"Your paper's great! But..."

The gordian logic knot of wanting to be "free of bias" is a lie, it always has been, and it's one of the most pervasive ideas in American "intellectual" circles. To believe that one can have no biases is to argue that you have no perspective. No human is truly neutral, that's the fucking point. /

It is infinitely infuriating that everything that is occurring is in large part due to feedback loops that come from the interaction of introducing general currency into a society and then giving control of that currency to whoever has the most of it Just such an obviously shitty design

The modern impetus of consolidation of power is in equating of "I'm uncomfortable" with "I am dying" The displacement of *worries* onto others is the point. When those worries multiply into violence through that displacement, it cycles and feeds back into post hoc justification of said displacement

Boy Meats World

The Butlerian Jihad will not happen. It should, but it won't. At least in a time that I will live to see. So many people have given so much of their ability to think to the pareidolia machine that ripping it away, while a good idea, would do genuine damage. It's become incredibly entrenched /

To start, I agree with Shaun on this topic. We can define consciousness in tons of ways, but I think what we're really doing is saying "Did we make life? Did we make a living thing?" Unequivocally, no. LLMs do not live. they simply do what computers do, moving bits from one place to another.

it's honestly very funny watching a whole generation of failson executives delete their businesses racing to "AI" because they're legitimately dumber than chatgpt so when they talk to it they think it's true genius

LLMs are sycophant machines. Gelman amnesia paired with insane hubris behind venture capital leads directly to constant LARPing as cult leaders Fascination with technology aesthetic, lack of understanding, and general stress leads to the average person offloading everything possible to a GPU parrot

The more I see shit continue the way it's continuing the more I'm convinced that people are going to literally be dying as a result of AI before literally anything gets done about it. The rich pay researchers to build what they all believe is god. They're going to use it to smite people.

I saw Sinners over the weekend (fantastic). While watching it I was reminded of a tiktok I saw by thiiirdperson (can't find it atm) where he was talking about an example of a kind of simulacrum of culture where white kids in a school vocal performance will sing a jazz piece with a scat part...

Surface tension on that bubble looking pretty unstable

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” Diary of Anne Frank January 13, 1943

Camp can be one of the most sincere forms of art in my opinion. I've never connected with art more than when it does something incredibly silly while looking directly at me and refusing to blink. MGR's Rules of Nature, all of Guilty Gear, all of JoJo, Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, Lethal Company, etc

Kurt Vonnegut man

I think that religion/magic is the method by which we tell the most existentially comforting stories, the scientific method is the best method we know of telling consistent stories These are not mutually exclusive and never have been Everything is stories, that's how our brains store information

the alt right attacks diverse views in because video games are some of the most powerful metapolitical tools of our era

Fascist hatred foments around artificial culture shit involving games because games are one of the most popular frontlines of artistic expression To the average person this appears "silly" or "insane" to care about deeply, especially if you try to draw any connection to political implications

Conservative ideology's wet dream of a nation being "profitable" is born of a woefully idiotic swap of causation and correlation They believe that the nation is a business, but fail to consider what would happen if a business printed the money This is also why they see no issue with company scrip

If anyone ever utters the words "Quantum Computing" and "AI" (or "AGI") in the same sentence, know that there is an overwhelming chance that you are being grifted. Quantum computing solves very specific problems, mostly related to periodic systems. It is not magic, it is physics.

Capitalists see "Artificial General Intelligence" as Roko's Basilisk because they see lost profits as akin to little deaths. "If I don't help build it, someone else will and I won't be one of the exalted ones so I may as well be dead." Everything is currency to them, so missing out would be death.

I wish we'd stop using the term "AI", there is no "artificial intelligence." The hubris to assume that we can create intelligence aside, the Chinese Box cannot suddenly learn German, let alone ever learn Chinese or English. There is massive monetary incentive for OpenAI have you believe so.

I think that the most frustrating part of the prevalence of ChatGPT usage is the way that people seem not to care about how it can just lie to you. Sometimes my students won't even make sure their code compiles before turning in ChatGPT output. Articles clearly go out with blaring factual errors.

Hanlon's Razor is to not attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance, but at a certain point, ignorance becomes malice. The more responsibility someone has, the lower that point goes. When someone has infinite responsibility, all ignorance is, by necessity, malice.

I like this but also find it silly a bit. Wheels are processing, books are memory. Complex gears are wheels that store memory. Computers are billions of tiny complex gears made of electricity. It's the same myth just scaled up. Nothing has changed since Odin had "Memory" and "Thought" as familiars.

I wanna be clear that Frank Herbert wasn't 100% based and amazing at all times, but I think it's very important that we think about the structure and point of his writing about the Butlerian Jihad. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind." Perhaps we should listen to this.

Emergent properties of systems may be the closest thing we have to the existence of something magical. A new thing exists that wasn't before, and is both separate from and part of this system. Life comes from big bang. Intelligence from life. Consciousness from intelligence. Art from consciousness.

Magical thinking for the non-computer oriented involves confusion and frustration over how the black box that somehow delivers wonders to the screen can't count the r's in strawberry. Magical thinking for techbros involves assuming that there must exist a combination of black boxes for everything.

Tweets, posts, whatever you want to call them, packing x amount of meaning into y characters, is sort of like a freeform haiku. Not "5 syllables, 7 syllables, then 5 syllables', but instead "Here, have 17 syllables and do whatever you want with them." It's the same game structure, different function

Humanity itself, evolving from chaos, can be seen as an absurdly large, clumsy Turing Machine to shows the recognizability of any conceivable problem. But see it this way reduces us to machines. The brain is not a digital computer, we are instead but analog meat shocking itself into joy and sorrow.

Due to a previous injury, my elbow is made of surgical steel. I think about it every time I see the scar. How much human labor and time was put in to mining the ore, smelting it into form, delivering it to my surgeon, and installing it into my knitted bone? I wish I could thank all of them.

The shadows on the wall are not reality, they are a projection of reality. Leaving the cave does not make you better than those who are still bound within it, but it absolutely makes you better than those who left and chose to go back only to put on a shadow play for their own amusement.

Money != utility, money is an attempt to measure utility. But utility is a function of what "good" a good brings to a consumer of that good. Quantification of subjective feeling is not possible, so utility cannot quantify "good", much less can money fulfill that role.

When I eventually die I only hope I do something half as annoying as Fermat before I do. Maybe I'll make something fucking wild up, "I've a magnificent proof of why P is not NP but a single post is too narrow to contain it"

Every time a crypto bro tries to sell me on swapping to "the chain" I get sold some drivel about how "do you trust humans more than code?" Buddy who the fuck do you think wrote that code, you didn't rear the code yourself, do you are indeed trusting humans

I'm fond of saying that we tricked crystals into thinking re: computers, but it's facetiously inaccurate. It's more like we found a way to create controllable rivers and dams the size of microorganisms, then push electricity through those channels only to read what comes out the end

Thread of definitions I'll add to when I think of a useful one to explain that I feel is hard to use without having a thing to point to: Joy - excitement to experience more of life or more of something whose motivation exists from an intrinsic something within someone. The point is the excitement

When we display magical thinking when material reality is impacted by it, that's ignorance. When we display it when it's not, that's play with ideas, art. If someone can't distinguish magical thinking from logical process, they are at risk of acting as a malicious artist.

I've wondered for a long time why people are so resistant to thinking of concepts in a systemic manner. It's so freeing and easy to work with when you understand things as a part of a connected web that only requires small restructuring when you learn something new. But I think I understand why now

Very often I call certain behaviors from people "Econ Brain", behaviors that stem from absurd abstractions of material things into "utility". "The homeless should just get jobs" abstracts ills of life itself into a simple "you have negative utility, there's positive utility over there though?"

I think the major thing that bugs me about AI bros is that they seem to think that the brain is just a complex neural network. We call it a neural network because we modeled it from our perception of how brains work electronically, not because it literally is a brain.

If monkeys paws existed we'd create a monkey factory where we specifically raise monkeys to be cursed so that we can have their paws for more wishes They'd wish, then unwish something but keep 0.000001% of the benefit. The cost is 100 human lives every time but they'll find a way to not give a shit

If monkeys paws or djinnis existed, most people in our current system would immediately waste all the wishes on "please give me as much money as that guy has +1 dollar", then repeat it two more times when that guy makes 2 dollars. A finger curls, millions die, "lmao" says wisher, repeat forever.

Wish we could fuck up René Descartes for calling them "imaginary numbers" and thereby forever ruining high school and college students' ability to actually learn them rather than laugh about it and write them off as useless. Unless they're mathematicians or electronic engineers I guess

Programming is abstraction of circuitry into mathematics, mathematics is abstraction of thought pushed into a coordinated system. Philosophy is game we play where we throw abstracted ideas back and forth with one another or juggle them ourselves.

Communication is a 5 phase thing. I have thought -> I translate thought into language or action -> language or action is sent out into the ether -> you perceive it -> you take that perception and translate it back into thought. It's compression and unpacking of information, like a fuzzy zip file.

Gödel did this really cool thing where he proved that no system of knowledge can ever be "complete", basically saying that no matter what angle we shoot at "true understanding" from, we're gonna have spots that we just miss and there's not shit we can do about it. Fucking terrifying.

"Nature abhors abhors a vacuum" this and "Nature doesn't create straight lines" that, well nature made me and I like vacuums and straight lines so maybe nature does, indeed like that shit just in the most roundabout possible way.