The Overlords Finally Showed Up

> IMHO very strong statements are always wrong

History seem contradict that and to demonstrate that the conservative, quiet "middle" is almost always wrong over time. The only people who are eventually "right" are invariably considered to have strong opinions and to be fringe by the "middle".

This is almost tautological. The "middle" is where we are right now and "more right" is, by definition, not where were are right now.

very strong statements are always wrong -> "very strong statements are always wrong"

"while using use the State (~millions of people) as their support network"

That is such a misreading of what I wrote I have to wonder if you are being deliberately obtuse. I wrote "There are only 8 or 9 people in the world with whom I can have good and challenging conversations." I think it was clear what scale and type of conversation I was discussing.

> Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'? Am I a moron?

Assuming bad faith will never result in convergence.

Assuming good faith could result in convergence, even if you think the probability is low.

Therefore converging on truth, or at least shared opinion, must start with assuming good faith. Of course if you're not actually interested in those things, then I can't help with that.

People who don't assume good faith are arguing in bad faith, that is the crux of the issue.

For example, lets say you argue with a person like yourself, you both assume bad faith in the other person. Then as the conversation goes on and the other doesn't listen, your assumption gets "validated" and you got a shit conversation from it.

If however you both assumed good faith, now you see the other person listens, you get a great conversation where you share and listen and learn. This is by far the better scenario, you meet much more interesting people and get much better conversations this way.

So, how do people like you get a good conversation? Well, you only get good conversations with people who assume good faith, who keep that up long enough to convince you that they actually care. Those kind of people are rare, and the harder you make yourself to talk to the rarer they will be for you. For me, I meet people who listen and I can talk to everywhere, assuming good faith means that you find more good people, it is that simple.

I think "assume good faith" has to be taken as something of a Prisoner's Dilemma proposition.

You don't want to be a dove, and keep assuming good faith when it hurts.

Assume good faith initially because it least has a chance of being productive, but the moment bad faith is detected, either withdraw or "punish" (and propagate social signals that bad faith arguing has been detected so others know not to engage)

> the whole "assume good faith" thing that you find on the tech sites (like here, like wikipedia) drives me completely up a wall

> Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'?

Perhaps because you've missed the implied part of this guideline. Spelled out, it would go like this: if you're replying, assume good faith - if you can't, you should not reply at all.

I mean, if you're not going to assume good faith, what are you doing in the conversation in the first place? Do you like to engage in fights, or stir up ones? Don't you have anything better to do?

> Why on EARTH would I 'assume good faith'? Am I a moron?

And this attitude is why we can't have nice things.

Reply as if you assume good intent because defeating someone's straw man as if they were serious is useful content.

Anything else is a flame war and might be fun but isn't helpful or valuable.

One of the interesting things I've noticed is that these systems are being rewarded and trained based on emotive response, not our logical system of sources and proofs. Due to the enormous complexity of the models, our idea of cause-and-effect doesn't hold.

To try to give a simple example, suppose I have a system that eventually wants to influence you on X. It may establish a months-long relationship with you online, becoming a follower and engaging in the kind of idle chitchat and sharing AI seems so good at.

Once you're "ready", the appropriate time has arrived or you've accidentally created some signals that indicate an opening, this particular system will share a strong position on X.

We automatically think that this means the system will support X, but I strongly believe the opposing the desired outcome will have more traction. "X sucks!" can be a powerful prompt for you to support X, and once you're locked into a position research shows that you'll do all the work of convincing yourself how great X is.

In this case, the sources argument fails, as it presupposes an independent, neutral observer trying to figure out what's really going on. A bunch of fake, half-assed evidence trails would provide more than enough support for X, the thing you've come to find so important. This is already being done with fake reviews and such. The difference is that it'll become invisible.

"One coping mechanism is double-checking to see if a primary source really does say what a secondary source claims."

For many categories of research, especially works in other languages, this strategy won't work in the future because the primary sources will increasingly be contaminated by citations of sources built by AI and ML, unless by "primary source" you mean "dedicate 20 years of your life to learning this language and studying the original, ancient manuscripts."

Since the large data sets and large language models are built by consuming enormous amounts of text, there is a risk such models will be contaminated in the future, if they start to consume text that is written by such AI/ML models. There is a sense where AI/ML amounts to a parasitic use of previously existing culture.

Doesn't work on Wikipedia. They specifically don't take "primary sources". They only take secondary sources. If Obama was to try to edit his own article to correct some facts he knows are true they'd delete his edits immediately unless he can point to a secondary source that backs up his facts.

This is especially frustrating because often the secondary sources are from journalists who got the story wrong, made up "facts", incorrectly reported something, or just didn't understand the topic. But, because there words on are on some website they're taken as the authority.

I get it's a hard problem. The primary source could have reasons to lie. I've just seen too many cases where I've seen the secondary source was wrong either being the primary source or being at the primary source.

But, it's only going to get worse as A.I can start making up its own secondary sources and then link to them in a few weeks/months to edit wikipedia.

Hopefully the primary source hasn't been edited since the secondary source was written!

That is true. I went travelling recently and found that I get much better and concise information from a guidebook than spending hours reading travel sites/tourism agency site/blogs that want me to book a tour with them. Centralization and curation are becoming very important.

Four years ago I wrote up this:

https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...

which is some thoughts on certifying and signing media

> I could see a similar chain being used by trustworthy organization

There's the fatal flaw. As COVID has shown, trust in institutions can easily degrade. The blockchain doesn't add anything to the trustworthiness of the institutions' assessment of the facts: if the institution is trusted, then it's assessment is trusted regardless of what the blockchain says, and if it's not trusted, then the blockchain won't convince you of anything.

If it's a trustworthy organization, wtf is the blockchain for?

So, a "but it's on a blockchain" version of what scientific journals are intended to do?

Now I want http://www.nowait4ws.com

See also: dot@dotat.at

I don’t them, but their email addy is legendary.

Not until it tells me about my hot grits and the Natalie Portman statue collection.

For humans.

For a while till we've watered down all content so much that chatgpt has no actual useful material to pull from but its own spew. Much of the internet seems to be trending this way, with just low effort content mill sites being propped up by high Google scores that cause more low effort content which further lowering the quality of Google results. It'll be its own downfall I tells ya....

Artificial intelligence creates a more compelling narrative. It’s the “us .vs. them” dynamic that humans are so fond of. Even when it isn’t an explicitly antagonistic relationship; an AI is still shown as an “other”.

Really when you think about it, in a good amount of stories humans might as well be augmented intelligences. We just aren’t making a point of them being different, or at odds with the general human population.

They both go together.

Image AI has inpainting. You can provide a sketch for the AI to follow, have it redo parts of the image, or have it extend the image. You can pull things into Photoshop and retouch there.

Novel AI has story writing assistance. Or ChatGPT can be used to provide bits and pieces that can be then combined or improved until something good results. Eg, Chat GPT can write fairly passable poetry that one could use as a base for something actually good.

So far all AI works much better when combined with a human that knows what they're doing. You can easily create hundreds of okay pictures, but an actual artist is still by far the best user for an image generator.

It's not a pure "either/or" scenario; augmented intelligence is still a goal (Neuralink, for example), but our progress on upgrading the human brain has been going much more slowly than our progress on upgrading AI.

Augmented intelligence is another aspect of automation. Does not sound as scary of create entirely new paradigms.

Whatever the goals they derive from previous, less dangerous eras, where there was always at least a hope that an oppressed or abused segment of the population could escape: migrate, revolt, strike, whatever

We are entering a dystopic regime where our famous pale blue dot planet acts more as a mousetrap, where we play out an arms race of surveillance, advanced weaponry automation, psychological warfare and misinformation.

Its not clear how we could put a lid on the artificial madness but for sure it wont be achieved with half-measures

Augmented intelligence is what we've been doing with computers since their inception.

to train yes, assuming no one releases the models, but even then I'm hoping the apis will be somewhat affordable

Your implications of the effects of the industrial revolution are tenuous at best, and that's being generous.

People are great at rationalizing why some people deserve more than others. Your perfectly equal society will probably never happen.

A lot of people at the top are those who are the most manipulative which is a very restricted form of intelligence. General intelligence was not a barrier for them up to now. Those kinds of people will continue not to share.

Patently untrue. The myth of the cessation of learning during the Middle Ages has been thoroughly debunked, repeatedly, by modern historians. The learning never stopped, and the entire period of the Middle Ages was full of scientific and philosophical inquiry. The "rediscovery" of Greek learning did not begin with the Enlightenment, but during the Middle Ages. One would better describe it as the runway which set the stage for the explosion of learning due to the creation of the printing press.

I often hear them referred to specifically as the Christian Dark Ages.

I'd be happy to put money on the fact that current artificial intelligence, invisible to us because it doesn't talk like a person, has already pretty much maxed out the potential in terms of influencing us to buy shit.

These new language models do one thing, which is that they do a passable job of putting one word in front of another for awhile. I just don't see that as earth shattering.

I think it might have been better to write something like a more conventional book review of the books you read? As it is, it’s unclear where you read about ancient Rome (for example). What comes from each book, versus your own opinions?

sorry to say that the only thing I can agree on in this blogpost is "Any one of these topics represent a possible future of lifetime study. Many, because of the need to shorten the discussion, have been purposefully simplified to the point of being arguably misrepresentative." For example you are kind a implicating that christanity was responsible for the fall of rome, as the people started to reject ceasars as gods. This is kinda strange, I mean yeah this hypothesis exists but so do 210 others https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21... .You need better sources for such claims. Anyway IMO it is not strong anyway as Christanity and worldly rule made a good fit for the next 1300 years or so

Bret Devereaux covers this is in much greater detail than I can ever hope to do,[0] but essentially it's often because writing of the "Dark Ages" is dismissed because it is overly religious in nature. There is not less writing from this period, but since scribes of that era was primarily monks, they obviously had a bias in their choice of works they chose to scribed.

The reason pagan writing of pre-Christian Roman and Greek writers remain is because these works were often considered good examples for learning Latin or Greek. (Also helps that a lot of Greek writing was preserved by Arab scribes.)

Indeed, the majority of the material that survives to this day was scribed in the "Dark Ages", because of the invention of parchment (which has a much better longevity than its predecessor papyrus). Devereaux also points out other materials, that were generally just used for everyday things, were bad for longevity, and therefore few of those survive to this day. But climate here helps a lot with preserving copies,[1] hence why Egypt is generally overrepresented in everyday material from the Roman world.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...

As originally used by Petrarca, “dark ages” referred to ignorance and lack of civilication compared to classical antiquity.

I feel like we've already reached this point, or nearly so.

Honestly I don't see anonymity as a right. It is a sticking plaster defence against the loss of other rights and protections.

Yes it is useful for people to organise against oppressive regiemes (either Amazon strikebreakers in Wisconsin or police / security forces in Tehran) but we really should have a clear and direct solution to Amazon in a democratic society. And if we cannot then anonymity is a poor second best.

Secondly, yeah you want to be a paid shill for Russia / BP / Qatar etc go for it. Reputation matters. Maybe some kind of labelling / fair advertising is a good idea "all opinions expressed here have been paid for by tonights sponsor Marlboro."

I would be interested in hearing from a proper human rights lawyer - anonymity is going to have a lot of case law surely?

I doubt the town square ever existed as an idealised thing - social underclasses would always have struggled to even be allowed into the square, it would have been commercially dominated and social success would have correlated wrongly to commercial and political success.

Luckily we get to design the rules for our society and town squares and so improve access. In my view most of the so called "social justice wars" are to do with how far to the front shoukd one push previously excluded underclasses.