AQuantized

I think the essay has the implicit assumption that if you're 'better' at doing things, you'll end up happier. Since intelligent people aren't happier, the conclusion becomes that intelligence is mostly only relevant to a subset of well-defined abstract problems that don't represent the real messy problems of life.

I think the reality of human happiness is that being in better material circumstances, or being better at solving problems practical or not, doesn't necessarily improve long term happiness.

Adaption to circumstances, the 'hedonic treadmill', means most people aren't going to obtain some very high level of happiness and sustain it indefinitely, regardless of station.

Doesn't really make sense as there are already open weight models that are close to frontier models, and the compute to run them isn't outrageously expensive, and every indication that it will only get cheaper over time as has been the strong trend in terms of $/outcome.

> You really don't want to end up with dementia and related illnesses, it totally sours everyone's view of you.

This seems like such an absurd conclusion to this, as though the opinions of other people of you are what matter when you functionally lose your personhood and then die.

Maybe a better focus would be that there often isn't a good way for a community to manage a person who suddenly becomes irrational because of an illness.

Not sure how this is relevant given it's the effects of a future climate catastrophe being discussed, not something that has already happened.

Einstein was enamored with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Spinoza, in Schopenhauer's conception of the will and Spinoza's pantheism. The God of Spinoza (or indeed Einstein) is strictly deterministic, and we are all a part of such a God, as is all of nature. Hence his quote 'God does not play dice', and in part it explains Einstein's philosophical commitment against some of the indeterministic interpretations of quantum physics being ultimately true.

This comment is a bit odd to me since I don't think those basic things you mention have been difficult to get working on most distros for quite a while now.

I wonder if meditation could give you this ability? After having an intense 'breakthrough' during meditation I had an enhanced ability to imagine things, especially visually, for ~1 week. I stopped meditating for a while because it was too intense and immersive.

It felt like I 'let go' of some subtle assumptions around how I would visualize things normally and had an expanded ability, but it also seemed more intrusive and without the same 'distance' between 'me' and the imagining.

Game Programming Patterns is also excellent. There's something that feels quite 'honest' and straightforward about the style of both books. It sometimes seems like authors feel like they have to play along with the idea that it's all black magic, or maybe I'm just too stupid to understand GoF design patterns.

To be fair that really isn't 'big money' in most of those cities, assuming big money has some connotation of significantly above average after tax and expenses disposable income in those areas, especially relative to your peers. I don't think it would be unfair to say that would be big money compared to many European workers in the same jobs though.

The stimulus starts the fixed action pattern, but that action pattern includes the behavior to make the entire web, not just the start off the process. Different species of spider have different fixed action patterns (and different neurology underlying that, and different DNA underlying that neurology).

I think throwing a ball is more learned, although some behaviors like grasping the ball may provided a fixed action foundation on which higher order learning builds. Baby humans have a grasp reflex that works in a similar way to the fixed action pattern described, but with a simpler action sequence. If you touch the palm of a toddler, they will instinctively tightly grasp. It's interesting that the grasp reflex disappears around 5 years old, so the fixed neuronal pattern is subsumed by higher order learned behavior.

There's an idea of 'fixed action patterns' where certain behaviors are encoded in the neurology of an animal, and triggered by certain stimulus.

For spiders then there is an action pattern that upon certain stimulus they will use their spinnerets begin forming a web, first placing anchor points and gradually building it up with radial threads and spiral. The exact behavior differs by species such that they have different resulting patterns. It seems possible that there is an element of 'learning' beyond the basic pattern as well, even in seemingly very simple animals.

I doubt the spiders have a mental model of what their web looks like as such, it's more evolutionary driven genetic behavior, a particular neuronal pattern encoding the action sequence rather than an underlying fundamental understanding.

I had the opposite experience. I always had such an intense 'inner monologue' that it dominated my experience of life. Outside of doing things that required all of my attention like playing games I never lived in the moment. It made social interaction difficult because I would always obsess over how to say things in the right way.

It took me until my 20s to learn how to relax it and not go over and over everything.

Your account seemed really alien to me when I read it, it's hard to believe people can have such a different experience of life. It's rarely discussed explicitly.

To be fair 'modelling the brain' might not include things like neuron metabolism that probably isn't required for AI but is a part of the substrate of our own consciousness.

Using Prison Architect as an example, when playing can you 'remember' the dimensions of the different rooms you've built? Or would you have to zoom out to plan an extension of your prison? It definitely sounds like aphantasia.

I don't think it has anything to do with your eyes being open/closed, or even to do with your eyes at all, unless it's describing something different to what I assume. It's about mental images and visualization, not your field of vision itself.