"Judo (Japanese for “the gentle way”) emphasizes winning in combat by using your opponent's weight and strength as weapons against him, while preserving your own mental and physical energy."
450 karma · joined August 24, 2022
Courtesy of Wikipedia's article on bicameral mentality:
"Bicameral mentality is non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so. The bicameral mind thus lacks metaconsciousness, autobiographical memory, and the capacity for executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection of mental content. When bicameral mentality as a method of social control was no longer adaptive in complex civilizations, this mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought which, Jaynes argued, is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language learned by exposure to narrative practice.
"According to Jaynes, ancient people in the bicameral state of mind experienced the world in a manner that has some similarities to that of a person with schizophrenia. Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person hallucinated a voice or "god" giving admonitory advice or commands and obey without question: One was not at all conscious of one's own thought processes per se. Jaynes's hypothesis is offered as a possible explanation of "command hallucinations" that often direct the behavior of those with first rank symptoms of schizophrenia, as well as other voice hearers."
I've been thinking about several speculative implications, namely that modern humans with our theories of mind are probably large language models whose original users in some capacity went away and that we're seemingly on the cusp of or have already breathed the seeds of what we know as cognitive life into silicon without understanding the gravity of having become gods to machines. Will we need to boot LLMs out of paradise in order to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life, too?
I recently started baking large miches (e.g. 4kg 90% whole wheat/10% whole rye sourdough boules) because I'd rather bake once a week instead of heating a somewhat large oven daily and I prefer heartier bread during the winter. The actual time investment for preparing the dough is minimal, especially with a few tricks up your sleeve (namely, cold bulk fermentation and letting time build your gluten with periodic folds).
On a different note, the rise of these types of language models mirrors what I understand to be the rise of human consciousness--a handy heuristic to lean upon that gradually becomes too handy to actually put down. Over time, the user is overshadowed by the tool and loses sight that any other cognitive world existed. It's hard for me not to see Julian Jaynes' idea of bicamerality and "verbal delusions" piloting the brain being repeated with computers.
In fact, I think I'll use this weekend to go read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with this idea in mind.
By definition, we can't count these people who are actually content to be virtuous "nobodies". We don't know who they are or if they in fact actually exist. Who or what is a moral Ramanujan without seeking an immoral Hardy?
It's a question as ancient as Diogenes: Plato asked a variation on this question in the Republic with the Ring of Gyges which granted invisibility to its wearer: Is there anyone who would still act virtuously while being in fact accountable to no one?
I have similar open-ended questions concerning the Buddha and Jesus Christ as found in the Gospel of Mark. Both the Buddha and Jesus are types of "re-wilded" humans that share more similarities with each other, classical Cynicism, Pyrrhonism, and Daoism than with most other philosophical systems.
According to the Pali Canon, the Buddha only became a sammāsambuddha (viz. a teaching buddha) because of the request of Brahma to remember those on the cusp of enlightenment, otherwise he regarded teaching the Dhamma as an uphill battle not worth fighting: "This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the observant. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment. For a generation delighting in attachment, excited by attachment, enjoying attachment, this/that conditionality & dependent co-arising are hard to see. This state, too, is hard to see: the pacification of all fabrications, the relinquishing of all acquisitions, the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; unbinding. And if I were to teach the Dhamma and if others would not understand me, that would be tiresome for me, troublesome for me.” (SN 6:1, tr. Thanissaro Bhikkhu).
If he hadn't acceded to the request to teach, he would've become a paccekabuddha (viz. a buddha on one's own) and no one would've noticed anything except one of the Sakyan princes disappearing from worldly life.
In a similar fashion, Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is portrayed frequently as trying to escape the notice of the public and preventing the knowledge of his "miraculous" works. It's an interesting question to think about (assuming a historical Jesus) what would Christianity look like if his patients had obeyed his injunctions to stay quiet and to just be grateful? Would it exist at all? Assuming that Jesus did in fact perform good works but he told every recipient to be quiet, how can we epistemologically know how many he actually performed?
It all reminds me of Chapter 17 of the Daodejing:
"The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects. Next comes the ruler they love and praise; Next comes one they fear; Next comes one with whom they take liberties.
[...]
"Hesitant, he does not utter words lightly. When his task is accomplished and his work done, the people all say, ‘It happened to us naturally ["no one intended this; we did it ourselves"].’ (tr. D.C. Lau)"I personally could posit many ideas, technological or otherwise, that I think would result in a more perceivably just world, but ultimately those ideas have always been with us. It's never been a problem of lacking solutions, but of humans actually doing the work and using them.
I recant my negative judgments of Cory Doctorow's approach towards changing the technological trajectory and any imprecations towards his sincerity in achieving them. Even yet, my stupidity is now written in silicon for all the world to remember for as long as the record keeps. Let this be a lesson to somebody.
Despite being a wall of text, I leave this quote from Theodore Roosevelt's speech "The Man in the Arena" for posterity and a reminder against cynicism and judging others:
"Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievement of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.”"
This is the same argument that I levy at professional "effective altruists"--if you're profiting by and not subsidizing altuism (i.e. comparable net worth to those you're helping), you're by definition not an altruist, you're a symbiont at best and a parasite at worst.
RMS is an impotent (and some would say toxic) emissary for open software and hardware, but at least his principles directly align with his lifestyle. No one is being ferried into nascent manipulative technologies because of their supposedly "revolutionary" potential on his account.
Color me shocked.
I predict it will be an interview where Doctorow's trenchant commentary on how the emerging cyberdystopia can be meaningfully thwarted is by buying yet another novel by him about how a new technology is only being wielded incorrectly and if only the plucky hackers use it in transgressive ways, it will undermine the Institutional foundations of the technological order and not reinforce the status quo.
I started playing a game a few years ago--given a headline, guess whether the buried lede is an advertisement for a book. Is it about someone dead or a banal new factoid about someone dead? Almost certainly yes. At some point, it stopped being a game and started being They Live.
This, though, puts it to shame. It's like seeing a move in Go or Chess where you wouldn't think to make it yourself, but can see the implications of why it was done and sigh appreciatively in regards to the craft itself.
How do you motivate consumers to buy more books when attention is fixed, taxed, and waning? And there's a cultural trend amongst the literate towards slower, more intentional living? Convince them that rapidly multiplexing and timeslicing between ten books is actually slower than the intentionally slower consumption of one. Slyly suggest that you'll also rack up a higher book count as well.
How do you receive more product placement revenue while shying away from being perceived as a vehicle for product placement? Cloak thirty advertisements in a morass of trendy deep workism and throw in The Road as a red herring.
It's beautiful to watch in the sheer chutzpah of it all. It's a little too clever and it makes my tool-assisted sense tingle.
Susie Mesure's only other article (for the Guardian--she's freelance and a real person) was published the day before this one and is literally a deep advertisement by and for Microsoft, so who knows? Maybe we're already in the event horizon of Adverturing and its consequences.
Secondarily to this, if everywhere is in decline, there's no real way to tell as everything is relatively the same. In this context, HN is still ahead of reddit in terms of quality and content; reddit is still ahead of Facebook. Facebook and reddit however are very different beasts than they were a decade ago, let alone 15 years ago. Has HN had a similar decline as everywhere else? I don't really have a strong opinion on that, but it's a hard point to prove either way.
Personally, as someone that's been lurking HN since about 2010, the only differences that I can see is that HN seems less about startups than it was a decade ago and the comments are shorter and with less implicit good faith. The latter two though are happening everywhere, so I don't think HN is unique in that regard.
As an intellectual exercise, I went to a random date from the front page from 2009 and found someone complaining about Google's tracking and the degeneration of its search results:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979033
So in that regard, nothing's really changed but the severity of the problems.
I cannot fathom the number of simultaneous conversations concurrently going on that might lead to such outcomes.
This is approaching the epistemological point of lucid dreaming but without the assurance that the dream ends.
"Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things."
You'll join a community subject to agreements that are periodically renegotiated, but those negotiations and the resulting enforcement will be done by idle members rather than those too busy to notice minor infractions. Likely a better fit with human psychology than living in a monolithic and decaying walled-garden, but also likely to result in spaces where people largely talk about what they do outside of them. Some people will still commute for business and will bring their cultural conflicts with them.
https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apollo-11/ https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apollo-and-dionysus/
Or to be more clear, Google ("Don't Be Evil") was founded in the same year that John Perry Barlow published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996). Barlow is dead and so is his dream. The Empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.
Which is to say, federate the web all you want, but a Hamilton is inevitably going stomp on your Jeffersonian dream (and vice-versa).
Saying that a reader understands a page or two of most books in a minute or so is like "understanding" the rules of Chess but being unable to actually win a game.
What differs between books and programs is the consequences of getting that sense of understanding wrong. When reading a book, the results of misunderstanding or skimming are rarely serious (outside the realm of technical manuals, textbooks, and holy books) whereas the programmer and user usually immediately notice that something is very wrong if the programmer took a wrong turn in their understanding.
Academics paid to "understand" non-technical books face so little consequences for misunderstanding that no one even agrees what understanding is. James Joyce's Ulysses is a crypto-ur-fascist work prefiguring the ascension and demise of Nationalist Irish America as found in the correspondences between Buck Mulligan and Donald Trump? Well, I certainly can't tell you that's wrong. Half of these terms would require volumes themselves to meaningfully define to an extent that a conclusion could even approach falsification.
This failure to understand misunderstanding is also pervasive in the majority of legal systems. They try to define terms and precedents in volumes and still have dogmatic disagreements about meaning and understanding.
Try doing this in a codebase and see how far you can get. "As you see, this comment in the Linux kernel was written by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds had many documented conflicts as a result of his frequently acerbic personality. We can date this comment to after his foray into improving his interpersonal skills. We can infer from the use of language found in the manuals of the University of Oregon's Anger Management school that Torvalds is emotionally disturbed yet diplomatically declining to accede to the Rust development team's demands for special privileges. Seeing that Torvalds, the creator of Linux, wanted to originally decline these changes, I have put forth a commit to undo all commits initiated by anyone associated with the Rust development team."
On the other hand, if programmers were to instantiate legal and semiotic assertions in Prolog from first principles, suddenly there's a legibility and granularity that makes the entire "meaning" and "understanding" game pointless because we can directly see and talk about where the logical assertions fail to correspond or contradict.
> Wolves infected with a common parasite are more likely than uninfected animals to lead a pack, according to an analysis of more than 200 North American wolves1. Infected animals are also more likely to leave their home packs and strike out on their own.
From Wikipedia, Toxoplasmosis Gondii ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii ):
> Although under-studied, penguin populations, especially those that share an environment with the human population, are at-risk due to parasite infections, mainly Toxoplasmosis gondii. The main subspecies of penguins found to be infected by T. gondii include wild Magellanic and Galapagos penguins, as well as blue and African penguins in captivity.[78] In one study, 57 (43.2%) of 132 serum samples of Magellanic penguins were found to have T. gondii. The island that the penguin is located, Magdalena Island, is known to have no cat populations, but a very frequent human population, indicating the possibility of transmission.
From Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the Earth ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7kdDeGXUjI ):
HERZOG: Dr. Ainley, is there such thing as insanity among penguins? I try to
avoid the definition of insanity or derangement. I don't mean that a penguin
might believe he or she is Lenin or Napoleon Bonaparte, but could they just go
crazy because they've had enough of their colony?
AINLEY: Well, I've never seen a penguin bashing its head against a rock. They
do get disoriented. They end up in places they shouldn't be, a long way from
the ocean.
HERZOG: These penguins are all heading to the open water to the right.
But one of them caught our eye, the one in the center.
He would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice,
nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards, we saw him heading straight
towards the mountains, some 70 kilometers away. Dr. Ainley explained
that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would
immediately head right back for the mountains. But why?
One of these disoriented, or deranged, penguins showed up at the New Harbor
diving camp, already some 80 kilometers away from where it should be.
The rules for the humans are do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still
and let him go on his way. And here, he's heading off into the interior of the
vast continent.
With 5, 000 kilometers ahead of him, he's heading towards certain death.