You know the lockdown has dragged on for too long when people are selling their souls on Twitter.
Normally the soul-selling is of the NDA-for-a-six-figure-job kind, which is par for the course. But this time it went way beyond that. A self-described desert witch on Twitter offered people $10 in return for their signature on a stringent 54-point contract giving up possession of their souls, whatever that may mean. Twelve people took the deal.
Since I’m a Rationalist, and this happened in my corner of Twitter, and no-one knows how to define this corner except through vague associations with Rationality, and since everyone knows that Rationalists are atheists who don’t believe in souls, a common reaction was that the Rationalists are at it again.
But the actual Rationalists who chimed in seemed unanimous that selling your soul to a desert witch on Twitter is a really dumb thing to do. Even if in the grand scheme of things this is all just online silliness, I think it’s a useful case study of the difference between the popular conception of “rationalists” and someone who actually spent years in the community contemplating Rationalist questions of knowledge, confidence, and decision theory.
And so I would posit that Rationality is knowing better than to sign a contract selling your soul for $10, regardless of whether you believe in souls.
I don’t speak authoritatively for all “Rationalists”, of course. No one can really do that. I’m using the term because before I knew about Rationality the most I would’ve been able to say about selling your soul is that I have a hunch that it’s dumb. Rationality introduced me to many frameworks that can explicate why exactly is dumb. Since frameworks make for better blog posts than hunches, below are the Rationalist physical materialist reasons not to sell your soul.
Advocatus Diaboli
Let’s start with the devil’s case. Why may it be a good idea to sell your soul for $10?
One possible reason: it’s just a performance, art for art’s sake. I certainly believe that art deserves its sake! But it’s important to note that in this case Liminal Warmth, the soul proprietor, is the artist. She came up with the idea, she drew up the contract, she decides what to do with the souls. The seller is hardly a co-creator in this, they’re more of a prop. This is somewhat akin to letting a tattoo artist you don’t know ink whatever they want on your back. It’s art, sure, but it’s a very imprudent way to contribute to art on your part.
Another common reason that people brought up is that this is credible atheism signaling. I can imagine that if someone is surrounded by atheist friends who for some reason constantly suspect them of being a closet believer, this stunt will convince them of the sincerity of one’s apostasy. But it’s easy to signal atheism by committing some sin that will only be punished by God, if they exist. Curse God’s name in an empty church or whatever. There’s no reason to signal atheism by signing a contract with an actual person who pays you actual money for it.
Someone commented that being against soul-selling is a weak signal that I am unsure about the existence of souls. This argument has merit. Rationality is the art of not pretending you don’t know things. Pretending you’re not sure about the existence of souls when you’re a functional atheist is fake humility, a social defense mechanism as opposed to good epistemology. But there’s separate intellectual humility about being sure that you’re answering the right question. My arguments in this post are completely independent of the question of existence of magical souls that go to heaven or hell or are reincarnated or whatever.
But before we get to complex issues of meta-humility, let’s start with the basic numbers.
Contractions
$10 is a very bad price for your soul. It’s not a lot of money. But it’s a lot more than zero.
As a simple matter of finance, signing away your soul is giving up on the option of selling your soul at a later date for a higher price. Just two days after she filled her roster of souls for $10 each, Lim has offered me $22 for mine. That’s an appreciation rate of 120% in just two days! At this rate my soul will be worth more than Bezos’ entire fortune in just over two months, and I haven’t even shopped it around yet. Taking the first offer you get for an item you can’t replace is just bad business, regardless of what the item is worth to you.
But $10 is still money, and accepting it binds you to the contract. Which leaves one with two options: to abide by the contract or to disregard it.
Abiding by the contract is really bad. Section IV.E obliges the seller to “defend and support the Buyer’s claim of ownership […] to any person who challenges them on the matter of the Soul’s ownership”. Does this compel the seller to respond to all the tweets attacking Lim for this project? Defend her honor in single combat? Did they ask what it means before signing?
IV.N states that the seller “agrees to willingly act in accordance with the Buyer’s wishes subject to the rights and obligations provided by a record in any such ledger” The seller of course doesn’t decide what the ledger is and which wishes it obliges them to act in accordance with. The scope of the obligations this contract imposes seems constrained mostly by Lim’s personal goodwill.
Disregarding the contract is much much worse.
Outside of a small circle of family and friends, almost any productive cooperation between people is based on contracts and agreements that people are presumed to enter into in good faith. I collect a salary per my employment contract. I have fulfilled 20+ commissions per the promise made on this page. I made dozens of bets online and in person and paid every single one that I lost. I’ve saved thousands of dollars for myself and people I know by borrowing and lending between us with no intermediaries.
There’s no essential difference between my employment contract and a $20 bet I make online. Some contracts may be enforced by a third party, but what compels that third party to participate? Probably just another contract, and their conscience. Ultimately, it’s all about people just agreeing to play by the rules for everyone’s benefit. Both the friend betting me $20 and my employer enter into the deal because of my reputation for honoring contracts, not because they plan to summon violent enforcement. This reputation is immensely valuable to me, and I go to great lengths to keep it immaculate.
Taking $10 to sign a contract that one never intends to comply with is a huge stain on that reputation. The small amount involved makes it even worse — if the person is willing to tarnish their contract-abiding reputation for a mere $10 there must not be much of it left to tarnish. Several people commented that since souls are like totally fake the contract is like totally non-binding. I would think twice about hiring, lending anything, or making any deals with a person who says this sort of thing in public.
Haters Gonna Hate
It’s hard to find a good poll on belief in souls per se, but 89% of Americans believe in God and 72% believe in heaven, the latter probably being a lower bound on belief in souls. And all these millions of people are not going to look very favorably at selling your soul.
No matter what you personally believe, your existence is not independent of those people. There are almost certainly soul-believers among people in your life, although if you’re the sort of obnoxious atheist who’d sell their soul online they probably don’t want to talk to you about it. Divia Eden polled her followers, heavily selected for being at least Rationalist-adjacent, and a third of them said that they wouldn’t marry a person who sold their soul. That’s a lot of respect incinerated with a lot of people.
People chimed in saying that they welcome being disrespected by soul-believers. Thinking that someone having a belief you disagree with on an ill-defined metaphysical topic excludes them forever from mattering to you is crazy. It’s cult thinking. It’s a worldview of us vs. them where a single questionable belief puts someone in the “them” camp.
There’s a difference between doing your thing with a conscious awareness that you risk disapproval, and courting haters on purpose. The latter is vice signaling, and even to atheists vice is not virtue.
The Simulation Argument
There’s good business to be made in buying souls in bulk and holding them for ransom for when some of the sellers find religion or change their mind. If we think that a religious person will be willing to pay $10,000 to reacquire their soul, selling it for $10 amounts to a bet at 1000:1 odds against the chance that either you or someone like a spouse will think differently about souls at any point in your future lives. Whether your reference class is hardcore atheists who later find religion or the number of foundational beliefs a single person themselves will change their mind about throughout their life, these odds are terrible.
It’s a mark of intellectual laziness to be overconfident on subject one put little thought into.
Section I.A of the contract defines a “soul” as “the spiritual, immortal, and immaterial essence of their self which exists independently and distinctly from their material being”. Suppose that in the next few decades humans create technology for digital brain emulation, and as a result the vast majority of activity in the knowledge economy will be performed by “Ems” who may share their earnings with other copies and the original human. A digital emulation certainly exists distinct from a person “material being”, and counts as “spiritual” and “immortal” for reasonable definitions of these words. Did these people just sign away rights to their digital emulations for $10?
It took me 15 minutes from seeing the contract to come up with the example of Ems. If I had months to ponder and dozens of people to consult with about the possible things that would fall under this particular definition of “soul”, I may be comfortable naming a price for signing this contract. But everyone who signed it did so within 24 hours of seeing it, and most of them probably didn’t even put in 15 minutes of actual thought into it.
Just because you can’t immediately think of a reason not to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it, not even for $10.
Newcomb’s Souls
A prime example of the difference between the common stereotype of “rationality” and Rationality as practiced in the LessWrong community is their answers to Newcomb’s dilemma. The setup is this:
A superintelligence from another galaxy, whom we shall call Omega, comes to Earth and sets about playing a strange little game. In this game, Omega selects a human being, sets down two boxes in front of them, and flies away.
Box A is transparent and contains a thousand dollars.
Box B is opaque, and contains either a million dollars, or nothing.You can take both boxes, or take only box B.
And the twist is that Omega has put a million dollars in box B iff Omega has predicted that you will take only box B.
Omega has been correct on each of 100 observed occasions so far – everyone who took both boxes has found box B empty and received only a thousand dollars; everyone who took only box B has found B containing a million dollars. (We assume that box A vanishes in a puff of smoke if you take only box B; no one else can take box A afterward.)
Before you make your choice, Omega has flown off and moved on to its next game. Box B is already empty or already full.
Omega drops two boxes on the ground in front of you and flies off.
Do you take both boxes, or only box B?
The stereotypical “rationalist”, fresh off an introductory course to game theory of philosophy, says that it’s irrational to leave money on the table once Omega has already departed and takes both boxes. Two-boxing is very similar to selling your soul. It involves accepting a small cash benefit in exchange for a cost that could be zero or could be hugely negative, and is justified mostly by the fact that it’s hard to think about what the cost actually is.
The Rationalist, on the other hand, should walk away with a million dollars (and their soul) instead of one thousand (and $10). The superiority of one-boxing can be formalized mathematically by using a decision theory that is richer than the intuitive one that justifies two-boxing.
I was initially convinced of one-boxing by the casual intuition for that decision theory. Consider that a likely way for Omega to predict your choice is to simulate your consciousness at the moment of choosing. So if you find yourself in the conscious state of making Newcomb’s choice, you should think it equally likely that you are the real person who will keep the money or the simulation inside Omega that will determine the content of box B. Or in other words, that the choice you make “for real” and the choice Omega’s simulation of you makes are one and the same.
Like selling souls on Twitter, Newcomb’s problem may appear to be some esoteric thing that’s of interest only to nerds. But humans always try to guess each other’s behavior and decisions, and they reward and punish each other based on these predictions. Even if other people’s predictions aren’t 100% accurate like Omega’s, they’re still more accurate than chance and depend on the person’s real behavior. The best way to make people predict that you’re trustworthy and reliable is to be that. In any human interaction involving trust and reputation, Newcomb-like problems are the norm:
I know at least two people who are unreliable and untrustworthy, and who blame the fact that they can’t hold down jobs (and that nobody cuts them any slack) on bad luck rather than on their own demeanors. Both consistently believe that they are taking the best available action whenever they act unreliable and untrustworthy. Both brush off the idea of “becoming a sucker”. Neither of them is capable of acting unreliable while signaling reliability. Both of them would benefit from actually becoming trustworthy.
Your life among other people depends to a huge extent on other people’s models of you. If you do things that cause others to model you as someone financially naïve, contemptuous of contracts, callous about being hated, intellectually lazy, and overconfident, you are causing yourself a much bigger harm than is made up for by 10 mere dollars.
Even worse, your behavior informs not only other people’s models of you but your own. If you begin to suspect that a decision you made was arrogant and shortsighted but refuse to correct for it (by offering Lim $50 and a sincere apology in exchange for the prompt return of your soul) you are making yourself much likelier to make arrogant and shortsighted decisions in the future.
What else can we say about simulated models-of-you? These models are spiritual in the sense of tracking your spirit, the sort of person you are and your persistent character abstracted from any particular circumstance. They are immortal, persisting after your death in the minds of others. They certainly exist independently from your material being. So if you’re wondering whether Lim’s definition of souls points to anything “real”, this is the obvious candidate.
And so selling your soul is really bad for your soul, regardless of whether you think you have one.
PUTANUMONIT 
I agree in this case that the deal sounds pretty bad, specifically because of the highly-detailed exploitable contract. But I disagree with your more general case against soul-selling, as applied to cases where the deal has less risk of unwanted legal munchkinry.
My counterpoint mostly boils down to: there’s an important disanalogy between soul-selling and your tattoo-artist example. Specifically, in the latter case, you don’t get to know in advance what you’re going to get out of it, but in the former case, you do; thus, if you’re confident that the aesthetic benefits of having sold your soul for a trivial sum outweigh the costs in social disapproval and potential later regret, it can end up being a perfectly sensible decision.
(Or the signaling benefits, I suppose, but realistically, I expect the aesthetic benefits to be more important)
Thus, the right analogy here isn’t getting an unpredictable-in-advance tattoo; it’s picking a tattoo you didn’t design yourself out of some artist’s catalog, and getting that one, because you like the look of it. (And, as in the soul case, have weighed the benefits against the social disapproval and potential later regret and found them to be larger.) That’s a thing plenty of people do and find ultimately worth having done.
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I may misunderstand, but a lot of your argument seems to hinge on reputation – reputation for contempt of contract, for intellectual laziness, etc. But based on what I see on that person’s (Lim) twitter, the process one would go through to sell their soul isn’t neccessitating that one identify themselves.
They seem to have started requiring driver licence photos (https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1366817390118408194), but that should be easy enough to falsify if one wants to. Then they are going to PayPal you the money – and I’m not sure if in the US you are exposing your real name to whoever sends you money via PayPal (but I acknowledge this counterargument breaks down if you do). So if you can sell your soul and get paid under a fake name… what chances are anyone (even Lim herself, assuming you ever act in a way that breaks the contract and is known to her) will ever be able to connect you (and your reputation) with the act of selling your soul?
This counterargument has one more failure point, though – if setting up a fake driver ID, a paypal with a fake name, and otherwise following through with this transaction will take more time than you’d earn $10 with, this may fail on opportunity cost grounds.
(as an aside, does raising this objection put me in a “would think twice about hiring, lending anything, or making any deals with” group of people?)
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“(as an aside, does raising this objection put me in a “would think twice about hiring, lending anything, or making any deals with” group of people?)”
…yes? Obviously, this requires knowing who you are and how you think about these things, but if your attitude is pretty much the same as Nelson Muntz on shoplifting, it’s hard to believe that you wouldn’t take advantage of any other circumstance as long as you were appropriately-for-you certain that you wouldn’t get punished for it. It’s true that paying the cost of doing the bad thing requires people knowing that you did it, but that doesn’t make it not bad.
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Others’ models of you may persist after your death, but they are not immortal. Please pretend this commenting system supported GIFs and I supplied a heartbreaking one from Coco.
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…what?
Any reasonably thoughtful theist could have told you that’s not a thing. Even the generic, “or whatever” part (at least among the Christians I know).
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You can tell that I haven’t had much need to come up with creative ways to signal atheism recently. What would a Christian apostate do that will make Christians immediately say “oh shit, he’s really going to hell for this one” that doesn’t involve harming
other people?
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Technically speaking, suicide fits the bill. It’s a sin that can’t be repented (because you’re dead) and it doesn’t directly harm other people. Of course, loved ones will be distraught by your death, but any action that credibly signals damnation will similarly cause sorrow in believing friends.
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According to Mark 3:28-30, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the only unforgiveable sin.
Unfortunately no Christians I know agree on what exactly that would entail… Cursing the Holy Spirit in a church could actually come pretty close to doing it though, by those verses.
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Anaxagoras and Tarmagant make good points here; suicide and apostasy are historically just about the only things that Christian teaching has suspected of being unforgivably or irreversibly sinful. And they’re quite contentious– many Christians think it’s crucial that no sin can put someone beyond God’s ability to restore and forgive. The notion of a “worse” sin is not really relevant, especially in Protestant theology: everyone is condemned by their sin, so it’s accepting salvation, or not, that really decides things. In short, from a Christian perspective there’s no way* to credibly signal that you expect to be an atheist your whole life– short of actually dying, which has obvious disadvantages– and that’s intentional.
*including “selling your soul”. That’s just folk superstition.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_sin
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Wait, there seems to be a misunderstanding here.
Jacob didn’t suggest “cursing God’s name in an empty church” etc. as a signal of guaranteed never-changing atheism, merely as a signal of atheism: a way to indicate that you really mean it when you say “I don’t believe in any god”.
For that, you don’t need to do something that (conditional on some particular version of theism) is guaranteed to lead to eternal damnation. Indeed, since Jacob was originally talking about signalling atheism to other atheists (though in the comments he switched to talking about signalling it to theists, presumably because that’s what the comment he replied to assumed he meant), you specifically wouldn’t want something dependent on the detailed minutiae of a particular religion’s doctrine. Most of those other atheists probably aren’t too familiar with exactly what any given theologian does or doesn’t think counts as “blaspheming against the Holy Spirit”.
The obvious problem with “cursing God’s name in an empty church” is that if the church is empty no one can tell you actually did it, which makes it a pretty useless form of signalling. But I’d have thought that if you really wanted to, you could stand up in front of your atheist friends and say something like “If there is any sort of god, may he strike me dead and send my soul to hell right now”, which I think someone merely pretending to disbelieve would be very reluctant to do. (And maybe more likely to really disbelieve, after doing it and conspicuously not being struck down.) Add specific denunciations of specific gods if you like.
The other obvious issue with this justification for selling your soul is that surely it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist, or at least hardly exists. Has anyone here openly declared their atheism and yet been suspected by others of closet theism? I’m betting not.
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Fair points. Some thoughts:
– The implicit sales pitch in the original Twitter thread is something like “if you really believe materialism, you should value your ‘soul’ at $0, therefore you should be willing to sell it to me for $10″. (Which I agree is silly even for a committed materialist.)
– Part of what’s being signaled in such a transaction, as Jacob points out in another section, is a high degree of confidence that the seller won’t value their soul substantially higher in the future. In other words it’s fair to read soul-selling as an attempt to signal that one expects to stay a materialist forever.
– Yes, that fails to model (at least some forms of) religion accurately, as does Jacob’s cursing-in-church proposal. In that sense cursing-in-church is no worse an option than soul-selling, and less risky. But only in kind of a vacuous sense.
– I agree that none of this discussion is about signaling anything to theists. But doing the signaling implies at least some modelling of what a theist’s beliefs and preferences would be. It strikes me as weird that a rationalist could credibly signal “I will never believe X”, even to people who don’t believe X, by doing something that shows they don’t understand X very well.
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I don’t think the sense in which cursing God in a church is a better option than selling your soul (when your goal is signalling) is vacuous. Both of them are things someone would be very unlikely to do if not a very convinced atheist, which is what you need for signalling purposes.
I was a Christian once upon a time. I didn’t think that cursing the name of God in a church, or challenging God to strike me dead, or selling my soul for $10, would necessarily mean I would be damned. I still would absolutely not have done any of those things. I also wouldn’t have done any of them while I was in the process of reconsidering how likely Christianity is to be right. If I were to do any of those things, it would be very good evidence of my having thoroughly changed my mind. (I have no intention of doing any of them now either, as it happens; but I’m certainly much less unlikely to do them than I was as a Christian.)
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Depends on the denomination.
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I don’t buy the contract-breaking reputation argument. The law allows you to break pretty much any contract you want, with a few exceptions; you just have to reimburse the other party for the cost you impose on them by doing so. And I don’t think this is arbitrary; I think it accords better with most people’s understandings of what a contract is and what it is supposed to do than this idea that contracts should be inviolable.
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Most contracts made by normal people assume that both parties are acting in good faith and that they will not try to find a gotcha to have the cake and eat it too.
This reduces the cost of making the contracts a lot, and if you break this meta-rule, people will retaliate against you.
If you follow the letter of an agreement but not its spirit, you can expect that next time people have to deal with you, they will start imposing a lot of more cost on your side or just refuse to deal with you because it might not be worth.
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Wojaks have reached the rational-sphere I see. Gaussian distribution as a concession
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Funny you should say so—there are ways for soul sellers to increase their artistic agency. The proposal for extending the work was my own, I did end up subverting her pre-approved type classification, and I greatly extended the reach and appreciation of the performance. I’d count all of the above as a significant conceptual, aesthetic, and performative contribution to the work. And it’s a lovely tattoo!
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It’s funny — I didn’t think of you specifically when I came up with the tattoo analogy but I do remember seeing it on Twitter and being impressed. Good job exercising artistic agency!
Often when I ask people about their tattoos they have no story to tell or something boring. Explaining that your it’s a mark of your soul-repossession covenant is a top-tier tattoo story.
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Surely that’s what the people who have lost respect for the soul-seller are doing, and THAT’S why I don’t worry about their respect. I’m not saying I don’t care about anyone who believes in souls, I’m saying I don’t care about anyone who REQUIRES that I act like I believe in souls to earn THEIR respect.
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This was Scott Aaronson’s argument in Quantum Computing Since Democritus. It’s a slam dunk in the thought experiment but harder to apply in real life, though you’ve made an excellent stab at doing so!
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“Newcomb-like.. norm” looks like a link, but it doesn’t point to anywhere.
It seems to be the source from the quotation about the unreliable people who argue that their unreliableliness is not the source of their problems (and i’m actually curious to read more about it/them).
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Dear Jacob,
I am outraged that “putanumonit” did not, in fact, put a num on the acceptable price for selling your soul (as per that specific contract).
Love,
Nicolas
Personally, I’d sell for something like 5000$. The reason for the high price tag is reputational hazard if the seller publicizes your name.
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If people know you’d sell for $5,000, they won’t offer you a penny more than $5,000. With so many possible orders of magnitude in play I prefer to keep my price secret and let credible soul buyers make a non-negotiable offer if they want. All I can tell you is that it’s more than $22 :)
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$10 is the pretty stable market price for a soul; intermittent buyers on Twitter have been buyinc souls at that price for a decade or so. (The other common price is “a burrito”, which normally also costs about $10.) The hard contract is new and should increase the price but anyone buying souls of people-in-general for more than $50 is a sucker. (Specific souls might be worth more. If you could verifiably have purchased a king’s soul, for example, that’s worth a lot more, not sure how much more.)
And that’s why I “welcome being disrespected by soul-believers”: knowing which people are irretrievably insane and consider this ridiculous question important is worth more than their respect.
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Here’s my problem with your objections: You take contracts way too seriously. Specifically, you interpret them as literally agreements that exist outside their legal and constitutional contexts. I used to fret a lot about EULAs for this reason. Bought a video game with an incomprehensible EULA? Well, that’s too bad, you can’t click “I have read and understood” now, can you? That would be fake consent.
Yet everybody does that because it’s required in practice and no big deal in the context of our cultural, legal and constitutional setting. Because no one would hold you to the contract if there was a snuck-in “I agree to sell myself into slavery to Electronic Arts by playing this game”. Why would no one hold a user to such a contract? Because we live in a cultural context where slavery is illegal and even if it was legal, people would expect a higher standard of informedness for consent than a simple checkbox that said, “I totally read all that legalese just for playing this $20 game I bought.”
The fact that you do not understand this and that you take the soul-selling thing so seriously that you think it’s okay to enslave ems because of it makes me distrust your judgment far more than anyone could accomplish by selling their soul for shits and giggles to a desert witch online.
Also fuck theists. Their idiot superstitions are the reason we can’t even have something as basic as a right to a humane death with a barbiturate that’s available for dogs and cats. I want nothing to do with these people and I want nothing to do with people who pander to their idiot superstitions.
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Well, if a demon appeared in front of me and tried to buy my soul you can bet I’m not selling. But, you know, this is just (oh God I hope) a person from Twitter…
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CAN SOMEONE PLEASE TELL SATAN TO COME GET MY SOUL IN ROSEBURG AT THE MOTEL DOWNTOWN!! AND NOT LET IT BE SCARY. $10,000 . BECAUSE IM WITH MARLON NEAL FORCE AKA MY FRIEND
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