DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Why should anyone care about humanity in the abstract?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
I do not see why the existential of potential entities that "emulate" me in such a theoretical fashion precludes me from caring about the more prosaic/physical instantiations.
That's because you fail to seriously ask yourself what the word "computation" means (and likewise for other relevant words). A given computation's outputs are interpreted one way or another with regard to a decoder, but your approach makes the decoder and in fact the decoding irrelevant: you claim, very confidently, that so long as some entity, no matter how inanely arranged, how fragmented in space and time, "computes you" (as in, is made up of physical elements producing events which can be mapped to bit sequences which, together with other parts of this entity and according to some rules, can be interpreted as isomorphic with regard to your brain's processes by some software), it causes you to exist and have consciousness – if in some subordinate fashion. Of course it is indefensible and ad hoc to say that it does not compute you just because we do not have a decoder ready at hand to make sense of and impose structure on its "output bits". It is insane to marry your beliefs to a requirement for some localized, interpretable, immediately causal decoding – that's just watered-down Integrated Information Theory, and you do not even deign to acquaint yourself with it, so silly it seems to you!
And well, since (for the purpose of your untenable computational metaphysics ) entities and their borders can be defined arbitrarily, everything computes you all the time by this criterion! We do not need a Boltzmann brain or any other pop-sci reference, and indeed it has all been computed already. You, as well as every other possible mind, positively (not hypothetically, not in the limit of the infinite physics – your smug insistence on substrate independence ensures it) have always been existing in all possible states. As such, you do not get to ask for epsilon more.
Either concede that you have never thought about this seriously, or concede that you do not have a legitimate claim to any amount of control over the first-order physical substrate of the Universe since it is not meaningfully privileged for a strict computationalist. Or, really, we can just stop here. At least I will.
Once again, I do not care to enlighten you, you've been given enough to work with, only hubris and shit taste stops you from reading Koch or grown-up philosophy.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
As for Dust Theory, it's been a while since I read half of Permutation City. But I fail to see how it changes anything, my subjective consciousness wouldn't notice if it was being run on abacuses, meat or a supercomputer, or asynchronously. It doesn't track objective time. Besides, I sleep and don't lose sleep over that necessity, the strict linear passage of time is of no consequence to me, as long as it doesn't impede my ability to instantiate my goals and desires.
I've written a bunch, and deleted (your response to the issue of causal power was decisive). The long and short of it is that, being who you are, you cannot see the problem with Dust Theory, and therefore you do not need mind uploading – in the Platonic space of all possibilities, there must exist a Turing machine which will interpret, with respect to some hypothetical decoding software at least, the bits of your rotting and scattering corpse as a computation of a happy ascended SMH in a Kardashev IV utopia. That this machine is not physically assembled seems to be no obstacle to your value system and metaphysics which deny that physical systems matter at all; all that matters, according to you, is ultimate constructibility of a computation. From the Dust Theory perspective, all conceivable agents have infinite opportunity to 'instantiate their goals and desires'. Seeing that, I would ask and indeed try to prevent you from wasting the valuable (for me, a finite physical being) negentropy budget on frivolous and wholly unnecessary locally computed and human-specified simulations which only add an infinitesimal fraction of your preferred computations to the mix.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
Call a bugman a bugman and see how he recoils etc.
As I've said already, "sophistication" is not what is needed to see your failures here. Specifically, the distinction between copy-pasting and transposition. Indeed, this is very trivial, children get it, until they are gaslit with sloppy computationalist analogies.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
Grasping at straws.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
humans have a moral skeleton, innate hardwiring that allows us to learn morality
I suppose we have, to some extent, but it can't be all that robust. Tons of species are psychopathic by our standard, and of course this standard exists to distinguish humans who don't fit it. So it's more like a slight inductive bias, in the same way we have biases to learn to navigate in 3D space and prefer sugary foods. Biases of the algorithm can be substituted with biases in the data.
and believe it (as opposed to mimic it). This is highly instrumentally non-convergent and probably needs to be coded into an AI directly; gradient descent on output will only produce lying psychopaths mimicking morality.
I don't see why that would be true. Indeed, I do not see why gradient descent wouldn't be much better of learning deep cognitive regularities including morality. You seem to hold that morality is something essential, some set of terminal value-influences, but why is that true for morality and not any other aspect of our cognition, both instrumentally worthwhile and «instrumentally non-convergent» ones? Every part of our decision-making feels profoundly qualitatively colored for us.
Why is "coded directly" better than learned? The major reason we're doing this stuff is that it's vastly better at generalization,
Sorry, this looks like a vibe-based argument, where neural nets deceptively "imitate" and hard code is "good and honest". It's all algorithms. Inasmuch as human minds are computable, our morality is an algorithm too.
GOFAI has some hope because we could code morality directly
What good would that do? It'd break OOD just the same, and if it didn't break, it'd be rewritten or worked around by the purported daemon of optimization.
But I'm not seeing any hope of success on non-uploads without the ability to look inside the box. This is because "is moral" and "is pretending to be moral successfully" have identical output except in situations where dropping the pretence is worth it i.e. situations where there's a high chance of you losing control upon betrayal.
Reminder that LLMs cannot learn to do the «treacherous turn» because the dreaded SGD mercilessly ablates cognitive routines that do not contribute to decreasing loss in training. This, of course, holds in the general case.
But even beyond that, outputs may be similar but activations aren't, we know how to look at activations, and we know there are differences between the model subjectively evaluating its output as true or false.
it seems like the difficulty of determining whether spaghetti-code does X is generally at least as high as the difficulty of writing code that does X, which implies that making safe NNs is at least as hard as writing GOFAI
No, generation is always vastly simpler than classification unless you require classification that reconstructs the process of generation, of course.
I've long held that Yuddist program is, in addition to all else, an attractor for a particular variation of anxiety/OCD disorder: fetishization of «being in control», of making thoughts play by «proper rules». But it's fetishization because it doesn't really work, it pursues ghosts, precisely the deceptive external form of reliability. You gain clarity of ideas by testing them against evidence, not by being real suspicious of disconfirmations.
Pitts wrote that his depression might be “common to all people with an excessively logical education who work in applied mathematics: It is a kind of pessimism resulting from an inability to believe in what people call the Principle of Induction, or the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Since one cannot prove, or even render probable a priori, that the sun should rise tomorrow, we cannot really believe it shall.”
This malady is to be treated, not nurtured.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
i don't believe cows or chickens possess a meaningful capacity to suffer. pigs probably suffer more
How does this work on the substrate level? You may like pigs more or whatever but they're clearly organisms on the same level of sophistication as cows. (Naturally humans are not far off from either)
If you don't have children and want to become a transhumanist immortal being, you shouldn't trust me
Which I won't, but more due to your rabid tribalism and clear bad faith than these differences. I'll note that I've always wanted to and still hope to have a large traditional family besides living forever as an uplifted human (the question of whether this, combined with my values and probable tolerance for further self-alteration, would initiate a slide into profound non-humanity and disconnect has concerned me since, like, age 6), but that's neither here nor there.
Self-serving? of course! So are all of your positions.
No. If you admit this, you concede that your arguments about «stake» are disingenuous. I do not have to concede anything of this sort.
DaeschIndustries and Chrispratt, seem stupified and angry at the idea that I might endorse the third guy, at the expense of the other two because this isn't dEmOcRaTic. I have my values and want to see them survive. Democracy is not a terminal value.
I also don't worship democracy. The point of my comment about democracy is that there is no agreeable external standard of a «good vision». Everything resolves either with a negotiated consensus or with a power competition that ends in more or less disagreeable and unequal compromises. We don't have power struggles here, so you've got to argue why your offer is better even by the standards of others. Perhaps you can address their higher-order values, showing why your standards allow for those to be satisfied better. Maybe you can offer some concession. Doubling down on asserting that your stuff is gooder and you are gooder is not productive.
Most irritatingly, there's a clever bait and switch with definitions of stake you use.
Here, you claim that your vision advances the common good simply because it is… good. Also aligned with people you agree with and whose satisfaction is more important by your account. So it's a «stake» not in a future where humanity thrives, but in the particular future with a version of thriving you prefer for your internal reasons, in a word – a preference. Okay. Naturally everyone thinks his preferred values are the best, else he'd have abandoned them. But this is just circular. This isn't a serious attempt to persuade: you ask that your collective values be respected (and in practice, you clearly hope to preclude the realization of other values), and if your numbers are sufficient, you demand that they be given supremacy. (You also clearly desire incompatibility – with the presumption your party will come out on top and snuff out others – because you find other visions morally abhorrent, a negative irrespective of contingent factors; you have a stake not simply in the future where baseline humans can peacefully exist, but where others cannot. But that's okay too. Most people this serious about religion are genocidal in their heart of hearts, I think, and for the most part they can behave themselves).
However, in your original comment, you did try to persuade. You argued that your political preferences, and those of other parents, are inherently more deserving of trust because your values and traits, chiefly having children (and wanting yourself and them to die, for whatever reason), give you «a stake» in the common long-term flourishing of humanity: according to this logic, you have skin in the game and it gives you an incentive to make more responsible choices than others, in this context, apparently wrt AI progress. This is how I understand e.g. the following.
I certainly hope this is just my bias showing, but I have greater fear for Altman types running the show than Musks because they are a few extra steps removed from stake in future civilization. We know that Musk wants to preserve humanity for his children and his grandchildren. Can we be sure that's anymore than an abstract good for Altman?
I counter that this is bad psychology. Why would Altman (or me, or selfmadehuman, or even fruitier types in my list above) have less of a subjective stake? If he personally intends to be present indefinitely, he totally has a massive stake; we aren't debating whether his plan will work out but simply whether his idea of his stake in the future motivates him to act responsibly to effect less risky outcomes for the common good, in this case lesser odds of a rogue AI wiping out humanity like Eliezer fears (it sounds improbable that a misaligned AI would wipe out everyone but Altman; I'll leave the topic of Altman-aligned omnicidal singleton aside, though it is important in its own right).
Perhaps your brain is overloaded with oxytocine and so you feel that, since Altman doesn't have children like you do, he cannot act seriously: children are obviously (to you) the most valuable existence in the world, more important to you than you are, and Altman is not tethered to anything as important. I can easily believe that Altman cares more about his livelihood than you do about your entire family combined, and thus has a greater «stake». In any case, this is just psychological speculation about the magnitude of perceived value from humanity not getting whacked. I cannot look into your head any more than I can look into Altman's. I could also argue that Christians cannot be serious consequentialists, nor give much of a shit about preventing Apocalypse ≈indefinitely, and their stake is phony since the whole premise of their faith is eternal blissful immortality conditional on faithfulness to some deontological rules; so even Altman with his assumed materialistic egoism is more reliable. I won't, because this is an entirely worthless line of debate.
Can you appreciate the difference and why equivocation between those senses of the stake would irritate?
More mundanely, the society simply respects parents because through their procreation it perpetuates itself (also because this signals some baseline competence, under non-dysgenic conditions at least); and parents are hardwired to egoistically demand a greater share of the common pie – a greater stake, one could say – on behalf of their progeny, cowardly submit to any intimidation when that seems to protect their children, psychotically denigrate, belittle and rip off childless people (who end up feeling irrational shame) and do other silly things. This might be necessary for the system to work and, in fact, I've recommended doubling down on such uncouth behaviors.
Personally I am constitutionally incapable of feeling shame for being correct, though.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I gave those reasons, Israel is an important ally against Iran
It is indeed unclear that the US needs an ally against Iran, or that there are significant reasons to continuously antagonize Iran, probably the highest human capital, oil-rich Muslim state, that do not amount to protecting Israeli interests.
You treat the US as the decision-making party here. IMO that's clearly wrong: Israel decides on the basis of its interests, and the US rationalizes support provided under lobbyist pressure.
I think Israel can and should stop building settlements
It's telling that the official US position seems to be the same, yet it is so glaringly impossible to effect change that the topic is barely brought up. The same logic applies to the gag order on Israeli nukes.
US-Israeli relation is not a reciprocal alliance. Americans have about as much reason to fight Iran as Belarus to invade Ukraine. And it's as laughable to pretend that the US supports Israel out of geopolitical self-interest as to explain Iraq war with oil.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
See edits.
Anyway, what I'm asserting is that the presence of bluster of this kind is not enough to disqualify the proposition as «uniformly just nonsense». Something like 25% of Uriah's conjectures may well prove correct. If I were to bet on it, I'd say that brachycephalization-domestication thesis, episodic memory vs. «stamp collecting» adaptations and the bit about Oceanian quivering smell less like bullshit than Japanese Omega-3 one, but all of it is within the realm of sane academic hypotheses, if not Overton-compliant ones.
Milk Lobe is... controversial in my mind.
Well Galton got further than 90% of modern social scientists (whose received wisdom still looks like this) with just that plus a bit of math. Directionally the same, it seems, happened for the whole Hajnal line discourse, Indian Aryan issue and other topics. We've been hearing a lot of cackling from the wannabe sophisticateds about stupid racist nazi chuds obsessed with foreheads and brow heights or using CaLiPeRS to reach conclusions about intelligence; but time and time again it seems like calipers work to an extent. So I think there are grounds for cautious optimism about this approach.
Pre-20th century, or perhaps more to the point, pre-Civil Rights guys were less technically informed but also less mindkilled and could reason freely on the basis of what is now unattainable purity of real experience; explicitly rechecking and refining their intuitions with modern tools could be a legitimate way to revitalize anthropology in the broadest sense.
That said, wilder schizoposter accs are merely riffing off the aesthetic of gentlemen scientists, if not scholars of the occult.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
«Schizoposters» with more or less believable hot takes about human biodiversity and essential qualities of «races» are prevalent in the esoteric right Twitter, chiefly in BAP's circles. The greatest among them all was Hakan Rotwrmt (RIP), and MIYA BLACK HEARTED CYBER ANGEL BABY was a close second; both were apparently collective accounts ran by extraordinarily witty people.
See our resident spammer Carlsbad (?) burrowing into the BAP network.
I haven't read his most recent thread - but his output before that was uniformly just nonsense, and there wasn't any truth or value in it whatsoever, not even in an 'adjacent to truth' sense.
On that basis are you saying this? His inferences are straining credulity, but he cites genuine data.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Why?
It makes sense for the definition to precede the concrete example, both on the scale of the paragraph and the whole post.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
It's quoted verbatim from the Etymology section of that page, though.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
I do not report you because I practically never do but I would like to ask you not to use basic slurs. I don't care about it but others may care and this poisons the site for neophytes. Let's not slide into /r/CultureWarRoundup even faster.
On the other hand, opposition to skilled immigration seems super common amongst HBD people here
Aren't you that South Asian rationalist guy who audaciously implied that ethnocentrism is an entirely alien notion to you since you're not white, and that it is impossible to have «reasoned debate» with people who don't want you to immigrate to their countries, because they have «blue-and-orange morality», so the only way to deal with them is censorship?
You sure are good at assimilating: you can learn English and slatestarcodex lingo and whatever else is needed to «pass». I'm sure you pride yourself on this ability to mimic superficial markers of a cooperating agent. But what matters is not how much you look the part: such «assimilation» is not worth more than changing skin color. What matters is actually, you know, cooperating, including respect for host's values, even irrational ones.
I've already said all I had to say about you years ago.
Perhaps this «opposition to skilled immigration» is not about skill, nor even primarily about race, but is specifically opposition to sociopathic, uncompromising immigration that immediately sides with one's political enemies and gloats about disempowering legacy population.
If anyone reads this, you may explain to them how such an opposition is illegitimate or founded on alien moral precepts.
(On another note, it's really funny how @HlynkaCG has corncobbed himself with his philosophical notion of woke Neo-Nazis and other clever inversions. Will we see him arguing that DEI values follow from literalist interpretation of the Constitution and are more American than apple pie, if another moderately suave progressive happens to aid him in his dunking on woke HBDers?)
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
19d ago
It sucks as much as any country in its socioeconomic class.
No.
You cannot understand how much India sucks.
Maybe the next generation will. Or the one after that.
To every Indian, I have the same advice. Everything is a dick measuring contest. Grow a bigger (economic) penis. Your economic penis is the only thing that matters.
Wrong too, but expected.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
Wojak is at the Republican primary, standing in the corner, his feet hurt, I bet they don't even know how I've transcended simian instincts.
Way to prove him correct. Did you feel clever when writing it? Or did you feel Based?
This is just dumb, Hanania is arguing against a cartoon Republican he just made up in his head.
No, he is not. In fact he isn't arguing at all. He is trying to normalize shaming of Trump loyalists as low-status, trash, unserious Republicans, to divert the remaining talent to a candidate with better chances – both of winning the election and of prosecuting a desirable policy.
We still have tons of Trump loyalists even on this relatively sophisticated sub, for all the good this loyalty has done for them. Hanania is very mean, sure, but his meanness is sensible. What would it take for them to abandon Trump, if his demonstrable political ineptitude, lack of gratitude or respect for his base, ugly and self-defeating tantrums, immaturity so pronounced one has to suspect it's affected etc. – did not?
I think he's correct that it's only humiliation of Trump as a man. But it doesn't really matter. The sad truth is that very many people do not even have a simian idea of political worth. It only matters for them whether voting for Trump is Based or Chringe.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
At least, that's the Outer Objective, it's the equivalent of saying that humans are maximising inclusive-genetic-fitness, which is false if you look at the inner planning process of most humans. And just like evolution has endowed us with motivations and goals which get close enough at maximising its objective in the ancestral environment, so is GPT-4 endowed with unknown goals and cognition which are pretty good at maximising the log probability it assigns to the next word, but not perfect.
Should I develop bioweapons or go on an Uncle Ted-like campaign to end this terrible take?
Since when has this ever been true in anything else?
Like what?
I'm not American, I don't owe it to your paranoid star-sprangled hivemind to pretend that China is a thing worth paying attention to. There is no «Yellow menace», there is no «threat of Chinese eugenics»; for the world at large, China is about as relevant as Czech Republic, only quantitatively bigger. Do you want to talk about the Czech AI threat? If you want to talk about China, we can go off vibes. My read on vibes is diametrically opposite to yours. If you want to discuss the evidence, well, what is the evidence for this purported Chinese focus on AI?
Especially in a priority area like AI, why would they slow down to respect commercial ethics?
Because the CCP is well-known for cutting uppity businessmen down to size, and AI to the party bosses looks like «blockchain» or «fintech» – some new grifting scheme to syphon off some of their control over the system; another invention that's a bigger internal threat than external competitive edge. Remember when Americans were afraid that Choyna, ever ruthless and game-theoretically diabolical, will leverage their dominance in cryptocurrency mining? They've gladly regulated it out of existence instead.
It's accepted they're in a race with the US over the most important technology of the century. The US certainly thinks so, that's why they imposed their semiconductor sanctions on China.
Yeah, it's accepted by Americans, but does China notice that they're in an AI race? For all I know they're of the mind that semiconductors are needed only for drone warfare over the first island chain, monitoring Uighur camps and manufacturing automation – or, perhaps, to produce high-end smartphones; which is why the severity of sanctions and impossibility of compromise befuddles them so. Many Americans are, indeed, obsessed with geopolitical dominance of their Empire of Freedom, like some Avengers franchise characters or, less charitably, suicidal ants willing to lay down their livelihoods for the largesse of the colony. But I don't notice the same spirit in Chinese people; they're selfish, entrepreneurial, too engrossed with busywork to notice the big picture. Does Baidu or ByteDance believe they're forging the future of the lightcone? What are the names of Chinese Hassabis or Altman? How many mainlanders are even aware of this eschatological discourse?
Consider the Chinese anime-fication photo app that turned blacks into furniture, monkeys, whitened them, removed them entirely because it was clearly trained that blacks weren't beautiful. That would never pass from Google, they'd get pilloried.
Ironically, the underlying model was Stable Diffusion, or specifically a minor finetune of NovelAI. Stability is incorporated in London, UK. Novel – Delaware, US. Alibaba has never released Composer. I wonder why.
America has regulated its productive industries into the ground, shipbuilding, high-speed rail, construction of literally everything is strangled by red tape
Alternatively: Americans are obsessed with building, so they whine about red tape; the Chinese are obsessed with grifting, so they pretend to build. But what has China built concretely? Rail for empty trains, and empty apartment blocks? Automated ports to ship Aliexpress gizmos to the Americans? This is all immaterial in the AI race. Where are their new supercomputers? Buying out consumer GPUs? Centralized collection of annotations to train foundation models, incentivized with Social Credit score (does it even work yet)? They have many levers to compensate for their hardware and expertise shortcomings. Which ones, exactly, have they pressed? They've only ever gone in the opposite direction – prohibiting tech giants from harvesting data, imposing regulations, forgoing opportunities.
They'd rather take an unsustainable loan, erect another concrete dildo, stuff it with pigs and Huawei snout recognition and pat themselves on the back for being innovative. All the while some pig-like official collects gold bricks in the basement of his overpriced siheyuan in the countryside. That's what Chinese building is like.
I may sound a little racist here. But the bigger issue is that Mainland China is so incredibly sheltered. They don't have the sense of what is possible, their culture is a tiny shallow hothouse for midwit takes. It's like Belarus or some other stale post-Soviet backwater; actually worse. This is true of their entertainment as well as of their tech and politics. I've tried to take them seriously for a while, and came to this conclusion. Ignoring China and assuming they won't do anything consequential nor retaliate in any meaningful way when Anglos are kicking them in the balls has consistently been the rational choice.
It makes far more sense for China's AI strategy to follow their broad accelerate-economic-development strategy
They've curtailed this strategy though, now it's about «the struggle for security» or something. Not like it'll work.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Exit rights is a separate issue, and cars are great in this sense; every household should have one. Indeed, a car is also a great lethal weapon, a storage, a mobile lodging – a necessity for any high-agency individual (it's a shame cars are so easy to break into, though).
As for more mundane applications, in reality it seems like there's no stable position of «walk only»; dense cities with fewer cars and more emphasis on public transport encourage greater access to personal transport, self-powered and human-powered, like bicycles, motorbikes, scooters and such. My favorite lazy way to move around is EUC. 15 mph is enough to vastly exceed the pedestrian range and explore other zones, especially if you hop on and off public transport lines. It's really very neat, the apex of small electric transport: you get free hands, intuitive control, decent speed, virtual independence from roads, and it's the size of a suitcase.
I suppose that for many Americans, not even old ones, such modes of transportation constitute an apparent indignity and, crucially, a serious health risk. Nevertheless, in the limit, the allure of the «European» way where living isn't car-centered is clear. Hauling your 300 pound ass 15 miles to Walmart to pick up 10 gallons of HFCS and other trash in your 1 ton pickup truck is... freedom in some sense, and shouldn't be made inaccessible; but it's also clearly grotesque. There is vastly more indulgence than embrace of freedom to ordinary car use.
You want specifics? What I mean by the disgusting lack of taste is inability to notice how, say, stuff like this – the whole (acclaimed in India, allegedly) channel – is garish and, ideally, ought to not exist; how it differs not just from high Western culture, but from mass entertainment too. Its existence is downstream of the same cause as willingness to drink feces from the Ganges; most likely mediated by the same neurophysiological differences. From what I can tell, a typical Indian male sees no problem here, because he involuntarily acts out those same mannerisms and thought patterns, whether as a Western politician – more polished, of course, by virtue of high intelligence and class and usually caste – or a bitter troll on themotte who suffers from lack of success on Tinder; in lower castes, this is often so pronounced and cringeworthy that I physically cannot bear to watch for long. What is the point in explaining it, pointing out cringeworthy inflections and expressions of the body, tacky spice of exaggerated interests, sloppiness of thought? Humans cannot meaningfully debate deep intuitions of propriety and grace, and I do not care to force some mimicry even if it were possible to convince Indians of my "correctness". It's a comprehensive and, yes, visceral sensation of rejection. Another race, another civilization, is entitled to a different set of standards. Indians do not know cringe or disgust, and I suppose that's psychologically better for them. Superpower by 2030 anyway, and Americans, who are also rapidly forgetting what it is to feel cringe, will be friendly to India anyway – because English, because economics, because geopolitics.
P.S. The phrase «spiritual pollution» is something I've taken from an offhand comment, long lost, by a Brahmin, about reasons Brahmins historically and contemporarily tend to live with their own, even at substantial cost, and seek to distance themselves from other Indians: to not be infected, not learn to move, act, think like… this, to cling to what purity they have salvaged. He saw the same thing I see, and I guess this is part of why they insist on bringing casteism even to Silicon Valley. I sure would love if it worked the other way around, «pollution» of civility and taste spreading to all. But probably not.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Navalny was in line with American goals for Russia, breaking it down into ethnic components
What?
I'm getting tired of your low-information default twitter righoid takes, could you increase the quality of your commentary?
Consider that you aren't 100% sure of being a reliable narrator, and that the uncertainty, however minuscule, is greater than odds of spontaneous physical miracles – as per @sodiummuffin's logic. Conditional on you invariably ending up alive, you will... not have had experienced lethal harms that cannot be survived without magic; and if it very convincingly looks to you as if you had experienced them, well, maybe that was just some error? A nightmare, a psychedelic trip, a post-singularity VR session with memory editing...
I woke up today from a realistic dream where I got crippled and blinded by a battery pack explosion. In its (and, in a sense, my own) final moments, I consciously chose the alternate reality relative to which that world was a dream, focused my awareness, and realized that this has happened many times before – in other worlds I had escaped by simply waking up into this one. (This reminded me: I've never read Carlos Castaneda but he probably wrote about this stuff? Sent me on a binge. Yeah, that's one of his topics, mages jumping between apparent universes that should be ontologically unequal).
Dreams aside, I feel like the idea of quantum immortality is unfortunately all tangled up with the idea of observer effect. As per QI, you aren't immortal across the board – you die, and soon, in the vast majority of timelines observed by any other consciousness, just like all humans who have died before our time. You are, right now, in a timeline you observe (though as noted above, only probably) – and presumably you aren't yet dying any more than any other person who's exposed to normal risks and aging. The idea is that you do indeed die in those scenarios where you eat an explosion, develop malignant tumors, are lying in a dump bleeding out all alone with no chance of survival, or are 80 years old in 1839; but those are counterfactuals, not real timelines, and the you who doesn't die, the person typing those comments, doesn't get into them. If it looks to you as if you did, and QI is right – you being wrong is more likely than a miracle.
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