I found this post really helpful for crystallizing a lot of concepts in the simulacra discussion. Thanks!
I read an early draft of this, which ended up (potentially) clarifying something that had been nagging me about Simulacra. I think this is something of a disagreement with Zvi and/or Benquo, which I mentioned in the draft comments but decided to post as a comment on LW rather than debating it beforehand.
A key clarification in this piece is “In Level 3 vs Level 4, 3 is authentically trying to represent their group affiliation and position in social reality. Level 4 deceives people about it’s group affiliation, and/or holds social reality as a thing to be manipulated.”
In the draft-comments, Zvi said (paraphrased) “That’s part of it, but not all of it. Level 4 has a whole different mindset, which can’t form longterm physical plans, which accumulates power rather than pursuing goals.”
And… this feels inelegant to me.
Certainly this type of level 4 person exists. But it feels like an additional claim, beyond the simulacrum model, to argue that all (or most?) level 4 people have this mindset. (I’m not arguing whether this claim is true or false, just it feels unnatural to me to group it in with the model)
It feels much simpler to define level 4 as “willing to lie about level 3”, full stop. And then any additional considerations about 4-type-people are additional claims, outside the model (though perhaps derived from it)
And I think this maybe relates to an early objection I had to the original simulacrum model: the model implies there is a progression, from level 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. And it’s not obvious to me that that’s true. It seems plausible to me that ancient hunter-gatherers developed an understanding of physical-level-reality and social reality in tandem with each other. I agree that in the very beginning, physical-level reality had to have come first. But it seems plausible to me that social-reality predates language. (I.e. maybe early rats or wolves or primates first developed internal respect for object level reality, but by the time they were communicating with words, they may have already developed some primordial social reality, and using object-level-communications as coordination mechanisms.)
(This is not a claim that social reality does predate language, only that I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true)
So the more elegant model, to me, looks less like levels 1-4, and more like a 2x2 grid, where there is physical reality, social reality, and the propensity to lie/manipulate beliefs about either of them.
This feels like a useful way to carve up reality to me, independent of what order the levels were developed, or how common level 4 implies Zvi’s hard-to-grok-level-4-gestalt-of-attributes.
(I do believe that the hard-to-grok-level-4-combination-of-attributes is a significant and common pattern in the world, that we need to contend with in some way.)
Addressing the full substance of this would be (at least) another long post, and things are really weird and I’m still trying to fully understand them, so this is at best a very quick sketch, but basically...
You’re not going to give a good gears-level understanding of the level-4 mindset, be able to predict the actions of those acting with level-4 orientation, or model the actions of a level-4 group/organization/civilization, if you view 4 simply as 4::3 as 2::1, start treating that reduction/abstraction as the thing, and deny the need to think about any of these other dynamics.
What you *can* do, I think (only 80% confident this actually works but 95%+ that it is a good quick heuristic?) is use “are they willing to mislead about *and/or take action to reshape meanings and associations in* level 3, and treat that as necessary and sufficient to identify someone operating at least partly at level 4. Iff they do that, they’re at least partly level 4. Note that you can’t ask whether they do this *on purpose* if you want the right answer, you only get to ask if they’re actually doing it (but same with identifying other levels of action too).
As I said throughout MM, these are things that our brains actively don’t want to look at or see. That’s true even if we ourselves are on level 4 - it is an instinct of level 4 players to prevent coherent models of all kinds, and in particular of level 4, until the *overall civilization’s level* reaches level 4 and then all hell breaks loose and predictions get very hard, before/while all literal hell actually does break loose and you get some form of collapse. So the instinct is constantly to round everything down.
That doesn’t mean you can’t carve reality very usefully using the 2x2. This post is doing its best to *not rely on* the progression order (beyond keeping the names 1, 2, 3 and 4) and to *not rely on* the True Form of level 4 or what not.
The thing where it looks like I/we are ascribing ‘good’ things to level 1, and ‘bad’ things to other levels, is probably not *entirely* objective, but it’s mostly because, well, that’s the way it is and I’m/we’re trying to tell it like it is best we can and understand best we can. If we treat levelism as an ism then that’s a good way to *not even look at* most of what Level 4 behavior actually is in any useful way, possibly 2 and/or 3 as well.
Progression is real too, in multiple ways/levels, but yes the system can be useful without them. Note that level 1 proceeded level 2 and level 3 even if all three (or four) pre-date language.
Certainly this type of level 4 person exists. But it feels like an additional claim, beyond the simulacrum model, to argue that all (or most?) level 4 people have this mindset. (I’m not arguing whether this claim is true or false, just it feels unnatural to me to group it in with the model)
It feels much simpler to define level 4 as “willing to lie about level 3”, full stop. And then any additional considerations about 4-type-people are additional claims, outside the model (though perhaps derived from it)
I think this captures one of my issues with the original simulacra levels post. It feels like there’s an aesthetic bias going on in a lot of these posts where truth-oriented rationalists are ascribing all sorts of positive attributes to the truth-oriented levels, and negative attributes to the non-truth oriented levels.
So the more elegant model, to me, looks less like levels 1-4, and more like a 2x2 grid, where there is physical reality, social reality, and the propensity to lie/manipulate beliefs about either of them.
This gets at one of the other things I’ve been uncomfortable with the model—it’s conflating being able to see any given level with being unable to see the other levels.
For instance, I know people who basically aren’t tracking reality at all, they’re just tracking tribal affiliations. when they talk. Meanwhile, I know people who are intimately aware of reality in their minds, INCLUDING the tribal affiliations they’re signaling, and take both into account when talking.
This implies then that rather than a 2x2, where you’re either a liar or a truthteller along two separate axes, there’s actually four separate skills.
The ability to track the truth of object-level reality, and communicate it.
The ability to lie about object-level reality
The ability to track the truth of social reality, and signal it.
The ability to create dishonest signals about social reality.
I can think of a few people who are barely able to keep track of the truth, but are great at lying about the truth to get object-level benefit. However, I think this is relatively rare, and your 2x2 may be more elegant.
Edit:
The final things that’s going on here is the conflation of: Being able to see the level, with Being able to play at the level, with Choosing to play at the level.
There are people who can see the social reality being manipulated, but couldn’t manipulate it themselves. There are people who can are able to see other’s tracking the truth, and who can play at the level of finding and communicating the truth, but choose not to. There are people who can see social reality being manipulated, and can play at that level if they need to, but choose to stay at the level of communicating the truth if they can.
I do think Zvi’s post here does a good job of breaking down what it looks like for people to have different relationships with different levels. (He may not have quite broken down the “able to see a level” and “ability/propensity for interacting on that level” aspect, but it feels like a natural extension of the post)
I ended up writing some more thoughts on how the concept of Simulacra Levels seem to have evolved on LessWrong, over on Chris Leong’s post. It was sort of relevant to other things I brought up in this comment thread.
I do have some sense that the entire simulacrum model was kinda backchaining from “try to articulate something about how bad level 4 is.” (I think I have a greater sense of this in Zvi’s portrayal of simulacra, partly because I expect it to be more directly downstream of Zvi’s work on Moral Mazes)
I’m not sure if that’s quite accurate, but, it’d make sense if Zvi or Benquo replied with something like “if you get rid of the nuanced-comprehensiveness-of-level-4, you’re throwing out a motivating piece of the whole thing.”
But, even if that were the case, I think it’d still make sense to break out the nuanced-gestalt-of-how-level-4-often-operates into a separate model, that builds on a simpler, more streamlined version of the simulacrum model.
I don’t understand why the word “bad” needs to be involved. The motivation of trying to find words that actually describe level 4 even to ourselves, and hopefully to others, to create common knowledge, is a huge motivation. But that has nothing to do with whether level 4 is *bad*. I notice that when I or Benquo (or Jessica or Zack etc etc) describe things while carefully not using “good” or “bad” people constantly ascribe them to us anyway. I understand why, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.
Two things I notice that makes me want to slow down here a bit is:
From this comment:
while carefully not using “good” or “bad” people constantly ascribe them to us anyway.
And from the other comment
and deny the need to think about any of these other dynamics.
First, I do think your layout of the levels here was fair (and seemed to go out of it’s way to do so, especially with the different groupings). A significant chunk of why I think you think level 4 is “bad” is associations from the Moral Mazes sequence, and an assumption that you see level 4 as tightly entwined with the sort of person who thrives in a moral maze. That involved reading into some things you may not have intended, in which case, sorry.
(That said, I’m honestly pretty surprised if you wouldn’t characterize level 4 as “bad”, even if you went out of your way to avoid doing so in this particular post)
Second, man, I went out of my out of my way to say “It’s important to think about the pattern that you’re pointing to with your characterization of level 4, I just don’t think it makes sense to cluster in the simulacrum abstraction. The abstraction seems less useful if it’s trying to do too many things at once.” I’m very much not saying you don’t need to think about these other dynamics.
(a while later I’ll respond in more depth to the object level discussion, right now just wanted to express some worry like, if we’re both reading things into each other other’s comments we didn’t say, that’s a warning side to slow down and be more careful or something)
The ‘bad’ word is just not useful in such situations, I think you even noted that a bunch of people wish I hadn’t used it in Complexity is Bad and Choices are Bad.
We need some amount of level 4 awareness. We need to be able to change social reality not only communicate inside it. And the level 4 effects happen whether we intend or notice them, or not.
What I’d be tempted to call bad is when the general simulacrum level gets to 4. Or when someone gets into the patterns of inability to think about reality on the object level or even to realize a reality exists. It’s still a poor atom blaster that won’t point both ways.
Also, I don’t think my original comment here was intended to focus on the “badness” characterization.
What I meant to be saying is “It seems like the overall simulacrum model was invented, in large part, to some particular failure modes that happen when society or individuals operate primarily on the level 4 level.” Thus, I realize my suggestion to factor out the implicit “level 4 is complicated” claims probably flies against the original intended-use-case of the model. But, nonetheless, I think it’ll be easier to talk about “societal level 4” and it’s pathologies with a different model that builds off a simpler simulacrum model.
I was just using “bad” as shorthand. It wasn’t meant to be a cruxy element of my argument.
We don’t really have a lot of language to talk about aesthetic nuance. I know that my use of “bad” is just trying to say “it seems like you’re framing this as ugly/unpleasing/aesthetically unpleasing”, but the only words that sort of point at that without a bunch of inferential distance is “bad” and “good”.
The 2x2 grid idea reminded me of the AQAL chart, developed by Ken Wilber. It is in the upper-right corner of this image. The levels of simulacra are also similar to the ego development stages as it explores how the ego progresses when adding more layers of societal cooperation or tension, though it does not map 1-1. For example, the diplomat at level 3 is concerned with social norms and in-group behavior, whereas the expert at level 3⁄4 may override these norms in pursuit of a different goal. From my understanding, each level in the stages below is part of a spectrum and each are meant to have an unevolved and evolved form as they progress.
I found this post really helpful for crystallizing a lot of concepts in the simulacra discussion. Thanks!
I read an early draft of this, which ended up (potentially) clarifying something that had been nagging me about Simulacra. I think this is something of a disagreement with Zvi and/or Benquo, which I mentioned in the draft comments but decided to post as a comment on LW rather than debating it beforehand.
A key clarification in this piece is “In Level 3 vs Level 4, 3 is authentically trying to represent their group affiliation and position in social reality. Level 4 deceives people about it’s group affiliation, and/or holds social reality as a thing to be manipulated.”
In the draft-comments, Zvi said (paraphrased) “That’s part of it, but not all of it. Level 4 has a whole different mindset, which can’t form longterm physical plans, which accumulates power rather than pursuing goals.”
And… this feels inelegant to me.
Certainly this type of level 4 person exists. But it feels like an additional claim, beyond the simulacrum model, to argue that all (or most?) level 4 people have this mindset. (I’m not arguing whether this claim is true or false, just it feels unnatural to me to group it in with the model)
It feels much simpler to define level 4 as “willing to lie about level 3”, full stop. And then any additional considerations about 4-type-people are additional claims, outside the model (though perhaps derived from it)
And I think this maybe relates to an early objection I had to the original simulacrum model: the model implies there is a progression, from level 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. And it’s not obvious to me that that’s true. It seems plausible to me that ancient hunter-gatherers developed an understanding of physical-level-reality and social reality in tandem with each other. I agree that in the very beginning, physical-level reality had to have come first. But it seems plausible to me that social-reality predates language. (I.e. maybe early rats or wolves or primates first developed internal respect for object level reality, but by the time they were communicating with words, they may have already developed some primordial social reality, and using object-level-communications as coordination mechanisms.)
(This is not a claim that social reality does predate language, only that I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true)
So the more elegant model, to me, looks less like levels 1-4, and more like a 2x2 grid, where there is physical reality, social reality, and the propensity to lie/manipulate beliefs about either of them.
This feels like a useful way to carve up reality to me, independent of what order the levels were developed, or how common level 4 implies Zvi’s hard-to-grok-level-4-gestalt-of-attributes.
(I do believe that the hard-to-grok-level-4-combination-of-attributes is a significant and common pattern in the world, that we need to contend with in some way.)
Addressing the full substance of this would be (at least) another long post, and things are really weird and I’m still trying to fully understand them, so this is at best a very quick sketch, but basically...
You’re not going to give a good gears-level understanding of the level-4 mindset, be able to predict the actions of those acting with level-4 orientation, or model the actions of a level-4 group/organization/civilization, if you view 4 simply as 4::3 as 2::1, start treating that reduction/abstraction as the thing, and deny the need to think about any of these other dynamics.
What you *can* do, I think (only 80% confident this actually works but 95%+ that it is a good quick heuristic?) is use “are they willing to mislead about *and/or take action to reshape meanings and associations in* level 3, and treat that as necessary and sufficient to identify someone operating at least partly at level 4. Iff they do that, they’re at least partly level 4. Note that you can’t ask whether they do this *on purpose* if you want the right answer, you only get to ask if they’re actually doing it (but same with identifying other levels of action too).
As I said throughout MM, these are things that our brains actively don’t want to look at or see. That’s true even if we ourselves are on level 4 - it is an instinct of level 4 players to prevent coherent models of all kinds, and in particular of level 4, until the *overall civilization’s level* reaches level 4 and then all hell breaks loose and predictions get very hard, before/while all literal hell actually does break loose and you get some form of collapse. So the instinct is constantly to round everything down.
That doesn’t mean you can’t carve reality very usefully using the 2x2. This post is doing its best to *not rely on* the progression order (beyond keeping the names 1, 2, 3 and 4) and to *not rely on* the True Form of level 4 or what not.
The thing where it looks like I/we are ascribing ‘good’ things to level 1, and ‘bad’ things to other levels, is probably not *entirely* objective, but it’s mostly because, well, that’s the way it is and I’m/we’re trying to tell it like it is best we can and understand best we can. If we treat levelism as an ism then that’s a good way to *not even look at* most of what Level 4 behavior actually is in any useful way, possibly 2 and/or 3 as well.
Progression is real too, in multiple ways/levels, but yes the system can be useful without them. Note that level 1 proceeded level 2 and level 3 even if all three (or four) pre-date language.
I think this captures one of my issues with the original simulacra levels post. It feels like there’s an aesthetic bias going on in a lot of these posts where truth-oriented rationalists are ascribing all sorts of positive attributes to the truth-oriented levels, and negative attributes to the non-truth oriented levels.
This gets at one of the other things I’ve been uncomfortable with the model—it’s conflating being able to see any given level with being unable to see the other levels.
For instance, I know people who basically aren’t tracking reality at all, they’re just tracking tribal affiliations. when they talk. Meanwhile, I know people who are intimately aware of reality in their minds, INCLUDING the tribal affiliations they’re signaling, and take both into account when talking.
This implies then that rather than a 2x2, where you’re either a liar or a truthteller along two separate axes, there’s actually four separate skills.
The ability to track the truth of object-level reality, and communicate it.
The ability to lie about object-level reality
The ability to track the truth of social reality, and signal it.
The ability to create dishonest signals about social reality.
I can think of a few people who are barely able to keep track of the truth, but are great at lying about the truth to get object-level benefit. However, I think this is relatively rare, and your 2x2 may be more elegant.
Edit:
The final things that’s going on here is the conflation of: Being able to see the level, with Being able to play at the level, with Choosing to play at the level.
There are people who can see the social reality being manipulated, but couldn’t manipulate it themselves. There are people who can are able to see other’s tracking the truth, and who can play at the level of finding and communicating the truth, but choose not to. There are people who can see social reality being manipulated, and can play at that level if they need to, but choose to stay at the level of communicating the truth if they can.
Nod.
I do think Zvi’s post here does a good job of breaking down what it looks like for people to have different relationships with different levels. (He may not have quite broken down the “able to see a level” and “ability/propensity for interacting on that level” aspect, but it feels like a natural extension of the post)
Agreed. I like the nuance that Zev has added to the conversation with this post.
I ended up writing some more thoughts on how the concept of Simulacra Levels seem to have evolved on LessWrong, over on Chris Leong’s post. It was sort of relevant to other things I brought up in this comment thread.
I do have some sense that the entire simulacrum model was kinda backchaining from “try to articulate something about how bad level 4 is.” (I think I have a greater sense of this in Zvi’s portrayal of simulacra, partly because I expect it to be more directly downstream of Zvi’s work on Moral Mazes)
I’m not sure if that’s quite accurate, but, it’d make sense if Zvi or Benquo replied with something like “if you get rid of the nuanced-comprehensiveness-of-level-4, you’re throwing out a motivating piece of the whole thing.”
But, even if that were the case, I think it’d still make sense to break out the nuanced-gestalt-of-how-level-4-often-operates into a separate model, that builds on a simpler, more streamlined version of the simulacrum model.
I don’t understand why the word “bad” needs to be involved. The motivation of trying to find words that actually describe level 4 even to ourselves, and hopefully to others, to create common knowledge, is a huge motivation. But that has nothing to do with whether level 4 is *bad*. I notice that when I or Benquo (or Jessica or Zack etc etc) describe things while carefully not using “good” or “bad” people constantly ascribe them to us anyway. I understand why, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.
Two things I notice that makes me want to slow down here a bit is:
From this comment:
And from the other comment
First, I do think your layout of the levels here was fair (and seemed to go out of it’s way to do so, especially with the different groupings). A significant chunk of why I think you think level 4 is “bad” is associations from the Moral Mazes sequence, and an assumption that you see level 4 as tightly entwined with the sort of person who thrives in a moral maze. That involved reading into some things you may not have intended, in which case, sorry.
(That said, I’m honestly pretty surprised if you wouldn’t characterize level 4 as “bad”, even if you went out of your way to avoid doing so in this particular post)
Second, man, I went out of my out of my way to say “It’s important to think about the pattern that you’re pointing to with your characterization of level 4, I just don’t think it makes sense to cluster in the simulacrum abstraction. The abstraction seems less useful if it’s trying to do too many things at once.” I’m very much not saying you don’t need to think about these other dynamics.
(a while later I’ll respond in more depth to the object level discussion, right now just wanted to express some worry like, if we’re both reading things into each other other’s comments we didn’t say, that’s a warning side to slow down and be more careful or something)
The ‘bad’ word is just not useful in such situations, I think you even noted that a bunch of people wish I hadn’t used it in Complexity is Bad and Choices are Bad.
We need some amount of level 4 awareness. We need to be able to change social reality not only communicate inside it. And the level 4 effects happen whether we intend or notice them, or not.
What I’d be tempted to call bad is when the general simulacrum level gets to 4. Or when someone gets into the patterns of inability to think about reality on the object level or even to realize a reality exists. It’s still a poor atom blaster that won’t point both ways.
Nod, makes sense.
I think we are (at least mostly) in agreement about this aspect of the territory, and the disagreement is just over what sort of maps are most useful.
Also, I don’t think my original comment here was intended to focus on the “badness” characterization.
What I meant to be saying is “It seems like the overall simulacrum model was invented, in large part, to some particular failure modes that happen when society or individuals operate primarily on the level 4 level.” Thus, I realize my suggestion to factor out the implicit “level 4 is complicated” claims probably flies against the original intended-use-case of the model. But, nonetheless, I think it’ll be easier to talk about “societal level 4” and it’s pathologies with a different model that builds off a simpler simulacrum model.
I was just using “bad” as shorthand. It wasn’t meant to be a cruxy element of my argument.
We don’t really have a lot of language to talk about aesthetic nuance. I know that my use of “bad” is just trying to say “it seems like you’re framing this as ugly/unpleasing/aesthetically unpleasing”, but the only words that sort of point at that without a bunch of inferential distance is “bad” and “good”.
The 2x2 grid idea reminded me of the AQAL chart, developed by Ken Wilber. It is in the upper-right corner of this image. The levels of simulacra are also similar to the ego development stages as it explores how the ego progresses when adding more layers of societal cooperation or tension, though it does not map 1-1. For example, the diplomat at level 3 is concerned with social norms and in-group behavior, whereas the expert at level 3⁄4 may override these norms in pursuit of a different goal. From my understanding, each level in the stages below is part of a spectrum and each are meant to have an unevolved and evolved form as they progress.