Valentine

• Valentine 20 Jul 2023 1:45 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Sapi­ent Algorithms

  …I’m a bit sus­pi­cious based on the use of stim­u­lants to treat a broad range of con­di­tions like ADHD…

  Just to be clear, I was de­scribing my ex­pe­rience as a case study, and my im­pres­sion is that I can pretty di­rectly read how caf­feine af­fects my body’s en­ergy re­serves. And I don’t have ADHD or any­thing like that.

  The things I ob­serve sure seem to have clear mechanisms be­hind them, like adeno­sine sen­si­ti­za­tion. Between that and what I ob­serve about how peo­ple act around caf­feine, I get the im­pres­sion that what I’m see­ing in my­self is pretty gen­eral.

  But I don’t know. And I definitely don’t know if ADHD brains are mean­ingfully differ­ent in some rele­vant way. (Do they not sen­si­tize to adeno­sine? I don’t get how chronic caf­feine use can fix a chem­i­cal im­bal­ance un­less there’s too lit­tle caf­feine adap­ta­tion!)

  Hope­fully it’s clear that for the pur­poses of the ex­am­ple in the OP, it doesn’t mat­ter if ADHD and other con­di­tions hap­pen to be cases where caf­feine works differ­ently.

  But maybe you mean to sug­gest that things like ADHD hint at caf­feine work­ing mean­ingfully differ­ently in ev­ery­one than I’m sug­gest­ing…? In­clud­ing in my­self? In which case you mean this to challenge whether the ex­am­ple of us­ing sapi­ent al­gorithms is a rele­vant one?

• Valentine 20 Jul 2023 1:38 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: evoth’s comment on: Sapi­ent Algorithms

  So, even if the out­come of the sapi­ent al­gorithm is more un­pleas­ant than the au­topi­lot al­ter­na­tive (like in your caf­feine ex­am­ple), per­haps the ex­tra agency gained in the pro­cess (and recog­ni­tion of the value of this agency) is a re­ward in it­self.

  Hmm. Maybe? I’m puz­zling with you here on this one.

  I’d lean to­ward agency not be­ing in­trin­si­cally re­ward­ing enough to over­ride that kind of dis­com­fort. I’m guess­ing, but my gut says that isn’t how it works.

  My im­pres­sion is, the ca­pac­ity to be and stay pre­sent acts as a kind of an­chor that sta­bi­lizes con­scious­ness in the storm of painful emo­tion-mem­o­ries (“trau­mas”). Like, when I get be­hind in emailing peo­ple, I tend to get a kind of sink­ing and scared feel­ing. If I let that drive, I keep avoid­ing the email in fa­vor of… watch­ing YouTube. Why? Be­cause YouTube drowns out the sink­ing/​scared sen­sa­tion from con­scious aware­ness! If I just sit there and feel it… well, the prospect can feel at first bor­ing, then weirdly scary.

  But if I’m sta­bly here, in this em­bod­ied ex­pe­rience, then those feel­ings can come and grow and even threaten to over­whelm me and I’m fine. I’m just ex­pe­rienc­ing over­whelm. It’s okay!

  …and then the emo­tion sort of washes over me, and “di­gests” (what­ever that means). It loses its power. My emo­tional ori­en­ta­tion changes. It’s eas­ier for me to think clearly about the whole topic.

  Lo­cally, this is harder than watch­ing YouTube. And slower!

  But it also gets me more in touch with the aware­ness of longer-term benefits. I care more about build­ing my ca­pac­ity to weather what­ever arises in me than I do about be­ing com­fortable in most mo­ments.

  (Though I might have a differ­ent opinion if it were nev­erend­ing dis­com­fort to be pre­sent!)

  I’m ram­bling some re­lated thoughts as I think about this. In short, I think you might be on to some­thing. I just won­der if the na­ture of the re­ward is based on per­spec­tive rather than on agency be­ing im­me­di­ately more re­ward­ing to ex­pe­rience as a sen­sa­tion.

• Valentine 20 Jul 2023 1:28 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Sapi­ent Algorithms

  I like your ex­plo­ra­tion here.

  I won­dered about the global workspace thing too. I kind of won­der if the auto-gen­er­al­iza­tion thing hap­pens nicely be­cause the “sum­mon sapi­ence” thing puts more of what’s go­ing on into global workspace, mean­ing it’s in­te­grat­ing more con­text, so what­ever it is that does strate­gic stuff is ac­count­ing for more of what’s rele­vant.

  I’m just mak­ing stuff up there. But it’s a fun story. It’s at least con­sis­tent with what I’ve no­ticed of my ex­pe­rience with these al­gorithms!

• Valentine 20 Jul 2023 1:25 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Sapi­ent Algorithms

  I am struck by the jux­ta­po­si­tion be­tween: call­ing the thing “sapi­ence” (which I cur­rently use to de­note the ca­pac­ity for rea­son and moral sen­ti­ment, and which I think of as fun­da­men­tally con­nected to the abil­ity to ne­go­ti­ate in words) and the story about how you were sleep walk­ing through a con­ver­sa­tion (and then woke up dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion when asked “Can you speak more plainly?”).

  Oh, that’s a neat ob­ser­va­tion! I hadn’t no­ticed that.

  Minor cor­rec­tion to the story: She asked me if I’d be okay with her speak­ing frankly. Your read might not change the ex­am­ple but I’m not sure. I don’t think it af­fects your point!

  Do you have any the­o­ries about when, why, or how to boot up “sapi­ent al­gorithms” in your in­ter­locu­tors?

  Gosh. Not re­ally? I can in­vent some.

  My first re­ac­tion is “That’s none of my busi­ness.” Why do I need them to sum­mon sapi­ence? Am I try­ing to make them more use­ful to me some­how? That sure seems rude.

  But maybe I want real con­nec­tion and want them to pop out of au­topi­lot? But that seems rude to sort of in­flict on them.

  But maybe I can in­vite them into it…?

  This seems way clearer in a long-term re­la­tion­ship (ro­man­tic or oth­er­wise) where both peo­ple are ex­plic­itly aware of this pos­si­bil­ity and want each other’s sup­port. I’d love to have kids, and the mother of my chil­dren needs to be ca­pa­ble of ex­traor­di­nary lev­els of san­ity, but nei­ther she nor I are go­ing to be lu­cid all the times when it’s a good idea. I could imag­ine us hav­ing a kind of es­cape rou­tine in­stalled be­tween us, kind of like a “time out” sign, that means “Hold up, I call for a pause, there’s some fishy au­topi­lot thing go­ing on here and I need us to re­ori­ent.”

  That ver­sion I have with a few friends. That seems just great.

  Some of my clients seem to want me to gen­tly, slowly in­vite them into im­ple­ment­ing more of these sapi­ent al­gorithms. I don’t usu­ally think of it that way. I also don’t in­stall these al­gorithms for them. I more point out how they could and why they might want to, and in­vite them to do it them­selves if they wish.

  That’s off the top of my head.

• Valentine 17 Jul 2023 20:11 UTC

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: kostelny’s comment on: Sapi­ent Algorithms

  No. I’ve be­come very phys­i­cally aware of how caf­feine bor­rows from my body’s re­sources. There’s always a need to re­cover later. After all, there was a rea­son my en­ergy wasn’t that high in the first place! So that rea­son comes home to roost.

  I also sus­pect I adapt to caf­feine faster than av­er­age. I think I get a lit­tle de­pen­dent. My body grow­ing a few more adeno­sine re­cep­tors. So the next day or two it has to no­tice that those aren’t needed.

  But I think I’m just su­per aware of these en­ergy fluc­tu­a­tions. Mostly be­cause I trained my aware­ness to be this fine-tuned. I doubt I would have no­ticed the effects I’m talk­ing about five years ago.

Sapi­ent Algorithms

• Valentine 9 Jul 2023 13:55 UTC

  27 points

  10

  on: Aging and the gero­science hypothesis

  It’s quite cool that you’re do­ing this. Thank you!

  It’s a phys­i­cal law of the uni­verse that you will age.

  This, as a sum­mary of one of the book’s points, slams my death­ism alarm bells. It causes me to go on alert for where the au­thor is try­ing to con­fuse me with their own death­ist con­fu­sions.

  I as­sume the au­thor is hint­ing at en­tropy. How life can be thought of as an en­tropy pump, keep­ing in­ter­nal en­tropy low even at the cost of in­creas­ing net en­tropy. And yes, on long enough timescales this is guaran­teed to even­tu­ally fail. Even if noth­ing ex­ter­nal de­stroys the pump di­rectly, even­tu­ally en­tropy will af­fect the pump it­self, re­sult­ing in a down­ward spiral of its func­tion­al­ity. And sure, we could call that last effect “ag­ing” in some gen­er­al­ized sense.

  But this is hugely dra­mat­i­cally differ­ent from the claim that our bod­ies have to break down within about a cen­tury. That it’s in­evitable that the thing we nor­mally think of as ag­ing ab­solutely has to hap­pen in roughly the way it cur­rently does.

  This con­fla­tion is a com­mon death­ist re­frain. It re­minds me of the ar­gu­ment against cur­ing ag­ing that goes “Well, you still might die in a me­teor crash or from mur­der or from any other of a num­ber of things, and the longer you live the higher the prob­a­bil­ity ac­cu­mu­lates to some­thing kil­ling you… so it’s not re­ally im­mor­tal­ity.”

  As though the fact that cur­ing ag­ing wouldn’t count as “true” im­mor­tal­ity makes it ir­rele­vant.

  When­ever some­one con­flates these two el­e­ments — the en­tropic in­evita­bil­ity of death vs. the en­g­ineer­ing com­plex­ity of deal­ing with ag­ing as it cur­rently ap­pears — I usu­ally find death­ist ideas wo­ven el­se­where in what they have to say. They’ll say a bunch of ob­jec­tive and of­ten in­for­ma­tive things… and then slip in some­thing about how “You wouldn’t want to live for­ever any­way” based on get­ting tired or bored or watch­ing peo­ple you love die or some­thing.

  Often it’s more in­sidious than that. Like a gen­eral defeatist tone. “Well, gosh, there’s no real point in hon­estly try­ing to cure ag­ing, but given these bio­chem­i­cal facts we might be able to make the de­cline a lit­tle more pleas­ant in thus-and-such a way.”

  I’m still grate­ful you’re putting this sum­mary to­gether. I don’t mean any of this as a crit­i­cism of you or of what you’re do­ing! I liked read­ing through the rest of what you’ve writ­ten here.

  I just mean to is­sue a memetic cau­tion about the book for any­one who might have missed the signs based on what you’ve sum­ma­rized here.

  (I’m par­tic­u­larly sen­si­tive to these sig­nals. I was raised im­mor­tal­ist. Homeschooled by tran­shu­man­ist cry­on­i­cists. This stuff just re­ally stands out for me.)

• Valentine 3 Jul 2023 2:38 UTC

  4 points

  −1

  on: Why it’s so hard to talk about Consciousness

  This is a re­ally clear break­down. Thank you for writ­ing it up!

  I’m struck by the sym­me­try be­tween (a) these two Camps and (b) the two hemi­spheres of the brain as de­picted by Iain McGilchrist. In­clud­ing the way that one side can nav­i­gate the re­la­tion­ship be­tween both sides while the other thinks the first is ba­si­cally just bonkers!

  It’s a strong enough anal­ogy that I won­der if it’s causal. E.g., I ex­pect some­one from Camp 1 to have a much harder time “vibing”. I as­so­ci­ate Camp 1 folk with re­jec­tion of in­ef­fable in­sights, like “The Tao that can be said is not the true Tao” sound­ing to them like “the Tao” is just in­co­her­ent gib­ber­ish.

  In which case the “What is this ‘qualia’ thing you’re talk­ing about?” has an awful lot in com­mon with the daugh­ter’s arm phe­nomenon. The whole ex­pe­rience of see­ing a rain­bow, know­ing it’s beau­tiful, and then wit­ness­ing the thought “Wow, what a beau­tiful rain­bow!” would be hard to pin down be­cause the only way to pin it down in Camp 1 is by mod­el­ing the ex­pe­ri­en­tial stream and then talk­ing about the model. The idea that there could be a di­rect ex­pe­rience that is it­self be­ing mod­eled and is thus prior to any thoughts about it… just doesn’t make sense to the left hemi­sphere. It’s like talk­ing about the Tao.

  I don’t know how big a fac­tor, if at all, this plays in the two camps thing. It’s just such a strik­ing anal­ogy that it seems worth bring­ing up.

• Valentine 10 Jun 2023 16:34 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: sjeffh’s comment on: What are brains?

  Ah, cool, this sounds like maybe the right kind of thing. Your step 4 par­tic­u­larly jumps out at me: it high­lights the self-refer­ence in the an­swer, which makes it sound plau­si­ble as a path to an an­swer.

  Thank you!

• Valentine 10 Jun 2023 16:31 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: What are brains?

  “Real­i­tyfluid”—ter­rible name by the way, lets call it “fun­da­men­tals”

  I don’t think that quite cap­tures what I was point­ing at. I’ll buy there are bet­ter words for it, but I don’t just mean “fun­da­men­tals”. Or at least that phras­ing feels mean­ingfully in­ac­cu­rate to me.

  I picked up the phrase “mag­i­cal re­al­ity fluid” from a friend who was deep into math­e­mat­i­cal physics. He used it the same way ra­tio­nal­ists use (or at least used to use?) “magic”: “By some magic cog­ni­tive pro­cess….” The idea be­ing to name it in a silly & mys­te­ri­ous-sound­ing way to em­pha­size that there’s some­thing non-mys­te­ri­ous but that we don’t yet un­der­stand.

  “Mag­i­cal re­al­ity fluid” is a refer­ence to what­ever it is that the Schröd­inger wave equa­tion shows is wig­gling. There’s prob­a­bly a tech­ni­cal term for this. It’s a math­e­mat­i­cal struc­ture, just like the elec­tro­mag­netic field. Lots of physi­cists give up on the philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion and just say “We use it to com­pute prob­a­bil­ities, we don’t ask how it works, maybe ‘how it works’ is a con­fused ques­tion.”

  Pre­sum­ably there’s some­thing in, uh, ac­tual re­al­ity (what­ever that is) that our Schröd­inger-based math is some­how re­lated to. Cur­rently the math makes it look like it’s some kind of fluid or some­thing that has waves in it.

  Hence “mag­i­cal re­al­ity fluid”.

• Valentine 10 Jun 2023 16:24 UTC

  8 points

  6

  in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: What are brains?

  Also, my be­ing a cofounder of CFAR doesn’t mean I’m im­mune to suffi­ciently com­plex ba­sic con­fu­sions! This might be sim­ple to clear up. But my mind is or­ga­nized right now such that just say­ing “map vs. ter­ri­tory” just moves the ar­tic­u­la­tion around. It doesn’t ad­dress the core is­sue what­so­ever from what I can tell.

• Valentine 10 Jun 2023 16:22 UTC

  1 point

  −2

  in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: What are brains?

  Yep. The trou­ble is that all maps are in the ter­ri­tory. Even “ter­ri­tory” in “map vs. ter­ri­tory” is ac­tu­ally a map em­bed­ded in… some­thing. (“The refer­ent of ‘ter­ri­tory’”, al­though say­ing it this way just re­curses the prob­lem. Like refer­ence it­self is a more fun­da­men­tal re­al­ity than ei­ther maps or the refer­ent of “ter­ri­tory”.)

  So solv­ing this by clear­ing up the map/​ter­ri­tory dis­tinc­tion is about cre­at­ing a map within which you can have “map” sep­a­rate from a “ter­ri­tory”. The true ter­ri­tory (what­ever that is) doesn’t seem to me to make such a dis­tinc­tion.

  The is­sue is, how do maps arise in the first place? It’s not like “map” is a nat­u­ral thing-like cluster in re­al­ity in­de­pen­dent of hu­man minds.

  I think an­other way of ask­ing this is, how does refer­ence arise?

[Question] What are brains?

• Valentine 10 Jun 2023 13:48 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Cri­sis of Faith case study: be­yond re­duc­tion­ism?

  I don’t know if it does. It’s not that kind of shift AFAICT. It strikes me as more like the shift from epicy­cles to he­lio­cen­trism. If I re­call right, at the time the point wasn’t that he­lio­cen­trism made bet­ter pre­dic­tions. I think it might have made ex­actly the same pre­dic­tions at first IIRC. The real im­pact was some­thing more like the mythic re­frame on hu­man­ity’s role in the cos­mos. It just turned out to gen­er­al­ize bet­ter too.

  Post-re­duc­tion­ism (as I un­der­stand it) is an in­vi­ta­tion to not be locked in the paradigm of re­duc­tion­ism. To view re­duc­tion­ism as a tool in­stead of as a truth. This in­vites wider per­cep­tions which might, in turn, re­sult in differ­ent pre­dic­tions. Hard to say. But the mythic im­pact on hu­man­ity is still po­ten­tially quite large: the cur­rent re­duc­tion­ist model lends it­self to nihilism, but re­al­ity might turn out to be vastly larger than strict re­duc­tion­ism (or maybe any fixed paradigm) can fully han­dle.

• Valentine 8 Jun 2023 14:25 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Cri­sis of Faith case study: be­yond re­duc­tion­ism?

  Post-re­duc­tion­ist: …well, I don’t know what to write here to pass the ITT.

  I can’t speak for the post-re­duc­tion­ist view in gen­eral. But I can name one an­gle:

  Atoms aren’t any more real than ap­ples. What you’re ob­serv­ing is that in the­ory the map us­ing atoms can de­rive ap­ples, but not the other way around. Which is to say, the world you build out of atoms (plus other stuff) is a strictly richer on­tol­ogy — in the­ory.

  But in a sub­tle way, even that claim about richer on­tol­ogy is false.

  In an im­por­tant way, atoms are made of ap­ples (plus other stuff). We use metaphors to ex­tend our in­tu­itions about ev­ery­day ob­jects in or­der to think about… some­thing. It’s not that atoms are re­ally there. It’s that we use this ab­strac­tion of “atom” in or­der to ori­ent to a quirky thing re­al­ity does. And we build that ab­strac­tion out of our em­bod­ied in­ter­ac­tions with things like ap­ples.

  Said more sim­ply: in­fants & tod­dlers don’t en­counter atoms. They en­counter ap­ples. That’s the kind of thing they use to build maps of atoms later on.

  This is why quan­tum me­chan­ics comes across as “weird”. Real­ity doesn’t ac­tu­ally be­have like ob­jects that are in­ter­act­ing when you look closely at it. That’s more like an in­ter­face hu­man minds con­struct. The in­ter­face breaks down upon in­spec­tion, kind of like how icons on a screen dis­solve if you look at them through a micro­scope.

  (This con­fu­sion is em­bed­ded in our lan­guage so it’s hard to say this point about men­tal in­ter­faces ac­cu­rately. E.g., what are “hu­man minds” if ob­jects aren’t ac­tu­ally in the ter­ri­tory? It’s a fake ques­tion but I’ve never found a way to dis­pel it with ac­cu­rate lan­guage. Lan­guage as­sumes thing-ness in or­der to gram­mar. It’s like we can only ever talk about maps, where “ter­ri­tory” is a map of… some­thing.)

  So re­ally, we already have ex­am­ples of con­struct­ing atoms out of ap­ples (and other things). That’s how we’re able to talk about atoms in the first place! It’s ac­tu­ally the in­verse that’s maybe im­pos­si­ble in prac­tice.

  (…as you point out! “…a hy­po­thet­i­cal su­per­in­tel­li­gent be­ing with an in­sane com­put­ing ca­pac­ity (prob­a­bly would need to ex­ist in a differ­ent uni­verse) might be able to de­scribe the ap­ple in the terms of atoms….”)

  I think the core is­sue here is that the stan­dard re­duc­tion­ist view is that maps can be ac­cu­rate. Whereas my un­der­stand­ing of post-re­duc­tion­ism ba­si­cally says that “ac­cu­rate” is a type er­ror aris­ing from a faulty as­sump­tion. You can com­pare two maps and no­tice if they’re con­sis­tent. And you can tell whether us­ing a map helps you nav­i­gate. But things get very con­fus­ing at a ba­sic philo­soph­i­cal level when you start talk­ing about whether a map ac­cu­rately de­scribes the ter­ri­tory.

• Valentine 2 May 2023 15:57 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: Where is all this ev­i­dence of UFOs?

  In fact, as we get bet­ter sen­sors, the UFOs move out to the edge of our new sen­sor ranges.

  That’s ac­tu­ally just false, just FYI. By re­ports, fairly of­ten they show up speci­fi­cally as though they’re try­ing to be seen.

  There’s also a whole set of in­ci­dences where UFOs showed up to fuck with nu­clear ma­chin­ery, demon­strat­ing that (a) they knew ex­actly where the “hid­den” bases were and (b) they could con­trol the launch pro­cess bet­ter than the peo­ple at the con­trol pan­els. Un­der­stand­ably, this isn’t some­thing that gets ad­ver­tised very much and can be ex­plained away. It’s pretty im­por­tant to make such in­ci­dences as plau­si­bly de­ni­able as pos­si­ble given the game the­ory of MAD.

  But in terms of “bet­ter sen­sors make the UFOs seem to van­ish”, that’s just flat-out false. That’s not what the re­ports sug­gest ba­si­cally at all.

• Valentine 2 May 2023 15:49 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Where is all this ev­i­dence of UFOs?

  As­sum­ing, just for the sake of ar­gu­ment, that these en­tities were “real”. How could these events hap­pen?

  One pos­si­bil­ity:

  Sup­pose that our 3D-ish re­al­ity is ac­tu­ally a tiny part of some­thing much, much larger.

  And when I say “larger”, I don’t mean just “more di­men­sions” or “par­allel uni­verses”. It’s worth re­mem­ber­ing that our im­pres­sions of space, time, ob­ject, etc. are ba­si­cally bits of soft­ware in­ter­face that let us in­ter­act with… some­thing… in ways that seem to be rele­vant to our sur­vival. That doesn’t mean they rep­re­sent re­al­ity as it ac­tu­ally is, any more than the folder icons on your com­puter desk­top rep­re­sent the state of your com­puter as it ac­tu­ally is.

  If there’s some­thing we’d in­ter­pret as en­tity-like when it in­ter­acts with our tiny cor­ner of ex­is­tence, but what­ever that some­thing is op­er­ates mostly in the big­ger con­text, we’d find its be­hav­ior im­mensely baf­fling. Kind of like ants try­ing to make sense of an anteater, or of a storm.

  Or a kid fuck­ing with the ants out of pass­ing cu­ri­os­ity.

  The kinds of things we think of as re­sources only make sense in the con­text of our sur­vival. What if “sur­vival” as we think of it looks about as mean­ingful to mega-”en­tities” with a larger per­spec­tive as our watch­ing a rock finish rol­ling down­hill? Oh no, it stopped mov­ing. The hor­ror. And how cal­lous of us not to care about the rock-in-mo­tion’s pos­si­ble de­sire to keep ex­ist­ing!

  And I mean this much, much more vastly than with UFO-type stuff. We don’t know where the laws of physics come from for in­stance. We no­tice beau­tiful sym­me­tries and fas­ci­nat­ing cor­re­spon­dences be­tween differ­ent parts. But what that shows is a kind of con­sis­tency. A river is rel­a­tively con­sis­tent too. It still makes sense to ask where the river comes from, even though you can fully ex­plain the river’s lo­cal be­hav­ior based on the shape of the ter­rain and the pres­ence of already-mov­ing wa­ter. It’s awfully strange to pre­tend we know ev­ery­thing about the river be­cause we can give these ex­pla­na­tions. Those ex­pla­na­tions miss al­most ev­ery­thing about al­most ev­ery­thing.

  So I think there’s a lot of room for re­al­ity to be pretty im­mensely vast. Far more vast than even this already mind-bog­glingly over­whelm­ingly huge phys­i­cal uni­verse.

  Mostly we just talk about the tiny thing hu­mans are used to talk­ing about.

• Valentine 1 May 2023 15:09 UTC

  8 points

  −2

  in reply to: Razied’s comment on: Where is all this ev­i­dence of UFOs?

  In which case their be­hav­ior makes ab­solutely no sense to me, ei­ther com­pletely hid­ing them­selves, or full out­right re­veal would make sense to me, but this weird “let hu­mans have sneak-peaks but never any ac­tual proof” is just weird.

  For what­ever it’s worth: Jac­ques Val­lée high­lighted how the baf­fling & seem­ingly non­sen­si­cal na­ture of these en­coun­ters is one of the few con­stants. One I re­call (off the top of my head — I was told this one, I have no idea how to offer refer­ences here) was a re­port of some ship land­ing in a farmer’s field and then perfectly nor­mal-look­ing peo­ple com­ing out to offer the baf­fled farmer… pan­cakes. Just pan­cakes. Upon close in­spec­tion it be­came clear that they were perfectly nor­mal pan­cakes with the sin­gle ex­cep­tion of hav­ing ab­solutely no salt.

  There are other odd­i­ties like MLB en­coun­ters where the MLBs were driv­ing ab­solutely brand-new cars from half a cen­tury prior. If these are to be taken at face-value, one has to won­der what kind of be­ing goes through the effort of look­ing hu­man and try­ing to blend in but con­structs a car that’s sev­eral decades out of style and ba­si­cally can­not be ac­quired that new any­more. It smacks of the way Rowl­ing’s wiz­ards are strangely clue­less about how to pass as mug­gles.

  Val­lée’s point, though, was that these phe­nom­ena seem to adapt to what’s ex­pected of them, but always with a twist. It’s al­most as though they’re try­ing to keep us off-bal­ance as to what they are, con­firm­ing our sus­pi­cions what­ever they may be 90% of the way and then toss­ing in some­thing bizarre that doesn’t fit the pic­ture at all.

  A num­ber of peo­ple have no­ticed the strange similar­ity to DMT en­tities, and to leg­ends of faeries.

  Of course, I’m sure there’s noth­ing to these. Just statis­ti­cal anoma­lies plus quirks of hu­man cog­ni­tion. That seems to clearly ex­plain 90% of the phe­nom­ena. There’s just this lit­tle bit off to the side that we haven’t quite figured out how it fits…

• Valentine 31 Mar 2023 18:28 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Paus­ing AI Devel­op­ments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Is any­thing uniformly praised in the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity? IME hav­ing over half the com­mu­nity think some­thing is be­tween “awe­some” and “prob­a­bly cor­rect” is about as uniform as it gets.

• Valentine 12 Mar 2023 0:05 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: andrew sauer’s comment on: Where’s the eco­nomic in­cen­tive for wok­ism com­ing from?

  That… makes a lot of sense ac­tu­ally. A lot. PT Bar­num style ad­ver­tis­ing. I had not con­sid­ered that. Thank you.

  What would be a form of right-mes­sag­ing that would be less alienat­ing to the pub­lic than left-mes­sag­ing?

  How about pride in Amer­ica? An ex­pres­sion of the no­bil­ity of the coun­try we built, our re­silience, the Pax Amer­i­cana, the fact that we ended WWII, etc.

  It doesn’t strike me as too strange or difficult to do this.

  But that’s af­ter about 20 sec­onds of thought. I’m sure I’m miss­ing some­thing im­por­tant here.