Hi James, Hi Matt, Last time I posted on this mailing list was 25 years ago. I'm posting now, because my internet connection failed, my email bounced, and emails to AGI are in my inbox, instead of gathering dust on my hard drive. I have no clue if this mailing list will allow me to post, or if this email will bounce. I shall find out.
James, I want to mention something that might feel very off-topic; trust me, it will come around. When I was a freshman in college, second week, I get my first serious homework assignment: write a two page paper, double-spaced, wide margins, No problem, Easy. I put it off till the night before. Topic: Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx. Wait, hang on, wasn't he some communist or something like that? But its only like 10-12 pages, so whatever. I get through the first paragraph. The second paragraph, I'm lost. I read it five times, and wtf ...??? OK, so here's the important part of this story, that you don't know about. I'm smart, like, I'm actually smart. So I know how to deal with this. Find the subject, find the verb, and see, everything else in there is going to be modifiers -- adjectives, adverbs, noun phrases. Identify those, and I shall master this Marx guy. I shall be king and rule this intellectual roost! Shit. I can't find the subject, I can't find the verb. I try and I try ... fuck me. Where's the period at the end of the sentence? Uhhh .......turn the page, ..... uhhh, wait .. there it is .... there's the period at the end of the sentence. The sentence is effing one whole effing page long. Suitably armed with this new knowledge, I was able to find the subject, the verb, the modifiers and clauses, and figure out wtf Marx was writing about. Except its now midnight. So I bang out my two-page paper. Go sleep. Hand it in the next morning. (I actually got like an A+. Can't complain.) Turns out no one else understood the Manuscripts of 1844. This total and abject failure caused Marx to re-evaluate his approach, and a few years later, he wrote the Communist Manifesto in response. Using plain words, simple language, short sentences. Catchy phrases that you could remember and chant while you attended a street protest. "History is Not Written by Kings and Queens, but by the Workers Relation to his Means of Production" -- easy stuff, just rolls of your tongue. Why is no one reading your socio-political theory? It's too dense. What should you do? Turn it into slogans. Better yet: memes, maybe a cat saying "can haz socio-political theory" Why is no one funding you? Same reason political philosophers weren't funded, ever, anywhere over millennia of history. Dangerous trouble-makers, might incite a riot. You want insurance companies to throw money your way? Well, can you take your ideas and turn them into some stochastic differential equations that can arbitrage insurance risk? No? Errm, well.... Realistically? The number #1 most important thing you can do these days is to catch the eye of some youtubers who will take your discussion (this discussion) and turn it into comprehensible entertainment for those of us with short attention spans and ADHD looking for a quick dopamine hit before the next elections. Matt has been on this mailing list maybe 25-30 years ... why aren't the youtube people here, begging for an interview with Matt Mahoney? You got a message? This is the way to get it out. You want to theorize with intellectual peers? Well you can do that too, but hard intellectual labor doesn't sit well with engaging in the difficult martial battle of turning the is-world into the ought-world. Karl Marx got lucky. And in his name, great crimes were committed. So it goes. -- linas On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 5:57 PM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 3:59 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> The reason that we can use text compression to test language models but we >> can't use video compression to test vision models is signal to noise ratio. > > > We can't really use compression to test language models—not because of the > noise floor, but because of political economy and industrial path dependency > (ala The Hardware Lottery). It's absurd that neither the Hutter Prize nor > your LTCB is funded by the insurance industry with billions of dollars in > underwriting in order to discount the risk that capital investments in > current algorithms and hardware will need to be written off. That's all > political economy nonsense arising from taxing activity rather than the > liquidation value of net assets at something like the 30-year Treasury rate. > And, yeah, that's _my_ theory of macrosocial dynamics showing from my > experience getting the government to stop protecting public and private > monopoly power with the resources of entrepreneurs like Musk. And that's why > I started looking for ways of reforming the social pseudosciences because no > one would believe me until now it's almost too late. > > Given what is at stake in macrosocial dynamical theory, the juice is worth > the squeeze whereas it may not be in video compression, nor in many other > areas where less is at stake and therefore there is less of a conflict of > interest bedeviling the science. > > > Artificial General Intelligence List / AGI / see discussions + participants + > delivery options Permalink -- Patrick: Are they laughing at us? Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tb9c1aaff01c2b823-M4fd7b09928d80b099f3964ac Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
