pols45

so its hard to be sure

Who is asking you to be sure in the first place? Why do you need this certainty? Farm animals need the comfort and stability of the farm to survive. They "flourish" within the parameters some one else sets.

In the Elephant-Rider model of how the mind works, people are talking to rider And the elephant.

The elephant just needs some feel good stuff, to momentarily focus shift away from all the unpredictability in the universe, it has no control over - in this case it is being fed - well the story teller who is not sure about anything is atleast "diligent".

When you let go of the story, and realize the elephant is not under your control and can never be, the ride is much smoother. And that's the only story, no SEO game needed to promote the Truth. And truth is - you are just along for the ride. Don't act like a farm animal thinking you are healthy based on how many eggs you have been told to lay. You are a chimp. All animal domestication protocols break down sooner or later when dealing with chimps. Cuz the chimp mind has an elephant in it. Taking it for a wild ride.

Requires good stories/music/dance/mysticism. And rituals. And modernized pastoral care.

This is why religions have survived the fall of kings, empires and nations. When system starts collapsing under the weight of its ever building contradictions, they allow for stabilization, repair and continuity.

But with the arrival of the printing press and then the internet info tsunami, those older stories and rituals (which act as sync mechanism for large groups over different time frames - daily-weekly-yearly touch points) start loosing influence. This is happening without a good story/sync replacement (see Philosopher Charles Taylor's The Secular Age).

So look to HBO/Netflix/Pixar or the WWE. One is interactive almost real time narrative/emotion resonance/ritual engineering and the other is a deeper slower process. Those are the kind of spaces where potential breakthroughs will come from. Not the totally clueless science or tech world.

They should feel some pressure but the language and framing is a bit over the top. These probs are not going to be solved without these kinds of systems.

The UN's sustainability development goals/WHO data shows most countries in the world hardly have ~1 therapist for every hundred thousand citizens.

The goal they set was ~15 per 100K. Barely a handful meet the goal and even then the quality of care in urban and rural areas is night and day. So we are such a long way away from actually providing mental health to the majority.

OpenAI type systems can really change the story. So good to see them releasing data about what is going on at population scales. Try getting data out of a therapists and priests about how many people they have actually helped and how many they could not. If you can't get it, labelling what they do as "an uncontrolled social experiment" doesn't do anything useful, because in many cases there is no one else stepping up to the plate.

More like "super talented engineers" will keep increasing cost of such projects until they get told this stuff doesn't generate revenue/cost cutting is happening, so work more on ad tech, leave or find external free labor("community") to maintain it.

Well ICQ/Yahoo/MSN messenger did not need AWS.

The modern apps are full of unnecessary features not because anyone asks or even uses these features, but because its become easy for devs to roll them out.

I use Signal only for initial contact/handshake. After that its on private client not touching any cloud. If Signal dies tomorrow, its not the end of the world.

People have been thinking about this stuff for a long time. Here's a partial compilation of the answers - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181 click sessions - lecture 12 for utility oriented story - but I would recommend going through the whole series, cause depending on life situations you get thrown into, it will help to see what other stories people have told themselves that have helped them flourish.

Not really. Microbes have been around for a long time. And there are more of them today than there are stars in the sky. No intelligence required. Plus they change so fast that what Life looked like yday can look totally different tomorrow.

As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with each other and group size increases.

The philosophers have talked about the bugs for a long time (see Plato's chariot, Hobbes passion vs reason, Freuds id-ego-superego, Kahnemann's system 1 vs system 2, Haidt's Elephant Rider). The mind needs stories to handle the bugs. And there is no dearth of stories on Earth to keep the 3 inch chimp brain occupied forever.

Gary Marcus is not changing the story financiers are telling each other about AI. He has been telling the same story without making a dent in their stories. And that is because he is not in the arena. What he says, does and thinks doesn't matter.

Cause he hasn't built anything or found a job since he sold his last company ages ago.

Paradise Lost

Donna Haraway's Chthulucene gets my vote.

All related to - Why do central banks exist? How did they emerge in every country of the world? What was the cycle before that happened?

Well not surprising. National security/national infra is involved. Private companies will not fund/build nukes, missiles, aircraft carriers, fighter jets etc if there aren't certain guarantees from the State. Not just in US, all over the world.

Think about what would have happen if the Manhattan Project was run by the private sector. As soon as national security/infra becomes a risk the state will start getting more involved whether the private sector wants it or not.

The banking system/telcos/utilities in most countries have the State providing some kind guarantee to keep the lights on in case something unpredictable happens.

It's just middle men reinforcing middle men. History shows platform economics is not sustainable.

Every kid is shown silicon valley and taught being an intermediary/middle man is the path to success. Every kid can see margins running an oil ring, mine, farm, factory or hotel are less than running a platform by a huge factor.

So who is going to want to be a producer in such a system? When the balance in an economic system tilts from production to middle men it makes the whole system unstable.

So silicon valley has pushed the whole world into an unsustainable unstable state, of everyone falling over each other trying to be middle men.

What is working is temporary. They are not blind to it. They just don't know how to do anything else. It's a runaway train.

Just like the British East India company. No one designed it. No one controlled it. No one could do anything when it collapsed. The Free banking system is a similar story. Everyone thought running their own money printer was a great idea. Why doesn't it exist today? Silicon valley will follow the same trajectory. There is a reason its CEO ran to DC to bend the knee. Cause they know their survival is based on maintaining middle men status. Which can break any day the political winds change or another TikTok appears on the horizon from outside SV.

7 Billion $$$ is not small change.

And can be eaten - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig50qN9V4IQ

Science doesn't provide a Priest who will show up and sit with you at your time of grief or despair in handling the unpredictable. Priests in all religions are trained to occupy that space. And that is the prime reason Religions have survived for thousands of years long past the death of empires, kings and nations who all get tired or bored of showing up and occupying the unpredictability space.

Lot of that Despair is thanks to how the architecture of the chimp brain handles unpredictability over different time horizons - whats the system going to do tomorrow/next month/next year/next decades. Confidence decreases anxiety increases. You want to break the architecture keep feeding it the unpredictable.

So we get the corporal hudson in aliens cycle - "I'm ready, man. Check it out. I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art" > unpredictability > "Whats happening man! Now what are we supposed to do? Thats it man. Game over man. Game over!"

Think about what science offers corporal hudson.

It is not decay. People are just more conscious than previous generations ever were about how the world works. And that leads to confusion and misunderstandings if they are only exposed to herd think.

The chicken doesn't understand it has to lay a certain number of eggs a day to be kept alive in the farm. It hits its metrics because it has been programmed to hit them.

But once it gets access to chatgpt and develops consciousness of how the farm works, the questions it asks slowly evolve with time.

Initially its all fear driven - how do we get a say in how many eggs we need to lay to be kept alive? How do we keep the farm running without relying on the farmer? etc etc

Once the farm animals begins to realize the absurdity of such questions, new questions emerge - how come the crow is not a farm animal? why is the shark not used as a circus animal? etc etc

And thro that process, whose steps cannot be skipped the farm animal begins to realize certain things about itself which no one, especially the farmer, has any incentive of encouraging.

Just enough funding to view suffering. No funding to end it.

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love"

Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson had their Crossfire theatre 20 years ago. Both are still performing the same act. Everything is built on top of us Vs them anxiety elevation.

It's hard to come up with a single American figure or group that has escaped that trap.

Yup. Not just Nvidia. Just look at the quarterly results reported by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple. Each one is reporting revenues never before seen in history. If you make 100 Billion a quarter you have to spend it on something.

These guys are running hyper optimized cash extraction mega machines. There is no comparison to previous bubbles, cause so no such companies ever existed in the past.

Nobody wanted to be the morality police

Why?

Cuz Rationalism and Logic does not produce Morality. [ How does it emerge > https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181/ ]

So don't ask for proof. Its a waste of time.

Ask Sam Altman what his source of Morality is.

Depending on the time horizon the predictions change. So we get layers - what is going to happen in the next hour/tomorrow/next year/next 10 years/next 100 etc (and layers of compression of which language is just one) and that naturally produces contradictions which creates bounds on "intelligence".

It really is a stupid system. No one rational wants to hear that, just like no one religious wants to hear contradictions in their stories, or no one who plays chess wants to hear its a stupid game. The only thing that can be said about the chimp intelligence is it has developed a hatred of contradictions/unpredictability and lack of control unseen in trees, frogs, ants and microbes.

Stories becomes central to survive such underlying machinery. Part of the story we tell is no no we don't all have to be Kant or Einstein because we just absorb what they uncovered. So apparently the group or social structures matters. Which is another layer of pure hallucination. All social structures if they increase the prediction horizon also generate/expose themselves to more prediction errors and contradictions not less.

So again Coherence at group level is produced through story - religion will save us, the law will save us, trump will save, the jedi will save us, AI will save us etc. We then build walls and armies to protect ourselves from each others stories. Microbes don't do this. They do the opposite and have produced the krebs cycle, photosynthesis, crispr etc. No intelligence. No organization.

Our intelligence are just bubbling cauldrons at the individual and social level through which info passes and mutates. Info that survives is info that can survive that machinery. And as info explodes the coherence stabilization process is over run. Stories have to be written faster than stories can be written.

So Donald Trump is president. A product of "intelligence" and social "intelligence". Meanwhile more microbes exist than stars in the universe. No Trump or ICE or Church or data center is required to keep them alive.

If we are going to tell a story about Intelligence look to Pixar or WWE. Don't ask anyone in MIT what they think about it.

All this froth on the ocean surface is only possible in an economy where household net worth has been inflated to 150 Trillion.

Private individuals have learnt that the hard way through out history.

The pattern goes -

Kings and Queens get propped up not because the chimp troupe loves them, but because the village has to be defended from threats and some chimp has to be in charge of security ie find ways to pay for the upkeep of armies. Not a job for the faint of heart.

Sooner or later bankers, traders, industrialists etc etc all become richer than kings and queens, because they don't have to fund armies or deal with all the issues and temptations of having an army. They start wondering why they need to be bowing and bending to kings and queens.

And the story then writes its self, since there is only one way the kings and queens are programmed to react to threats.

Everyone knows this including the Companies that say these things and their customers.

They leverage/exploit the fact that it takes time to Verify anything. [Hype-verification gap]

Their theory goes if you use that time delay to beat the drum louder than the next guy you have a shot at attracting more customers, investors, employee, govt support than if you dont. Those who don't do it appear less Ambitious or Capable. Exploit and amplify that also.

Chimps have 3 inch brains. And this is all easier to do than solving quantum field equations. So they do it happily, cluelessly, patting each other on the head about how fascinating they are.

As soon as one chimp troupe (corp) does it well, everyone else does the same, and that's when the entire system experiences a phase transition.

It's no more about what individual chimps or companies say or think, a super structure has emerged, which traps everyone Inside the super structure, into patterns they can't escape.

Stories emerge about what the super structure is then doing. Outsider and Insider stories start diverging. And we get a bifurcation point a moment in chaos theory where one neat line splits into 2, 4, 1000, until you can’t tell what’s signal and what’s noise[1] It’s all feedback where every claim feeds on every other claim, a forest of branches growing out of thin air and verification moves too slowly to prune it.

So what's the message to the kids watching it all and getting absorbed by it? Recognize when you have jumped into the chaos stream between bifurcation and verification. When everything starts to sound urgent, revolutionary, world-changing but no one can show you how or why youre standing dead center in chaos. Stories multiply faster than facts can catch up, where everyone’s pretending to see patterns that arent there yet. The louder it gets, the less meaning there is.That’s your cue to walk sideways. Dont let it drain your attention, time and energy. There are better things to do in life. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Lo...

It's not Nuts. These guys are just front office foot soldiers of the Elite. Elites on all sides use these kind of characters to protect/expand their power.

The Elite all don't get along with each other, but in a "civilized" world where there is enough loot to share with everyone, they don't need to directly attack each other. Unless something really threatens and freaks them out.

But once in a while they authorize their foot soldiers in the military, judiciary, legislatures, media to attack each other. Which is all just a side show - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elites

There is. Learn to dance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiAwpYIkRmU

Germany/Japan/Taiwan/South Korea are all easy targets cause they are all examples of compressed modernity post WW2 (their rebuild and trajectory was decided not by locals but by the hegemon).

Rate of economic change happened faster than the natural rate of change society, politics, culture could handle.