lies keine oden, mein sohn, lies die fahrpläne:
sie sind genauer, roll die seekarten auf,
eh es zu spät ist. sei wachsam, sing nicht.
der tag kommt, wo sie wieder listen ans tor
schlagen und malen den neinsagern auf die brust
zinken, lern unerkannt gehn, lern mehr als ich:
das viertel wechseln, den paß, das gesicht.
versteh dich auf den kleinen verrat,
die tägliche schmutzige rettung. nützlich
sind die enzykliken zum feueranzünden,
die manifeste: butter einzuwickeln und salz
für die wehrlosen, wut und geduld sind nötig,
in die lungen der macht zu blasen
den feinen tödlichen staub, gemahlen
von denen, die viel gelernt haben,
die genau sind, von dir.

– hans magnus enzensberger, ins lesebuch für die oberstufe¹

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Liked Vladimir Nesov’s post against anthropic evidence (or at least, certain kinds). Thought, doesn’t that depend on your values, though? So I wrote a quick simulation and tested a few options. I had an idea how you might be able to exploit the anthropic evidence anyway, but nope, Vladimir is right. Still, clarified some issues with measure for me.

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I’m having Those Dreams again, probably because I thought too much about dreams in general. I’m especially tempted to lift my dream embargo because I just unlocked the next stage of what I know is a cool skill. But yeah, I’m still on a “no new methods or drugs” diet, and I don’t need more insanity right now, so I’m now actively censoring my dreams again, and won’t even mention what the skill is. (Sorry, future-me.)

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If I understand the Catholics right (and I probably don’t, but that hasn’t stopped anyone else so far), their view of free will and salvation is essentially that of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. It works like this:

A moral act must be freely chosen, and so also freely caused. (No determinism up in this bitch.) Fortunately, humans are capable of such free causation, but they cannot truly bring anything into existence. Thus, God must first create the circumstances of the choice, but then it’s all free will and deserved merit or sin.

Thus, to be moral, you must have God’s grace - He must present you with an actual choice. If He decided not to ever do that, you’d be screwed. He could damn you against all your intentions if He wanted to because a human has not enough causal power to truly make moral choices ex nihilo. But still, mere grace is not enough - you must still choose freely, grounded only in yourself. You cannot cause yourself into existence (that’s His trick), but once there, you can cause your own moral acts freely out of yourself. (“So God created mankind in His own image.”)

In other words, God has to write the CYOA book, and you have to play it. This is why Catholicism teaches salvation through grace and works. One alone is not enough. (Which is why all Protestants are going to Hell.) I also note that this view is nicely local and intuitive. (And states what exactly distinguishes a PC from an NPC.) (And that “self-determined causes” make more sense to me than the Great Web of Causality.)

(And if I may, let me state the muflax theory of atonement: Jesus died for your choices. Adam committed a sin so grave², it derailed the whole story and left plot holes visible to this day (if you look up into the sky, towards the center of our galaxy). Jesus is the narrative center point, who ripples forwards and backwards in time, and who offers all humans again choices that lead towards virtue.

Yes, that’s kinda vague, but have you looked at the other atonement theories?)

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Made a new Anki deck for memories.

My family has virtually no oral tradition, or what Korzybski used to call “time-binding”, i.e. a process to pass on and preserve information. There are many important personal memories and scars that at most 2 people know about, and which will soon be forgotten. Most of my life, this didn’t bother me. I wanted to take everything to the grave with me, and so was happy to deny those memories any further existence.

But now, I feel like a ghost, haunting old ruins. Everything is decaying and all dreams are broken, and yet I remain unattached. This reminds me that I never quite wrote down how I got into the Dark Stance.

Originally, it grew out of frustration with what I used to call the Dukkha Core, a part of me that would never accept anything, that was never satisfied. I finally gave up and tried to diagonalize it by feeding it inputs it couldn’t possibly deny, like itself, or the process of denial, or frustration itself. Eventually I thought, what if I just decide to be fine with the unacceptable. I couldn’t make my mind not be hateful, so why didn’t I just embrace hate for hate’s sake? Not to turn it into something else - that would still get rejected - but to make those things the Dukkha Core called wrong, right.

Fuck your sweetness, I like my grapes sour anyway!

To my surprise, this actually worked. It was a good counterweight to all that niceness in my system, was a way to actually engage with those rejected aspects. I probably didn’t quite believe the Dark Stance was actually valid beyond the diagonalization attempt, but that didn’t matter.

Until one day I experienced great loss. The details are irrelevant, but when I was overcome by grief, I finally got the Dark Stance. I knew that soon enough, I’d “recover” and “get better”, would return to my emotional set point, that the hedonic treadmill applies to all states. I was not ok with this. I had already lost, I would not also lose my grief! I had a genuine grudge with the world and swore not to forget it. I can’t undo the past, but I can at least make sure the world would not also take my rightful grief. And so, I won’t let it call this bad, I won’t allow it to turn my grief into something to be healed. I’m not surrendering it to the world.

Once I stopped rejecting it and made the grief a permanent part of me, the Dukkha Core also disappeared. That’s all it ever wanted - that I freely choose something and accept it, independent of anyone else’s approval.³ I have forged a new value out of my broken heart, and I’m ok with that.

So now I think it’s time to commit more strongly to the promise that I would never let go, so I made cards for these kinds of memories. I am not an empathic participant, I’m more of a sensate archiving interesting feels. But at least I can now say to the people who have shared important memories with me, your dreams will not be repaired, your wounds will not be healed, your wishes will not be fulfilled, and your suffering will follow you to your death, but at least I will not forget you. I will not pass on your story, but I will preserve it in my heart, unredeemed.

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Fallacy of discernment: X claims Very Specific Thing happened to them. Very Specific Thing is highly unlikely according to my priors, and so X must be wrong. Therefore, the General Thing that Very Specific Thing is a special case of didn’t happen.

Example 1: Joseph Smith claims to have been visited by the Angel Moroni. Angels are implausible. Therefore, Smith was not visited by a transhuman intelligence.

Example 2: Tens of thousands of witnesses report the Miracle of the Sun near Fatima and credit the Virgin Mary. Jesus was not divine, and so there is no Virgin Mary. Therefore, nothing happened near Fatima.

Example 3: They(tm) claim 19 members of al-Quaeda hijacked planes and crashed into the WTC. Untrained wannabe terrorists could not have performed the attacks. Therefore, no planes flew into the WTC.

Inverted Example: Jews claim Jesus did not rise from the dead. It is unlikely that someone stole his body because the Jews posted guards at his tomb. Therefore, Jesus rose from the dead.

Note that the fallacy is merely that the conclusion does not follow from the premises, and that by refuting a Very Specific Thing, you have in no way discredited the General Thing it belongs to.

(Indirect HT to Yvain for reminding me of this.⁴)

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A quick point about subs.

I like this Oglaf because it’s such a concise summary of my position of what most people really mean by “submission”. (Including past-me. Compare also Twilight.)

This bothers me. Past-me used to think he really wants (and wants to want) to be a “slave of righteousness”, as Marcion Paul says. Not just in the figurative sense, but also in the literal sense.

Yet, see above. Past-me was a horrible would-be slave, and made little efforts to become a better slave. He’d use the excuse that no one explicitly told him yet what to do, but he was well aware of universal instrumental goals, and could have just worked on being as useful as possible once he did find a master, and of course work on generally useful institutions, or even master-locating institutions.

The interesting thing is that right now, I’m actually in position now, psychologically, in which I could make this happen, slowly.

What past-me really wanted is a deal like this: “I permanently and credibly give up any aspirations for highest status, and so won’t be a threat to you, and in return, you grant me your high status protection.” Present-me is sympathetic to that, but thinks past-me was stupid. He acted out of fear of harm, but present-me is no longer afraid.

Present-me can longer credibly make such commitments.