a bottle cap

We're born with a sense of fairness, honor, empathy, sympathy, and even altruism - the result of our ancestors adapting to play the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. 

The keyword here is *sense*, and there's not a whole lot saying that this sense can't vanishes as easily as it appears. Interpretting a human as a "fair, empathetic, altruistic being" is superficial. The status quo narrative of humanity is a lie/mass delusion, and humanity is a largely psychopathic species covered in a brittle, hard candy shell of altruism and empathy. If this is true, the entire article is confused.

If you have a strong aversion to this claim, imagine how humanity would appear if you... (read more)

If one values winning above everything else, then everything that leads to winning is rational. The reductio to this is if torturing a googolplex of beings at maximum duration and increasing intensity leads to winning, then that's what must be done.

Yet... perhaps winning then is not what we should most value? Perhaps we should value destroying the thing which values torturing a googolplex of beings. What if we need to torture half of a googolplex of beings to outcompete something willing to torture a googolplex of beings? What if outcompeting such a thing is impossible? What is the threshold for the number of beings tortured, in total? Such a question must by... (read more)