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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30471 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?

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!

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