On 11/13/23 6:42 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
Well in that case, definitely look up the interview he did with Sara
Walker and Lee Cronin.
I will not comment further.
Eric
Gah!
Coincidence that I just finished Stephen Webb's updated review of the
Fermi Paradox. I didn't choose to read it because I have a vested
interest in the answers (roughly 75 whack-a-moles), but rather a
fascination with the fact that the question hasn't been advanced
significantly since the Eric Jones' LA-UR of 198
<https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf>5 (Alias Smith
and Jones?) on the topic, which I read as a very young LANL Staff
Member when it was published internally. Or the Drake equation since
1961? It was also fascinating to be re-introduced to Knuth's Up-Arrow
notatio <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation>n for
expressing excruciatingly large numbers....
At the time it seemed like we hadn't been asking the question long
enough (~40 years) for the answers to mean much (have much
relevance?)... 40ish years later is only 2X longer yet the technical
progress (e.g. SETI/Hubble/Webb/Deep Machine Learning/...) the silence
of the cosmos seems significantly more pregnant?
I've given Walker/Cronin/Fridman about 70 minutes so far and my head
hurts (in the best way)... and I'm clearly over my head in beaucoup
ways... though I may not be able to stop and it will be definitely one
of those "4 hours I will never be able to, nor want to, get back?)
she said /"the fact that we can even talk here is a result of the
fact that we can exchange structures in assembly space"
/
statements like this and implied references to abstractions like Godel
Numbering on Assembly Indices and Kauffman's NK model, casual graphs ala
Glymour or Perl, L-systems, Wheeler's It-to-Bit and a spectrum from
discovered to invented, leave me (yet more) painfully aware of how over
my head I am... I dismissed SFI's "interplanetary" announcements back
when (2019) as unserious but with Ted Chiang's "Arrival" at SFI in light
of his "Story of your Life" and the
In a few months/years I expect this type of discussion could as easily
be actors reading a GPT-X script which entirely captures the stylization
of a serious discussion without being (necessarily?) serious at all and
perhaps *nobody* could tell?
The intersection of /possibility/ and /probability/ spaces seems to
define/imply something about what I said at earlier about the difference
between memory/imagination, past/future? (/Will, Qualia, ???/)
I'm suspect I should follow your lead and not comment further (for
entirely different reasons)... If I really want to hurt myself (some
more) I should probably cue up Fridman's interview with Wolfram back to
back with this one. At this rate I doubt I will ever get around to his
interviews with Netanyahu and Kushner or Rogan...
Lex just commented "/discovering wisdom through nuanced disagreement/?"
and it seems to be good support for Glen's agonism...
Argh... "why does head hurt when Hulk try to think?" maybe I should
sign up for the Neuralink Beta and get the GPT-shield to go with it?
With a power-tower count of components
(./... must... stop... now.../ )
On Nov 13, 2023, at 5:57 PM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote:
On 11/13/23 12:06 PM, glen wrote:
You might want to check the Gurometer. Lex has an entry:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Oe-af4_OmzLJavktcSKGfP0wmxCX0ppP8n_Tvi9l_yc/edit?usp=sharing
While Lex's scores are relatively low compared to some of the wackos
on the list, we are known by association. And many of Lex's guests
score relatively high.
Fascinating resource, thanks! You are a veritable font (fount) of
things like this that I should probably be able to find for myself.
I had to look a little to find a key to the columns of the table, I
don't know if this is the preferred or only one, but it seemed close
enough to be useful for my purposes:
https://techhenzy.com/gurometer/
I haven't listened to enough of Lex's podcasts (did I mention 1-2
hours each?!) to be able to evaluate what his "coupling" is with his
guests... even without the GuruMeter I felt that theme ("known by
association") from the more prominent/recent interviewees he has
engaged... but my contingent judgement of the *content* and *style*
of the interviews counterbalanced that almost to an extreme. Which
is why I brought it up here.
Implicit but likely opaque/arcane to your own references to community
(self) policing and ?agonism?, I feel (with limited experience so
far) that Fridman may well provide a regulating role within some
community (of Galaxy-Brain Gurus?)...
I doubt I will get the 'round t'uits but it seems like there is a
tensor product to be explored among these folks and their various
interactions with one another... something interesting might
emerge? Maybe this only occurs to me because Lex is more of a
coupling agent than a primary source of any ideas/theories/positions
from what I've seen so far. I haven't investigated the GuruMeter guys
enough to understand their methods but I take it for granted they are
not unserious in this work.
On 11/13/23 10:08, Steve Smith wrote:
It seems (maybe only to me?) that "will" is what defines the
intersection of memory and imagination? The
free-will-less-ness-ers among us (ala Sopolsky
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/24/determined-life-without-free-will-by-robert-sapolsky-review-the-hard-science-of-decisions>)
may find this an entirely specious thing to consider or discuss
(though without free will, what means "specious" or "discuss" or
"consider" sans free-will?).
I recently discovered Lex Fridman's podcasts
<https://lexfridman.com/podcast/> and was quite surprised by
several things (albeit with very limited sampling... all of his
most recent interview with Musk and a bit of his interview with
Isaacson and about half of the Harari one): I don't significantly
disagree with the general mistrust of Musk in his Autistic-ish
style and affect, but I'd say that Lex brings out the best in him,
showing him to be capable of thoughtful and even empathetic-ish
observations. As I understand it (from my reading of Isaacson's
biography of Musk) brother Kimball may also be a significantly
similar "regulating influence" on Elon. Grimes maybe, maybe not.
The other mothers of his children, same-same... probably each and
all of them for a period of time or within certain frameworks.
And again, same with the children... though maybe projection on my
part having been moderately well-regulated in several modes by my
own children during each of their phases (right up to their current
middle-agedness).
As an aside, Fridman's other interviews also all sound potentially
fascinating... though I cringe at the fact/thought of interviews
with Netanyahu, KanYE, Kushner, Rogan... the commentary I've
read around those interviews tends to skew toward "how could you
normalize (amplify?) those A**holes by even giving them the time of
the day???!!!?". Lex's interviews are definitely long-form (1-2
hours) compared to today's
tik-tok/ad-jingle/bumper-sticker/snark-pith calibrated
sound-bitery. I find myself avoiding them for this reason (not
wanting to commit to listening past some of my own prejudices long
enough to hear what they are really about?) but recognize (and have
already begun to practice) that as with long-form written
journalism, I can take it in bits, like I might eat a rich holiday
meal... not try to gulp it down quickly in one sitting like a
TV-dinner (for you X-ers, "Hot-Pocket", and Millenials == "??") for
the mind.
My recent fascination with Deacon's "Teleodynamics", Jeff Hawkins'
take on the structure/function of the neocortex and Ian
McGilchrist's updated take on brain bicameralism (Master and
Emissary
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary>) feeds
into this question of the intersection of memory and imagination
and the implications of Transformer Models and other Generative
Models in general. My direct experience with GPT-4 and DALL-E is
significant (many 10s of hours of engagement) but still a drop in
the bucket. There are times when I feel that all I've done is
engaged with an incredibly high-dimensional french-curve/bezier
spline and thereby been able to smoothly interpolate/extrapolate a
handful of interesting (to me) data points into what feels like a
powerful elaboration of what is implied by said curve-fit in the
past (unknown knowns?) and future (unknown unknowns)? When I'm
not totally enraptured by the (apparent?) novelty (relative to my
expectations/predictions) of it's responses I'm generally
disappointed at it's limited creativity... and left puzzling over
the question of "novelty vs creativity".
Bumble,
- Steve
On 11/13/23 10:27 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
It seems to me that neither Musk and Thiel are interested in the
unknown. They are interested in doing things they can already
imagine. For Musk I thought that was because it is how he
raises money. Now I think he is not imagining consciousness in
a, say, a transporter pattern buffer, he imagines life on the
Enterprise bridge in his body. Rockets are comparatively science
fictiony for people that can't imagine transport without a car, so
he gets some points for that.
On Nov 13, 2023, at 10:11 AM, glen<geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
There's an interesting parallel between the Stross and Gellman
pieces: Stross both laments and implicitly appreciates the
bureaucracy of getting a book published, where Thiel's aggrieved
by the bureaucracy of societal evolution.
It reminds me of the engineering-vs-biology dichotomy (yes,
false, like all of them) I came to appreciate after being exposed
to enough biomimetics (to kill a horse). Some of us see the world
and think about how to change it, build a better world ... or
perhaps destroy the world, whatever floats your inner engineer.
And some of us see the world and are awestruck, hypnotized,
baffled by its qualities (whether beautiful or horrifying). It's
easy to give the latter a pass and denigrate the former when
confronted with, say, butterflies or the Grand Canyon. And it's
easy to give the former a pass when confronted with poverty and war.
But the next time you're at the DMV or arguing with some poor
sucker manning the phones at the IRS, it can be useful to
remember the falseness of the dichtomy. Similarly, when all you
want to do is sleep under the stars and those damned gnats keep
homing into your ears, it can be useful to think like an engineer.
Policy and science fiction aren't that far apart.
On 11/10/23 13:46, Marcus Daniels wrote:
original.png
Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From
Democracy<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/peter-thiel-2024-election-politics-investing-life-views/675946/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share>
On 11/10/23 11:26, Roger Critchlow wrote:
Text of Charlie Stross' talk to Next Frontiers Applied Fiction
Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023, concerning where
the techno-industrial elite found their horrible
philosophies/secular religions.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html
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