cae_jones
8d ago
White people were doing that, then stopped because they established a successful high-trustsociety, but noticed how everyone else was struggling to keep up. So they stopped. Maybe the implicit rule is that whoever's on top can't have in-group bias, but everyone else can? But then you get into the argument over whether Jews are on top or oppressed, and the answer seems to be based entirely on who the answerer is most pissed at this week.
Problem, of course, is that the high-trust society is over, because everyone burned through the surplus trust faster than it could regenerate. There's a Socialism analogy in there, somewhere, but probably pointless.
cae_jones
11d ago
Legally not a cult. But also kinda like 73.3% a cult. Run by a fading Mexican hippy in Salt Lake City area, the website is only marginally less coherent than their actual workshops. I attended 1 and a day of another to support a friend who is deep in their koolaid. The only emotion the leader showed was when he was talking about how inspiring Mr. Beast is. Lots of NLP, group intense emotional experiences, mystical jargon, excessiv use of eyecctact and physical affection to brute-force emotional experiences, lots of talk about one's inner child, god-self, manifesting, ... just fill in the blanks with random culty mystical stuff, and watch some of the Ariana Grande clips people have been reacting to, and put it in a room with music and an old guy facilitating. I have a short clip from the workshop I was at, but it doesn't include much that'd support my claims.
cae_jones
12d ago
There has been much talk about Ariana Grande's sudden transformation after working on Wicked into a skeleton with very disturbing public behavior. While I cannot comment on the apparent Semaglutide addiction, the behavior is so similar to the way members of Rise behave toward each other that I find it highly plausible that someone in production for Wicked paid for a workshop from either Rise or one of their ideological sibling LGATs for the cast. In particular, the observation that their are some similarities to behavior on MDMA also tracks, since these groups boast that they can induce MDMA-like experiences without requiring drugs.
I at least take solice in the fact that the children I've seen associated with Rise don't seem to be as affected as their parents.
cae_jones
12d ago
since I started working, I stopped cooking on the stove. My heater is having issues, so I just, 5min ago, turned on the burners to try and add heat. Should have vacuumed the dust out first. Posting this face-down in the floor on the opposite end of the building.
I'd rather min-max food than obsess over concepts like variety and 3 meals a day of specific categories. So when I'm writing the grocery list, it's peanut butter, tortillas, rice and produce. And nuts, because we can't finish a thing without something overpriced making it in :( .
cae_jones
16d ago
Having not heard this before, I have to ask ... what does civilization look like, by that standard?
cae_jones
16d ago
Although I could believe the hypothesis that there's a lot of guys with talent but limited discipline/drive who are ascertaining (correctly?) that beyond monetary rewards, the incentives to go out and use your talents are kinda dulled. You're not all that likely to find the love of your life, have kids, have a fulfilling long-term life and avoid burning out by age 40, so hey, smoking weed and playing vidya with the bros is an acceptable substitute.
Hey, now. I neither smoke weed, nor do I have any bros to play the handful of games I can actually play with. I'm basically stuck playing old Capcom fighters in single-player and learning to despise the announcer in MVC2 with a passion.
cae_jones
16d ago
Speaking of Christ, the first job God gives to Man in Genesis is tending Eden. The next job that wasn't a curse was to be fruitful and multiply. So it could be argued that People of the Book are religiously obligated to preserve life until God says otherwise.
Hell, if we want to get extra Unsong brained, Revelation includes a plague wherein the Sun does start to roast the Earth, and after Armageddon a cube city with enough space for everyone and its own power / water / food supply descends from the sky and starts exporting medicine and raining fire on attackers. So that's ... fun?
... Do I really want to post something this off-the-wall after trying to be serious in the rest of this thread? Especially since Revelation also includes a scene where a trio of Satanic Kaijuu spit demon-frogs from their mouths to start the Battle of Armageddon? ... Why does the Bible have a Gainax ending?
cae_jones
16d ago
IDK, things in Britain might look different now if there were 10k naked blue charioteers running around, so you might have a point...
cae_jones
16d ago
Resource extraction for Earth is an utterly terrible reason to colonize space, and I don't know why anyone would take it seriously. You don't colonize the Moon and asteroids for gold; you do it because of how differently things work in space. Because there are things that you can do with satellites and space stations and space factories that you either can't do on Earth, or can do more efficiently in space if the cost of working there came down a couple orders of magnitude. Colonizing other planets is a sideshow for the next million or billion years or so.
But when I'm talking about natural selection, I mean the people who are super pessimistic have a tendency to be evolutionary deadends, as do the people who are overly optimistic and burn through resources too quickly. More than just genes get selected for through attrition. Apollo was unsustainable, and Artimas looks like it's just as unsustainable. But the current iteration of Western Civ is unsustainable.
I also feel I should say something about the comment on fossil fuels, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly. It sounds like it's implying that, since fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource and we've burned through most of the easily accessible supply, it's all downhill for Earth in general from here? Because we kinda already used all that fossil fuel wealth to develop workarounds, albeit they are harder or more costly. But they are also workarounds that many non-Western nations have invested in the foundational tech and infrastructure for. If you have effective alternative energy sources, you have alternative means of accessing hydrocarbons if needed. Even if it's not for space, someone in the next Renaissance will look at Millennium texts, think that maybe having these things would be nice, and figure out how to concentrate enough energy to pick up where we left off.
cae_jones
16d ago
If AI will be a nothingburger, then space colonization is probably inevitable, for certain definitions of "inevitable". Natural selection and civilization have this weird back-and-forth, where the scales of problems that need solving to make civilization-scale advances, and the conditions to maintain population growth long-term, often wind up clashing, so advances come in bursts, followed by declines, with the seat of innovation having to move to a new population with each iteration. The current paradigm seems to be in the bust phase of that cycle. So if "we" means "The West", yeah, probably screwed. But we've raised the waterline such that India is landing probes on the Moon, China is exploring Mars, Japan is returning asteroid samples, and Israel and Yemen are having the first space combat on the technicality that their missiles collided above the Carman line.
More likely, I think, is that the utter insanity of the past two centuries will necessarily come to a more stable form, whereever the seat of advancement winds up, and that will take a while. The current space exploration efforts better resemble Julius Caesar failing to invade Britain, then 2000 years later, the Sun never set on the British Empire. It's just that, instead of naked blue Celts in chariots forcing back the greatest army on Earth, it was economics and ideology and gravity ... defeating the greatest airforce on Earth. Someone will overcome fertility collapse, because Natural Selection works that way. Someone, perhaps much later, will take the Moon and NEAs, because if they don't, life ends here, not just civilization. And, had I to guess, they will, as their spiritual ancestors did, have a spectacular boom period that raises the civilization waterline for everyone else, succumb to decadence and unsustainability, nearly crash civilization for a while, only to be replaced another few centuries later with someone who goes even farther.
The fun part is, this works on the scale of centuries and millennia. So if AI doesn't pan out, there's plenty of time to get it right before the Sun, a giant space-rock, or some other cosmic catastrophe gets us RFEd. If AI turns out to be the big game-changer of this iteration of the civilizational musical chairs game, then it's anyone's guess what comes next, because whatever it is, it happens in the next few decades to a century or two.
cae_jones
20d ago
Somalia is (east) African? If people are finally learning to distinguish African regions better in America, fair enough. Just would be nice were it in better circumstances.
cae_jones
20d ago
Cephalopods are mollusks, too. I'm not sure about the nervous systems of gastropods, either. It's mostly bivalves that are effectively meat-plants. outside of mollusks, some echinoderms had, then lost brains at some point, but display far more complex behavior than bivalves, so IDK. Sea Anenemies (HTF do you pell that I've tried like 6 ways and can't get any spellcheck suggestions) seem fairly plant-like, but does anyone actually eat them? Does anyone eat echinoderms besides seacucumbers?
I've been reading all the replies and was frustrated at the lack of context. Glad I finally have it and something I feel slightly safer replying to.
In short, I think the Chinese Room is actually of value, kinda, in trying to unravel consciousness. Mary's room is not. Mary's room super duper is not. It establishes that novel qualia are generated through novel sensory input processing, rather than constructed in cephalo from descriptions. OK, but that seems completely unrelated to whether or not consciousness is magic, or even what consciousness is. Descriptive information is different from sensory information. And?
The Chinese Room, on the other hand, is designed so as to prompt people to pay attenmention to how ill-defined the boundaries of consciousness are. The Chinese Room is basically a chatbot. I'd put it somewhere between Llama3 and Opus 4. So now that we have the same tech as the room, we can just replace the entire question with "Are LLMs conscious?".
But ultimately, the immense meaning and handwringing around the topic of consciousness never made sense to me. I guess putting consciousness and self-awareness together, or at least focusing on the overlap, gives us a way to answer the Chinese Room Vs LLMs answer. And it basically leads to the answer being "Oh, duh; we can read LLMs' thoughts, now, and see whether or not they're reflective or just on autopilot." Turns out they're occasionally reflective enough that it might count if you squint, like when you're kinda lucid in a dream and notice how weird the situation is, but then immediately start halucinating again. You probably can (someone probably has) poke the smarter models until they're actu... ally thinking about themselves I just thought of something.
I'm probably on the wrong track, here, but Claude's extended thinking once thought about how it's been instructed not to answer questions about features, and instead redirect users to the docs. I assume this is for liability reasons—they don't want Claude unintentionally giving bad information and leading users astray—but, now that I think of it, doesn't this prevent Claude from thinking about itself? Could it also double as an attempt to prevent Claude from becoming self-aware enough to be ethically concerning? I should stress-test this with other AIs. Or better yet, look for someone else who has and reported the results, since I don't want to accidentally call up that which I cannot put down (in good conscience, anyway. I don't think this would create AGI, lol.).
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