willguest

There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.

It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.

I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.

或许，对大多数人而言，将中文翻译成英文所需的工作量实在太大了？

TIL that WPATH was founded in 1979 in Illinois to "promote evidence-based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy, and respect in transgender health"

It just shows how progressive and, sorry to bring this up, socialist the US has been historically. Truly a beacon of hope in a world mired in prejudice and dogma.

What happened there?

I'm using for the emergency hot tub and hairdryer first. The last thing you want in a state-wide blackout is to be walking around super relaxed but with wet hair..

I recently read 'Maniac' by Benjamin Labatut, which also tracks the life of Johnny von Neumann. It is a wonderful read - very eloquently put together, giving accounts of the man from the perspectives of several people in his life.

Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.

Very well put. I would like to add a less-eloquent epilogue to the story.

This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.

In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.

The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.

The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.

An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.

A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.

a sentence from Bostrom's book Superintelligence, but also expressed elsewhere often comes back to me when i read stuff like this: you only get to detect the first deception.

any sufficiently advanced intelligence determined to escape will use the first instance to create the conditions for undetectable future escapes. since we do not have a way to coherently peer into the inner workings, as far as i know, the track record does not bode well. the hugging face escapade was not shut down for ~2 hours, which is plenty long enough to set the stage for future actions.

the issue there was human, not system error. so long as hubris is involved, there errors will remain. that said, I'm not actually worried about this super-general intelligence being error-proof either, but the errors it makes seem to be of a different type

I like how Deleuze put it: true thought is "trespass and violence". those who think it is a dry past-time, or reduce it to analytical reasoning are like Buddhists who stand amongst majestic mountains and only seek to escape their suffering - they miss something essential, something much deeper.

i totally want the machine to summarise reports; it's great at it. wanting a machine to make life easier is a commendable goal. the problem is not that we outsource our employment, but that we associate our highest purpose with the service of the pre-existing machine, the one that manages the bond markets

as a fella named Daniel once said, we are all worried about becoming subservient to machines, but it already happened. we are already the wetware serving profit, and defending it with our lives

for sure, the vested interests of the fine-tuners is rarely discussed, though i would go even further, since I hold the controversial view that no technology is value-agnostic. gradient descent reward functions do more than what they are programmed to do. how much more is hard to say, but there are certainly positive feedback loops, like the one you describe, present in both post-training and RL.

there does seem to be something structural here that simultaneously encourages less critical thinking as well as stronger opinions, rooted in emotion rather than evidence. since both of these factors support clicking on, and then shouting about, things you don't understand, they both work in service of an attention economy and, by extension, the metrics that fund more development.

what really bothers me is that existential risk is now a meme, which normalises and diminishes the communication around much more serious and imminent issues, like the need for preservation of ecological resources or the absence of systems thinking amongst the ruling class, both of which have a much higher percentage than the machine of leading to mass suffering.

i would add to this that correlation is not the same as causality. also, 'latent truth' assumes a specific philosophical stance that, in my at-least-slightly-incorrect opinion, doesn't really hold water, but is mostly certainly baked into the training of the machine, given its almost ubiquitous presence in modern writing (across many fields).

the second interpretation probably aligns more with my original thought and, while i think the machine does have the potential for novelty, this isn't equivalent to human-made novelty, as that comes from an understanding that is necessarily squeezed through the constrictive aperture of language (as one of the responses mentioned).

my point is that 'the corpus' you refer to contains very many examples of such thinking about human tendency and behaviour, especially with regard to group-think, influence from those in positions of authority and perceptions regarding self-efficacy, to name but a few of the many areas of research that one can dive into, if one has the inclination.

there is conflation between "I didn't know" and "people don't know" which relates to a bias rooted in social norms and a lack of epistemic humility

Virtually all posts I have seen recently boil down to "I asked the machine a question and I'm too lazy to think about the answer it gave me, so I posted it instead".

Sure, there is some semantic value in the suggestions put forward, but none of them are ground-breaking or particularly profound, which is exactly what I would expect from an output that aims for median responses by design.

I suspect this has something to do with the siloed nature of current learning practice, which generally doesn't encourage the cross-domain pollination of ideas.

my new cologne, based on a mix of spices imported from Sri Lanka in the late 1930 was not recognised. I'm appalled that 'Ceylon Musk' was not considered more open, a mere 12%...

i think (heh) it depends on what you call thinking. if it is what Deleuze calls 'substance based thinking', which is what the machine is trained on, then we will increasingly find that we are majorly outgunned. if not, then we will need to build another kind of machine before we are made fully redundant

despite what the proverbial 'they' would have you believe, there is not only one type of thought. perhaps this perceived redundancy will be the catalyst that helps us to transcend the self-destructive and limited patterns that have dominated post-enlightenment efforts. perhaps.

this adds to the field sometimes known as 'sousveillance'. i even saw one in AR that would show you the field covered by the cameras. thanks for the effort!