Mostly some self-description, since you seem want a model of me. I did add an actual disagreement (or something) at the end, but I don’t think there’ll be much more for me to say about it if you don’t accept it. I will read anything you write.
I have the feeling that you have pretty much lost the “enjoy the game” shard, possibly because you have a mutant variant ” enjoy ANY game”.
More like “enjoy the process”. Why would I want to set a “win” condition to begin with?
I don’t play actual games at all unless somebody drags me into them. They seem artificial and circumscribed. Whatever the rules are, I don’t really care enough about learning them, or learning to work within them, unless it gives me something that seems useful for whatever random conditions may come up later, outside the game. That applies to whatever the winning condition is, as much as to any other rule.
Games with competition tend to be especially tedious. Making the competition work seems to tends to further constrain the design of the rules, so they’re more boring. And the competition can make the other people involved annoying.
As far as winning itself… Whee! I got the most points! That, plus whatever coffee costs nowadays, will buy me a cup of coffee. And I don’t even like coffee.
I study things, and I do projects.
While I do evaluate project results, I’m not inclined to bin them as “success” or “failure”. I mean, sure, I’ll broadly classify a project that way, especially if I have to summarize it to somebody else in a sentence. But for myself I want more than that. What exactly did I get out of doing it? The whole thing might even be a “success” if it didn’t meet any of its original goals.
I collect capabilities. Once I have a capability, I often, but not always, lose interest in using it, except maybe to get more capabilities. Capabilities get extra points for being generally useful.
I collect experiences when new, pleasurable, or interesting ones seem to be available. But just experiences, not experiences of “winning”.
I’ll do crossword puzzles, but only when I have nothing else to do and mostly for the puns.
Many video games have a “I win” cheatcode. Players at large don’t use it. Why not, if winning the game is the goal ?
Even I would understand that as not, actually, you know, winning the game. I mean, a game is a system with rules. No rules, no game, thus no win. And if there’s an auto-win button that has no reason to be in the rules other than auto-win, well, obvious hole is obvious.
It’s just that I don’t care to play a game to begin with.
If something is gamified, meaning that somebody has artificially put a bunch of random stuff I don’t care about between me and something I actually want in real life, then I’ll try to bypass the game. But I’m not going to do that for points, or badges, or “achievements” that somebody else has decided I should want. I’m not going to push the “win” button. I’m just not gonna play. I loathe gamification.
Creating an ASI-driven UBI paradise is discovering that the developer created a “I Win” button.
I see it not as an “I win” button, but as an “I can do the stuff I care about without having to worry about which random stupid bullshit other people might be willing to pay me for, or about tedious chores that don’t interest me” button.
Sure, I’m going to mash that.
And eventually maybe I’ll go more transcendent, if that’s on offer. I’m even willing to accept certain reasonable mental outlooks to avoid being too “unaligned”.
This is the split between Personal Agency and Collective Agency.
I don’t even believe “Collective Agency” is a thing, let alone a thing I’d care about. Anything you can reasonably call “agency” requires preferences, and intentional, planned, directed, well, action toward a goal. Collectives don’t have preferences and don’t plan (and also don’t enjoy, or even experience, either the process or the results).
Which, by the way, brings me to the one actual quibble I’m going to put in this. And I’m not sure what to do with that quibble. I don’t have a satisfactory course of action and I don’t think I have much useful insight beyond what’s below. But I do know it’s a problem.
One : if there is no recognizable Mormons society in a post-ASI future, something Has Gone Very Wrong.
I was once involved in a legal case that had a lot to do with some Mormons. Really they were a tiny minority of the people affected, but the history was such that the legal system thought they were salient, so they got talked about a lot, and got to talk themselves, and I learned a bit about them.
These particular Mormons were a relatively isolated polygynist splinter sect that treated women, and especially young women, pretty poorly (actually I kind of think everybody but the leaders got a pretty raw deal, and I’m not even sure the leaders were having much of a Good Time(TM)). It wasn’t systematic torture, but it wasn’t Fun Times either. And the people on the bottom had a whole lot less of what most people would call “agency” than the people on the top.
But they could show you lots of women who truly, sincerely wanted to stay in their system. That was how they’d been raised and what they believed in. And they genuinely believed their Prophet got direct instructions from God (now and then, not all the time).
Nobody was kept in chains. Anybody who wanted to leave was free to walk away from their entire family, probably almost every person they even knew by name, and everything they’d ever been taught was important, while defying what at least many of them truly believed was the literal will of God. And of course move somewhere where practically everybody had a pretty alien way of life, and most people were constantly doing things they’d always believed were hideously immoral, and where they’d been told people were doing worse than they actually were.
They probably would have been miserable if they’d been forcibly dragged out of their system. They might never have recovered. If they had recovered, it might well have meant they’d had experiences that you could categorize as brainwashing.
It would have been wrong to yank them out of their system. So far I’m with you.
But was it right to raise them that way? Was it right to allow them to be raised that way? What kind of “agency” did they have in choosing the things that molded them? The people who did mold them got agency, but they don’t seem to have gotten much.
As I think you’ve probably figured out, I’m very big on individual, conscious, thinking, experiencing, wanting agents, and very much against giving mindless aggregates like institutions, groups, or “cultures”, anywhere near the same kind of moral weight.
From my point of view, a dog has more right to respect and consideration than a “heritage”. The “heritage” is only important because of the people who value it, and that does not entitle it to have more, different people fed to it. And by this I specifically mean children.
A world of diverse enclaves is appealing in a lot of ways. But, in every realistic form I’ve been able to imagine, it’s a world where the enclaves own people.
More precisely, it’s a world where “culture” or “heritage”, or whatever, is used an excuse for some people not only to make other people miserable, but to condition them from birth to choose that misery. Children start to look suspiciously like they’re just raw material for whatever enclave they happen to be born in. They don’t choose the enclave, not when it matters.
It’s not like you can just somehow neutrally turn a baby into an adult and then have them “choose freely”. People’s values are their own, but that doesn’t mean they create those values ex nihilo.
I suppose you could fix the problem by switching to reproduction by adult fission, or something. But a few people might see that as a rather abrupt departure, maybe even contrary to their values. And kids are cute.
Mostly some self-description, since you seem want a model of me. I did add an actual disagreement (or something) at the end, but I don’t think there’ll be much more for me to say about it if you don’t accept it. I will read anything you write.
More like “enjoy the process”. Why would I want to set a “win” condition to begin with?
I don’t play actual games at all unless somebody drags me into them. They seem artificial and circumscribed. Whatever the rules are, I don’t really care enough about learning them, or learning to work within them, unless it gives me something that seems useful for whatever random conditions may come up later, outside the game. That applies to whatever the winning condition is, as much as to any other rule.
Games with competition tend to be especially tedious. Making the competition work seems to tends to further constrain the design of the rules, so they’re more boring. And the competition can make the other people involved annoying.
As far as winning itself… Whee! I got the most points! That, plus whatever coffee costs nowadays, will buy me a cup of coffee. And I don’t even like coffee.
I study things, and I do projects.
While I do evaluate project results, I’m not inclined to bin them as “success” or “failure”. I mean, sure, I’ll broadly classify a project that way, especially if I have to summarize it to somebody else in a sentence. But for myself I want more than that. What exactly did I get out of doing it? The whole thing might even be a “success” if it didn’t meet any of its original goals.
I collect capabilities. Once I have a capability, I often, but not always, lose interest in using it, except maybe to get more capabilities. Capabilities get extra points for being generally useful.
I collect experiences when new, pleasurable, or interesting ones seem to be available. But just experiences, not experiences of “winning”.
I’ll do crossword puzzles, but only when I have nothing else to do and mostly for the puns.
Even I would understand that as not, actually, you know, winning the game. I mean, a game is a system with rules. No rules, no game, thus no win. And if there’s an auto-win button that has no reason to be in the rules other than auto-win, well, obvious hole is obvious.
It’s just that I don’t care to play a game to begin with.
If something is gamified, meaning that somebody has artificially put a bunch of random stuff I don’t care about between me and something I actually want in real life, then I’ll try to bypass the game. But I’m not going to do that for points, or badges, or “achievements” that somebody else has decided I should want. I’m not going to push the “win” button. I’m just not gonna play. I loathe gamification.
I see it not as an “I win” button, but as an “I can do the stuff I care about without having to worry about which random stupid bullshit other people might be willing to pay me for, or about tedious chores that don’t interest me” button.
Sure, I’m going to mash that.
And eventually maybe I’ll go more transcendent, if that’s on offer. I’m even willing to accept certain reasonable mental outlooks to avoid being too “unaligned”.
I don’t even believe “Collective Agency” is a thing, let alone a thing I’d care about. Anything you can reasonably call “agency” requires preferences, and intentional, planned, directed, well, action toward a goal. Collectives don’t have preferences and don’t plan (and also don’t enjoy, or even experience, either the process or the results).
Which, by the way, brings me to the one actual quibble I’m going to put in this. And I’m not sure what to do with that quibble. I don’t have a satisfactory course of action and I don’t think I have much useful insight beyond what’s below. But I do know it’s a problem.
I was once involved in a legal case that had a lot to do with some Mormons. Really they were a tiny minority of the people affected, but the history was such that the legal system thought they were salient, so they got talked about a lot, and got to talk themselves, and I learned a bit about them.
These particular Mormons were a relatively isolated polygynist splinter sect that treated women, and especially young women, pretty poorly (actually I kind of think everybody but the leaders got a pretty raw deal, and I’m not even sure the leaders were having much of a Good Time(TM)). It wasn’t systematic torture, but it wasn’t Fun Times either. And the people on the bottom had a whole lot less of what most people would call “agency” than the people on the top.
But they could show you lots of women who truly, sincerely wanted to stay in their system. That was how they’d been raised and what they believed in. And they genuinely believed their Prophet got direct instructions from God (now and then, not all the time).
Nobody was kept in chains. Anybody who wanted to leave was free to walk away from their entire family, probably almost every person they even knew by name, and everything they’d ever been taught was important, while defying what at least many of them truly believed was the literal will of God. And of course move somewhere where practically everybody had a pretty alien way of life, and most people were constantly doing things they’d always believed were hideously immoral, and where they’d been told people were doing worse than they actually were.
They probably would have been miserable if they’d been forcibly dragged out of their system. They might never have recovered. If they had recovered, it might well have meant they’d had experiences that you could categorize as brainwashing.
It would have been wrong to yank them out of their system. So far I’m with you.
But was it right to raise them that way? Was it right to allow them to be raised that way? What kind of “agency” did they have in choosing the things that molded them? The people who did mold them got agency, but they don’t seem to have gotten much.
As I think you’ve probably figured out, I’m very big on individual, conscious, thinking, experiencing, wanting agents, and very much against giving mindless aggregates like institutions, groups, or “cultures”, anywhere near the same kind of moral weight.
From my point of view, a dog has more right to respect and consideration than a “heritage”. The “heritage” is only important because of the people who value it, and that does not entitle it to have more, different people fed to it. And by this I specifically mean children.
A world of diverse enclaves is appealing in a lot of ways. But, in every realistic form I’ve been able to imagine, it’s a world where the enclaves own people.
More precisely, it’s a world where “culture” or “heritage”, or whatever, is used an excuse for some people not only to make other people miserable, but to condition them from birth to choose that misery. Children start to look suspiciously like they’re just raw material for whatever enclave they happen to be born in. They don’t choose the enclave, not when it matters.
It’s not like you can just somehow neutrally turn a baby into an adult and then have them “choose freely”. People’s values are their own, but that doesn’t mean they create those values ex nihilo.
I suppose you could fix the problem by switching to reproduction by adult fission, or something. But a few people might see that as a rather abrupt departure, maybe even contrary to their values. And kids are cute.