All of M Ls's Comments + Replies

M Ls00

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... (read more)

M Ls10

Like in an examination for most of us. That's why we fail in the time allowed.

M Ls21

[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 th... (read more)

M Ls00

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 Ls52

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 Ls10

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 ... (read more)

M Ls10

back link https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/all-logic-is-a-prior

3Martín Soto
- Chan master Yunmon
M Ls60

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 his... (read more)

M Ls70

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... (read more)

9RogerDearnaley
Bear in mind that roughly 2%–4% of the population have narcissism/psychopathy/anti-social personality disorder, and only the lower-functioning psychopaths have a high chance of being in jail. So probably a few percent of the Internet was written by narcissists and psychopaths who were (generally) busy trying to conceal their nature from the rest of us. I'm very concerned what will happen once we train an LLM with a high enough capacity that it's more able to perceive this than most of us neurotypical humans are. However, while I agree they're particularly dangerous, I don't think the rest of us are harmless. Look at how we treat other primates, farm animals, or our house pets (almost all of whom are neutered, or bred for traits we find appealing). Both Evolutionary Psychology and the history of human autocrats makes it pretty clear what behavior to expect from a normal-human-like mentality that is vastly more powerful than other humans. The difference is, compared to abstract unknown AI agents where we're concerned about the possibility of behavior like deceit or power-seeking, we know damn well that your average, neurotypical, law-abiding human tends to be a little less law abiding if they're damn sure they won't get caught, most aren't always scrupulously honest if they know they'll never get caught, and tends to look out for themselves and their friends and family before other people.
M Ls00

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 Ls00

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 Ls10

Took me some 20+ years to come up with "why we should". 

M Ls10

 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 knowle... (read more)

2Quentin FEUILLADE--MONTIXI
I partially agree. I think stochastic parrot-ness is a spectrum. Even humans behave as stochastic parrots sometimes (for me it's when I am tired). I think, though that we don't really know what an experience of the world really is, and so the only way to talk about it is through an agent's behaviors. The point of this post is that SOTA LLM are probably farther in the spectrum than most people expect (My impression from experience is that GPT4 is ~75% of the way between total stochastic parrot and human). It is better than human in some task (some specific ToM experience like the example in argument 2), but still less good in others (like at applying nuances. It can understand them, but when you want it to actually be nuanced when it acts, you only see the difference when you ask for different stuff). I think it is important to build a measure for stochastic parrot ness as this might be an useful metric for governance and a better proxy for "does it understand the world it is in?" (which I think is important for most of the realistic doom scenarios). Also, these experiences are a way to give a taste of what LLM psychology look like.
M Ls10

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 in... (read more)

M Ls11

we need to get better at policing narcissism and psychopathy, arguing about anything else is a distraction

M Ls10

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. 

M Ls10

"specific" My General intelligence is possibly above average but my maths co-processor is crap, my AiPU module for LLM is better than anyones, to the point I laugh at my own jokes in great pain, using the AiPU for maths is not great, I have a strong interior narrative, I am not a super-recogniser, not tone deaf, but have some weird fractal 2.23 mind's eye (I can swap between wireframe rotations and rendered scenes plus some other stuff I cannot find words for)(def not aphantasic https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/margherita-arcangeli-institut-jean ... (read more)