Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13hr ago
I don't suppose I could interest you in psychoanalysis? This would be a "skeptical" position by your standards, but, hopefully it's a type of skepticism that may provide some illumination:
In what, then, consists the gap that separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism? At least, Lacanian psychoanalysis.
In order to answer this question, we should confront what I think is the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blind spot. Ok, maybe some of you are more intelligent, but I was talking with many Buddhists, and all of them, I'm asking them this same question. I didn't yet get a good answer. The simple question is the following one: how did the fall into samsara, the wheel of life, occur? That is to say, the question that we should raise is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern; "how can we break out of the wheel of life, this wheel of false passions and so on, and attain Nirvana"? The question is exactly the opposite for me... it's not, "we are caught in this false reality, can we break out of it and attain the void"? The question is, how did we fall into it in the first place? [...] The nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerged out of the void, is the big unknown at the heart of the Buddhist edifice. [...]
This question points towards an act that, precisely in the quantum sense maybe, breaks the symmetry of Nirvana itself, and thus makes appear something out of nothing. Freud's answer for this is precisely "drive", trieb [the death drive]. I want to be here very precise. What Freud calls drive, trieb, is not the Buddhist wheel of life. [...] The point of Freud is not, "no we cannot get out, we are forever caught in the wheel of craving which makes us nonsatisfied". Drive on the contrary is a kind of Freudian eppur si muove. The Freudian ontological wager is that even when you traverse the fantasy, go through the illusions and so on, you are not in Nirvana. Something still moves. [...]
...Drive is a persistence which goes on even when the will disappears or is suspended. I think it's wrong, phenomenologically, to read Freud's todestrieb as another expression of "will". Todestrieb is precisely something which remains even when you suspend the will. [...] Again the question that interests me in Buddhism is, to put it in popular culture terms, the question that unfortunately Star Wars fails to answer: how did evil emerge? How did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? And the film fails there of course, miserably. But there is one useful notion that you find there: this idea of a disturbance in the Force. The idea is, to put it in Buddhist terms - and there are some mysterious passages in Tibetan Buddhist stuff that point in this direction - it's not simply that we have Nirvana, and then samsara, the field of false passions and appearances. Something can go terribly wrong already at the level of Nirvana itself, up there. There is something wrong up there, some pathological disturbance, which is not yet "we are caught in desire and false craving", and that would be "drive", I think. Drive is Nirvana, spiritual enlightenment, going wrong.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16hr ago
So… what exactly is the suggested course of action here? Abstract theorizing about who is and isn’t part of the coalition is all well and good, but what do you want me to do about it? Because I’m sure as hell not voting Democrat.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
Senator Gillibrand recently said about UAPs: "We don't know whose they are. We don't know what propulsion they use. We don't know the tech. We don't know it. It's not off the shelf stuff."
Hearing in the senate on UAPs scheduled for the 19th of this month.
Exciting times!
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers
I didn't use the word "compassion" in the posts I wrote about vaccines, and that's not what I was asking for anyway. I was asking for understanding - an understanding of the conditions and values that cause people to do what they do and think what they think - but that's different from compassion.
There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there
No there isn't.
It's just a fact that some people are more fit for biological reproduction than others. But I don't think that evolutionary fitness is tied in any direct sense to your ultimate moral worth. Some of the greatest men to ever live (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, etc) had no children.
Nature is dumb; it is opinionated, certainly, but you can decide for yourself how seriously you want to take its opinions. The appropriate response, upon learning that you are defective according to nature, isn't "ah, I am defective, all hope is lost". The appropriate response is "very well, I am defective. I accept this designation. But now what? What can this defective organism accomplish? You might be surprised at the answer."
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
The fact that anyone takes "For Bee" seriously is completely wild to me.
The best analogy I can think of is that it's like if a dad is going through his tween daughter's text messages, and he comes across one that says "Sally isn't allowed in our secret club because we don't like her". And instead of brushing it off with a "bleh, kids can be so mean", he instead becomes deeply concerned with what will become of Sally if she is denied the prestigious honors of being part of the secret club. Like, obviously being in the secret club is the most important predictor of life success, right? What can we do to rectify this injustice? Can we get the school involved? He forgets that he's supposed to be an adult on the outside looking in, and instead he becomes completely absorbed in the (obviously childish and ultimately unimportant) narrative.
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.
Also:
I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race.
This is undoubtedly the sort of comforting thing that one might like to believe, because it is tantamount to saying that there are no real conflicts to deal with, only pseudo-conflicts. But it is of course false. Racial/ethnic conflicts are real; they are based in material reality, and they have real effects on people. The alleged "conflict" between men and women is a purely symbolic construct, a postmodern creation of cyberspace. Women have neither the ability nor the desire to sustain an actual, physical conflict against men for any length of time. And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.
I encourage you to travel to Palestine and tell people that the real divide is not between Muslims and Jews, but between men and women, and see what kinds of responses you get.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
That is the implied connotation, because it’s true.
Well, not in an entirely unqualified sense, obviously. We know that people can live without vaccines, because they did so for thousands of years. Life expectancy may have been lower, sure, but modern medicine is not a necessary precondition for human civilization to exist.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
the entire concept of rewarding companies for treating disease is getting dunked on
But Tabarrok didn't say "we should reward companies for treating disease". What he actually said (if you scroll up a few posts) was:
Pharma stocks nosediving means your life expectancy is nose diving.
This is not good.
When I read this in the political context of the ongoing vaccine debates, the implied connotation I get is something like: "Listen here, you ignorant yokels. You might like to think that you're 'self-sufficient', but you're not. You depend on me, my tribe, the educated elites. Without us, you'd be dead. Specifically, you are dependent on the stock valuations of big megacorps continuing to rise. You know; stocks, the global finance market, i.e. that same thing that is the engine of mass immigration, the offshoring of industrial labor, the woke-industrial complex, and so many other things that you find politically abhorrent."
Obviously, he didn't write those exact words. But that's how it comes off. And that's a poor way to endear people to your cause, regardless of the actual merit of your claims. So the backlash he got on twitter makes perfect sense to me.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
Right, obviously I’m not going to do that! I didn’t say it was easy, or even feasible.
In fact when questions like “when will woke end?” or “what can we do to stop wokeness?” get raised on this forum, I’m usually in the position of being the bearer of bad news: wokeness might last for a very long time, and there’s probably nothing you can do as an individual in the near-term to hasten its downfall. There was probably nothing that any one individual could have done to hasten the end of communism in the USSR. If someone did speak out publicly, we might admire it as an individual act of heroism, but ultimately it would have accomplished nothing in historical terms. Deciding to arbitrarily burn all your social credit one day is pointless if it doesn’t accomplish anything. Probably you could make a bigger difference by staying under the radar and putting your talents to use elsewhere.
But nonetheless. The biggest historical changes still have to start as individual, isolated thoughts. Just letting someone know that they have permission to think heterodox thoughts, privately, to themselves, can be very powerful. If it wasn’t, then TPTB wouldn’t be so obsessed with censorship and deplatforming. Tiny messages communicated from one individual to another can go on to have ripple effects. Or so we have to hope, anyway.
What is there even left to be said at this point? You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."
The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations. If people would just affirm being racist, sexist, and transphobic as positive things then so much of their power would evaporate.
EDIT: Just to head off some potential misunderstandings caused by my imprecise phrasing: I'm not saying to turn yourself into an evil caricature. Don't make yourself adopt positions that you don't sincerely hold in the first place. What I meant was that, the ideal scenario would be, you lay out your position as honestly and truthfully as possible, and if you are then informed that your position is sexist/transphobic, etc, your response would be: "ok, point accepted. I am. Now let's move on to the actual substance of the issue."
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
a certain kind of entitlement to other people’s money
I know what you’re talking about, but I have to wonder to what extent it’s due to actual objective differences in the “national character”, or whether it’s due to my own political biases, or perhaps whether it’s due to America’s (my country of residence) geopolitical relationship with the countries in question.
India and China both come off to me as being notably entitled (not just in terms of “other people’s money”, but more broadly). But I don’t feel that way about Russia, or Japan, or Latin America, or basically anywhere else in the world.
I dunno, it just seemed like the right thing to say.
EDIT: Permanent unelected bureaucrats were instrumental in blocking the implementation of certain Trump policies during his first term. The fact that the transition team has already floated multiple proposals for trimming the bureaucracy seems to show that they’re aware of this fact and have a strategy for dealing with it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8d ago
The DOGE combined with the pending executive order to review military officials for "requisite leadership qualities" make me think he might actually make good on the Project 2025 promise to do some housecleaning in the bureaucracy. I'm not holding my breath, but, we'll see.
The speed at which the transition team is moving gives at least the superficial appearance that they learned something from Trump's first term. They know how they were stymied the first time, and they're making efforts to prevent that from happening again.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8d ago
Sure, I agree with all of that. It would be silly for skeptics of LLMs to “declare victory” now. I say give it another 5 years at least. The main reason I brought it up is because Ilya’s the one who’s saying it, which lends quite a bit more authority to the claim.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
It's hard to become a dictator in the US, would be one huge reason. When people are worried he's going to 'become a dictator' there are a lot of steps that would need to happen, only some of which he has any control over.
Sure. But it seems like this is just bolstering my case. Yes, it is hard to turn the US into a dictatorship. That's why he wasn't able to do it in his first four years. We can extrapolate that he probably won't do it in his second four years either.
I think the right's self image of being very tolerant of different opinions is massively exaggerated though
I don't disagree. Especially if we take a broad historical view. Going back not only through the religious right of the 80s and 90s, but going all the way back, through the centuries of western political thought; if we polled most people who could at all be classified as "rightist" throughout history, "tolerance of dissent" would probably not rank highly as a political virtue for most of them. And the right is no stranger to moral judgement and condemnation, certainly. I don't deny any of that.
Ultimately the only person I can speak for is myself. The views I have expressed here are not universal among "my side", although they are not wholly unique to me either.
The terms "left" and "right", although convenient, may not be the most accurate terms for our current political context. Perhaps "woke" and "anti-woke" might be better?
there are tonnes of people on the right who absolutely revel in liberal tears and obviously loathe their political opponents.
Oh sure. Some amount of animus towards your political opponents is natural and unavoidable. I get angry at people, I find myself wondering why they have to be such NPCs. But I think all of that is still importantly different from thinking that your opponents are evil. Evil is harder to come back from; there's less chance of redemption. It seems unclear how one could sincerely wish for there to be any space for "evil" to flourish in the world. If possible, I'd like for my opponents to have a space in the world where they can be happy and live their lives according to the principles they believe in. I just want them to do it away from me.
You say you just see me as different but in the end our ideas are probably incommensurate so if you are going to impose your beliefs on mine (as is the right of those who win elections), how do you feel okay about it if you don't think your ideas are superior but just different?
I don't think there's much that can be said in the abstract here without a concrete example to work through (what am I imposing on you, by what mechanism, etc).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
Kurzweil, as one of the original singularitarians, is likely banking on ASI to bail us out here.
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training - the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures - have plateaued.
Sutskever is widely credited as an early advocate of achieving massive leaps in generative AI advancement through the use of more data and computing power in pre-training, which eventually created ChatGPT. Sutskever left OpenAI earlier this year to found SSI.
“The 2010s were the age of scaling, now we're back in the age of wonder and discovery once again. Everyone is looking for the next thing,” Sutskever said. “Scaling the right thing matters more now than ever.”
Sutskever declined to share more details on how his team is addressing the issue, other than saying SSI is working on an alternative approach to scaling up pre-training.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
I think we have plenty of evidence that Trump admires dictators and wants to become one and will work towards becoming one.
So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one. He was already president for four years, and yet we still have democracy. He's a known quantity.
Now it's very interesting that at least lots of his voters appear to either not mind this, or to see something else in him, and does this fact give me pause? Sometimes, but ultimately 99% of people I esteem and respect in the field of ideas/politics/philosophy oppose Trump so this makes it pretty easy for me to conclude that his supporters are the ones with faulty judgement.
Consider the following: I am a Trump supporter. Based on the above, I presume that you would thereby see my judgement as faulty. But the feeling is not mutual. I don't see your judgement to oppose Trump as incorrect; I just think you're a different type of person than me and you have different values, so of course you would think differently. You see me as faulty, whereas I just see you as different; and difference is not in itself a bad thing. Does this fact give you any pause?
An additional dimension is that 'democracy is in peril' is not only about elections. It's also about the ability of ideas to face off against one another in a somewhat mutually comprehended arena.
I think the left has had a profoundly more deleterious effect on intellectual discourse over the past 10+ years than anything Trump has ever done.
Of course people in this forum just think Dems lie more cunningly
I don't think the left is bad because they lie. In fact I don't think of them as being particularly untruthful at all, not anymore than the right is anyway. If I had to enumerate all my complaints with them, "lying" would not make the list. Rather, I think they're bad first and foremost because they can't tolerate dissent.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10d ago
life extension, replacing workers, treating disease
But all of these problems are reducible to text generation. In some sense every conceivable problem is, because solving the problem means writing out the solution, in language.
For “solving” medicine, just have the LLM print a formula for the drug you want. A lot of remote work just is text generation in a sense, but for physical labor, a sufficiently intelligent LLM would be able to accelerate progress in robotics significantly.
Whether LLMs can actually achieve these things though is an open question.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10d ago
Not a problem! I’m happy to continue the conversation at any time if you ever want to.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10d ago
Paywalled, but here's a summary from reddit:
"Some OpenAI employees who tested Orion report it achieved GPT-4-level performance after completing only 20% of its training, but the quality increase was smaller than the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4, suggesting that traditional scaling improvements may be slowing as high-quality data becomes limited
- Orion's training involved AI-generated data from previous models like GPT-4 and reasoning models, which may lead it to reproduce some behaviors of older models
- OpenAI has created a "foundations" team to develop new methods for sustaining improvements as high-quality data supplies decrease
- Orion's advanced code-writing features could raise operating costs in OpenAI's data centers, and running models like o1, estimated at six times the cost of simpler models, adds financial pressure to further scaling
- OpenAI is finishing Orion's safety testing for a planned release early next year, which may break from the "GPT" naming convention to reflect changes in model development
“Some researchers at the company believe Orion isn’t reliably better than its predecessor in handling certain tasks, according to the employees. Orion performs better at language tasks but may not outperform previous models at tasks such as coding, according to an OpenAI employee. That could be a problem, as Orion may be more expensive for OpenAI to run in its data centers compared to other models it has recently released, one of those people said.”
This is one of several articles/posts/tweets coming out of the LLMsphere over the past couple of weeks that are renewing concerns over LLMs hitting diminishing returns.
Of course this is just speculation until OpenAI actually releases Orion (or whatever they end up calling it). And really we would need several models past Orion too to actually extrapolate a pattern. But this does fit with my subjective impression that the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was not as big as the leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3, and the leap from 4 to o1 was not as big as the leap from 3 to 4. The fact that they're considering again releasing a new model without calling it GPT-5 is also telling. They know how psychologically important the "GPT-5" moniker has become at this point and they won't give that name to a model unless it really represents a major leap forward.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns.
I can!
But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy
Sure!
not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?
This phrasing makes it sound like the response to Covid arose naturally from "the facts on the ground". But the response to Covid was a political and ideological choice. We could have chosen differently. There was no direct unmediated causal link between the actual effects of Covid and the measures we took in response.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
If we get another pandemic under Trump and another round of global lockdowns, I will update heavily towards thinking that Covid was intentionally planned and the new one is too. Because that would just be a little too perfect.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
No. They’ve still won it. Reports of a pendulum swing are greatly exaggerated.
I don’t think most people voted for Trump as an explicit anti-woke vote. My impression is that the modal voter was voting mainly on the economy, with maybe a smattering of other more “procedural” considerations in play (the assassination attempts, the lawfare, etc). I don’t think wokeness was really on the radar this election cycle for most people.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
Oh sure. I agree completely. But if we’re stuck with universal suffrage, then the least we can do is require that people actually go to the damn polling place if they want their vote to be counted.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
The voting process should select for higher agency / lower time preference voters. That’s a good thing; those are the people who should have a bigger influence on politics. It’s outside the Overton window to require an IQ test as a precondition of voting, but thankfully it’s still within the Overton window to have some very simple and reasonable measures like, requiring that someone physically travel to a polling place, or requiring that someone procure a mail-in ballot for themselves. Any slight barrier to entry is better than canvassers going door to door and telling people “just sign on the dotted line, please” in order to harvest votes.
Zizek explicitly distinguishes the death drive from Schopenhauer’s concept of Will:
The death drive is the point where the subject contradicts and undermines himself; it belongs to the domain of the unconscious. It is what makes a final state of completion or satisfaction (even in the purely negative sense of being free from desire) impossible. It certainly has nothing to do with any conscious willing or desire.
I didn’t quote the part where he references Schopenhauer by name, but if you check the video, he does mention him.
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