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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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You need to break things down in order to understand what will be scalable. Why should Dunbar's number exist? What are the actual limits of intimacy? I absolutely agree that our current methods for scaling Dunbar are limited, and that there are also fundamental limits. But we need to clarify what those limits are for specific systems.

Consider the following HyperDunbar social module algorithm.

  • Run a classifier on the types of humans.
  • Practice being intimate with LLMs trained on these classes of humans and of course humans of these classes themselves.
  • This effectively flattens them, which is bad. It lowers your awareness of who they are and their needs, and thus lowers intimacy, however, we can mitigate most of this by loading the data lost in compression Live from an exobrain using RAG as you are talking to a specific individual.

Using this technique, what part's of Dunbar's number scale?

  • The intimacy with which you know the person you are talking to right now: Scales
  • The amount of time you can give to one person: Semi-scales. You'll have to rely on LLM instances of yourself to scale this, but you can continuously improve the accuracy of this sim and the ways in which it backloads compressions of all its interactions back into your meatbrain. Whether this is really 'Your' Dunbar number isn't a scientific query, its a philosophy of cybernetics question. Since what we are discussing is the effectiveness of scaled organizations, we ought to be focused on the scientific query of whether you can meaningfully love and empower others in the same ways with your LLM self as your bio-self rather than philosophical questions like what self-hood is.
  • Percentage of your total captured capabilities that you give to each person: Doesn't scale. But it never did, even when the Dunbar number was 100.
  • The amount of your life/telos/subconcious that you can dedicate to improving yourself for each other person: Semi-scales. You'd think that this is the same as the last question but no. This actually scales with how many of the people in your circle are co-aligned, because if everyone is perfectly aligned, then the same personal growth actions can be telelogically dedicated to all of them.

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