This is a linkpost for https://youtu.be/Bbwp4PbWYzw
I like this enough that I'm considering picking a screenshot of the Goddess of Everything Else and replacing my twelve year old standard avatar with it.
Liv Boeree's voice acting is really impressive! The animation too! Congratulations to the whole team, I think it's fair to say it's professional quality now!
I'd say this is almost, but not quite as good as 500 Million, But Not A Single One More, but that's probably because I like the message of that one more.
Beautiful video!
How much effort has been gone into identifying and solving the underlying problem, though?
In this animation, it seems like units compete and destroy eachother, and that which changes is the size of each unit. The less units you have, the less conflict. And the difference between the goddess of cancer and goddess of everything else might be whenever effort is applied "correctly" or subject to Goodhart's law.
I'm asking because the ending seems to be possibly naive. All capacity for beauty is ultimately human. You should be very careful about what humanity you get rid of. Lifting human beings above our natural desires and instincts might very well be the end of beauty and everything nice (that is, mathematically sub-optimal but much more appealing to human nature than strict optimization)
I hope that most people here realize that you shouldn't just kill everything subjective and replace it with the objective, kill taste and replace it with logic, and kill human instincts and replace them with things which are "productive". The only forces against moloch is exactly humanity, the subjective, taste, and our instincts which are capable of grasping these better and more beautiful ways of living. And mathematical optimization and various metas seemingly emerging in populations exceeding Dunbar's number are a result of human aspects being abstracted away and lost.
I see the process in question as follows:
You can either have stability, a contentment with what is, and thus no striving after anything "better". Or you can have striving, growth and evolution - which must change over time, and therefore be unstable. i.e. a set of states which loop forever, or the absence of loops.
It's easier to grasp the problem from the aspect of a game designer. Do you release expansion packs forever so that your users don't get bored, or do you look for ways that they can be content playing the same game forever? And how do you do this when the game will sooner or later be completely solved?
Even this video calls for more than contentment, namely improvement. But the two seem to be at odds, unless you have an indefinite tension between the two. Look at Yudkowsky's "Laws of fun" and try to incorporate these laws into a game which is still bounded and stable over an infinite amount of time. And notice how these laws seem to necessitate aspects of life that we deem undesirable! Notice how solving all our problems, and having no more problems to overcome, would be undesirable! As I see it, even death and destruction are valuable, only the reduction of life is undesirable.
The game we're currently playing might already be the perfect game, and if so, then winning it would put it to an end.
I'll paste the link here since I don't know how the formatting here works: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qZJBighPrnv9bSqTZ/31-laws-of-fun
This is an animation of The Goddess of Everything Else, by Scott Alexander. I hope you enjoy it :)