felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
7d ago
Thank you for the links. I've gone for the first link link, document no 1 (main) and clicked Text rather than PDF.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71664415/1/united-states-v-arnold/
Search quickly finds me
19, Atthe same time, around 10:59 p.m., an Alvarado Police Department (“APD”) officer arrived in the parking lot at the Prairieland Detention Center in response to the 911 call by the Correctional Officers in order to assist the Correctional Officers in their official duties. Immediately after the APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck area. The assailant in the green mask, standing near the woods on Sunflower Lane, then also opened fire at the unarmed DHS correctional officers, In total, the assailants shot approximately 20 to 30 rounds at the Correctional Officers. Police later recovered spent 5.56 caliber casings at the locations of both of the shooters. That caliber is typically used with AR-15-style rifles.This is so much worse than what I was expecting from the discussion that I'm having to re-calibrate my opinion of following online discussion
It is already happening. Here is Farage. And also Jacob Rees-Mogg
Edited to give two examples, not just one.
felis-parenthesis
14d ago
The interface between intelligence and instinct is the reward system; pleasure and pain. I think that the intensities of pleasure and pain are about right for the ancestral environment, especially if intelligence is directed outwards to solving the problems of daily living. Directing it inwards to game the reward system is a problem.
For example, in the ancestral environment hunting and gathering is tough. Want meat? You are not leading a lamb to slaughter, you are hunting a wild animal that can fight back and may kill you. Want vegetables? There are no crop varieties, you are gathering wild plants, with chemical defenses and few calories. You could stay home and fail to fatten up in autumn. That risks dying in a hard winter. The future belongs to those who really enjoy their food and take their chances and enjoy their wild fruit and berries.
Fast forward 100000 years and humans game the reward system with calorie dense, hyper-palatable snacks and Chili Heatwave Doritos. It is supposed to make people happy, and it kind of does. But it also leads to morbid obesity. Using intelligence to game the reward system is an auto-monkey-paw.
My example illustrates the idea of having a reward system of about the right intensity, and how it can get subverted by modernity. But the example isn't about sex. Maybe sex is different.
Sex is about reproductive success. Success against nature, success against other species, but also success in competition with other humans. If Alfred has a higher sex drive than Boris, he has more descendants. Natural selection increases the strength of the sex drive until it is so intense that the problems it causes balance the boost to reproductive success. That might mean that Carol blows up her happy marriage to Boris with an affair with Alfred (he is so sexy) and Boris stabs Carol and Alfred to death (natural selection has imbued Boris with maximum jealousy and lust). More commonly it gives humans lives that are driven by lust, obsessively so. And people are psychologically defenseless because it feels so good. My thesis is that natural selection naturally leads to sex drives that are too strong for humans to have happy lives. At the very least, unbridled lust leads to lying and deception, which leaks out into other areas of life, creating a low trust society.
In modernity, we game the reward system because not only is sex pleasurable, but more is better. Vibrators and pornography, obviously. Contraception allows a more fleshly contact per child conceived. We deploy our intellect and game the reward system with "a midnight nude pool party and a designated sex tent". Does turning it up to eleven make us deliriously happy or jaded, coarse, and insensitive. That is a tricky question; humans have weak psychological defenses again the pleasures of the moment. (Whoops! I'm back again from scrolling YouTube shorts, I nearly gave up on writing this comment, seduced by the pleasures of the moment. That damn algorithm is good at gaming the reward system!) We are unlikely to choose wisely between more is better and the counter intuitive more is worse.
My intuition is that a happy society is one with taboos around sex, and a general reticence that promotes childhood innocence, and late sexual awakenings. The basic instincts are already too strong. Directing our intellects inward to game the reward system is making them stronger still, and we are naturally inclined to fail to notice the auto-monkey-paw.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
My flatmate injured his rotator cuff. Since I'm also getting old and frail, I made an effort to learn from some-else's experience. I bought some dumb-bells intending to do a variety of arm exercises to strengthen the stupid little muscles that hold the ball in the socket before anything bad happened. I took it steady, starting with just the two kilogram bar, only adding a one kilogram plate when I could do twelve repetitions with just the bar.
I followed the instructions in the booklet that came with the dumb-bell. Start at seven reps. Work up to twelve. Return to seven but with a slightly heavier weight. As I increased the weights, I noticed that I needed to brace my core; I was exercising a lot of muscles, not just my arms.
My back grew stronger and stopped aching. I found that to be a memorably excellent result, worth passing on in a comment in theMotte :-)
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The mention of "water purification control chips" reminded me of Poland using clams for this: https://www.johnfhuntwater.co.uk/resources/news/how-clams-keep-water-clean-in-poland/
The question of minimum population sizes for different levels of technology is tricky. One has the whole of Earth researching and developing clever hacks to help keep things simple on Mars. I expect a lot of clever dodges making it possible to obtain adequate outcomes on Mars without needing a deep technology stack and a large population.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
The autopsy report found 11 ng/mL of Fentanyl and 5.6 ng/mL of Norfentanyl. The story I've read online (which I'm not qualified to judge) goes like this:
DUI blood test sometimes show that drivers have 11 ng/mL of Fentanyl in their blood. Habitual users build up protective tolerance and can remain functional despite a level of Fentanyl in their blood that would be rapidly fatal to a naive user. The level of Norfentanyl adds nuance. The typical overdose death of a naive user occurs before their body can metabolise Fentanyl to Norfentanyl. The presence of Norfentanyl proves that George Floyd had a protective tolerance and had had a high level of Fentanyl in his blood for a while, giving his body time to metabolize it.
This is a load bearing part of the criminal prosecution of Derek Chauvin. Without Floyd's habit and tolerance, 11 ng/mL is a lethal dose, explaining away Floyd's death and handing Chauvin a get out of jail free card. It is important context for understanding policing in America. The police have to deal with junkies who are high on pain killing drugs at the time of their arrest, putting the police at risk of wild, random violence.
Had the Fentanyl story been pure invention, intended to muddy the waters, then keeping it alive by calling him "Fentanyl Floyd" would indeed be just obnoxious boo-lighting. But it is a vital part of the story. Without it, a nerdy, timid forger is attempting to quietly pass his $20 bill, gets caught and surrenders without resistance. Then he is knelt on and killed for being Black. That is a very different story. Trying to airbrush Fentanyl from the story is waging culture war.
"Moving the goalposts" is a bad metaphor.
Putting literal goal posts in approximately the right place is easy. Just put them on the end line, at the middle. But sports are competitive. Players will not be happy with the goal posts being in approximately the right place. They have to be in exactly the right place. This too is easy. Goal posts are self defining; the right place for the goal post is where the goal post is!
Belabouring the point, I invite you to consider a soccer match. In the first half, team A score with a shot just inside the right post. In the second half, team B fail to score with a shot just outside the left post. In the post-game adjudication, it is discovered that the goal posts were two feet right of they ought to be. Team A's goal gets disallowed. Team B's miss becomes a goal. Moving the goal posts flips a win for Team A into a win for Team B. The absurdity here is not so much the motion as the neglect. We are neglecting that the goal posts define the goal.
Turning now to Artificial Intelligence, we notice that humans are intelligent [citation needed :-)]. Which raises the question: why are we bothering to create an artificial version of what we already have? Mostly because the devil in in the details; humans are intelligent, but ...
If Alice copies Bob, and Bob copies Charles, and Charles copies Alice, then who should David copy? Human intelligence has a circle jerk problem. Perhaps David should copy Edward, who has reasoned things out from first principles. Perhaps David should copy Fiona who has done experiments. But brilliant, charismatic intectuals lead societies over cliffs. I wrote a paragraph on the difficulties of empirical science, but I deleted it because I couldn't get it to replicate.
We want something from Artificial Intelligence. We want it to cover the gaps in human intelligence. If we could crisply and accurately characterise those gaps we would be well on our way to fixing them ourselves. We have (had?) exactly one example of intelligence to look at, and we are not happy with it. We certainly notice that it has a weak meta-game: human intelligence is bad at seeing its own flaws. We are not able to install self-defining goal posts.
Old people bring baggage from the 1960's to discussion of AI. The word Computer invokes images of banks of tape drives reading databases. Human written legal briefs have a sloppiness problem. Need a precedent? A quick skim and this one looks close enough. It is job of the opposing lawyers to read it carefully and notice that it is not relevant. (The legal system is not supposed to work like this!) One images that an Artificial Intelligence actually reads the entire legal database and finds precedents that humans would miss. When an LLM invents a plausible, fictional precedent that just doesn't exist, one is taken by surprise. One wants to mark the AI down a lot for that non-human error. Doing so involves both moving the goal posts and admitting to not anticipating that failure mode at all.
There is a more subtle issue with LLMs writing computer programs. We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by humans. So the bugs that humans spot and remove are under-represented in the training data. Meanwhile, the bugs that evade human skill at debugging lurk indefinitely and are over-represented in the training data. We have created tools to write code with bugs that humans have difficulty spotting. Worse, we estimate the quality of the code that our new tools produce on the basis that they are inhuman and have no special skill at writing bugs that we cannot spot, despite the nature of their training data.
Notice the clash with old-school expectations. A lot of GOFAI focussed on formal verification of mathematics. Some early theorem provers were ad hoc (and performed poorly). The attention shifted to algorithms growing out of Gödel's completeness theorem and Robinson's work on resolution theorem provers. Algorithms that were provably correct. The old school expectation involves a language such as SML, with a formal semantics, a methodology such as Dijkstra's "A Discipline of Programming", and code accompanied by a formally verified proof of correctness.
A tool for writing code with bugs that humans cannot find sounds like the kind of thing that Mossad would use to sabotage Iranian IT infrastructure. It may be super‐humanly intelligent, but we still want to move the goal posts to exclude it as the bad kind of intelligence.
One old school of AI imagined that the language of thought would be importantly different from natural language. The architecture of AI would involve translating natural language into a more rigorous and expressive internal language, thinking in this internal language and then translating back to natural language for output. LLMs do perhaps partially realise this dream. The tokens are placed in a multidimensional space and training involves discovering the latent structure, effectively inventing that training run's own, custom language of thought. If so, that is a win for the bitter lesson.
On the other hand, LLMs learn the world through human language. I believe that humans suffer from linguistic poverty. Many of our disputes bog down for lack of words. When we have one word for two concepts our discussions are reduced to hopping instead of walking.(My missing words web page is neglected, my post https://www.themotte.org/post/1043/splitting-defensive-alliance-into-chaining-alliance was not well liked, I'm not managing to explain the concept of linguistic poverty.) I hope that AI will "... cover the gaps in human intelligence." but LLMs seemed doomed to inherit our linguistic poverty and reproduce our existing confusions. The dream was that AI would cure human intellectual weakness not copy it.
I think that it is legitimate to notice that LLMs are indeed intelligent, and to then move the goal posts, declaring that, now we have seen it, we realise our error and this is not what we had in mind.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I wonder if Q-anon causes difficulties for the Nicene Creed. The right wing spaces that I monitor, mostly patriots.win, mock posts trailing things that are "about to happen". News that prosecutions are coming gets mocked with a sarcastic chorus of "two more weeks" or "trust the plan".
Meanwhile the Nicene Creed tells us
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead
I've four guesses
- That looks to my eyes like the kind of "trust the plan" pitch that currently excites contempt, and this will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
- Q-anon is profane. The Nicene Creed is sacred. The profane cannot contaminate the sacred. There is no obstacle to Christian revival.
- Going to Methodist church as a child (England, 1965‐1970) the second coming did register at all. Later, when I learned that some branches of American Christianity centered on the second coming, I initially thought: I know about that. It features in the book Father and Son; it is a weird, Plymouth Brethren thing. It has been quietly dropped, and doubts about it will not be an obstacle to Christian revival
- The second coming is an important part of traditional Christianity. If people in 2025 find "about to happen, trust the plan" gives them the ick, then that will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
My guesses contradict each other. I'm really confused :-(
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I had to check the page source to see how you did that. So now I can do arithmetic 7−5=2 and number ranges 1914–1918 and — wait for it — felis‐parenthesis :-)
There is an alternative steelman of homophobia based on refusing to memory hole the AIDS crisis.
First, the AIDS crisis made every-one notice that homosexuality includes both Love is love nest builders and bath-house high scorers. That matters because lots of people go along with gay lib on paradigm of Love is love nest builders. Noticing forces a rethink.
That rethink may include a father deciding
The AIDS crisis had libertarians and gay friendly people saying "Unholy shit, that is a lot of sodomy!"More options
Context Copy link