Here’s an example involving two idols of Capital-S Skepticism: biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. In his book A Universe from Nothing, Krauss claims that physics is answering the old question, Why is there something rather than nothing?
Krauss’s book doesn’t fulfill its title’s promise, not even close, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the book’s afterword: “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”
Just to be clear: Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss, a hack physicist, to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so dumb? Because he hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment. The author of The God Delusion succumbs to what you might call the science delusion.
Clipping
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web > Diatribe against skeptics
[https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-controversial-diatribe-against-skeptics]
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web > Humans worshipped gods, then fame, then AI
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35510021]
Some related pop sci-fi: in the game Deus Ex they call it “Daedalus”. A super intelligent AI that evolved to replace government. The main character has an encounter with the prototype (called Morpheus) and it just drops some fascinating dialogue for a game released more than 20 years ago.
“The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.”
“The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.”
“The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.”
“The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning.”
“God was a dream of good government.”
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web > Everyone will have their own AI
[https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/everyone-will-have-their-own-ai]
I’ve been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy recently, a near-future sci-fi epic of terraforming, ecology, politics, big history.
One of the intriguing background details in this story is that everyone has a personal AI.
Your AI can think with you, riffing on possibilities, helping spark creative breakthroughs.
Your AI keeps a running a log, and fine-tunes itself on everything you’ve been thinking about.
You can talk to your AI, like Siri. You can also read it, like a book, and add notes to it, like a notebook.
Your AI can do research for you, ambiently crawling the net for things you’re thinking about, reporting back.
Your AI can talk with other AIs, negotiating with them to get information you need.
Your AI can do complex calculations and spot high-dimensional patterns… the kind of thinking computers are good at.
The data in your AI belongs to you. It is end-to-end encrypted. Only you can access its locked contents. Yours for life. You might even pass down a personal AI to your kids, like sharing an old journal, but interactive.
An AI networked notebook. A second brain.
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web > The Hard Problem of Feelings
[https://dynomight.substack.com/p/feelings]
So, we have feelings. So what? Well, why do we have feelings? Consider this variant of our earlier puzzle.
We are alive.
We have feelings.
We were created by evolution.
We feel good when we do stuff that would help propagate the genes of someone in a hunter/gatherer band.
But feelings can’t “do” anything.
The hell?
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web > Vibing All the Time
[https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-24-planetary-scale-vibe-collapse.html]
One day, deep within the forest, Agaso, then about 13 years of age, found himself with a rare good shot at a cuscus in a nearby tree. But he only had inferior arrows. Without the slightest comment or solicitation, the straightest, sharpest arrow of the group moved so swiftly and so stealthily straight into his hand, I could not see from whence it came.
At that same moment, Karako, seeing that the shot would be improved by pulling on a twig to gently move an obstructing branch, was without a word already doing so, in perfect synchrony with Agaso’s drawing of the bow, i.e., just fast enough to fully clear Agaso’s aim by millimeters at the moment his bow was fully drawn, just slow enough not to spook the cuscus. Agaso, knowing this would be the case made no effort to lean to side for an unobstructed shot, or to even slightly shift his stance. Usumu similarly synchronized into the action stream, without even watching Agaso draw his bow, began moving up the tree a fraction of a second before the bowstring twanged.
He grasped the wounded cuscus before it might regain its senses and slipped out onto a slender branch that whizzed him down to dangle in the air an inch or so before Agaso’s startled face. The startle had begun its standard transformation to ecstasy, when Usumu startled him again by provocatively dropping the quivering cuscus onto his naked foot, as he flicked a tasty beetle he’d found up in the tree into the pubis of delighted young Koniye (the youngest of the group). Doubly startled in quick succession, Agaso was wallowing in an ecstasy, then shared by all, until he abruptly realized that the cuscus might come back to life and dash off. Then in a mirthful scramble they all secured it.
Within that type of spirit they roasted both beetle and cuscus on an open fire (to which two friends exploring separately added grubs they’d found in a rotting log). As night came on, one-by-one, they all dropped off to sleep together, entangled in what can only be described as a contagiously subdued rapture coalescence. It took many years for me to understand the underpinnings of this guileless hypersensual interactive unity (another example of the kind of language awkwardness that arises when speaking of events across eras).
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web > AI tutors will be held back by culture
[https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/ai-tutors]
In other words: the main bottleneck in education, now that tutoring is becoming cheap, is culture design.
Can we figure out ways to scale access to high-growth cultures? Are there ways for more people to grow up in cultures that approximate in richness that J.S. Mill, Pascal, and Bertrand Russel had access to?
It is not a question that has been given serious consideration in the pedagogical literature that influences the design of schools. But there are insights to be mined from anthropology, internet community moderation, lineage traditions in martial arts, small experimental schools, scenes, workplaces, and so on. It is possible to deliberately create high growth cultures, and software makes it easier to scale them. But there are many open questions. (If there is interest, I could do a write-up of my understanding of this design problem.)
Cultures and tutoring systems are complements. The more powerful AI tutors become, the more valuable cultures that support learning will be. (Teaching and tutoring systems, on the other hand, are substitutes, which implies that we can expect teaching to lose value over the coming decade.) There is an opportunity here to direct resources away from things that AI systems can automate, such as teaching, and into the more ambitious project of building better cultural infrastructure.
To be clear: I’m not saying that AI tutors, or other kinds of software, can replace humans. Most of us need the support and community of others to push ourselves to excellence and to find meaning in the projects we pursue. But soon we will be able to spend less precious human time on basic tutoring; instead, the emotional labor we do to support each other can be invested in a more leveraged way.
The education system will be slow to embrace this possibility. But others will fill. We will tend the bull.
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web > The status trap
[https://every.to/no-small-plans/the-status-trap]
When our status is challenged, our body reacts like it’s in physical danger. If you don’t learn how to manage that reaction, you may find yourself in the status trap—endlessly chasing status as a way to try to feel safe and whole.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35417702
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103497725173760
Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103627387813888
Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
From @naval’s Twitter thread “how to get rich (without getting lucky)”
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936
My note: wealth is options; options are freedom, and buying your time back. Only play status games if you’re playing for fun, but don’t confuse it with success and freedom.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35419120
when our status is challenged, our body reacts like it’s in physical danger
While it’s not 100% certain, the fact that there appears to be a biological adaptation that makes us seek status and avoid losing status strongly suggests that the author is underestimating the importance of status in human society.
For example: “we find that status is significantly associated with men’s reproductive success, consistent with an evolved basis for status pursuit.” (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1606800113)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35430512
That adaptation may not be appropriate for the modern environment.
When exposed to modern/ internet-scale communities, it could be that there are so many false-positive threats to one’s status that the advice to (generally) not worry too much about it is good advice.
Our innate desire for sweets comes to mind.
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web > Useful augmented reality
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35427852]
He’s wrong, of course. Perhaps I am biased because I am quite asocial, but squandering the full possibilities of AR to focus on social stuff is myopic.
Instead, AR should be about empowering the individual. I have no desire for “zoom, but heads-up”.
What I want is heads-up walking directions in an unfamiliar city. I want annotations of plant and animal species as I walk around the park. I want IKEA assembly instructions that make sense in 3D. I want to look up and know where any particular plane is coming from and going to. I want to know where the last time I saw that car with that license plate was. I want to leave cute messages around the house for my wife that are triggered by environmental cues (a heart in her coffee cup when she makes her morning latte, etc). I want to cross reference my grocery list with the store layout and plan the best path to get my shopping done. I want to blur out the advertisements and idiots around me. I want interactive virtual christmas decorations that I don’t have to pack away…
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web > Fears of AIs are fears of capitalism
[https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html]
TED CHIANG: I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.
Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.
Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.
It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?
And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.
TED CHIANG: And again, I think that’s an indication of how sort of completely some people have sort of internalized either capitalism or a certain way of looking at the world, which also sort of underpins capitalism, a way of looking at the world as an optimization problem or a maximization problem. Yeah, so that might be the underlying common element between capitalism and a lot of this A.I. doomsday kind of scenario, making this insistence on seeing the world as an optimization problem.
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web > Superheroes are anti-egalitarian
[https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html]
TED CHIANG: I understand the appeal of superhero stories, but I think they are problematic on a couple of levels. One is that they are fundamentally anti-egalitarian because they are always about this class of people who stand above everyone else. They have special powers. And even if they have special responsibilities, they are special. They are different. So that anti-egalitarianism, I think, yeah, that is definitely an issue.
But another aspect in which they can be problematic is, how is it that these special individuals are using their power? Because one of the things that I’m always interested in, when thinking about stories, is, is a story about reinforcing the status quo, or is it about overturning the status quo? And most of the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo. Superheroes, they supposedly stand for justice. They further the cause of justice. But they always stick to your very limited idea of what constitutes a crime, basically the government idea of what constitutes a crime.
Superheroes pretty much never do anything about injustices perpetrated by the state. And in the developed world, certainly, you can, I think, make a good case that injustices committed by the state are far more serious than those caused by crime, by conventional criminality. The existing status quo involves things like vast wealth inequality and systemic racism and police brutality. And if you are really committed to justice, those are probably not things that you want to reinforce. Those are not things you want to preserve.
But that’s what superheroes always do. They’re always trying to keep things the way they are. And superheroes stories, they like to sort of present the world as being under a constant threat of attack. If they weren’t there, the world would fall into chaos. And this is actually kind of the same tactic used by TV shows like “24.” It’s a way to sort of implicitly justify the use of violence against anyone that we label a threat to the existing order. And it makes people defer to authority.
This is not like, I think, intrinsic to the idea of superheroes in and of itself. Anti-egalitarianism, that probably is intrinsic to the idea of superheroes. But the idea of reinforcing the status quo, that is not. You could tell superhero stories where superheroes are constantly fighting the power. They’re constantly tearing down the status quo. But we very rarely see that.