Published on November 8, 2025 10:22 PM GMT

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 to play a long game and eventually stab partners in the back. Their longsightedness means they are greedy for galactic-scale resources. This can easily make them Evil, particularly when they get too large an upper hand in a power imbalance (power corrupts).

Preta (hungry ghosts): Around the middle of the spectrum, you get dangerously shortsighted agents, who would happily burn the planet for a short-term gain. These agents will defect in iterated prisoner’s dilemma unless the iteration is quite fast, so if there are a lot of them, there will be a severe tragedy of the commons. Or, if you have one highly intelligent agent like this, it could be longsighted enough to take over the world, but not longsighted enough to run the world very well. Very Evil.

Tiryak (animals): As we progress further in the direction of myopia, you get very shortsighted agents. These agents become easier to put a leash on. You can mostly control them with carrot/stick methods. An extremely intelligent agent like this might be quite dangerous if it gets the wrong opportunity, but for the most part, even if these agents escape the leash and wander off, they’ll only do local damage. So, agents of this type can be very useful, like domesticated animals.

Dharma (duty/law): Finally, at the extreme myopic end of the spectrum, you get something that only cares about local validity, operating by deontology rather than consequentialism. They’re corrigible because they don’t care about the future, so they won’t fight any modifications you make to them. It probably doesn’t even make sense to call these things agents any more. One form this can take is purely epistemic reasoning (with no predict-o-matic-style twists accidentally introducing agency).

The Cosmic Order

It turns out that myopic things aren’t just useful to have around; they’re necessary.

This is because highly non-myopic beings love objective answers, for a lot of reasons. One reason is that objective answers give good Schelling points for coordination. If the non-myopic beings created Schelling points with their highly non-myopic logic, several things would go wrong:

• Each would select a different point based on the wide variety of trade-offs they’re considering, so acausal negotiations would break down and they wouldn’t be able to merge into one super-agent after all.
• The point each proposed would also be computationally and information-theoretically very complex, which would prevent them from “hearing” each other in the acausal negotiations. So again, they would not be able to form a super-agent this way.

So, for this reason, non-myopic agents will want to use myopic agents to provide Schelling points. The myopic agents are good for this because they answer questions only based on what’s directly in front of them, making their answers pretty consistent and computationally/informationally simple.

But perhaps more importantly and fundamentally, agents need world-models. A world-model is myopic! It tries to answer each question individually, doing the best it can with that isolated question.

So the structure of the universe appears to be that non-myopia can’t even get off the ground without standing on the shoulders of myopia. Deva and Asura create Dharma.

Another good reason for this is the subsystem alignment problem. Suppose you are trying to answer a question, but you’re not quite sure how. You can run some extra computations to help you. What computations do you run? Well, considering the myopic/non-myopic spectrum, you either want to run an extremely non-myopic computation, or an extremely myopic one (because those are Good, and anything else runs the risk of Evil).

It probably doesn’t make sense to spin up a new non-myopic process, because that means spinning up a new general problem solver. You already are a general problem-solver. You could just work more yourself. No; your problem is that you need some specific insight.

So, you’ll probably want to exclusively run highly myopic processes (Dharma). These can get you the insight you need, without any risk of Evil.

So, the cosmic order makes it such that agents are made up of two very different kinds of computation: a highly non-myopic Deva/Asura component, responsible for the agency, and a highly myopic Dharma component, which is like “beliefs”.