felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The dark meaning of mercy for the villain is the same as the dark meaning of opposition to the death penalty. Brutal thugs are not executed, but given long prison terms. Warehoused. Saved for later. This reserve army of brutal thugs is a valuable resource for avant-garde revolutionaries. Think 1917 Russian revolution. Its was a close run thing with a brutal civil war. Typically the avant-garde don't have the numbers. They may win power, but not have the numbers to hold on to it. They need to put boots on the necks of counter-revolutionaries. Since their tests for counter-revolutionariness have too many false negatives, they have to go large and put boots on the necks of the general population. Where do they find the feet to fill the boots? They release brutal thugs from prison to provide the muscle for the NKVD, KGB, Stasi, etc.
It is a very dangerous game. The avant-garde revolutionaries need to retain control of their brutal thugs. The thugs need to be kept divided. If some get ideas above their station, others are sent to kill them. But the Russian revolution and the French revolution both ate themselves. One faction within the revolutionary avant-garde sends their tame thugs to kill a rival faction within the avant-garde. The death toll rises and Stalin or Napoleon comes out on top.
I'm unclear on the causal connections here. Perhaps opposition to the death penalty is all high minded mercy. When the revolution comes, it is an unfortunate accident that the revolutionaries are gifted a reserve army of brutal thugs to help them consolidate their power. Or perhaps there are some strategic thinkers covertly funding the merciful people naturally inclined to oppose the death penalty. The money boosts the opposition to the death penalty, enough for mercy to defeat prudence.
It is not just domestic revolutionaries that one has to worry about. When the USSR took over Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, releasing brutal thugs from prison, to provide the muscle for the secret police, was one of the techniques used to impose the new communist governments.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
The most scary damage is that universities have been training young people in how to do science. The replication crisis, while bad in itself, also shows that the universities have actually been training young people in how to do science wrong. How does that damage get undone?
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease.
The situation is darker and bleaker than that because of the third option: social contagion.
In Scotland, drug overdose deaths have soared to over a thousand a year in a country/(region of the UK) of merely five million. There is a big concentration of deaths in Dundee. The dynamics are rather like a contagious disease. How does social contagion mimic the in-person spread of an infection disease in the internet age? Junkies in Dundee are not going to Glasgow to buy their drugs; it is friend of a friend stuff with-in Dundee. The need to pass physical drugs from hand to hand creates geographically local dynamics.
But I'm old. I'm already familiar with the heroin cycle. Heroin is really cool. The fluffy cloud happiness of the high. The don't-give-a-fuck charisma of the users. The bodies piling up. And piling up. The rising part of the heroin cycle doesn't last. You don't introduce any-one younger to heroin use after your own funeral. And the occasion itself puts a damper on the whole scene. Soon heroin gains the evil reputation that recreational use deserves. "Nobody" uses any more. But every year, Mr Nobody grows a year older. Eventually the young people, who won't touch the stuff because they saw what it did to those ten years their senior, are no longer young enough to be at risk of starting. Those young enough to start, look to those a little older and see neither use nor warning signs. Some of them work out for themselves that heroin is fun. They tell their friends. The cycle closes and heroin in cool again.
I came of age during a low point of the heroin cycle, so I never tried it. But the micro-foundations of the cycle were evident in parallel matters. Things spread by word of mouth and from hand to hand. Friends warn against some things and endorse other things.
He was 35. Which brings my comment to the edge of the abyss. Back when needle sharing made Glasgow the AIDS capital of Europe, the prognosis for a heroin addicted was to become addicted around 20. Use for ten years. 50% die. 50% hit rock bottom (or just age out) and quit. 35 is old for an addict. Now that AIDS is treatable, the prognosis is probably better. Now that fentanyl is on the scene the prognosis is probably worse. I'm not keeping up with the statistics and don't know how it balances out. When some-one dies of drug addiction, we bury an "innocent victim". His "friends" in the drug scene play the role of his personal angels of death. And walking my comment over the edge of the abyss: did he take his curse to the grave with him, or did he manage to pass it on before he died?
I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.
felis-parenthesis
11d ago
I see a parallel fault line within socialism, with Syndicalism in conflict with Central Planning. For me, this goes back to the 1973 miners' strike in the UK. The mines were owned by the National Coal Board(NCB), a branch of the government. Much of the coal was sold to the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), another branch of the government. The basic idea of the strike was to raise electricity prices (by government fiat) to get the money for higher coal prices to get the money to pay the miners higher wages. Or just subsidise the NCB out of general taxation. That was the Trades Union perspective, but the Socialist Planning perspective was that the British coal fields were pretty much worked out. Paying high wages for the horrible job of going under the North Sea to mine small amounts of coal from narrow, wet, fractured seams was a bad plan. Much better was to send the miners to work in factories above ground manufacturing things and stuff to trade for coal from places with more favourable geology.
Basically the National Union of Mine Workers was butting heads with the planners in the socialist part of the British economy and seeking rents based on their ability to crash the economy by coming out on strike.
In a capitalist economy, with fragmented private ownership of the means of production, and lacking national trades unions, this specific kind of rent seeking works badly. The employees at one company come out on strike. They win an excessive pay rise. Their employer starts losing money, and goes bankrupt. The workers lose their well paid jobs. Whoops! Both capitalism and socialism suffer from rent seeking and capitalism has some internal defences to it. Capitalists are entitled to say that rent seeking is not narrowly specific to capitalism; they don't have to own it.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
But I see no reason that an ideological system involving uniting the elites to rule over the rest is a problem
My theory of how society works is that it depends on a competent ruling elite, but there are problems of ossification and egalitarianism, with ossification leading to the rise of egalitarianism. I'm going to make up illustrative numbers. The ruling elite is 10% of the population. Elites don't breed true, but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Half the next generation of ruling elite are the children of the current ruling elite. So that is 5% accounted for. Where do the other 5% come from?
One in eighteen of the children of hoi polloi is talented. 1/18 of 90% = 5%. They are the scholarship boys, talent spotted, educated in grammar schools and inducted into the ruling elite.
My theory of how society works generates two opposing theories of how society fails. First ossification or the protection of the failson. Half the children of the ruling elite are downwardly mobile. As time passes the elite fail to change the heritability of the genetics, but they do change society to save their failchildren from social descent. The second generation of elite are 5% true elite, 5% ordinary, while the scholarship boys are locked out of upward mobility. The third generation of elite are 2.7% true elite 7.2% ordinary. (I'm assuming that the child of a failson has the usual 1/18 chance of being talented). Degeneration continues 1.8% elite, 8.2% ordinary; 1.35% elite, 8.65% ordinary. The asymptote is that the ossified elite regress to the mean and end up looking like the original society. The original society was 10% elite, 90% ordinary. Thus the end state of the ossified elite is 1% true elite 9% ordinary. Their badly governed society also has its hoi polloi. That 90% of the population spilts 9% true elite talent, locked out by the loss of social mobility and 81% ordinary. This either ends in revolution as the 9% fight for their place in society, or in collapse, because 1% true elite isn't enough talent to keep society functioning.
Second, egalitarianism. Meritocracy gets rejected. I like the way that @cjet79 puts it here "A job is work to be done" versus "A job is a ceremonial position". Jobs get redistributed to ensure fairness, ending the elites' lock on the best jobs. The 10% of prestige jobs get filled, effectively at random. 1% true elite, 9% ordinary people. There are too few talented people in the top jobs leading to collapse. It could be worse. Maybe, post-revolution the children of the previous elite are locked out of the top jobs. Of the 10% filling the top jobs, only 1 in 18 is talented = 0.55%. That is less than the 1% of a completely ossified society. Dysfunction and collapse come quickly.
The two tendencies, ossification and egalitarianism play off each other. In a partially ossified society, hoi polloi look at the elite, and compare the official story with what they see. Officially a job is work to be done and the 10% top jobs are filled on merit. But many of the elite are ordinary, and their jobs are ceremonial (except that sometimes a failson has a real job that he lacks the skill for, which is even worse). As the generations turn and ossification gets worse, every-one can see that many top jobs are ceremonial. Ordinary people resent that their children are largely locked out of these top jobs. Meritocracy is seen to be a sham for two reasons. Society is functioning poorly (due too little genuine talent in the ossified elite) which undermines the official position that jobs are given to the best candidates. Some jobs are all to obviously ceremonial and merit doesn't even apply. This boosts belief in egalitarianism until DEI seems reasonable.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves,
That is a big part of your answer right there. There is an important distinction between reserves and resources.
Reserves are uranium ore that it is profitable to mine and process at current market prices with today's technology. Some reserves are being mined as I type; they are really there, with absolute certainty. Other reserves as less certain. One might want to drill a shaft and get some samples to check. Proven reserves meet a threshold for certainty set down by the financial regulators. Thinking of investing in a mining company? Reading about the proven reserves that they own? Proven is a term of art for investment grade certainty.
Resources are a guess about the amount of uranium that is actually there. In some sense. It needs to be possible to mine it and refine it, but it doesn't have to be profitable today. The guess work can include some guesses about technological advances in extracting Uranium.
It is the same for natural resources generally. The case of oil is notorious. Yes, back in 1920 we only have 30 years of oil reserves. (I've not checked the history, but it is well know that we have many times run off the end of oil reserves) Prospecting for oil is expensive. If an oil company wants to borrow money from a bank to build an oil refinery, the bankers will ask: will the oil run out. If the oil company only has 25 years of reserves on its books, it may be worthwhile prospecting for more. The bankers will take a risk, but for a price. How does the cost of prospecting compare with the price of risk? Bankers rarely look more than 30 years ahead. If the oil company has thirty years of reserves, paying prospectors to find more, and increasing that to 35 years, will not get the oil company a cheaper loan. It is not worth the money.
We only have thirty years of reserves because it is not worth looking for more, so we don't bother. Notice that the results of prospecting include discovering bodies of ore that fall a little short of what it is currently worth extracting. They count towards the resource. But not towards the reserve. However, prices can rise. If the electricity price rises, prices for oil and uranium to fuel power stations are likely pulled up. Now some of the resource becomes reserves. It is routine for reserves to fluctuate due to price changes elsewhere in the economy, independent of consumption and discovery.
You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of uranium resources. The logic of the argument is (maybe) valid, but since the premise is false the conclusion does not follow.
You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of proven reserves of uranium. Now the premise true, but the logic of the argument is invalid, and the conclusion still doesn't follow.
The equivocation between reserves and resources has been going on all my life, and I find most discussions of social collapse tainted by this.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
In the particular case of fluoridating water, the ruling elite had a good story. Scientists knew that naturally occurring levels of fluoride varied from place to place. Did it matter? They did the epidemiology thing and decided that less than one part per million made tooth decay noticeably worse. More than four parts per million caused dental fluorosis, but nothing else showed up strongly with natural levels of fluoridation. So topping up fluoride to bring low fluoride water up to one part per million seemed super safe; lots of people were already living with 1ppm. And had been for their entire lives. It was a rare case where we have data (albeit epidemiological) on all cause mortality, due to pre-existing "natural experiments".
... without facing widespread riots or resistance is just insane ...
Your confusion is the result of a garbled account of events. That is bad in itself, but I want to make the case that it is important to say that "topping up" and "adding" are different and that the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
First I will offer paradigms of "topping up" and "adding" and then make my case that things can go horribly wrong if we tolerate people confusing them.
Topping up Measure the level. If it comes in at 0.5 ppm, add enough to increase the level by 0.5 ppm. Measure again. If it is in the range 0.9 to 1.1 ppm declare victory. If outside that range, find out why, and adjust appropriately.
Adding Don't bother measuring, or if some-else has measured, just ignore it. Add enough to increase the level by 1 ppm. Continue to fail at measuring and be smug that the level is at least 1 ppm because our addition guarantees that out-come.
Now picture a town debating water fluoridation. Why? Well, Mr Bad Guy hopes to get kick backs from the contracts for fluoridation equipment and chemicals. He persuades his fellow citizens to top up fluoride levels at public expense. They vote for it. Mr Bad Guy sets it in motion. The measured natural level turns out to be 1.3 ppm. There is nothing to be done. No contracts, no kick backs. Mr Bad Guy looks around and notices that nobody is watching. He arranges contracts for equipment and chemicals to add enough fluoride to increase the levels by 1 ppm. He pockets his bribe money. Fluoride levels increase to 2.3 ppm. Mr Bad Guy feels safe. No-one will notice 2.3 ppm and if he falls under suspicion for corruption, he can always say that he misunderstood.
Later Dr Nerd measures the fluoride and checks the records of the old measurements. Dr Nerd is unhappy about the waste of public money, or about the dangers of fluoride, take your pick. He tries to "blow the whistle". But what language does he speak? If he uses the vernacular he complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply and we shouldn't be doing that, we should instead be adding fluoride to the water supply [sic]. Nobody understands his point. So he switches to Nerd-speak and complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply when we should be topping up; very different. Topping up is free! But the towns-folk don't speak Nerd-speak, so Dr Nerd still fails to make himself understood.
Talking about topping up fluoride levels using the word adding is bad. It covers up corruption and is why we cannot have nice things.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Have I misunderstood the over-turning of Roe-versus-Wade? I thought that it was over-turned on the basis that abortion was a matter for States, not the Federal Government. So a Federal abortion ban would be struck down by the Supreme Court; no point voting for one.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
One idea of how it could work is that the points system only gives points to construction workers. Then house prices rise at first, when every-one turns up, but they get jobs building houses. Eventually, having imported too many construction workers, builders' wages fall, and construction gets cheaper. House prices fall, or houses get larger :-)
That isn't going to work for immigration from India to Canada. Even if the construction workers are genuinely qualified, the Indian construction workers know how to build houses to withstand monsoon rains, but have no clue about the high level of insulation needed to stay warm in the Canadian winter.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
Your argument, about the implied gender of foreign names, builds the case for traditional pronouns, not preferred pronouns.
felis-parenthesis
12d ago
It's possible the US would be more cohesive if public education was centralized and everyone was taught the same value system, and parents were not allowed to go against it.
My analysis of this kind of proposal is based on what I call the riddle of the flute children. The ordinary concern is that power is abused. The riddle of the flute children is that power is fought for. The optimum amount of Government power is less than you think, because it is only the survivors of the fighting that live to suffer the abuse.
The idea that you mention takes the lid off a power honey pot of such extraordinary sweetness that opening it will attract more hornets than wasps and lead to fighting on the scale of the Thirty Years War. I think that the Thirty Years War is the appropriate comparison because it too was about which value system, Protestant or Catholic, was to be the sole value system, regardless of parental wishes.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
But the language of "adding" rather than "topping up" has erased the concept of already has enough fluoride in it naturally. The idea is missing from the discourse. Lots of ordinary people have naturally occurring fluoride in their drinking water and have no idea that it has always been like that. Dr Nerd's third attempt at making his point will make not make sense to those people and they will ignore him.
We can tell that the idea of already has enough fluoride in it naturally has been erased from the discourse, simply by listening out for the missing follow-up questions. When some-one is on the media, arguing against fluoridation on the grounds that the recommended level is a health hazard, the interviewer questions them. The obvious line of questioning is "What about places with naturally occurring fluoridation? Do you advocate removing it? How? Are the health problems actually showing up? There have been multiple life times for them to appear!" But the obvious questions don't occur to the interviewer. The concepts have somehow gotten erased :-(
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
The positives have to be weighed against the negatives.
The anti-immigration position starts with endorsing the claim that when Chopin moved from Warsaw to Paris, that benefited the French, and when Marc Isambard Brunel fled France and ended up in England, that benefited England. What makes it the anti position is the additional claim that you can tell whether Chopin can play the piano; you don't have to admit half the population of Warsaw to get the musician. And you can tell that Brunel knew about civil engineering; you don't have to admit any Jacobins to get your tunnel under the Thames.
So no, you don't have to weigh positives and negatives. Let the positives in, keep the negatives out.
The core of the pro-immigration position is "You cannot tell whether Chopin can play the piano. If you want the positives, you have to accept the negatives, so weigh them and choose."
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.
"Racism" has changed so much over the past fifty years that the "Racist" and "Anti-racist" positions have swapped. It used to be that teachers were racist and didn't let the Black children into the Advanced Placement classes because "Blacks are stupid". Back then the anti-racist position emphasized individual variance/merit. The clever children go in the top stream and the stupid children go in the bottom stream. Ideally the stupid children benefit from being kept out of the top stream; it is miserable and harmful to be in a class for which you are unprepared and which leaves you behind.
But one notices that the top streams are White or East Asian or Brahmin. That drives a re-alignment. Accepting individual variance/merit is the new racist position. Modern anti-racism looks to the statistics for groups, and expects all groups to be represented according to head count, regardless of individual merit. (and there is the extra, weird twist where Black under-representation is the fault of Whites, because Whites are bad (and, if they object to this condemnation, fragile (which oddly enough, earns them mockery not gentle handling)))
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
You should read patriots.win. I'm guessing that it is peak MAGA. And yet they engage in lively debates, with comments calling out Donald when he makes mistakes, and getting upvotes.
Unfortunately, bad appointments has been one of Trump's glaring weak points. 28 upvotes, 12 hours ago
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power
That cuts both ways. Do you limit government power by permitting the government to accumulate a reserve army of brutal thugs, or by preventing this by murdering the nascent reserve army in its crib?
I've mentioned Communist revolutionaries. See https://theworthyhouse.com/2024/11/19/on-the-1956-hungarian-revolution/ for an interesting, horse-shoe twist
The chief instrument of this terror was the secret police—the ÁVO, an acronym for Államvédelmi Osztály, Department of State Protection.
It filled its ranks primarily with two disparate types of people—hardcore Communists, many or mostly Jews resentful towards non-Jewish Hungarians (again of which more later), and former Arrow Cross toughs, usually from the countryside, whose past could be held over them and whose predilections toward violence were of use to the new regime.
But one could read about Oskar Dirlewanger and where he found the men to staff the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirlewanger_Brigade
Coming up to date,
The Wagner Group has been recruiting large numbers of prisoners for Putin's war in Ukraine.
https://www.newsweek.com/inside-wagner-group-criminals-contractors-putins-war-1770392
I must stop writing this comment before I sink too deeply into despair, both about where government power comes from, and the level of counter-ruthlessness needed to oppose it.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I cannot get the link to work. I'm expecting something formatted like
I'm seeing
https://old.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/s/2Ax2KXHCWr
which takes me to a submission page. Guessing that the "s" is for submission, I hand edit the "s" to "comments"
https://old.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/comments/2Ax2KXHCWr
but that just gets me "PAGE NOT FOUND"
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
Perhaps the "fundamental logic" at issue is geography.
Think about the viability of solar power for providing electricity to power air-conditioning in Arizona. Peak generation is around noon. The air is still heating up, so I guess that peak demand is around 2 or 3 pm. A bit of a mismatch. Curing that only needs two or three hours of storage. Overprovisioning might be cheaper than storage, there is still plenty of sunshine at 3 pm. The occasional cloudy days reduce the output of solar power plants, but those days are cooler reducing the power needed. It looks to me that this will work well and cheaply, and contribute to people saying that solar power is economically viable.
But I live in Scotland. Long days and some sun shine in summer. Short days and thick dark clouds in winter. The demand for power is for space heating, not air conditioning, and is in winter. I pay attention when I see reports of exciting new technologies for grid scale energy storage, but it all seems to be half day storage; keep the electricity on over night. The resource - summer sunshine - is six months out of synchronization with the requirement. Solar power, to generate electricity to run heat pumps to keep homes warm in Scotland is beyond the reach of current technology. Suitable grid scale storage doesn't exist, and huge overprovisioning would be fabulously expensive.
I favor nuclear power for Scotland. And people in Arizona should make their own choice based on how things really are in Arizona.
The anti-nuclear power argument seems to be "solar is cheap, therefore no nuclear". Prod a bit and it seems to be just missing the geographical factor. Putting geography in unsympathetically and it becomes "solar in cheap in certain circumstances, therefore no-one may have nuclear, and people in the wrong circumstance must freeze to death in winter."
Another contender for "fundamental logic" is that many technologies have an early dangerous stage.
The medieval cathedral builders had collapses. Ship stability wasn't properly understood leading to capsizes, even of giant prestige warships. Steam engines were indirectly dangerous because their high pressure boilers would explode. Railway trains had lots of disasters before signalling got sorted out. There is also an interesting technology progression with making braking systems fail safe, with the fail safe version of vacuum breaking getting displaced by Westinghouse's fail safe version of air brakes. The Tay Bridge disaster isn't really a railway story, it is about structural engineers not knowing about wind loading. Civil aviation started off really dangerous and is now very safe.
So it is odd to give up on nuclear power when you can look at the details of accidents, such as Chernobyl, and say: we don't build them like that any more, we are past the dangerous stage. We also understand key parts of the sociology. Nuclear power was cloakatively about providing electricity to civilians, but really about creating plutonium for nuclear weapons, so corners were cut on safety in the rush to Armageddon. Today we know about gotchas such as Wigner Energy and this time around is 100% about providing electrical power. I think that the safety issues really are in the past.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
Here is how I try to make the concept of Free Speech coherent, at least for this narrow topic. Free Speech needs to be a graded concept, with levels of speech.
Let us set up a little context. Mr Red-one exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-two beats up Mr Red-one and boasts about it. Mr Red-one decides to stay quiet. That is a clear infringement of Mr Red-one's right to free speech.
Mr Red-three exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-four says "You had better shut your trap, or you will get a beating, like Mr Red-one." This is second level speech. Is it covered and protected by the concept of free speech? Mr Red-five makes a public fuss about what Mr Blue-four said, trying to persuade Mr Blue-four's employer to dismiss him. This is third level speech. First level is political policy discussion. Second level is using speech to deprive others of their first level speech rights. Third level is using speech to deprive others of their second level speech rights.
I think it is coherent to say
- First level good
- Second level bad
- Third level good again
Could we say that the first and second level are both good? I see this as the incoherence that @FCfromSSC is concerned about. Some people think that free speech absolutism requires us to uphold second level speech. But that has it backwards. Since second level speech rights trash first level speech rights, upholding second level rights is going soft on free speech. There is a real conflict, but we have to uphold the first level and therefore we must disparage the second level.
What of the complication of saying that the third level is back to being good again? It really is a complication. It might be neater superficially to say that the third level is also bad. But that is to make the mistake of the lazy school teacher who doesn't make the effort to find out who is the bully and who is the victim that hit back. The first level is the one that we are trying to defend, so we object to the second level, but consistency leads to a ripple effect, with the third level good again, least we go soft on our objection to the second level, and end up weak in our defense of the first level.
felis-parenthesis
15d ago
Agreed. And that highlights a contradiction in the original post
General artificial intelligence could be capable of synthesizing the perspectives and contexts of every place and time into one universal viewpoint. Mapping out the elephant of the world with more objectivity seems more plausible than ever before.
The second sentence, with its "than ever before", is a nod to LLMs. But while LLMs are obviously intelligent, it is not the kind of intelligence that we were hoping for. LLMs flip between the different narratives that the blind men have written about the elephant. The LLMs do not have their own perspective on the elephant. They haven't felt it. They don't have hands. They don't even know that there is an elephant, or that what people say about the elephant ought to agree (because it is an elephant (real), not a unicorn(fictional). They just know that there are lots of words about elephants and how to generate more of the same.
There is a least one big breakthrough still to come before General Artificial Intelligence. If there are two big breakthroughs needed, the period in between them, will be fascinating/fraught. Half the world will believe AI's uncritically, half the world will notice that AI still isn't quite here yet,...
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I like piano music. If a professional is playing it, then Scriabin, such as Fantasie Opus 28. If I'm playing it for myself, then it needs to be within my technical ability, for example Clementi, Opus 36 no 3 which has an impressively high ratio of happiness&fun to technical difficulty.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The most interesting questions arise from the idea of the memetic immune system. What pressures does natural selection exert on the memetic immune system?
An egregore is in competition for minds with other egregores, much as a fox is in competition for rabbits with other foxes, but with a twist. Human minds are not its food, but its substrate. Call an egregore fertile if it encourages the women it occupies (cordyceps?) to have many children. Call an egregore barren if it discourages this. Natural selection works on egregores to improve their own reproduction, we might call this their infectivity, but also to be fertile rather than barren so that they have more substrate to infect. Meanwhile natural selection works on the human genome, hoping to generate subtle memetic immune systems that are vulnerable to fertile egregores, but resistant to barren egregores.
You could go all in on reductionism and say it is just natural selection, but this will be an obstacle to understanding the tangled mess when people and egregores are evolving a subtle mutualism.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
Knowing that there is a real world, out there, beyond language.
Are the moon landings a hoax? Large Language Models can say what people say, perhaps rather more fluently and persuasively. If one is open to the possibility that there is more than one kind of intelligence, then LLM's have one of those kinds of intelligence, and in greater degree than an average human. But LLM's are rather stuck on giving their own opinion of whether the moon landings are a hoax, because they don't know whether the moon is real or fictional. Nor do the know whether the Earth is real or fictional. The whole "ground truth" thing is missing.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
I read you article
Much of the concern centers on legislation in Congress that would remove the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups that are found to be supporting terrorist organizations.
I partly understand the concern. Legislation may be much different from how it is described. Nevertheless "tax breaks for terrorists" is bad optics. Does any-one know the story behind this? The article discusses various groups
Groups that support L.G.B.T.Q. rights, promote gender equity and champion other progressive causes have cut staffing and announced that longtime leaders are leaving.
but doesn't join the dots on how accusations of "supporting terrorist organizations" could be weaponized against the groups mentioned. Perhaps there are other groups, not mentioned, that are more at risk?
thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, sometimes abbreviated to TTS
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