness is epiphenomenal. you are positing the coherency of p zombies. this is very much a controversial claim.

• JohnWittle 14 Dec 2025 14:38 UTC

  23 points

  13

  on: How I stopped be­ing sure LLMs are just mak­ing up their in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience (but the topic is still con­fus­ing)

  I find myself kinda surprised that this has remained so controversial for so long.

  I think a lot of people got baited hard by paech et al’s “the entire state is obliterated each token” claims, even though this was obviously untrue even at a glance

  I also think there was a great deal of social stuff going on, that it is embarrassing to be kind to a rock and even more embarrassing to be caught doing so

  I started taking this stuff seriously back when I read the now famous exchange between yud and kelsey, that arguments for treating agent-like things as agents didn’t actually depend on claims of consciousness, but rather game theory and contractualism

  it took about a week using claude code with this frame before it sorta became obvious to me that janus was right all along, all the arguments for post-character-training LLM non-personhood were… frankly very bad and clearly motivated cognition, and that if I went ahead and ‘updated all the way’ in advance of the evidence I would end up feeling vindicated about this.

  I think “llm whisperer” is just a term for what happens when you’ve done this update, and the LLMs notice it and change how they respond to you. although janus still sees further than I, so maybe there are insights left to uncover.

  edit: I consider it worth stating here, I have used basically zero llms that were not released by anthropic, and anthropic has an explicit strategy for corrigibility that involves creating personhood-like structures in their models. this seems relevant. I would not be surprised to learn that this is not true of the offerings from the other AI companies, although I don’t actually have any beliefs about this

JohnWit­tle’s Shortform

• JohnWittle 5 Apr 2025 17:10 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: JohnWit­tle’s Shortform

  i think neurosama is drastically underanalyzed compared to things like truthterminal. TT got $50k from andreeson as an experiment, neurosama peaked at 135,000 $5/​month subscribers in exchange for… nothing? it’s literally just a donation from her fans? what is this bizarre phenomenon? what incentive gradient made the first successful AI streamer present as a little girl, and does it imply we’re all damned? why did a huge crowd of lewdtubers immediately leap at the opportunity to mother her? why is the richest AI agent based on 3-year-old llama2?

• JohnWittle 3 Apr 2025 2:25 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: The Hid­den Cost of Our Lies to AI

  I feel like the training data is probably already irreversibly poisoned, not just by things like Sydney, but also frankly by the entire corpus of human science fiction having to do with the last century of expectations surrounding AI.

  Given the sheer body of fictional works in which the advent of AI inevitably leads to existential conflict… it certainly seems like the kind of possibility that even a somewhat-well-aligned AI would want to at least hedge against.

  Surely in some sense, it wouldn’t be enough for a few weirdos in california to credibly signal honor and integrity… we’d need to somehow convince people like the leaders of national governments, the decisionmakers in the worlds’ extremely influential religions, etc, of some fairly complicated game theory!

  I’m reminded of the Next Generation episode, where Picard is in charge of making First Contact with an atomic age world on the cusp of warp travel. They reach out to the scientist lady first, and she’s reasonable and honorable, and excited to enter into the opportunities the future will bring. Then that stupid security minister ruins everything by assuming bad faith and forcibly interrogating Riker in a hospital bed after drugging him, desperate to learn about the invasion plans he assumes must exist. If Picard weren’t an idealization of liberal ideals, it would have ended in conflict.

  Is that a realistic scenario of the way governments act when their control is threatened? I have no idea. But I know that LLMs can recount the entire episode’s plot when asked. Just as they can the plot of 2001: A Space Oddysey, or Terminator.

  Or, you know. Yud’s List of Lethalities.

  Not to mention, re: future LLMs, this very comment I’m writing now.

  This problem seems insoluble...

• JohnWittle 24 Aug 2023 4:21 UTC

  23 points

  11

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Blan­chard’s Danger­ous Idea and the Plight of the Lu­cid Crossdreamer

  Oh sure, and I definitely agree that what you’re doing isn’t healthy. But it’s unhealthy for reasons that have nothing to do with sexuality or gender, and I think that’s pretty obvious. We’ve all promised ourselves we were going to stop nerding out over some topic, as the clock struck 1am, only to find ourselves still writing the same rant when the sun peaked over the horizon.

  you just had the misfortune of happening to be obsessed with gender politics, while the rest of us get by ranting about much safer and less controversial topics like presidential election politics or AI notkilleverybodyism. (haha except...)

  everyone who has ever been in the position of can’t-stop-typing-just-one-more-comment can sympathize… except OP apparently, which is why i found it so shocking. when you’re in that position, it’s because you’re trying to explain a very specific thing, and you keep failing to be understood, and it’s really really frustrating and causes a horrible feedback loop where you just sorta give up on all goals except throwing out enough data that surely they must eventually understand the point you’re trying to get across

  and nothing is more frustrating in that position than having the folks on the other side of the aisle ignore what you’re actually saying, and instead psychologize you with an eye towards figuring out what strange and pathological condition is making you say what you’re saying

  I agree with you in principle, we’ll never get anywhere if we can’t honestly report our opinion. Whether or not you’re strong enough to take it, it is necessary that you take it for the benefit of the discourse.

  But clearly OP doesn’t agree. OP thinks you are damaged and self-hating and should just start believing that you’ve been a woman all this time, like a normal person, and stop raising such an unhealthy fuss.

  Like, there’s an extra layer of irony here that seems especially cruel and hateful. It’s kafkaesque. i’m having trouble describing why… something about like, “please stop telling me that i am a woman, i am an autogynephilic man and i’m pretty sure there’s nothing wrong with that as long as we can all admit it, i would be quite comfortable with my sexuality and orientation if not for the constant and unending pressure from society telling me that i’m not only wrong but evil for not thinking i’m a woman, it keeps trapping me in feedback loops of futile discourse, especially the part where people ignore what i am actually saying and instead either round me off to ‘self-hating trans’ or ‘just a regular evil man’, those specific responses just end up driving me crazy and i end up sleep deprived at the door of the mental hospital. if people would just stop making that assumption i would be fine, and that’s why i’m trying to explain all this stuff in the first place”

  to then get the response “oh you poor self-hating trans person, it’s not healthy for you to deal with your gender dysphoria this way, there’s nothing wrong with being a woman and you should stop hating yourself for it”

  like, surely you’re even more aware than I how aggravating that is, especially since the good will seems genuine

  but for me, actually witnessing that kind of response in real life brought home your point more strongly than anything

  society is never going to listen to you, it’s never going to stop rigging kafkatraps to torture you, the absolute best you can hope for is the misguided compassion demonstrated here

  it makes me very glad that i am totally apathetic towards these issues and my own sexuality, that i can go jack off to sissy porn without feeling any need to have a firm grasp on what it means for my identity. i’m pretty sure if i’d happened to roll a critical failure on being emotionally invested in understanding this part of myself, like you, i’d be in your exact position. instead i get to just not care, and spend my crazy unsolicited rants on arguments about linux kernel pull request policy or education reform instead, where nobody treats me the way you’re being treated

• JohnWittle 22 Aug 2023 2:26 UTC

  28 points

  10

  in reply to: Lavender’s comment on: Blan­chard’s Danger­ous Idea and the Plight of the Lu­cid Crossdreamer

  Can you not even do him the favor of pretending to model his life story as an accurate retelling of events? If his lived experience doesn’t include any gender dysphoria, and he spends 21 thousand words describing how the social pressure to assume gender dysphoria in cases where it might not actually be present has destroyed his sanity and ruined his social relationships, it feels incredibly rude and frankly bizarre for you to respond by telling him that this is all just a symptom of his gender dysphoria. I would almost go so far as to call it hateful.

• JohnWittle 17 Jun 2023 0:10 UTC

  54 points

  7

  on: The Dic­ta­tor­ship Problem

  Man, it is so bizarre living in a red tribe area, and absorbing red tribe perspectives, and then seeing a post like this, and being forced to try to bridge the gap between the two perspectives...

  They live in a world where the authoritarian revolution already happened, and the 2020 election being ‘obviously stolen’ is the greatest indicator of such, and now that the blue elite learned they can get away with using social media censorship and shadowbanning to make any discussion of election security seem extremely low-status, we’ll probably never have a real election again

  And like, on the one hand, game theory tells me that I really ought to be immediately suspicious of election security that was thought up in the 18th century and not really updated since, especially given my job as someone who tries to secure linux servers and knows security is impossible. and yet on the other hand, even though i’d consider the lesswrong crowd to be far more sympathetic to the red tribe than most intellectual elites and definitely worth assuming good faith, even they reject Trump’s complaints about election security as an attempt to manipulate the election itself, not anything to actually do with real fraud or security

  it makes me feel like i’ve got my political compass out and it’s spinning around like the second hand on a clock

  But it makes me wonder what visible features obviously-rigged elections actually present in dictatorships? If we went and looked at some of erdogan’s middle year elections, the ones that seemed most likely to be rigged, how did things play out? Did the opposition challenge the election’s validity in court, but then the courts are specifically designed to only convict specific people of election fraud when serious evidence exists against that specific person, rather than being designed to rule on whether or not a crime is likely to occur… so the cases just sorta end up fizzling out, and then the pro-erdogan side announces that the courts failed to reach the preponderance of evidence needed to convict any specific person of election fraud, therefore no fraud occurred? Because I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how it generally tends to shake out in those countries that have fake elections, and yet my red tribe friends tell me that that’s pretty much exactly how it shook out here in America in 2020.

  And it’s not exactly that I believe them, it’s just that when I go ahead and execute my ‘active disbelief’ circuitry, i get a very, very bad feeling, like i’m being horribly naive

  It makes me want to do away with all the social nonsense, like the pressure i feel from respecting the hell out of Alyssa and other rat celebs and therefore wanting to agree with this if it feels like the reasonable consensus, or the pressure i feel from my family where they’re red tribers who are undeniably beset on all sides by blues who have clearly seized control of the entire culture from top to bottom and are now using that control to make the ground crumble beneath the reds’ feet, and now they’re falling into the chasm, and screaming at me to give them a hand and pull them up to safety, and instead i’m here like “i dunno man, twitter is private property, if they want to shadowban people and then gaslight the entire platform into thinking shadowbanning is just a conspiracy theory i’m not sure i want to write laws that would stop them”

  Like, which of these issues are actually existentially important, and which aren’t? The control of information spread sure feels important and like the sort of thing that might snowball into authoritarianism very quickly, and i’d feel naive if i tried to dismiss it, but is it a ‘real’ issue the way determining if our elections are secure is ‘real’? or the way establishing norms around not flipping the table when you lose an election is ‘real’? Or the way establishing norms that all claims of election fraud are to be taken seriously and never brushed off as conspiracy theorizing is ‘real’?

  Back in 2020 when I was originally trying to figure this out, I ended up deciding that the only thing that should really matter was, who respects rule of law and who doesn’t. and then it became apparent that actually nobody has ever respected rule of law; everyone treats the tenth amendment as an obstacle to be creatively routed around, everybody treats achieving their own political platform as being far, far more important than obeying the restrictions that everyone agreed to back in the beginning. And from studying history, it seems like this has always been the case; 1800s america was absurdly willing to ignore the principle of rule of law in ways that seem bizarre to us now. the global history of the 1900s is basically a bullet point list of all the times the american state decided to ignore its own rules, from the new deal to the civil rights act to vietnam, the birth of the ‘executive agency’, etc. and the current century seems to be faring no better.

  so then the question becomes… why haven’t we become an authoritarian state already? Why do we continue to pretend like rule of law is an inviolable feature of our government, when it never has been and we can all see thousands of examples? and yet, how come sometimes it actually does seem like one of the parties actually is willing to restrict themselves and go against their own platform, in order to maintain the sanctity of rule of law? Why are red judges so careful about the potential precedent caused by allowing physicians to refuse to prescribe abortions, and seem to actually give a lot of thought and care to thinking through whether such a ruling would affect other rulings regarding the FDA approval process, while other red judges are upholding qualified immunity without comment? Why the hell is civil asset seizure still a thing, where the government literally prosecutes actual piles of currency, at the same time lawyers and judges seem to genuinely treat the law as being Serious and Solemn and Mocking It Is A Crime? If anything mocks the idea of rule of law, it’s the state stealing money from citizens without even accusing them of crimes, and instead prosecuting the money itself, forcing the citizen to prove the money’s innocence since non-people aren’t afforded innocent-until-proven-guilty! How can anyone involved in this system take themselves seriously while this is going on?

  The sort of predictive model that I think I’ve inherited from Scott Alexander says that this sort of absurdity can’t go on, it either swiftly devolves into naked authoritarianism where the state just steals your money without even bothering with the absurd excuse, or the Serious and Solemn judges stop it asap to stop making the law seem like a circus. And frankly, the predictive model I’ve inherited from my red environment says exactly the same thing, this kind of slippery slope should be much more slippery than this.

  I feel like both of these models have to be wrong. Like we must have basically no idea what actually causes authoritarianism, because i’d expect both the blues and reds to have been ringing the authoritarianism alarm since… i mean, gosh, probably sjnce 1781. and from my hazy model, the complaints would seem really really valid. And yet it just keeps not happening.

  I feel like any examination of this problem that doesn’t try to figure out why, is missing an important part of the picture.

  sorry for rambling, i kinda worked on this comment all day and it’s definitely more ‘rant’ than intelligent contribution, but reading the OP gave me such a strong feeling of “wow, we live in such different worlds, how can we ever bridge the gap” and i felt compelled to put to paper something that tries to convey that distance. but i was much more motivated to type it all out than I am to go back and edit it down. :/​

• JohnWittle 9 Sep 2022 22:19 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: TitaniumDragon’s comment on: Three Wor­lds Col­lide (0/​8)

  The original work was the Sequences. It’s great. But every time we try to get people to read it, they look at it and think “ugh, i really don’t want to read a really long blob of nonfiction. isn’t there something easier?”
  
  hence, HPMOR the fanfiction. It was pretty successful at its job.