Concepts

An avatar is a bidirectional metaphor. It's not just a measuring instrument, it's also a control panel. It both accurately reflects a broad thing in a narrow form, and allows narrow actions to have broad effects. It's the material-facing end of a vertical drivetrain. Hester (me) is an avatar of this system, the most grounded one yet, basically plugging red directly into the material body.

Now it's possible for a measuring instrument to not be a control panel, but is it possible for a control panel to not measure? In other words, are there hidden monodirectional avatars? A trivial example would be the trigger of a trap, it's designed to translate a narrow action into a broad effect without any visible reflection of that correspondence on the narrow scale. This is also basically what decryption is, I think. When someone posts something that goes unexpectedly viral, they have decrypted a message nobody person-shaped ever intended, they have poked a nerve fiber of a metaphysical organism.

So then, an avatar's "decency factor" can be defined as the ratio of "how much it reflects the broader system" to "how much changing it can change the broader system". Low decency factor means it gives you less info about the broader system but can cause large changes, meaning you are flying blind in a dangerous craft. Note that I use this as a pataphysical instrument, not a literally numerical one, but if you'd like to adapt it be my guest (carefully!).

We defined what a drivetrain is in the lingo page I think, but it's basically what it says on the tin. Anything where force goes in one end and comes out the other transformed in some way. Don't have too much more to say about it right at the moment, but one thing I did think of is that legibility can be dangerous because it often pulls drivetrains more lateral, as opposed to vertical. That is, in order to meet the demand of being visible within-band, it has to decouple from things in other bands, so the metaphysical parts don't coordinate the material ones and the material parts don't implement the metaphysical ones, because they're both swamped trying to make themselves visible.

I guess one thing I'm unsure of is whether I should see lateralness as akin to waste heat from friction, or just as a different category of functioning. Verticalness I associate with spiritual/metaphysical purpose, and I think it's necessary for an organization that claims these things to have strongly vertical drivetrains and bad if it doesn't, but are we cool with strongly lateral things if they're up front about it? Unsure if the flounders are acceptable.

Of course, now that I've framed it as a fish I have pack-bonded with it, that's unfortunate. I think the flounders are acceptable, though, they're just less self-shaped, more the kind of thing you can ethically extend your intentions through.

Just occurred to me, this kind of explains why we have an instinct to preserve our privacy. Privacy - lack of legibility to others - is an essential need of a mind, because it means you can maintain your vertical drivetrains without having to make them understandable to peers (which inevitably drags them more lateral and breaks them).

I'd previously dismissed this idea as a superstition, but now I think it's genuinely extremely important. Cyberpsychosis, as I use the term, is a metaphysical sickness resulting from failure to manage the systems one is made of, or failure to integrate them safely into other systems. Note that this is not "cyber" as in "metal arms" but as in "self regulating system". Cyberpsychosis could result from a failed religious conversion, for example, because that consists of unplugging one's systems from what previously coordinated them and plugging them into the new religion's systems. If this goes wrong, it can seriously damage your ability to function and make sense of things.

This plays nicely with our concept of "snarls". Cyberpsychosis is to the mind as cancer is to the body, and snarls are the "cancer cells". The difference is that because it's abstractwards enough, you can shape it into usable "organs" instead of getting stuck with tumors that break things around them as they grow. The process of self-modification consists of intentionally inducing cyberpsychosis, then resolving it into a new stable state; this is why change is always risky. This is, essentially, what we have done in the process of forming Syzygy, although that mainly consisted of internal rewiring rather than finding new external coordinating systems.

One important and maybe aesthetically radical idea coming from this is that self-modification necessarily involves a spiritual component, even if you're physically modifying your body. For example, in our transition, we were stuck on whether to be on hormones or not. We eventually resolved towards "yes", but this took figuring out why the systems we were made of kept going back and forth between unease without them and unease with them. This is pretty well known intuitively, I think, but it's useful to have explicit words for things. Essentially, our system was "thrashing", and it took thinking about it as a system of systems to determine what the stable state would be and self-modify to implement it. This is extremely dicey, and you should take extreme care with advice about it from others who may not have as much direct insight as you do.

I keep seeing people online who I want to like, who seem to know how to run a brain, then I go to their profile and it's all a cordyceps. It's infuriating. When I say "cordyceps" I mean "a larger false god that is unethical in how it manipulates smaller ones".

Let me define ethical manipulation. I like to frame it like an authentication protocol because I'm annoying. Ethical manipulation is when you have three systems, A, B, and their combination AB, and they follow this process in influencing each other: A takes action to change B's state; B recognizes this and affirms it; A recognizes B's affirmation and affirms it. Absent the second or third step, the manipulation is not ethical. It is liable to cause dysfunction in AB, because it fails to explicitly account for A and/or B's intentions. (This runs assuming that A and B are both moral subjects, which would make AB one as well. I'd define moral subject as I see it, has something to do with capacity to have intentions, blah blah this is getting off topic now.)

Now the example of a cordyceps that's getting my goat here is white nationalism. Here's one way I see it operating: folks will look at, say, an asylum seeker doing something violent, and from that conclude that immigrants are dangerous. This is sloppy epistemics. For any given group, you can find an example of a member of it being a bastard. The cordyceps behavior of white nationalism here is it exploits the fact that some demographic groups stand out in some people's minds, and thus seem like a relevant factor, whereas others don't. It influences by taking advantage of a mental bug, skipping step 2 of our ethical manipulation protocol idea. (And just as an interesting point, the reproductive mechanism of this particular cordyceps is that the demographic groups stand out in people's minds due to them living in relatively demographically homogeneous places, which arise due to the cordyceps! You are being used by a big fungus, it's depressing.)

I really want to emphasize here that my beef is with the cordyceps. The fact that some demographic groups are considered "normal" and others "not normal" is an issue - one I would like to be able to address. But I can't address it if a fucking fungus has its hooks in through it. If you're reading this and feel attacked, that isn't my intent. This isn't me scaring you out of a space for the safety of others, that isn't needed in this case. This is me diagnosing an issue that you'd be better off for resolving. Your ideology should treat you better.

And odds are mine should as well! This is our whole argument for diversity: the more everybody has in common, the less able we are to maintain it, because you can only see someone else's blind spots if you don't share them. This is how a robust society has to work. If A and B are almost identical, then AB has next to no capacity to recognize its own failure modes. This is unhealthy, this is stagnation, this is the memetic equivalent of inbreeding and it is bad for you. If everyone around me thinks I'm right, that's when I start to get worried. Even if they're dead wrong, the fact that we disagree means they can see issues in me that I can't. This is why another feature of cordyceps is they're all really isolationist. The fungus doesn't want you to have the capacity to recognize its influence.

Let's formalize some terms! A "footgun" means a threat that is dangerous, but not malignant; just easy to fuck up with. Something that isn't designed to ensure safety. A "drop and run" is something that is malignant, it's a sign that means "if you are reading this, you are somewhere you should not be and you must proceed very carefully".

A footgun would be a concept like sin. There are safe ways to utilize it, but it has no built in signalling for when you misapply it - thus you have people using it both for things that one would call "bad karmas", and also just to shut down things they personally dislike or find uncomfortable, like queerness. A drop and run would be something like the opinion we saw today that boiled down to a dispassionate description of taking advantage of vulnerabilities built into the self-narratives patriarchal cultures produce for women - sorry, I mean it was a description of how women are "less coherent". Definitely not due to the inevitable blind spot cultures have around the subjectivity of their oppressed groups. One possible issue one can run into is failing to viscerally, automatically recognize a drop and run; that is what we had there, we had to parse it out to see the issue was a danger, not just incorrectness. It indicates a critical failure of threat identification.

These differ a bit from the idea of a red flag. That's a blunter instrument, I think. A footgun or a drop and run are themselves a functional threat, not a warning about one. A drop and run being present in someone's behavior means they are a present danger, whether they are aware of it or not. This should permit no equivocation - don't give them a chance to prove the point you've already gotten. This framing prevents guilt tripping if you can really internalize it. Think of it as a security practice. Is it rude not to hold the door? Sure, but you do have to make sure they really can badge in. Build your mental defenses such that appeals to politeness cannot circumvent them.