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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?

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.