tiffany-loves-broadway asked: The cast album for the Groundhog Day musical just came out and, aside from just being kickass in general, several of the songs reminded me of your recent post about gender and relationships (and the responses to it).

I didn’t even know the musical existed.  Thanks for the tip, I will publish this ask to remind myself to listen to it

tiffany-loves-broadway asked: There's an entire Tumblr botnet dedicated to hunting down and mass-reblogging posts people have said not to reblog. :|

Yeah, this is why I use variations like “#don’t reblog ////”.  Some of the blogs might conceivably pick up on the more common variations, but this has never happened to me yet.

tiffany-loves-broadway asked: Why does Roko's Basilisk need to perfectly simulate its forefathers, exactly? Couldn't it just simulate any minds to *think* that they're its forefathers, creating a general rule that if you're one of Roko's Basilisk's forefathers you ought to be nice to it? The objection that it couldn't be a friendly AI if it torture people is easily bypassed if it simply rewards cooperators rather than punishing defectors.

If the AI can reach back and simulate people from the past, then I think this works: if you think you’re a forefather, you might just be a hypothetical forefather it made up, so you should behave as though it can interact with you directly.  (That’s neat and I had not heard it before.)

But as I said in my most recent post, I don’t think Roko’s idea is that it can reach back and simulate minds from the past (and I can’t see why anyone would believe that).  And if the conscious experience of the simulations starts after the AI is created, then in order for the incentives to be effective, it has to simulate you, or at least have some chance of simulating you.  If you just makes up people with some traits in common for you, that’s not relevant for your decisions in the same way.

tiffany-loves-broadway asked: I'm a fairly recent initiate into the NGE fandom, and I love EOE, but I kind of got the impression that TNC's reputation within the CC fandom is an exaggerated form of either EOE or EOTV's reputation within the NGE fandom.

I meant to say “and I love both EOE and EOTV”, sorry!

You know, I didn’t have that in mind at all, at least not consciously!  I get the sense that EOE is relatively well liked except by a contrarian minority, and that while a lot of people are dissatisfied by EOTV, it’s not quite weird or inexplicable enough to inspire a TNC-like reputation.  (In particular, EOE is if anything “weirder” than EOTV, but also more traditionally satisfying, which breaks the analogy somewhat.)

The reception of TNC relative to Salby’s other work was inspired consciously by Homestuck Act 6, Finnegans Wake, The Silmarillion, Philip K. Dick’s later novels and his Exegesis, the later issues of Cerebus, and probably a few things I’m forgetting.