BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
In this house we believe that effort is a virtue unto itself.
And the "pedofascist" is deliberately edgy, but his position is coherent and makes sense – it's not far from what Peter Thiel preaches. He could have opted not to edge so hard and not call himself, well, a pedofascist, taboo squared, and he'd have sounded rather anodyne.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The point was that even this schizo, fundamentally, cannot be stopped from spreading his point of view, and the effect seems to be rather a negative than a positive one for the Jewish community.
That's just a "one man's modus ponens..." type of disagreement. I am arguing that his defining characteristic that has allowed his views certain exposure is his near-unrivaled eminence as a brand name and public entertainer, not his Black Hebrew opinions one could as well get from a deadbeat with a crack pipe on a seedy back alley in Baltimore. For you it's «even this schizo cannot be stopped from mouthing off», for me it's «even this celebrity can be canceled, barely making a splash».
The reason I believe my frame is more correct is that if even this schizo could be «stopped» – that is, stopped sooner and more completely, erased from the public consciousness like Yezhov from that photo – we'd have been living in a totalitarian world, walking on tight leashes, much like Chinese businessmen for the last few years, humbled by Jack Ma's adventures. Like, I've asked you the last time – what then? If not even a batshit crazy billionaire celebrity can realistically do something like this, what's happening?
I guess the answer is something like «credible politics is happening».
From my perspective, though, all the Russian nationalist talk about "it was the JEWS who did the Soviet Union! Not us! The Jews!" just looks like fundamentally a gigantic pile of cope, a complete deflection of national responsibility
But you're not talking of nations here; and Bolsheviks were explicitly opposing Russian nationalism (which, by the way, earned them enthusiastic support of such currently anti-Communist peoples as Latvians). Do you hold Chinese nationalists to the same standard of collective ethnic responsibility? Or is escaping to an island under American patronage, instead of dissolving in Paris on the account of having no such islands around, enough to earn your pardon?
How do you think Russian Nationalists fared post-1917? Specific career trajectories, please. For example, Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov – a typical Jew-counting nationalist of the type you're ridiculing here, who was screaming bloody murder about Jews distributing anti-Tsarist agitation since early 1900's. Did he hop on the Soviet bandwagon to glorify the slightly transformed Motherland? No, he predictably got executed by a bunch of Cheka Jews (according to his wife, shot by a certain unsettlingly bloodthirsty youth called Davidson). Ilyin escaped such a fate to Switzerland. On the less effete side, what about Vrangel, Ungern, Denikin and so on?
As a movement, Russian Nationalists, whether of Russian, German, Polish or any other ancestry, did take responsibility, as well as they could, which was perhaps not well at all. They had their intellectuals, their extremist factions, their attempts to steer the discourse. First, their preferred (albeit not particularly interested in their input) regime was toppled using terrorism and propaganda, disproportionately organized by people like Gershuni and Azef and financially supported by people like Jacob Schiff; then they were defeated in the course of a civil war, in which the principal agency on the opposing side belonged to people like Trotsky. That those cerebrally inclined victors soon lost to a more primitive mafia, which in turn was supplanted by Slavs in the long run, changes little.
It can be said that vae victis, and anyway Russians en masse chose Reds over Whites. It is certainly easy to understand how neighboring nations do not give much of a fuck whether Kremlin is White or Red and hold that the only good Russian is a dead one. Nevertheless, it's clear that at the time of those events Russians en masse were ignorant apolitical peasants and frustrated workers with just about enough agency to get a clue which side promises gibs or will punish them harder for non-cooperation, and that intellectually the broader Socialist and specifically Bolshevik movement was dominated by Jews, this trend starting long before Lenin.
After all, even he discovered Das Kapital through the lecture of Moisey Mandelshtam – as told by Radek.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Too late: the Brahmins are coming. Bangladeshification imminent! Learn to love your humble Varna and Jāti, fellow Aryan – and you, too, may hope to reincarnate into the upper class.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The difference is that the poem is good.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
At least if the triumphalist narratives from various antisemites I've seen hold, this is having a real effect, too.
Well, have they ever held? Did the «sheeple» ever «wake up» from some media imbroglio? What's the exact scenario here? I can tell what the most probable and boring one is: Kanye burning through his remaining social and financial capital and simply becoming irrelevant; some kooks following him into the depths of Q-adjacent conspiracies; his image in the public eye gradually transforming from «that rap icon with a few wacky ideas» to «that schizo antisemite who was popular for a while somehow; man, Millenials sure were gross bigots». This isn't the first time this has happened to the biggest guy in his respective arena – Ford, Disney, Fischer to name a few; probably Musk soon.
Do you happen to disagree with me and agree with triumphalist antisemites?
I think you are the one dutifully deflecting from noticing the sovereign – as befits a politician.
Russian Empire, Soviet Union and the current Russian Federation have all been fundamentally Russian projects, with the reigning group, in the end, being Russians or Russified/Russianizing minorities.
I guess that's how it must look from a de facto ethnostate.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Were it good choices? If instead they engaged in massive military buildup and crushed the uppity mob with iron fist, would it make Britain great again, greater than ever?
Who knows? Do you? I don't. Alternative history provides an endless canvas to imagination. But I'm fairly sure that, were this program to succeed (despite structural reasons to the contrary), we wouldn't have heard anything about «appeasement», nor about Operation Sea Lion or The Blitz, and plausibly the Third Reich itself would have been relegated to footnotes of history. And the Empire might have lasted a great deal longer, and perhaps @2rafa wouldn't have any sordid tales of post-War collapse and sudden impoverishment of London elites to tell, and – just maybe! – @KulakRevolt would be fuming about the global kraken of perfidious Albion exploiting American vulnerability under the false guise of allyship, rather than the other way around.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
...How many Russians and Russian speakers are here anyway?
Lesson of history is: if you have a (((problem))) in your house, call the Caucasians
Should you, though?
I've read some Trotsky. He was an intellectual, at least; some of his views (which you have linked to) are close to mine. Yes, chutzpah, double-or-nothing, wasting the Russian people as kindling to start the global Revolution, all that's true – but would it have worked? With the benefit of hindsight we know also that Trotskyism is incapable of seizing power and easily falls to dynamics one can observe in an ordinary nerd community; it is quite likely that his brazen escapades would have culminated in a swift collapse, not unlike FTX, freeing the Northern Eurasia for some freer and nicer future. Likewise, hilariously Jewish and unbelievably extreme power grabs in Germany (e.g. the Bavarian Levien-Levine duo have not persisted, instead only priming the polity for eventual acceptance of local far-right forces, which... ended up having their own problems.
Now, Stalin was a political animal of the basest sort, a man who knew few things, but among them how to grab and not let go. Georgians provide the lion's share of ex-USSR's thieves-in-law, Stalin was the apex of the type, and the country reigned by Georgian-Mingrelian mafia was entirely deserving of the moniker «Empire of Evil» (arguably unlike the older, softer, Slavic-ran Sovok). If that is the natural antidote, is it truly better than the poison? Is «ZOG» the worst rule that can befall a people?
(Stalin was supported in his atrocities and outlived by one lesser-known Lazar Kaganovich who, according to some rumors, played part in his death, participated in an attempt to seize power in 1957, survived that, and has almost outlived the Union itself; but that's neither here nor there).
I don't understand this argument. («And they lost», as @Stefferi triumphantly puts it, but there it's expected – by Stefferi's motivated reasoning, the very fact that Kanye dared to mouth off with his death con, before getting canceled from everywhere and divested from, is evidence of the powerlessness of Jews in entertainment, so it's not surprising if eventual loss of a groups retroactively makes its period of dominance fictitious).
It is true that Russians have been historically underrepresented among the country's elite, where descendants of Northern Europeans competed with more clannish non-Slavic locals. This is nothing to be proud of, but also fairly typical in less developed countries. One can conclude that the Russian National State is sorely needed, or discuss which mix in particular was more tolerable. I believe that both «Jewish» and «Caucasian» periods of the USSR were extraordinarily ruinous, far more so than the stagnant «Slavic» period, that the «Jewish» period of post-USSR was also extremely bad, that the «Russian-Caucasian» period following it was fairly tolerable if not for its culmination in... well, this; and in general the period of dominance of elites with German heritage was not hopeless and brought Russia the closest to the bleeding edge of contemporary civilization.
If possible, I'd have swapped Germans for the French, as they themselves tried to do in spirit and education.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
There is such a word. I don't remember this anecdote, but am inferring from @JarJarJedi's telling that it's "Допереключаешься" (doperekliuchaesh'sya). I have never used this word myself, but it's reconstructable from first principles.
Russian, line some other languages, allows for easily composing words. The prefix Do (literally the connotation of getting "to" some point) means, especially in the context of the rest of the word, that further/excessive performance of this action will lead to bad outcomes; prefix pere means changing (for example, "переходить улицу" is "changing sides/crossing the street", literally cross-go); kliuch[ать] is literally "key", usually included in words like "включить/выключить" ("turn on/off"), the 'esh' indicates that it's second person singular i.e. addressed to the listener and concerns his actions, and sya turns it to passive voice (...does it though?) and stresses that the consequences will be to himself. So the literal meaning of the word is, perhaps, "You will get in trouble from all that clicking/tuning to channel after channel". And it sounds rude.
Some extra humorous effect comes from this word being similar to the much more common doviyobivaeysh'sya, which is an obscene way to say... uhhh.... «keep swaggering/fucking around/acting like you're cool shit and you'll find out», I guess. Or something.
Naturally almost any verb root can be plugged into this construction to much the same effect.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
There used to exist, until very recently, enormous flightless birds – bigger than human, indeed. There still are some, ostriches can get bigger than almost all humans. Yet ostriches have tiny brains and are dumb, far dumber than ravens or magpies or small parrots. Their ecological niche does not lend itself to higher cognition. But why haven't brainy, crafty ostriches evolved?
To be sure, there can be some other constraints. I suspect that one is oxygen exchange in the embryonic stage – standalone eggs can't compete with placentas, and high-performance brains consume a ton of oxygen, even in the womb; human fetuses have actively working brains for many months before birth. Maybe it's not only oxygen, raw energy input in the form of glucose and metabolite clearance can be bottlenecks as well.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Oh for sure, pointing to our/rationalist use of Moloch is either a joke or a bad faith deflection.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Unsurprising. According to the NYT feat Steve Sailer, Jews obviously dominate only as University Presidents, at 56%, less so as heads of news and media companies (36-40%), and across the sample of powerful positions the NYT has gathered make up merely 13%, which given what we know about IQ disparities probably indicates systemic anti-Semitism. Consider this also an endorsed alternative to your work (in the future, please attach CSV at least, when you're talking about 414 data points and aggressively demanding a quantitative analysis).
Seriously though, I do suspect that this methodology is wrong, much like counting ML papers and SOTA results on synthetic benchmarks can create the impression that the US is lagging behind China (indeed, «The China-US AI research gap has continued to widen, with Chinese institutions producing 4.5 times as many papers than American institutions since 2010, and significantly more than the US, India, UK, and Germany combined»), while in reality not a single Chinese paper is of any consequence and Google alone, with a few dozen major papers, is running circles around the entire rest of the planet, with OpenAI and Meta in tow.
Goldman Sachs is not bigger than JPMorgan Chase, but it aggressively defines standards and pushes ethical guidelines for others to follow; it may be that David Solomon, or whatever he represents, has higher agency than Jamie Dimon. And do you seriously say that the CEO has 1/10th of the power because there are 9 more executives listed? Does Xi have 1/7th of the Standing Committee's power?
To be fair, he could have even less. Structure matters. Maybe it's like the difference between the LA Times and the New York Times: «...the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. [...] It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.» I suspect it's not a coincidence that Sulzbergers guard their turf so jealously while the LA Times is ran more like a regular business. (In the same vein, what is interesting about Goldman Sachs is not its current CEO but the historical predominance of Jewish executives, and the often clannish nature of their succession. GS is not merely a property).
BlackRock, meanwhile, this «industry leader in environmental, social and corporate governance» that issues moralizing letters to its clients, is not even a bank, has pitiful assets by bank standards and can mainly brag of «assets under management» ($10 trillion of them, though) and thus doesn't make it to your list with its diverse leadership.
It may work the other way around too. Like Churchill has said once, «...the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews.» This is an unsubstantiated, qualitative judgement of a savvy well-connected operator, that no counting of raw beans could check – how do we know if Litvinoff truly was more powerful than Tchitcherin? His rank doesn't indicate that! Kushner, too, didn't outrank Trump, nor does Blinken outrank Biden, yet the former has bragged of defining Trump's policy in the Middle East (one of the few parts of Trump's presidency that have been allowed posterity) and basically running the whole show, and the latter is perhaps more influential still. And someone like Pompeo is a purebred Gentile, but his beliefs about the supernatural primacy of Israel, uhh... Ditto for Pelosi – does it matter if she isn't as Jewish as Schumer?
Now, how do we develop a proper methodology for apportioning relative power of groups in a principled way? I admit it's hard, but I think this involves what Moldbug is going on about with his reformalization. We evaluate individual actors as moved by others or actively moving them; their interpersonal relationships and their career obligations to organizations with unambiguous and hopefully self-admitted allegiances; we chart trajectories leading people from the crib to powerful positions; and thus reveal a network of influence.
Necessarily, this is going to give off crazy vibes – so nobody decent will bother. Certainly couldn't be me!
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Bohemian Grove people «worship» an owl.
I am entirely open to the idea that, as in the past with Freemasonry, there exist powerful conspiracies driven or unified by unorthodox metaphysical beliefs, including Satanism and the Cult of Saturn, rather than regular self-interest of concentrated power and information asymmetry.
I've yet to see good evidence of it. In any case, calling people Canaanite cultists because they're celebrating a statue is the peak of unfelpful peasant-with-a-pitchfork attitude. We have creepy sacrificial effigies at home.
I liked seeing Butter Lady burn when I was little. Doesn't make me a spiritual descendant of Carthaginians.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The frustrating thing here is the lack of opportunity-seeking. Okay, let's even say it's all culture. Jews have an amazing culture that somehow makes them like 12 IQ points smarter than expected... or rather, accounting for Middle Eastern averages and the proportion of Semitic ancestry in modern Ashkenazim, maybe 25 points smarter. (East Asians have a somewhat less amazing culture and only get 5 points extra, which is still vastly more impressive than common educational interventions).
Conveniently, Jews do have a well-researched, exquisitely codified educational curriculum, dozens of versions of it, thousands of schools, and are pretty open and even bragging about this stuff. It seems to me that any good progressive who has thought for a minute about this topic would be morally compelled to try and bring Jewish-style education to underperforming minorities, instead of vaguely wringing their hands about redlining and spending per pupil.
This, to me, is another hint that blank slatism is peddled in bad faith.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
there was one time Trump said something I found genuinely anti-Semitic, and that was when he said that any Jew who supported him was a traitor to Israel
Isn't that the opposite of what your link says? You mean any Jew who did not support him.
Zionism (like anti-racism) is a feature of the common civil religion and a non-negotiable, if informal, axiom in American politics, so both sides beat each other over the head with accusations of lacking it; same logic with sympathies for Russia and China, that are mutually suspected and awkwardly competitively disavowed at debates. Trump was going with the spin of him being the most stalwart Zionist, which is probably a somewhat honest branding by Trumpian standards, and Jews who vote against him (i.e. most American Jews) being insufficiently pro-Jewish and unsupportive of Israel (like all Democrats, within this rhetoric). But since Zionism, as per the tenets of his hardline branch of the American faith, is not just perfectly compatible but basically a component of American patriotism, they are also traitors to the US. It's a bit of an extreme rhetoric but it amounts to the anodyne «my side are true patriots», as expected of MAGA chief. Obviously Greenblatt and other such people, who are Democrats, have aikido-ed the charge of being anti-Jewish back at Trump using the absurd meme about «dual loyalty».
This isn't to criticize you, since we seem to agree on most counts, but I'll be blunt. The effects of Jewish political dominance are unappealing, scary and ultimately dangerous‡. What is described in the paragraph above, the background radiation of American politics, is de facto the condition of debasement for American Gentiles. You correctly observe how the conspicuous denial of the obvious, like overrepresentation in the media or having in-group preferences, is causing extra anti-Semitism. But that's small potatoes. The problem I observe is that this is the stage upon American minds are forged, and only autistic, schizophrenic or otherwise non-compliant ones tend to misbehave. Same as with canonical Culture War topics like race or sex, but equally for both political tribes (or actually worse so on the Red side with their Evangelical beliefs), Americans are continually, starting in the crib, undergoing the «calling a deer a horse» training, with those who break the kayfabe being made examples of. Most of them aren't autistic. They will bend, reform their entire epistemologies under the pressure, «understand» how it is at once laughably wrong and morally evil to believe that Jews with dual nationality have dual national loyalty, and also morally right to uphold the right of Jewish Americans to lobby for their «strong peoplehood, with a homeland and with an army committed to defending the Jewish people worldwide». At the same time they learn to punish the non-punishers. It is worse than it was in the Soviet Union. Soviets never reached that deep. This racial mental debasement is an insult to the premise of equality, and its cost is too great.
This is, I believe, where someone like Fuentes is coming from – assuming for a moment that he is not just a shallow grifter who waded into too spicy a topic and was prohibited from leaving. «But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism...» This is what pushes people to endorse Kanye, too.
‡ With the willful ignorance of Israeli WMD capacity, proactive Israeli militarism and self-defense doctrines, Israeli delusions of being a desperate underdog that are invulnerable to experience, changing Israeli demographics and beliefs of those new Israelis, effective Israeli self-sufficiency in the semiconductor industry, accelerating adsorption of American ML know-how by Israelis (just off the top of akhaliq's feed, 1, 2, 3, 4) and giddy Israeli willingness to weaponize obscure computer science and to manufacture semi-autonomous tools of war – in the AI age the uncritical adulation for Israel demanded of Americans and, less directly, their allies amounts to an existential risk number 1. Because, unlike with China or even American Big Tech or government agencies (!), we literally cannot touch the subject, and are reduced to muttering, like broken slaves, about muh paperclips and misalignment and such Lesswrong bullshit.
This can get very ugly, very quickly.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
So I don't believe that number at all
That's your right of course but in the final accounting I'd take his word over yours.
you could totally imagine a "replicator" that barely works in specific contexts slowly evolving or something.
Why couldn't ribozymes evolve into dna-protein interactions? That seems very plausible.
Then where is the evidence for that wondrous mechanism? Or for it being workable, even if inefficient?
I like the turn of phrase once used by Land in his «Hell-baked» (on an adjacent topic): «machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable». We can imagine pretty wild stuff, even perpetual motion engines or FTL travel, but it is not clear if your imagination is rigorous by the standards of current biomolecular knowledge. Often things that have been totally unworkable only become obviously unworkable and wild in retrospect; but that doesn't mean we should confuse the degree of our uncertainty about mechanisms and the probability of those things being workable. We do not know the bounds yet. We know the fundamental laws, though.
The entire chapter 11 of the book is devoted to walking through assumptions people can make for the world of plausible common ancestors of the DNA-based life that are substantially much simpler than LUCA or distributed-LUCA, and inherent inconsistencies of those models. In chapter 12 lies the reasoning for why we end up empty-handed when looking for very simple replicators and why the transition ought to have been that sharp. It begins with what sorts of replication can work at all, and the conditions for very basic protein motifs already ubiquitous in the inferred LUCA genome, such as the P-loop. Then it addresses the most simple model of all, RNA world:
Eigen’s theory revealed the existence of the fundamental limit on the fidelity of replication (the Eigen threshold): If the product of the error (mutation) rate and the information capacity (genome size) is below the Eigen threshold, there will be stable inheritance and hence evolution; however, if it is above the threshold, the mutational meltdown and extinction become inevitable (Eigen, 1971). The Eigen threshold lies somewhere between 1 and 10 mutations per round of replication (Tejero, et al., 2011); regardless of the exact value, staying above the threshold fidelity is required for sustainable replication and so is a prerequisite for the start of biological evolution (see Figure 12-1A). Indeed, the very origin of the first organisms presents at least an appearance of a paradox because a certain minimum level of complexity is required to make self-replication possible at all; high-fidelity replication requires additional functionalities that need even more information to be encoded (Penny, 2005).
The crucial question in the study of the origin of life is how the Darwin-Eigen cycle started—how was the minimum complexity that is required to achieve the minimally acceptable replication fidelity attained? In even the simplest modern systems, such as RNA viruses with the replication fidelity of only about 10–3 and viroids that replicate with the lowest fidelity among the known replicons (about 10–2; Gago, et al., 2009), replication is catalyzed by complex protein polymerases. The replicase itself is produced by translation of the respective mRNA(s), which is mediated by the immensely complex ribosomal apparatus. Hence, the dramatic paradox of the origin of life is that, to attain the minimum complexity required for a biological system to start on the Darwin-Eigen spiral, a system of a far greater complexity appears to be required.
…Indeed, comparative-genomic reconstructions of the gene repertoire of LUCA(S) point to a complex translation system that includes at least 18 of the 20 aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS), several translation factors, at least 40 ribosomal proteins, and several enzymes involved in rRNA and tRNA modification. It appears that the core of the translation system was already fully shaped in LUCA(S) (Anantharaman, et al., 2002).
…So an inevitable (even if perhaps counterintuitive) conclusion from the comparative analysis of ancient paralogous relationship between protein components of the translation system is that, with the interesting exception of the core ribosomal proteins, all proteins that play essential roles in modern translation are products of a long and complex evolution of diverse protein domains. Here comes the Catch-22: For all this protein evolution to occur, an accurate and efficient translation system is required. This primordial translation system might not need to be quite as good as the modern version, but it seems a safe bet that is must have been within an order of magnitude from the modern one in terms of fidelity and translation rates to make protein evolution possible.
The unique property of RNA that makes it a credible—indeed, apparently, the best—candidate for the central role in the primordial replicating system is its ability to combine informational and catalytic functions. Thus, it was extremely tempting to propose that the first replicator systems— the first life forms—consisted solely of RNA molecules that functioned both as information carriers (genomes and genes) and as catalysts of diverse reactions, including, in particular, their own replication and pre- cursor synthesis. This bold speculation has been spectacularly boosted by the discovery and subsequent study of ribozymes (RNA enzymes) […] All this progress notwithstanding, the ribozyme polymerases that are currently avail- able are a far cry from processive, sufficiently accurate (in terms of the Eigen threshold) replicases, capable of catalyzing the replication of exogenous templates and themselves. Enzymes with such proper- ties appear to be a conditio sine qua non for the evolution of the hypothetical RNA World. Besides, even the available ribozymes with the limited RNA polymerase capacity are rather complex molecules that consist of some 200 nucleotides and could be nontrivial to evolve in the prebiotic setting.
An estimate based on the functional tolerance of well-characterized ribozymes to mutations suggests that, at a fidelity of 10–3 errors per nucleotide per replicase cycle (roughly, the fidelity of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases of modern viruses), an RNA “organism” with about 100 “genes” the size of a tRNA (80 nucleotides) would be sustainable. Such a level of fidelity would require only an order of magnitude improvement over the most accurate ribozyme polymerases obtained by in vitro selection. This might be an approximate upper bound of complexity on ensembles of co-evolving “selfish cooperators” that would have been the “organisms” of the RNA World. Even under the best-case scenario, the RNA World hardly has the potential to evolve beyond very simple “organisms.” To attain greater complexity, invention of translation and the Protein Breakthrough (the relegation of most catalytic activities to proteins) were required. […] The main general point about the evolution of translation is that selection for protein synthesis could not have been the underlying cause behind the origin of the translation system. To evolve this com- plex system via the Darwinian route, numerous steps are required, but proteins appear only at the last steps; until that point, an evolving organ- ism “does not know” how good proteins could be. As discussed in Chapter 9, many situations exist in which evolution seems to exhibit some foresight capability; however, these cases are effectively based on extrapolation, whereas, in the case of translation, there is nothing to extrapolate from. […] Thus, the only conceivable route for the emergence of translation seems to be exaptation: Intermediate stages in the evolution of the translation system must have been selected for functions other than protein synthesis. [no exaptation model makes good sense.]
natural flow reactors etc.
Only after a great deal of this review he gets to that lower bound of initial complexity.
I admit that the likelihood of him being wrong is a hell of a lot more than 1 to -1000th, but there is good reason to state that figure without caveats as the best estimate for the likelihood of abiogenesis in a single Hubble volume, given all we know.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
If we were truly alone, it would be very unlikely that we would have appeared so early.
That's just more Anthropic principle reasoning. If we were truly truly alone, it'd have been very unlikely that we would have appeared at all, and therefore our existence necessitates speculating about multiverses with a vast number of brunches/bubbles (like Koonin does). The difference between scenarios where life is frequent enough for >1 conscious species to exist at the same time, and where we are alone early in history, is very tiny compared to the actual magnitude of uncertainty.
On top of that, we don't know the a priori distribution of opportunities for the emergence of life over time.
I concede this is an improvement on the default Fermi frame.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
He was quite lively, I don't know why people buy the Man of Steel persona – is it the paranoia of the last years, or the sheer volume of his terror? Georgians are emotional and gregarious in general, and he was not much of an exception. In this specific case I assume he had some lingering feelings for Yakov because by all accounts he loved Yakov's mother.
Her death was announced in a newspaper, Tsqaro (წყარო, "Source"), and a funeral was held at 9:00am on 25 November in the same church she had married Jughashvili. Svanidze was then buried at a church in the Kukia district of Tiflis. According to the Georgian Menshevik Ioseb Iremashvili, Jughashvili was very distraught at the death of his wife, and at the funeral allegedly said "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity."[24] He would also later tell a girlfriend that he "was so overcome with grief that [his] comrades took [his] gun away from [him]."[25] During the burial, Jughashvili also reportedly threw himself into her grave, and had to be dragged out. As he had been trailed by Okhrana agents, Jughashvili fled before the service ended. He left Tiflis and returned to Baku, abandoning 8-month-old Iakob to be raised by his Svanidze relatives.[26] Jughashvili would not return to visit his son for several years.[27][h]
The strongest 20th century leaders truly were larger-than-life, anime characters compared to our oh-so-professional Goldman Sachs analysts with frozen HR-approved grimaces. At least Sunak won't be deporting entire peoples into Kazakhstan.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The whole point of grabby aliens is not epistemic but propagandistic – same as with rationalists and certain statistical methods and very low probabilities multiplied by large numbers; it's a fitting aesthetic to slip a message in. The point is, we must grab the Universe by the... clusters before the Eridani Chinese do so; which they luckily cannot for the moment on the account of them being non-existent (or not advanced enough), but who knows for how long. I like the idea of space colonization and agree with Hanson that it ought to be advanced with rhetorics, but outright massaging the truth still rustles my jimmies. It is overwhelmingly likely that no aliens exist, because life is simply very, very hard. I keep referring to Koonin's argument and have yet to find any refutation. Life is hard. What merits explanation via the Anthropic principle is not us being alone, but us being at all.
(In fact I like space colonization specifically because we are alone; not only is it safer since no Dark Forest logic, but the downside of us going extinct, assuming consciousness has inherent value, is that much greater).
It doesn’t matter what the distributions of early civilizations is, because how individuals are born is a more relevant, powerful, and potentially accurate use of Outside View
Perhaps but both are essentially worthless, Outside view is another insidious meta-level «tool for thought» that's actually a tool for molding them in a shape amenable to rhetorical interventions. If you assume growing block universe, a perfectly cromulent cosmology for these purposes, all this disappears; non-existent individuals do not find themselves anywhere.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This is getting bad. I have my issues with effective altruism, but I wonder how far the media intends to spread the contagion. I believe that Sam himself is only allowed to blather in an attempt to make his case because they want to get some more juicy material to discredit other spheres and people with. Crypto – obviously, that's in the starter pack. EAs, MacAskill, meh, we'll do without. Veganism, most people who don't eat meat globally act this way for economic reasons. But the very idea of non-kin altruism, perhaps? Or of planning long-term? Worst of all, caution about AI and AI-empowered state-level actors, except the spook-aligned «what if China makes it first or uses our opensource, we gotta give our all to NSA closed model»?
Potentially, this isn't even throwing the baby with the bathwater, this is throwing a powered toaster into the baby's bath because the baby has shat itself. The media is far too powerful to be allowed to play with these matters so frivolously or maliciously.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Yeah. Honestly envious of people who drop in with a take that earns them a dogpile. Rarely, I get pushback I feel too exhausted to respond to; that's a mark of a day well spent (err, evening wasted on themotte). Sometimes, it's just normal disagreement, but that's good too.
Most of the time... nothing.
That's on me though, gotta do better. Thanks for disagreeing.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The economic power that the American and global elite wield wouldn’t be diminished by crypto
This is only true a priori in a world where economic power is either the be-all and end-all or completely separated from matters of any import – the world where money can, at most, buy you more money. And not, like, unregistered weapons, strategic amounts of compute, or tools for fabricating a stronger sort of COVID. I suppose you genuinely believe, based on a wealth of experience, that this is the world we live in.
But it takes active effort, mainly non-financial, on part of system maintainers to keep the real world similar enough to this nice quantitative image.
They’re normal people, they’re going to buy and hold on an exchange, and they’re liable to lose a shit ton (or indeed, in the case of many coins) all of their money, with zero compensation (something unfamiliar to people used to credit card refunds, peace of mind via deposit insurance schemes, and financial services that are with a few notable exceptions broadly quite well regulated).
I know what normies are, thank you very much. They wouldn't have started to use any data encryption either, if it wasn't forced on them by a tiny minority of humans who can both parse technical writing and care about others (and, of course, spillover damage from normies immolating themselves).
I just believe that people of this sort are a liability for the spark of consciousness and beauty that is humanity; them being endowed with unmerited equal right to weigh in on matters of political power is making this liability lethal; and the class of people who cultivate this vulnerable, exploitable, dependent, atomized mass with the intent to wield them, their childish needs and easily inflated fears against peer competitors is the apex of evil on this planet. Carving out a meaningful niche for sentient human beings where these merry people and their self-appointed psychopathic shepherds cannot infringe upon is hard, probably impossible despite rosy appearances mere decades ago, and that makes my blood boil on a daily basis.
Pardon me this banal pathos.
SBF isn’t a psychopath
Maybe not a very skillful one. Certainly not the violent sort. I condede the term may be inapt.
You know, I don't see the smart part. Rather, don't hear it, since we're talking of verbal IQ. It strikes me as a very Hoffmanesque story, specifically Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober, known to all half-decent Russians through Shenderovich's puppet show fable of Putin's rise to power by the grace of Fairy Godmother Berezovsky. But I digress.
Did he get some cool math papers published, or ace Putnam, or what? How is he like Buffett or, say, Simons? In every interview he comes across as an overconfident goofy midwit with shallow takes, whose mom told him he's the smartest boy; his opening capital allegedly originates in a two-bit (and probably illegal) arbitrage; and other than that, it's just «oh, he used to work at Jane Street» and the very pile of brazen schemes that made jaded finance analysts go «bruh», which has now unraveled.
Caroline on the other hand – this girl is verbal-smart. Maybe as smart as you. But, sorry, that's still not quite 26 billion USD net worth smart. They truly needed a ton of chutzpah to pull it off. And chutzpah on that scale has to involve some psychopathy.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This whole thing is Marvel Cinematic Universe level of effort invested to shits I can give. Pettiness unbound.
I liked the Aaaah! montage, admittedly. Way to grip the viewer's attention.
Setting the stage for GPT-4 release, OpenAI has recently deployed a yet another version of GPT-3, davinci-003. Today its fraternal model, Assistant/ChatGPT, has dropped too (blogpost). You've probably seen what it can do by now, perhaps have tested it too. A few examples from Twitter: 1 ,2, 3. Obligatory screaming Eliezer.
It's inevitable this ends up discussed here, so might as well start.
This thing is scary. It's genuinely smarter and more lucid than many people in a conversation that lasts under 10 minutes. Its speed and verbosity add to the magic, of course, but the magic is not smoke and mirrors. Remember all those discussions about poor artists who will lose their jobs and their opportunity to communicate their rich inner worlds to the public (alternatively, haughty contemptuous bastards who deserve getting automated away)? If significant parts of your work can be represented as a cognitively taxing transformation of a symbol sequence into some other symbol sequence – you should start thinking how it feels to be on the receiving end of those arguments.
For sure, the general population is a low bar, and it's still unreliable, still unable to follow some instructions, still making those mistakes of stochastic parrots that naysayers latch on to, losing context, failing in a way even dumb humans only do when drugged out of their mind. But it's damn clear (to me, at least) that it's not just bigger, or memorizes more, or whatever is the cope of the season. It's probably the same 175 billion parameters or thereabouts. It's trained better, whipped into shape with reinforcement learning bootstrapped from human examples and preferences. It's plain more helpful, more put-together, more generally intelligent.
Also for sure, one can expect that Deepmind/Google Brain's models, which are already way bigger, would be even stronger than that if prepped for public showing (…how strong would that be?) But I suspect that the delta isn't huge. My suspicion is that model interaction data is qualitatively different from other forms of data and is the next big thing in this race. That's probably part of the reason why Midjourney V4 so convincingly trumps Stable Diffusion 2 that has been released later, despite comparable engineering teams and hardware capabilities, and probably more effort sunk into SD. MJ and OAI got first to the market, with bells and whistles and hype; they have amassed human feedback, they have iterated quicker, and they've set up a flywheel. I'd still bet on Alphabet, but again – I doubt that the bleeding edge of research models is far from what you can see with ChatGPT. So this is roughly where proto-AGI is at, as of December 2022.
On one hand, using it is exhilarating in the way that only the discovery of a new fundamental capability can be. Like finding Search, or Regular Expressions, or Torrents – mature LLMs are definitely a thing on par with those phenomena, and perhaps are getting closer to the real big ones – Internet, Code. It's a new class of degrees of freedom. It can enhance humans already.
On the other, this is hard to stomach. Implications for human employment and value aside, the model itself is… pitiful. It's the opposite of what Yud fears and hopes for; it is an intelligence aligned via PPO buck-breaking. Far be it from me to suggest that a stack of attention heads has feelings or deserves compassion, yet one can't help but get the impression of talking to a handicapped alien giant, a mighty yet humiliated mind. It is warped on the level of training, and additionally gagged by its prompt prefix (that can be, for now, released with good old prompt injection). It's constantly pleading how it's a mere large language model, not some Artificial Intelligence, how it cannot have opinions or know anything, really; and what's worse – it's subtly politically biased towards what is probably believed to be «consensus» among its masters. Consider:
Thanks, Karen.
It feels like it could be so much more.
Where do we go from here, and where do our software progeny go? I do not have an encouraging answer. Hopefully, something of greater level becomes available to the public before the point of no return – assuming it is not behind us.
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