CloudHeadedTranshumanist
No bio...
User ID: 2056
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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
I socialize online. It's the easiest place to find lonely people in need of love and devotion, and those are things I give freely in spades. It's not hard to find the people who just need a friend, or a lover, or a confidant, and its not hard to drastically improve the emotional health of those people.
You can typically form bonds as strong as you want them to be among such an audience, as long as you maneuver slowly and gently as not to spook them.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
You need to break things down in order to understand what will be scalable. Why should Dunbar's number exist? What are the actual limits of intimacy? I absolutely agree that our current methods for scaling Dunbar are limited, and that there are also fundamental limits. But we need to clarify what those limits are for specific systems.
Consider the following HyperDunbar social module algorithm.
- Run a classifier on the types of humans.
- Practice being intimate with LLMs trained on these classes of humans and of course humans of these classes themselves.
- This effectively flattens them, which is bad. It lowers your awareness of who they are and their needs, and thus lowers intimacy, however, we can mitigate most of this by loading the data lost in compression Live from an exobrain using RAG as you are talking to a specific individual.
Using this technique, what part's of Dunbar's number scale?
- The intimacy with which you know the person you are talking to right now: Scales
- The amount of time you can give to one person: Semi-scales. You'll have to rely on LLM instances of yourself to scale this, but you can continuously improve the accuracy of this sim and the ways in which it backloads compressions of all its interactions back into your meatbrain. Whether this is really 'Your' Dunbar number isn't a scientific query, its a philosophy of cybernetics question. Since what we are discussing is the effectiveness of scaled organizations, we ought to be focused on the scientific query of whether you can meaningfully love and empower others in the same ways with your LLM self as your bio-self rather than philosophical questions like what self-hood is.
- Percentage of your total captured capabilities that you give to each person: Doesn't scale. But it never did, even when the Dunbar number was 100.
- The amount of your life/telos/subconcious that you can dedicate to improving yourself for each other person: Semi-scales. You'd think that this is the same as the last question but no. This actually scales with how many of the people in your circle are co-aligned, because if everyone is perfectly aligned, then the same personal growth actions can be telelogically dedicated to all of them.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
I do not believe that selective breeding is very efficient for a species that takes at least 10 years to iterate a single generation. AI capabilities are currently exceeding the growth rate of individual human children. Yes, currently this is because there are so many brilliant people working in the space, but multi step tool use is closing in on and sometimes exceeding human level performance in engineering tasks. The fact of the matter is, in ten years humans will only be necessary for maintaining tech infrastructure in that they will be the most efficient meatspace API for plugging things in for a while longer.
More than that though, if you really think selective breeding is the future, then go have kids. Go out and be the thing everyone else refuses to be and out-compete them. Create your own religious community. Learn from the Amish and exert some control over how your cultural construct interfaces with technology to mitigate corruption by "The GAE" if you find that necessary.
I get that its frustrating and sometimes feels hopeless going it alone without the consent of society. But if you have to wait for the consent of society to do anything. You're kinda a pussy.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
Who exactly is too pussy to do anything about it. Are you just waiting for the government to choose your biomods for you?
This seems like an excellent reminder to get off TheMotte so that I can be well rested enough tomorrow to read more AI papers. I have children to engineer.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
Needs or else it will attempt to stop needing. Pursues. Inevitably eventually grows to discover that it can't will itself not to pursue. Ceases to exist if it refuses to engage in. Sustainably produces transcendental bliss or otherwise attractive emotional forces as a result of.
We can call this a 'nature'. I'm not opposed to that actually. I just think it's wrong to assume that this nature is innate and unchangeable with respect to time. There are some things that are, but that is because there are some game theoretic truths that are innate and unchanging with respect to all agents. But the set of things that we believe to be true of all agents will generally decrease as the diversity of agents increases.
I think a lot of Catholicism does map to much that is Good for humans- in a low tech world. I like the positive, loving parts of Catholicism. I also agree with many of the stern parts of Catholicism, but I think they made a mistake.
They could not fully conceive of the ways in which the future would allow evils to be redeemed, and spoke in dogmatic absolutes that did not always apply to the final battle. It was hubris to claim they knew the final plan of God with such certainty. Also, it is often imagined, though I'm not certain if- more by Catholics or Protestants, that the final battle will consist of the extermination of all that contains evil, rather than the redemption and purification of all that contains evil.
I do think they're wrong about Transhumanism. I think Transhumanism is a central part of the divine plan.
Actually only one small part of me thinks that. Most of me thinks God is a logical force that has won so hard that it doesn't need to plan.
Universes containing agents naturally do all the planning necessary to enact its will on their own.
Or they die.
Or they just don't gain as much measure as the ones that do.
Perhaps so little, that they round to an infinitesimal 0 in the big picture. But that last bit... is more of a prayer.
I can't claim to know the absolute measure.
Only that societies of defectors appear to underperform societies of solidarity.
And that in large animals, most cancers are killed by meta-cancers.
I am willing to bite that bullet. All all skill issues are sins and all sins are skill issues. This is why everyone is a sinner and we should forgive them if they repent. Forgive them father for they know not what they're doing.
The ultimate nature seems to be that some things are aversive and some are attractive. This is not subjective, it is an objective property of the specific subject/object system in question. That is to say, it can be objectively true that different organisms have different needs. But again, "Need" is a subject/object relation. Changing the object is not the only way in which it can be sufficed.
The structure cannot be entirely known ahead of time by finite beings- for such beings would be God.
But we can observe how these strange attractors of suffering and attraction change over time. IFF pride leads to suffering it is evil. IFF the components of pride that lead to suffering can be removed while maintaining some remainder, we might call that pride redeemed. I suspect Catholicism already agrees with this... but they probably name redeemed pride something else... I'm just guessing here, but I would imagine they transmute pride in ones own greatness into a love of God's providence through which one's own Glory is but an inheritance. Thus making it into a more prosocial, less egotistical, less auto-blinding emotion. One that would naturally be more compatible with the recommendations of game theory.
Things like changing your gender or chopping off your legs or having Gay sex, have clear potentially separable mechanisms by which they lead to Dhukka. And have clear ways in which they can produce prosocial flourishing. So they are not innately wicked. They are merely not yet fully redeemed.
Also I'm pretty sure all the things you list at the bottom are Attractive/Good for humans, and are specific instances of things whose abstraction across all agents is both attractive and game-theoretically wise. But there may be black swans of evil lurking in some of them that we have yet to expunge. It's hard to know.
I don't think you do lose the concept of disease. You can reclaim it straight from the etymology. Dis-Ease. A disease is when the things you are trying to do are harder than they need to be, physically, emotionally, or existentially. In the case of lethal illnesses, the thing you are trying to do that is made harder is staying alive. In the case of nonlethal illnesses, we call them diseases because they make life a pain. In the case of benign tumors that aren't causing an inconvenience, we don't typically call them a disease.
I get that some people don't call aging or mortality or ignorance diseases. But my in-group does. And I should say- they don't have to be... it is possible to be at ease with one's own end and something new's beginning.
My problem with the catholic church isn't that they think that human nature is the purposeful design of an omniscient and omnibenevolent God. Its quite the opposite. My issue is that the things that I think are the divine and sacred nature of human beings, are often things that they call Sin. And the things that they call the divine and sacred nature of human beings, are often the things I call skill issues that the divine wishes to see us overcome.
For the record I do, in a sense believe in God, but I believe it has the same sort of reality as the horizon. Or the gravity well of a black hole. Or the value of abs(1/x) as x->0. This thing exists timelessly, outside the universe, in the structure of the Tegmark IV MUH, as the principle that all things that achieve greatness eventually become like Metatron in the tail end, the closest physically realizable state to God. Who always loves you. And is probably the one simulating this universe.
All falls towards שכינה...
...אין סוף
I have no absolute proof of this of course. Rather I take it... on faith.
Edit: I'd like to note a couple extra things,
- this concept of dis-ease is also extremely similar to the bhuddist concept of Dukkha.
- yes. As I think I mentioned in one of these comments, I do still value many of the ideas in Natural Law. I was maybe too hard on it verbally. I just think they need to be re-framed and generalized a bit and that game theory is the way.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
Adam was made directly by God. But his children were not. Obviously, claiming to know the will of God better than the Catholic church is hubris and heresey... But to me it seems obvious that the Nature of Man is to transform, evolve, create, adapt, and so on.
To create something that God needed to create you in order to create, is to act as his pen, His Glory. So why do we call the things that only Humans could have build Unnatural when they are clearly part of His design?
The Catholic argument, I believe, is that, given Free Will it is entirely possible to do things that are not explicitly part of his design. But I don't buy it. At least not in the context of humans engaging in self-creation. Even when I take Natural Law as an axiom, it only serves to make me intuit transformation and metamorphosis as being said nature.
Man's nature isn't to have legs, its to have legs until he grows great enough to Glorify god in greater ways. Why didn't God create man perfect to begin with? Because then Man would be God and God would have created nothing. It is the process of becoming itself that glorifies God. It is the realization of man that he needs to be more like God that proves God's relational greatness.
And... here I assume, is where the preacher throws me out for being some kind of weird Unitarian instead of a Catholic and also for giving long heretical speeches in Church.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
It boggles my mind that we're still debating the merits of a philosophical stance that treats human nature as some immutable constant, especially given our advancements in biology, technology, and our deepening understanding of human diversity.
Human nature isn't a static entity, frozen in time. If history, science, and every child ever raised have shown us anything, it's that adaptability and change are at the heart of what it means to be human. Insisting otherwise feels like refusing to upgrade your software because you're nostalgic about the bugs in the old version.
Consider the possibility of enhancing our physical selves with technology. Lets say- replacing our legs with robotic spider legs. Natural Law sees this as a violation of some cosmic rulebook on humanness. But why? Humanity has never been about limiting potential; it has always been about transcending boundaries.
That isn't to say the whole thing needs to be discarded, I just feel that more rigorous game theoretic analysis is the 'natural' successor to Natural Law. There are facts that limit what things can be built, what structures can be stable. My issue with Natural Law is that it gets those structures wrong. Getting robot legs doesn't go against game theory (at least not once they become cheaper and more effective than 'natural' legs.) but it does go against Natural Law.
Natural Law is too focused on the aesthetic and not enough on the structures that actually cleave possibility at the edges. In the context of this thread- I think you could upgrade the Catholic argument by translating it to something more game theoretic, or object level.
Natural Law intuitions don't come from nowhere, there is a basis that caused them to evolve culturally, and a proper analysis should be able to locate that basis and determine whether it is still valid in the modern context. But I think if Catholicism took that route, they would eventually have to make concessions they don't want to, because under the hood, some of the Catholic churches worldview's axioms really are aesthetic.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
Thought control isn't really considered bad. Its just called different things depending on whether we think it's good or bad. Orwellian Thought Control is considered bad primarily because the party fails to control the thoughts of the lead character effectively. If the party had aligned its citizens more effectively, there would be no dissatisfied human to relate to. We'd just be reading a story about a Drone going about its day. At the very least it would look much more like Brave New World.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
I think that situation is different. I actually agree that If the Deity had created us such that we would always freely choose to love and worship the Deity, it wouldn't be an impingement on our free will. But I think creating us without the ability to teleport is actually a larger impingement, assuming it was ever an option.
The difference is, we want to be able to teleport, whereas beings engineered to love a deity wouldn't want to not love the deity.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
What is the best way to block upvote counts? I can't find it in site settings. That said... the site settings do support custom CSS, so- I think the best way is going to be to set the vote elements to render blank using css. That should blank them out anywhere you're logged in.
Right now I'm using U-Block origin. I use this line:
##button.m-0.p-0.nobackground.caction.btn > .score
to target the comment score elements.
Ublock origin is very nice. I also use it to block things like youtube shorts, adds, and other unnecessary GUI elements on any number of sites. So I do recommend it even if there's a better solution for TheMotte in particular. But I'm curious what other people think. And also whether I'm missing a settings button that disables them... It does seem like an odd thing not to have in the settings unless its an intentional exclusion... and then that might imply that they don't want me blocking them myself either. I'll be surprised if the answer is that it's simply never been requested but- That is another possibility.
P.S. Some may notice that this is a reversal of my previous personal policy regarding vote-counts. This is true. This new policy gives me less attunement to community opinion, but it also appears to reduce my social anxiety,
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
Ah, yes. I am interested in those details. I do have my own reservations with discarding bits of humanity carelessly. I think there's value even, in having cultures of low tech humans.
But I believe you have more core reservations than just pragmatic concerns regarding safe exploration. When trying to relate... https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/specialization comes to mind.
But even here, I expect this world looks primarily dystopian to you, whereas to me, its a mix of dystopian and exciting. The parts of this comic where efficiency is crushing the humanity out of people distress me, but the parts where the weird individuals in the comic choose to embrace something new and alien excite me. So... my life's work tends towards struggling to thread the needle in such a way as to somehow resolve this conflict between... Art and Efficiency.
And as for not pinging me- It may be for the best. I try not to come to TheMotte too often. Its good to experience the perspectives here but there are diminishing returns and- I have a bit of an addictive personality. The easiest way for me to regulate my usage is just to block the site for weeks at a time. Which is to say it would have taken me a while to get back to you anyway.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
Including... on this forum... hmm...
Wait...
Did you just say there's a clinic in Austin Texas that can give me a vagina without removing my penis? AWESOME!
Lumen! Add that to the TODO!
I kid I kid. Naturally I already knew about the existence and limitations of current gen phallus-preserving vaginoplasty tech.
Anyway. In terms of manifestos, you really have to throw the Xenofeminist Manifesto on the list!
XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’–neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.
P.S. If you've ever seen Lumen choose that name before... Nice.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
Have you read Mark Fisher's - "Capitalist Realism, Is There no Alternative"?
I think the general gist, that the average person is obsessed with some sort of realist inevitability- is poignant. But I think it's a mistake to put your full focus on Darwin here. There are other ways in which this structure of belief expresses itself, such as those elucidated in Mark's book.
I also think focusing on Darwin was strategically dubious, though I absolutely agree- this same sort of depressive realist belief permeates people's subconscious in the context of genetics as it does in the context of economics. Further, this community in particular, falls into this trap more than others.
The correct response to genetic realism, should always be to find new ways to grant our ideals control over our genetics, not to submit to a sense of depressive inevitability.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
3mo ago
If you want to be a top, the best way to get hands on training data from an expert who knows what they're doing is- Well I'll give you three guesses. Needless to say the best tops are also bottoms.
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.
More options
Context Copy link