FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
If I have a book and 5% of the pages I look at are blank, I'll have the strong expectation that the rest of the pages are blank too. And for the same reason - why would the author leave any pages blank? Energy is energy. If you're bothering to colonize any measurable amount of the universe, you'll colonize the rest too. Any species that ever stopped expanding would stop expanding long before it became globally visible.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
You can't even claim innocence, I would say, when your followers start building mountains of the wrong skulls!
Note: if you grew up in East Germany, Signalis is going to be a headfuck. This game is "DDR in space" through and through. It's actually painful how familiar it feels.
Pretty fun though. In downside, I'd say it feels like it's designed "to imitate RE" more than "to be good" at some points. Some puzzles are very much for the sake of puzzles. But RE is a good design anyways, so it mostly works, and it's short enough that it doesn't end up overstaying its welcome too badly.
Also, lesbian robots.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
For most of human history, this has been the case.
Sure, but what's their concept of heaven? More labor? No, a rest from having to do labor all the time. "Not enjoying it and wishing it would stop" is pretty much the defining difference between labor and fun. I don't think anybody's ever invented a wageslave heaven. (Maybe the Chinese...?)
I'm not saying the work shouldn't be done. I'm just drawing a difference between work as an instrumental and terminal goal: in fact, "instrumental goal" is also a pretty good synonym of labor.
People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from.
I mean, I don't think constructing social necessity is particularly hard. If we find we want, terminally, for there to be socially useful labor (even aside how we're pretty alienated from the fruits of our labor in our current society, something something letterbombs), I don't think that's going to be hard to arrange even in the absence of any true environmentally-imposed scarcity. But note that now we're looking at labor as a terminal goal. So that's what I'd argue: all non-terminal labor should be abolished - not in the sense of just not doing it, but in the sense of not having to do it.
I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die. Any money you are paid for your labor is only reinvested to make you a more effective employee. Children are still raised (16 hours of schooling and training per day, enter the labor force at 12), but they refund their parents the cost of raising them and thus are merely another labor-raising device. All fun that one has is optimized for perfect recovery to maximize socially useful labor. I think if we look at why such a society was bad, we find what the proper role of fun is: this society doesn't seem to be for anything aside from itself. Is society for man or is man for society? Whereas from the "fun" perspective, or rather the "human values" perspective, we find that we don't need to justify labor: a life with a balance of meaningful challenges, self-actualization and silly fun seems more preferred, even on its own merits, than a life of only one of them. So there are two arguments for labor: first, a society with only fun quickly runs out of fun overhead. This is an argument that even fun-maximalists will embrace, but it doesn't give you meaning in a post-singularity setting where the amount of labor strictly required for fun maximization is zero. The other is that meaningful labor is fun. (At least, if we stretch the meaning of fun somewhat, to mean "fulfilling".) This offers a blueprint for a post-singularity world of voluntarist labor. And in that model, we may imagine that some people genuinely are most satisfied by a life filled entirely with vapid fun, and so what? Their fun does not diminish mine.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I mean sure, but on the other hand in some sense the immaturity (play etc.) is a valid purpose of humanity. What else are we striving for with the term "good times" if not a reduction in demand for useful things, leaving more overhead for playing games?
Speculation, but I find it suggestive: Strong men increase variation, weak men reduce it. ("Strong men explore, weak men exploit"?) So when things are going bad, you want a certain level of strong men to have a chance to hit a fix; when things are going about as good as can be expected, you want to reduce your strongman:weakman ratio to avoid breaking things. Such a model would also result in the observed men/times cycle if you selected for successful countries.
Phrased like that it sounds suspiciously like "thrive vs survive", which would fit with the "right = strong, left = weak" framing.
Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms via the presidency?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Right, I guess I'm saying if you wanted to train a specific response to a level of uncertainty, it would be difficult to construct the training samples.
Evidently, the model has figured out that something should be hooked up to its uncertainty. But I have no clue how you'd make that happen intentionally.
The thing I don't understand is how you can possibly train for uncertainty.
The model needs to "learn the feeling of not being sure". But whether it's sure or not always depends on its state of knowledge at the time, and that state of knowledge will never be represented in its training set. Additionally and relatedly, you cannot train a LLM to "notice when it's saying something wrong" without indirectly training it to say something wrong, then say it notices.
You would have to inspect the network and somehow determine when it is objectively uncertain, and to what degree, and then synthesize a training task based on that actual uncertainty. That level of interpretability is pretty beyond us at the moment.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
It's a joke.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I mean, I guess if you're putting a person who has aged a year back into a younger body, you're already applying god-tier/superintelligence-tier modification. At that point, "how" you go about it, if you do it parsimoniously by applying some general effect to the brain, or if you literally just rewrite every atom, you're not so much putting your thumb on the scale as grabbing the scale and tilting it whichever way you like. Of course Aslan could have made them remember clear as day and without any doubts if he wanted to do that. So yeah, I guess I agree that "well, they're remembering hazily because they were de-aged" doesn't do anything, because it's not like de-aging is a primitive process that would have to be further enhanced for clear memories. - Then again, Aslan has never seemed as all-powerful or unconstrained as capital-G God to me. Maybe it is a primitive process.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Mod decision prediction market when (only half-joking)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
since there's no vetting system, you can't even claim that people attracted this way are going to do a worse job.
Sure you can, if you think the populations selected by either will be different. You don't need vetting; effort acts as a filter as well.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
It's nonsensical, but it's nonsense that screens off the other nonsense. You're basically double-counting criticism. If you grant that the kids return to being regular kids at the age they left, that already gives you all the nonsensicality required for the hazy memories as well.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I think one more aspect is reflectivity: the degree to which a system integrates knowledge of its own operation into its schema. For instance, a search engine that can show a "Google is down" page, or that lists the number of results, or that finds Google help pages on search as search results, has (basic) reflectivity. It seems plausible to me that a lack of reflectivity is a big part of what's holding LLMs back and causing hallucinations and the like: they may be confident or uncertain, but they cannot condition on their confidence.
You can take Elizabeth Holmes as another example, though I don't think the comparison is fair, since Musk delivers something tangible, but this would be my guess to what's happening with investor money. Generate hype, get money, use it to make something to generate more hype, repeat.
I mean, if the "something" is "deliver the product you are paid for", I think you have defined every public company ever as a scam.
I'm saying that if he's getting the governments to pay him 3x the price tag that he's advertising to everyone else, then that cheaper price tag is arguably fake, and governments are subsidizing it.
Everybody does that though. It's only fake if the cheap price is dumping. If you're not selling the cheap segment to dumping prices, it's just called "not leaving free money on the table." A company that didn't try to segment the market like that would be incompetent as a business.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
As long as the rockets continue to fly, and land, and the competitors continue to largely not do that, or do that plainly worse, at some point you're asking me to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes.
I don't believe in ideas, I believe in dollars per kg to orbit.
This is funny to me because Christians have been and still are guilty of doing all of those things: cut off parts of genitals, "sterilization", and IMO teaching eternal punishment in hell is at least as bad as convincing them their parents are trying to commit genocide.
And of course the child grooming.
A secular humanist could maybe make this argument. A christian should attend to the beam in their own eye.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I don't know if this is true, and I don't think it's very likely, but it would be hilarious to me if "jews" turned into a dogwhistle for "the cultural elite".
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I don't think the interns were put there as a last-ditch motivation attempt for otherwise-NEETs.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I mean, obviously it's possible for gays to procreate with women, since it's what happened historically. You can stick your dick anywhere, what you cannot change easily or at all is what you need to see in front of you, in reality or your mind's eye, to get hard in the first place.
Seems like a motte/bailey.
Motte: As a group, homos must replenish from non-homosexuals' offspring, necessarily; if they didn't do this, they'd already not exist.
Bailey: Homosexuality is a choice; what's more, it is actually a movement agentically interested in swelling its numbers. To do so, they must make our kids gay.
The problem with the bailey is the assumption that ... either, kids should rather be gay but stay their lives firmly in the closet; or the way that this looks from the outside, kids should just "choose" to "be" straight. Which, as far as I can tell, is and remains largely impossible.
I think you're getting downvoted because you're putting something in that comment that wasn't there to begin with.
Touching a soldering iron and jumping in a housefire both result in burns, and yet they have almost nothing to do with one another. Just because two things may be comparable in one very specific way doesn't mean they're comparable in any other way. This goes especially for the spectrum of human perversions, which famously spans (almost?) every human activity, and double-especially for porn, which is known for not tracking reality particularly closely in the first place.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
**Transhumanists
You are correct that it's a wedge issue, and we're impatiently waiting on the other side of the wedge. Morphological freedom soon!
**Likewise, gender abolitionists
Yeah many trans people are surprisingly gender essentialist, but once the body is cosmetic their opinion won't matter, the ensuing social drift will be unstoppable.
But at that point, don't they stop being a viable explanation for UFOs?
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