Are all invitations coercions????
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
<https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson>
On Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Sorry, by Vocal Grooming, I mean this
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming,_Gossip_and_the_Evolution_of_Language
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming,_Gossip_and_the_Evolution_of_Language>>
not merely "vocal". [⛧]
Your defense of gridding the garden reminded me of road trips
where you'd run across a tree farm or orchard where all the trees are
perfectly lined up ... nauseating ... maybe akin to trypophobia, some
deeply ingrained (false?) registration of toxicity. It also reminded
me of Trump's claim that Finland rakes the forest. Granted, I
recognize the satisfaction of Engineering, making the world in your
image. My first real sense of that was the aircraft factory I got to
walk through at Lockheed to get to the campus nurse for my drug
tests. Watching all those robots do things like shaving aluminum
blocks was transformative. Feynman's "what I can't create, I don't
understand", ALife, and biomimicry all argue for a fuzzy boundary
between science and engineering. I'm sure there are Dork tests out
there similar to OCEAN that might ask whether you get in the flow
more by staring at lichen or desoldering capacitors.
But it feels a bit like the built environment has hijacked
"wonder". I have a Quine atom tattooed on my left hand. And it's a
beautiful concept. But thinking about it's uniqueness under different
systems feels very different from, say, watching a batch of baby
spiders spread out to discover the world. I expect that the dopamine
circuits being exercised are different. Tech like AI, social media,
gooning, etc. seems akin to alcohol or heroin. It hijacks your
pleasure centers such that the rest of the world turns gray and
boring. Conversing with a sycophant, even with the veneer prompt of
"be argumentative", who never ghosts you (unless Cloudflare fails!),
never has its own agenda trying to coerce you into their domain (Hi
Nick), never dismisses your idea as a complete waste of time, etc. is
a kind of hijacking ... very similar to professionally produced
pornography or Hollywood movies where every woman is a bombshell and
every man has a six-pack. Pffft. Gimme real sociality
over parasociality any day. I've never really had a comfort zone
and I'm not trying to find one now that I'm almost dead.
Of course, we've tread this ground. There's a difference between
factory farms and .... what was it? ... "husbandry"? "permaculture"?
IDRemember.
[⛧] However, cf Social tension after grooming in wild Japanese
macaques (Macaca fuscata yakui) is sex specific and sensitive to
social relationships. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.23664
<https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.23664>
On 11/17/25 4:11 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>
> On 11/17/25 2:34 pm, glen wrote:
>> There's a very real risk.
>
> guessing you are referring to the "entropy minimization
strategy" reference?
>
>> The itch the chatbots scratch is partly (mostly, imnsho)
vocal grooming.
> I don't know about vocal literally but perhaps if you mean
"verbal" or more generally "linguistic"? This is a significant
component of the "bar friend" mode I've referenced. Someone I can
"rattle on with" and get a variety of disagreeable agreements and
vice-versa... at best exercising social muscles with the main reward
being the tiny bits of fatty protein I find down in the fur to pop in
my mouth and down my gullet.
>> But it's also partly co-construction/collaboration. I'm
antipathetic to the former. So I don't miss that part. But the 2nd
part is critical. Conversations with the chatbots *feel* to me like
living in a planned community ... i.e. flat-out yucky ... no
stigmergy ... no graffiti ... no crabs living in soup cans.
> It does remind me from time to time of those all-agreeable
conversations (some) sports fans and political-awfulizing gaggles do
when we get together... on a good day it feels like chatting with
someone who really does want to understand my point of view and (if
encouraged to be argumentative)help me explore the
negative/complementary space I've neglected. A little like the
conversations I'd get stuck in when I went to college with Jesus
Freaks (the hippy/jesus looking ones, not the overgroomed,
back-from-mission versions).
>> In this case, no long-winded friend constantly polluting the
air with tangent after tangent. >8^D No bent threads. Etc.
> I resemble that comment! Just think of it as
Performance/Graffiti Art?
>> I suppose if you want your world to be all grids and bullet
points, hyperreal veneer, then fine. Have your chatbot.
> I rarely need help bulleting/gridding my unruly garden, but it
is nice to have a plow and seeder that normalizes the planting grid
(a little) in spite of being more of a one-straw-revolution kinda
guy. My garden art is more edward-scissorhands than Disney but ...
not. a forest either?
>> But the world's looking a bit grim to those of us who prefer
the forest to Disney World. And if you run across someone who can't
tell the difference between a forest and Disney World ... well, IDK
... that's "uncanny" to me ... like talking to a sociopath.
> Maybe I have a fetish for drawing the inner sociopath out in
people? Or just recognizing it. Maybe not sociopathic but more
socio-divergent, but not the performative kind, the deeply
ideosyncratic, unselfconscious kind... like the roadrunner who seems
to be trying to join my small herd of 6 chickens. I hope she's
teaching them some anti-wiley-T-Coyote tricks... on that note, I'd
better go run them into their coop before they freak out over the
northern lights again?
>>
>> On 11/17/25 10:41 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>> I don't even know if I will send my response to this thread,
I've come to delete most of my "usual" offerings without sending,
some without finishing, others without starting. Some kind of
entropy-minimization strategy on "y'all's" side of my Markov Blanket?
>>>
>>> Lots of rich stuff here. I don't think I disagree with any
sentiment here (can they ALL be compatible?). Tom's original
(implied) question is probably as much about "should those of us with
fat ETF portfolios switch their mix from high-performing AI-fueled to
some other place with better risk/reward ratios?" as it is about "is
there even a 'there there' in the AI cascade of new affordances and
competencies being offered (hyped) by 'the market'. But maybe they
are fundamentally the same question in this highly human-conditioned
manifold of intersubjective reality we inhabit together?
>>>
>>> Obligatory anecdote: when a moved to my current property
(2000), A huge russian olive (50' tall, 3'diameter trunk, broad
reaching branches) hosted a huge magpie nest in one of the forking
horizontal branches... maybe 6-8' long made of branches from all over
the property (area) and many other elements. It had a half-dozen
babies in it when I first came to review the property but by the time
we moved in, they had fledged and the nest was fully abandoned (only
for the season?) Within the year we took it upon ourselves to remove
the nest and found the myriad bits of interesting detritus they had
gathered. The structure of the nest seemed fully rhymed and
reasoned in spite of being opportunistic to the
branch/twig/grass/fur/??? at hand and wabi sabi in the extreme, but
the strange bright bits of yarn, string, fabric, bottle caps, broken
glass, etc cetera, were much more arcane/occult-to-me. But
nevertheless alliterated, rhymed and likely reasoned. As did our own
>>> slow picking-apart of the structure with the help of Jays,
Packrats, and the weather which had it's own uses for these "objects
of desire"?
>>>
>>> Within 3 years West Nile flared up the Rio Grande, killing
(most notably, but not exclusively) Magpies. Even now, 20 years
later, the populations have barely begun to recover in a small way,
probably migrated back down from the Chama/Rio-Grande headwaters and
environs? This anecdote could tangent into the (very few) people I
know of who contracted (and one died) of West Nile during that time,
and the cascade of influences/effects that had on the lives of the
people I know, but except for a vague "where did all the Magpies go?"
I hardly registered the *devastating* effect it had on the Magpies
(and likely many other corvids/birds in the region?). Or tangent to
the "Rabbit Hemorhaggic Fever Pandemic" which coincided with human's
COVID 19 which devastated the Jack and Cotton populations here (and
many other regions globally)...
>>>
>>> This is probably an allegory or parable or something.
Re:Cautionary Tales starring NRA wankers - I did just (re) watch two
Charlton Heston classics from my "coming of age" era: "Soylent Green"
and "Planet of the Apes" but was spared (paywalls) from "Omega Man".
I didn't tangent to "Ben Hur" nor "Moses" for different reasons, but
to quote Glen (who might have been quoting David Byrne?):
>>>
>>> "Same as it ever was!"
>>>
>>> On 11/17/25 10:57 am, glen wrote:
>>>> That's the point. Some of us line our nests with robust
things like straw. Others line theirs with fantasies peddled by
grifters and then expect the rest of us to share our nests when
theirs collapse. We will *definitely* bail out the capitalists again
... and again ... and again, even after/while they['re] deport[ing]
us, abusing us, killing us, sending us to kill foreigners, stealing
our water to run their data centers, etc.
>>>>
>>>> We are the gift that keeps on giving.
>>>>
>>>> On 11/17/25 9:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>> I remember where I was when I saw Torvalds’ first Linux
release. I started downloading pretty much immediately and looking
for a PC to sacrifice. It was hardly capitalist hype.
>>>>>
>>>>> *From: *Friam <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of glen
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>>>>> *Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 8:54 AM
>>>>> *To: *[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>>>>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than
the Dot Com stock collapse?
>>>>>
>>>>> Exactly. That's Chris' basic argument. Even his point
about fscking Twitter. To argue that it's "running just as well as it
did" seems a bit discordant. But at some altitude, he's right. It's
just as much of a toxic wasteland as it was before. Every time it
crosses my gaze, I wonder why people still use it ... or bluesky, or
reddit, or <arbitrary-tag>.
>>>>>
>>>>> My experiments with Cline have just about ended. I've
decided to avoid it. It works great with Claude (and some others),
but not with gpt-oss or codestral. Both of those work fine if *I*
manage the prompting. Chris also mentions linux, which I've been
using as my daily driver since ~1995 (?) ... IDK, maybe I was mostly
using ultrix & minix in '95. But sporadically, as with the Windows 11
update breaking recovery, all the dorks get all riled up and talk
about linux finally being ready for the desktop. [sigh]
>>>>>
>>>>> The fact is that we're no smarter than rats or birds
who'll fill our nests with whatever stupid little shiny thing the
capitalists bother to hype.
>>>>>
>>>>> On 11/17/25 8:21 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>>> The first example that comes to mind are malls. Malls
aren't needed now so many of them are closing.
>>>>>> Some people see something bad about that. I see
something good about that: Ruts get erased and new opportunities
arise. Power gets redistributed.
>>>>>> We're between cycles of exploitation and exploration, and
there's some adaptation that is required.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: Friam <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> On Behalf Of glen
>>>>>> Sent: Monday, November 17, 2025 8:02 AM
>>>>>> To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than
the Dot Com stock collapse?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But Chris' argument isn't really about AI. Chris is as
guilty of preemptive registration as the others. Short-term markets
distort everything. The task is to free up the terms coercively bound
by the grifters and marketeers. Once the terms are unbound, we can
discover which formalisms fit and which don't.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If we're charitable, Chris is right that *something* is
amiss. The disagreement is about *what* is amiss. Same as it Ever Was.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 11/17/25 7:45 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>>>> But what ARE these investments right now? It seems to
me they are well established companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and
Google. NVIDIA has existed and will exist should AI revenue dry up,
just like it outlasted Ethereum mining.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The new players aren’t yet public companies. OpenAI
has a longer path to profitability, but Anthropic (technical users)
is already making good progress @ $7B. AI has already penetrated
education and will likely spread more. People will become dependent
on it like they are dependent on cars.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> *From: *Friam <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of Prof David West
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>>>>>>> *Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM
>>>>>>> *To: *[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>>>>>>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse
than the Dot Com stock collapse?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Marcus and Jon are not incorrect. I do see a problem
that they do not, the fact that the vast majority of users/adopters
of AI are dramatically less technologically compentent than either of
these gentlemen. The manager that is positive that AI will eliminate
most if not all of his human employees, the student using an LLM to
"cheat," the social media addicts taken with the latest AI fad bots,
etc. etc. almost certainly will become disillusioned and turn away
from AI.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Perhaps more importantly, all the capitalists who see
immediate—not long term—return on investment are not going to remain
invested. Lot's of other peoples money will be lost as a byproduct.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The market of Jon Marcuses is not large enough to
sustain all the current investment. Maybe one large AI company will
survive (ala Amazon that lost tons of money for a long long time).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> davew
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Sun, Nov 16, 2025, at 3:51 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I mostly agree with Marcus' sentiment. The dot com
analogy may be apt, but it also smells too easy an analog. I find the
K-shaped AI adoption to be bizarre. Personally, I do not believe
LLMs, nor any particular architecture, to be the be-all-end-all. I
suspect we will see a transition away from throwing money at
developing the most general form and a move toward more idiosyncratic
instantiations. For instance, I continue to think that Deepmind did
meaningful work going the RL path with AlphaGo/Atari games and it has
yet to come to my attention what happens when Transformers attempt to
replicate these successes. Almost every LLM I have met is really
really bad at go. This said, AI in their current form, and from this
perspective, has been here for a decade. Some have adopted it and use
it to surprising effect, others treat LLMs as nothing more than a
robust database querying language. What people do with it and how
they perceive it will undoubtedly have an
impact.
>>>>>>> In the
>>>>>>> meantime, I am excited to see what happens as
programmers learn to use formal type theories as pidgins and LLMs
become more amenable to compositionality.
>>>>>>
>>>>
