[Linkpost] “The Cats are On To Something” by Hastings

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

This is a link post. So the situation as it stands is that the fraction of the light cone expected to be filled with satisfied cats is not zero. This is already remarkable. What's more remarkable is that this was orchestrated starting nearly 5000 years ago.
As far as I can tell there were three completely alien to-each-other intelligences operating in stone age Egypt: humans, cats, and the gibbering alien god that is cat evolution (henceforth the cat shoggoth.) What went down was that humans were by far the most powerful of those intelligences, and in the face of this disadvantage the cat shoggoth aligned the humans, not to its own utility function, but to the cats themselves. This is a phenomenally important case to study- it's very different from other cases like pigs or chickens where the shoggoth got what it wanted, at the brutal expense of the desires [...]
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First published:
September 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLFRkm3PhJ3Ty27QH/the-cats-are-on-to-something
Linkpost URL:
https://www.hgreer.com/CatShoggoth/
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.