We need less *trust* and more *trustworthiness*. What I meant by "reality distortion
field" seems different from what you meant. I meant the effect of being ensconced in
privilege, having billions of dollars, swimming in an ocean of sycophants, etc. Musk's
reality is severely distorted.
Of course, I think a part of the TESCREAL club's rhetoric is similar to revelatory religions like
Catholicism or Scientology ... or even occult societies and heavy psychedelics users, where
initiates have a distorted view but the masters who've "studied" for a long time have a
clearer understanding of reality. A wealthy man once told me, "Money is like air. It's
everywhere. The difference between you and I is that I know how to build engines that harvest and
concentrate it." He clearly felt like he had a better understanding of reality than me. The
rhetoric inverts.
I feel the same way about inter-species mind reading. When I see humans engineer their
local ecology (e.g. damming a river or introducing a biocontrol species), I don't see
humans understanding biology *better* than, say, the rats whose day to day lives might be
intensely impacted. I see the rats as having the clear view and the humans as having the
"distorted" view. Musk, Thiel, and all the rest seem to think they're Hari
Seldons. But we rats understand that *luck* is the primordial force and those with it
(the lucky) are so badly skewed they can't see their hand in front of their face. Perhaps
the continually unlucky are also badly skewed? Only those of us who can narratively map
our wandering from luck to unluck and back are best situated to understand reality?
The same difference exists between, say, a front-end developer and a "close to the
metal" embedded systems developer. The former is closer to ideal computation,
computronium, as it were. The latter is closer to the actual world, where the rubber
meets the road. Which of the two has the more distorted field? Or perhaps only full stack
(writ large) developers experience the least distortion?
Arcing back to conceptions of openness. Here are some indices that seem more
trustworthy than whatever field being whipped up by the byzantine AI Alliance:
https://opening-up-chatgpt.github.io/
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/introducing-foundation-model-transparency-index
On 12/6/23 10:47, Steve Smith wrote:
As the habitual tangenteer that I am, I'm left reacting to the phrase "Musk's
reality distortion field". Tangent aside, I do very much appreciate Glen's take
on this and found the multiple references (much more on-topic than my tangential riff
here) interesting and useful. I too hope Stallman will weigh in and wonder what the
next evolution of EFF might look like or be replaced by in this new evolutionary
landscape at the intersection of tech and culture?
I'm hung up, the last few years, on Yuval Harari's Intersubjective Reality
<https://medium.com/amalgamate/inter-subjective-realities-64b4f6716f72> as derived
from the social science Intersubjectivity
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity>.
When I first heard Harari's usage/coinage I reacted to it somewhat the way I did to
Kellyanne Conway's Alternative Facts
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts>, but I now deeply appreciate
what they are all alluding to, some more disingenously than others.
I don't disagree that Musk's every action and statement has the effect of "distorting
reality" but it is our /Intersubjective Reality/ that is being distorted, not the reality that
most of us were trained/steeped in via the philosophical tradition of /Logical Positivism
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/>/. Others here were (Social Sciences,
Humanism) probably trained up and steeped more in Phenomenology
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/> and more comfortable with Intersubjective
Reality.
I find the likes of Musk or Trump or Altman or ( * ), as the /Personality/ in "Cult of
Personality" in much the way star this recently discovered in-sync planetary system
<https://mashable.com/article/nasa-exoplanets-orbit-star-sync> exists (see below). With
the planets' orbits finding pairwise (and more generally n-wise) resonances, all (presumably)
coupled exclusively by gravity (and synced through internal dissipative tidal forces?).
Is chatGPT or OpenAI or AIAlliance ( or, or, or, . . . ) yet another species of
celestial body in an orbital dance?
Musk, of course, operates in a higher-dimensional field of forces with Tweets (X's?),
public appearances, financial transactions, and launch/contract/release announcements as
the "intermediate vector particles" and the sturm and drang of individual
drama trauma among the companies, organizations and individuals who are effected by it
all as the internal dissipative forces.
Mashable article on in-sync planetary system
<https://mashable.com/article/nasa-exoplanets-orbit-star-sync>
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/tess/discovery-alert-watch-the-synchronized-dance-of-a-6-planet-system/
On 12/6/23 10:57 AM, Pietro Terna wrote:
Genius!
Il 06/12/23 15:11, glen ha scritto:
For those of us who refuse to contribute to Musk's reality distortion field:
https://thealliance.ai/
Yeah, it's interesting. 2 questions came to my mind: 1) Where is Mozilla? Are they a part
of it? And 2) "open" is not a simple concept. Is it possible that so many
organizations have a clear understanding of what it means? If so, what do they mean?
We've seen, over and over again, a kind of exploitation of Utopian values, especially in
infrastructure-level software. (I'd love to get Stallman's opinion.)
One way to clarify someone's position on their private conception of "open" is to ask
how they feel about limits to the exportation of encryption software.
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/us-export-controls-and-published-encryption-source-code-explained>
Another tack is to ask how they feel about fake news, trust in institutions,
free speech, platforming, etc.
IDK. The AI Alliance smells, to me, kinda like more TESCREAL [1], ripe for exploitation
and *-washing [2] by the privileged. If a tech is open and stays open, it'll most likely
do so because individuals commit to it, not because some meta-corp of mega-corps get
together as "allies". But I'm a bit cynical.
[1] Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulatarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism,
Effective Altruism, Longtermism
[2] Green-washing (fossil fuel lobbyists at cop28), ethics-washing ("ai
safety"), dei-washing (sensitivity training), etc.
On 12/5/23 23:47, Pietro Terna wrote:
Dear all,
what about the post below?
Star Wars?
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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