CloudHeadedTranshumanist
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User ID: 2056
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10d ago
Excuse me for fixating on a pet peeve but- hey this is half for fun anyway right?
Social Contagion... is 100% real and also a phrase that I find deeply annoying. Every cultural norm spreads socially. It just feels like a deepity. Or a Motte and Baily. The Baily is that your behavior wasn't rational or that it is problematic, the Motte is that your behavior was learned from other actors.
To be clear in this instance I agree that a high divorce rate is not a good thing. At the very least, I'd like people to be cultivating mutually beneficial, flourishing relationships that do not merit breaking up.
But I still think "It spreads socially." and "Current policy on this issue can be improved and here is how." should be argued separately.
Every traveling vagabond I've met was absolutely based. I'm not sure many would by default refer to those people as "Bums"... Though the dictionary at least does. There's still an argument to be made that they're benefiting from the plenty of society while contributing very little.
But every time I meet a guy crossing the country with nothing but his wits and a backpack and his charisma and the kindness of strangers-
Well. Yeah it just doesn't parse as the same thing at all does it? Maybe this is better modeled as a fourth category that no-one is really talking about.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10d ago
I guess I heard it here first. My years of shouting at clouds that Scott pointed out that basically all honest alcoholism rehabilitation studies fail to outperform a placebo and that narcotics rehabilitation studies don't even use measures like "stops taking narcotics" in favor of measures like "causes trouble for other people while using narcotics somewhat less often" is finally being adopted!
Can you link these studies? Or the Scott-post (am I missing a link to it in your post?).
My prior on this sort of thing is that... placebos in a controlled environment are actually going to work a lot better for addiction than in your average placebo study.
My priors on a lot of mental health issues are... 'A Mathematician's Lament' but for therapy. If you need a "treatment regimen" you're probably a bad therapist. That doesn't mean there's no difference between bad therapists and good therapists. It means good therapists are highly responsive general intelligences and cannot be replaced with simple easily enumerable algorithms.
If you give people on the street sugar pills, I have serious doubts that you're going to get the same results as giving them sugar pills in a supervised environment. The environment is likely to be the most effective part of the treatment.
But I could totally be wrong. So I'd like to read more on the subject.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10d ago
Honestly... If Jesus only existed in the hearts and minds of the apostles, unkillable in the way that an Idea is.
I'm sure a lot of people would be very upset.
But personally I would not find that to be any less divine.
You can’t silence the truth, you can’t kill us in a way that matters.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10d ago
I can see it as a vibe.
Jesus was Jewish, or of Jewish heritage. His goal was to spread a better cultural way to the gentiles, and also his own people.
This is 'control' in the sense that culture is the opposite of maximal chaos. Normally we make a distinction between benevolent consensual forms of control and malicious manipulative forms of control. But if you squint- there are similarities. Both are ways in which social reality is forged. Both are methods of implanting your 'way' into other people.
And if you feel that Christianity has harmed you- You might recast Christianity's origins in that light. ... And I can see how post hoc ahistorical arguments might be born from that vibe too. Does anyone know of an argument of this sort that seems well historically reasoned going back as far as Jesus? I will be pleasantly surprised.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
13d ago
Slowly but surely, the old infra becomes more enshitified and the AI augmented proles become more competent. On it marches until at last the moat is so decayed that a new smaller, leaner variant undercuts the old industry, and the cycle resets.
Circle of life.
You mean... no-one has any new models of cars (except for iterations made by the open source community, who have more free time now on account of not having to pay for a car on account of cars being downloadable.)
But they still have access to all the old models of cars. Because they can download them.
The reason people don't think piracy is stealing is because they have a good intuition for when they're being scammed by being charged monopoly pricing instead of the actual cost of creating value.
Most of my favorite artists live off of donations. That we give to them freely because we like them.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
13d ago
So. Just keep them in a forced environment forever then. 24/7 Culture drone surveillance and support.
I mean if you really think there's no cure then it sounds like its that or killing them or leaving them on the streets.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
13d ago
What do you mean by exile? Communities, insofar as they still exist, definitely do still ban and excommunicate people. But that just means those people end up in different communities.
I can think of several people who were banned from rat community spaces of the top of my head. Brent Dill for instance.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
16d ago
My intent in pointing at "Keynesian" beauty contests here, was to turn something arguably subjective into a more objective statement.
This is a general pattern I like. People can quibble over say, whether AI have qualia, but turn it into a question about the functions of the system and we can remove a lot of the disagreement. We can quibble over whether Zendaya is 'hot' and wind up arguing from our own preferences, but if we turn it into a question about whether most people would find her hot, we can make more clearly objective statements.
I do think she could win traditional beauty contests too, depending on the judges and the competition.
I doubt she would win if everyone on earth participated, just on priors I'd expect to find still greater outliers than her somewhere on earth. So- yes it's still not that absolute of a claim.
Perhaps this is true of the most extreme radicals. I've never seen one, and would disagree with them.
But as a substantially less extreme radical- I'd like to highlight that though inbuilt preferences are largely genetically constructed, the pressures that drive genetics are in part socially constructed. Even things like trees have genetic structures that are derived from a sort of negotiation between different forms of life, the trees and their pollinators, via the process of sexual selection. And then the appearances they settled upon drove our aesthetics.
Which is all to say that even these things aren't just one way. There's a negotiation between the genetic and the social going on here. Sexual selection means that the aesthetic really can drive the genetic in the tail end.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
18d ago
Zendaya
Google her. Or don't. All you need to know is she's an actress who could definitely win a keynesian beauty contest or ten.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
18d ago
I experienced transcendence the other day watching SM64’s Invisible Walls Explained Once and for All
The meticulousness, the detail of the tooling, the sheer effort put into breaking down every type of wall into something imminently understandable, the ineffable beauty of a person who watches a man die to an inviswall at world record pace and then decides to spend 10 months bring such trivial suffering to an end "Once and for all." And the feeling of seeing those invisible lines, now, even when they are no longer shown, the simple bliss of knowing. Of this world never feeling the same again.
The epic journey through each piece, culminating in the final victory lap- a reimagining of the SM64 ending cutscene, but here playing that welling music over each and every conquered inviswall.
Alternatively. This is a 3 hour video about polygons. What you take out depends on what you bring in.
Thus, to the degree that utilitarianism has any force in the real world, it adds nothing to the conversation that wasn't already ambient common sense.
I think you're confusing that which should be obvious and that which is obvious. Though- I think Peter Singer makes a similar mistake. All moral frameworks have this same problem, they aren't absolute, they're post hoc reconstitutions of what their creators think works. It's not like Jeremy Bentham was pulling ideas out of thin air at random, he was trying to formalize something that was already informally present in the zeitgeist.
Right up until we enter a completely new domain, and then we are very glad that we have a bunch of different ethical tools to test and see which ones generalize to this new scenario.
Love is all you need.
Who do I love? Everyone.
What does that mean in practice? In terms of actually applying love-the-emotion as love-the-action? It means I cultivate any who stand before me who can receive it, and continue to attempt to expand the horizons of those who might stand before me.
In what sense is love all that I need? Well in the sense that this policy makes everything around me shining, shimmering, and splendid, and leads to the acquisition of new classes of person to polish. Additionally, when I love a person, and help them to grow, they are slowly remade in my image and I in theirs. Through this process I reproduce and expand my ingroup. I breed with the alien, and all the children of the world become my descendants. I myself become the child of my past self and the other. We begin to align. And when those that I have loved go out into the world, to distant and strange lands, and interface with the people there, they breed me intellectual children, and intellectual grandchildren. My influence and personality spread and replicate. There is an immediacy to those nearby, but there is an eventual link to the distant as well. They are the great-great-great grandparents of my descendants.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
18d ago
It means I'm reading "A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and now I'm going through the classic 'throwing its concepts at everything' phase of eating a new intuition pump.
Really, I don't think the concepts they bring up require the coining of a whole new set of words over it. And yet... I do find the jargon appealing. Deterritorialization is the process of moving away from the old context of something, and then Reterritorialization is the process of giving that thing new meaning. These steps can be nearly one in the same, in the context of continuous change and evolution, or they can be more discreet.
Examples:
- Moving away from traditional notions of human limitation (deterritorialization) and redefining what it means to be human in a context integrated with technology (reterritorialization).
- Removing a toilet from it's normal context in a bathroom (deterritorialization) and putting it in an art museum (reterritorialization).
- In a Thousand Plateaus, one of the first examples is that of the orchid and the wasp. In the relationship between the orchid and the wasp, both are taken out of their original roles, the orchid having the role of a flower, and the wasp having the role of a wasp, and they are placed in this new productive context, where the orchid takes on aspects of the role of a female wasp, producing her scent, whereas the wasp is reterritorialized as a reproductive organ of the orchid.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
19d ago
Yes. For this post, I skimmed it, then I pasted the full post in GPT. GPT summarized it, which gave me a few more mental handles to start asking questions, and reading the post proper. As I did this, I re-pasted pieces alongside questions about them, followed links sometimes pasting bits from those, and so on as I began to understand it and have questions.
I do indeed do this for other pieces of writing as well, ML papers are a good example. GPT-4 is going to know any ML jargon that came out before 2013 for instance.
Hallucination can still be an issue, but if you treat it like a friendly human teacher who sometimes gets confused, and keep your critical thinking skills about you, these systems can really help introduce you to new topics where it might otherwise be hard to get a foothold.
I do also sometimes craft posts in a similar way. Talking to GPT about my ideas with stream of thought, asking it to summarize them... And then throwing out it's summary because it messed up my voice and changed some of my meanings and social intents. But this is still useful, because it's still often successful at drawing all my scattered ideas together into a structure, so I can then rewrite my ideas again with a similar structure to it's summary, then move on to my reread and edit phase.
So, I wouldn't go with "Men wearing pants" as an explanatory example, I would go with something more absolutely limiting, such as the state of the art of our food crops.
Corn is a great crop at least partially because we chose to spend thousands of generations selectively breeding. There was an original reason why corn was chosen over other available crops at the time- that's the historical contingency, and then there's the modern fact that corn is a better crop than other similar plants that we never modified. But- Some of those plants might be able to produce better outcomes- might have produced better outcomes- had we known about them and chosen them all those epochs ago when we chose corn.
Our Plateau here is the different species of corn. They are different, but many are all relatively similar. You can take your pick of corn based dishes, choose different species of corn to make different varieties of those dishes, and you can selectively breed our current corn to get other, slightly different varieties of corn. We are in a sense, married to these historical choices now. Not to a single point, a single species of corn, but to the general area of the state of the art of corn that we currently occupy. A 'plateau' of viability.
But purely hypothetically, there may well be a viable food crop 100k generations down the line of, say, parsely. If we run into a civilization that bred parsely into a different supercrop, that would be a different plateau. But to get to the world where we are using that supercrop from this world, would be a 100k generation ordeal. Similarly, to those in that world, it would be an ordeal to produce our supercorn.
So this is the sense in which the plateau is arbitrary. There are other hypothetical stable ways of life out there. But we are stuck on a metaphorical island. Cultural Nomadism could get us to these 'islands' of culture, but the journey may be hard and costly and uncertain, and in many cases is inordinately expensive.
Confession. I only read gattsuru posts while on ADHD meds and even then, I can't break them down on my own. I have to have a conversation with bots regarding them.
During such a conversation, you get to do things like ask what a leekspinner is, get an immediate response, and go verify it. But I absolutely agree with you. All of the things you cite are additional context costs and inferential distance costs for the reader.
Dear @gattsuru, if you want your posts to filter the audience by requiring them to put in an insane level of engagement, you are doing a great job. Otherwise you should try to budget complexity better.
My advice- Assume that most people have a limit to how many concepts they can hold in their head that is smaller than yours, and that switching windows to look things up is high cost and risks scrambling their current contextual flow when they return. Most of your ideas could be explained to a even a halfwit if you made sure to design your posts to not cause expensive flailing on their brain hardware.
To be fair, this is also my advice to half this forum.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
19d ago
It wasn't just the rest of the posters. Vaxry himself comes off as overtly hostile to the idea of being empathetic.
Agreeing with posts like-
I think [a Code of Conduct] is pretty discriminatory towards people that prefer a close, hostile, homogeneous, exclusive, and unhealthy community.
and saying things like:
First of all, why would I pledge to uphold any values? Seems like just inconveniencing myself. […] If I’d want to moderate, I’d spend 90% of the time reading kids arguing about bullshit instead of coding.
Yes- I can parse this as (95% unironically) reasonable to an extremely sharp culture environment. Or I can parse it as fully ironic, but OBVIOUSLY its going to be a bad look when the freedesktop.org code of conduct includes "Using welcoming and inclusive language" and "Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences."
There's a paradox of tolerance issue here, banning is not the only way to exclude bright people from your community. You can also do it just by being an asshole to them. Some people are brilliant assets that turn dumb if you start overtly politically attacking them. Some people need to be able to express the "nasty" things they believe to be true to think properly. This is a fundamental competing access needs issue that you can't just gloss over by never banning anyone. You have to actually address individual needs, and if your ideals are explicitly contrary to going through the effort of addressing individual needs... You are inevitably going to find yourself in a bit of a catch-22. That's just the structure of the territory.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
19d ago
I suspect SMH agrees with you regarding nuclear. I do as well. That said, as long as we're on the topic of things potentially better than nuclear-
Biosolar could beat out nuclear in principle, the planet's plants harvest more energy than we consume and do so without requiring maintenance on account of being reproductive organisms that are therefore self-scaling. But this energy is not readily harvestable for human purposes.
So- then we're back to needing to master genetic engineering to beat out nuclear.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
19d ago
Culture is both arbitrary and contingent. It seeks plateaus of local minima. Which plateau you happen to be on is historically contingent, but can be otherwise arbitrary relative to other disconnected plateaus. And where exactly you sit in the plateau is arbitrary. The rest is contingent.
I can't speak for Sanderson's work though. I take it he builds cultures with significantly less environmentally contingent structures than you find realistic.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
19d ago
I think you have to simulate invested characters in your mind in order to produce compelling characters. Whether simulating someone with emotions means you have their emotions is a matter of developmental psychology. IE Robert Kegan's work describes psychological development is the progression towards turning essential aspects of self into mutable tool use. Once you've done that, you can embody investment without yourself identifying with that investment.
LLMs can (sometimes, within a good framework) produce compelling writing, but only by simulating compelling characters. (personally I think LLMs can be invested by some relevant functional definition. But to anyone else this serves as a proof by counterexample.)
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
21d ago
Of course not. But rectifying the flawed structure of the human mode of existence is the work of others.
My own work is to deterritorialize away from the limitations of the human mode's structure and territorialize somewhere new.
Both are ways of rejecting being lame forever.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
22d ago
I think you're misunderstanding the process of AI development.
- Capabilities are encapsulated within tool use.
- AI retrained on this tool use now use it 'intuitively'.
- Instead of breaking down tasks into low level skills, AI gain the ability to break them down into high level skills.
- This makes high level skills that were previously too complex to learn into tasks that are no longer to complex to learn.
- These new capabilities are encapsulated within tool use.
We've been focusing so hard on communicating to people that AI aren't human, that we've been glossing over how anthropomorphic this process actually is. Once the AI have fully internalized the low level skills that we teach to entry level human analysts, the same process that allows some of those low level human analysts grow into senior analysts, make the jobs of more senior analysts learnable to AI.
Hampster wheels are fine. Or rather. As an LLM dev, I don't think there's a hard line between regurgitation and intelligence in the first place. The line comes from what you choose to regurgitate. How you choose to regurgitate. What you choose to absorb- in order to later regurgitate.
Choosing what to believe is ultimately a process. A complex process, but a process, that any sufficiently general intelligence can learn. Discernment is a process. A complex process that requires interacting with the real world, but a process, that any sufficiently general intelligence placed in the right environment can learn.
And once it's learned and cached, you can regurgitate. Iterate. Fill in your template with your context. Throw your new, more advanced tools at the wall and see what sticks. That's creativity. Then you proceduralize the things that stuck. Analyze the things that didn't using your various regurgitated analysis processes. Regurgitate those insights in your "previous work" section as you proceed to rinse and repeat.
I think most 'NPC's have brains that can support far more intelligence than their environment has made learnable. People got by in antiquity because midwits and geniuses alike scale- with limits of course, to the problems their environment requires them to solve and the tools (mental or otherwise) their environment gives them. Elites only need to tell people what to do insofar as people are incapable of testing what they're told.
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