I've brutally snipped out the part of Eric's post that I want to focus on. And then I not so
brutally snipped out a questionable part of Steve's post. Re: the churn being "closer" to
the attention span of an organism and/or with global effect, my response is "Is it,
though?"
I agree that it *seems* so because we can only work with what we can see.
There's something like Gell-Mann amnesia at work, here. And those of us who
think too much (or a lot) about linguistic things like computation are at MORE
risk of this than, say, historians or plumbers. It's also akin to an
evolutionary biologist claiming they're up atop some pyramid with the actual
biologists who work for a living somehow beneath them.
We (perhaps) falsely assert that language is King merely because language is
all we know, the only thing we CAN know. But there's a complex soup of
mysterious forces (e.g. Hilbert's #6, or autocatalysis) turbulently thrashing
about around it, generating it.
And this is where I agree with Eric's suggestion that argument is insufficient. Yes, the formalisms
(special purpose language) are a pinnacle of achievement. But it's the implementation/embodiment
that presents the real work (work as in social, psycho, physio, chemical, physical labor). AI Slop
can be seen as fantastic by those of us steeped in "requirements satisfaction", quoted
because it's jargon. I've spent most of my adult life implementing others' formalisms (to be
generous with the word). Any old Tom, Sally, or Alice can dream up whatever nonsense requirements
they want. Then as long as they can pay me, it's my job to make it happen - deliver to them the
"credit".
But to those of us who demand some kind of frame or paradigm with properties like consistency, AI
Slop looks truly *deranged* ... not even non-sensical. We have Socratic methods for kneading
nonsense into sense. No, it's not nonsense ... it's just sensical enough to be batsh¡t crazy [⛧].
And this is where the "dopamine" (token for all the reinforcement learning biological
subsystems) shows its effect. If we "get off" on the stimulus, then we'll want more of
it. The analogy between AI chatbots and heroin isn't bad. I'd even argue that chatbots are less
healthy than heroin. But there are functional heroin addicts. And Harm Reduction is a thing.
Anyway, rationality/argumentation is a nice-to-have. But the real work lies in the machinery that
implements the "thoughts", whether that machinery is silicon or carbon based. The real
enemy here is the preemptive registration of concepts like universal computation. And to be clear,
it's the preemptive registration at fault, not its victims like universal computation ... the
elevation of "thoughts" beyond their warrant.
I really want to tie it back to e pluribus unum. But any point I'd make about
that depends on the above rhetoric. So I'll pause to allow derailment. 8^D
[⛧] It may seem that "batsh¡t" contradicts Eric's perception of "just void" from the other thread. But I chalk
this up to how we each treat rhetoric we find in the wild. Those of us who choose their battles, it seems to me, rapidly triage
rhetoric. We've got ~80 years of time. That's not a lot. Send that sh¡t to /dev/null if you can't make sense of it. Then there are
those of us who "get off" on crazy with no regard to, say, our 401k. It's literally difficult for me to stop reading or
listening to garbage like My Big TOE <https://www.my-big-toe.com/> or Chris Langan's CTMU
<https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Cognitive-Theoretic_Model_of_the_Universe>. It's like pornography to me, a lifelong addiction
I've worked hard to recover from. "Batsh¡t" isn't an insult but an attractive quirk.
On 8/17/25 9:25 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
/Accelleration of Scale/Temporal Compression/: This churn which once had a
characteristic time/space scale of decades (life-phase) and region
(scandinavia, northern/southern/western Med, E. EU, etc) is now scaled closer
to the */attention span of a single human/* (hours, months) and geopolitically
(nearly?) global?
On 8/17/25 4:48 AM, Santafe wrote:
It is hard for me to see using “arguments” or other fairly fragile and
low-dimensional tools to deal with problems until we have found ways to address
these previous two big context-aspects.
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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