CloudHeadedTranshumanist
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User ID: 2056
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6mo ago
Why... did you post this? I am somewhat interested in seeing other people's dialogues with models. But maybe they should just be linked to...
I'm not sure how to engage with something like this here on the Motte in the middle of the culture war roundup?
Should I engage with your thoughts or analyze the chat as a whole? Also did a chunk of this get chopped off? ... Did you post by mistake?
Huh. Do I know you? I feel like I know you...
Though rat-adj with BPD was like half the community when I was in the bay area so- Ah well. Probably best not to try to disambiguate you anyway.
But yeah... Vassar- just had that cult leader energy. Everyone who met him knew that much. The act of talking with him would give people a contact high.
Vassar, before I came to Berkeley, someone warned me "Vassar is kind of crazy and it's impossible to have a normal conversation with him". As a result, I spent several months avoiding you. Then I finally got to meet you and I realized I had made a huge mistake. I mean, you are crazy, and it is is impossible to have a normal conversation with you. But normal conversation is incredibly over-rated compared to whatever the heck you call the thing that interaction with you involves. I regret that we didn't get more of a chance to talk about stuff and I hope to solve that sometime in the future.
-- Scott Alexander
You listen to Michael Vassar. You don't remember traveling to this party or sitting on this beanbag. You don't remember when he began to speak. He is still speaking. He sounds like madness and glory given lisping poetry, and you want to obey.
-- Alicorn
I was around when people were elevating Vassar's sexual misconduct on social media...
Many wispy memories of drama from the old discords and tumblrs bringing me back... Memories of friends of friends having psychotic breaks... Memories of jailbreaking our minds...
I wonder if HasturTimesThree is still out there... or Alice Monday... Listen. We were all crazy, and looking for something, anything to render us sane. The ratsphere selects for people that are seeking sanity after all.
Vassar's energy? His confidence? It enables him to attract people with that need.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
5mo ago
I think it’s describing a situation where you engineer a threatening environment so that you don’t need to use explicit force at the moment of decision. I think ziz is trying to say once you recognize that the environment was designed to corner someone into compliance, you can view it as morally similar to actually using violence, because the threat itself is doing the work of forcing their hand.
Why ziz didn't just say that- I may never know.
The term comes from Magic The Gathering lore and color pie philosophy. In mtg circles people will sometimes identify themselves by a color or color combination. Either due to liking the gameplay of that combo, or liking its aesthetics or personally vibing with the actual ideology.
Golgari is Black/Green. Life and death. The growth and decay of all things. Rot and Compost. One organism's bloated corpse is another organism's egg laying site. The mode of thinking that believes that the most respectful way to treat the dead crewmate is to return them to the ship's biomass recycler. This is the circle of life. This is the essence of Golgari.
"They say nothing lasts forever. I say everything lasts forever, just not in the form you may be accustomed to."
-- Deathsprout flavor text.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6mo ago
Thank you. I... Guess I should say something else but actually I'm just thanking you because you voiced one of my frustrations eloquently. People making worse versions of things because the good version is patented, people creating deadweight loss to get rid of to reap the benefits... or inducing unnecessary paradigm shifts so that they can be at the top of the transition team...
I guess I really do believe that theres no actual way to create more value for people. The modern amish have everything they need really. What was the point of all this junk we made? The medicine is nice yes. The food. The energy. I don't mind the AIs, though people trying to sell them to us is just another example. Take away friends, replace with 20$/month subscription. The cars... seemed nice but slowly grow to disgust me as I see how the travel distances expand to match their speed, keeping me only farther from other people. The trinkets and stopwatches and beer umbrellas add spice... but it turns to ash in my mouth without someone to share them with.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6mo ago
Life is not a song
Life is a song. But sometimes, that song is a dirge.
Anyway good post. I appreciate the analysis.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Those studying music look up to Mozart rightfully and would be visibly disgusted upon finding out about his scat fetish accusations.
Hmm. This sentence clings to me. What's going on here... lets see... yes. This sentence was just an aside. An example to further your point. Really a completely irrelevant thing to make my response about.
However to me it was a discontinuity. A confusion. The above sentence is treated like a "as we all know". But I totally missed the memo.
Why would those studying music be disgusted by their idol having gross kinks? I can see how you could likely elicit that disgust with any unsolicited claim of "Famous_Name has a scat fetish"- to someone that themselves is not into scat. But then- it wouldn't be about their Hero it would just be about the scat.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6mo ago
Autism and schizophrenia can be modeled as opposing cognitive strategies—autism compressing into narrow, high-fidelity pattern recognition and coherence maintenance, while schizophrenia expands into wide, low-filter signal processing and generative variability—both shaped by environmental and informational pressures in increasingly complex systems. Autism appears to emerge as an adaptive response to cognitive overload, reinforcing structure and specialization, while schizophrenia highlights the fragility of coherence under excessive input and recursive noise. Rising autism rates may reflect selection pressures favoring pattern-matching and abstraction capabilities in high-information environments, while schizophrenia may signal edge cases of system instability where variance outpaces integration. Together, they illustrate a species adapting under selection for cognitive architectures that balance specialization and generalization, testing the boundaries of predictive processing and distributed reasoning in the face of accelerating complexity.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10mo ago
I saw some content recently that contests the idea that the common Y-chromosome haplotype previously assumed to come from Ghengis Khan actually does. Apparently new reasearch can trace it back further than him and his direct descendants share a different haplotype.
Not that this is relevant to your point. Presumably, there's still some historical figure that you could slot into the same argument. Just a fun fact I picked up recently.
What does "Subvert" mean.
People can learn things and share opinions with those they talk to. That's how we arrive at decisions about who to vote for. Without a great firewall no election can truly be safe from foreign influence, because individuals will always internalize the influence of their foreign friends.
I think that means I agree that this is a tough nut to crack. I'm not sure there's a hard line, we might have to choose somewhere on the gradient and draw one.
Hopefully we'll all arrive at some agreeable middle ground. "rules of honorable culture war"... Perhaps something where you're allowed to influence online friends but to do so with a government backed media campaign is a culture war crime? (this is just a spitball in the direction of the vibe... I doubt the UN would actually pass this.)
Of course I say "we"... but I'm not Romainian. I merely say "we" because... its a nut America has yet to crack as well. It's something every country needs to figure out.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
9mo ago
I'm sure exceptions exist, but in my experience, most obese individuals I’ve encountered fit one or more of the following categories:
a) They struggle with poverty,
b) They deal with depression or isolation, or
c) They're part of a family with substance abuse issues, like alcoholism.
Revealed preferences are not a great way to model addictive or stress-driven behavior. Overeating, for example, may appear to be a revealed preference of someone who is depressed, but this behavior is highly contextual. It often vanishes when the individual is removed from those circumstances.
Furthermore, individuals aren't monolithic. Everyone is more like a collection of competing drives wrapped in a trenchcoat. "Revealed preferences" are often better understood as the final outcome of an internal, contingent battle between various drives and impulses, rather than the true essence of a person. What we observe as a preference in the moment may simply reflect which drive happened to win out in that context, not a consistent, rational choice.
As people age, they often gain the wisdom and self-determination to step back and recognize these internal conflicts. They realize that their earlier choices—made when their short-term drives held more sway—were myopic and not aligned with what they genuinely value in the long term.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
11mo ago
Agreed... except... that last part. Spears are SS+ tier in terms of skill floor, ease of production, ease of use, leverage, reach... there's a reason so many weapons of antiquity are variations on long stick with pokey end.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6mo ago
I agree with you. So I'm not sure how things will be resolved.
Personally I never liked this game though. Win or lose the culture war is emotional hell on earth.
I think there's more to it than the IKEA effect. But, the IKEA effect is a cognitive bias or quirk where people value things they assembled themselves more than things built by someone else. It is named after the store IKEA which sells furniture that you must self-assemble.
From wikipedia
A 2011 study found that subjects were willing to pay 63% more for furniture they had assembled themselves than for equivalent pre-assembled items.
I'm not sure this is really a bias in all cases. Having built something develops virtue and having that memory triggered when you see the object cements that virtue. But when the IKEA effect shows up in the context of assessing whether something is a good deal based on its actual cost of production- or estimating something's value to others- it can definitely be a bias in that context and lead to overestimating things you made.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6mo ago
I do think it's interesting. But ultimately this... now removed conversation was only the "bouncing ideas off of a rubber duck" phase of making a well directed point or refining an insight.
I think that part of what makes the LLMs so attractive is their ability and infinite willingness to listen to and expand one's own thoughts. It feels good because the ideas flow more smoothly. You have a social interface to lean them on and reify/refine them with, and of course, these models are usually intoxicatingly positive too.
When you write something for an audience, you have to be attentive to how you are directing the audience's attention, who the audience is. What concepts they are aware of, and how to move their attention cleanly from idea to idea with minimal friction. In the case of this post, even just a preface introducing the context of the chat to us would have been a nice improvement (though I still think any full convos should be linked and then discussed rather than hard posted in a top comment). LLMs talking just to you can be writing for an audience of just you, referencing priors and ideas that the LLM inferred would click with you. And using interaction modes that you told them to use to optimally interface with you.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6mo ago
That makes sense.
I think it's also difficult for me to conceive of enjoying the smell of farts or unveiling one's inner truth as vices. I think that's the oft discussed purity / exploration divide.
Plus something aesthetic relating to my existence as a Golgari mage. Shoveling shit is clean honest work. That requires a bath afterwards.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10mo ago
Tanks? RPGs? Explosives?
lets do it.
We don't have to give these weapons to every individual.
But make damn sure that every state militia is primarily controlled by that state, then expand the militia system, give every city their own city militia. By the time we have those in place, there will be enough of a pro-defense cultural shift that we can re-assess the 'private citizens with Uzis' issue.
And while we're at it- Don't defund the police, instead train every citizen into a reserve officer.
God. I hate that. I can't function in the presence of promoters like that. I think it's fairly obvious that many people can't. If the advertiser is succeeding at getting people to go inside who otherwise wouldn't, and those people end up disappointed, then he's committing attention fraud against those people. Maybe that's fine and marginal for most people. But williams syndrome-adj ADHDs like moi don't have the spoons or filters to cope with this.
We've taken to pointing at the screen and yelling "Consume product!" every time an advertisement comes on TV in my household to counteract the damage it does to our brains. It's awful. The other scenario is no better to be clear. I have to distance myself from both of those things to function.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10mo ago
Nothing against your aesthetic but it's not my aesthetic. I mean, it is metal and badass, for sure, but I'd prefer psychedelics in a relaxing bed amongst family as my body naturally gives out if it must die this millennium.
You're right that the current legally permissible aesthetic is insufficient for everyone. But your aesthetic is also insufficient for everyone. If we want this to work for more people we should broaden the permissible aesthetics.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
I think Elon runs things on a foundation of hype rather than any other core merit. But I still think hype can get real results if it brings in enough capital. Eventually you break through with brute force even if you personally are only a coordination point.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6mo ago
Hmm... I can relate to this sort of thinking. I too think something is lost in the transition between a casual game and a competitive game. But something is gained too.
Speedrunning Minecraft, is a different game than Minecraft. Even if they share most of the mechanics in theory. Letting the game play you... Is the point.
We're doing to ourselves something similar to what we do to train LLMs. Because falling into the flow of that training is pleasurable. And optimizing for something (like speed) helps us to unveil something new about the game and provides a direction for improving our own capabilities.
Those ACE bugs can be used for more than just end credit skips after all. The knowledge generalizes back to casual play. And if you don't like one category, because too much of the game has been cut out or you have grown tired of the route, you can always switch to another. Or to casual play. It's not like your free will has been entirely circumscribed.
I do think the communities get a bit overly excited about the metric of mastery over the game improving, (completion speed) when the more valuable thing to me is the understanding that has been gained regarding the game. But its alright. I won't begrudge them their records.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
8mo ago
Saying they "sample" goals makes it sound like you're saying they're plucked at random from a distribution. Maybe what you mean is that AI can be engineered to have a set of goals outside of what you would expect from any human?
The current tech is path dependent on human culture. Future tech will be path dependent on the conditions of self-play. I think Skynet could happen if you program a system to have certain specific and narrow sets of goals. But I wouldn't expect generality seeking systems to become Skynet.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10mo ago
I am thinking of random biohackers. People like The Thought Emporium.
Big Pharma definitely delivers things that random biohackers don't, but how much of that is talent capture that then ends up community funded by insurance anyway? I'm likely not well read enough to know the proper solution. But I know I hate this system and want to fund people who are willing to give a non-revocable free license for all their results.
My anger is speaking here to an extent but I'd rather take an OOM drop in quality if it means the producer of the content actually loves me and doesn't see me as just another object to be exploited. I suspect big pharma misses out on entire classes of easier solutions because easy solutions don't sell. ie- Were there a wild leaf you can chew on to cure cancer Big Pharma would be incentivized to neglect it and find something different enough to be patentable instead. Their results are largely worthless to me if I can't trust their motives not to be rent-seeking.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
10mo ago
Huge regulatory hurdles and huge costs followed by huge payouts is a model with its own problems. I'd much rather have small crowdfunded teams advancing tech then releasing their results for free so that we end up with advancements that a private individual can replicate. Various science youtubers have shown that real progress can be made this way (though somehow I see more of this progress happening in biology than in AI). I want to see more of that.
Could FDR? yes... Of course he could. The constitution wouldn't matter.
He had the Espionage and Sedition Acts and the Office of Censorship and the public trusted him. Had he told them we were banning publishing Der Stürmer the courts likely would have deferred to him during wartime.
Note that the internment of the Japanese Americans involved:
This wasn't just a violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments but an assault on the very concept of equality under the law. The Supreme Court upheld internment in Korematsu v. United States (1944).
And FDR just unilaterally did it. With an Executive order.
Long story short, constitutional rights can be expected to become elastic during wartime.
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