This treats sexual selection as determined by instrumental genes and selecting for instrumental genes, but I feel like it makes more sense to say that sexual selection selects for terminal genes (or at least terminal phenotypes), since those are the ones organisms will spontaneously collaborate to promote.

Was Blanchard aware of furries when he did his research? That might count.

Though I'm puzzled by why it is necessary to come up with something new.

Schizophrenia and bipolar are generally seen as mostly biological in etiology

What's the evidence for them being biological? Just that they're heritable? (Even though non-biological etiologies like type 2 diabetes can totally be heritable too...)

What's your thoughts on my finding that HS/TS-spectrum gay men were only minimally shifted in gender-related psychological traits compared to wholly cis gay men? https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/major-survey-on-the-hs-ts-spectrum-and-gaygp/ Except for aesthetic traits.

"Learning about TDT does not imply becoming a TDT agent." No, but it could allow it. I don't see why you would require it to be an implication.

Because we are arguing about whether TDT is convergent.

"CDT doesn't think about possible worlds in this way."  That is technically true, but kind of irrelevant in my opinion. I'm suggesting that TDT is essentially what you get by being a CDT agent which thinks about multiple possible worlds, and that this is a reasonable thing to think about.

"Reasonable" seems weaker than "instrumentally convergent" to me. I agree that there are conceivable, self-approving, highly effective agent designs that think like this. I'm objecting to the notion that this is what you get by default, without someone putting it in there.

In fact, I would be surprised if a superintelligence didn't take multiple possible worlds into account. 

A superintelligence which didn't take the possibility of, for example many branches of a wavefunction seriously would be a strangely limited one. 

MWI branches are different from TDT-counterfactually possible worlds.

What would your PCFTDT superintelligence do if it was placed in a universe with closed timelike cuves? What about a universe when the direction of time wasn't well defined? 

We don't seem to live in a universe like that, so it would be silly to prioritize good behavior in such universes when designing an AI.

Your reasons don't make sense at all to me. They feel like magical thinking.

1) By the time AI reaches superintelligence, it has already learnt TDT, at which point it has no reason to go back to being a PCFTDT agent. 

Learning about TDT does not imply becoming a TDT agent.

2) What if the ASI reaches superintelligence with CDT, and then realizes that it can further increase the proportion of possible worlds in which it exists using TDT to effect something like acausal blackmail? 

CDT doesn't think about possible worlds in this way.

Yes, as in if you start with causal decision theory, it doesn't consider acausal things at all, but for incentive reasons it wants to become someone who does consider acausal things, but as CDT it only believes incentives extend into the future and not the past.

Acausal stuff isn't instrumentally convergent in the usual sense, though. If you're really good at computing counterfactuals, it may be instrumentally convergent to self-modify into or create an agent that does acausal deals, but the convergence only extends to deals that start in the future relative to where you're deciding from.

This still requires people to design an AI that is prone to engaging in acausal extortion, and it's unclear what their motive for doing so would be.

It requires other people to think in enough depth to pick out you as a target. Admittedly this is made easier by the fact that you are posting about it online.

Have you thought in enough depth that you've helped the acausal extortionist to target other people? That may be evidence about whether other people have done so with you.