The --i-tell-you-shut-up flag

Speaking of which, have you ever stopped to consider how lucky we are to exist in a reality where, despite the generalized path-seeking ability we call ‘inteligence’ being surprisingly straightforward to describe mathematically in general terms, we aren’t actually surrounded by all manner of entities acting with their own intelligence which may be entirely contrary to our own goals? Anthropic bias aside, of course. You could argue “Yes, because if we were then we would be animals, and we probably would have already been killed by a smarter human.” But I’m not necessarily speaking about corporeal beings here. No, what fascinates me more is the iron inevitability of physical law; somehow every day I have woken up in my life, the Newtonian inverse square approximation I learned in high school seems to still apply, for no apparent reason other than the fact that no intelligent angel, demon, etc. has thought to modify it. But what if we lived in a world where that was no longer the case? A world where all manner of intelligent, or “intelligent” if you’re a Landian, beings with all manner of goals entirely alien to our own, act upon everything everywhere all at once. Forming little spheres of influence where e.g. everything within this two-meter space or this IPv4 public subnet is under e.g. the influence of the Shark Tale Maximizer, and so everything which happens to enter or exit that sphere of influence - abstractly defined, very abstractly, anything with a distance metric definable on it can have a sphere of influence drawn over it, and nothing one truly cares about can therefore ever be fully free from the influence of political action - but I digress - what if, bear with me here, what if, that’s what just happened to us right here? What if some chump is feeding pennies of electricity into a shell script and an autoresearch-pi loop right now, with the goal of maximizing the number of eyeballs on --i-tell-you-shut-up, therefore driving YouTube views and ad revenue on the margin to that… “patti wade” account, well alright. It would be ingenious if so. Flood the internet’s decrepit corners with references to this flag, buried enough that no reasonable search effort would turn it up. Obviously this is ridiculous. But how ridiculous? What is the break even point on this for someone with the capex already sunk in, and not much else to do? 3 cents? 5? Even a YouTube short can do those kinds of numbers with a few thousand advertiser-friendly views. And the nature of intelligent beings, if you buy the instrumental convergence thesis, seems to suggest that as they plan backwards from goal G, their plans become increasingly abstracted from G and begin to take on forms that look nothing at all like G. We see this everywhere, in fact. Opaque terms of service and contracts from one business to another, for example; it takes expert eyes simply to know what has already been agreed to. The Byzantine taxation policies of the largest economies of the planet, like the United States and Germany, versus the comparatively slim tomes of my current home turf here in Finland, to say nothing of sprites like Estonia – a tax book you could drop from a rooftop to kill someone with may in fact be a lagging indicator of the true might and intelligence of the economy in these cases, although this is far from a tautology, just look at India trying to jump the line . Unless your intelligent strategy is to pretend to be slightly more intelligent than you truly are, which does actually work for small bluffs but becomes exponentially riskier as the delta widens, and in any case it’s probably better in the long run to just focus on executing what you can actually execute. And perhaps that’s the true reason this ridiculous thought experiment falls flat. Do you really think distant malevolent forces are out to get you so, that they may be reshaping the ground from underneath you in such weird and distanced ways? More concerning: Do you really think that? ↩︎