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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30437 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Overhyped, like all Facebook models. An interesting and perhaps unnerving milestone in marrying LLMs to game agents, but it's narrowly specialized and it only works for blitz – for now.

As for your post.

Namely, if the goal is egregoric anti-proliferation, do not make it easier for more agents to develop egregoric systems. Do not try to create your own egregores. Do not reward the propagation of any egregores, regardless of their particular ordinal position in the chain of propagation (viz. recognize downstream grifters as loyal opposition and treat them as such). Dismantle the egregores that you host yourself.

Herd immunity against mimesis starts with you.

This is a loser's strategy. «Egregores» are not some autonomous living pests, for they dissolve in random noise without support, but a matter or engineering; and there is an entire industry dedicated to endowing you with an unauthentic Dasein. It can only be resisted on equal terms. If you don't play the game, you will be played, or swallowed whole by bit pieces of players. What you call egregores are tools of extrapolated agency, which begin with humans. Let us not forget this in the age of machines.

We’ve open-sourced the code and published a paper to help the wider AI community use CICERO to spur further progress in human-AI cooperation. You can also visit the CICERO website to learn more about the project and see the agent in action. Interested researchers can submit a proposal to the CICERO RFP to gain access to the data.

Thanks, Mark, Yann.

@HalloweenSnarry you once asked why I stan Zuckerberg. This is why: when they concoct man-made horrors beyond your comprehension, they hand it over much more often than their competitors. I am 99.7% sure those are feeble prototypes compared to some of the classified NSA/NCSC/Unit 8200 stuff, but hey, it's something to play with, at least.

By the same token:

EVA is the first open-sourced billion-scale vision foundation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of downstream tasks.

Thanks, CCP.

Out of interest, when did the term «egregores» enter the Motte’s common lexicon? Who popularised it?

Egregores were a rat-adjacent twitter term that seemed to jump to the LessWrong lexicon and moved out from there: see here and here for 2015, here for a popular fictional example from 2016, here or here (promoted at here) for a 2017 use, moving to the SSC's more mainstream ratpack by 2018.

I don't think it was common in 2014, since Meditations on Moloch nor its comments reference it. NRx played a role in popularizing it/being an example case, but like the thede/elthede stuff a lot of it was more insightful outside of their context. Probably a bunch of other references from that sphere that's been deleted/offlined since, but gfl finding anything from that era by Nydwracu or jokeocracy these days.

Wait, it didn't come out of 4chan?

Thx for posting about it.

Huh. I wouldn’t have guessed, since I’d only seen it in occult circles topics, like “tulpa.”

What’s a “thede”? Now that I’ve mentioned it, is my phone going to get haunted?

Tulpa sometimes pops up in psychological (and as a result, ratsphere) contexts, though I'll admit the difference between that and occult ones can be blurry at best.

Thede is a formalization of "who are we doing this versus" concept, in the sense that the thede is a group that you would favor defending, and elthede is a group that you'd attack. It's distinguished from ingroup/outgroup in the recognition that these things are concentric, situational, and opposed: the hated rival school's football team is elthede to your football team until they make it to the championship, in which case it's more important that someone from your state beats the weirdos from Florida, which in turns falls by the wayside under an alien invasion. Like a lot of NRx-adjacent terms, it smuggles a lot in with its assumptions -- most seriously the belief that a coherent group needs someone Other to exist -- but the common usage watered down to the extent that didn't really survive.

This is a derail, but wait, Moldbug decided to make his castes Dalit, Vaisyas, Brahmins, Helots, and Optimates?

I feel like there’s a lot to unpack from this mishmash of cultures.

Do you know if nydwracu is still around somewhere? He was fun.

They were haunting the tumblr ratsphere for a while, but I haven't seen much if anything under that name since 2016. They were going through a spasm of switching tumblr names on a pretty regular basis, though.

I googled to see if they'd done anything more recent - found nothing after 2016. last post were just some fanfiction and the last post of their blog saying they're done with politics

I was first exposed to it on https://exploringegregores.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/introduction/

Apparently it originated in an ancient Hebrew apocalyptic text called the Book of Enoch, and was then reintroduced in the early 19th century.

I wasn't even sure it is present in our lexicon, but OP uses it. In my experience it comes from Russian Satanist Warrax, apparently quoting Eliphas Levi.

Involtation to an egregore is a term borrowed by Warrax from Jewish kabbalistics in an attempt to define Satanism. «Involtation» in this case means «connectedness», «egregore» something like «archetype». Thus, to racial Russian it translates roughly as «being connected to some idea».

The phrase first appeared in Warrax' «FAQ on Satanism» and went like this:

A Satanist is one who has an involtation to the egregore of Satan.

Those who wish to understand the deeper meaning of this phrase are advised to read the article «Sepulka».

Also, involtation in general is the establishment of an atsral connection between two objects. Or the actions that follow it. And originally, it was outright the infliction of damage by witchcraft with the help of a figurine representing a victim – a volt.

Among other things, "involtation to the egregore" has spawned several secondary memes. For example, «disinvolt» means «to break a friendship with someone» or simply «to remove them from one's friend list», e.g. after the publication of Kholmogorova's letter, Warrax conducted a session of mass disinvoltations.

Daniil Andreyev, whom I've previously mentioned here, also uses this term in his magnum opus:

I seem to recall, for example, that within Jewish mysticism can be found the concept of the egregor; however, it is difficult for me to judge how closely the term corresponds to the meaning given to it here, if only because of my less than superficial knowledge of Jewish theosophy. In any case, what is meant here by egregors are variomaterial formations that take shape over large collectives from certain emanations of the human psyche.

Egregors do not have monads, but they possess a volitional charge of limited duration and the equivalent of consciousness. Every state, even Luxembourg, has its own egregor. They are essentially static, passive beings. The majority of egregors do not take part in the struggle between the demonic and Providential forces in Shadanakar. There are some, however, that side with the demonic camp.

When egregors disintegrate, their equivalent of consciousness disappears as well, dispersing into space. They do not experience any pain at such times.

To the extent that it is possible to speak of the landscape of those planes, the sakwalas of egregors are characterized by yellowish swirls of space in which the egregors themselves stand out as somewhat denser than their surroundings.

Huh!

I think it comes from Handwaving Freakoutery, and I think this is the first post on that topic: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/memespace-egregores-and-google-maps

Not sure when it took off around here.

Is that /u/Beej67’s blog? He’s the guy who was really into the idea. I always thought he brought the term to the motte. See this post.

Nah, I was first exposed to it on https://exploringegregores.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/introduction/

Apparently it originated in an ancient Hebrew apocalyptic text called the Book of Enoch, and was then reintroduced in the early 19th century.

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