11 KiB
The Masquerade
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 5
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Created: 2016-05-25T00:09:25
Post:
[deleted]
Comments:
u/pizzahotdoglover [+8] (14 minutes later)
Does every rationalist have to have the goal of bettering humanity or giving equal access? The fewer people who share an advantage, the greater the relative advantage is, so it's pretty rational not to share this kind of information.
u/trekie140 [+4] (27 minutes later)
You're technically correct, but in my experience rationalists almost always are utilitarians that seek the betterment of humanity.
u/GaBeRockKing [+6] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (53 minutes later)
Most rationalists are utilitarian at a personal level, but society-scale utilitarianism isn't really more than a tangential part of most peoples' value systems. Sure, we'd like to see the betterment of society, but ultimately we're pretty self interested.
u/trekie140 [+1] (2 hours later)
So you expect rationalists, including yourself, to keep extraordinary truths secret rather than reveal those findings so long as there is personal benefit to keeping them secret? Doesn't that run contrary to the scientific advancement we support?
u/GaBeRockKing [+3] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (2 hours later)
That depends largely on the benefit the individual rationalist gets from keeping the secret.
u/None [+1] (3 hours later)
People are flawed and fallible! If we were really dedicated to that, would we be wasting valuable time posting on Reddit? We have tribal and hedonic values.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+5] Utopian Smut Peddler (2 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/Faust91x [+1] Iteration X (2 hours later)
Depends the setting. And in real life its a problem to spend years developing something, releasing it and then having someone else (usually someone with more resources) just arrive and reap the benefits. Sure in an ideal world everyone would release everything for the benefit of the masses but even then, some information may be worth less or have undesirable side effects if released.
Could also be because we live in a capitalist society and in a post scarcity world where we didn't require competition we could afford to just share everything.
u/jesyspa [+3] (42 minutes later)
Isn't this against the "don't post scenarios for discussion" rule?
Anyway, HPMoR has an example of this.
More generally, it is often quite feasible that back when the separation started, there was a good reason for secrecy; a minority with magical powers could be the target of exploitation. Since then, the balance of power changed, but now disrupting the status quo would be more trouble than it's worth. Even if the rationalist protagonist thinks it would be better for humanity if secrecy were broken, he might have better things to do (like, you know, the plot), and not have the opportunity either.
In other words, a rational character doesn't need to support The Masquerade; they just need to find it momentarily less bad than the process of society readjusting.
u/trekie140 [+1] (2 hours later)
If that is a rule I'm not aware of it, and that's my bad. You're right that the masquerade could just be temporary, such as the length of the story, but I really like the idea of a whole secret world that will be kept secret forever and want to see if there are way of justifying it.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+4] Fruit flies like a banana (3 hours later)
Just remember that truth-telling and knowledge-seeking are instrumental rather than terminal. If a good and proper rationalist learned that truth-telling was, in some cases, bad for mankind, he would cease to tell the truth. If he learned that seeking knowledge was, in some cases, bad for mankind, he would cease to seek knowledge.
u/trekie140 [+1] (4 hours later)
I agree, and thanks for explaining that, but I can't think of any examples where that would be the case. Even when telling the truth would harm people, I can't imagine keeping it a secret forever would cause less harm in the long run.
u/jesyspa [+1] (10 hours later)
Well, I wouldn't call this any more "temporary" than, say, the existence of the human race. For my suggestion to work, the status quo should be firmly ingrained, so the Masquerade should have been going on for at least a few generations, if not for a few thousand years. On the other end of things, it's not like anyone forces you to say what will happen to it once the story is done. Maybe your character will finally have time to get around to breaking it, maybe they won't.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+3] Fruit flies like a banana (2 hours later)
Some knowledge is dangerous. If it were possible to somehow make the equivalent of an atomic bomb in your kitchen using household ingredients, would you spread that information?
Some knowledge is private. If you learned that someone was homosexual and knew that they didn't want that information shared with anyone, would you spread that information?
Some knowledge creates anti-utility. If you learned that an otherwise fantastic doctor was regularly using cocaine, would you spread that knowledge?
I think those are the three basic arguments; danger, privacy, and utility. Though I could probably come up with more if I knew what specific Masquerade you were working with.
u/callmebrotherg [+3] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (an hour later)
Stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos usually have the justification that knowing about the Mythos erodes your sanity because of its very nature, but that's based on a presupposition about how human minds work that we rationalists try to defy by altering our conception of reality.
This is a case of flanderization. If you look at Lovecraft's stories, the erosion of sanity almost always takes the form of either trauma-related disorders (e.g. having a phobia of subways, cellars, and other underground places because of ghouls) or acting in ways which are perfectly rational but depend on information that others don't have (e.g. obsessively avoiding places with angles, because that's how the Hounds of Tindalos get you).
u/scruiser [+3] CYOA (3 hours later)
Unless you have submitted original rational!work, the rule is you aren't allowed to post purely brainstorming threads (I think 1 chapter per 1 post or something like that it the rule of thumb the mods use). However you can post in the Friday off-topic, Monday general discussion, and Wednesday world-building threads and people will reply there if you really want to get some feed back.
In case you have made submissions and this thread isn't taken down... Nasuverse has magecraft that gets weaker the more people that know it's secrets. So it is rational for magi to hide the existence of magecraft given their goals of strengthening and improving their magecraft to reach Akasha (basically gaining omniscience/ascending to a higher plane of existence/getting magic that is omnipotent within its specialty, depending on how the path to Akasha is used)
u/trekie140 [+1] (4 hours later)
Sorry, I'm new to posting on the subreddit and didn't know all the rules, though I probably should've.
u/wtfbbc [+1] (12 minutes later)
Have you read the Sequences? Eliezer provides pretty solid reasoning for keeping science relatively secret here; the post is immediately followed by the first installment of his Bayesian Conspiracy story, which is entirely founded on the idea of keeping science (and rationality in general) relatively secret. Whether or not this suggestion is entirely serious, it's still pretty interesting imo, and certainly fits the Masquerade bill.
Related or not, I know many who would argue that certain information concerning nuclear weaponry, artificial intelligence, and various basilisks would be best kept under wraps.
u/trekie140 [+1] (23 minutes later)
I got the impression from that entry that Eliezer was suggesting a marketing strategy to make science education more attractive by making it seem like forbidden knowledge. Serious or not, I still thought his intention was to spread knowledge to for the sake of it.