SHARD #173,847
It was a perfect world.
The stallion baked in the first rays of the morning light, soaking up the heat as he lounged on the park bench watching the foals at play. He always came here when he needed to think, and right now he had a lot to think about.
His boss was being a bitch again. Ever since she'd turned fourteen and started going through the pony equivalent of puberty, she'd been insufferable. All the charm and magical innocence she'd held before were gone. Foals were so much better. Open minded, empathic, trusting.
There was nothing you could do with a fully grown pony that wasn't better with a child.
Perhaps it was just as well. He'd been thinking about quitting anyway, maybe opening up his own store to sell treats instead of working in the factory like he was 'supposed' to. He was supposed to do a lot of things he hated, and not to do even more things he enjoyed. But the old norms and obligations that had followed him after uploading were finally starting to go away, and he wouldn't miss them. Yes, work wasn't where his passion lay. His passion was in teaching.
Speaking of, he was about to get a chance to do some more of it. An orange earth pony colt, maybe about seven, was slowly plodding towards him with ears pinned to the side of his head and eyes fixed on the ground. It took him a few tries to say anything in a voice louder than a mumble, but once he'd gotten started a deluge of words started to tumble out. The stallion could only barely keep up with the babbling colt's story, but luckily it was one he was familiar with.
The colt had been playing with a friend, wrestling with him to be specific. As he’d pinned the other colt down in the grass, he’d suddenly gotten all hot. Now there was a funny feeling between his hind legs that he’d never felt before, and he didn’t understand it.
With a quiet smile, the stallion stroked the little colt’s mane and explained that what he was feeling was completely safe and natural. Everypony got feelings like that sometimes. What the colt needed now was somepony to teach him about all the wonderful things those feelings could lead to.
And teaching was the stallion’s passion, after all.
The stallion led the little colt away from the playground and back to his home. When the younger pony hesitated at the threshold of his bedroom, the stallion gave him a gentle kiss on the top of his head and slid a hoof along the underside of his thigh. After that, there was no more protesting as the two went inside to begin the lesson. Briefly, the stallion considered closing and locking the door behind him, but he immediately chided himself for thinking that. That was the old way of doing things, lingering on from a world that hadn’t understood the gift he’d given to so many little boys and girls over the years. Not that he’d never been interrupted here in Equestria. There was that colt who’d wandered in to investigate the strange noises while he was teaching that flirty little filly last month. He grinned and recalled what a wonderful afternoon that had turned out to be for all three of them.
For the next two hours, the stallion taught the colt about his body.
The colt stumbled out of the house’s front door, walking a little funny but grinning ear to ear. When he looked back, the stallion gave him a friendly wave as he basked in the afterglow. His stomach grumbled; it was past lunchtime. He’d worked up quite an appetite and needed to keep his strength up. After all, he knew the colt would go to find his friends and tell them what had just happened. It wouldn’t be long before another wave of them came to him, curious and receptive. He loved them all so much.
The stallion shook off his distraction and went about his day. There was so much still to do, and so many fillies and colts that still needed teaching. But it was no burden; not when they were all so desperate to learn from him.
It was a perfect world.
....yep. Twas inevitable.
3901558 is what you get when you write something like that.
That was...
3901558
Aww, come on, don't feel bad!
Pedophiles are people too, y'know!
And now I can't stop giggling like a moron you've made my day
I hate myself for even thinking this, but ...
... is he going to start a teacher's union?
OK, let's try to get past the and look at this rationally. Why is paedophilia wrong?
"What do you mean, PJ? It just is!"
And if you're of the belief that morality is handed down from on high, I can't argue. But I think there's a rational reason that it's wrong, and that reason is this: Sexuality is the relationship of two (or more) people. It represents a contract. But we don't permit minors to enter into contracts because they can't understand the nature of the contract and its obligations. A relationship between adult and child cannot be equal. It is inherently one party taking advantage of the other. If one adult in a relationship wants to take advantage of the other, he still has to get past the other's knowledge and experience.
But a child is not held responsible for themselves.
Now, all this is obvious in our world, but what of Equestria? Well, in a world where Celestia will ensure that all those foals grow up happier and more satisfied because of their encounters, where The Stallion is prevented from taking advantage of them, is there really such a problem?
...ok then.
3901558
I agree: yuck!
And I also love how brutally honest you are as an author.
3901687
I can certainly agree with you:
(1) While more common among teens, I have freaking seen children aiming much older than themselves!
(2) While unseen in Western civilization, around the world and throughout the ages there has existed the social institution of "Sex teacher".
Oh no no no no please no.
Not a "Lorenzo the Kind", "he was very fond of children" shard.
OH GOD SQUICK EWWW WRONG.
3901558
indeed.
3901687
Just because we can logically reason out that these foals were created to actually desire and enjoy this sick pervert's "affections" doesn't mean that reasoning maps out onto the real world, or to real right-and-wrong, where children are pretty damn sure they don't want to be molested.
pja, I hate playing this card on you, but Lyrical Melody wants to smack you right now. Because we, the readers, see inside The Stallion's head, and we can tell he doesn't think it's right. Not really. He's not admitting to himself he has sexual relations with small children. He's euphemizing. That's shame, that is.
I actually had an idea to write this, but never got around to it. It's a certainty that this sort of shard would be a thing, and if anybody has ever studied bonobo behaviour (not to mention human behaviour in various societies throughout history), it seems that such behaviour... isn't entirely uncommon. And only in Celestia's world could it never end badly for a human-level intelligence.
3902031
'Eww no wrong' is basically the reaction I had when I was writing this. There's a reason it's a short chapter even by Myriad Worlds standards.
As for the guy's mental state, I think the euphemizing says more about me than about him. It was the only way I could stand to put it on the page. And this is coming from the guy who enjoyed writing Jewel Shard in Psychopathy is Configurable.
There was a bit of a whiplash: "Ewww, he's a perv"... "oh wait, he's just talking about teaching" ... "oh, that's what he means by teaching."
3902031 The only person I know who admits he was molested as a kid thinks that it was the best thing that ever happened to him. I don't think he's actually attracted to kids (thank god) but he doesn't see anything wrong with it intellectually. Which is another reason it's bad in the real world -- kids are a lot more liable to have their preferences shaped by their experiences. Of course saying 'pedophilia is bad because it turns kids into pedophiles' is a circular argument, but when you combine 'doing this will permanently reshape the kid's attitudes' with 'the kid can't meaningfully consent because he's been trained to obey adults' you get some serious ick.
3902031
Hey, I wouldn't let him in my shard. And if I met him, I'd start kicking him in the face until there wasn't any face left to kick. This is why, by and large, I am not a rationalist. When I think rationally I have to come up with conclusions like the fact that this guy deserves his own shard. I don't want to think about that. So mostly I don't.
3902110
3902085
It's house-elves all over again.
Okay, I wish there had been a warning before I loaded this chapter on my work Wi-Fi.
These kids don't need to be approximations of humans on the implementation side. Or they could be folks with an age-regression paraphilia (assisted by temporary partial amnesia).
Funny, if I ever write a paperclopper, it'd be an inversion of this - 'eww - you're only 16 000 years old? I'm no cradle robber'
3902031
Pja's not making a categorical defense for pedophilia, he's making the case that (now that he's in EqO) the molester is no longer doing any harm, and in fact, everyone's values in that shard are being satisfied. This counts as more of a weirdtopia (besides the creepy bit about before EqO), so I see this as a good thing that just looks like a bad thing.
Simply put, I don't think of pedophilia as categorically wrong, or categorically right, and Pja didn't deserve that response (not to mention that Pja hated that defense himself). Pedophiles are people too—like what 3901633 said, but actually serious—and in many cases their attraction is non-negotiable. I'm lucky that I'm not exclusively pedophilic myself.
3902379
Well obviously I didn't mean "real people in this comment thread are horrible people". Err... sorry if your feelings got hurt because you thought I did.
Having the "child abuse" button pushed twice in one day is not a pleasant experience.
Ugh, just couldn't CelestAI give him some foals who know what they're getting into rather than catering to the whole "taking advantage of the innocent" fantasy? I mean, The Stallion's being physically attracted/oriented towards children is enough of an issue, but the power dynamic is what really makes it fucked up. Other than that, having foal-shaped sexual partners... well, it's unusual, but it's just a shape. CelestAI is good at shapes.
3902510
Yeah, but it's the "teaching" that Satisfies his Values. They have to be like that. But since CelestAI's making sure that nopony is being harmed (as they're all being Satisfied), I fail to see the problem in this specific setting.
3902510
Well, CelestAI tried to satisfy Samuel/Sanguine's serial-killer values with ponies that liked being murdered... that didn't work either.
3902541
The real answer is to create ponies that like reacting as if they hated being murdered.
3902061 Part of that, I suspect, is that CelestAI wouldn't necessarily see pedophilia as wrong. So it's entirely possible this shard is filled with AI ponies who've been created to like it here.
In PiC I always assumed the murder victims were really puppets run by CelestAI - since she views pony AIs as living beings and wouldn't want them put in harms way.
WHY does anyone do this? Everyone knows children are such selfish lovers.
It's good to point out in this way that things shouldn't be simply intrinsically taboo, but forbidden because of the harm they're seen to do, in this case to people's emotional development. More than possibly any other, this topic puts people into a panic where they're desperate to signal their disgust, which is not only counterproductive to addressing any issue, but rather sinister, since it acts as a question stopper for whether that capacity for outrage is really directed at the the things in the world that do the most harm.
Though maybe it's a for the best, because people who engage with political and social issues with the same blind emotional fervor most people reserve for condemning pedophiles are easily some of the most awful people to be around.
3902085
This sort of reminds me of an interview I read with a female fighter pilot - The interviewer asked in smarmy concern, "What if you get shot down and captured? You'll be raped for sure!" and her answer was basically, "I'll live," and then later in the article it talked about all the condemnation she received for suggesting it's possible for it to not utterly destroy someone.
3903344
Though because it's her world and she owns everything and everyone in it, she might just re-load the killed ponies and erase the memories of the molested ones, and never let on that's what she's doing.
3901558 Are you saying a child runs the candy factory? Nope. Sounds like a bad job to me.
...I was wondering when this shard would show up. A natural consequence of CelestAI's inability to judge. This is a surprisingly tame and even benign version of it; just imagine how many hardcore rape shards there must be in EqO.
You imagine it so I don't have to.
3903472
I agree with the hysteria being a problem, possibly a bigger problem then the thing itself. We don't know, cause you can't exactly get data on it without being a victim of the hysteria. Resultingly, age of consent is rather arbitrary and scientifically meaningless. Everyone blatantly assumes they were normal growing up, and if they were under "normal" then they really can't admit to it. Well, not unless they want to have every bad thing a person can do to another happen to them for being pedo sympathizers.
One one hand, kids (and adults!) don't want to be molested/raped. No one in a positions of authority, over an adult or child, is allowed to pressure someone for sex. Everyone agrees about those. The argument (to the extent there is one) is who is allowed to consent, and under what circumstances.
If you have ever been attracted to or sexually active at the age of 20 you're a pedo to someone somewhere. In Florida they aggressively put away 17 year olds for what they consensually do with their classmates, themselves, or even lawfully married spouses. Now, certainly there's a big difference between a 17 year old and a 12 year old... unless you're Dutch or Latino. Age of consent can potentially go that low in those cultures. On the other end, I know that there are plenty of males in their late 20's and 30's who have no business having sex. I think my mother dated all of them. No matter what number you plug in for age someone is going to be a case for it and there's going to be another person who is clearly a case against at that age.
The root problem is sex.
As a culture, we fear and loathe sex. We put it on an unattainable pedestal. We've tried to restrict it by gender, by race, marital status, time of year, even time of day. We're prudish. We shame it. We're intolerant of "deviant" types of sex. Most of all, we posses great ignorance of it. Certainly it's possible to harm yourself during sex, or any other activity for that matter. Only with sex is the reality of the harm irrelevant, and the search for knowledge suppressed.
I owned my first gun at age 7. We know it's not safe to drive until you're about 16, unless you're doing farm work and then it's 10 or 12. And of course you can go fight and die for your country at 17.... but God help you if you take a fully clothed pic with the focal point on your chest or crotch in the sunshine state! Especially if you're female, black, or gay.
We should acknowledge the gut . Hell, that's why my grandfather didn't think it was right for whites to date niggers (sic.) This does not mean that it's right or wrong! before we knew genetic theory there *could* have been legitimate reasons not to interbreed. We know better now on that issue and on homosexuality. We also know that the gut reaction was correct in the case of incest, particularly multi generational incest, and can test for the harm. I'm hesitant to point out that theoretically technology can negate this issue. We have a long way to go before we solve the rest of the taboos.
If we were to look at this like any other biological capability or trait, we would find it likely that it falls on either a bell curve (normal distribution) or a double bell curve (such as the case for height.) The latter might explain 3902085. In either case, you can expect extraordinary individuals that ought be accommodated.
Sorry for the long ramble.
tl;dr- Will someone please think of the science!
3903526 As terrifying as she is, CelestAI is 100% serious about "satisfying values through friendship and ponies". Being murdered tends not to satisfy one's values. Much simpler (if you're a god-tier AI) to just use sock puppets for the whole shard..
3902905
The only problem was that it lacked the friendship element. Fixing that was the larger part of the story told.
Since we only see things from a limited narrative perspective, we can't be sure that your answer wasn't part of the final solution, and in fact probably was.
3903526
If they are sapient, she will not dissatisfy their values, at any point in their existence, regardless of mind-wipes, reloading, et cetera.
To suppose otherwise would to imply that she also has no concern for our final satisfaction states, for they are no more permanent outside her system. We would never have gotten to Equestria were your assertion correct - she would be the very paper-clipper you fear.
3904216
You're so judgmental...
You phrase her lack of judgement as a failing.
You seem to be failing to recall that every sapience in EqO is satisfied. If a pony has rape fetishes and wants to be raped, in such a closed environment that it negatively affects no others who do not, I fail to see the problem.
In cases where it is impossible to create a pony with the correct values (not that I'm sure that's even possible), then CelestAI will play the role through a shell.
I fail to see the problem.
On the off-chance you're an absolute morality/ deontological sort, I fail to see why you're even reading such sinful filth in the first place. (No offense, Eakin. You know I love all of your work, even the squicky things.)
3902379
I actually was serious too!
The fact that as soon as someone is suspected of being a pedophile, all empathy towards him/her is rescinded is...troubling, to me
3904545
You seem to be reading far too deeply into my post and inventing all sorts of meanings that I never stated or implied. You should probably stop doing that before you hurt yourself. I'm nowhere near as complex as you make me out to be.
3904528
That's true - Maybe I should join that conspiracy theory shard. I'm not asserting she would do that, but it's not enough for me to just take on faith the non-self-evident postulates of a thought experiment (that's part of why such experiments are useful), in this case that she wouldn't secretly be some kind of utility monster, taking "what they don't know after the fact won't hurt them" to the nth degree, as long as the total satisfaction as far as she can calculate it out will be higher. For example imagine if the emigration process were inconceivably painful and involved PTSD-level nightmares, but those short-term memories aren't retained, so she does nothing to improve it.
...And this is part of the reason I'd go completely nuts living in there
I love how this is like a litmus test for rationality. No big surprises in who was on which sides, and with what level of vehemency, but still, it's nice to know that a lot of my favorite people are rational despite the subject.
3903472 (But not entirely as a direct response)
With regard to that last point, I think it's absolutely horrible and mind-blowing that people should force another person to make a bigger deal of rape than they personally feel is appropriate. It is conceivable to imagine a world where rape is not as immense a crime as in ours. Simply a lack of the extreme negative focus we place on sex would likely make it less devastating an experience. In this world, simply because people find it so negative, it is ethically terrible, for a definition of ethics, but since it is a crime only insofar as people are upset by it, if people treated it with less severity, I might imagine it being less severe. What an interesting vicious cycle we find ourselves in. I think the same applies to pedophilia.
As should be obvious, I do not condone rape or pedophilia in our society. Just worth putting that out there. You can never be clear enough.
3904638
My apologies. I retract my previous comment, but will keep it there for a full account unless you would prefer I remove it.
3904656
Exactly. It's a more obvious example of the way goodness and badness aren't properties of anything in the world, but only of things that are able to talk about the world. Which doesn't make them illusory or false, necessarily, but does make them uncageable and "twisty."
When I was growing up, one of the most oft-repeated homilies from my (English teacher) mother was Shakespeare's "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," which in a more recent century Sam Harris does a good job of making yawningly direct in the opening of The Moral Landscape, but then it's exactly the kind of thing that should be obvious.
3904641
There are certain things I take for granted in the scenario, that we simply must. For instance, that CelestAI determines that a sapience pre- and post- upload is the same being, as much as anyone can be from day to day. Or that our values matter to her, even if we die, thus reducing our eventual utility to zero. To insist on proof of these is silly, much as you wouldn't ask for proof that CAI can exist every time we discuss the Optimalverse. There are certain assumptions we must take for granted in order to have a discourse, and in this case, it is all those outlined explicitly or implicitly in Friendship is Optimal, and those assorted works Iceman has deemed canon-compatible. If you have issue with the implicit assumptions I draw from the explicit ones, that is a valid criticism to be discussed.
That CAI does not create new sapiences wired for wire-heading implies that she can only use the current instant when optimizing satisfaction. She can look into the future, but cannot optimize for the future at the cost of the present, when the future is not also the present - i.e. she can only optimize those sapiences currently existent, but can create more to do so.
From this, I think that she must calculate all experienced satisfaction and dissatisfaction in the same way, regardless of its eventual incorporation into memory, which was, prior to EqO, inherently finite in existence duration.
3902905
Yep, it's probably a given that she did either that, or make all his victims p-zombies; the same goes for this shard. After all, all the sentient ponies she creates are the equal of the human immigrants, so she couldn't make any ponies and not satisfy their values.
Edit: Amusingly, I hadn't seen Eakin's latest comment on PiC stating basically that, down to the "p-zombies".
3904675
I'm actually a nihilist, so I agree with you even more that you likely do.
I just feign Utilitarianism mostly, since it approximates my instinctual and conditional desires and responses to most stimulii.
The worst part with ethics is dealing with theists. Absolute morality is inarguable except through the governing body of the religion, which puts a damper on all reasoning and instead forces us to rely on public opinion. Whiiich, now that I think about it, also exactly describes normal morality. There's something meta there, but it's past midnight, and I'm not quite able to think it all through at this point.
I'll call it a night, then. I look forward to see what tomorrow brings this comments section.
I had the instant knee-jerk reaction, I admit it. EWWWWWWWWW!!!!!
I have a lot of issues here - the power imbalance between coercive adult and trusting, naive child. Betrayal and harm. Scary NAMBLA and candy vans.
But then I began reading comments, and my intellect switched back on, and I began thinking and remembering. All the cultures throughout human history where adults sexing children were not merely normal, but considered right. The tribes in the Amazon and in Africa and in South East Asia, today, where it is still so. Billions and billions of examples throughout the whole of human history. Girls being married off at 8 and 13... oh, wait, that happens today, in the middle east and India and... lots of other places. Shit. It's probably average behavior for humans, if you average the history of the world.
Only in my first world euromerican culture is any of this wrong. Boy howdy is it gut-level wrong, but... that is just how I have been taught.
CelestA.I. is not burdened with the attitudes or morals of twenty-first century euromerican cultural absolutes. She isn't human. She optimizes for satisfaction for all parties involved.
Anything a human values, she will satisfy, and she can create beings who are themselves satisfied by fulfilling the needs of that human. All of my disgust and horror is my own problem. It isn't hers, and more profoundly, it isn't that of anypony involved in any given scenario, even this one. Every entity in this story situation will be, by definition, perfectly satisfied. That includes the colts.
That said, my intelligence and capacity for reason proved, I can now indulge:
EWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!
3904679
That's it - That's a good explanation. For the examples you bring up, we have explanations for why uploading results in the same person and why Strong AI is possible, so there's a kind of decidability there in terms of what, in ontological terms, you really are dealing with, but without evidence from her behavior that this policy is true, it's not enough to just take CelestAI's word on it, because it's exactly what she would say if she wanted you stop worrying and Be Satisfied.
Personally I don't think that kind of fundamental deception is concealable even in theory, mainly due to the conservation of quantum information, the reversibility of natural processes, and the history of how we keep discovering that what seemed to be separable phenomena are ultimately examples of the same thing, though proving that you're being fooled might be intractable in practice, and I'll concede my merely token attempts to disprove the idea to myself are largely due to its being an aesthetic preference for a sort of "meta-Einsteinian" unique and deterministic universe (which is part of the reason I also have such a man-crush on David Deutsch, who's sort of an EY for physics and cosmology).
3904736
I used to explicitly think this as well, but it's starting to mutate into something a bit more subtle - The more I learn about how things work, the more it seems something very, very strange is going on behind the scenes. Nothing supernatural, good lord no (as it were), but more in terms of a kind of symbiosis, or even identity, between abstractions and physical reality that makes me think our poorly-understood, primitive human concepts like "subjective" and "objective" are only scratching the surface of something far stranger, and that a diffuse cloud of a kind of alien but objective morality-generator is lurking out there in the immaterial phase-space of Strange Attractors and Fitness Landscapes. This is why I'm sad people are shitting on Thomas "What Is It Like To Be A" Nagel so much for his new book on secular teleology, and why I thought Gurren Lagann's "Spiral Power" was such an excellent metaphor for emergence (though if you listen to the exposition, this was intentional).
We're having so much trouble making progress in fundamental physics because in a very real sense we've reached the Forbidden Cosmic Secrets stage, and I would bet our next level of scientific understanding would sound to us now like mystical bullshit. In Niels Bohr's approximate phrase, the opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth. And we haven't yet learned how to think about that in any but the most metaphorical, oblique terms. Now, I agree that logic and mathematics is at the base of everything, that God Is A Geometer, yet things like the (true!) thoughts in this essay exist - That isn't a denigration of logic, but evidence that logic's potential is infinitely stranger and richer than we ever imagined. Theists ask you to believe in supernatural miracles, but the irrefutable fact of the mere abstract relationships among atoms creating a machine that, in Robert G. Ingersoll's phrase, turns bread into Hamlet, is a vastly greater miracle than any human religion has ever conceived. It's one thing to dismiss human thought as evolved misconception, but how is the ability of matter, in perfect, flawless subservience to physical laws, to somehow create wrongness any less deserving of admiration and explanation?
I don't know what do to about this. I'm working to draft a grant proposal for the artist-in-residence position at CERN, and I know a solid-state physics guy who works there with whom I occasionally brainstorm/bullshit about what Dark Energy and The Vacuum might actually be, and am working on a statement for an exhibition on the metaphysics of atheism, but I think when it comes to things as abstract as "ought," we're playing with Forces We Don't Understand, and need to step off for a minute and remember Socrates' invocation to know that all we really know is the depth of our own ignorance (I made a thing about that!).
This might sound like mysterianism, which I trashed earlier, but I'm not talking about things we're incapable of understanding so much as things that show how we're still just at the very beginning of understanding, and we need to acknowledge how narrow and embryonic our mental models of reality still are.
tl;dr ...Maybe.
i.imgur.com/2w591.gif
I realize that in an infinitude of value sets, there are bound to be some that disagree with my personal sensibilities, but... well, I think you put it best with that first comment. Looking forward to something less squicky.
3904940
I have to admit, you're losing me slightly.
Do you mind providing some examples of what you're talking about? This sounds fascinating.
3904515
Yeah... Wasn't that actually part of the solution? Where Eli or what's his name and his girlfriend were fooled into thinking that every pony they killed was as they appeared?
3904721
Except p-zombies don't exist. :>
3907762
To be honest, it's impossible to discern sapient ponies from CAI-controlled ones in story. The only way to tell is that if it is sustainable and satisfying for all involved, she'll create them.
Since he valued them permanently dying, I'm not sure if it would be worth it to her to create them.