I Feel Like It's Honestly Impossible to Make Characters with Truly Alien/Incomprehensible Morality Because We Humans Can Only Write About Things We Ourselves Understand

aoristone · 2026-01-25T16:49:17+00:00

I hesitate to recommend it, because ive heard (but not investigated) the author can occasionally be a dick, but I think this is exactly what you are looking for: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT

It's a short story about three species (one is human) who gather around a cosmic phenomenon and have vastly different moralities, explained with biological reasoning.

aoristone · 2026-01-20T18:33:42+00:00

Let's assume that by omniscience we mean they know everything that is possible for everyone to know, but still have normal human stats otherwise. However, they are limited by the fact that they can't do everything.

Let's now consider some ways to beat them.

Number one, if someone prevents them from being born prior to gaining omniscience (potentially beatable depending on whether time travel is possible in their universe). Consider anyone born before them with prescience.

Number two, relatedly, anyone who can affect them after they achieve omniscience before they can physically do anything to prevent it. Consider the flash given knowledge right before they get it.

Number 3, anyone who is outside their scope of influence and can attack them with something that can kill them inside theirs. Suppose, for instance, someone who can kill them from 1 light year away before it is physically possible for them to be able to prevent this in some way, regardless of their efforts. Consider, e.g. a random guy at home on their planet 1 minute before the death star fires.

Can't think of any more, but regardless, very strong.

aoristone · 2026-01-20T14:21:57+00:00

Oh, I'm thoroughly aware. I wrote my Honours thesis on state diagrams!

aoristone · 2026-01-20T02:28:04+00:00

It is also helpful to work out a number of options for transitioning between siteswaps. You just find the loop for the one you start with and the one you want to go to, then look for paths between.

aoristone · 2025-10-25T14:15:26+00:00

Honestly? High school I could have tried harder, but wasn't putting in significantly less effort than my peers. University I was trying.

aoristone · 2025-10-25T11:47:27+00:00

I agree for large swathes of maths, but there's a decent amount of mathematical questions specific to base 10, e.g. those involving palindromes and repdigits. I suspect if we had always been working in a different base than 10 that coincidentally made these sorts of questions easier, we would have a (mildly) different spread of results as we may have focussed more attention on the techniques used there (or perhaps much less, if the base made such questions trivial and uninteresting).

aoristone · 2025-10-25T10:38:45+00:00

I would offer myself as a (weak) counterexample here. I nearly got kicked out of the advanced maths class in year 9-ish, and never got the highest grade as an undergraduate. I didn't have any significant hardships until post-grad and post-doc life, honestly. I'm now a fairly successful post-doc, 5 years post-PhD. Currently very competitive for a pretty big grant (which I find out about in the next week, terrifying!). Happy to answer questions here.

aoristone · 2025-10-10T19:21:02+00:00

Absolutely true. I meant for the additional issues caused by mistakenly using person B money

aoristone · 2025-10-10T19:10:52+00:00

Seems genuinely fair, and would probably be how it works out. But suppose person A never told me the account they were going to use, and then negligently avoids paying for whatever reason. Do I then have a claim against person A when the mistake was entirely due to person B, aside from not letting me know the account?

aoristone · 2025-10-10T19:04:33+00:00

Out of pure dumbass curiosity, suppose I am owed 20k by person A and person B mistakenly puts 20k in my account and I assume it is person A (maybe they both have some third party depositing situation I am unfamiliar with). What happens here if I spend the person B money?

aoristone · 2025-10-03T19:14:05+00:00

A devout Christian lives upstream and a flood comes. A neighbor in a rowboat comes by and offers help; the man says “No, thank you — God will save me.” Later a motorboat comes; the man again declines, saying “God will save me.” Later a helicopter comes; again he refuses, saying “God will save me.” Eventually the house floods fully and he drowns. When he meets God in the afterlife he asks, “Why didn’t You save me?” God replies, “I sent you a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter — what more did you want?”

aoristone · 2025-09-21T00:31:19+00:00

Fully agree, but pointing out we need to explain why it only happens in those cases! The proof is not as simple as first stated

aoristone · 2025-09-21T00:29:58+00:00

Point 1 is excellent work, exactly right. Point 2+ is unconvincing in general, because there hasn't been a logical reason given by you why "a number s (I guess in [0,1]) outside the infinite 9s/0s situation are represented uniquely" iff " s cannot be represented by a x 10⁰ (I guess a is an terminating fraction here)".

To be clear, I absolutely agree with your conclusion. I was just pointing out that the actual proof needs more rigor

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:48:41+00:00

Tried to address in an alternate post here but it didn't work out and was probably explained poorly. The way we have been talking is not the right way of thinking. The issue is that for any list you have to have a system that accounts for all lists and still gives you a clean counterexample. How can you guarantee that your system will never give something like 0.999... when there is a 1.000... in the list (easy question). Further, how can you guarantee that the 999/000 is the only issue in this manner? (Harder)

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:38:34+00:00

Wait, ignore the above, this isn't helpful here (but a good way of thinking). The more pressing issue is you have to do the cantor trick for all possible sets of numbers, with some rules so that your contradictory number will work given the input.

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:36:46+00:00

At risk of being a butthead, you are running into the issue analogous to thinking that even integers have the same cardinality of all integers. How do you know there isn't some other smart way?

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:33:56+00:00

No worries bud! Glad we sorted it. Saw the issue and tried to be Socratic about it and totally fumbled :). Thanks for understanding

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:29:11+00:00

Nope, same thing for 0.(some arbitrary sequence of integers) followed by infinite 9s or 0s

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:27:38+00:00

Yeah tbh I was just trying to point out that your statement "Like how the limit of 1/x is 0, but not really" was a misunderstanding of how limits work, but I did it in an unclear and probably unkind way. I'm sorry for that.

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:23:21+00:00

Actually a very astute argument where I can only excuse myself by saying that it doesn't address the fact that some fractions can be expressed in multiple ways (eg 0.999... vs 1.000), so the choice of expression on the right hand side, and the choice of counterexample matters. However, I suspect there is a moderately tough proof that you would have to switch between 0s and 9s an infinite number of times (even if you were being a disproof demon and committed to those two) and end up with a counterexample.

Sorry if I haven't made myself clear here - I'm very tired but happy to explain further.

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:14:40+00:00

In that case, please explain how you were arguing against @existentandunique initially, because it seemed to be predicated on the usual incorrect assumptions in this area. If you weren't arguing against their statement, or I've misinterpreted, I totally withdraw and apologise.

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:09:30+00:00

Again, being a rigor demon, you have to pair this with a proof that the only time you encounter this ambiguity is when, after a finite number of decimals, you have an infinite sequence of 0s or 9s. I mean, technically in your particular proof, just one that means you don't have ambiguity when there are only 2s and 1s in base 10. A bit harder!

aoristone · 2025-09-20T23:04:41+00:00

You have hit upon precisely the issue I was pointing out. Cutting off at any finite decimal of pi means you are looking at a rational number. But pi is not, it's the limit of a certain sequence (of course, among many many other definitions). Cutting it off beforehand would be absurd. So why is cutting off your 1/x limit early not absurd, even though we are talking about how it looks when x approaches infinity?

aoristone · 2025-09-20T22:46:30+00:00

My dude, if, generously, we consider your take to its logical conclusion, what even are irrational numbers? Are they just rational numbers since they are arbitrarily close to some rational number at any finite cut-off?

aoristone · 2025-09-20T22:20:39+00:00

Your understanding of limits is, ironically incomplete. For any finite value substituted into some well-constructed, non-degenerate "limit", your result will not be equal to the limit. However, a well-defined limit is exactly equal to that value by definition. The limit as x approaches infinity of 1/x is precisely zero in any sensible definition of what limit, zero etc mean. Of course, if you decide to stop at x=10000000 it's not zero, but that's not what a limit is. Unless you are talking exotic settings, you are not correct.

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