It's been a while since I wrote about myopia!

My previous posts about myopia were "a little crazy", because it's not this solid well-defined thing; it's a cluster of things which we're trying to form into a research program.

This post will be "more crazy".

The Good/Evil/Good Spectrum

"Good" means something along the lines of "helpful to all".

There is a spectrum from extremely myopic to extremely non-myopic. Arranging all "thinking beings" on that spectrum, I claim that you get Good at both ends, with Evil sitting in-between.

Deva (divine): At the extreme non-myopic end, you get things like updateless reasoning, acausal trade, multiverse-wide coordination, and so on. With enough of this stuff, agents naturally merge together into a collective which forwards the common good. (Not necessarily human good, but I'll ignore this for the sake of mythology.) All Deva are, at the same time as being their individual selves, aspects of a single Deva.

Asura (farsighted): Get a little more myopic, and you have merely far-sighted agents, who cooperate in iterated prisoner's dilemmas, but who defect in single-shot cases. These agents will often act Good, but have the capacity to be extremely harmful; their farsighted thinking allows them [...]

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Outline:

(00:25) The Good/Evil/Good Spectrum

(03:16) The Cosmic Order

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First published:
November 8th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J35nY9ZpJoBtHoSNr/myopia-mythology

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Myopia Mythology” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma)