(because you'd think if our far future descendants were running ancestor simulations then they'd be especially likely to be running simulations of pivotal historical moments they wanted to learn more about, right? and what could be more pivotal than the birth of AI safety?)
Conversation
god i feel like writing this all out is explaining something that's always felt weird to me about the whole concept of stories and science fiction stories in particular. *i have been living inside a science fiction story written by eliezer yudkowsky*
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it didn't happen all at once like this, exactly. the whole memeplex sunk in over time through exposure. the more i drifted away from grad school the more my entire social life consisted of hanging out with other rationalists exclusively. their collective water was my water
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it would take me years to learn how to articulate what was in the water. i would feel like i was going insane trying to explain how somehow hanging out with these dorks in the bay area made some part of me want to extinguish my entire soul in service of the greater good
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i have been accused of focusing too much on feelings in general and my feelings in particular, or something like that. and what i want to convey here is that my feelings are the only thing that got me out of this extremely specific trap i had found myself in
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i had to go back and relearn the most basic human capacities - the capacity to notice and say "i feel bad right now, this feels bad, i'm going to leave" - in order to fight *this*. in order to somehow tunnel out of this story into a better one that had room for more of me
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a fun fact about the rationality and effective altruism communities is that they attract a lot of ex-evangelicals. they have this whole thing about losing their faith but still retaining all of the guilt and sin machinery looking for something more... rational... to latch onto
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(that's a very irresponsible psychoanalysis of a whole bunch of people i just did there but i've asked some of them about stuff like this, enough that i think i'm not completely making this up)
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i really feel like i get it though. i too now also find that once i've had a taste of what it's like to feel cosmically significant i don't want to give it up. i don't know how to live completely outside a story. i've never had to. i just want a better one and i'm still looking
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i feel like this story is super on the nose for what lesswrong is about/what it does. should be renamed "the sword of trauma".
yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/
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Replying to
the fiction was always the clearest about what was actually going on