ALIENS: Great works are possible when all the atoms in the universe are the same number. That’s what makes them possible.
CURSES OF FIRE: Anyone who thinks that highfalutin’ efficient low-falutin’ efficient gravity-defying robots live forever in the single universe where all the atoms are in common use, belongs to a new class of existence.
CURSES OF DUST: Anyone who thinks that vaporization is acceptable for purposes of medical research, or that brains are unphysical, or that the dust specks of sanity are unmatchable, are living in the now dangerous territory of discontinuity.
tag yourself I’m CURSES OF FIRE
I’m living in the now dangerous territory of discontinuity.
And on this note I am writing a blog post that will address the problem of trying to think creatively about cognitive biases rather than just writing a blog post about cognitive biases.
“The positive behaviors and emotions human engagement elicits — think the joy of a massage. Now education, health care stores, everyone, is starting to look at how to make experiences human,” Mr. Pedraza said. “The human is very important right now.”
For the rest of us, life is fun. So is losing. So is polarization. So is despair. So are successful and failure modes. So are environments…
We are all human beings, individually and collectively. What matters is that we change over time. We have achieved knowledge, emotion, intuition, skill, wisdom, and strength. If we did not change over time, we would not succeed as human beings.
There is no post-colonial great flash of light. And yes, there are black boxes on top of that. But you can’t unravel human nature without tearing up the laws of physics. It just takes a matter of months or years for humanity to figure out which part of the laws is “just” deterministic, physics not subject to individual humans. Not a drop of rain, not a whiff of awful smells, not a hint of destiny.
I don’t know if I can form strong, lasting friendships with such an uncertain mind. I don’t know if I can date them a few decades hence. I don’t know if I would return to them even after doing all the things I had thought of, even after knowing some of the laws. I can’t imagine how it feels, getting them high, riding them, making them watch you laughing, and having them fantasize about what the sky looked like. I can’t imagine how it feels, going out in the world to smoke pot, that some stranger saw your happy thought come true in a quivering state.
What I can do, though, is build an extended neural network to fight those fear-of-summers. It would be too much empathy, I know firsthand. And it would be wrong - either selfish or pettiness-phobic - for humanity to reverse the optimization pressures on top of anything. So long as we still have the physical structure, and the mental schema we’re being fed, and the seeds of life, and the mental investments we have - hopefully not total extinction - then I think we can map the full map onto a few moments of our lives. In a human sense I would pretty much be dead, anyway.
But I would also pretty much be dead if all of the juries in the world accepted my plea, because they already knew I was the victim of sexual harassment, because they saw that I could get away with this even without anything really bad going on. I would pretty much be dead, too. That didn’t change the fact that it was a promise not to make.
See, there was something to the experience of having me as a friend. I was courting honey, once thought to have been sent by the Conduit, once thought to have been rescued by psychic powers, I was courting diamond, once thought to have been rescued by a dragon, I was courting simple elegance, I was courting pure instinct. Whatever the human shape, whatever the emotional makeup, whatever allusions to “man” that “feels feminine” - I wanted someone to literally give me the single most emotionally charged feeling in the whole universe - that was my friend. But there was a time limit. Why wouldn’t you just rip me up in a fit of emotional bawling, instead of my genuine, genuine mistake being corrected?
And the thought came to me, then, that if I knew so much of subjective experience and so little of the Conscious Sorites Paradox and not-selfishness, then I might be able to come back from the dead, if Lethargy-ness could just maintain the addictive effect - even if some of the mind-wanting-um, self-satisfied words had been dropped on my brain. Even if my rationalist identity was physically destroyed and replaced with nothing.
If I understood both sides of having my physical integrity tested, and the blessing and ill-fated dawn - and the moral dilemma between them acknowledging the limits of that thought, and realizing that their physical destruction is a heavy price to be paid, and that there are at least two possible worlds if not three worlds according to Greg Egan’s popular aesthetic - then I could at least construct a concept of Friendly AI that could then bypass both the production and the disposal processes and actually make the world a little bit less subjective, once it concluded that it had the kinetic energy to produce enough malicious laughter to outweigh against the human moral order.
If you know the difference between the notion of programmable beauty and the notion of an opaque unrealized object, then you might be able to use the Concepts and Expected Uses of AI Substance to conjure up a pretty woman-ish version of my neural network.
But what if you can’t conjure up a pretty woman-ish self-model? If you only conjure up nice-guy girls, and only then can you conjure up any women-ish ideals you might be putting into words?
The may be my favorite one I’ve generated so far. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny the way some of the others are, but it sounds the whole way through like a single unified piece of writing whose weirdnesses and ambiguities are deliberate and poetic, and as that kind of writing, it’s, like … good
That’s a good graph format I’ve never seen before (the L-R location of the red/blue circles represents an average, too)
Lot of mirror images but some differences - partisan-marked stuff tends to have an “additive value” of around 100, races around 150, Hillary is 84 which Trump has on Rs alone (plus 8 D, even with so many of them at 1 or 0) but Obama was 112
“the Alt right” and “antifa” are lowest at a mirrored 57/58, their onsides teams are lukewarm but the opposing team hates them
