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A philosopher or meditator should chime in here. Spending a modicum of time in meditation shows you that intentions just show up from nowhere, they're not "you". We might as well call the earring "your prefrontal cortex" (or whatever), and this would describe the current state of things.
as soon as most people wear it "abnormally" becomes "normally".
logically the rare enlightened who refuse to wear it and instead keep their own [spoiler] become abnormal unsuccessful failures, not the other way around.
Does anyone know the provenance of this story? One comment says, responding to someone who recommends publishing it,
> The problem is that it's published so he can sell only second rights.
EDIT: The story is tagged (at the top) "fiction, raikoth". Raikoth is the 'constructed civilization' of Scott Alexander, author of Slate Star Codex, et al. And though the post is at gwern.net, I see the author is "Scott".
I don't get it. First, how is it "better for you" to take the earring off, if "the wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family?"
Second, apparently some people do choose to take the earring off at some point, because the story refers to "the testimony of all living wearers." So it does not, in fact, appear to usurp, subvert or replace the wearer's free will.
How can you know it’s not the earring giving those testimonies? The story doesn’t say whether they were wearing the earring while being interviewed, but given that wearing it for a long time wastes away your neocortex and turns you into a flesh puppet, I don’t think long-term users are even able to speak on their own anymore.
OTOH people who are still themselves, in the early stages of the takeover, will certainly tell you of their own volition that the earring always seems to be right. Wearing it is presumably highly addictive.
Same shape as any "trust the metrics not the person" trap. Saw it with sales comp plans in the 90s — optimize number, number stops meaning anything, and whoever's left defending it isn't thinking straight anymore either.
It stands to reason that the people who took the earring off were less happy and made worse decisions than the people who kept it on for the rest of their lives.
So then ask yourself: why did they take it off? Pondering the implications of that question is the entire point of this short story.
An exclusive choice between maintaining free will and agency vs. achieving some definition of “success” makes for a good story. You’d think the choice would be blindingly obvious, and yet turns out it isn’t (or to some it is blindingly obvious in the opposite direction).
The problem is not that it limits the wearer's free will. On the contrary, it allows the wearer to exercise it way too effectively on the premise that the wearer already knows exactly who he is and what he needs.
> Second, apparently some people do choose to take the earring off at some point, because the story refers to "the testimony of all living wearers."
You are hilariously misreading that :-)
"First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers"
Who says that they testified after taking the earring off? My reading (done with my non-atrophied brain, used to reading human prose not LLM-prose) was clear on the very first go: Those who testified did so while wearing the earring, then they died but their testimony was already recorded.
> Not seeing the problem here.
As you've made clear in many many of your posts on HN, you are all-in on LLMs and appear to use them much more than even the average HN user. Maybe start considering that you are losing comprehension with regard to human-written prose?
Note the word "usually." That's the failure rate hiding in a footnote. Nobody logs the wearers who ended up in a ditch, same as nobody writes a postmortem for the outage that didn't happen.
> how is it "better for you" to take the earring off, if "the wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family?"
I think it's pretty obvious since you read until the end you know in the second one there's quickly no "you" remaining ;)
It's like the terrifying answer to Star Trek teleporter paradox. On the surface it's the same guy. He walks like Bob and talks like Bob and is more successful thanks to the power of instant travel! But YOU are dead after the first teleportation.
Derek Parfit's line on this: if psychological continuity is what matters, not some further fact of identity, then the "quick death" framing is question-begging. The story just makes vivid what reductionist views of personal identity already imply, whether or not you find that comforting.
This is a good companion to the yesterday's HN post of ten steps to happiness.
I've read that Malachi Martin described what he called "a perfect possession". I do not know where as I haven't found this piece myself. But the idea was that typical cases of demonic possession are imperfect, the victim is struggling, and the struggle is visible to the outsiders. A perfect possession does not manifest itself.
I wonder if there is a self consistent way to desire having your mind digitally uploaded into a computer, while detesting the idea of listening to the commands of the earring (and conditioning it to have all of my unconcious thoughts and desires). I guess I just discovered a bit of cognitive dissonance I didn't know I had.
mind upload is closer to the version in the comments, with gem learning to emulate brain and then brain gets removed
the difference is in targetted influence from outside aimed at changing you for its own goals and final form
consider the "accelerated version" of this earpiece - where you just get whackked with dose of heroine (making you "perpetually happy") and then taking over your body
Based on your comments I think you do understand it but are taking it too seriously / too literally.
Consider the title: Scott Alexander and others have written more clear, philosophically robust versions of a similar argument ("you shouldn't trade your agency for good outcomes").
But that's not the point here. This is the artsy version that's supposed to make you feel the argument.
In the brain-chip case (or indeed already now, in the case of our rectangular appendages), some of the hisses and clicks come from mysterious sources beyond the earring.
At first glance it can work only by completely disabling the meaning-seeker part of the wearer's personality. Ennui and existential/absurd feelings can't be resolved by indulgence.
Would it make Sisyphus happy without bypassing the implied will of gods that he shall be forever fully conscious in order to suffer? Someone pls give the earring to poor dude.
I've been thinking about this story a lot lately. When giving away your agency gives strictly better results, should you? And if you shouldn't, do you really think you're strong enough to resist it?
Would you give away your agency to another human or human organization if they gave strictly better results? My guess is you value your own agency over your life more than that. It's your life to make mistakes and hopefully learn from (but that's up to you), not somebody else's to live for you.
Read this back when Scott first posted it on LW years ago. The gotcha nobody mentions: the earring doesn't need to be right every time, just net positive, and that's exactly how you rationalize the first few compromises. By the time it's obviously bad you've already outsourced the muscle for noticing.
"Mysterianism" not quite right term here IIRC — that's usually about consciousness being unsolvable, not about withholding solutions for fear of consequences. Story's more like an argument against transparency-as-default, different animal entirely.
