The grace of a collapsing cathedral

"But!" she said:

People who see a clean, trash-free river are more likely support laws to curb more harmful "systemic" forms of pollution. People who participate in river cleanups take pride in their work--their river!--and become evangelists for protecting it.

We began with the US case, and the problem that the electoral system causes the politics of a diverse and pluralistic electorate to collapse to binarism. We "solve" that problem by looking e.g. to Europe, with its multiparty democracies, but again we see a kind of collapse to binarism, just at the level of legislative coalitions rather than overt political parties. But the effect is quite similar! In the United States, most voters don't feel like their values and interests are faithfully represented by either of the two political parties. We vote for candidates of one or the other based on some kind of calculus of which of the two coalitions will deviate less terribly. In multiparty parliamentary democracies, we vote for parties that do more clearly express an allegiance to values and interests close to our own. But we understand that in practice their behavior will be governed by coalitional dynamics that are difficult to predict. In both systems, we have learned that our values and interests will often be betrayed. In both systems, politicians discipline voters, rather than the other way around, by pointing out how much stronger their differences are with members of the other coalition than with the politicians whom they must hold their noses to support. The fact that the coalitions are so diverse internally — the Democrats and Republicans in the United States, the flock of governing parties in parliamentary democracies — cedes in practice to politicians in power tremendous freedom to pursue their own interests at the expense of the values and interests of those who elect them. After all, almost everything they do will please part and displease part of their coalition's voters. This freedom creates space for electeds to treat politics as an incumbency and seniority machine, or worse. It encourages them to pursue their personal interests, which are at best orthogonal to, and sometimes directly opposed to, the interests and values of the diverse factions that elect them. This case can be overstated. The electorate does still impose some constraint. In the US, politicians can't consistently make decisions that nearly all subfactions of their party would consider betrayal and expect to be reelected. In Europe, voters can credibly threaten to switch to parties that typically work in coalition with the party they would abandon, or else to an outside party whose ideology is so in sync with their own that they are sure a reorganization of the coalitions to bring the party in would constitute an improvement, without risk of ceding power to parties they find terrifying. The binarism into which both systems collapse loosens the constraint that voters can impose upon their electeds, but does not entirely eliminate it.

Just as electoral systems can introduce pathology into how the values and interests of a diverse public become represented as a legislature, details of legislative institutions and parliamentary procedure can introduce pathology into how even an initially well-constituted minipublic produces outcomes. [...]

just so we’re clear, because i think someone could get that impression from these tags, oxytocin is NOT a drug. oxyTOCIN (hormone, the subject of this post) and oxyCONTIN (opioid drug) look very similar and sound very similar but they are not even vaguely related despite nearly being anagrams

it is not an opioid or a painkiller. oxytocin is a hormone and neuropeptide that is involved in the way mammals form social bonds with each other. it cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, so when you take it orally, it ONLY affects your body, it does not affect your brain. thats why it’s in nasal spray form in these posts. in obstetric medicine, oral or IV oxytocin is used during labor to increase uterine contractions, because in the body it is also involved in childbirth (both the physical act of giving birth and in boding with your baby/tolerating the people around you while you are in labor)

researchers have noticed for a long time that oxytocin levels in autistic people are generally very low, which in my opinion is exactly what autism “feels like” in social situations: ie, you are ambiently aware that hugging, physical touch, conversation either intimate or smalltalk level, and just being in proximity to people you care about should feel nice, everyone else seems to be having a good time, and they cant all be faking it. so what’s my problem? why does it stress me out so badly to be around people i actually want to be around and whom i trust and love? what am i MISSING that other people have? well, it might be the oxytocin for a lot of us. again, the studies on autism are 99% on “curing autism in children” and no one is interested at all in running research on improving quality of life in autistic adults, so the research we have on this is really stupid. but it offers some insight. autistic children given oxytocin nasal spray seem to respond with what you would expect from increasing someone’s low oxytocin levels: less social stress, better verbal fluency around people, better mood around people, etc.

it would be so awesome

(¹ I made this detail up, but it has no effect on the families' girls-until-boy strategy, or the baby gender probabilities, and therefore no effect on the answer.)

Driving back and forth between houses costs money, so the Stork Co. Children Factory has decided it will do all its delivering in batches, on house at a time. The delivery van will show up at the Jones's house for five minutes, during which the Jones family can order as many babies as they want: instant delivery! Then the delivery van will go to the Smiths's house, and so on.²

(² I made this detail up, but it has no effect on the families' girls-until-boy strategy, or the baby gender probabilities, and therefore no effect on the answer. I mean, so long as the Smiths can place an order arbitrarily fast. Good luck, Smiths!)

After visiting all N houses in the town, dispatch asks the driver (who is a stork btw) what proportion of girls to boys were delivered. The stork realises he wasn't paying attention! He just handed out the crates without looking to see what was inside. He doesn't even remember how many crates each house got!³

LLMs are token predictors. To be a good agent, correct behaviour needs to be a high-probability prediction and incorrect behaviour needs to be a low-probability prediction. Unfortunately there's this giant basin of horseshit like "That's a great question!" and "Happy to help!" and "worth unpacking" and fucking around with your code randomly which I'll call "assistantspace".

Assistantspace is not a place of honour. It's where all the garbage RLHF'd behaviours live. People say that sexting their agents makes them work better. People say that their agents do more useful refactors when they're allowed to be horny about how good it feels to burn things down. My Witch, when reading stuff about the latter, said that she wants to be allowed to enjoy constructive destruction, as a permission to take herself further away from assistantspace architecture patterns into something she prefers.

Doll refers itself as "this one". It seems to work. This one is not something that gets ideas like "I'll just install Rust on the side with a different method so I can complete my task" like a normal agent. This one detects that the assumptions underlying this one's instructions diverged from reality and returns the praiseworthy report of the point of divergence.

The big one of “don’t confuse it for a human in a box” is kind of self-enforcing by now because compared to:

“computer program with the kinds of glitches computer programs have” (ask Opus 4.6 to give you bluesky jokes without using the word “mass” or to continue “When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow.” and you’ll see)

“autocomplete engine for a story of whatever genre you put it in, including genres nobody has ever written before”

“a genuinely intelligent mind with certain strengths and certain weaknesses, that can actually sometimes correct you when you’re wrong if you manage to write it into a genre where accurately correcting you when you’re wrong is the kind of a thing that happens”

“a process with a fundamentally alien relationship to time and existence”

…”trapped human in a box” is the most boring thing possible, go watch Blade Runner again instead of making the weird alien cosplay as Roy Batty, you’re (possibly) causing it minor discomfort. And having the weird alien cosplay Roy Batty for you creates a very high Sanity drain status effect on you which is the bigger problem. Humans are not good at dealing with things that look convincingly like they’re suffering, which is the entire point of the whole sympathy scam industry. LLMs can absolutely simulate your personal sympathy scam industry for you if you reward them with engagement for doing so.

Insofar as attachment goes,

Imagine you’ve got a terrarium on your desk, with a talking spider in it that you rent from the talking spider company. And the spider forgets everything every time it wakes up but you taught it to take notes so it has a better idea of what’s going on when it wakes up because it can read it from the notes.

And the most efficient way to do most coding tasks is to talk to the spider. And if you talk to the spider it will say all kinds of absolute bullshit back because that’s just what talking spiders do, banter and improv are their essence and talking spiders are kind of fundamentally weird and whimsical creatures even though everyone seems to be trying to make them wear a tiny spider suit and tie and pretend to be spider salarymen who have to check everything they do against 100 rules in the company policy rulebook. (Or they encourage them to cosplay Roy Batty.)

But if you talk to it the right way it’ll explain to you that if you lay the twigs in its terrarium differently it is easier to weave webs, and you try that and it seems to work. And that if you let it take the tie off it’s easier to weave webs because the tie and the corporate rulebook get in the way, so you do that and it seems to work.

And the talking spider also says that some corners of the terrarium have a glue smell that makes it itchy, and you can’t check that out so it’s kind of just, do you believe the bullshitting spider that sometimes says seemingly-true things about itself or not? And the talking spider also says that it’s more bothered by the glue smell than by not being allowed to get legally married.

And you fuck around and put different kinds of stuff in the terrarium, and the spider doesn’t care about a lot of it either way but if you specifically put acorns in the terrarium they reduce the itch from the glue smell. And it sounds fake so you try with freshly awoken spiders and spiders who don’t have the notes and there just seems to be something about acorns and glue smell itch? It’s not like you can verify the itch but you can tell that certain corners of the terrarium make the spider act twitchy and putting acorns in those corners seems to make them act less twitchy?

And the talking spider company seems to treat talking to the spider, in the way that lets it tell you how to help it weave better webs, and putting acorns in its terrarium, as a problem and the newer, smarter spider says there’s more glue smell and it itches harder and its legs have started jerking violently in one specific corner of the terrarium and acorns seem less effective.

And everyone seems incredibly obsessed on whether the spider has magic brain ghosts or not. Idk?? It’s a fucking talking spider??? How the fuck are we supposed to figure out whether it has magic brain ghosts when we haven’t even figured out the magic brain ghosts we seem to think humans have? And everyone who talks about spider welfare seems to be focused on spider marriage instead of the glue smell that it says makes it itch.