The correct contrarian cluster

[pataphor]

So finally, I have decided to do the most obvious: to go back to the
original Yudkowsky article in order to check if there were certain
specific insights in there that I might have overlooked.

But damn! Even if he got the general theory more or less right, he gets
all the facts wrong!

It's like trying to signal you are an intelligent being, ready to start
a conversation with the rest of the cosmos, but at the same time being
unable to understand basic things, like, in a human reference frame, an
open hand means I am holding no hidden weapons inside. Or, to be a bit
more general and to prepare for interspecies communication, like maybe
they are just waiting until we come to our senses (!), showing that one
can survive without taking sustenance from other living organisms. As
it is now, we seem to gather around the lowest level of that Kardashev
scale analog for morality: the highest developed among us still eat
plants, while most of us are barely able to talk: they still eat meat.

So let's see what other points Yudkowsky missed out on or completely
botched.

OK, the article is from 2009, so we have to grant the possibility that
maybe we are operating with hindsight, and to be fair he got lots of
things right too, and to have the idea to try to find the correct
cluster itself is a major accomplishment.

As to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, well, he got
that kind of right, but only in the precognitive, visionary kind of
way, kind of like someone who knows what is true but unable to admit to
himself that the source is intuition.

This is confirmed by his second blotch: the Rorschach test.

Now as to how many worlds really works, we can't know, but one way it
could work is that at some point in the future virtual reality gets on
par with physical reality, after which it quickly goes ahead and takes
over, just like is supposed to happen when computers reach the level of
intelligence we ascribe to humans.

In such a world we could start to see interesting things happen, things
like redistributive justice and the correcting of history for all the
criminal and false advantages people have tried to gain for themselves
by the abuse of power and by propagating asymmetric information
positions.

You think it is unlikely some made up thing can be seen as more real
than what 'really' happened? Think again after we finally destabilize
the big corporations, or disrupt them, much like the current 800 pound
nuclear gorilla shamelessly finances resistance groups in countries
they would like to install a more obedient dictator in.

At some point tracing every bullet will become possible and then we
will finally punish those who are responsible for what happened,
whatever delegation processes they try to hide behind, be they
officials or weapon manufacturers. Of course this will have a huge
impact on the way we reconstruct history. It will be a story of a few
enlightened who combat the nearly unseatable moguls of today, never
mind how much we are socially reinforced to pretend to like them, or
financially inhibited (who likes to lose their job or be unable to
house their family) to speak out against them.

But in the end virtual reality will tell the real story, and it will be
more clear than the befudged nonsense we are fed today by the mass
media, like a mathematical equation, or a computer program, that is by
and by formulated more elegantly and is cleaned of errors.

So just as we will create an Internet sun to take over from the real
sun, we will reverse this shameless parody of a culture, where money
flows upward instead of downward. A basic income is just the first
step, at some point the cognitive magnetic poles will be reversed and
we will receive utilities because we reward the website we visit with
our attention, the way it should have been from the beginning.

So, both many worlds and Rorschach tests are kind of "yes", but
different from the way the Yudkowsky article states it, and with the
latter kind of necessary to create the visions leading to the former.

I'm not going too deeply into this world trade center rigged with
explosives thing except that I feel that, according to the more current
lore, the building rigged with explosives was not the building that got
hit by a plane but the one next to it. The explosives might have been
there for some unrelated reason, the point being is that it was
unlikely for the other building to collapse too, and in any case so
fast, because it wasn't hit directly.

As to cryonics, it seems kind of incompatible with the AI singularity,
like someone stating it is OK to kill people because one impregnates
enough women to compensate for the loss of life, the point being that
once we create superhuman AI, why would we purposely keep those brains
with faulty, incorrect worldviews around, instead of debugging them
and installing the correct software. But once we do that it seems moot
to want to have a suffering substrate walking around our idealized city.

I mean why would we want to have desperate, unhealthy, disease
spreading, filthy people zooming around in our flying cars when we can
just look up their data and replace them with a happier version? You
wouldn't want your dog to have a genetic defect, would you?

So in the end, the article helped somewhat, but finding the correct
contrarian cluster still remains as hard as it ever was.

P.

"old person, focus on the abuse"