Clarity didn't work, trying mysterianism (2012)
gwern.net
gwern.net
as soon as most people wear it "abnormally" becomes "normally".
logically the rare enlightened who refuse to wear it and instead keep their own [spoiler] become abnormal unsuccessful failures, not the other way around.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Also here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131230055512/http://squid314.l...
Does anyone know the provenance of this story? One comment says, responding to someone who recommends publishing it,
> The problem is that it's published so he can sell only second rights.
EDIT: The story is tagged (at the top) "fiction, raikoth". Raikoth is the 'constructed civilization' of Scott Alexander, author of Slate Star Codex, et al. And though the post is at gwern.net, I see the author is "Scott".
Second, apparently some people do choose to take the earring off at some point, because the story refers to "the testimony of all living wearers." So it does not, in fact, appear to usurp, subvert or replace the wearer's free will.
Not seeing the problem here.
> So it does not, in fact, appear to usurp, subvert or replace the wearer's free will.
Ok, the ice cream scooping happens slowly. At what point of atrophy, do you think it becomes easier to revert to what is left of it?
You still have free will, in the strictest sense. But you are increasingly dependent, so have lost optionality that no amount of will can replace.
Is your life story about what flows to you? Or about what challenges come to you, that you, yourself meet and overcome?
EDIT: But you are also right - given discipline - the right thing to do is always leverage every piece of good advice we can get. From bot or earring. By always (1) first coming up with our own best plan, so we have a basis to recognize and appreciate the insights in better ideas (2) get the best possible feedback on that plan, the good and the bad, and then (3) with what we learned from that, attempt a better plan, and repeat until getting somewhere better that either initial plan, for all the looping. Then still learn from any failure or success. And do not go down the slippery slope of delegating unimportant questions, like choices of ice cream flavors! This is how I get the most from my AI advisors. To work and train myself faster and harder!
One way to answer that might be to argue the counterfactual. How would I feel if I were born in the state described in the story -- little or no gray matter, but endowed with the promise of a successful, enjoyable life, valued and respected by those around me -- and someone offered me an earring whose advice would give rise to uncertainty, self-doubt, and a constant, nagging awareness of my own ignorance and lost potential?
What incentive would I have to continue wearing that earring?
For that version of the story to make sense, you'd almost have to make it a cursed object that couldn't be removed once equipped.
OTOH people who are still themselves, in the early stages of the takeover, will certainly tell you of their own volition that the earring always seems to be right. Wearing it is presumably highly addictive.
Is there more than one of these earrings? The rest of the story makes it pretty clear that it's a singular artifact. If so, and given that the other wearers certainly weren't dead when being interviewed, the only explanation is that some people just decide it's not for them and take it off. Leaving out the qualification "living wearers" would have left some wiggle room, but that's not what the text says.
It's one of those stories that sounds profound only until you start to ask questions.
So then ask yourself: why did they take it off? Pondering the implications of that question is the entire point of this short story.
No. It always tells you what will make you happiest. "Better for you if you take me off."
I think it's pretty obvious since you read until the end you know in the second one there's quickly no "you" remaining ;)
It's like the terrifying answer to Star Trek teleporter paradox. On the surface it's the same guy. He walks like Bob and talks like Bob and is more successful thanks to the power of instant travel! But YOU are dead after the first teleportation.
Eh. The teleporter thing is not about that kind of dying... and the earring one also!
This is distinct from the kind of teleporter that makes a copy and kills the original.
And Star Trek is... Okay looking it up it apparently converts you into an energy being that is still fully alive and conscious and mobile, then sends that. Let's ignore Star Trek.
The entire story is about the definition of self imho.
You are hilariously misreading that :-)
"First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers"
Who says that they testified after taking the earring off? My reading (done with my non-atrophied brain, used to reading human prose not LLM-prose) was clear on the very first go: Those who testified did so while wearing the earring, then they died but their testimony was already recorded.
> Not seeing the problem here.
As you've made clear in many many of your posts on HN, you are all-in on LLMs and appear to use them much more than even the average HN user. Maybe start considering that you are losing comprehension with regard to human-written prose?
I've read that Malachi Martin described what he called "a perfect possession". I do not know where as I haven't found this piece myself. But the idea was that typical cases of demonic possession are imperfect, the victim is struggling, and the struggle is visible to the outsiders. A perfect possession does not manifest itself.
the difference is in targetted influence from outside aimed at changing you for its own goals and final form
consider the "accelerated version" of this earpiece - where you just get whackked with dose of heroine (making you "perpetually happy") and then taking over your body
Consider the title: Scott Alexander and others have written more clear, philosophically robust versions of a similar argument ("you shouldn't trade your agency for good outcomes").
But that's not the point here. This is the artsy version that's supposed to make you feel the argument.
Not to say I think it's a bad thing at all that people have a name for this concern for giving up agency to an external system, even when that system really has your best intent in mind. You can call Claude a whispering earring and people will understand what you mean pretty well. The actual consequences you're looking out for are maybe a bit subtler than your brain atrophying, I really really never liked that detail in the story, but that's fine, people will get it. By the Death of the Author, the story's a great contribution as it is.
But it just feels like a loss that there really was a different thing that the author meant, and it got lost in translation. http://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.li... clarifies it. It's quite similar to a Yudkowskyan fun theory concern (and IMO really not surprising that the story was released a couple of years after the fun theory sequence): If making the right choices and doing the right thing eventually comes down to a mechanical computation, and you've got all of your resource limitations and psychological hang-ups and such things out of the way, then there's no room left to do the right thing, and you've turned yourself into a mechanism.
I don't think that's really a possible state that any system with any trace of humanity left in it will ever enter, there's too many too large search processes in the way to fit in a finite universe. So it's a pretty abstract concern even among its peers. But it's one that's fun to talk about sometimes, and one lesson we've learned from the response to this story is that mysterious, easily misinterpreted parallels in fact do not point people in the right direction to see it.
Either way, what is it right about? In your mind?
People complaining about this have a long and storied history, this is the same as Plato complaining philosophers were ruining their minds by writing things down to remember them.
But either way, people's minds do not wither in this story, it explicitly works out fine for them?
Huh?
"when the corpses of the wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action"
You could infer their minds fading away even without that paragraph, but it's very explicit.
Also you have another comment where you insist nobody has explained what the story is arguing when multiple people told you what the story is arguing, what the heck.
Is the story actually arguing something? I have just been literally asking what it even presumes itself to be about. Is it the gloss above?
If it's about agency, I don't get it. It seems silly/facile to assert the "right" decision is the thing that matters without making the thing so magic it doesn't even make sense. Does agency stop you from getting hit by a runaway bus? Help you from being persecuted for arbitrary reasons? The story tells us they all, unfailingly, live "abnormally successful" lives. That's all supposed to be because of their (non) agency because of the earring device?
The story is not about physical brain changes, no. It's about losing yourself. It's arguing that to exist is to make decisions. Following the device too much leads to a life that looks successful from the outside but inside no longer has a person enjoying the success, just a puppet.
Come to think of it, its not even clear there is a question of agency or like some inverted solipsism as you suggest. Wouldn't the wearer need to be compelled for that to be at stake? Kadmi-nomai can wear it and take it off, right?
Aren't they, from the inside and outside, just listening to magically good advice and getting along great because of it?
It gives you one of the best options for happiness for any decision you face, which is not quite the same. And don't forget it tells you to take it off very first thing.
> Where as a reader are we supposed to gather this is not an internal happiness?
The rest of the story.
> Come to think of it, its not even clear there is a question of agency or like some inverted solipsism as you suggest. Wouldn't the wearer need to be compelled for that to be at stake? Kadmi-nomai can wear it and take it off, right?
It's a problem if you wear and follow it for a very long time. He talked to it for a couple hours.
> Aren't they, from the inside and outside, just listening to magically good advice and getting along great because of it?
Your neocortex is pretty important. You can argue that you think loss of self is unrealistic, but the story is very clear in its judgement. Don't turn a disagreement with the story into "not understanding" the story.
Very modest opinion from a, as you can see, pretty dumb guy: the reason the Ring of Gyges is a "good" parable (or insert similar here) isn't because it somehow contains everything we want to be "argued" against, e.g., Thrasymachus. Rather, it's because it creates a unique ethical dimension to be interrogated and possibly overcome. It creates a true dilemma and a kind of need for ethics. OP's little story here just feels like Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius dressing on top of some commitments we are already supposed to be in on. It does not really inspire one to dig deeper, or to even really think (which kinda has a fun irony to it relative to the story).
In fact developed countries are built on top of these "earrings": it's called math (and by extension science in general). If the math is right, it's always right, and it has spared their lucky citizens a LOT of needless misery and wheel-reinvention.
"Thinking for yourself" is overrated if you don't have good framework. See antivaxxers and their "research"
Take it this way. People seem to judge that LLMs are not conscious and thus have no real inner experience. And that humans do. So if you replaced a human brain with a very powerful LLM (with some simply residual neural matter), you've basically killed the human. He isn't feeling anything at all anymore, he's just an automaton, basically a flesh robot.
I think this story is a weirdly good discussion point because many people still don't seem to "get it" that success is completely fundamentally irrelevant, and what matters is having a good inner life. You are what happens in your mind -- overall good thoughts and inner life = good life; bad thoughts and inner life = bad life. You can theoretically be the richest man in the world and about the most miserable, and very poor and living the best life.
If we don't kill our definition of good life and success (i.e. reaffirming value as pertaining exclusively to the mind), it will sooner or later kill us, or kill what's good in us. The more we can orient our entire society toward good inner lives and not anything else, the better our lives will be.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150407223525/http://squid314.l...
Then went back to a society safeguarded by the "earrings" (OSHA, FDA, CDC, etc). Poor countries usually don't have the resources and enough HDI to enforce public safety.
Not saying his experience doesnt count, but 1 week is not enough to experience that crushing learned helplessness when everyone around you keep doing stupid sh*t and sabotaging themselves and others near them.
Which is why Trump defunding public safety agencies is baffling to me, a person from a poor country. Such a decadent behavior.
Would it make Sisyphus happy without bypassing the implied will of gods that he shall be forever fully conscious in order to suffer? Someone pls give the earring to poor dude.