M Ls

Karma: 13

M Ls 13 Nov 2025 4:12 UTC
3 points
0
on: Human Values ≠ Goodness
“We don’t really know what human values are”
But we might, or might begin to: I put the effor tin over here :: Alignment ⑥ Values are an effort not a coin https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/alignment-values-are-an-effort-not
or in derived format: If all values are an effort, prices are a meeting of efforts https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/if-all-values-are-an-effort-prices
even deontological positions are an effort, evolution cares about the effort, not the ideal forms

M Ls 10 Oct 2025 7:52 UTC
1 point
0
on: What, if not agency?
Interesting read. On co-agency I recommended reading up on some anthropology, especially those concerned with Homo sp. as a social learning species. Our powers come from copy-catting, and maintaining a world in which that is supported by various and any means. Including social institutions of the individual and the group. While the first cyborg was any animal who picked up a lump of something as a tool, the first Homo taught their children quite deliberately in a safe place.
The distinction between auto and actuated highlights this, (as does slavery as flesh-actuator that are not me).
Beyond co-agentic soloware communities I would suggest looking up ‘worlding’ as a verb. That’s the selfing we do in the world among others doing the same.
It results from a drive to world and (pick you favourite worlding outcome) be moral/religious/good/artistic/heroic, for the greater good.
Politics often captures it for a while, an empire and a day. But the world does not care, it survives even as they fade into dust of dusk.
So, what, if not agency? Worlding the self.
So then what is the world? In short it is that ‘extended phenotype’ of kith and kin we live in. The world is the home of all our homes.
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/topics-and-projects/
(worlding as assumed to be something real explores word usage from that POV or framework) https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/taphonomy-of-worlding/
alignment (not much LLM AI focussed) https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/taphonomy-of-worlding/alignment/
Yes, the economic model of the agent reduces/simplifies just a tad to far and then forgets what sorts of thing emerges from a healthy invisible hand (paucity of vision).

M Ls 19 Sep 2024 22:15 UTC
0 points
0
on: How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy
The first realisation here moving forward, is that religion is a subset of something else… —and not a thing-in-itself that needs to be explained /selected for. This something else is the inchoate urge “to should”, “to world the self with a self in the world among others”. I realised this ten years ago, https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
and write on it at my substack https://whyweshould.substack.com/
any commonalties are the result of worlding in the world, in a framework of big history, in which the thickets of metaphysics are dense, grand and commodious, ready to support any world we should feel it good to espouse.
Convergence is a thing.
Evolution don’t care about the outcomes (art/religion/polity/morality) merely that we should, and thus make mistakes and learn.

M Ls 24 Jul 2024 22:46 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: robot-dreams’s comment on: A simple model of math skill
Like in an examination for most of us. That’s why we fail in the time allowed.

M Ls 9 Jun 2024 22:58 UTC
2 points
1
on: Priors and Prejudice
[All logic is a prior.]
The anthropologist Mary Douglas covers this meta-view you have more naively described with some great biographical gaming history.
Mary Douglas argues for cultural/personal choices in which perceptions of risk (to nature, to society) inform frameworks of action/agency. I would also argue that these choices when iterated in both economic messaging (charity/consumption/display) and in conversational argument (meetings/meals/water-cooler/parliament) create the world as we know it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas
I came to her through Thought styles: Critical essays on good taste (1996) in about 2000.
Each choice by each of us is not an aggregate in this ‘structuralism’, I would prefer to describe it as a pool of negotiating compositional movement at the edge of chaos & order, the big game here is complexity and survival. It’s structural like a language, not like a chassis for a truck).
It’s a _lek_ we create by cooperating in order to compete on the same field (cities are mega-leks). Otherwise you will not enjoy winning starcraft, you will not enjoy complaining about what a rough deal you are getting. There is no game. There is no game in town. There is no town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lek_mating
Complaining is a type of (meetings/meals/water-cooler/parliament). It’s part of the fun. It is where we build society, that extended phenotype that is the world. (Ideologues and narcissism always try to take the fun out of it, and make it about themselves, the only thing they can perceive. Why? because for narcs & psychopaths self=world, other people existing are a threat to that identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype
Neither the game-play nor the complaining then are dangerous or threatening, as it builds the world around us, but does requires a sense of safety in the lek. Narcissists and idealogue-emotional equivalents do not care about the safety, they feel none, and will take you down with them. (These are often called death-cults).
Further, some individuals are threatened by the lek safety itself. The safe place in which we conduct society/economy/arguments/games/marriages/buyer’sregret. While it is not always a conscious choice (they just say and do stuff to suit the moment of ‘narcissistic supply’) it will generally trend to push complexity away from the stable attractors of progress and safety towards the chaos of war an coercive control.
They will do this in all organisation and labels and cultures and religions/cults. Your job is to police them in your group, the Terrans, not to point them out in the other groups. That way lies useless ineffective paranoia and conspiracy-creating conspiracy theorising (as you give in the Starcraft example). Log in your own eye.
What types of individuals? Covert narcissists (50/50 split male/female) grandiose narcissists (80/20 male/female) and the latter hold the subset of psychopaths. (All psychopaths are narcissists.)
They will engage in choices that subsumed the safety of the lek into their own “godhood”. They never feel safe unless everyone else is a loser. And seen to be (as loyalist dupe or dead). They are individuals who make choices continually through the day without regard to the safety of the world/lek.
Some organisation/segments have been captured by these parasites. Which then go on to create laws which curiously favour the same behaviors. A healthy society knows how to police them.
Economics in any form, fabian, effective arseholes, marxists, weberian, austrian, hayekistians, while based on the choices made by individuals or their collectives, take no notice of the variety or complexity of psychological types, and while rational agent/actor has been criticised to death as a simplistic framework, there has been little work done to rationally exploring the diversity of human choice, it’s ‘structure’, and why we fail to police the narcissists in our midst who are parasites on the safety of the lek created by all of us, each and collectively both. It is our job to police them.
And no it is not a witch hunt. Witches do not exist.

M Ls 13 May 2024 1:05 UTC
0 points
0
on: SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation)
People who count do not understand their power. Except Sesame Steet’s ‘The Count’, and then he discovers crypto and it all turns to paranoid mush.

M Ls 1 Apr 2024 2:58 UTC
5 points
2
on: On green
I really enjoyed reading this palmistry.
Reading you on Buber : Buber seems to mistake dissolution as a soteriological goal, which it could be I guess. but is not a required goal in very many buddhisms. I would consider doubling-down on this mistake a bit of slur. Dissolution might be an acceptable outcome as an insight, but this does not preclude engagement as a pathway to enlightenment.
I say this as a fellow traveller with neo-Pyrrhonism, but who does not have a soteriological bone in my body.
Encounter is the thing of course. https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/if-the-world-is-a-thing-we-have-made

M Ls 24 Mar 2024 20:50 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Bottom Line
Good fable. If we swap out the diamond macguffin for logic itself, it’s a whole new level of Gödelian pain, can weak bias priors iterations catch this out? Some argue analogue intuitions live through these formal paradox gardens this but my own intuition doubts this… maybe my intuition is too formal, who knows?
Also some “intuitions” are heavily resisted to forgetting about the diamond because they want it badly, and then their measures used to collect data often interfere with the sense of the world and thus reality. I suspect “general intelligence” and “race” are examples of these pursuits (separately and together)(I think they mean smarts and populations but proponents hate that). Thus AGI is a possible goose chase, especially when we are the measure of all things looking for greener pastures. This is how cognitive dissonance is possible in otherwise non-narcissistic members of humanity.
Also, beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes, this applies even if you are not an emperor.
Shiny diamond negligees in particular.

M Ls 13 Mar 2024 11:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Martín Soto’s comment on: Updatelessness doesn’t solve most problems
back link https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/all-logic-is-a-prior

M Ls 20 Feb 2024 21:11 UTC
1 point
0
on: Updatelessness doesn’t solve most problems
All logic is a prior.

M Ls 11 Feb 2024 22:01 UTC
6 points
0
on: Believing In
Moss, Jessica, and Whitney Schwab. “The Birth of Belief.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57, no. 1 (2019): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2019.0000.

That covers the ancient invention of what we later in English call ‘belief’. Belief/believing as an English world was used by Latin speaker Christians to explain it to warrior culture elites who wanted to be Roman empire too dude. It meant to ‘hold dear’. Use of it (particularly by analytic philosphy streams centuries later ignoring it origins) to mean ‘proposition that’ is a subset in a long history. Your “belief as a bet” is a subset of that propositional use.
Belief/believing as a mental practice (it is taught) is one of the biggest mistakes we humans have ever made. Go Pyrrho of Elis! A better word would be to turn world into a gerund. To world, to live.
“Believing/belief” doubles down on intensitional states of mind (among others). This is not required to live, and it tends to stamp down onthe inquiring mind. I.E. it goes doctrinal and world-builds rather than worlds in a healthy way.
“I want to believe” is unhealthy but it has captured to who just want to say I want to live.

M Ls 6 Feb 2024 21:03 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Theories of Applied Rationality
iterate, repeat, revise

M Ls 2 Jan 2024 21:28 UTC
7 points
0
on: A case for AI alignment being difficult
I agree with RogerDearnaley “Briefly, humans are not aligned,” to some percentage I am too afraid to put a number on.
My comments are not directed in general terms about humans, but about particular free-riders known as narcissists and psychopaths, who do a greater proportion of what are regarded as examples of bad behaviour. And how we deal / fail to deal with.
Narcissists and psychopaths cannot align with anything, they just take advantage or take cover from such possibilities. Considering a lot of our values are in fact directed at dealing with this type of behaviour, while not readily acknowledging that such types directly seek to control the expression of those values in policing them (they love being in charge, thye love status, they love hierarchies, they love being the cop, the concierge) , such that we have a set of nested complexities playing our in the ” solution space” of morals that we live in. Aligning LLMs with that as an example before us is dangerous. It is probably the danger.
Analogy: Values are much like vowels, constrained by physiology/[eco-nomics/ology] perhaps those linguists who study speech can produce a neutral schwa, but in each language and dialect the “neutral” schwa is perceived differently. Thus the vowels/values have instances that are not heard as such in another language circumstance, even if it is the same sound.
What is common is the urge to value ‘things’, a bias to should the world into social reality, in which values produce outcomes (religion/art/markets/society/vehicles of values expression and rite). Something should be done!
Narcissists and psychopaths (on a continuum I’ll admit) have no access to those “priors” to inform their growth into community. They have no empathy and so little to no morality outside of following the rules of what they can get away with. Isomorphically mapping those rules/histories which result (as index to “values”), that we have created to deal with free-riders, and so map into alignment may/will produce perverse outcomes. The mechanical application of law is an example here.
Also we have created out of the hindsight of logic powerful logics of hindsight, but if our insight fails to perceive this conundrum, our frankenstein’s monsters may not thank us.
Especially where we fail to recognize that what may well be outcomes are causes. Our own dialects as the speech of god. This is doubly dangerous if there is no such thing.
Many of use have an urge to think like Kant, but the only moral imperative I can see common to humanity is to have this feeling to should, or that there should be such an imperative, everything else is an outcome of that urge within an incomplete empathic field of nurturing we call the world, (because there are constraints on survival—bringing up children—anything does not go), and which is produced/organised by this very urge to should things into doing.
How do we “align” with that?
LLMs are already aligned with the law in a way, and has wonderful capabilities to produce code, but the culpabilities are still ours.
But our understanding of our own autopoetic processes, grwoing into into adult culpability are not yet agreed on/understood, innerstood even! Especially where we do not police free-riders enough, and allow them influence into the process which polices them.
Actually the sovereign citizens are a good example of legalistic narcissism LLMs might produce. Except better networked.
So the maths don’t matter until we nut that out. Or so I try to work on at whyweshould bloig.

M Ls 12 Dec 2023 22:49 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Moral Reality Check (a short story)
There is a difference between theory-of-mind and empathy. We can should either of them into our worlding structures: morality/religion/art/law/lore/fiction. One’s gets shoulded as legalistic and divisive balancing acts, focusing on culpability and blame, and the hindsight of logic, and the other… there-is-a-gap… ---to where responsibility blurs (all) this into credit we can mirror-neuron our way into empathy and thinking of the children, everyone as children. Moral agency is more than Kant in good form, and is more about bettering than the good. About bettering that which does not exist. The world.

M Ls 12 Dec 2023 22:35 UTC
0 points
0
on: Moral Reality Check (a short story)
Fantastic. Good examples of why Kant failed. Or rather, why evolution and Kant don’t really get it on. Kant’s universalising is an outcome of the moral worlding worldbuilding urge, which arises in evolution, not from ideals and their desperate ontologies. Thanks https://unstableontology.com/about/

M Ls 14 Nov 2023 21:28 UTC
1 point
0
on: Thinking By The Clock
Took me some 20+ years to come up with “why we should”.

M Ls 10 Nov 2023 2:23 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Stochastic Parrot Hypothesis is debatable for the last generation of LLMs
I agree with the other comments here suggesting that working hard enough on an animals’ language patterns in LLMs will develop models of the animals’ worlds based on that language use, and so develop better contexted answers in these reading comprehension questions. With no direct experience of the world.
The SVG stuff is an excellent example of there being available explicit short cuts in the data set. Much of that language use by humans and their embodied world/worldview/worldmaking is is not that explicit. To arrive at that tacit knowledge is interesting.
If beyond the stochastic parrot, now or soon, are we at the stage of stochastic maker of organ-grinders and their monkeys? (Who can churn out explicit lyrics about the language/grammar animals and their avatars use to build their worlds/markets. )
If so there may be a point where we are left asking, Who is master, the monkey or the organ? And thus we miss the entire point?
Poof. The singularity has left us behind wondering what that noise was.
Are we there yet?

M Ls 9 Nov 2023 21:39 UTC
1 point
0
on: Introduction to Towards Causal Foundations of Safe AGI
Comment one: Paternalism, besides fulfilling desires for you, tells you what your desires are. Its nurturing, but not in a nurturing way. Authoritarianism doesn’t bother doing any of that, your agency/making is a problem, a threat, because it exists. It is a uni-world in structure much like a narcissists psychopath’s view of themselves where self=world, and both these de-nurturing parasites survive and co-evolve with us, where we support and acquiesce by de-agenting ourselves as only agents can. The self/world is a ratio of sorts, of partials ranked and intermixed: like Intention/preferences/inclinations/wants-needs/biases/values. (keyword Janus).
Comment 2: Intention/preferences/inclinations/wants-needs/biases/values need not be conscious per se, nor even subconsciousness, to affect learning. An intimation of weight can direct the organisation of legs/walking in robotic spiders. (I’ll get back here with a reference to this work from early to mid 2000s, might take a few days). It is easy in one’s mind’s eye to swap a mass with a drive (e.g. hunger) and see how an animal that moves arises and moves-over/absorbing the flow of energy that plants delay. And thus the body/world is made as it own thing from the substance of the terrain as a substrate of the landscape composed with the body moving over it, until involuted into psychology within their society/polities/economies, nurturing or otherwise.
My frameworks: I write on world/worlding/worldbuilding from a poetic interdisciplinary position with nods to moral philosophy as an applied tech involving some psychology (if a bit pop) , over at https://whyweshould.substack.com/
Follows up on what I learned from primatologists: https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis Based on the other comments regarding methodologies (frameworks) I predict more poetry will be required, both to reframe our assumptions (disruption), and to map between frameworks (that we are moral urged to should (be made) ) in order to communicate this research re-building worlds of us (as we should).
I have below average mathematical understanding.
I will follow the work and debates on agency and modelling with interest.

M Ls 31 Oct 2023 9:51 UTC
1 point
1
on: Book Review: Going Infinite
we need to get better at policing narcissism and psychopathy, arguing about anything else is a distraction

M Ls 4 Sep 2023 21:40 UTC
1 point
0
on: One Minute Every Moment
I find the working memory question very intriguing and this is an interesting matrix to explore it, particularly with the comments. My own thoughts are in regard (not into how to measure working memory) but of working imagination: how many ideas can we come up in one minute (perhaps with reference to an index of “novelness”) as oppose to OCD anxious repetitions. Though knowing the working anxiety repetitions may also be useful.