re: human coupling space&time scope: You know I've made the argument that we're
becoming more like a slime mold and less like a herd/murder/clowder. So I agree
with you to some extent. But the distinction I'm making is between thoughts versus
biology, language versus physiology. Thought-coupling *way* outpaces
biology-coupling. While it's true that something like Sars-cov-2 percolates across
the planet way faster than it would have (not) without planes and dense cities or
wet markets, thoughts percolate much faster.
You might note that outrage stimulates our biology, which has allowed it to dominate
social media "algorithms". So linguistic structures that are more tightly
coupled to biology will be more promoted or more inhibited than linguistic structures
that are less coupled to biology. So you might also argue that thought-mediated
biological coupling is way faster than something like Sars-cov-2's percolation.
But these are all granular considerations that are glossed over by the
assertion that the inter-organismal coupling is tighter/more/increased. That
perspective is language-biased and biology impoverished.
re: Hume's guillotine: You've also seen me argue that there are cases where the
separation isn't as crisp as some believe. But your implication that there's a
coupling between *talk* and *care* is suspicious. It needs, at least, a clear
marker for where it crosses the ought-is divide.
re: programmer slaves: No. It's no more acutely slavery-like than anything
else. But it does speak more directly to Eric's topic of entertainment vs.
living. There's translation that occurs in plumbing that doesn't occur in
programming. So even if your plumber's your slave, they can learn things during
the process that they can apply to their own home or to other jobs. That
translation is often weaker in programming, depending on the job at hand. (cf
my comments on working in the REPL)
Re: TV as opiate - Chatbots as heroin: That meta-analogy doesn't work very
well. TV is too passive. Yes, there's a gradation. TV stimulated audiences to
positive reinforcement, at least compared to radio. But chatbots are *very*
responsive. I argue that difference in degree is large enough to be a
difference in kind. With TV, even 500 channels isn't enough to satisfy
everyone's appetite. But with the amount of training data and billions or
trillions of parameters, chatbots *are* enough to satisfy everyone's appetite
... for linguistic and a back door to visual stimulus.
chatbots as lasers: No, I don't think so. Yes, some of us lase our language. Some of us
do not. On this list, it might be hard to argue that ... because I suspect everyone here
likes and wants to lase their language most of the time. But I meet a lot of people who
don't enjoy that, don't "get off" on it. E.g. many people get off on trading
pseudo-profound bullshit. That's not lasing at all. You can literally say any non
sequitur you want. The properties that trigger the dopamine hit are per-sentence and
maybe/sometimes per-conversation. Inter-sentence or inter-conversation relations need not
be stable or even present at all.
On 8/18/25 8:51 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
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.
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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