[FRIAM] lurking

Mon Nov 1 16:41:47 EDT 2021

Marcus -

Thanks for the reference to Harari's interview on 60 min.   I haven't 
read his books but have read reviews of them as well as shorter pieces 
of his work and am impressed.   I'm not yet tangled up in much concern 
about AI vs Humanity, though that may just be willful ignorance on my 
part.  Maybe his 60 min's interview will wake me up.

- Steve

On 11/1/21 1:21 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> < It's maximizing/optimizing that's to blame. Gaming is objective-neutral. In some sense, so is maximizing, just a little less neutral (by 1 dimension, I guess). Given that we're embedded in a wannabe meritocracy, gaming is miscast as maximizing and maximization is fixated on merit. And merit is fixated on clicked Likes and money. >
>
> Yuval Harari was on 60 minutes last night and made a distinction between consciousness and intelligence as it relates to AI.   He raised a red flag about artificial systems becoming intelligent (and eventually more than humans) but having no consciousness, and that should be cause for concern.
>
> Well, it seems to me people are becoming more intelligent too, but relatively less conscious.
>
> I don't think there is getting away from optimization.  However, I'd define a conscious agent as one that defines its own objectives and meta objectives.  It isn't clear to me why a person like Harari would think machines couldn't do that.   Perhaps all he is saying is that machines haven't yet been allowed to self-organize at scale?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 10:49 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>
> Excellent! I agree completely. When behavior like Blue Sky thinking is encouraged ... rewarded, even ... you end up with Blue Sky thinkers unaware of their own ignorance. I watched both these vids during my workout this morning:
>
> "Why ignorance fails to recognize itself" Featuring David Dunning https://youtu.be/ErkhYq13VVE
>
> How the U.S. Keeps Losing its Wars
> https://youtu.be/SmpkdPm9eeQ
>
> Both are good examples of the dark side of gaming. And the statistification of work environments has successes as well as failures. Thanks to Deming <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming> et al for the horror show that is Amazon.
>
> But I don't blame gaming. Gaming is older than God. It's maximizing/optimizing that's to blame. Gaming is objective-neutral. In some sense, so is maximizing, just a little less neutral (by 1 dimension, I guess). Given that we're embedded in a wannabe meritocracy, gaming is miscast as maximizing and maximization is fixated on merit. And merit is fixated on clicked Likes and money.
>
> On 11/1/21 10:26 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> I actually don't believe all gamers are lumped into one category.   You argued against two of my so-called lumpings, after all.   I see more dark sides to gaming.   Some companies now advocate for pair programming.  Can more eyes see bugs faster?  Sure, in some circumstances.  But how many cars have two steering wheels?    And who really appreciates a back seat driver?   The goal of pair programming is not unlike one of the goals of coding tests.   They want to see how easy it is to task a person on small things, and how responsive they will be to suggestion, and how quickly an outcome will come from that suggestion.   These technical and social interaction tests are kinds of games.   "Agile" is a sort of rulebook for the game.  Would one think a great writer could be identified through these tricks?   Any good idea I have had came to me when I was alone and my mind was wandering.   The desire of managers to quantify this sort of competence and cooperativeness is understandable, but I don't think it is predictive to find people that can create actionable new ideas.
>>
>> Meanwhile, there are the charismatic types who claim to have great new ideas, e.g. Elizabeth Holmes, but not real specifics on how to do it.    Perhaps if Theranos had more bone pickers amongst their investors and staff there would not have been such a spectacular failure.    Almost every boss I've ever had is to some degree like Elizabeth Holmes.   Their business is manipulating people in the face of ambiguity.   It is amazing to me how people will sit quietly while they pat themselves on the back.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>> Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 9:56 AM
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>>
>> Right. But by citing the gamer glossary, I'm attempting to point out that gamers *are* playful. The speedrun is an excellent example. Some earnest game maker(s) put together what they think is an interesting and fun, often a bit collaborative, fiction. A typical gamer plays the game "blind", having the "fun" the game maker intended. I agree with you that this isn't really *play*, not in the loaded sense you and SteveS were using it. It's simply following along with the author's intent. It always involves a lot of things like suspension of disbelief. In written fiction, that's psychological. In video games, it's a willingness to overlook artifacts and bugs like ill-fitted textures or a failure in constructive geometry, as well as inconsistencies in the "lore".
>>
>> But after that blind playthrough, gamers ... being gamers ... will start playing, actual play, in the sense you mean it. Such play is, in software words, an attempt to find the edge cases. Here, the willingness to overlook the bugs becomes a focus on the bugs ... "cheesing bosses" ... using exploits to win at PvP, etc. While this is play, it's not the best play. The best play is when the edge cases are plugged by other players as is done in MMOs. You're trying to exploit a feature while they're blocking your exploit, perhaps with another exploit. This is no different from 2 tiger cubs learning the relationships between their body, the other cub, gravity, etc.
>>
>> So, lumping all gamers into the category of dolts who only follow the storyline isn't accurate at all. I've never met a gamer who does that. Even in the worst cases, say, where people claim to be big fans of trash fiction ... they do play with it at least a little bit. Harry Potter is a great example, just off the tail of Halloween.
>>
>> And lumping all gamers into hyper-competitive maximizers isn't accurate either. Yes, some gamers are just jerks. My dad was a classic example. He'd throw a hissy fit if my mom screwed up a hand and they lost at bridge. His competitive obsession prevented him from understanding the larger game ... the meta-game. Most gamers are not like your caricature ... even those who explicitly game the system so that they win. In office games, it's often enough to simply signal to the gamer that you know they're gaming it and they will change their tactics on the fly. Which tactics they use and how they react to your signal can tell you what kind of gamer they are ... hyper-competitive morons or truly appreciative of the world.
>>
>> The real problem, in my experience, are the people who play the game but refuse to admit they're playing a game ... insist that what *they* do is not a game or that it would be wrong, immoral, to gamify it.
>>
>> On 11/1/21 9:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Games are indeed everywhere.   Topics of inherent interest sometimes fall under the category of (professional) work.  Approaching those topics in the way I would like would be much less structured if it were up to me.  But no, work is another effing game, so I must try to keep the monsters (that is, some reliable fraction of my colleagues) at bay.  People who care about nothing but maximizing their status in the organization by gaming the system of rules associated with the organization and their position in it.
>>> Play and games are not the same thing.   Games are a social construct.
>>> The gamers are the people that impinge my ability to reflect and be creative.  They are a source of anxiety and distraction.  They work in the world of extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic motivation.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>>> Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 8:27 AM
>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>>>
>>> Ouch. Your retort certainly wins the game, eh? Congrats on winning.
>>>
>>> But if you'd take a minute away from vampire bone-picking, you'd find space to agree that nobody swims in septic tanks. So your retort is nothing more than hyperbolic nonsense. If we make it more true, more real, we can say there *do exist*  septic tank repair people. And they are often splattered with sh¡t. And they would not claim to *enjoy* being splattered with sh¡t. But if you actually hang out with such people, you'll notice that being splattered with sh¡t does lead to quite a bit of *enjoyment*. So to ask whether they enjoy being splattered with sh¡t is an ill-formed question, the answer to which is "yes and no".
>>>
>>> Feel free to pick yet another bone.
>>>
>>> On 11/1/21 8:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> Glen writes:
>>>>
>>>> < or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their Poker
>>>> prowess, this is the world.>
>>>>
>>>> Septic tanks are part of the world too, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy swimming in  them.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Nov 1, 2021, at 7:20 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Holy fire hose, Batman!
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm too ignorant and incompetent to adequately synthesize last weekend's blast of fecundity. But I did spot a thread (tapestry?) that I'd like to highlight. I'm going to list *my* bullets first. Then I'll try to decorate it with text.
>>>>>
>>>>> • gaming & play
>>>>>   - not infinite but hyper-, or meta-, games of games
>>>>>   - does accretion raise or lower degrees of freedom?
>>>>>
>>>>> • digitization ⇒ virtualization
>>>>>   - parallelism theorem
>>>>>
>>>>> • corrosive memes & reconstruction with destruction
>>>>>   - "corrosive" annealing → rigid crystal
>>>>>   - explosive bursts → escape from local optima
>>>>>
>>>>> • preservation & provenance
>>>>>
>>>>> • ideal vs practical - universities to games to a formalized polity
>>>>>   - corruption ← idealism
>>>>>   - meta-games ← abuse
>>>>>   - formal idea ⊂ dirty real
>>>>>
>>>>> Y'all left so many little bones laying all over the floor, so many bones to pick. But rather than acting like a social vampire, obsessing over all the nits that need picking, I figured I'd try to follow this one thread through the whole mess. From SteveS' challenge to Marcus on whether hyper- and meta-games are still games, to Manny's corrupted ideal of the Highlands, to Jon and Jochen's attempt to look under the provenance rug, Doug's transhumanist assertion, and EricS and SteveS' formalization of the polity, the fire hose presents to me the theme of the ideal swimming in a sea of the dirty real.
>>>>>
>>>>> The interesting games are those wherewith (incl. wherein) *more* games can be devised. All our formalizations are battle plans that don't survive contact with the enemy, including both Packer's 4 Americas and any given video game, however "nonlinear" or "open world". And to target Jochen's and Jon's disagreement directly, it *seems* fine to try to eliminate abuse, corruption, corrosive, and destructive memes. But, to a large extent, those forces are, if not welcome in themselves, inscrutably intertwined with all the other forces. It's the same machine that produces both good and bad. And that machine lives in this world, not some ideal world formalized by a (provably) myopic subset of that world.
>>>>>
>>>>> So, as cringy as is to appeal to Musk as a "great man", forgetting
>>>>> the armies of actual great people that came before ... and as
>>>>> cringy as it is to see Pepe the Frog and wonder whether it's a
>>>>> racist meme or just juvy gamer silliness ... or as cringy as it may
>>>>> be for some dork to be proud of their Poker prowess, this is the
>>>>> world. And it's reflectively both horrifying and miraculous that
>>>>> many of us can't enjoy that world in all its repulsive glory. Ha!
>>>>> Maybe it's not a thread, after all, but mere imputation on my part.
>>>>>> 8^D
> --
> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>
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