techno_tsar

...I did, a few years ago, when I went camping with some friends.

This does make me think about Kuhn's concept of scientific revolutions and paradigms, and that paradigms are incommensurate with one another. Since new paradigms can't be proven or disproven by the rules of the old paradigm, if an LLM could independently discover paradigm shifts similar to moving from Newtonian gravity to general relativity, then we have empirical evidence of an LLM performing a feature of general intelligence.

However, you could also argue that it's actually empirical evidence that general relativity and 19th century physics wasn't truly a paradigm shift -- you could have 'derived' it from previous data -- that the LLM has actually proven something about structurally similarities between those paradigms, not that it's demonstrating general intelligence...

I'm working on a Yelp alternative called Vibehuntr -- just something different to browse venues using Google's API, with a social layer so I can see what my friends like. It's very rough around the edges right now and it might be completely different by next week. It's been a fun experiment in vibe coding on a full stack. https://vibehuntr.io

This is unreadable slop.

I was thinking about how the point of reading isn't to literally 'internalize' what you've read. When you're engrossed in a piece of literature, you don't remember the specifics of the last page you read. What's more important is what the book is doing to your mind as you read -- it triggers a set of processes that force you to imagine and therefore form connections that you haven't made before, even if subtle and unrelated to the content of the book.

It's the same with writing. Writing isn't just a way to produce a good piece of writing, it's what the process of writing does to your brain as you think aloud, connecting words and sentences together. The same with painting, gardening, and organizing your stamp collection. The final 'product' isn't actually important. The significance lies in the process of immersion from the creator and the people who witness it.

The 'capabilities' of simulated neural networks have nothing to do with consciousness.

I have some family in Hong Kong that lived in public housing for the longest time. Some of the newer apartments were pretty good. 40th floor, nice view, free WiFi.

I agree. You don't need someone's ketamine use to explain why they're a Nazi.

You know who else uses a lot of ketamine? The rave scene, the queer scene, and people treating PTSD. And those are some of the most un-Nazi folks out there.

It's a dissociative drug. It can be used recreationally, it can be used therapeutically, and of course, for medical purposes.

Let's be real. Why is Musk a megalomaniac? Because he is a megalomaniac. The end.

stuff like this gets taught in school? that’s like a take from the 1600s. literally descartes’s argument that animals are just automatons and only humans have minds.

Pretty much created the mind-body problem.

This is completely nuts. Well done.

There's a rigorous proof on Wikipedia, but there's simpler ways to show it.

For example, we know that 1/3 = 0.333...

3 * 1/3 = 3 * 0.333...

1 = 0.999...

You can also do it with subtraction. For example, 1 - 0.999... = x. Assuming x is greater than 0, then it should evaluate to 0.000...1.

But we can't have the digit 1 after an infinite number of zeros. If there truly were a "1" after infinite zeros, it implies reaching the end of infinity, which is a logical contradiction. So x can't be greater than 0.

What’s missing in the Gessen and Silver’s article here is that our ideological backdrop is largely realpolitik. If we’re talking about saying certain things to get re-elected, then yes, the notion of what public opinion is and how that affects potential votes is purely an academic matter. If it’s the case that Palestine alone will torpedo Biden’s re-election, then for sure he will change his tone.

But as Silver points out, it’s not obvious that Palestine is big enough of an issue to affect him. For the most part, Democrats run on being a big tent that represents teachers, unionists, college grads, progressives, globalists, democratic socialists, neoliberals, etc. It’s going to be watered-down, that’s a feature, not a bug. Trumpism is much more straightforward.

The irony in Gessen’s complaint is that the more “fringe” views you see on college campuses are largely correct in a narrow sense: what’s happening in Gaza is a product of The West. We are the Bad Guys. If you look at the world with no nuance whatsoever, then yes, binary logic would say Hamas are the Good Guys. Obviously, that’s insane.

But the colonial West analysis is fundamentally true. It’s true if we set our scope of history to the last century (British Mandatory Palestine) or the last 500 years. It’s true in an obvious sense, in how the US supports Israel today. Historians a thousand years from now will see The West as one long, colonial Empire, and Israel is its beachhead in the Middle East.

The “woke” kids on the campuses see this in a maximally socially constructivist sense, i.e, of course things like cops, oppression, capitalism, etc are all related to Gaza. So much of our way of life is built on violence… but if you’re a liberal (not a leftist!) you still believe you need these things to maintain society… Which is how you end up with Biden’s realpolitik neutrality, which means supporting Israel to win an election.

What Gessen ought to hope for is that public opinion does reach critical mass such that it is guaranteed that Biden would be re-elected if he was pro-Palestine. That is more or less their implicit desire: a free Palestine, but no Trump.

That is not impossible. But it will require a sustained political strategy from the ground up, not from the DNC. And the only viable political strategy is not one of utilitarian vote counting, because that’s what begets this kind of violence to begin with, but appealing to people’s pathos towards the suffering of others.

Someone ought to write an article on Nate Silver’s straw manning in order to write this article.

Thanks for sharing. I saved your comment because it’s something I can see myself coming back to.

I can definitely relate to your story. Child of first generation immigrants. We had to move back to Hong Kong when I was 9 because my dad died and it was too difficult for a single mom in a new country to support us. When I was 18, I took advantage of my citizenship and moved back.

The constant pressure to find a way to take care of my mom has always been difficult for me, especially because it sometimes feels at odds with pursuing personal truths. I can go work for the bank, make sure mom is taken care of, but lose my own life. In my twenties, I spent some time living an “alt” lifestyle, working as a musician, and hanging out with B-listers in Beverley Hills. But I could never really enjoy it, not just because it was vapid, but because finding a way to truly secure a future for my mom was always in my mind. It was like wrestling with two sides of the American Dream. And no one around me could relate.

As I’ve gotten older the balance between “serving the parents” versus myself has become fuzzier. It’s obvious now that making sure my mom can enjoy the rest of the time she has is the right thing to do. But in turn, her expectations of me have relaxed. She understands that she’s raised a free, independent adult, and in the culture we live in, that’s a virtue.

It’s all so complicated, as I’m sure anyone who has had a similar upbringing would know, and the details are so specific to each person. But it’s good to know that it’s a common human experience.

I agree. If you have two narratives about your life, and both are true, it is literally pointless to hang onto the negative one.

One's self-identity is important. The truth about what one's "narrative in life" is is not a brute property etched into the universe.

We should be pragmatic about what what thoughts we nurture.

Her actions have more to do with her psychology and less to do with her keeping a journal. A lot of people keep journals and it probably has the opposite effect. She sounds emotionally immature.

The assertion is not grounded in reality at all. It’s a common myth among people who live in a STEM echo chamber. Personally, I don’t know why people who haven’t even done more than a cursory overview of philosophy feel entitled to make meta philosophical claims. My only explanation is that it’s a way to defend a dogma of naive scientism. Why? I don’t know, probably the same reasons why people cling onto religion.

What part of Plato are you referring to? Republic is honestly written at a 10th grade English reading level. The most esoteric work of Plato is Timaeus, but most people do not see that as a foundational text in Western philosophy.

I don’t interpret this discussion as about absolving oneself of responsibility. To be fair, what people spend their weekends doing is none of my business.

But it is true that Netflix makes UI decisions that encourage binging. They are not evil for doing so, because honestly, there isn’t anything wrong with binging anyway, but it’s indicative of the logic that is going to be used when it comes to producing their own shows.

Search process underway to identify permanent successor.

Put me in, coach.

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The “poor” in capitalist countries have a higher standard of living than medieval kings?

In so far as they have electrical heating, access to global food products, information technology, modern medical care, sure, plenty of people have a “higher standard of living” versus pre-industrialized societies. That’s a trivial statement. It’s vacuous.

Actually, what’s relevant is that the “poor” in any country have to work long, difficult jobs in order to survive. Some people even die or receive brutal injuries at work. And none of them are being compensated enough, because some people — like our version of medieval kings — don’t have to work at all.

In the context of this discussion, we have situations where people can’t afford to do obvious things that benefit themselves and others. I can’t point my finger and say “capitalism did this”, because the whole engine of human relations (economic, social, cultural) is incredibly vast, and capitalism is such a massive, loaded concept.

But I can sincerely say that somewhere along the line in this engine of human relations that there are very glaring issues that should make us question our sense of humanity.

I am not advocating for some massive, state sponsored rewriting of economic relations or technocratically calculated wealth transfers. The former was empirically a disaster in the 20th century. The latter is purely an academic debate. Nor am I saying that we ought to guilt trip people into donating more to support developers working on free projects. That feels manipulative, although making any community more self-sustaining and caring is obviously good.

I don’t know how fruitful parroting one of coldest takes (capitalism made people richer) can be in light of the lived realities of billions of people, working poor, passionate developers, and everyone who isn’t a 21st century robber baron. We are capable of being kinder and more open-minded.

The truth that society is constantly being reorganized every day. Even the shift from feudalism to “capitalism” happened over hundreds of years. In 300 years, people will look back at our current society and give it a name and analysis, because by then we would be living under a different paradigm. However, until then, future is what we make of it. And we could be more empathetic, and more imaginative.

That's simply not true. Critical theories do not depend on modal logics, nor is your characterization of modal logics correct.

Critical theory and justifications for essentially Marxist ideologies have pretty much nothing to do with Kripke, who was writing within a strict Anglo-American/analytic tradition. Kripke didn't invent any kind of magical thinking. His contribution to modal logic was that he showed, formally, its completeness (as a teenager, too).

You seem to be pointing at a common critique of poststructuralist thinking as focused on the "dissolution" and "destruction" of meaning. This has a lot more to do with Derrida, who wrote strictly in a continental tradition. Critical theories do not rest on modal logics, since many of them are anti-foundationalist in nature, they would probably not rest on anything except works in the 'critical theory' canon (e.g. Marx, Adorno, Foucault, etc).

Ironically, and I mean this sincerely, but if you had actually read anything by Kripke (or critical theorists), you would realize that his most famous work after completing modal logic was restructuring semantics in a way that espoused scientific essentialism (cf. Naming and Necessity). That is something critical theorists would very likely be antagonistic towards.

This is what the author and some commenters are missing out on: entertainment value. If you're a young adult doing extracurricular debating, you're going to get very very bored doing things by the book and sticking to the narrow confines of 'policy making'. Running a kritik is probably really fun for those students. The author makes it explicitly clear where her biases are, and even reiterates cliched conservative fears of critical theory.

Sounds awful. I’ve done the same once, in college, reaching for a shower curtain. I genuinely thought I was too young to experience issues like that.

Could also be a nerve thing. Sometimes my upper back and shoulders compresses a nerve and it ends up shooting into my elbow.

I herniated a disc at 21 and that was just from bad posture, I was sitting on the couch as well and as I was getting up I felt a terribly electric pain shoot from my lower right back to my leg. It took years for it to be better and I’ve aggravated it several times. On one occasion the pain was so bad it requires a hospital trip, where their best advice was physio and to stay active. Rest and a sedentary lifestyle is disastrous if you’re prone to back injuries. Even now, although I’m very active, just sitting in the same spot for an hour triggers piriformis syndrome. Quite literally a pain in the ass that affects my hips.

Rest in peace. He taught at my university (University of Toronto), and he was obviously a rock star in the philosophy department. Still, as an undergrad, I was too concerned with drinking and passing my classes to really give his work serious intellectual consideration.

Moving into a new home the summer I graduated, I found a pile of books left on the curb. One of them was Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science. I ended up tearing through it, utterly fascinated by the ideas and the philosophical landscape -- an agenda of discussion -- that he laid out so clearly, like a dictionary. I used to be quite naive when it came to science -- I thought philosophical topics around it were not worth thinking about. But he slapped the naivete out of me and single-handedly deepened my curiosity in science as an enterprise, as a social worldview, and as a variety of competing epistemic outlooks with profound implications.

Reading this article, I'm glad that he received the accolades and attention that he had. So much to think about, and what an incredible amount of thinking he did in his life.

Did you do poorly in school? Did you grow up in such a privileged environment that you can't believe that people like me exist?

This is not about you. If you really care, I was rasied by a single-mother in relative poverty. But this is not about me, either. This is about scientific methodology, society, and everyone that participates in it. So the answer to this problem is obviously not going to involve your personal life story or your inner experience of your personal intellect.

The reason IQ isn't studied isn't because it's "not useful." It's because people who study it are systematically shunned by academia.

Using the absence of evidence as evidence of widespread conspiracy is fallacious. You've been repeating this throughout the entire comment section, but you haven't given any evidence to support the claim that research is suppressed. Searching up "IQ prediction" brings up zillions of hits on Google Scholar.

I specifically remember teachers lauding me in 2nd grade for how hard I worked, when honestly I was and am pretty lazy. I remember very well sitting in class in 7th grade, watching the same presentations by the teacher that all the other kids watched and then with zero studying getting 100% correct on the test while many of them struggled. And I remember going to many of their houses and seeing that their home environments were either equivalent or superior to mine.

Your main point is anecdata? I certainly had the same experience you had, but the most general claim I can make is that school was a breeze for me, not that I was universally smarter than everyone else. That would be intellectually imprudent, and not very smart at all. A more intellectual prudent approach is to focus on the things that didn't come easy to you, but easy for others. I remember being subject to IQ testing, where I did extremely well. Obviously, I did extremely well in school too. But that correlation should be trivial. Before IQ measures any 'general' intelligence, it first measures test-taking ability. Through what means is most of our success in school determined? Test-taking.

At base, the environmental argument boils down to something like this: "Anyone in the world could have beaten Magnus Carlsen to become world chess champion if they'd just had the proper environment." Such an argument is so obviously preposterous that the prior should absolutely be that it's false.

That is such a ridiculous straw man. I'm seriously questioning your apparent intelligence if you are going to be straw manning views, as oppossed to steel-manning them.

The point of contention is that between-group (i.e. racial) heritability of IQ is not explained by genetic factors, not that people are born 'tabula rasa'. The other point of contention is that heritability and genetic determination are separate concepts, and that it was a methodological error by Charles Murray to conflate the two to draw conclusions about between-group heritability of IQ.

Another point: We already know IQ is genetic. Witness that the housecat and humans have vastly different IQs, and no cat will ever perform better on an IQ test than the median human. Again, the prior obviously should be that IQ is genetic.

So after straw-manning the arguments, you make the sweeping claim that IQ is genetic. Actually, we have mountains of evidence that show income and socioeconomic status affect IQ; the widely cited Turkheimer (2003) study showed that in impoverished families, 60% of variance in IQ was accounted for by family environment, genes contributed next to 0%, while the reverse was found in rich families. Is that surprising, that if one is struggling, that they would not be less likely to reach the 'genetic potential' of their intelligence, the same way that a malnourished child is less likely to reach the 'genetic potential' of their athleticism?

The problem with your arguments is that they are riddled with bizarre leaps of logic, and seem to be motivated by your incessant belief in predestined intellectual superiority of other people. It is obviously the case that some people, by nature or nurture, are generally brighter than others, there's no disputing that.

But what is to be done about it? If we follow the science, which almost unanimously shows that environmental and societal factors play a huge role in 'IQ gaps' -- perhaps more so than molecular genetics -- the right kind of 'solution' is one that ought to be plural, and ought to be inclusive. We are dealing with society after all, which was the point of contention in The Bell Curve. That is, if we want smarter people, and we want people to reach their innate potential, then we should make our society more egalitarian, where families struggle much less than they do today. Charles Murray reaches the opposite conclusion. Why do you think that is? There is probably a parsimonious account that explains both his choice in using flawed methodology and exclusionary policy proposal of cutting welfare. I'll let you guess at what is, and it ends in -ism.

This is a seriously cold take that’s infamously descended from Karl Popper’s argument that Marxism is unscientific. It’s obviously the case that Marxism is unscientific under Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for science, but

1) it’s contentious in Popper’s field itself on whether this criterion is right (it is generally accepted today that he is wrong) and

2) it’s contentious on whether Popper even understands Marx’s theory of history, which is where his criticism comes from, and

3) even if we decide by fiat that the predictions made by Marxism are unscientific, that does not preclude it from being a source of knowledge, or prevent Marxism from being imported as a normative political or ethical framework.

The whole “not true Marxism” thing usually comes from the mouths of people who’ve never read Marx, let alone explicitly non-Marxist thinkers who were influenced by Marx. In other words, the kinds of people who have never given this serious thought at all, but have likely watched some YouTube videos or read a couple articles. There is really no such thing as “true Marxism”. Marxism in practice has ranged from the USSR to Zapatista, which are very different from one another, but they are both no more “truly Marxist” than the other. The only person who could decide that is probably the guy himself, who is long dead.

This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.

If nuance and actual engagement with primary source material (as opposed to whatever it is you’re doing) does not count as “critical thinking”, then I strongly believe we cannot have any further discussion here.

You’re making a lot of criticisms, but you haven’t shown me why what I’ve said is extremely subjective, or why it’s an emotional argument.

First of all, it is obvious that society isn’t already leftist. If you’re citing “many quarters of society howling in disagreement”, you’ll have to show me to 1) the data and 2) this somehow changes the actual nature of our society. Do you actually think that we live in a leftist society? I certainly do not see a plurality of worker co-ops walking down the street, and last I checked, the vast majority of the means of production are still privately owned. I am not going to explain my argument again as to why this gives critical theory a leftist bent.

Your argument seems to be motivated by the fact you don’t like some of the conclusions drawn out by academics in the humanities because they don’t fit your priors. To me, it’s obvious you fall right Dunning-Kruger’s trap, having read and understood virtually nothing about the subjects in question if you’re citing “cyborg techno feminism” as an example of “Marxist devolution”. You’re really proving the point here that a lack of engagement with the humanities leads to a lack critical thinking.

always felt that just means it's poorly defined.

No, it just means that it’s qualitative. Why would qualitative descriptions of entities mean it’s poorly defined? Take for example in philosophy of mind where qualitative descriptions of the colour red are more relevant to the discussion than quantitative descriptions of it, such as it’s frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. In this example, having a qualitative description of the colour red, or a qualitative description of what qualia is (if it were to exist) is actually necessary in order to engage with the problem.

Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.

What do you mean by processed?

There’s a difference between whether propositions can be expressed in first order logic vs. whether the argumentation itself is derived from first order logic. People did not sit down with a table of axioms to figure out all of aerodynamics by decree. Like many fields of inquiry, it took deduction, induction, abduction, and the scientific method. Writing things down via first order logic came after.

Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic. But I can assure you that modal arguments regarding, say, philosophy of mind, are conceived and argued in prose, with symbolic modal logic being used to aid the reader. What does that tell you about “processing via first order logic”?