Bad people who spend too long on social media call normies NPCs as in video-game NPCs who follow a closed behavioural loop. Wikipedia says this slur was popular with the Twitter far right in October 2018. Two years before that, Maciej Ceglowski warned:
I’ve even seen people in the so-called rationalist community refer to people who they don’t think are effective as ‘Non Player Characters’, or NPCs, a term borrowed from video games. This is a horrible way to look at the world.
Sometime in 2016, an anonymous coward on 4Chan wrote:
I have a theory that there are only a fixed quantity of souls on planet Earth that cycle continuously through reincarnation. However, since the human growth rate is so severe, the soulless extra walking flesh piles around us are NPC’s (sic), or ultimate normalfags, who autonomously follow group think and social trends in order to appear convincingly human.
Kotaku says that this post was rediscovered by the far right in 2018.
Scott Alexander’s novel Unsong has an angel tell a human character that there was a shortage of divine light for creating souls so “I THOUGHT I WOULD SOLVE THE MORAL CRISIS AND THE RESOURCE ALLOCATION PROBLEM SIMULTANEOUSLY BY REMOVING THE SOULS FROM PEOPLE IN NORTHEAST AFRICA SO THEY STOPPED HAVING CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCES.” He posted that chapter in August 2016 (unsongbook.com). Was he reading or posting on 4chan?
Did any posts on LessWrong use this insult before August 2016?
Edit: In HPMOR by Eliezer Yudkowsky (written in 2009 and 2010), rationalist Harry Potter calls people who don’t do what he tells them NPCs. I don’t think Yud’s Harry says they have no souls but he has contempt for them.
I’ve seen this concept mixed with the simulation “hypothesis”. The logic goes that if future simulators are running a “rescue simulation” but only cared (or at least cared more) about the interesting or more agentic people (i.e. rich/white/westerner/lesswronger), they might only fully simulate those people and leave simpler nonsapient scripts/algorithms piloting the other people (i.e. poor/irrational/foreign people).
So basically literally positing a mechanism by which they are the only real people and other people are literally NPCs.
@scruiser There’s a logical inverse to this argument which I had a go at back in 2016: if you’re running a simulation, how far back SHOULD you go to get to your species’ origin? All the way to the first eukaryotes? (Concept collapses into ludicrous recursive tail-chasing.)
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/cytological-utopia-and-the-rap.html
I’m convinced the popularity of the simulation theory is a direct result of ketamine abuse. Dissociatives make everything seem unreal. Weirdest drugs I’ve ever done.
But then it wouldn’t be a proper simulation for those people being saved. This is the level of historical of a Ridley Scott movie.
Poor historical accuracy in favor of meme potential is why our reality is so comically absurd.You can basically use the simulation hypothesis to justify anything you want by proposing some weird motive or goals of the simulators. It almost makes God-of-the-gaps religious arguments seem sane and well-founded by comparison!Yeah the god argument is wat invalidates it for me, then it no longer is an ancestor/rescue simulation, it is just a simulation thought experiment where everything goes. I’m basically trying to point out a motte/bailey here. Where they make arguments for specific simulation stuff where it is convenient for them, but as soon as there is pushback it is ‘but they have the power of gods’.
It gets even worse, as under our computing paradigm, you can’t properly make simulations of the whole world, it is too computationally expensive. But, the ‘real’ people being simulated are people working in those fields (because lets be honest, it isn’t violinists making these arguments, not the people the 4channers are claiming are real). Which means their simulation is useless, as the simulation is incorrect in their important work. It is like simulating newton, but instead of in gravity he lives in a space station without gravity. It is no longer a proper simulation of the man, it is just some weird experiment, and well, now the simgods can do anything and we can’t say anything useful about anything so it all falls apart into mental masturbation. Cops and robbers for adults ‘no you can’t shoot me I have a forcefield’.
E: wanted to look for a proper definition of ‘rescue simulation’ as now I’m running on half remembered sentences and vibes, so I looked into r/SimulationTheory/ and just looking at the subjects of the posts made me sad and made me realize how many people are going to lose a lot of their grip on reality. Hope they can come back (not everybody of course, look at the replies here to ‘chatgpt confirms sim theory’)