Ritual Sacrifice and Europa Universalis 4

This post is an experiment, I have no idea if people will find value in it, but I wrote this and so I'm posting. I’m also introducing collapsible paragraphs for making subpoints, explanations, and clarifications that would make the text too long or dense.

I'm making a ritual sacrifice. This sounds dumb but is significant. As a first practical experiment in chaos magic, I’m deleting my favorite save on a game as a sacrifice to the inner daemon. And yes I do use esoteric language to sound cool.

Thesis proposals at the University of Lisbon are due in exactly one month. This is the first serious research project in my life an it’s as a chance to prove myself to others and me. However after putting endless hours into this research idea, making progress is still a grind. What’s wrong?

Work should feel effortless. Things turn out the best when you follow the Dao. Move with the flow. Light touch in everything unless indispensable. Navigate by feel without relying on rigid plans and feats of intense self-discipline.

I haven't embodied this yet.

• There’s a fuzzy line between flow and laziness, but I think they can be reliably distinguished.
  
  I’m not saying slack off or taking big uncalculated risks. I’m saying bring attention to your options and and take the one that feels right.
  
  If you pay a modicum of attention you will not end up homeless, your social safety net will support you, we can count on each other.
  
  I think of the Dao as a magnetic field both in physical space and in thought space. The way I feel it most clearly is by feeling how anxiety in my belly responds when I focus on regions of a space. It probably varies between people. It’s probably easier to feel the Dao if you meditate and keep good internal hygiene in general. (See Magick Without Tears)

It’s the stakes. The stakes and the fact that I have time mean that I’ll go to arbitrary lengths to make sure this project is SPOTLESS. And so progress has been slow, hindered by analysis paralysis, perfectionism, and sheer inexperience. I’m trying too hard and forcing a bandwidth I don’t have yet.

My advisers have been with me since July of 2019. They’ve been patient and gave me the freedom to approach any topic connected with AI alignment. So I went on a quest to find the perfect thesis topic, with the ultimate impact-to-sexiness ratio available. It took 3 different AI safety workshops before I realized I need to just start. On anything.

I haven’t embodied that ideas don’t matter that much yet either. It’s how you build on them.

It’s been one-and-half semesters since I started “thinking” about a topic. I’ve done a big literature review: 1) a rough overview of the work that has been/is being done in AI alignment, and how it fits into different sub-areas, 2) a review of the epistemology and arguments for AI risk, and finally, 3) reviewing research agendas and other paths that seemed stimulating.

I've annealed around RS - recommender systems (like the youtube algorithm) because they're the biggest misaligned boys around in terms of real life impact and sophistication. Specifically, I want to see how an RS that optimizes for user retention (instead of whatever its users' goals are) might affect the long-term condition of a network of users who are both collaborating and competing. (see Goodhart's law) My advisors told me to formalize this.

• Current recsys are a specific example of the alignment problem in the wild, which I figured might be easier to address than the general version of the problem. RS are misaligned as they clearly have different incentives - increasing retention or ad profit - from their users’, who are trying to get information or play games with one another.
  I told my advisors about this and sketched a rough model to compare how people’s opinions on stuff might be influenced by a RS with its own agenda versus a pure Christ-like recommender that has our own best interest at heart. They told me there’s a lot of talk about these sorts of topics in academia, but not much action, and to show them a well-defined formal model.
  
  It’s been rough. I don’t have much experience using game theory to make models, so I keep starting ideas, thinking about some other thing that makes sense but is incompatible, start again, rinse, repeat. Something that is helping but is ULTRA SLOW is actually playing out games between 2 or 3 users and 1 recommender under different set ups. (game trees:  Extensive form game)

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been GRINDING to gather all my disparate thoughts about society and emergent effects from recsys but it just isn’t happening fast enough. Every time I make a tiny breakthrough I feel a “victory rush” and I either do something else as a reward or stick around but browse social media and get tired.

Most thinking happens under the hood anyway, why am I spending so much conscious effort on this? What happened to light touch? This routine feels rigid and wrong. I need to recruit my inner daemon, my unruly unconscious substrate. I need a sacrifice. - “ The Value of Subtle Communication: Toward a Secular Materialist Model of Chaos Magick  - Chaos Magic”

Ritual sacrifice isn’t causally related to outcomes by some magical parallel plane. Neither is it of exclusively symbolic value. Instead, it’s a costly signal to the subconscious that we’re serious about something. Serious enough to drop something we value.

As you might know, I’m a big history dork. I love playing EU4 and started a new hardcore campaign (no backtracks) this quarantine period, as Byzantium. The game starts in 1444 and Byzantium is a famously hard start.

It’s going fantastically. 100 years in, I’m the # 1 world power, expanding in all directions, including the Pontic steppe, which I fancy. All my rivals are weak and I have extensive territorial claims just about everywhere. But, as you can likely tell, it does drain my attention. I find myself strategizing during the day, and always end up playing for longer than intended at night.

One doesn’t need endless self-discipline to avoid playing. In a moment of clarity, I could merely store this campaign’s save, uninstall the game and my attention would start flowing elsewhere. Light touch. When I’m less busy, I could reinstall the game return and finish this campaign without losing any progress.

However, this is also an opportunity to make a meaningful sacrifice. I’m deleting my save, which means that I won’t be able to pick up where I left off. It might not seem like much, but this hurts. I’ve probably put over 20 hours into this, and I’m unusually proud of how early it is and how much I’ve done so far. Think of it like leaving an awesome sandcastle at the beach. A part of me is being ripped out and vaporized, but it’s important that I actually do this for the “spell” to work.

In terms of the ritual process, I’m not doing anything fancy. Just meditate, feel the tingling in my forehead, enter gnosis, and think about the intention - focus all idle energy on my thesis proposal. I’m willing to give up the progress I’ve made in other pursuits to ensure this one goes better.

As for results, it’s waiting and seeing, really. I’m expecting to be able to focus more quickly and to have more capacity in general for thesis work. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go mourn my campaign.

Apr 28, 2020