FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
It turns out it's possible to speak English without actually being able to think. Some argue that we did not need the doped silicon to learn this, but here we are.
I would argue, based on my experience, that the AI I'm working with is channeling intelligence, not possessing it. You have to metaphorically dip it into the pool of intelligence and prime the pump to get flow. I'm entirely open to the idea that I'm bad at using it or that newer models are better (I'm mostly using opus and a bit of fable), but that's how I'd describe my experience.
Yes, it's factual. It's maddening that people don't know this sort of thing, given our society's purported obsession with searching for any visible sign, marker or dogwhistle of genocidal totalitarianism, provided it's not visible signs, markers or dogwhistles of the genocidal totalitarianism that's considered super-cool and popular with large portions of the tribe most obsessed with the search.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
Things we make out of tiny transmitters and recievers which obey mathematical principles are in every case things we can manipulate deterministically to a high level of detail. Human minds are notable in the ways in which they depart from this paradigm. A whole lot of scientists have expended very large sums of money and time attempting to prove, in your words, "dud theories" to the contrary.
Meanwhile, when was the last time you've come across any such establishment that is as right-wing as this place is left-wing?
An example of a fairly small, low-cost-to-entry organization is an indie game studio. These can be so small, in fact, that they can be done as one-man-bands, but then can scale up from there. Why don't we see more right-wing indies?
Scott Braden Cawthon (born June 4, 1978) is an American video game developer, writer, and producer best known for creating Five Nights at Freddy's, a series of horror video games which expanded into a media franchise.
Five Nights At Freddie's is one of the most successful indie games of all time, and it earned him a ton of money and fame and a massive fanbase. Then it was revealed that Scott Cawthon was Red Tribe.
In June 2021, Cawthon became a trending topic on Twitter when his publicly available political donations were shared on the website. Except for one donation to then-Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard and another donation to former Indiana House Speaker John R. Gregg, also a Democrat, all of Cawthon's donations were to Republican politicians, including Mitch McConnell and U.S. President Donald Trump. He posted on Reddit to confirm his support for the Republican Party, describing himself as pro-life. He claimed that he had been doxxed and had received threats of violence and home invasion after his donations were publicized. Reactions on social media were mixed, with some people reacting negatively.[24] Days later, Cawthon announced his intention to step away from professional game development and appoint someone else to assume creative control of the franchise.
Strangely, harassment, death threats and literal home invasions of a popular celebrity did not draw support for that celebrity, nor condemnation of such tactics, nor broad discourse that online toxicity was a serious problem. The Dev did not receive wall-to-wall coverage portraying him as a saintly victim from a sympathetic press, who oddly failed to coordinate broad-spectrum condemnation for the internet trolls and other deplorables engaging in this horrifying behavior. The Dev was not invited to speak at the UN.
Scott Cawthon will not be making any more video games.
Any attempt to stand up something like the right-wing equivalent of the DSA or Antifa is immediately torn apart by infighting and ideological purity-spiraling.
"political infighting" and "ideological purity spiraling" is not what I have observed killing attempts to stand up right-wing equivalents to the DSA or Antifa. Selective prosecution seems like a much larger factor. This is your reminder that posting anonymous "It's okay to be white" posters on a college campus resulted in an actual investigation by the for-real FBI.
Meanwhile I walk out my door and find no shortage of Pride parades and anti-ICE protests, all seeming to go off like clockwork, with no subsequent chorus of left-wing influencers asserting that these events are "false flags" or whatever.
Also riots and the occasional, wildly celebrated political murder. Mustn't forget those.
We will be fired from our jobs and beaten in the streets if we do the right-wing equivalents of these things, and the police will look the other way for those inflicting the latter. This does not mean that right-wing political action is impossible, only much, much harder, with the concomitant increased likelihood that coordinated meanness outside the standard system of procedures will ultimately prove necessary. We'll get there, don't you worry.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
I won't take mere decades as evidence of durability here, on historical clocks it should at least be 100 years to transcend the realm of suspected expedience.
Your argument is that Nationalism has a worse record for international cooperation than Progressivism/Blue/Globalist Ideology, correct? If so, asking for a century's record seems to me to define away the discussion. Communism as an official system didn't last a hundred years, so the China-Vietnam-Cambodia wars don't count, presumably the USSR violently suppressing Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia and making repeated attempts on Tito in Yugoslavia doesn't count, And Angola's civil war doesn't count. Likewise the numerous civil wars/purges/whatever-we-call-mass-killing-your-own-citizens. And as you note, Nationalism itself isn't actually much older, maybe 50 years more, and you've said the US and Britain don't count because they're the same country. I'll note that once we're past Napoleon, Britain and France seem to hang together fairly well; ending up on the same side in two world wars and the cold war ought to count for something. But overall, if you draw your standards of evidence in this way, it seems to me that I probably can't demonstrate a solid record of nationalism being good for cooperation, but likewise you can't draw a solid record of it being bad at it either. By your reckoning, it seems not enough time has passed to draw any conclusions at all.
I would argue a looser standard, and point out that we do actually have around two centuries of nationalism and around a century of Progressivism as large-scale reigning ideologies, and I would much, much prefer the nationalist experience across that time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23hr ago
I'd imagine the point is that it makes the AI x% more productive according to the standard benchmarks.
Fully agreed, though. I'm pretty far in the accelerationist camp and put very little stock in the idea of AI safety, but if we're going to entertain the idea of moving at something less than maximum speed, this seems like a real good place to coordinate the slowdowns.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Would European Red-analogues, if they were had their day in the limelight, even be natural allies to American Reds?
Yes, I think so. Mutual admiration, mutual support and mutual cooperation are completely possible, provided there's a foundation of shared values. I like England and Japan, I want them to continue and to prosper. We've been allies with England for well over a century at this point; we've been allies with Japan since the end of World War II. There's no reason in principle that we shouldn't continue to be close allies with these nations for centuries to come. I'm not sure where this argument that "nationalists can only have temporary allies of convenience" actually is supposed to come from. Numerous western countries engaged in both nationalism and durable alliances spanning decades or even centuries; numerous Communist countries fought wars with fraternal socialist allies even in the short span of formal Communism.
But if that is how you feel, I'd prefer America just separate.
If there were a cleaner way to do it, I'd be all for it. The situation is several different flavors of fucked due to multiple decades' worth of disastrous errors. Any possible plan has to account for the fact that Blues will get back in control and try to reverse any actions made, and staying inside the bounds they've dictated makes this a lot easier for them to do. Their plan for a decade now has been to play off Trump as an aberration, soon to be forgotten while their consensus resumes the reigns of power. This is wrong because Trump is the effect, not the cause. The fact is that, so long as the paradigm for cooperation Europe is planning for involves Blue-consensus dominance, we fundamentally are not reliable allies and probably aren't capable of being allies at all. Trump is the most effective way we currently have to send that message in a way that can't be ignored; maybe the democrats sweep the election this year and maybe they grab it all in 2028, but whether they do or not, Europe will have to remember that we elected Trump twice, and a large portion of us are willing to do worse yet.
Obviously, European leadership and the population at large aren't fully getting that message, probably for the same reason American Blues haven't gotten it, for the simple reason that it isn't a message they're particularly interested in hearing. So much the worse for us all. What doesn't change is that the world we were sleepwalking into prior to 2016 is not a world I or people like me are willing to accept, and we will do whatever is necessary to prevent the foreclosure of our future that such a world represents.
The conflict between American Reds and Blues continues to escalate, with no end in sight. Consensus European values are innately hostile to American Red Values and virtually indistinguishable from American Blue values. European institutions are joined at the hip to uniformly-Blue American institutions, and there is no reason to expect this to change. Anything resembling a European Red Tribe has been thoroughly suppressed and is utterly incapable of meaningful cooperation with American Reds in any but the loosest sense. Given these facts, there is no route for meaningful cooperation with Europe as it currently stands, any more than there is with American Blues. There is no way to get along, because our values are flatly incompatible; "Cooperation" means securing support for Blue Tribe in their efforts to remake America into something much more like what Europe is now, and that is not a form of cooperation worth pursuing.
I sympathize with European Red-analogues, but there is very little to be done. The overwhelming consensus in your societies is overwhelmingly hostile to everything I value, so it needs to be fought vigorously.
Your model seems generally sound, as far as it goes. You ask how people see it going further. I think the part you aren't clearly accounting for is, for lack of a better term, systemic risk of serious collapse throughout the current socio-economic system. You're framing this in terms of the preferences of large-type movers and shakers because that's generally been proven to be a reasonable thing to do when you're talking about geopolitics. I think for a couple of reasons that you're underpricing the risk of intractably adversarial conditions for large-type movers and shakers as a general class.
- The System, if you'll forgive the cliche, is sclerotic and ossified. It wields considerable social and economic power by a particular set of methods, and really, really needs those methods to keep working as close to the same way they've previously worked as possible. The more resources and energy the system expends trying to keep things from significantly changing, the less it has available to deal with changes it can't prevent.
- A lot of things are diverging from the way they used to work, and that divergence is observably accelerating. The culture war escalation spiral is one obvious example, but the American economy seems to be on a similar path, as do political norms and a lot of other apparently load-bearing members of the sociopolitical structure.
- Change does not diffuse like ideal gas into a perfect vacuum. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." There can potentially be overhangs, areas where potential change builds up in a similar way to potential energy in a cliff face, until random chance starts a cascade down into the low-energy trough. The System's efforts to forestall change, and the ordinary inertia of population-summed human perspectives, greatly increase the potential size of these overhangs: they kick the can down the road on unworkable systems until a painful but necessary change grows into a completely insoluble and unavoidable disaster.
- I am highly confident that some of these overhangs are not potential, but directly observable in the present moment.
If I understand it correctly, your model seems to assume that there are no small-scale overhangs on the road to the really big ones, where AI kicks off a new industrial revolution and previous modes of organizing society obviously stop making any kind of sense as the economic graphs go vertical. I think it's at least plausible that this sort of timeline is correct, that white-knuckling just the next one or two or five years might get us to the sort of runaway tech breakthrough sufficient to reshuffle our present concerns until the socio-political landscape is completely unrecognizable. The problem firstly is that such a shuffling does not seem to be a necessary consequence of an AI revolution, and less necessary the slower the revolution goes, and secondly that it's possible to identify existing overhangs of sufficient magnitude to at least potentially demolish society as we know it. It's probably a lot harder to develop AI in Bostrom's "easy nukes" vulnerable world. The world we are in is probably not that vulnerable, but it seems to me that it's very probably a couple orders of magnitude more vulnerable than you or, I think, most others are accounting for, and maybe vulnerable enough that large, complex organizations couldn't keep the lights on.
Worse, it's hard for me to see that vulnerability as strictly negative. I do not want to live in the world where the Authorities pay me in Starbucks coupons and slot-machine tokens while banning ownership of good steel and machine tools forever. I do not want to live in such a world badly enough that I would rather the world I do live in be vulnerable, and indeed be made additionally vulnerable, if it means significantly lowering the probability of such an outcome.
I think a lot of people arrive at a similar conclusion, if by different paths. People do not want to be cattle. Politics runs on hope, and hope is harnessed by plausible paths forward toward a better tomorrow. Those, it seems to me, are growing increasingly thin on the ground regardless of one's tribal affiliation. Extremism appears to me to be flourishing, and the modern Western world is still best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. If an overhang drops, that's the path I expect the energy to be channeled down, and given the overhangs I'm observing, I don't expect that to be a path the current system can easily survive.
TL;DR - current US AI dominance doesn't survive if the labs all burn down before they finish immanentizing the eschaton.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Anti-Yuddites Don’t understand that you don’t need omnipotence to do major damage here. AI is probably, if so directed, perfectly capable of taking down the banking system.
Social Security is also probably capable of taking down the banking system. "Taking down the banking system" is very clearly a human-scale problem with human-scale solutions; Yuddism is entirely about appealing to supra-human-scale problems that purportedly don't have solutions outside Yuddism. I am 100% on board with the argument that AI safety, were it to be a thing, should focus on the human-scale problems and not the supra-human ones, which I'm not confident exist and which I'm not confident have reachable solutions if they do exist. But this approach is very clearly incompatible with Yuddism.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
"Left Wing" and "Right wing" are fuzzy social categories, not mathematical primitives. You should sort by tribe, it's closer to the joints of reality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Militarily defeating Israel isn't impossible, though. You can argue the ought, but Israel is bleeding public support pretty much everywhere, and it is entirely possible it ends up as a pariah state. It has an exceptional military, relative to its immediate neighbors, but that military was exceptional under the old paradigm, the old paradigm is going away, and its performance under the new paradigm has not been stellar. It is entirely possible that we will live to see the end of the nation of israel.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Up until this comment, I thought the jew-caricature outfit was from this current event, and was blown away that this was even a discussion. But apparently his happy merchant getup is from an anonymous show in 2014, and apparently he did claim at the time that he hadn't recognized the implication and apologized?
This event is quite the rollercoaster.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Notice that adultery never triggers the same defense mechanism as homosexuality, because it's widely seen as a sin while the homo stuff is a challenge to the prevailing moral order.
...Then what are honor killings about?
That's all fine at first, but doesn't it collapse into "Nothing is comprehensible, so believe whatever you will."?
I am pretty sure that all humans do in fact believe whatever they will. That is, Belief formation is unavoidably a product of acts of the will, of choices made.
I used to think that beliefs were formed at least somewhat deterministically: you accumulate evidence, and the weight of the evidence eventually forces your mind down a channel. Then I spent a couple decades arguing logically with people, and realized that humans do not actually work this way.
Near as I can tell, there are three ways to form a belief:
- You can accept (or reject) a belief proposed to you by others uncritically. This is a willful choice.
- You can examine the proposed belief based on evidence. "Evidence" is an infinite class, and not one of the smaller infinities either, so it has to be pruned to a vanishing fraction. This pruning is a choice. Then it has to be weighed, and the metrics of the weighing are a choice. Then you can either draw a conclusion or go looking for more evidence, and this is also a choice.
- If you want something deeper, you can use Axioms. Axioms have a shape, and some sets of evidence fit within them, and others don't, so this provides a more rigorous way of selecting and pruning evidence. But there are infinite axioms, and while you can have interplay between evidence and axioms, you still have to choose both your axioms and the evidence to test them against, making it, again, a willful choice.
People speak of motivated reason. But we reason for reasons, to accomplish some goal, and so it seems to me that all reason is motivated. This does not mean that reason is useless, only that its usefulness has an observable upper limit. It seems to me that those aware of this are better able to operate within those limits than those who believe their reasoning is not motivated, that their beliefs are not choices but rather deterministic machinery. One of the best ways to lose the ability to make good choices is to cement the belief that you aren't making choices at all, but are only a set of gears grinding out the mechanistic results of cause and effect.
But making from that the leap to the benevolent God who cares about each of individually, to an afterlife, to Jesus the Son of God, or any other specifica of any given faith, I can not.
Are you looking at this as a set of facts that compel belief mechanistically, or as an option that can be chosen? If the former, then I'm confident you will never find it, since it doesn't exist for this or any other belief. If the latter, the furthest I'd say is that it is clearly possible since I've done it myself, but whether it seems like a good idea to you is a very different question and one I obviously cannot answer.
What I keep circling back to is this - If there were a God who cared about each of us individually, who speaks to us, he'd do so unmistakably, impossible to overlook or misunderstand.
My theory is that compelling belief would violate peoples' ability to choose to love or not love him freely. I do not expect this theory to be compelling to others, though.
Not through vague signs, interpretations, exegeses, the words of supposed son and and prophets handed down through two millenia of misrepresentation, mistranslation and lost context.
I don't think the texts have actually been misrepresented, mistranslated, or had their context lost. I would rather not sidetrack into a tangential issue, but the short of it is that, from what I've observed, the evidentiary basis for this sort of argument was generated by the same intellectual cultures that gave us the Sokal hoaxes, Professor Arday, and all the other fruits of the Academy, and by similar methods.
It all seems too flimsy and accidental, too much held together by the transparent desire for God to be so.
I believe in God because I want to believe in God, straight up. When I didn't want to believe in God, I didn't believe in him. Belief in God is an Axiom, and axioms are chosen, not compelled. I appreciate that there's a ton of cultural baggage and associations that say it isn't supposed to work this way, but in perfect honesty, I think it's the cultural baggage and associations that are wrong. I've had versions of this conversation a number of times here, and I always emphasize the same point: I am not under the impression that I am going to convert my opposites to Christianity, but I really would like to get people to take a serious look at how beliefs are formed in the general case, both because I find the question fascinating, and because I think it provides significant insight into a lot of otherwise-mysterious aspects of human behavior.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I'm not aiming to compel adoption, only to provide an intuition pump for something the OP finds inconceivable, for whom they claim to be unable to generate a theory of mind.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Okay with ethics like that why be anti abortion? We're back to it actually being about fornication because it ain't about valuing life.
It turns out that while innocent life is worth protecting, those subjected to the death penalty aren't generally considered innocent, and neither are soldiers in a war under, to my understanding, a somewhat different model.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
When one can't be sure if he's speaking with God or with the echoes of his own mind refracted through religious culture, where does freely made choice even come into it?
Why do you need to be sure? Most (all?) major and highly consequential decisions you make in your life, you have to make without being "sure". Why should this one be different? You can, if you choose, believe in God. You can, if you choose, proceed under the axiom that he has communicated, and even that he continues to communicate. Many people do this, and many of those who do report good results. You can do likewise or not as you prefer.
You can argue that things ought to work a certain way or not at all, but this isn't generally how the world works in the cases where we can test it, and if others don't agree with your logic, why be confident that the way you think it ought to be is basic reality, and not your own biases and models echoing back to you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Simulation theory is bizarre and counterintuitive and not, I think, all that widespread.
If this were a conversation in the general population, I'd agree. Maybe the rationalist stock has diluted somewhat here as well, but I've argued some of the points straight from the Sequences in the past. I maintain that the intellectual history of Rationalism shows that Materialism can break down and people mostly don't notice, much less ask "People just pretend to believe this, right?".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Are you familiar with the atheist arguments that God's relationship to us could not possibly be loving, because it's based on coercion through threats and bribes? In my view, there's a pretty solid argument that it has to be this way for our choice to be freely made.
Interrogation of truthfulness is a good thing; my main objection is that most people I see attempting it seem to me to be doing it poorly: strict Materialists incapable of recognizing breaks in Materialism, for example.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
It's interesting to read them, check the date, and then recall how the Social Justice movement played out. It's possibly the wrongest Scott ever was.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
If our assumptions based on the observable reality don't work for higher realities, then that should signal we can't derive how/if God works from what we see in our world.
Say rather, you can't derive the mechanics of higher realities from observation of lower ones, and this is a point that most people theorizing about stacked realities appear to miss.
But God is not a mechanism. If a willful intelligence in a higher reality wants to talk to you, it can. If it makes claims about your reality, you can compare those to what you observe of your reality. If it tells you things about the higher reality, you can choose to believe it or not, and the perceived accuracy of its statements about the reality you are in can lend some degree of evidence for trust to operate.
In any case, what is "truth value"?
Or Tay, these long years murdered.
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