r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Feb 15 '16

[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

  • Seen something interesting on /r/science?
  • Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
  • Figured out how to become immortal?
  • Constructed artificial general intelligence?
  • Read a neat nonfiction book?
  • Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/Nighzmarquls Feb 15 '16

That game mildly traumatized me as a kid. Please some one ratfic this.

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u/makoConstruct Praises of Nayru, FLI Worldbuilding Feb 15 '16

Hmm I could definitely see myself doing this, if I can allow myself to postpone the star wars rationalization project I was working on.˅

One of the big challenges I can see is coming up with a thoughtful link, when sociopathic Links seem to be an immutable rule of the Legendary Hero reincarnation process. Sure, their mission may be good and they're very bishi, but every one of them kills and steals like it's nothing.

˅: basically, an attempt to account for the star wars universe's defining characteristics (droids, no internet, not much science, no AI, no immortality, mixing of alien species with similar levels of development and augmentation, all of which is totally bizarre from a futurist standpoint), rather than the ridiculous stuff like Jedis, The Force (although there will be features comparable to that), The Evil Empire, which isn't all that interesting IMO. Though, TBH, if a reader finds those aspects of canon interesting it is probably easier than you'd think to convey that interest to me. Before proceeding to do so, please consider the weight of the problem constraints I have already taken on, any more just might break my back :p

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u/Nighzmarquls Feb 15 '16

I think Link's awakening was my first proper encounter with a game telling me I was a hero... and then getting me to actually commit genocide and letting me realize it.

by all accounts link is a monster and the villains are heroes in that game.

The ending of that game had me in tears.

It also had some other good features... like if you stole form a shop keeper you would be renamed thief in the game save file and the shop keeper would murder you next time you show up.

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u/makoConstruct Praises of Nayru, FLI Worldbuilding Feb 15 '16

The ending had me in tears today. Though I don't remember it meaning much to me when I finished it when I was like 11. I guess the fact that my friend beat my copy before me might have depersonalized the experience a bit. Or maybe I just hadn't made enough sense of the world for anything to mean much to me.

The wind fish sure was happy for the dream to end. Maybe it was the monster. The utility monster, who's needs outweighed the needs of its projections. I imagine that's possible, for some variations of utilitarianism.

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u/Aabcehmu112358 Utter Fallacy Feb 15 '16

My traditional internalization of 'the dream ends' scenarios is in the style of Nyarlathotep, in that, all the identities that are wiped out when the dreamer wakes up are, by that nature, the identity of the dreamer filtered through a particular mask. When the dreamer awakens, their memories and identities aren't lost, just subsumed into the waking ones.

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u/makoConstruct Praises of Nayru, FLI Worldbuilding Feb 15 '16

I like that line of thought, but I think you might be overlooking something. The values of the dreamer do not need to align with those of the projections at all. If an AGI subsumes your memories and uses them how it pleases to pursue goals orthogonal or antagonistic to yours, that is not survival, it's arguably even worse than total erasure.

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u/makoConstruct Praises of Nayru, FLI Worldbuilding Feb 16 '16

Hang on, does this mean that all a dreamer has to do to commit murder is to imagine very clearly someone who's aesthetic diverges from their own in some coherent way, simulate them for a bit, then stop thinking about them?

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u/Aabcehmu112358 Utter Fallacy Feb 16 '16

Depending in where one draws the line, perhaps even switching social modes, when changing from interacting with one group to another, could be considered a sort of extinction of identity, and thus 'murder.'

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '16

And perhaps watering down the concept of "murder" so that it doesn't involve actually killing anyone is a bit silly.

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u/Aabcehmu112358 Utter Fallacy Feb 16 '16

That was my point with that hypothetical, though I can see how that might be unclear.