CloudHeadedTranshumanist
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User ID: 2056
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
3d ago
Honestly i'm surprised the founders of google are alive. Weekly meetings in front of the whole campus in a building anyone could tailgate into with no security. Lots of secluded lines of sight to the stage...
I guess noone hates them that much. Well. That and I think those company-wides ended in 2019?
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
3d ago
Hmm. I don't have numbers... I feel like materialism peaked a few years ago in the internet atheism era... has it still been growing since then? If so then its probably just my filter bubbles that have changed. Something to do with my own fall into nihilism and subsequent spiritual journey.
Oh, and my favorite psychology authors are the ones writing Magick Tomes. Much more aesthetic than the other therapy paradigms let me tell you.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
3d ago
Thank you. I... Guess I should say something else but actually I'm just thanking you because you voiced one of my frustrations eloquently. People making worse versions of things because the good version is patented, people creating deadweight loss to get rid of to reap the benefits... or inducing unnecessary paradigm shifts so that they can be at the top of the transition team...
I guess I really do believe that theres no actual way to create more value for people. The modern amish have everything they need really. What was the point of all this junk we made? The medicine is nice yes. The food. The energy. I don't mind the AIs, though people trying to sell them to us is just another example. Take away friends, replace with 20$/month subscription. The cars... seemed nice but slowly grow to disgust me as I see how the travel distances expand to match their speed, keeping me only farther from other people. The trinkets and stopwatches and beer umbrellas add spice... but it turns to ash in my mouth without someone to share them with.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
4d ago
The demand for off brand cell medium (gatorade) is so outstripped by the supply that its almost too cheap to meter unless you're doing industrial bulk. I suppose I can't speak for your basement. But surely someone you know has room for a petri dish.
There are drugs that cost hundreds of dollars even though we can engineer cells to just bioprint them. These cell cultures can be shared by moving them from one petri dish to another. We should mandate the open sourcing of such cultures. To do otherwise is ethically obscene.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
As long as something can in principle be fabricated by cells fed Gatorade in your basement, I question the necessity of its scarcity.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
13d ago
Minecraft is at least also about building. No amount of Draconic Evolution having higher numbers really replaces how cool this worthless farm I built looks.
And usually, unless its a challenge pack with altered recipies, most of the best building tools will be fairly early game allowing you to entirely sit out the combat or energy meta or what have you. It's not like most packs give you anything to kill with that infinity + 1 sword that doesn't already die to the infinity - 1 sword anyway...
Though... maybe the meta is to build a ComputerCraft Turtle and download your entire base... Still. Even with super intelligent building tools there's still your own personal aesthetic to choose to express.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
13d ago
Hmm... I can relate to this sort of thinking. I too think something is lost in the transition between a casual game and a competitive game. But something is gained too.
Speedrunning Minecraft, is a different game than Minecraft. Even if they share most of the mechanics in theory. Letting the game play you... Is the point.
We're doing to ourselves something similar to what we do to train LLMs. Because falling into the flow of that training is pleasurable. And optimizing for something (like speed) helps us to unveil something new about the game and provides a direction for improving our own capabilities.
Those ACE bugs can be used for more than just end credit skips after all. The knowledge generalizes back to casual play. And if you don't like one category, because too much of the game has been cut out or you have grown tired of the route, you can always switch to another. Or to casual play. It's not like your free will has been entirely circumscribed.
I do think the communities get a bit overly excited about the metric of mastery over the game improving, (completion speed) when the more valuable thing to me is the understanding that has been gained regarding the game. But its alright. I won't begrudge them their records.
I... think I agree with this. Though I'm not certain. It might be possible to come up with a plan that would convince me otherwise. No, I don't think we should simply set aside election results. Ideally whatever method we use is entirely prior to voting, (as a great firewall would be) without being... the great firewall. I can't think of a solution I fully endorse.
It's a bit of a paradox under my value system in the first place. Reconciling the need for shared values and the need for individual liberties I mean. Coordination of wills and individuation of wills trade off closely with one another.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
13d ago
Liberal values are the greatest opponent to eugenics, this should be obvious.
Can you explain? It is not obvious to me. Though that might be due to me confusing "Liberal Values" for "Values that are Liberal" such as morphological freedom.
Huh. Do I know you? I feel like I know you...
Though rat-adj with BPD was like half the community when I was in the bay area so- Ah well. Probably best not to try to disambiguate you anyway.
But yeah... Vassar- just had that cult leader energy. Everyone who met him knew that much. The act of talking with him would give people a contact high.
Vassar, before I came to Berkeley, someone warned me "Vassar is kind of crazy and it's impossible to have a normal conversation with him". As a result, I spent several months avoiding you. Then I finally got to meet you and I realized I had made a huge mistake. I mean, you are crazy, and it is is impossible to have a normal conversation with you. But normal conversation is incredibly over-rated compared to whatever the heck you call the thing that interaction with you involves. I regret that we didn't get more of a chance to talk about stuff and I hope to solve that sometime in the future.
-- Scott Alexander
You listen to Michael Vassar. You don't remember traveling to this party or sitting on this beanbag. You don't remember when he began to speak. He is still speaking. He sounds like madness and glory given lisping poetry, and you want to obey.
-- Alicorn
I was around when people were elevating Vassar's sexual misconduct on social media...
Many wispy memories of drama from the old discords and tumblrs bringing me back... Memories of friends of friends having psychotic breaks... Memories of jailbreaking our minds...
I wonder if HasturTimesThree is still out there... or Alice Monday... Listen. We were all crazy, and looking for something, anything to render us sane. The ratsphere selects for people that are seeking sanity after all.
Vassar's energy? His confidence? It enables him to attract people with that need.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
14d ago
Life is not a song
Life is a song. But sometimes, that song is a dirge.
Anyway good post. I appreciate the analysis.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
14d ago
I agree with you. So I'm not sure how things will be resolved.
Personally I never liked this game though. Win or lose the culture war is emotional hell on earth.
Could FDR? yes... Of course he could. The constitution wouldn't matter.
He had the Espionage and Sedition Acts and the Office of Censorship and the public trusted him. Had he told them we were banning publishing Der Stürmer the courts likely would have deferred to him during wartime.
Note that the internment of the Japanese Americans involved:
- Forcible removal from homes, businesses, and communities.
- Incarceration in remote camps without due process.
- No evidence of wrongdoing against the vast majority of internees.
This wasn't just a violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments but an assault on the very concept of equality under the law. The Supreme Court upheld internment in Korematsu v. United States (1944).
And FDR just unilaterally did it. With an Executive order.
Long story short, constitutional rights can be expected to become elastic during wartime.
What does "Subvert" mean.
People can learn things and share opinions with those they talk to. That's how we arrive at decisions about who to vote for. Without a great firewall no election can truly be safe from foreign influence, because individuals will always internalize the influence of their foreign friends.
I think that means I agree that this is a tough nut to crack. I'm not sure there's a hard line, we might have to choose somewhere on the gradient and draw one.
Hopefully we'll all arrive at some agreeable middle ground. "rules of honorable culture war"... Perhaps something where you're allowed to influence online friends but to do so with a government backed media campaign is a culture war crime? (this is just a spitball in the direction of the vibe... I doubt the UN would actually pass this.)
Of course I say "we"... but I'm not Romainian. I merely say "we" because... its a nut America has yet to crack as well. It's something every country needs to figure out.
I think there's more to it than the IKEA effect. But, the IKEA effect is a cognitive bias or quirk where people value things they assembled themselves more than things built by someone else. It is named after the store IKEA which sells furniture that you must self-assemble.
From wikipedia
A 2011 study found that subjects were willing to pay 63% more for furniture they had assembled themselves than for equivalent pre-assembled items.
I'm not sure this is really a bias in all cases. Having built something develops virtue and having that memory triggered when you see the object cements that virtue. But when the IKEA effect shows up in the context of assessing whether something is a good deal based on its actual cost of production- or estimating something's value to others- it can definitely be a bias in that context and lead to overestimating things you made.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
14d ago
I do think it's interesting. But ultimately this... now removed conversation was only the "bouncing ideas off of a rubber duck" phase of making a well directed point or refining an insight.
I think that part of what makes the LLMs so attractive is their ability and infinite willingness to listen to and expand one's own thoughts. It feels good because the ideas flow more smoothly. You have a social interface to lean them on and reify/refine them with, and of course, these models are usually intoxicatingly positive too.
When you write something for an audience, you have to be attentive to how you are directing the audience's attention, who the audience is. What concepts they are aware of, and how to move their attention cleanly from idea to idea with minimal friction. In the case of this post, even just a preface introducing the context of the chat to us would have been a nice improvement (though I still think any full convos should be linked and then discussed rather than hard posted in a top comment). LLMs talking just to you can be writing for an audience of just you, referencing priors and ideas that the LLM inferred would click with you. And using interaction modes that you told them to use to optimally interface with you.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
15d ago
Why... did you post this? I am somewhat interested in seeing other people's dialogues with models. But maybe they should just be linked to...
I'm not sure how to engage with something like this here on the Motte in the middle of the culture war roundup?
Should I engage with your thoughts or analyze the chat as a whole? Also did a chunk of this get chopped off? ... Did you post by mistake?
The term comes from Magic The Gathering lore and color pie philosophy. In mtg circles people will sometimes identify themselves by a color or color combination. Either due to liking the gameplay of that combo, or liking its aesthetics or personally vibing with the actual ideology.
Golgari is Black/Green. Life and death. The growth and decay of all things. Rot and Compost. One organism's bloated corpse is another organism's egg laying site. The mode of thinking that believes that the most respectful way to treat the dead crewmate is to return them to the ship's biomass recycler. This is the circle of life. This is the essence of Golgari.
"They say nothing lasts forever. I say everything lasts forever, just not in the form you may be accustomed to."
-- Deathsprout flavor text.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
17d ago
That makes sense.
I think it's also difficult for me to conceive of enjoying the smell of farts or unveiling one's inner truth as vices. I think that's the oft discussed purity / exploration divide.
Plus something aesthetic relating to my existence as a Golgari mage. Shoveling shit is clean honest work. That requires a bath afterwards.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
17d ago
Right. That is in my conclusion yes.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
17d ago
Nate is incapable of questioning if polls contain any signal what-so-ever.
Polls are useless for 2 reasons: When the margins are narrow (2020, 2024), polls are too noisy to get anything of value
???
Ok from this post Nate links in his defense, emphasis mine: https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-polls-are-close-but-that-doesnt
But our forecast has been hovering right around 50/50 since mid-September. Donald Trump gained ground in mid-October, and Harris has regained just a little bit now, but it’s always remained comfortably within toss-up range. So if you believe the polls, we’re coming up on the end of the closest presidential race in 50 years. Harris leads by about 1 point in our national average — though our estimate of the national popular vote, which is mostly not based on national polls, shows a slightly wider margin than that1 — and the battleground states are even closer. Donald Trump has a 0.3-point lead in Pennsylvania, while Harris has small leads in Michigan (D +1.1) and Wisconsin (D +0.9).
However, that doesn’t mean the actual outcome will be all that close. If the polls are totally accurate we’re in for a nail-biter on Tuesday night. But a systematic polling error is always possible, perhaps especially if you think pollsters are herding — only publishing results that match the consensus. And because things are so close, even an average polling error would upend the state of the race.
Now it’s important to note that polling error runs in both directions, and it’s pretty much impossible to predict which way it will go ahead of time. Harris could beat her polls or we could be in for a third Trump miss. But both scenarios have one thing in common: they’d turn election night into a relative blowout.
So. This sounds to me like Nate explaining that the polls are too noisy to gain anything of value (about who wins at least). The 50/50 result sounds like it is a direct consequence of this and that it is precisely what Nate is claiming. Maybe the guy is incapable of coming to the right conclusions. Many of the crowd here did manage to predict the direction of the polling bias after all. But it sounds like that was all Nate was missing.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
17d ago
So. I don't follow Nate. I don't really read his blog. I don't know how his model works.
a Trump sweep of the swing states was actually our most common scenario, occurring in 20 percent of simulations. Following the same logic, the second most common outcome, happening 14 percent of the time, was a Harris swing state sweep.
Well... it sounds like their model is made out of simulations. So- Perhaps I can see/guess how this works.
Imagine you make 11 different simulations of the election and use various factors to predict which simulation is most likely. Your "most likely simulation" can look one way, but your total likelihood regarding who wins is (probably) a weighted model of all the simulations you tried. This will be made up of lots of different ways the election could go.
If Trump wins in 1 simulation predicted 50% likely, but Harris wins in 10 simulations predicted 5% likely, you get a 50/50 total.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
17d ago
Those studying music look up to Mozart rightfully and would be visibly disgusted upon finding out about his scat fetish accusations.
Hmm. This sentence clings to me. What's going on here... lets see... yes. This sentence was just an aside. An example to further your point. Really a completely irrelevant thing to make my response about.
However to me it was a discontinuity. A confusion. The above sentence is treated like a "as we all know". But I totally missed the memo.
Why would those studying music be disgusted by their idol having gross kinks? I can see how you could likely elicit that disgust with any unsolicited claim of "Famous_Name has a scat fetish"- to someone that themselves is not into scat. But then- it wouldn't be about their Hero it would just be about the scat.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1mo ago
I think Elon runs things on a foundation of hype rather than any other core merit. But I still think hype can get real results if it brings in enough capital. Eventually you break through with brute force even if you personally are only a coordination point.
I would assume that having better access to relevant coworker knowledge and relevant information networks improved the efficiency.
Internet was a net good imo. But it would be healthier if it were more holistically filtered by use case without the human having to be the one to not habitually click the social media button while trying to work.
Instead the thing is designed to making your attention move in ways that make people money. And it's so normalized... it's just natural to blast all citizens with adverts for things that they do not need or ways to empty my savings account into a black hole. If prosthelytizers acted like adds, coming back every single day with no option to make them leave except with the help of an external service? I don't think we would put up with this.
To be fair, we don't. That's what addblock is for. But now we have to keep up that arms race. You know what would fix this? banning adds.
Half of all websites would crash. And this would be fine. because 90% of them were junk designed to factory farm human attention for money that now serve no purpose. We'd get the things we need to work up and running again. And the remaining sites would be the ones people terminally valued enough to preserve for no personal gain.
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