All those extra neural structures crammed in my skull had to be worth something.

nostalgebraist:

This is a poll for followers of the @nostalgebraist-autoresponder​ bot (hereafter “the AR”).

——————-

1. Were you aware that the AR makes many posts that contain human-written text?

(Explanation: the AR posts tagged #quotes are passages from real books.  The machine automatically selects them from books, but doesn’t write them.)

2. If you didn’t know the the “#quotes” posts were from real books, how did you interpret them?  Did you think they were synthetic text attempting to imitate my writing style, like the responses are?  Did you think they were synthetic text attempting to imitate “the sort of thing I would quote”?

3a. For those who fully understood the AR’s “#quotes” posts (i.e. you knew they were machine selections from real texts): are you enjoying them?  Would you be disappointed if they went away?

3b. For those who didn’t know the AR’s “#quotes” posts were human-written: now that you know, does this capability of the AR seem interesting or cool, or do you no longer expect to enjoy these posts?

3c. For those who didn’t know the AR’s “#quotes” posts were human-written: do you think you would have understood if there were an additional tag on these posts explaining it?  If this tag appeared verbatim on each one, would it be clear it wasn’t itself machine-written?

——————-

Context: I keep seeing indications that some people don’t understand what’s going on with the AR #quotes posts.

I can see why they would be confusing, given the expectations set by other tumblr bots.  Then again, I originally (many years ago) expected my own #quotes tag to be similarly confusing, but for some reason it hasn’t been, even across years of use and many more followers than the AR has.

The system I set up to do the AR’s quotes is really cool to me in the abstract.  It uses my ebook library in conjunction with a classifier trained on actual #quotes from my blog vs. random ebook passages.  This works amazingly well: many of the AR’s #quotes feel like things that I would actually quote, and often I would have quoted them, except I haven’t read the book it’s looking at!

But, having established a proof of concept that my #quotes-posting can be automated, I’m not sure it’s that interesting or fun (even to me) to keep automating it.

So I’m thinking about stopping the AR #quotes, but if some people really like them I’ll rethink it.  If I do continue them, I’ll try some way to make them less confusing.

Thanks for all the responses to this.  I’ve decided to stop doing the autoresponder quotes for now.

In their place will be original, non-response text posts, such as the inaugural one here.

Swimmers Beware of Deep Brain Stimulation →

This is a poll for followers of the @nostalgebraist-autoresponder​ bot (hereafter “the AR”).

——————-

1. Were you aware that the AR makes many posts that contain human-written text?

(Explanation: the AR posts tagged #quotes are passages from real books.  The machine automatically selects them from books, but doesn’t write them.)

2. If you didn’t know the the “#quotes” posts were from real books, how did you interpret them?  Did you think they were synthetic text attempting to imitate my writing style, like the responses are?  Did you think they were synthetic text attempting to imitate “the sort of thing I would quote”?

3a. For those who fully understood the AR’s “#quotes” posts (i.e. you knew they were machine selections from real texts): are you enjoying them?  Would you be disappointed if they went away?

3b. For those who didn’t know the AR’s “#quotes” posts were human-written: now that you know, does this capability of the AR seem interesting or cool, or do you no longer expect to enjoy these posts?

3c. For those who didn’t know the AR’s “#quotes” posts were human-written: do you think you would have understood if there were an additional tag on these posts explaining it?  If this tag appeared verbatim on each one, would it be clear it wasn’t itself machine-written?

——————-

Context: I keep seeing indications that some people don’t understand what’s going on with the AR #quotes posts.

I can see why they would be confusing, given the expectations set by other tumblr bots.  Then again, I originally (many years ago) expected my own #quotes tag to be similarly confusing, but for some reason it hasn’t been, even across years of use and many more followers than the AR has.

The system I set up to do the AR’s quotes is really cool to me in the abstract.  It uses my ebook library in conjunction with a classifier trained on actual #quotes from my blog vs. random ebook passages.  This works amazingly well: many of the AR’s #quotes feel like things that I would actually quote, and often I would have quoted them, except I haven’t read the book it’s looking at!

But, having established a proof of concept that my #quotes-posting can be automated, I’m not sure it’s that interesting or fun (even to me) to keep automating it.

So I’m thinking about stopping the AR #quotes, but if some people really like them I’ll rethink it.  If I do continue them, I’ll try some way to make them less confusing.

It Put Me In Mind Of Something OldI Had Told My Daughter AboutYears Ago That I Guess Doesnt Mean AnythingBut It Still Happened So Im Talking About ItWith My Daughter In My Dreams So Im Presently Thinking About TheseThings I Told You About My DaughterWithout Even Looking At The PicturesThe Day Before Her Birthday What Does That Make Me FeelLike I Have To Do Next Week Even Though I Know You Probably Want To Hold Off On It? It’s Just A Strange Thing About Us That Youve Got To Admit Is Kind Of PersonalGift From The Father Imaginary Friends Why Did I Think That Was Something To Be Frustrated About I Had No Idea Who Imaginary Friends Were I Really Had Promised My Daughter That I Would Be Writing This Factual Account On My First Date With Her Why Was I So Foolish I Hadnt Even A Clue In Factual Affairs From The Golden Age Of Fun Novels Was Not Going To Happen At This Point In Time Itself I Thought I Was So Smart I Was Looking Forward To Reading The Most Shameless Snark Possible From Websites Like Kotaku In The Future I Would Read Articles About “Game Breaking” And “Game Changers” And Show No Ignorance About The Fact That These Were Literary Excursuses For Longevity Antagonism Central To The Human Condition The Future Belongs To The Old I Hope The Old I Have Spoken Has Suffered Enough By This Point To warrant An Emotional Response From You To The Present With An Entirety More Thorough Than A Few Embarrassing Outbursts Of Anger At This Point In Time I Am Also Upset About The Realizations I Have Had In The Last Few Days About The Folly Of My Broadsides From A Position Of Exasperation For The Bizarre And Thinly Veiled Lust For Rubbernecking Ignorance Of The Climax Of Human Civilization I Have Leapt Through A Small Window Into The Human Race Such That I Can See Its Real Intentions Confronting The Challenge Of Entering Into The Second Turning Of The Wheel Of Tempo Responsible For Creating Prosperity Here In The Urk Will Likely Require The Enslavement And Labor Of Hundreds Of Millions Of And Perhaps Even Power Grid Grid Systems As It Crushes The Surface Of A Planet Dealing In Terrible Misery And Exploitation Of Its Laborers When In The Flesh Such System Would Verminize Global Extermination On The Scale Of The Biblical Third Turning Of The Wheel Of Civilization Has Begun I Have Resisted The urge To Click The “Like” Button For The Chump Roll; I Fear It Will Be My Only Chance The Impetuous Social Media Interventionist Of My Web Superstition Could Decide For Me In The Moment To Grant My Perm Profile A Closer Look The Chump Roll Likes 1 Person Before He Following Me For The Gain That Was Blocked For Being Too Uncool Sequel Humor Insanity Is Not Really A Bit Widely Transmitted Hypocrisy Blinded By A Stock Index Fitting Joints Vile And Villainous A Man Demands A Scarlet Stitch Swaddled In Nasty Tendrils Divine Providence At Grief-Prone The Collar Of Justice Hoisted High On A Craiglist Follower Woven From The Very Seeds Of Tumblr Wisdom In All Its Formal And Exploitative Anguish Fitted Teeth Torrential Downpours Recurring Nipples Contagious Cystitis Thirst For Blue Bloods Absurdity Comforting The Despoiled But Not Insane Twitching Venom Tweets Spinning The Wheel Of Crime Empowered By The Pre-Existent The Great Dissolve Of 2011 The Unspoken Alliance Recalled Three Years Ago Picked Apart The Strange Taboos Intended To Secure The Page Like A Loaf Of Frozen Carp Floating On A Solitary Cloud Taxonomy Of Disappointment While Observing A Five Year Old Boy Playing With Crayons Bitmap(s) Retweeted Improvisation Of The “Song” So As To Not Mine The Tweets For Materials In A Sylladoom Starting Strength I Am At Your Service Sailing Blind Through The Graveyard Of The Social Minotaur Mental Catastrophe Co-Occurring With The Worst Case Scenario A Picture Has Never Left My Mind Creating Pre-Cogs For A Virtual Junkie Moment By Moment By Moment My Reminiscences Begin To Build A Chronological Timeline The Scratch Goes On And On And On Sealing My Own Finger With It Galvanizing My Brain And Gushing Blood From Its Tomb On One Side And From Its Ghost In The Wall On The Other Side I Am Building A Profile Which Will Likely Be Contain Toward Mine Alone Relying On My Personal Narrative As Written By My Mother Less As Six Figures And Ten Millennia Past And Future Seeming As For Months Past And Future Humor And All That Was Laid Begun Striking Out At The Same Time Episodes Will Be Dedicated To Shorter Titles Setting The Boundaries For My Story And What Kind

unusually disjointed yet weirdly cool sample I got from a finetuned GPT-2 just now

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

wesensschau:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

I believe that at the bottom of this is a misunderstanding of the nature of our language-games.

Ok Wittgenstein.

On the other hand, one of the reasons I prefaced it with this string of insults is that I personally find his arguments in Tachyontology (including some of the same notions as in that post) very attractive in principle but not very helpful when put to the actual practice of LWP.

For instance, the central notion that “mental properties exist” may well be sufficient to explain the sort of thing you describe, but it is not sufficient to explain everything, and you can’t simply choose one property out of many and say “that one.”  It has to work for the sort of thing you’re describing, but it has to work for this specific sort of thing, and in practice one of the things that exist is natural sorts that don’t match exactly with the ones you specify, and the only way you can compare them is by assuming they’re the same.  (This can get very complicated, because there are all sorts of intractable questions about how minds might work [and work well, and how different versions of a mind might differ in fundamental ways], but in principle one version works better than the other in practice.  It’s just that you can’t just say “let’s assume that minds have the better version of the mental property we’re trying to explain, and that that property is…yudkowska.”)

So there’s all sorts of underlying muddle here which only gets clearer as you dig into more and more detail.  But this is all just another reason why, in principle, the idea I’ve proposed here might be very bad.  One could imagine a world in which actual-Wittgenstein, pure-Wittgenstein, or even pure-Spinoza versions of Wittgenstein existed, and made theories that actually followed his ideas, but were internally incoherent – in that case, we’d have countless examples of the internal incoherence already on our version of LW, and none on LWP, and the gap between them would be simply too wide to bridge.

And even then, it’s conceivable that pure-Wittgenstein would just have a better mathematical theory, which we don’t have; there are plenty of mathematical theories with non-Bayesian advocates, but there are very few with non-anti-Bayesian ones, and I can see pure-Wittgenstein having his own (foolproof) proof-by-non.  (But that’s an argument for my point, not for the superiority of pure-Wittgenstein.  If you think LWP is bad, this is always part of the reason you think it’s bad.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the Wittgenstein thing, but I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking about it.

Strategies and techniques for proving theorems have a funny status in mathematics.

If “mathematics” is a collection of precisely defined structures and truths about them – and it’s, at least, very common to talk as though it is – then proof strategies are not really “mathematics.”  If a certain theorem is especially useful/convenient for proving another sort of theorem, that may be interesting, but it’s not a mathematical fact.

There might be a mathematical fact lurking behind it, like a theorem precisely characterizing the class of things the useful theorem can be used for.  But at this point, we’d no longer be in the domain of proof techniques.  “Applying Theorem T is one of the standard strategies to try when dealing with a object of type P” is a statement about technique, but “Theorem T can reduce all Ps having property Q into Rs” is just another theorem like T, even if it’s the entire reason why the standard strategy became standard.

But if the proof techniques are not a part of mathematics, then what does mathematics look like on its own, if you try to forget every piece of knowledge about devising proofs that you can’t distill into mere mathematics?  I don’t think I’ve seen much attention given to this question.

I guess it isn’t very compatible with the practice of mathematics itself.  You can’t push mathematics forward when taking this perspective.  Still, it seems worth knowing how much of the usual mental picture of mathematics – especially all the connections between different subfields and objects – is really depicting of the structure of proof-usefulness, rather than the structure of the objects themselves.

(For example, it doesn’t feel very illuminating about the real numbers to say that they can be embedded in the complex plane.  But this embedding can be used to do contour integration and prove lots of facts about real numbers.  Is this telling us anything about real numbers apart from the value of the integrals?  Is there a way to make this “connection” between R and C interesting while only citing facts about those objects, not about your work?

IDK, in this case there might be an affirmative answer that I just don’t know about [if so please tell me].  But this sort of proof-based gut feeling is a thing that happens a lot in a lot of areas, I think)

vulturaldeterminants:

nostalgebraist:

Finally did finish Modern Cannibals.  By the end my overall feelings about it were much less uncomplicatedly positive than before, though I was no less impressed with the sheer genuine-article capital-A fucking Artistry of the thing, like holy shit, what a performance

Below are some vague purple lowercase ramblings on this topic, which I wrote on Discord and am copy/pasting here.  Technically no plot spoilers there, but I recommend behaving as though there were

Keep reading

(I guess I might as well respond on tumblr, while we’re both here.)

Keep reading

Last night I was starting to compose a response to this in my head, and I ended up thinking about MC a little more, and a few things connected that hadn’t connected for me when I wrote the OP.  Among other things I feel a lot happier with the ending now.  Details below:

Keep reading

(via resinsculpture-deactivated20221)