Moloch enthroned: if you want to do something worthwhile in the world, you have to gain power and accumulate resources to do it with. and boom, now you're good at gaining power and accumulating resources, not doing the worthwhile thing
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yes, yes, trivially resolved by regarding gaining power and accumulating resources as inherently worthwhile. aren't you special with your total lack of hippie brainwashing to deal with
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oh, you were gonna fix this by getting people who already have power and resources to enable you to do the worthwhile thing so you can focus on it? boom, now you're good at convincing people with power and resources to let you use them, not doing the worthwhile thing
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oh, you were just gonna give up and focus on getting the power and resources and letting specialists in the worthwhile thing handle it? boom, now you're rewarding looking to you like a good person to handle the worthwhile thing, not doing the worthwhile thing
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of course i'm not saying that Taylor Swift is Moloch, ha ha that would be ridiculous that would imply that as a society we were voluntarily sacrificing our children to her
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Chaos Retweeted bowser
this is a much funnier version of something i might have said about trying to embed terminal goals such that they survive optimization for achievement of instrumental goals and whether that's a betrayal of your future selfhttps://twitter.com/browserdotsys/status/1174078659830960128 …
Chaos added,
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basically, trying to lock in your terminal goals so your future self can't betray them is a straight-up announcement that you know your current goals are so dumb and childish that a version of yourself that isn't so helpless couldn't possibly care about them on their own merits
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Replying to @chaosprime
Not buying a box of doughnuts to constrain my future self may say something about my willpower or trust in my ability to make good decisions. But present-me's goal "don't eat a box of doughnuts" probably isn't more childish or dumb than future-me's "eat lots of tasty doughnuts".
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Replying to @mikeschiffer @chaosprime
When Faramir says "Not if I saw it on the highway would I take it", is he discounting the presumed greater knowledge of future-Faramir of whether to use the Ring, or anticipating that circumstances & desperation (and in that case supernatural temptation) might erode his judgment?
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he's working from the low-hanging fruit principle: if it's lying there in the highway and nobody's taken it, there must be something wrong with it
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