You're living an abnormally successful life, a rich and much-loved member of the community with a happy family?

Who the heck cares *who* is living such a life? It's being lived, right? If you can do it with an earring and half of the brain, instead of all of the brain, so much the better!

(suppose for the moment that you're being selfish and ignoring concerns about whether the parasite would be better at pursuing efficient charity and so on)

I wonder whether, in those circumstances, it would begin by telling me that I would be better to take it off. (If it did, I would.)

Oh, this is very, very bad.

Locking it up in a treasure vault isn't safe enough. I'd throw it into the nearest volcano.

If I learn faster with the earring than without it, then it's a learning aid and I'd consider it, although I don't see how you can accept everything but the first command.

This will be getting it wrong, too, but I'm going to write only a couple of paragraphs so that the ways I'll get it wrong will at least be excusable by the lack of apparent effort.

What if you could trust your hunch about people? What if, at least according to your perception, you could trust a person with well-fitting, clean, situation-appropriate clothes to make a good person to do business with while a huckster almost always looked like a huckster to you? What if there were pretty people in the world, but people who were available and who would make a good romantic partner to you just looked more glowingly beautiful than anyone else? What if people pitching to you ideas that would make bad career moves had annoying voices? What if, while fast food was decent, salad tasted really amazing?

Say you could get Consequence Glasses that do just that. Say they even have a tuning knob. It goes from 0 to 1 because I am a geek. At 0 you get your natural perception with its natural biases, at 1 things probably will have to get a little bit abstract because so much becomes just a representation of what kind of consequences it leads to. Maybe it even works on some kind of a curve, so that if you just use them at, say, 0.1, it simply protects you from whatever tricks you're most vulnerable to - your most sinful foods taste just a bit stale but not in such a way that it makes you less happy, the well-designed rewards of videogames that keep you playing seem just a bit more arbitrary and distant, etc.. Only once you turn it higher does it really start directing you toward anything specific.

You can decide to just not put the glasses on at all. You can decide to only run them at a very low level. Every turn of the knob is precisely your own choice. It's simply that the higher you turn it, the easier it will be to just do the right decisions in every situation. It won't even feel like someone else is in charge - it's you calling the shots, calling them as you see them. Hell, you were already wearing consequence glasses anyway, it's just that they're biased for inclusive fitness in mankind's ancestral environment, not for happiness and fulfillment in the modern world. Your existing emotional filters were never designed for the stimuli and for the consequences of this environment - changing your perception only makes them work better. It makes you into a more formidable person. A person with an easier life, yes, but only because your decisions are more grounded in reality, not less!

Yes, you will become dependent on the glasses, just as you would on the earring. They're probably eventually even going to cause changes to your brain structure as you stop worrying so much about whether people are lying to you, about whether you're making the best possible use of your time, etc.. But it's a lot, lot harder to see them as taking anything away from you. Certainly you can't just brush it off with a generic "things should not be that convenient" type of argument.

I do worry that the only way to figure out whether you should wear the glasses is to put them on and see how they look in a mirror...

Edited at 2012-10-04 07:40 am (UTC)

... That sounds like a porno.

And for mysterianism working better than clarity? Well, it's definitely easier to get away with a bad argument and get people to take it seriously if you write mysterious parable as opposed to a clear piece, so in that sense it "works" better.

There's a couple of ways read this. One is that the WE doesn't actually help you implement your 'real' goals, but the second or third order subgoals and that its first bit of advice, "take me off", was warning you about precisely this effect. Or you could read it as a warning about defining goals in such a way as to allow that being turned into a brainless puppet of an alien horror would accomplish those goal (if you think being turned into a brainless puppet would be bad).

Another random thought - it seems that the second-stage WE has effectively replaced my lower-level functions with an extremely smart but alien intelligence that does everything better than I could do myself...the thing is, I'm not entirely convinced that this isn't already the case in reality. Certainly, if I tried to, say, catch a ball running on only my higher-level cognition that I consider "me", I'd fail utterly.