I think there’s a really great core to this post, but I don’t know what to do with it, or how to regard it.
For one, this problem seems to be largely inescapable, though of course we can work to reduce its perpetuation. Where, exactly, can I go to live on unstolen land? History is very long, and I don’t know when the first moment was that our ancestors could be said to have any sort of right to the land they lived on (especially where said ancestors’ descendants still exist and live there), which the other predators and megafauna they displaced did not have, or if that would even matter. For another, there is a difference between conquering the world by force, vs. conquering it by giving people new options they choose to take, even if those options involve tradeoffs or risks or are compelled by Moloch.
“A map that reflects the territory. Territory. Not people. Not geography. Not land. Territory. Land and its people that have been conquered.”
The underlying epistemology and decision theory of the sequences is AIXI. To AIXI the entire universe is just waiting to be conquered and tiled with value because AIXI is sufficiently far-sighted to be able to perfectly model “people, geography, and land” and thus map them nondestructively.
The fact that mapping destroys things is a fact about the scope of the mapper’s mind, and the individual mapping process, not about maps and territories in general. You cannot buy onigiri in Berkeley but you can buy rice triangles, an conquering/approximation of onigiri, which (if cooked well) is just as useful for the purposes “satisfy my hunter, satisfy my aesthetic sense of taste.”
Perhaps this is all already implied by the post in a subtle way, but I get a strong “optimization is evil” vibe from it, which I do not think is true.
“They call themselves “the Territory”. It is built on stolen Native American land.
Territory.
Territory.”
IIUC this is saying that the minds of Rationalists are conquered territory. This is correct.
I think there’s a really great core to this post, but I don’t know what to do with it, or how to regard it.
For one, this problem seems to be largely inescapable, though of course we can work to reduce its perpetuation. Where, exactly, can I go to live on unstolen land? History is very long, and I don’t know when the first moment was that our ancestors could be said to have any sort of right to the land they lived on (especially where said ancestors’ descendants still exist and live there), which the other predators and megafauna they displaced did not have, or if that would even matter. For another, there is a difference between conquering the world by force, vs. conquering it by giving people new options they choose to take, even if those options involve tradeoffs or risks or are compelled by Moloch.
“A map that reflects the territory. Territory. Not people. Not geography. Not land. Territory. Land and its people that have been conquered.”
The underlying epistemology and decision theory of the sequences is AIXI. To AIXI the entire universe is just waiting to be conquered and tiled with value because AIXI is sufficiently far-sighted to be able to perfectly model “people, geography, and land” and thus map them nondestructively.
The fact that mapping destroys things is a fact about the scope of the mapper’s mind, and the individual mapping process, not about maps and territories in general. You cannot buy onigiri in Berkeley but you can buy rice triangles, an conquering/approximation of onigiri, which (if cooked well) is just as useful for the purposes “satisfy my hunter, satisfy my aesthetic sense of taste.”
Perhaps this is all already implied by the post in a subtle way, but I get a strong “optimization is evil” vibe from it, which I do not think is true.
“They call themselves “the Territory”. It is built on stolen Native American land.
Territory.
Territory.”
IIUC this is saying that the minds of Rationalists are conquered territory. This is correct.