There’s a good Rick and Morty episode with a similar premise: a crystal that shows how the user will die in the future. Morty uses it mindlessly to guide him to the fate he thinks he wants, but there are some unintended consequences.
1. I like that the first bit of advice is to take it off.
2. It recommends whatever would make you happiest in that moment, but not what would make the best version of yourself happiest, or what would maximize happiness in the long term.
Solving mazes requires some backtracking, I guess. Doing whatever will make you happiest in the moment won't make you happiest in the long run.
kybernetikos · 21m ago
I'm not actually sure how horrifying this is. It sounds like it's just a better executive planner to achieve your goals. As long as they are still your goals, surely you'd want the best executive planner available. I would say it's the goals that are important, not the limited way in which I work out how to achieve them.
It would certainly be horrifying if I were slowly tricked into giving up my goals and values, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening in this story.
Perhaps if I were to put the earring on it would tell me it would be better for me to keep wearing it.
djoldman · 36m ago
> It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest....The earring is never wrong.
> There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring’s advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.
> ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.
> Niderion-nomai’s commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.
The piece implies that
1. at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret.
2. not knowing what will make one happy is part of what makes one free.
I'm not sure I agree with these (it seems that 1. is a paradox) but it is an interesting thought experiment.
nine_k · 6m ago
> at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret.
Negative experience is crucial for learning, unfortunately. "If you never fail you don't try hard enough", etc. This is trivially understood in physical training: you have to get yourself exhausted to become stronger. It's much less of an accepted view in, so to say, mental training: doing thing that you later regret may teach you something valuable that always avoiding such decisions does not.
I do not necessarily support or reject this view, I'm just trying to clarify the point.
indoordin0saur · 15m ago
I think it's less confusing when you consider the very first thing the earring says: "better for you if you take me off". The wearer should rationally always regret not following its advice, including that first thing.
I think the paradox is here, and it comes from cheeky use of misleading language:
> ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.
The wearer doesn't really live any sort of life. Once it fully integrates with you your brain is mush, you're no longer experiencing anything. At some fuzzy point in there you've basically died and been replaced by the earring.
joshkel · 16m ago
> at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret.
Not necessarily. My take was that the practice of choosing may well be more valuable than the harm of the occasional regretted choice.
kens · 9m ago
I read a science fiction story (maybe 40 years ago in Analog?) about a somewhat similar device that provided life guidance. This device would detect if the choice you were currently making would likely result in your death and would flash a red light to warn you. (Something about using quantum multi-worlds to determine if you die.) Does this story ring a bell with anyone?
"The parable of the earring was not about the dangers of using technology that wasn't Truly Part Of You, which would indeed have been the kind of dystopianism I dislike. It was about the dangers of becoming too powerful yourself."
As I said in a comment on that post, 13 years ago:
"any parable that's about being too powerful is almost necessarily also about technology, because it's technology that allows the average person to get that power"
ameliaquining · 1h ago
True, but concerns about LLMs with anything like current capabilities are of the "Truly Part of You" flavor, not the "becoming too powerful" flavor.
bananaflag · 2h ago
Thanks! Even though I have the whole Squid314 archive, I had forgotten about this follow-up.
gnramires · 11m ago
That's a cute story, I certainly like its tone of mystery.
However, the premise seems a bit wrong (or at least the narrator is wrong). If your brain actually degenerates from usage of the ring (and is no longer used in daily life, acting only reflexively), the premise that you are the happiest from following the ring might be flat out wrong. I think happiness (I tend to think in terms of well-being, which let's say ranks every good thing you can feel, by definition -- and assume the "good" is something philosophically infinitely wise) is probably something like a whole-brain or at least a-lot-of-brain phenomenon. It's not just a result of what you see or what you have in life. In fact I'm sure two persons can have very similar external conditions and wildly different internal lives (for an obvious example compare the bed-ridden man who spends his day on beautiful dreams, and the other who is depressed or in despair).
What the ring seems to do is to put you in situations where you would be the happiest, if only you were not wearing the earring.
The earring that actually guides you toward a better inner life perhaps offers only very minimal and strategic advice. Perhaps that's what the 'Lotus octohedral earring' does :)
Jun8 · 3h ago
Compare/contrast the Whispering earring/LLM chat with The Room from Stalker, each one is terrifying in its aspect: One because it eventually coaxes you to become a shallow shell of yourself, the other by plucking an unexpected wish from the deepest part of your psyche. I wonder what the Earring would advise if one were to ask it if one should enter The Room.
summa_tech · 4h ago
A distant relative, no doubt, of Stanislaw Lem's "Automatthew's Friend" (1964). A perfectly rational, indestructible, selfless, well-meaning in-ear AI assistant. In the end, out of nothing but the deepest care for its owner's mental state in a hopeless situation, it advocates efficient and quick suicide.
adamgordonbell · 1h ago
Wow, small world, I just made a podcast episode about the dangers of turning your brain off when using Agentic coding solution and referenced the whispering earring as my metaphor.
I feel like if you use the agentic tools to become more ambitious the you'll probably be fine. But if you just work at a feature factory where you crank out things as fast as you can AI coding is going to eat your brain.
I want someone to try building a variant that just gives you timely cues about generally good mental health practices. Suggestions could be contextually based on a local-only app that listens to you and your environment, and delivered to a wireless earbud. When you're in a situation that might cause you stress, it reminds you to take some deep breaths. When you're in a situation where you might be tempted to react with hostility, it suggests that you pause for a few seconds. When you've been sitting in front of your computer too long it suggests that maybe you'd like to go for a short walk.
If the moral of the story is that having access to magically good advice is dangerous because it shifts us to habitual obedience ... can a similar device shift us to mental habits that are actually good for us?
ryandv · 3h ago
The moral of the story is that neocortical facilities (vaguely corresponding to what distinguishes modern humans) depend on free will. If you want to merely enthral yourself to voices of the gods a la Julian Jaynes' bicameral man, you can, but this is a regression to a prior stage of humanity's development - away from egoic, free willed man, and backwards to more of a reactive automaton, merely a servant of (possibly digital) gods.
abeppu · 2h ago
I think there's a meaningful difference between a tool to remind oneself to take a beat before speaking vs being told what to say. For example, cues that help you avoid an impulsive reaction of anger I think is a step away from being a reactive automaton.
patcon · 2h ago
My sensibility is that agency is about "noticing". The content of information seems perhaps less important than the attention allocation mechanism that brings our attention to something.
If you write all your own words, but without an ability to direct your attention to what needed words conjured around it, did you really do anything important at all? (Yes, that's perhaps controversial :) )
ryandv · 2h ago
Anger is just another aspect of the human condition, and is absolutely justified in cases of grave injustice (case in point: Nazis, racism). It's not for some earring to decide when it is justly applied and when it is not; that is the prerogative of humanity.
In either case none of this cueing or prompting needs to be exogenous or originate from some external technology. The Eastern mystics have developed totally endogenous psychotechnologies that serve this same purpose, without the need to atrophy your psyche.
abeppu · 2h ago
Absolutely anger is sometimes justified.
But people are also angry when e.g. someone cuts them off in traffic. The initial feeling of anger may not be appropriate. A cue to help you avoid reacting immediately from hostility isn't so much deciding whether anger is appropriate but giving you the space to make that judgement reflectively rather than impulsively. Even if anger is appropriate, the action you want to take on reflection may not be the first one that arises.
"The eastern mystics" managed to do a lot of things, but often with a large amount of dedicated practice. Extremely practiced meditators can also reach intense states of concentration, equanimity etc, but the fact that it's not strictly necessary to have supportive tools to develop these skills doesn't mean that supportive tooling wouldn't help a lot of people.
ryandv · 1h ago
> the fact that it's not strictly necessary to have supportive tools to develop these skills doesn't mean that supportive tooling wouldn't help a lot of people.
I would posit that the only faculty developed in wielding such supportive tooling, is skill at using those tools; when the real goal is the cultivation of character, the construction of a "virtual engine" [0] that governs action. Consider analogously that brain training apps' claims to improve general intelligence are specious at best, and don't seem to develop anything other than the ability to use the app.
Since, in the case of the earring, this virtual governor has already been outsourced to an external entity, there is no need to cultivate one for one's self. Not only does this miss out on the personal development attained in said process, it also risks enthralling you to a construct of someone else's design; and one should choose carefully at which pantheon they pour libations, for its value systems might not always align with one's own.
"Will certainly never align," I would say. But what matter? Long enough and "one's own" becomes specious, of course.
ryandv · 1h ago
"The king is dead; long live the king!" is the feudal manifestation of the archetype of the slain and resurrected god. In similar fashion one's own virtual governor requires constant renewal and revision.
throwanem · 1h ago
Don't you think Leary's term would land better here? Or have you avoided it precisely for such connotation? I remember having some trouble with that for a while in my twenties.
ryandv · 1h ago
I have not actually familiarized myself with Leary's work. The closest approach would have been via Robert Anton Wilson and the rest of the ramifications through the occult and western esoteric corpus.
throwanem · 48m ago
Well, Wilson is a preferable source for everything anyway. Less credulous, and so far as I know all he ever sought to sell was books.
throwanem · 1h ago
It is strictly necessary not to have supportive tools in order to develop these skills. Sentience and the ability to learn from experience are all that is essentially required. Past that there are no crutches and no shortcuts, because you have mistaken for disability the refusal to grow.
Barrin92 · 51m ago
>can a similar device shift us to mental habits
I think the moral of the story is that instead of reaching for something to "shift you" start doing the shifting. You are a living mind, rather than asking for some device to affect you, assert your own will. Don't avoid stress and conflict, embrace it, that's life. This instinctive demand for some therapeutic, external helper is what's wrong in the story, people craving to be put into passivity.
This need not even be a technology, The moral version of this could be some priest lecturing you on good and evil, some paternalistic boss making your decisions for you, the crux here is submission, being acted upon rather than actively embracing your own nature.
tacitusarc · 2h ago
I think this ignores the internal conflict in most people’s psyche. The simplest form of this is long term vs short term thinking, but certainly our desires pull us in competing, sometimes opposite, directions.
Am I the me who loves cake or the me who wants to be in shape? Am I the me who wants to watch movies or who wants to write a book?
These are not simply different peaks of a given utility function, they are different utility functions entirely.
Soon after being put on, the whispering earring would go insane.
No comments yet
y-curious · 1h ago
This reminds me of another story that I saw posted on HN and has provided lots of fodder for idle conversations: Manna[1]. It's a less mystical version of the whispering earring.
https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Crystal
1. I like that the first bit of advice is to take it off.
2. It recommends whatever would make you happiest in that moment, but not what would make the best version of yourself happiest, or what would maximize happiness in the long term.
Solving mazes requires some backtracking, I guess. Doing whatever will make you happiest in the moment won't make you happiest in the long run.
It would certainly be horrifying if I were slowly tricked into giving up my goals and values, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening in this story.
Perhaps if I were to put the earring on it would tell me it would be better for me to keep wearing it.
> There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring’s advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.
> ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.
> Niderion-nomai’s commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.
The piece implies that
1. at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret.
2. not knowing what will make one happy is part of what makes one free.
I'm not sure I agree with these (it seems that 1. is a paradox) but it is an interesting thought experiment.
Negative experience is crucial for learning, unfortunately. "If you never fail you don't try hard enough", etc. This is trivially understood in physical training: you have to get yourself exhausted to become stronger. It's much less of an accepted view in, so to say, mental training: doing thing that you later regret may teach you something valuable that always avoiding such decisions does not.
I do not necessarily support or reject this view, I'm just trying to clarify the point.
I think the paradox is here, and it comes from cheeky use of misleading language:
> ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.
The wearer doesn't really live any sort of life. Once it fully integrates with you your brain is mush, you're no longer experiencing anything. At some fuzzy point in there you've basically died and been replaced by the earring.
Not necessarily. My take was that the practice of choosing may well be more valuable than the harm of the occasional regretted choice.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.l...
However, the premise seems a bit wrong (or at least the narrator is wrong). If your brain actually degenerates from usage of the ring (and is no longer used in daily life, acting only reflexively), the premise that you are the happiest from following the ring might be flat out wrong. I think happiness (I tend to think in terms of well-being, which let's say ranks every good thing you can feel, by definition -- and assume the "good" is something philosophically infinitely wise) is probably something like a whole-brain or at least a-lot-of-brain phenomenon. It's not just a result of what you see or what you have in life. In fact I'm sure two persons can have very similar external conditions and wildly different internal lives (for an obvious example compare the bed-ridden man who spends his day on beautiful dreams, and the other who is depressed or in despair).
What the ring seems to do is to put you in situations where you would be the happiest, if only you were not wearing the earring.
The earring that actually guides you toward a better inner life perhaps offers only very minimal and strategic advice. Perhaps that's what the 'Lotus octohedral earring' does :)
I feel like if you use the agentic tools to become more ambitious the you'll probably be fine. But if you just work at a feature factory where you crank out things as fast as you can AI coding is going to eat your brain.
Link: https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/#the-whispering-ear...
If the moral of the story is that having access to magically good advice is dangerous because it shifts us to habitual obedience ... can a similar device shift us to mental habits that are actually good for us?
If you write all your own words, but without an ability to direct your attention to what needed words conjured around it, did you really do anything important at all? (Yes, that's perhaps controversial :) )
In either case none of this cueing or prompting needs to be exogenous or originate from some external technology. The Eastern mystics have developed totally endogenous psychotechnologies that serve this same purpose, without the need to atrophy your psyche.
"The eastern mystics" managed to do a lot of things, but often with a large amount of dedicated practice. Extremely practiced meditators can also reach intense states of concentration, equanimity etc, but the fact that it's not strictly necessary to have supportive tools to develop these skills doesn't mean that supportive tooling wouldn't help a lot of people.
I would posit that the only faculty developed in wielding such supportive tooling, is skill at using those tools; when the real goal is the cultivation of character, the construction of a "virtual engine" [0] that governs action. Consider analogously that brain training apps' claims to improve general intelligence are specious at best, and don't seem to develop anything other than the ability to use the app.
Since, in the case of the earring, this virtual governor has already been outsourced to an external entity, there is no need to cultivate one for one's self. Not only does this miss out on the personal development attained in said process, it also risks enthralling you to a construct of someone else's design; and one should choose carefully at which pantheon they pour libations, for its value systems might not always align with one's own.
[0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-6-aristotle-kant-and-ev...
I think the moral of the story is that instead of reaching for something to "shift you" start doing the shifting. You are a living mind, rather than asking for some device to affect you, assert your own will. Don't avoid stress and conflict, embrace it, that's life. This instinctive demand for some therapeutic, external helper is what's wrong in the story, people craving to be put into passivity.
This need not even be a technology, The moral version of this could be some priest lecturing you on good and evil, some paternalistic boss making your decisions for you, the crux here is submission, being acted upon rather than actively embracing your own nature.
Am I the me who loves cake or the me who wants to be in shape? Am I the me who wants to watch movies or who wants to write a book?
These are not simply different peaks of a given utility function, they are different utility functions entirely.
Soon after being put on, the whispering earring would go insane.
No comments yet
1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wvH1UzhiKk
And the original is fully analog.