On 8/18/25 9:08 am, glen wrote:
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.
I concede the validity of the question: Maybe it isn't "closer",
but the *coupling* amongst human individuals has increased in
space-time scope, and the mechanism has shifted from the most
immediate/material to something more abstract, distilled into language?
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.
Not only is language what we *talk about* when it is what we use to
*think about* what we presumably *care about*.
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".
I think this generally describes the plight of the "wage slave" in
general but computer programming is acutely that?
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.
I find AI "Slop" (if perchance we are speaking of the same thing?)
fascinating in a similar though different way from Lewis Carrol's
form of nonsense?
We have Socratic methods for kneading nonsense into sense. No, it's
not nonsense ... it's just sensical enough to be batsh¡t crazy [⛧].
we *are* clever sensemakers and that cleverness can (and often is)
be hijacked.
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.
As with Jabberwocky if not all of Wonderland and Looking Glass?
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.
TV is the opiate, closed-loop transformer interfaces are
fentanyl/PCP ? I get the gist of the analogy, if not the extrema
of it.
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.
And perhaps LLM's help to "Lase" our thoughts into a tighter, more
coherent "beam" to a fault?
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.
We can always depend on you for this type of mobius-strip
perspective... not a bad thing.
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