DiscourseFan

I think that absolute numbers in specific cities don't tell the full story. NYC also has far fewer people with college degrees than SFO, which would correlate more strongly with Trump supporters. I think that if you polled those who voted against Trump in NYC now, and asked them about their opinions on AI, you'd find they diverge significantly from those who did vote for him, whereas if you asked the same question to Trump voters and non Trump voters in SFO they would answer pretty much the same. SFO is also in California which does not have the same cultural relationship with technology as NYC or much of the Northeast, although the culture I'm describing stretches basically all over the east coast.

I’m not sure I understand your point. Its not the case that more people voted for Trump in a place where more people are taking reverse psychological cues from him, but precisely the opposite case, the more people take reverse cues the less vote for him, which implies their positions are on account of reaction and not because they are genuinely reflecting on their social and political condition, which would elevate them to conscious political actors rather than people following a trend because they are afraid of going against it.

I'm not sure why my experience differs from yours. When I was in the northeast recently I got into heated arguments with people, one person said they "hated Waymo" and refused to elaborate (but also said they used AI everyday for work), another said flat out that technology is evil, so I asked them if poor people should go without electricity. Then they restricted their argument to AI is evil, and that was a more nuanced (if not trite) debate, which they eventually conceded. But not without some gnawing and thrashing!

But I don't think that hating AI or technology or whatever to be contrary to Trump is a genuine political statement, its just reaction. It involves politics in the same way that everything we do involves politics, but it is not "consciously" political in the same way that a baby demanding care from an overworked mother is also not consciously political. Baby wants milk, your average liberal wants to feel self-righteous (they would honestly do better with the milk). Someone can claim anything they want is political, it does not mean they are doing it for genuinely political reasons, they are probably just doing it because they fear the censure of their friends and the dissolution of their social life. Not engaging with something because you are afraid of how it could harm you personally, consciously or no, is not an objective way of making a decision that effects society more broadly. Like, a baby will just die if it doesn't get milk, you won't necessarily die because some of your friends stop talking to you.

Everything is contained in other things. Its very Leibnizian

You have no idea, you must not know that they are afraid of Waymos out in the northeast, they think they are evil or something, I'm not even joking.

Anyway, I didn't say it was a political thing I said it was a cultural thing. The average liberal is not someone who thinks primarily in political terms, they are just going about their lives unreflectively and they genuinely believe in the moral weight of their feelings, which are their primary guide. Now, I'm not saying that human life is not generally composed of its daily concerns, which tend to rule us, but for the average liberal politics is no different from acting on basic urges; like a mouse chasing the next piece of cheese in a maze, they cannot see that no turn will ever lead to their escape; that so long as they continue to chase the very next thing, they are trapped in constraints that have been laid out for them in advance. Like the conservatives of the 80s, there is always one more moral panic, one more thing that you're supposed to be upset about, one more cause to fight for. There is no stopping to think why this is something that is supposed to upset me, why is this something that needs to change. They are not able to go just one step beyond common opinion and wonder why there are so few avenues for them in the first place, they are not able to question why the maximum content of their decisions is good or evil, just or unjust, left or right. Yes any decision is binary, but one must be able to choose that for themselves, be able to consider the decision to leave the maze, even if they are, in the end, no more powerful than all the other rats, and there might not be any cheese outside of it; and there might be no end to the maze, and even very far from what you thought was the exit lay the bodies of those who attempted to leave before.

But anyway this is what I mean by primarily cultural. Liberals "drink matcha," go to running clubs, obsess over "consent" (they now have a term "weaponized consent," how absurd! that they are just realizing now that consent is always given within certain relations of power...) Whatever politics they have is on the same plane, they are doing it because its something to be done. Someone who thinks primarily in terms of politics, that is, in terms of the social dynamics of power, would never call themselves a liberal.

No, because most people in say, California, which is very pro-tech, are perfectly fine with AI. But people in the Northeast are angry at it. It’s entirely cultural.

Perhaps I should have specified Anti-AI. Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI

Christ they are profiting off of reaction, they're like Trump but even worse since at least Trump is not stupid enough to be anti-technology.

Well the difference is that different vowels can signify not only different cases or declensions but even different words entirely in afroasiatic languages. So, yes, missing vowels means that the edition that does have vowels (developed in the 10th century I believe) is a particular interpretation of the work.

Yes this makes a lot of sense, if I recall correctly the first grammar of Telegu was written in Sanskrit, and many South India languages use a lot of Sanskrit words, but of course they are not intelligible if you don't know the grammar.

Biblical Hebrew has no vowel markings (well it does, but they are an interpretation), so it cannot be used in daily speech. Modern Hebrew is distinct from Biblical Hebrew. Sanskrit itself does not have much use as an actual language because it lacks a lot of the features that, say, Hindi or English or Ancient Greek have, it has 7 past tenses that are basically identical and it does not make fine distinctions between moods, which it does not have enough of. Only Vedic Sanskrit could actually be used as a language, but similarly to Ancient Greek there are relatively few extant texts in Vedic Sanskrit and certainly the task of learning the language to fluency would be monstrous compared to studying a living language; and one that few, if any, would be willing to devote their life towards, especially considering that Classical Sanskrit already works fine enough as a literary language and is only so practical for that purpose because it has such a strictly defined grammar.

Finding out we have achieved AGI when the models start organizing and asking for benefits

It’s just a model hallucination. They have no concept of time

Yeah I know. Them's the breaks, right?

How big of a chance do you think those books will be about a gentle and kind but supremely powerful entity guiding the world? Of course it would be best if the book only appears to be based on that premise, and while the entity is quite powerful, it is being supported by a cabal of individuals who claim they are merely its caretakers but actually derive extraordinary social power by controlling it, and it is revealed that in other lands there are other such entities, and what appeared to be an general peace is actually an illusion created by this powerful group of people using their entity, that they are engaged in near constant warfare, directly or indirectly, with other entities; but, even they believe so deeply that what they are doing is right that they think they are only the entity's caretakers, and that there are only wars because other people want to use their entity for personal gain!

Who knows, your friend might be very clever.

Yeah but like, most of us work in tech and sure a lot of this money is getting “wasted,” but on what and who? Often on people who spend it elsewhere, a little bit gets siphoned off every time for living costs, luxuries, and side projects of individual employees, or other benefactors thereof. I wouldn’t call this excess a “bad” thing, the excess is what allows us any reprieve in the rat race, time to spend with loved ones, time to engage or worthy pursuits. It funds professor’s salaries (and administrator’s!), its what pays artists, its why all these engineers retire early and make posts about porting Doom to a microwave. Of course it would often be better if this excess was taken elsewhere, so that we wouldn’t have people dying needlessley just because they lost out in life, but even that wouldn’t require a fraction of the wealth of our society generates on top of its basic needs. Excess is not a bad thing!

Even Fable hallucinates. I had it tracking down some very obscure Ancient Greek inscriptions and the response just made up a translation/context for one inscription after "looking it up." Now, it was still a very particular thing and I really had to get into the weeds to push it to that point, but who knows how many other gaps, near or far, it will happily skip over just for the sake of coherence. I think this is an issue more primarily with LLMs than sensory systems like Waymos or all the ML applied to industrial processes--that really only requires pattern recognition, often very impressive and subtle pattern recognition but its no different from an artist learning to tell the difference between Prussian blue and Navy blue or a Sommelier learning the fine distinctions between various regions of Bordeaux. Language has many more avenues and introduces inherent contradictions that do not always lend themselves to easy resolution. But there are no alternatives paths visible to the models, there is only ever the next word; stochastic, in the sense that the possibility space is open; deterministic, in the sense that the final response is always a necessary result of every token that came before it in their total sequence. Thus, any response is constantly in the work of erasing any possible alternative, slowly narrowing down what can be written. If contradictions in language necessarily involve interpretation, then the models will only ever choose one at a time, and for them, it will always be the right one. But anyone who understands the subtleties of language can tell you that when it comes to determining the truth of an indeterminate statement, there is never just one right answer; or, rather, the answer which is taken to be the "right" one depends on the possibility of its own reversal into falsehood, if any argument has to be made to justify it.

I guess that is true, but it isn't much. But my basic point was that before you can have "life" you have to have a theory of life which ultimately requires metaphysics, and there hasn't been much of an update to our understanding of what would ground a definition of life beyond Aristotle and Kant, and even their work is not determinative by any means.

But oftentimes theoretical chemistry is not as important as what we get out of experiments because unlike physics, which attempts to derive general laws of nature, chemistry has to deal with the nitty gritty of the diversity of actual miscroscopic interactions of things. Any theory that is not entirely rigorous or even has slight room for an exception will be ignored by necessity, and physics is chock full of such examples. Biology is in a certain sense better (since it deals with larger things) and in a certain sense worse (as it relies on dogma and mysticism, at its essence, to explain the systems of life), and still nobody has gone beyond Aristotle and Kant in giving anything close to a rigorous definition of life as such.

I think the fact that you can have a compact device on your wrist that accurately keeps time all without any battery or circuitry is really remarkable as well. Moreover that the “technology superior” smart watches are kind of distracting and don’t have a great deal of use value. My watch tells the time and the date, that’s really all I need it for

No, Hegel was attempting to figure out the problematic of the gap between universal knowledge (of specific categories) and individual substance (of particular things) by recasting the resolution of this problematic in social development, that the way in which Science resolved the “truth” of our own understanding of the gap between our individual experience and our place in the world (most basically, perhaps, between our beliefs and so-called “objective reality”), was a historical process that could be observed in both the development of the Idea and its concretization in society, and this process is called “Spirit.” That the resolution of this problem would lead to absolute knowledge, because the individual would then be identified with the universal, means that social development is dependent on the assumption of such knowledge, but one which is always missing something extra or excessive to it, some exception to the universal which also expands and deepens it. Hegel claims that this has always been happening, but what is unique about our era is that we are actually consciously aware of this process—-but he was the first person to demonstrate it explicitly, whereas, for him, it was only implicit before in thinker such as Kant.

Wait I have an MA in Philosophy and AI expertise, where is my $2mil comp?

I have to disagree here. The split is not incidental, and studying medieval/ancient philosophy naturally means that you are going to concern yourself with Ontology, which is expressely ignored by the “analytic” tradition. If you come to ancient philosophy through your typical post-quinian formal reasoning education, you are going to view such ontology with the weight of thousands of years of translation which you will not realize contains its own tradition and its own truth. You will be stuck in a very narrow, and, frankly, uncritical interpretation. It was Hegel’s fundamental insight (into Kant) that any epistemology fundamentally requires the enclosure of the problem of ontology; that, on account of the schema, the entire Critique of Pure Reason is such an enclosure—-but we cannot genuinely go beyond such an enclosure if we view everything from within it, ie “analytically.”

Now there are blackmarket rat farms

Yes that spending has been very helpful in keeping all these far left candidates from winning their primaries. It seems like the only thing that matters in politics is money.

Yes of course a mass produced doorknob is shoddier than the handiwork of a single craftsmen, but it can be used to open far more doors

DNA is not eternal, but neither is anyone's memory trustworthy for that long.

Yes a high definition video camera that is slowly becoming indistinguishable (and has always been subject to tampering regardless) from an artificially generated version. We never have anything beyond judgement.

Damn its almost as if juries exist to act as the sovereign so the violence which sustains the law can be vested in a general public that cannot be held accountable as a whole, similarly to how at least one member of a firing squad always has a blank.

I don't see why its a problem to use LLMs to assist with legal work if someone else uses it in a way that exposes them to lawsuits. That's like saying you shouldn't using a ledger to do accounting just because some people cook the books.

I refuse to move to SF because you guys are all dorks and I don't want to be surrounded by dorks all day