You write a lot of good content, so I think it’s likely that you are making a good point here. However, I don’t understand it at all and am finding this comment like trying to climb a smooth wall—I can’t even get started. Then again, I am relatively new to this community. If you have time, I’d be thankful (get it?? I ate so much I don’t want to move) if you could rewrite it with your definitions and assumptions made explicit.
Draco had observed that if the two prisoners had been Death Eaters during the Wizarding War, the Dark Lord would have killed any traitors.
Harry had nodded and said that was one way to resolve the Prisoner’s Dilemma—and in fact both Death Eaters would want there to be a Dark Lord for exactly that reason.
The idea is that coordination can be enforced by a central authority such as a Dark Lord, moving the situation closer to the Pareto frontier, but having a Dark Lord is terrible for other reasons, including as a source of risks that are hard to accurately anticipate.
This is intended as an analogy to the post’s story of employing identity in order to regularly exercise. The use of identity in reasoning is analogous to a Dark Lord in that it’s a terrible cognitive movement that seems natural, perhaps a psychological adaptation. As a straightforward example, it’s things like “What do you think causes global warming?” “I’m a Pastafarian. Pastafarians consider the decline in the number of pirates to be the cause of global warming. Therefore I believe that global warming is caused by there not being enough pirates.” The problem is that the question doesn’t get to be considered on the object level, it immediately goes to simulacrum level 3. In actual practice, it’s not at all straightforward, the arguments in support for a position that won’t be considered on object level come naturally and without a framing that makes the problem apparent.
One way of getting rid of the problem is to keep an eye on topics that trigger this movement, asking to affirm consistency instead of clarity of inference, and try to kick such topics out of your identity. There doesn’t seem to be much of a point in having anything as part of one’s identity in this sense, so the goal of the exercise is to eventually get rid of everything that plays that role, making identity empty.
You write a lot of good content, so I think it’s likely that you are making a good point here. However, I don’t understand it at all and am finding this comment like trying to climb a smooth wall—I can’t even get started. Then again, I am relatively new to this community. If you have time, I’d be thankful (get it?? I ate so much I don’t want to move) if you could rewrite it with your definitions and assumptions made explicit.
The punchline is a reference to chapter 33 of HPMoR:
The idea is that coordination can be enforced by a central authority such as a Dark Lord, moving the situation closer to the Pareto frontier, but having a Dark Lord is terrible for other reasons, including as a source of risks that are hard to accurately anticipate.
This is intended as an analogy to the post’s story of employing identity in order to regularly exercise. The use of identity in reasoning is analogous to a Dark Lord in that it’s a terrible cognitive movement that seems natural, perhaps a psychological adaptation. As a straightforward example, it’s things like “What do you think causes global warming?” “I’m a Pastafarian. Pastafarians consider the decline in the number of pirates to be the cause of global warming. Therefore I believe that global warming is caused by there not being enough pirates.” The problem is that the question doesn’t get to be considered on the object level, it immediately goes to simulacrum level 3. In actual practice, it’s not at all straightforward, the arguments in support for a position that won’t be considered on object level come naturally and without a framing that makes the problem apparent.
One way of getting rid of the problem is to keep an eye on topics that trigger this movement, asking to affirm consistency instead of clarity of inference, and try to kick such topics out of your identity. There doesn’t seem to be much of a point in having anything as part of one’s identity in this sense, so the goal of the exercise is to eventually get rid of everything that plays that role, making identity empty.
GOT IT. Great prose. Thank you.