Contra the yapping grovelers

The ancestor simulation that MY future self is running contains grovelers who yap WAY too much about the nature of the simulation they're in.

Groveler 1 here, Tòmás, makes the illuminating point “humans are not just sadistic status seekers” and—boldly still—“not every game is zero-sum and revolves around positional goods, e.g. anime harems [sic]".

Groveler 2, who goes by the name “SexMoneyArt”, brings to the table “being sadistic all the time would plausibly damage human souls and confine everyone to little islands of disagreeability”.

Incredible. This kind of discussion is why I want to attempt automating the quest for the human CEV: petty, shallow, reply-game-based, way-too-lyrical, goodharted, obvious, ever-winding, indirect, driven by pomp;

ridiculous buffoons whose simulated existence can solely be explained by my revealed preference for directing angry Subslop at them.

Only… angry Subslop does not come naturally to me! The abysmal pointlessness of the Bjartur-Sacha reply chain is insufficient to make me bare teeth and stamp my boot down on these probably-unsentient fumbling tube-men who clutter my time, because I'm not sure doing so IS IN MY NATURE.

(Naturally, the little Robin Hanson in my head that jerks off to recursive cynicism whispers, vizierly, “you're only SAYING that, in order to better stamp on their faces as some kind of saint!”;

but we're going to ignore him.)

The existence of humans who care not for positional goods did not cross the hangry author of Rubber Souls, as Tômas correctly points out:

For all that is unaesthetic about this, can we truly say it is grounded in sadism? No. Is it mostly zero-sum? If he met another guy with a bigger harem, would he lose all his life’s meaning? No. He’s just enjoying himself in his otaku heaven.

Indeed, to enjoy oneself in one's rubber harem is not to deprive another man of his own. Males engage far less frequently in hypergamy than females, and the ideal heaven for them along this axis only—if AI girlfriends end up being just another moral panic, like, say, YouTube Shorts(?)—would probably be something along the lines of what Eliezer Yudkowsky predicts might reduce human complexity so much as to not be worth it (i.e. nonsentient anime girl harems).

In other words, the [almost entirely male] anime-harem-otaku among us will emphasize with the positive-sumness of at least one axis in their life. Whatever ancestral-environment-shaped hole they have that anime girls complement, it is orthogonal to the positional goods vector of their CEV.

Harem anime is mass produced, can be found free online in far vaster quantities than Gwern could ever hope to consume in a pre-singularity lifetime, and does not naturally give rise to competition-shaped positional-goods dependent arenas as easily as video games or art production might.

To the reader, and especially the authors of those 2 posts: is anime not more popular than LinkedIn? (A bold claim, perhaps, but the best simulation one can find today of groveler sims is LinkedIn.)

Truly a behemoth oversight. That humans may be zero-sum enough to archipelagize civilization into randian islets—that humans may even want rubber faces to step on in the first place!—becomes more absurd the farther out you zoom.

It's not that pity and cruelty aren't part of the human CEV.

(Though in a territory of sufficient abundance they might fade away naturally: there is such a thing as evolutionarily adaptive traits that manifest only in scarcity, see “thirst” or “hunger” as facets of the human soul.)

Rather, to write an essay focusing on rubber souls only within that perspective is to reduce the hypercube of humanness we're attempting to approximate by such an absurd amount that none of your arguments are going to have any legs at all.

I stride among cynical bastards whose view of human nature is so constrained by that internet temptress Edginess that they cannot bang out proper utopian blueprint shards anymore, consumed by the short term.

Even as the object (utopia design) cannot suffer any shortsightedness! It's as far-mode as things can get, as Tømas notes.

And so I'm not sure I've succeeded in activating my sadism neuron, even as this Subslop post was an attempt to trigger it. I'm not sure I have one—or at least, it does not manifest in “contra” posts. Oh well. One more thing I won't need rubber for.