First, is part of Sociopathy the ability to feign Cluelessness, at least when among the Clueless? Especially for emerging Sociopaths with little formal power. Babytalk could go beyond being a communication tool and hide a Sociopath identity until the right opportunity arises.

Second, to what extent is there a Bank of Sociopathy where favors are liquid, easily stored and traded, and can we access it? If not, we’re stuck bartering on the spot – we can only trade what we hold in a given meeting, and only for what others are holding.

Enjoyed the series – discovered it less than a week ago and am selfishly glad it took you so long to finish, otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten a chance to comment. Thanks for the enlightenment and entertainment.

1. Its repertoire of actions is entirely known to you, even if it has some limited agency (e.g. smart weapons) – it is a tool.
2. Its repertoire of actions is mostly known to you – it is a slave.
3. Its repertoire of actions is somewhat known to you – it is a pet.
4. Its repertoire of actions is mostly unknown to you – it is a genie.
5. Its repertoire of actions is entirely unknown to you – it is a god.

For type 1, it will function as you expect, so moral responsibility seems transitive unless there is a breakdown, in which case it depends to what extent you knew it might break down.

For type 2 and 3, you share moral responsibility if it acts as you intend. If it doesn’t, then it depends if that was caused by another agency or failure of function. But you take a higher proportion of blame if failure occurs in this case.

For type 4, you take responsibility if it somehow behaves as you intend, and also if it doesn’t, because you know the danger involved. This is sort of the opposite of Taleb’s optionality then, because either way you are responsible for the damage, just that you would be vindicated if the damage was desirable to your side.

For type 5 it seems you can take no responsibility. It’s like prayer. You can only take responsibility for having prayed, so only if the effects induced are in response to your prayer will you be responsible. In practice it can be hard to tell, e.g. the shaman praying for rain and getting it.

Anyway, the first part of the post sounds like Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the war-machine, which is appropriated by states to form military institutions, where war then becomes its object, but in the end the states end up constituting a global war-machine, where peace is conditioned by war, and politics becomes the continuation of war by other means.

Mass communication to mixed groups of Losers and Clueless is actually the bigger missing piece I didn’t cover in the series (speeches and such). Its dynamics don’t follow in any obvious way from the 1:1 languages.

The big piece that I think you didn’t address is the comprehensibility of Agent 1 by Agent 2. So while I agree with your assertion that land mines are in principle not different from a complex killer robot governed by a complicated AI, this mutual comprehensibility makes a big difference. Reports of the Kasporov vs. Deep Blue encounter talk of how Kasporov fell into the trap of unconsciously modeling Deep Blue the same way as a human opponent and paid the price.

We all do this when we do things like screaming “Windows won’t do what I want!” at our computers. But I think it is crucial to distinguish three kinds of agent-agent modeling relationships.

1. Agent 1 can completely model Agent 2 (landmine, subsumer-subsumed relationship)

2. Agent 1 and Agent 2 cannot mutually model each other (see Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat” kind of thinking… bats “sonar cognition” is beyond our modeling even though it is a simpler creature by some measures).

3. Agent 2 can completely model Agent 1 (subsumed-subsumer relationship).

We can also add a sort of “order of magnitude” effect in the case of 1 and 2… how big is the gap? What fraction of the subsumer’s cognition is consumed by modeling the subsumee?

Friendly/hostile modelings of AI I think assume case 3 for the most part. I think though, most cases are likely to be Type 2+Type 3 (some non-subsumption, but huge degree-difference for the subsumed part, like raw depth-of-search capability for Deep Blue vs. Kasporov).

The difference is that the moral hazard is *far* higher for an agent unleashing a potentially “supersuming” agent on others. It’s the Frankenstein/creating-a-monster effect. It’s like the Bane vs. rich guy John Daggett in the Dark Knight Rises:

John Daggett: I paid you a small fortune.
Bane: And this gives you *power* over me?

What’s your culpability when you unleash a malevolent force that is potentially smarter than you? I think this case deserves separate treatment from moral hazard in Type 1 agency relationships.

The Type I moral hazard question is enough for current drone capabilities, but I think is ultimately fairly simple, and the solution is along the lines you mention. If drones are legitimate, so is terrorism. Citizens who legitimize military action at a distance (be they voters in booths or trigger-finger pilots at Creech AFB) are complicit in morally hazardous action of a certain degree of severity.

Type 2+Type 3 moral hazard++ is the tough one. I don’t think friendly vs. hostile AI is the right framing there somehow. Call it “Frakenstein Hazard” (or if you want to make fun of Singularitarians, call it “Roko’s Basilisk Hazard.”)

Incidentally both Ender’s Game and Use of Weapons, which I read recently, have interesting things to say about this question of agency relationships in war. In the former, the protagonist Ender has a prodigious capacity for modeling alien agencies in his head. In the latter, you have these huge, incomprehensibly powerful AIs (“Minds”) that run the ships of the Culture and seem almost indifferent to the minor time they devote to getting involved in human-scale conflicts by the Culture’s “Special Circumstances” group (a kind of “third world CIA” interventionist intelligence arm of the Culture).

I hope that, once the pain of the slog fades, you won’t feel your work here quite so pointless. Or, to be more precise: I hope that the meaningless you’ve found in writing this is as powerful as the meaningless you describe within this portion. It’s certainly had powerful effects on my understanding of (corporate) politics, and I doubt I’m alone in this regard.

Just calibrating expectations :) I’ve had people get offended when I don’t immediately chase down connections that interest them.

Yet, I think that’s also the reason why organiations with to much clueless in them collapse. They are simply running below a certain threshold of necessary sociopath – loser interaction, which inevitably is replaced by some sort or other of bureaucracy. Fascinating enough, organizations can stay in this mode infininatly as long as no outside force shows up.

Would it be possible for some civilization to get a handle on scripts, in such a way that they could adapt the script to suit changing conditions without anyone sensing it and descending? I suppose that conditions are too illegible for the oligarchs to engage in successful scriptwriting, but maybe it would be possible to generate an anti-fragile script, one that adapts itself?

Or maybe just the more abstract a script is, the easier it is to shoehorn new realities in and keep things from unraveling.

It is conflicting to say that, “Ideas are cannibals” and “Ideas are a very unique sort of resource because they can be generated entirely internally, unlike material resources”.

If ideas are created entirely internally with no access to material world, what are these suggested cannibals cannibalizing? Conscious mind as a blank slate is not a very promising avenue of inquiry.

There has to be a framework of established concepts or constructs on which you can build your ideas, that is if ideas here are supposed to have any meaning.

Even the framework on which meaningful ideas are built upon is not wholly internal. It too derives from the material world.

The one thing that seems missing when I get to the end is the article on straight talk. You skip over it because it doesn’t happen much, but thinking about it, isn’t the lack of loser-sociopath interaction the heart of the issue, the reason that the hierarchy needs to exist in the first place? You allude to it as being unbearably naked in its power dynamics, but unbearable to who? Or that it leads to a”nuclear reaction”, but what does that actually mean?

It feels like it’s the mystery of the dog in the night… The secret core around which the whole corporate system rotates.

I’m re-reading Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton right now, which puts forward the idea that naked communication is at the heart of psychological development. It makes an interesting complement to your thoughts on the sociopaths’ spiritual journey towards nothingness…

yeah, I’m familiar with Berne’s transactional analysis stuff. I quite like it, and have cited it before here. I definitely don’t think it is naive or passe

[...] some people acquire great power by experiencing something truly awful, and coming through it: broken, grieving, liminally stranded between the naive world of the optimists and the cold world of the dead. And in that between-state, they can accomplish things no one else can do. Holly’s story is about that. She was broken, and she took it and used it as her power to defeat someone no one else could touch. She will never belong, anywhere she goes, but her outcast existence will also take her places no one else has been and teach her things no one else knows.

Replace “optimists” with “clueless” and “dead” with “losers” if you like.

The word “sociopath,” here, really just seems to mean (as my boyfriend put it) “people who have high awareness of themselves and the people around them and very high ambition”. You could replace it with “Slytherin” and probably capture the meaning better.

And while some of these people manipulate others by constructing fantasies which leave out crucial data, the article itself creates a fantasy in which all social meaning is worthless. In which people who eschew all social meanings and construct from their lives, are somehow more authentic, for either being ignorant of them or pretending that they don’t exist.

But at some point this way of thinking becomes a useless solipsism, where you’re dismissing other people as valueless just because you feel that they’re valueless. Even the people used as an example in this article — nonhuman animals — often have very complex societies, which most humans are oblivious to. Saying they aren’t relevant isn’t a revelation of Pure Unvarnished Reality, it’s making a value judgment, which is yet another social construct.

Asking whether a social construct is “real” or not is pointless, compared to asking whether it’s “humane” or “useful.” I think the best secular and theistic religious leaders are the ones who help ask these questions; who lead people to consider parts of reality which they hadn’t, and suggest humane and useful ways to consider them.

I feel that this article is lacking with that regard.