1. It is not common knowledge that the level-4 simulacrum of justice is a level-4 simulacrum. Or even that it is not a level-1. There are people honestly trying to do level-1 justice using a mostly level-4 simulacrum, or a mix of all levels, etc. I feel like this error was present and somewhat ubiquitous, for various reasons good and bad, long before L-4 took over the areas in question, and its origin often *was* usefully thought of as a technical error. Its final one-winged-angel form is something else. 2. Even if something is not a technical error in the sense that no one was trying to solve a given technical problem, it is still true in many cases, including this one, that it claims that it *is* trying to solve the problem. Pointing out that it’s doing a piss-poor job of that can create knowledge or ideally common knowledge that allows the remaining lower-level players to identify and coordinate against it, or at least avoid making the mistake in their own thinking and realize what they are up against. 3. It can lead to potential ways out. One can imagine forcing common knowledge of being L-4 accelerating a reversion. Language has been destroyed, so anyone who cares about the object level can now exit and start again, and the system of levels (and perhaps The System, if it’s too linked to not be doomed) can collapse. That seems good. Alternatively, it can create value for the game piece of claiming that everything else is a simulacrum and thus one can invest substantial resources in creating something that is protected (at least for now) from that, to compete. Or, it can free the L-1 players from not only confusion but feeling bad about playing the game being played, since once there is only a game board, the game itself becomes the object level – that which no longer has *any* link to reality on the original level has its own distinct reality, and you can operate on that object level, and kind of start again with the new meanings of words. 4. Yes! These people ARE hopelessly perverse! And also, a sufficient amount of such pressures also makes them stupid because they don’t have any words or accurate information to think with! That’s in addition to being situationally constrained and habituated. These are not exclusive things.
In general, I have the instinct that pointing out that things *would be* technical errors if they were part of a proposed technical solution to the problem they claim to be solving, is a useful thing to do to help create common knowledge / knowledge.
1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds. I agree that this is not common knowledge, and never has been. I’d like to hear more about why you think the situation is new.
(It’s plausible to me that something’s changed recently, in response to the Enlightenment, and that something changed with the initial spread of Christianity, and that something else changed with the initial growth of cities and centralized cults.)
2. I agree. I think it’s more helpful if we additionally clarify that while there’s not really a good-faith reason to stay confused about this, many people have a strong perceived motive to stay confused, so the persistence of confusion is not strong evidence that our apparently decisive arguments are missing an important technical point. (Also, it’s better if noticing this doesn’t immediately lead to self-sabotage via indignantly pretending scapegoating norms don’t exist.)
Not much to add on 3 and 4, except that my response to 2 bears on 3 as well. Strongly agree with:
In general, I have the instinct that pointing out that things *would be* technical errors if they were part of a proposed technical solution to the problem they claim to be solving, is a useful thing to do to help create common knowledge / knowledge.
I cannot speak for Zvi, but I suggest that the new thing is communication pollution.
Reality is far away and expensive. Signs are immediate and basically free. I intuitively suspect the gap is so huge that it is cheaper and easier to do a kind of sign-hopping, like frequency hopping, in lieu of working on or confronting the reality of the matter directly.
To provide more intuition about what I mean, compare communication costs to the falling costs of light over time. When our only lights were firewood it cost a significant fraction of the time of illumination in labor, for gathering and chopping wood. Now light is so ubiquitous that we turn them on with virtually no thought, and light pollution is a thing.
Interesting in this context that the Biblical version of the tower of Babel (as distinguished from e.g. the Babylonian account) was specifically constructed as a signal tower to overcome coordination difficulties due to large distances.
1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds.
One (potential?) disagreement is that I think it’s quite plausible that level-4-simulacrums are in fact the original morality, or co-evolved with level-1 morality. I think it actually took work to get morality to a point where it made any “sense” in a principled way. (At least, with principles that LWers are likely to endorse)
My current best guess is that morality is rooted in two things:
1) the need to coordinate political factions (who has enough friends that they could beat someone and take their stuff, or avoid having themselves beaten-up-and-stuff-taken). Notions of ‘fairness’ (which come from the anger module), getting filtered through “what can a group of people agree is fair?”, as a coordination mechanism.
2) something something repurposing our disgust module (from diseased individuals) to dislike people that seemed dangerous to have around. (So low status, powerless people often produce a disgust reaction. If you hang around a diseased person you might get sick. If you hang around powerless people you might get stuck with a spear).
The oldest simulacrum-level-1 morality I can imagine would have involved coordinating hunters and maybe building shelters (where it matters how skilled people are). But I’d expect the same time period to already involve maintaining your position within a political tribe, and I’d expect higher-level-simulacra morality to already be at work in that context.
(I’m not sure whether it makes sense to think of levels 1-through-4 as distinct stages)
I’d expect the explicit level 1-4 transition to become relevant after we moved to hierarchical agricultural societies, but for that to be happening alongside levels 2-4 already existing in some form.
Coevolution seems plausible to me, but preexisting doesn’t. Forager-typical fairness norms seem like a coherent shared social agenda, which is I think all that’s required to be at simulacra level 1. The anger “module” is fundamentally social and seems to be object-level. Plenty of social animals not smart enough to be Machiavellian experience anger, a sense of fairness, etc.
(Replying to the last two paragraphs)
Agreed. Several things one could say here.
1. It is not common knowledge that the level-4 simulacrum of justice is a level-4 simulacrum. Or even that it is not a level-1. There are people honestly trying to do level-1 justice using a mostly level-4 simulacrum, or a mix of all levels, etc. I feel like this error was present and somewhat ubiquitous, for various reasons good and bad, long before L-4 took over the areas in question, and its origin often *was* usefully thought of as a technical error. Its final one-winged-angel form is something else.
2. Even if something is not a technical error in the sense that no one was trying to solve a given technical problem, it is still true in many cases, including this one, that it claims that it *is* trying to solve the problem. Pointing out that it’s doing a piss-poor job of that can create knowledge or ideally common knowledge that allows the remaining lower-level players to identify and coordinate against it, or at least avoid making the mistake in their own thinking and realize what they are up against.
3. It can lead to potential ways out. One can imagine forcing common knowledge of being L-4 accelerating a reversion. Language has been destroyed, so anyone who cares about the object level can now exit and start again, and the system of levels (and perhaps The System, if it’s too linked to not be doomed) can collapse. That seems good. Alternatively, it can create value for the game piece of claiming that everything else is a simulacrum and thus one can invest substantial resources in creating something that is protected (at least for now) from that, to compete. Or, it can free the L-1 players from not only confusion but feeling bad about playing the game being played, since once there is only a game board, the game itself becomes the object level – that which no longer has *any* link to reality on the original level has its own distinct reality, and you can operate on that object level, and kind of start again with the new meanings of words.
4. Yes! These people ARE hopelessly perverse! And also, a sufficient amount of such pressures also makes them stupid because they don’t have any words or accurate information to think with! That’s in addition to being situationally constrained and habituated. These are not exclusive things.
In general, I have the instinct that pointing out that things *would be* technical errors if they were part of a proposed technical solution to the problem they claim to be solving, is a useful thing to do to help create common knowledge / knowledge.
1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds. I agree that this is not common knowledge, and never has been. I’d like to hear more about why you think the situation is new.
(It’s plausible to me that something’s changed recently, in response to the Enlightenment, and that something changed with the initial spread of Christianity, and that something else changed with the initial growth of cities and centralized cults.)
2. I agree. I think it’s more helpful if we additionally clarify that while there’s not really a good-faith reason to stay confused about this, many people have a strong perceived motive to stay confused, so the persistence of confusion is not strong evidence that our apparently decisive arguments are missing an important technical point. (Also, it’s better if noticing this doesn’t immediately lead to self-sabotage via indignantly pretending scapegoating norms don’t exist.)
Not much to add on 3 and 4, except that my response to 2 bears on 3 as well. Strongly agree with:
I cannot speak for Zvi, but I suggest that the new thing is communication pollution.
Reality is far away and expensive. Signs are immediate and basically free. I intuitively suspect the gap is so huge that it is cheaper and easier to do a kind of sign-hopping, like frequency hopping, in lieu of working on or confronting the reality of the matter directly.
To provide more intuition about what I mean, compare communication costs to the falling costs of light over time. When our only lights were firewood it cost a significant fraction of the time of illumination in labor, for gathering and chopping wood. Now light is so ubiquitous that we turn them on with virtually no thought, and light pollution is a thing.
Interesting in this context that the Biblical version of the tower of Babel (as distinguished from e.g. the Babylonian account) was specifically constructed as a signal tower to overcome coordination difficulties due to large distances.
One (potential?) disagreement is that I think it’s quite plausible that level-4-simulacrums are in fact the original morality, or co-evolved with level-1 morality. I think it actually took work to get morality to a point where it made any “sense” in a principled way. (At least, with principles that LWers are likely to endorse)
My current best guess is that morality is rooted in two things:
1) the need to coordinate political factions (who has enough friends that they could beat someone and take their stuff, or avoid having themselves beaten-up-and-stuff-taken). Notions of ‘fairness’ (which come from the anger module), getting filtered through “what can a group of people agree is fair?”, as a coordination mechanism.
2) something something repurposing our disgust module (from diseased individuals) to dislike people that seemed dangerous to have around. (So low status, powerless people often produce a disgust reaction. If you hang around a diseased person you might get sick. If you hang around powerless people you might get stuck with a spear).
The oldest simulacrum-level-1 morality I can imagine would have involved coordinating hunters and maybe building shelters (where it matters how skilled people are). But I’d expect the same time period to already involve maintaining your position within a political tribe, and I’d expect higher-level-simulacra morality to already be at work in that context.
(I’m not sure whether it makes sense to think of levels 1-through-4 as distinct stages)
I’d expect the explicit level 1-4 transition to become relevant after we moved to hierarchical agricultural societies, but for that to be happening alongside levels 2-4 already existing in some form.
Coevolution seems plausible to me, but preexisting doesn’t. Forager-typical fairness norms seem like a coherent shared social agenda, which is I think all that’s required to be at simulacra level 1. The anger “module” is fundamentally social and seems to be object-level. Plenty of social animals not smart enough to be Machiavellian experience anger, a sense of fairness, etc.