DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
Because you can't program virtue ethics into an AI. You need a utility function.
I am not even sure Yudkowsky would argue this. In any case this is not defensible unless you think that virtue ethics is in principle not computable.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
Misspellings are allegedly a mechanism to invoke algorithmic suppression and not have your content revealed to the general audience. I do ignore them.
He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me
People generally do not become any smarter with age so that is okay. If one can make an argument at all, it can be made at 15 and with a teenager's mentality. Except when an argument depends on accumulated experience, like his time in academia.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
But did he check? What, in those sources, proves BAP wrong? Why did you believe him that he did check? The first paper is some inconclusive exploratory study. But it has interesting sections:
Challenges for incorporating Asian American donors
Engaging Asian American alumni as part of university communities is a major challenge for development officers. Several interviews revealed Asian Americans’ disconnections with their university. In the words of one development officer:
Alumni of color generally tended not to be as engaged and connected to the university. I think there tends to be a little more skepticism about the university’s commitment to issues of diversity ... so I think there are some hurdles that you have to get over with regard to trust and making sure that they understand the importance of being involved. (Personal communication, 23 February 2009)
In fact, many Asian American alumni form reunions solely within their own ethnic communities. Revisiting a previous conversation with Asian American donors, one development officer said,
‘a prospective Asian American donor, who is also an alumnus and his family have never attended [university’s reunion] ... it’s not that they weren’t invited – they get mailings just like everyone else – but they didn’t think the annual event contained anything meaningful for them’. However, a number of this alum’s Asian American colleagues, who graduated with him – whether they came from Mainland, or Taiwan, continue to get together and have their own annual celebration; they have no negative feelings about the university; but, their attachment is to each other and not to the university as an institution’ (personal communication, 3 March 2009).
Another challenge is soliciting monetary support from Asian American donors. This is in addition to traditional donations of time and personal efforts to support voluntary causes. As documented in previous research, Asian American donors possessed a strong desire to dedicate their personal time, volunteering for the Asian American organizations or serving as the Board members (Deeney, 2002). In contrast, financial supports have primarily benefited their family and ethnic groups (Ho, 2004).
One respondent explained:
Asian Americans are accustomed to giving in terms of their time – they are very involved in the community and/or serve on various committees, etc; but, they feel that that should be the limit of their giving. They don’t see giving in terms of dollars. It just isn’t part of their tradition. Giving money has always been about giving to a family and giving to a mainstream university is a relatively a new concept ... it is not a practice in which they’ve been involved throughout the generations. It’s not that they are withholding, or that they are parsimonious, it’s just that financial contributions to an organization are not part of their psyche. (Personal communication, 3 March 2009)
Working with donors in international settings, unavoidable obstacles are distance and communication. One development officer mentioned, ‘You [development officer] are not in front of them on a regular basis, and you might lose the momentum’ (personal communication, 26 March 2009).
In order to overcome these difficulties, development officers employ meaningful e-mail and telephone communications, and frequently travel to Asian countries to meet with the prospective donors.»
There's some hope about 2nd+ generations:
Previous research has revealed that first generation Asian Americans are more likely to give back to their home countries or give specifically to Asian American-related causes, while giving by second and beyond generations tend to be directed more toward mainstream organizations (Chao, 1999; Ho, 2004). One development officer responded, younger Asian American alum tend to ‘give more closely to their non-alumni of color counterparts, so they tend to give more generally to the university because they feel more connected to the class than the past generations have’ (personal communication, 23 February 2009).
I'll also note that the paper was authored by one Kozue Tsunoda, who, being obviously Japanese, is very much not a modal example of an Asian alumni in the current year, and who with characteristic Japanese tact avoids sharp angles of facts, such as «how much less do Han Chinese alumni donate». Ime this is typical for Japanese sociology (mealy-mouthed garbage even by Western standards).
I allow that with the rising proportion of 2nd gen Asian Americans and some other changes like greater motivation of the Chinese HNWI to show loyalty to the US, the situation must be changing to the better (for schools). However, in no way can this disprove BAP's argument about the schools' already baked-in, historical reason to engage in anti-meritocratic discrimination against Asians and also Whites.
Actually, were TheMotte in a better shape to try and impose new standards, I'd have petitioned to make «disingenuous citations that don't prove your point» a bannable offense. It's such a disgusting redditbrain intimidation tactic. And this user is generally acting with an agenda.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
That's a few words to express a fairly unjustified level of disrespect.
No, Asians really are meritorious as far as potential for educational and professional attainment goes. They get high scores, and those scores translate into life outcomes. A 99.9th percentile SAT taker comes in, a 99.9th percentile employee comes out and waves a diploma proving his or her value to the employer. This is a perfectly reasonable meritocratic system, as meritocracy has been defined for a very long time.
BAP is a romantic who believes that merely excellent outcomes are not what elite education is about; that the objective of such institutions is finding and riding the coattails of geniuses and heroes. Glory isn't just a better-ascertained «merit».
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
I'm not really seeing the argument here.
Are you baiting to have it be cited here, to make BAP look better? Okay, you win. That «recent tweet» is half a year old. The actual argument he makes is this one.
Why are there meritocratic admissions in the first place? How did it happen? The reason the universities were opened up in the 1950's was specifically because cases like Feynman's. It was felt unjust that he shouldn't have had entry into school of choice, etc., because of quotas (at that time capping Jewish students) and Columbia eg felt dumb for having rejected him. The feeling was that schools should be opened up to students like him, WITH THE EXPECTATION that they would do great things with their degrees. Maybe not be Feynman or make great discoveries, but at least use that opportunity to try to, or to have notable achievements in other fields, or at least to become very rich, and so on.
The concrete reward for this opening up of universities was eventually expected to be ....money. Whether legacies, or students allowed in on purely merit, alumni who were or became rich donated to these skrewls. For those who became famous or notable in their fields wihout being rich, this also added to skrewl's reputation, bringing in more money or grants or so on by other avenues. In other words, the universities got or maintained something concrete from opened-up admissions, and the easiest measure of that was donations.
Azn alumni and especially Han don't donate. Thus although they were let in initially in high % because of grades, test scores, etc., it was eventually noted they don't donate. But even worse, they become notable or famous at rates far less than others.
Whereas the expectation was ideally a Feynman, what you got in the Han case was use of the degree to become an ophthalmologist in upstate NY etc.; obviously not always; just as in other groups not all came out Feynmans. But the tendency, pattern became very clear. In the vast majority of cases the degree was used for nothing but a comfortable middle class life and the feeling of status. No fame, no reputation coming to the skrewl, and no donations.
Thus you had a population that presented very good scores, grades, conscientiousness, etc., and so if allowed in purely on "merit" would make up a huge % of undergraduate class; but out the other end, they didn't deliver on the whole, and especially...didn't deliver money. [an aside about objective merits of science done by Chinese people. I think the issue of lower effective creativity and irrational lust for busywork are absolutely clear. But, arguably, we are in the regime where Galaxy Brained Ideas both comprehensible for humans and useful in practice have all been had, so East Asian mindset is in fact more valuable].
To this can be added the behavior of Han students in classrooms. It was noticed they are taciturn and in general add nothing to class discussion. In campus social and intellectual life, they seemed absent or kept to themselves etc.; again you may have personal anecdotes to the contrary, I do also. I had very good Chynese students who I was glad to talk to, who were brilliant and got all A's (deserved in their case) and I have Chynese frends, etc. etc.; it matters nothing. As a group universities noticed these very clear patterns in the majority if not vast majority of cases. [an aside about cheating]
…It was, again, a population that, if you applied simple "merit" in admissions, would end up forming maybe even a majority of the student body, but that produced nothing that was expected from holders of these degrees, most notably no donations, but also, no fame, no risk, no contributions, and during skrewltime, another lifeless parody of "study," memorization, cheating, sullen apartness.
For all these reasons universities felt justified in discriminating against azn and Chynese students for admissions--and they were probably justified. But once they started to do this, libtarded professors and admissions committees felt it was necessary to discard almost entirely whatever was left of meritocracy. "This Johnny Cheung has very good test scores and grades and I'm discriminating against him...it's only fair that I don't pay attention to the fact that Johnny Walters also has good test scores and grades. Merit doesn't matter anymore, we had to get rid of it, so...let me invite this nice POC out of feelings of social justice, etc." Thus in a move similar to what justified grade inflation, merit-based admissions was also mostly discarded. I don't know the status of things at moment exactly now after Floyd, but even by 2015 or mid second term Obama's racial demagoguery and BLM craze, it was already starting to be very bad. Even by early 2010's maybe it was accelerating. Obviously there are still very good students who can get in, but it's much harder now.
For what it's worth, I (as a person inclined to be somewhat positive with regard to East Asians and utterly pessimistic about any political proposal of BAPsphere) think this is his strongest thesis in ages. He actually enumerates plausible (and I think true, but of course one can protest and demand statistics to back up the inflammatory etc. etc.) factual premises and delivers his conclusion, he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish, and he mostly speaks like a real person with a sane, if objectionable, reason to dislike test-based meritocracy, rather than a flamboyant auto-caricature.
And of course you would not see «civilization-ending» outcomes. China itself is not ending, and the Chinese clearly contribute a lot to American prosperity. It's only the particular forms of that civilization that can be disrupted by immigration; this is both known and desired. It is not absurd that the Irish have destroyed a certain America (as @2rafa often argues) – but now that the Irish are Americans too, they get to weigh in whether it was a good or a bad thing, and they're not going anywhere anyway.
You see, culture is fragile, human practices are fragile, valuable conventions are easy to ruin and hard to restore. Consider the following bizarre analogy. Add a random homeless person off the street to your household, have him eat and sleep together with your family (assuming you have one) – it will probably be ruined (some idealistic people have tested this approach). Add a random well-behaved stranger – nothing outwardly catastrophic will happen, you might become friends even! And splitting domestic chores, and paying rent – think of it! But your family will change, will become something pretty nonsensical. Maybe Bryan Caplan would argue that your household income will increase, that your children will be more likely to prosper, thus it is moral and proper to make this choice? The philosophy that BAP subscribes to detests and rejects this sort of crude economic reasoning, deems it subhumanly utilitarian. I suppose a real American must call BAP a sentimental fool then.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
I am not sure if you know that, but the real peso value has barely budged. Nobody sane used the official currency exchange rate when having any chance to avoid it; this is probably the country with the highest black market currency exchange share, couriers developing piles of cash for USDT everywhere. Milei has simply forced compliance with reality.
Price hikes are real, though.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo ago
It really is fine, I would never be able to care about such offenses (barring brain damage), or, hopefully, even intentional offenses from people like you or Ranger. I just dislike the quantum microtubules thing – it's tasteless too, after all; just adding a layer of pseudo-empirical woo to postpone responding to a relatively compact philosophical challenge.
give one good reason for why substrate independence can't work, especially if we can simulate neurons at the molecular level
I do not have to give you any reasons because your position, in its decisive dimensions, has zero empirical content, it is just metaphysics – of a tool who has first-person experience but cognitively is conditioned to process himself through the master's pragmatic point of view. Well, that and geeky masturbation about (irrelevant, surmountable) difficulties of computing this or that. My metaphysics is the opposite, I start with asking for a reason to believe that computational equivalence even matters, because this is about me, not about some external function. I exist for myself. Do you exist for yourself? What does it mean to exist for oneself? Can you even conceive, in a purely hypothetical way, of the possibility of a distinction between you existing for yourself, and "something that simulates you" existing for myself, but not for itself? Not a strict p-zombie, perhaps, but something whose internal experience is different from the experience it computes, in a way that does not remotely hold for your current implementation? In my experience there is a qualitative and insurmountable difference between people who can and cannot, so I'd rather not invest into debating you, and just have fun the way I feel like.
You started with outsider-oriented rubrics to test similarity between two black-box behavioral generators compared to a years-old exemplar (in x years every molecule changes etc. etc. as you say, and I just call bullshit on the idea that you're more like yourself in 70 years than like another similar guy of your age, but anyway it's irrelevant); then retreated to increasingly fine-grained circuit equivalence in white boxes; now you talk about molecular simulation which will necessarily, overwhelmingly capture neurocomputationally redundant content. This is commendable: you at least have some remains of a normal-person intuition that your consciousness literally is your brain and not some equivalent of it with regard to some interface or observer. But you cannot come to grips with this intuition or wonder if it corresponds to something coherent.
Some can. In the words of Christof Koch, whose book The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread But Can’t Be Computed I've mentioned a few times: «The maximally irreducible cause-effect power of real physical computers is tiny and independent of the software running on the computer… Two systems can be functionally equivalent, they can compute the same input–output function, but they don’t share the same intrinsic cause-effect form. A computer of figure 13.3 doesn’t exist intrinsically, while the circuit that is being simulated does. That is, they both do the same thing, but only one is for itself. […] Consciousness is not a clever algorithm. Its beating heart is causal power upon itself, not computation. And here’s the rub: causal power, the ability to influence oneself or others, cannot be simulated. Not now, nor in the future. It has to be built into the physics of the system… This is true even if the simulation would satisfy the most stringent demands of a microfunctionalist. Fast forward a few decades into the future when biophysically and anatomically accurate whole-human-brain emulation technology—of the sort discussed in the previous chapter—can run in real time on computers.13 Such a simulation will mimic the synaptic and neuronal events that occur when somebody sees a face or hears a voice. Its simulated behavior (for instance, for the sort of experiments outlined in fig. 2.1) will be indistinguishable from those of a human. But as long as the computer simulating this brain resembles in its architecture the von Neumann machine outlined in figure 13.3, it won’t see an image; it won’t hear a voice inside its circuitry; it won’t experience anything. It is nothing but clever programming. Fake consciousness—pretending by imitating people at the biophysical level».
A pragmatist says: what should we care about that! My causal power is that which… something something inputs-outputs, so long as the function describing this transformation is the same, surely it is preserved! A pragmatist more invested in the conversation would add: why, I've cracked open the book, and it seems this all depends on some weird axioms in chapter 7 and 8, kooky stuff like consciousness exists intrinsically, for itself, without an observer, about why accept them and not a much more convenient (or rather, observer-oriented) approach? Also, why not Dust Theory?
Koch's specific technical justifications have to do with IIT, which is substantially flawed. In time, a better theory will be developed. But I don't think one needs a theory to just see how confused the metaphyics of a Tool, of someone who cannot throw out the entire baggage of External Observers, is. One only needs taste. I do not hope nor intend to rectify your taste, you're free to revel in it, just as I am free to think it repulsive.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo 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
5mo ago
You're fine in my book. And 'sophistication' has very little to do with what I take to be their failures in taste.
That said, sadly you wouldn't have had much to worry in any case; and I think people most likely to ascend first have next to no taste.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
As is the comic, which I think we could all pull apart in a matter of seconds. Off the top of my head, what if you remove the screen and show the human and dog that the woofing isn't a real dog? Since when did anyone in this long and complex discussion say that sound was the only mechanism people/canines could use to recognize authenticity? The whole thing you're talking about is how complex and multifactorial identity-recognition is. It's irrelevant at best.
The idea of "multifactorial identity-recognition" is irrelevant for the purpose of understanding the issue of consciousness-continuity of a subject. But really, after such arguments, what more can be said? Truly, you can also look at the dog! Oh wow, the argument against black box analysis is pulled apart!
Since when did self-made say he'd be happy for you to send someone very like him (perhaps so similar as to be a soulmate or a best friend) to the garbage compressor because he wasn't so identical as to be effectively the same person?
Morality is irrelevant for this counterfactual; this is only dependent on the baseline self-preservation and endorsement of the notion that black box suffices.
As for substrate independence, we should be thinking about truth rather than beauty.
There is no meaningful difference between truth and beauty with regard to this question.
Poor taste is irredeemable, and you're one of the worst in this respect here, by the way.
How can it be impossible, in principle, to replace individual neurons one by one with a computerized equivalent such that normal function is preserved and the patient is conscious throughout the whole operation?
Following Moravec, I think this is possible, though I am not sure which aspects of neuronal computations and their implementations are relevant for this procedure (eg how to deal with LFPs). I reject the sloppy bugman idea that you can get from this to "just boot up a machine simulating access to a copy of my memories bro". Indeed, if you didn't have such poor taste, you'd have been able to see the difference, and also why you are making this argument and not the direct defense of computationalism.
Do you believe that there's some advanced quantum mechanics in our heads
Now that's what I call real disrespect lol. It's okay though.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
You avoid committing to any serious successor-rejection choice except gut feeling, which means you do not have any preferences to speak of, and your «memeplex» cannot provide advantage over a principled policy such as "replicate, kill non-kin replicators". And your theory of personal identity, when pressed, is not really dependent on function or content or anything-similarity measures but instead amounts to the pragmatic "if I like it well enough it is me". Thus the argument is moot. Go like someone else.
By this, do you mean that such evolution will select for LLM-like minds that generate only one token at a time?
No, I mean you are sloppy and your idea of "eh, close enough" will over generations resolve into agents that consider inheriting one token of similarity (however defined) "close enough". This is not a memeplex at all, as literally any kind of agent can wield the durak-token, even my descendants.
And why wouldn’t a fully intelligent ASI (which would fit under my bill of beings I am in favor of conquering the universe) that’s colonizing space “on my behalf” (so to speak) be able to design similarly lean and mean probes to counter the ones your ASI sends? In fact, since “my” ASI is closer to the action, their OODA loop would be shorter and therefore arguably have a better chance of beating out your probes.
This is a reasonable argument but it runs into another problem, namely that, demonstrably, only garbage people with no resources are interested in spamming the Universe with minimal replicators, so you will lose out on the ramp-up stage. Anyway, you're welcome to try.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
I think your problem is typical for Indians (and most other non-WEIRDs and non-Japanese, to be fair, including my people… but worse so in Indians): you have no taste, not even the notion of "taste", to you it's probably an arbitrary set of markers of one's social milieu rather than some relatively lawful intuition. So you settle for mediocre half-baked ideas easily as long as they seem "cool" or "practical", and – physics of consciousness being currently impractical – coolness is a much simpler function than tastefulness. I am not sure how or why this works. Maybe @2rafa can explain better; maybe she'll opine I'm wrong and it is in fact purely about social markers. (Also interested in the input of @Southkraut and @ArjinFerman). In any case, it's exasperating to debate such uncertain grounds without the recourse to "this is just ugly" when it patently is.
I've proposed a reasonably robust criterion for determining that, at least to my satisfaction. You blackbox both of us, and assess response to a wide variety of relevant stimuli. If the variability between us is within acceptable parameters, such as being less than the variability seen in the biological me after a nap or when I took the test 2 years ago, then that system is close enough to count as including a copy of "me".
Oh yeah? So which is it, a nap or a 2-year time span? Are you sure you can, really, practically can, define a rubric such that no other person I find comes closer to the first data point in the latter case? Sure you can do this without including password-recovery-tier questions, the answers to which are entirely value-free, RNG-produced token sequences, in no way corresponding to actually unique specifics of your inner conscious computation?
It's only reasonably robust from the viewpoint of a time-constrained clerk – or an archetypal redditor. As stated, I claim that you might well fail this test under realistic and legitimate conditions of dropping cheat items; and then, if I decide, in this contrived scenario, that the non-self-made-human is to be sent to the garbage compressor, you will very loudly (and rightfully) complain, not showing any "satisfaction" whatsoever. The only reason you propose it is your confidence that this does not matter in actuality – which it admittedly does not. And in any case, you do not need to optimize for a le scientific, robust, replicable, third-person-convincing etc. identity test. Rather, you need to think about what it is you are trying to achieve by clinging to the idea that a cluster of behavioral correlates an observer can identify will carry on your mind – just gotta make it dense enough that in practice you won't be confused for another naturally occurring person.
certainly I haven't seen any particular reason to assume a difference in internal qualia because of a difference in substrate, as long as the algorithms deriving it are interchangeable in terms of inputs and outputs.
But I would still prefer my original parents or kin, and attempt to convey my conundrum to them, likely by divulging privileged information only known to the original me.
I'll trust you on this even though I strongly suspect this would depend on the intensity of original memories vs. the recovered set.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
Larry of course. His first advantage is: he is real and nobody real cares enough to die in the process of assassinating him. (Consider that many Russians attribute the worst parts of the 90's to Chubais and indirectly Summers; yet nobody has bothered to go kill him. Granted, Westerners nowadays think we're basically a nation of limp-wristed cuckolds. But still – millions of people with "nothing to lose" over decades).
His second advantage is: he's put-together, well-known and well-connected, so even if he dies, his projects can continue, and indeed his tragic demise will possibly make him more powerful than when he was alive.
Then there's everything else people care about, like actual authority, security etc but that's a bit of an overkill.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
Money translating into power has always been a transient phenomenon of immature nations, and the Marxist delusion that money and power are one and the same is instrumental to other Marxist delusions (eg: "why does Israel fight Gaza? Because colonization for natural resources!" I kid you not, have seen this take in the wild, it was even popular).
Nation states, themselves puppets to special interests groups with non-monetary primary motivations, have a non-quantitative categorical advantage over billionaires, trillionaires and whatever – they can just take your shit and use it to fund users of hard power, which they have authority over, to compel you. The army cannot be meaningfully bribed, neither can the police, neither can the police robot dogs, neither can the politruk overseeing tech lord's robot dog assembly business; indeed, the very attempt to do so means you're dead meat.
The state can only reach abolition through degeneration from within and loss of relative legitimacy in the eyes of its most relevant constituents; which it will prevent at all costs.
Sorry to burst your cyberpunk bubble: Big Tech Has No Power At All. Larry Summers is and will always be more powerful than Elon Musk. He, ontologically, belongs to a caste which can have power, and Musk does not.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
My representation of "me" is robust to perturbations like going to bed and waking up tomorrow, or replacing 1% of the mass in my body via turnover when I drink a bottle of water, have lunch then take a shit.
It isn't robust to a large amount traumatic brain damage, dementia or the like.
This is not responsive to the argument. Your memorized experiences are fungible. Your differences from another Smart Indian Guy who's maximally close to you in embedding space are overwhelmingly mere contingent token, not type differences. Like, you love your mom and he loves his mom (very different!), you write sci-fi fanfics and he writes speculative fiction, you're on The Motte and he's on DSL, you are a GP and he is a cardiologist, you're into boobs and he's into armpits, you prefer 23°C and he sets it to 22,5… sure we can pile on dimensions to the point you become, well, a single extremely unique point, a snowflake indeed, but what of it? This is not how your consciousness works! This is not why you are infallibly you and he is indisputably him, this is merely why I can quickly tell apart those two instances of a Smart Indian! You are performing more or less identical calculations, on very similar hardware, to a near-identical result, and if you one day woke up, Zhuangzi style, to be him, your own life story a mere what-if distribution shift quickly fading into the morning air – I bet you would have only felt a tiny pinprick of nostalgia before going on with his business, not some profound identity crisis.
Moreover, if you get brain damage or dementia, your hardware and computational divergences will skyrocket, but you will insist on being a continuous (if diminished) person, and me and him will agree! It is pathetic and shallow as fuck to cling to a perceptive hash of a token sequence and say "this is me, see, day-to-day perturbations are OOMs lower than the distance to the next closest sample" – it's confusion of the highest order! Seriously, think this through.
(I am, incidentally, immune to this issue because I do not believe in computationalism or substrate independence. My self is literally the causal physical process in my brain, not the irrelevant hypothetical program which could define the computation of the process with the same shape with regard to its outputs hitting some reductive interface like an observer performing a classification task. This process can be modified near-arbitrarily and remain "me"; or it can be copied precisely, yet the copy would not be me but instead another, equal instance. I am not confused about first and third perspective, and the fact that physics teaches us frames of reference are irrelevant is trivial to me: they are irrelevant for an independent observer; yet the whole of my notion of identity is about the instantiation of the observer's egocentric frame of reference. I have made peace with the fact that most people can be gaslit into seeing themselves through the interlocutor's eyes. This comports with the repulsive fact that most people have been bred to serve an aristocratic class and accept perspectives imposed on them, and strongly suggests to me that most people probably really are means, not ends unto themselves. For deontological reasons, I will reject this conclusion until the time I have an opportunity to get much smarter and reexamine the topic or perhaps design some fix for this pervasive mental defect).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
You presume compromises and contingencies which have taken place in reality, and Anglo narratives about them. Napoleon was not essentially committed to liberalize Russia, and indeed did not emancipate the serfs on territories he entered, which is part of the reason for his failure.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
Why should anyone care about anything?
There's no absolute answer, but some ideas are more coherent and appealing than others for nontrivial information-geometrical reasons.
I’d bet that the memeplexes of individuals like me are much more likely to colonize the universe than the memeplexes of individuals like you
That's unlikely because your "memeplex" is subject to extremely easy and devastating drift. What does it mean "similar enough"? Would an LLM parroting your ideas in a way that'd fool users here suffice? Or do you want a high-fidelity simulation of a spiking network? Or a local field potential emulation? Or what? I bet you have never considered this in depth, but the evolutionarily rewarded answer is "a single token, if even that".
It really takes a short-sighted durak to imagine that shallow edgelording philosophy like "I don't care what happens to me, my close-enough memetic copies will live on, that's me too!" is more evolutionarily fit, rewards more efficient instrumental exploitation of resources and, crucially, lends itself to a more successful buildup of early political capital in this pivotal age.
If we're going full chuuni my-dad-beats-your-dad mode, I'll say that my lean and mean purely automatic probes designed by ASI from first principles will cull your grotesque and sluggish garbage-mind-upload replicators, excise them from the deepest corners of space – even if it takes half the negentropy of our Hubble volume, and me and mine have to wait until Deep Time, aestivating in the nethers of a dead world. See you, space cowboy.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
I think people with such beliefs have no more moral patienthood than a trust fund. What should anyone care about some loosely defined isomorphism, if it even holds? Moreover, why would you be entitled to replication of your sentimental baggage in some derivative entities? Just instantiate a distilled process that has similar high-level policies, and go out.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
If you’re like me and are able to view that machine as yourself
But why view it that way? The map is not the territory, and another territory arranged so as to be isomorphic to the one depicted on the map is not the original one.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
None of this is particularly damaging, and foreign owners of consequential companies are fellow Anglos; fighting NATO wars helps build team spirit. Anyway, what matters is differential damage – consider how gimped Germany is by the ongoing war, and how relatively unscathed is the UK. (Or, as the all-time greatest example, how Anglos got us to whittle down Napoleon, whereas the most rational move would have been to side with him… and again in WWI…) Russians tend to think of geopolitics in terms of handicapping and undermining civilizational competitors, and point to Albion as the chief culprit. But even as far as the positive agenda goes – somehow the moribund, overregulated UK has both DeepMind (despite it nominally being bought by an American company) and the lead in regulating AI for everyone else.
upper-bound for opportunities for high-merit people in London is greater than that of St. Petersburg / Moscow
It's not just about Moscow, it's about the entire rest of the world. You can be an oligarch's son in the Motherland, or if you have any merit, you can have a career in the US, but somehow they all salivate about the degree from London School of Economics, or even shaking hands with Brits.
That said, I personally do not feel like the UK is very important.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
More or less.
"Crypto-colony" does not mean anything falsifiable and predicts nothing. I think Russia is a generic low-agency country, in the manner countries with negative selection in elites tend to be, and consistently acts against both its "geopolitical" and its population's long-term interests, yet in the interests of savvier countries, mainly the US and the UK although it seems that Russians both high and low interpret their retarded and harmful activity as self-interested. This is also strangely accompanied by Russian petty elites squealing like teen girls about the prospect of their child becoming a Londoner; there's a distinct vibe that it's better to be a struggling student in the Metropole than an oligarch at "home", and I've seen this repeatedly since childhood. The prestige of UK is out of proportion with that nation's observable merit.
To what extent this is due to any deliberate effort, or just historical inertia, or needs any explanation at all, I am not sure.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
By the way: far as I can tell, JB has made it big on twitter after finally letting go of our sorry lot and focusing on reading academic literature.
So, which of those defects are present in his thread?
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