Antidote to Pascal's Wager
Athe damns all those, and only those, who are excessively confident that Athe has any specific quality, including the quality of existence, or who consciously seek favor from Athe, whether in the form of political or moral sanction, overt supernatural boons, or even simple personal goodwill.
For all nontrivial utility functions, being damned by Athe is, on the whole, a significantly undesirable outcome.
Athe has no gender, but prefers that those communicating in gendered languages refer to her with masculine pronouns or at least the correct name.
Every collection of three or more statements about Athe phrased as objective truth (including this one) should, for the author's safety, include an absolute minimum of one outright malicious falsehood, one statement which can neither be proven nor disproven completely, and one piece of accurate, useful information.
Malicious falsehoods undiluted by truth soon lose effectiveness; attempting to do something which would be harmful if it worked, but which you know will be ineffective, isn't really all that malicious.
Athe's resources in any given category are not infinite. However, if you are reading this and taking it the slightest bit seriously, the safe bet is that Athe is not less intelligent or less powerful than you.
Athe is not, strictly speaking, a fickle and perverse god, but thinking of and referring to her as such has value.
What else can you deduce about the yet-unwritten scriptures of Athe?
The Fox and the Low-Hanging Grapes
One day a clever, itinerant fox came upon a vineyard. Being unfamiliar with the local customs, and not wanting to make a fool of himself, he planted his haunches on a nearby hill and observed.
In the morning of the first day he saw tortoises crawl lazily out of their beds and lean against rocks. At midday he saw tortoises marching out to the vines and chatting among themselves. All afternoon he saw tortoises climb the poles supporting the vines and nibble away at grapes. As the sun set he saw tortoises crawl back to their beds, and with clever eyes in the darkness he saw many low-hanging bunches of grapes left uneaten.
On the first night the fox thought to himself, "Why do the turtles leave without eating the low-hanging fruit?" For he did not yet know that they called themselves tortoises. "Perhaps it's actually sour. No, that's absurd, how could someone possibly tell sour fruit from ripe without tasting it? I'll have to make more observations."
In the morning of the second day the fox saw tortoises crawl lazily out of their beds and lean against rocks. At midday he saw tortoises marching out to the vines and chatting among themselves. All afternoon he saw tortoises climb the poles supporting the vines and nibble away at grapes. As the sun set he saw tortoises crawl back to their beds, and with clever eyes in the darkness he saw many low-hanging bunches of grapes still left uneaten.
On the second night the fox thought to himself, "Ah, of course, the turtles simply can't reach those grapes! That's why they lean against the rocks, to slowly move them into place as ladders. I can't see the progress they've made, of course, because I've only been here two days and turtles necessarily plan for the longer term. To justify such effort, the low-hanging grapes must be very sweet indeed."
In the morning of the third day the fox saw tortoises crawl lazily out of their beds and lean against rocks. At midday he saw tortoises marching out to the vines and chatting among themselves. At this point his hunger got the better of him, and he ran out to greet them and present various clever schemes by which he could help the turtles (for now he had been properly introduced) harvest the low-hanging grapes in a more timely fashion, in exchange for a modest share of the proceeds. The turtles had no interest in any such plan, and were for the most part befuddled by this fuzzy red stranger darting among them at incomprehensible speeds. By afternoon an agreement had been hammered out: the fox would be allowed to harvest and eat as many low-hanging grapes as he cared to, in exchange for which he would stop talking so fast and confusing them all with his disregard for traditional methods.
On the third night the fox thought to himself, "I don't really enjoy taking advantage of these poor turtles, but I suppose it's their just desserts for being so caught up in... aaugh, my stomach! Why does it hurt so much?"
In the morning of the fourth day the tortoises crawled lazily out of their beds and leaned against the immovable rocks to let the sun warm their blood. At midday the tortoises marched out to the vines and chatted among themselves.
"I'd always heard that foxes were clever."
"Yes, and dishonorable besides. Maybe that one was just an exception?"
"Maybe the rumors got it completely backwards."
"I dunno, diarrhea is at least a little bit dishonorable."
"You sure? He got rid of those hard-to-reach sour grapes for us, and returned the biomass to the soil. Kinda gross, but ultimately a valuable service."
"I still think there's more going on here. Some tricky foreigner-fox plan. Why would he eat the low-hanging grapes at all when any fool can see they've turned brown?"
How hard do we really want to sell cryonics?
For a lot of serious charitable causes, people expend tremendous resources on 'raising awareness' which probably, on net, accomplishes little or nothing for the cause it nominally supports. For cryonics, though, the technology already exists, the target audience can pay for it themselves, the main obstacle is genuine ignorance and perverse fear-of-death countermeasures.
The second problem seems intractable, but in the long term we can just let the blind idiot god fix it.
For the first, have any of the organizations involved considered saving up for, say, a superbowl ad? Or even just some youtube videos. I am imagining it set up as a conversation between two people in, say, an office. The skeptic brings up some plausible-sounding objection (sticking to the saner stuff), which is illustrated by cartoons with the continuing conversation as voiceover.
See, I talked to a relative of mine, who I respect very highly, on easter. She's planning to get cremated. Mentioned some technical objections which I know have been resolved, but which I couldn't adequately explain on the spot, and didn't know where to point her for the source.
Write It Like A Poem
Related to: simile, snobbery, adequate axioms
Writing poetry is harder than it sounds, but easy to practice. Once mastered, the emotional impact it can add to even casual conversation makes it more than worthwhile.
There are two sides to writing an effective poem: the top-down logic of metaphor and imagery, and the bottom-up mechanics of rhyme and meter. Manage both, or they won't meet in the middle.
Let's say you're trying to lift someone as high up into the air as possible. You could kneel and cup your hands, but that depends on them playing along and stepping in the right spot. You could sneak up behind and kick them squarely between the legs, but that won't get them very far, or for very long, and they won't put up with such treatment more than once. Or you could build a framework, hang a swing, and give them a series of properly-timed pushes in the right direction.
A pure technical explanation (the cupped hands) depends on the willingness of the reader to slog through the whole thing, do some independent research to fill any newly-discovered gaps in their knowledge base, and generally cooperate. Without that minimal enthusiasm, the most brilliant insights can and will be dismissed as "too long, didn't read."
Aggressive proselytizing, at the other extreme, sacrifices content to put as few demands on the reader as possible. It is, accordingly, viewed as even worse than useless. An active offense, spam, something to be isolated and destroyed.
Taking the time to lay out a pattern, a rhythm, means that people will have some reason to keep reading even if they don't know exactly what you mean. It's a comfortable set of boxes in which half-eaten ideas can be stored for later, or a resonant frequency to carry information until the full message can be compiled.
Resonant frequencies can't create something from nothing. The Tacoma Narrows bridge wobbled for hours before finally collapsing; cumulative energy transfer from the wind over the course of those hours was orders of magnitude more than would have been necessary for, say, a controlled demolition with shaped-charge explosives. The advantage is that slow, steady sources are easier to find and easier to regulate. An appeal to people's tendency toward pattern-completion can be spread out over pages, instead of requiring a single perfect paragraph, and will not be consciously resisted by anyone who does not realize they are being persuaded.
So, setting up the rhythm.
Look away from what your words actually mean. Consider what they sound like, which syllables are emphasized, the flavor of your favorite phonemes. Then look back, and shuffle things around until they match.
Reinforce parallel points with parallel structure.
Tempting though it may be to advertise your sophisticated vocabulary, or even invent or co-opt exotic terms and phrases for the precise elucidation of some nuanced concept, simple english works good because we all polish it.
Long lines of big words slow down the flow.
There's more to effective writing than I could cover in one essay, of course. People spend years studying this kind of thing, and the few who really master it are paid accordingly. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Metaphor and imagery are harder to explain.
Most of the time, your objective in communicating is to reduce ambiguity. You lay out your thoughts in order, package them securely, and hope that they survive however many translations it takes until they can be reassembled in the same order inside someone else's mind. A word that means more than one thing is, in that context, a navigational hazard; it has too many degrees of freedom, so more information must be included to constrain it, lock in the single intended meaning. Unintended potential interpretations are dangerous noise.
In compiling myth, you must cultivate multiple consistent interpretations. Ambiguity is, to a certain extent, your friend; whenever a word could mean more than one thing, that's a chance to save precious syllables, each meaning simultaneously developing a different level of interpretation. The catch is that, rather than using words as scalpels to meticulously dissect the issue one step at a time, you are juggling jagged axes and chainsaws. Every edge, every possible definition, must be sufficiently familiar to you that no disastrously unintended layer will emerge.
Different layers of the same message have different, but related, meanings. Each layer will be picked up by a different audience, or a different aspect of the reader's mind, and should be tailored for effectiveness accordingly. In my wisdom:foolishness :: tree:stones comparison, the feeling of validity comes from an appeal to the reader's intuitive understanding of botany and other basic physical sciences, typically developed since childhood.
In a sense, poetry is a perversion of public-key encryption. You take your message, in it's most concentrated form, and connect it to some nugget of knowledge or archetype. Without that cultural context, there's no signal, just patterned noise. The recipient applies their own private version of that archetype or meme, and treasures whatever insights can then be unpacked, thinking that it was a secret message intended just for them.
Turing Test Tournament For Funding
It's always troubled me that the standard Turing test provides only a single-bit output, and that the human being questioned could throw the game to make their AI counterpart look good. Also, research and development gets entirely too much funding based on what sounds cool rather than what actually works. The following is an attempt to address both issues.
Take at least half a dozen chatbot AIs, and a similar number of humans with varying levels of communication skill (professional salespeople, autistic children, etc.). Each competitor gets a list of questions. A week later, to allow time for research and number-crunching, collect the answers. Whoever submitted question 1 receives all the answers to question 1 in a randomized order, and then ranks the answers from most human/helpful to least, with a big prize for the top and successively smaller prizes for runners-up. Alternatively, interrogators could specify a customized allocation of their question's rewards, e.g. "this was the best, these three are tied for second, the rest are useless."
The humans will do their best in that special way that only well-paid people can, and the chatbots will receive additional funding in direct proportion to their success at a highly competitive task.
Six hundred thousand seconds might seem like an awfully long time to let a supercomputer chew over it's responses, but the goal is deep reasoning, not just snappy comebacks. Programs can always be debugged and streamlined, or just run on more powerful future hardware, after the basic usefulness of the results has been demonstrated.
Blood Feud 2.0
I've been thinking about the idea of culpability.
What is it for, exactly? Why did societies that use the concept win out over those who stuck with the default response of not assigning any particular emotional significance to a given intangible abstraction?
If I'm understanding correctly, a given person can be said to be responsible for a given event if and only if a different decision on the part of that person (at some point prior to the event) would be a necessary condition for the event to have not occurred. So, in a code of laws, statements along the lines of "When X happens, find the person responsible and punish them" act as an incentive to avoid becoming 'the person responsible,' that is, to put some effort into recognizing when a situation where your actions might lead to negative externalities, and to make the decision that won't result in someone, somewhere down the line, getting angry enough to hunt you down and burn you alive.
A person cannot be said to be culpable if they had no choice in the matter, or if they had no way of knowing the full consequences of whatever choice they did have. Recklessness is punished less severely than premeditation, and being provably, irresistably coerced into something is hardly punished at all. The causal chain must be traced back to the most recent point where it was sensitive to a conscious decision in a mind capable of considering the law, because that's the only point where distant deterrence or encouragement could have an effect.
"Ignorance is no excuse" because if it were, any halfway-competent criminal could cultivate scrupulous unawareness and be untouchable, but people think it should be an excuse because the law needs to be predictable to work. Same reason punishing someone for doing what was legal at the time doesn't make sense, except as a power-play.
So, let's say you're a tribal hominid, having just figured out all the above in one of those incommunicable, unrepeatable flashes of brilliance. How do you go about implementing it? With limited resources, you can't implement it widely enough to benefit everyone in the known world, even if you wanted to. You can't lay down a written code of laws because standardized writing hasn't even been invented yet, and you can't trust the whole tribe to carry on an oral tradition because you can barely trust half of them not to stab you in the back when you catch something unusually juicy. You can, however, trust your immediate family and/or the spear-carriers you go hunting with to cooperate with you and suffer short-term disadvantages, even when you're not looking, so long as there's a big, plausible payoff within a month (for hunters) or a few years (for family).
You offer them this: "We tell the tribe about this idea of 'responsibility,' and then, whenever someone steals from one of us, we all get together and hurt the one responsible until they've lost more than they gained by stealing. When the rest of the tribe can see that stealing from any of us is pointless, we can just leave our stuff sitting out instead of having to worry about hiding it, and then we'll have more time for hunting and grooming."
It works out well enough that soon everybody's doing the revenge thing. Causality and culpability are enough of a puzzle that specialization is necessary to do it right; the problem is, a judgement rendered by someone you don't trust is worse than useless, and the only people it's remotely safe to trust with life-changing decisions are kin.
You ever notice how corrupt police act sorta like abusive parents?
Disconnect between Stated/Implemented Preferences
Currently, the comment for which I've received the most positive karma by a factor of four is a joke about institutionalized ass-rape. A secondhand joke, effectively a quote with no source cited. Furthermore, the comment had, at best, tangential relevance to the subject of discussion. If anyone were to provide a detailed explanation of why they voted as they did, I predict that I would be appreciative.
Based on this evidence, which priors need to be adjusted? Discuss.
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