[FRIAM] crackpots and privilege

Tue May 30 10:27:02 EDT 2023

"Somehow not the domain of peace and spirituality that I think first-worlders like to project onto first-nationers, and which might even be true for the first-nationers, since they are also from a milder time by a lot than a large extinction."

IDK, man. Are wild animals different from us in any significant way? Are they actually never lazy, never unvigilant, etc? Or, perhaps, is the attribution of vigilance (and hence never unvigilance) an illusion born of othering? A standard whipping post for me is this "Are you a cat person or a dog person" cocktail party ice breaker. Admitting the false dichotomy, dog people tend to think of cats as non-social, selfish, blahblah. Cat people tend to think of dogs as slobbery, vapid, etc. It's complete nonsense born of arbitrary delusions.

But of course, there is something to be said of the built environment. It would be difficult for a human reared in a city to navigate the Mongolian desert. But is that difference any greater than plopping a city dweller 13,000 years in the past? Are office or political games significantly different from the "games" wild babies play under the vigilant eye of their den mother? Yeah, I know. I'm putting too much weight on "significant". Obviously, everything's different from everything else. (I regret not being able to engage more with Jon's exploration of Deleuze.) But my conservatism tells me that objective othering would rely solely on coherent traits, fingers vs. claws, hair vs. fur, cortex or no cortex. A human now would be insignificantly different from a human then. If the apocalypse doesn't transform us into something other than human, whatever is rebuilt will be strikingly similar to what we have now.

On 5/28/23 11:29, David Eric Smith wrote:
> I’m not sure elitist, Steve,
> 
> That’s one bad habit that I don’t think they have.
> 
> More along the line, I suspect, of “out of ordinary people who mostly get mowed down, here and there will be some pockets that started to pay attention and got lucky enough to have time to make a culture of it, of sorts”
> 
> Wes Jackson likes the term “saving remnant”.
> 
> I happen to be in Sweden just now, and it has me thinking about sci-fi futures, ad also Nietzsche’s “last man” etc.
> 
> Also on this theme is the very interesting SFI lecture “living with distrust”, which signals things I have seen (Ernst Fehr?) and others say about the Ache and Machiguenga and other groups.
> 
> What do I think the saving remnant will be?  I imagine people who lost all the epigenetic marks associated with domestication, and took on hormone profiles more like chimps.  Or “born this way” to PTSD.
> 
> Take any wild animal, and contemplate just how _different_ they are from us.  Never lazy.  Never un-vigilant.  Or read Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam.
> 
> Suppose all the people who remain have survived only because they are that.  Unwind not only the past 70 years of developed-world tranquility, but the history of human domestication since at least the younger dryas.  Maybe a lot longer ago than that.
> 
> What is it like to have your Time Machine and go spend a weekend with those guys in their home?  Jared Diamond would be jealous.  Somehow not the domain of peace and spirituality that I think first-worlders like to project onto first-nationers, and which might even be true for the first-nationers, since they are also from a milder time by a lot than a large extinction.
> 
> I wish I had the imagination to be interesting.  It would be invigorating to read someone who could really imagine a different world, and a different us, and take you there in some convincing way.
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
>> On May 28, 2023, at 6:55 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>
>> Eric -
>>
>> Thanks for passing this link around here.   I suspect most here have the background to appreciate/parse this < insert Steve Martin's "hear me now and believe me later" SNL skit> but maybe not an "affordance to know" the more acute implications of it.
>>
>> One of the things I find (most) interesting in the RGND rhetoric is their (appropriate) invocation of Complex Systems ideas as well as the convergence of human consciousness (mostly from a neuroscience perspective) and the complex systems which are the techno-social-economic systems that are our energo-materio culture which is the engine that is spinning the earth-systems out of the orbits they were in pre-anthropocene (150 or 15000 years?)
>>
>> I may be reading them wrong, but this feels like "yet another" elitist trope, this time on (nanotech?) steroids:
>>
>>     /In short, we think it’s probable that MTI civilization will collapse catastrophically but that pockets of people with a rising level of consciousness and awareness of our eco-predicament will survive and act as the seeders of a new world.///
>>
>> I particularly appreciated your pithy observation:
>>
>>     /But here, we can maybe somehow combine the capitalists and the GNDers.  The concentration in the rate and provision of services, and of the ownership of the proceeds by whoever the rulers turn out to be, leaves the rest of us free to die off in peace, and not carry on the guilt of being ecological criminals.  It’s a win-win./
>>
>> /
>> /
>>
>> Thanks to Sabine (as Cassandra) and Eric and Marcus for raising this to my attention...  queing it up to provide background for my read lead me to her Collective Stupidity episode <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25kqobiv4ng>.
>>
>> I am left wondering if/how LLMs reflect/relate to Wisdom/Stupidity of Crowds?   Seems like LLMs are literally the encapsulation of collective knowledge.
>>
>> Sabine's invocation of "Information Cascades" was interesting in contrast with entrainment and canalization.   Will LLMs in some way help us avoid these short-circuits/shunts?  Or aggravate them?
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>> On 5/28/23 2:46 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> This comment leads to an interesting angle that I haven’t heard.
>>> Bill Rees, whom you can find here:
>>> <d8f080_78c1ab7b00b045ff9bbc01a273b00173~mv2.jpg>
>>> Home | The REAL Green New Deal Project <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,s4xLfGynLIjkrUt9NbN7gTjzG9OOoaJe64vBX3p4819H6jFz9AJSSe-qv9yDN4qwXF8gSayAREexT0axFnHBthp_EmNYm91Bl5Edsist24GG&typo=1>
>>> realgnd.org <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,mLU-zLi9KLRqdV1LCSsLf4xAqRPWhhLSvzK0ajNxs-Bl31f_tDo3AuTO8FftJArhBwcEpVAtKd58f8Nn8HWN8QWG-poN1K4CsHllfzctVyYuePFkCMo,&typo=1>
>>>
>>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,ui2uypSQ13uMOEz7hzM4YulUakJ2dduLZEW4fMauG5gh85fLSDmPC9mu3saCYT5TA1zSp3f4E7hrdi7Iu-Yxbt88L44PzeI9TxTtDQBN6mNsS-h87nJxhCE,&typo=1>
>>> writes numerous papers about how 90% of us need to die, or that this is just what will happen whether we articulate such a need or not.  I won’t go so far as to say that Rees “wants” 90% of us to die (see the smiling grandfatherly bearded ecologist photo in the pages), but after a long life of writing Jeremiads and not seeing the world change its ways, he seems so defeated by frustration that I read in him a deep and now constitutive misanthropy.
>>>
>>> (btw: the Real GND website is best read while listening to Sabine Hossenfelder’s song My Name is Cassandra, Prophet of the Dark.  Thanks Marcus for making me aware of her oeuvre, I had never noticed it.)
>>>
>>> Usually, the problem with the bait-and-switch of new technologies is “look, it will save so much labor we will all have leisure to be creative while still having comfortable levels of consumption”, when what actually happens is classic Marx: the few who can enclose the new services, either because they are exclusive or just through market-gravitational effects, now own an even larger sector of all income, and the expanding remnant is made increasingly desperate.
>>>
>>> But here, we can maybe somehow combine the capitalists and the GNDers.  The concentration in the rate and provision of services, and of the ownership of the proceeds by whoever the rulers turn out to be, leaves the rest of us free to die off in peace, and not carry on the guilt of being ecological criminals.  It’s a win-win.
>>>
>>> I worry that that story is probably incomplete, and maybe thereby wrong.  The concentrating advantage of advanced autocomplete services might only be a transient while our current stock of primary knowledge is “enough” and “not fully mined”.  Maybe all the inefficient activity of ordinary people is somehow a diffuse source that actually expands the primary base.  Certainly my impression of ecological organizations is that, below any small population of charismatic megafauna, there is a whole pyramid that goes down to an astonishing number of nitrogen-fixer bacteria.
>>>
>>> But I don’t know, what organizations are necessary by physical, mathematical, and biological laws, and which might be possible that we just haven’t ever seen before.
>>>
>>> Eric
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On May 28, 2023, at 7:27 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Looking at the recent rapid release of open source LLM systems like Falcon and Mosaic ML, Llama, etc. there is more going-on than titans like Microsoft, and Google battling it out with giant closed systems.  These are human know-how crystalized into open-source deliverables.  Why not share knowledge representations in this way?   Consider the cost and time that goes into medical or legal training.   Sure the energy requirements of digital systems are high, but so are the energy expenditures of a planet full of humans.
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
>>>> *Sent:*Friday, May 26, 2023 2:06 PM
>>>> *To:*friam at redfish.com<friam at redfish.com>
>>>> *Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] crackpots and privilege
>>>>
>>>>> My grandsons' girlfriends (twenty-somethings) say that they think babies are disgusting.  I hope they change their minds.  In any case, what does a shortage of babies have to do with AI?
>>>> Babies *are* (can be) disgusting, but same for puppies, kitties, and garden-soil from the right (wrong) perspective!
>>>> Maybe the point is "nobody left for the AI overlords to lord over" ?
>>>> I think the key is "existential threat"...    I didn't look for Schmidt's statement anywhere, so I'm just speculating that maybe he's doing a mild echo of Musk's idea that a collapsing (first) world population is somehow a *bigger* existential threat?
>>>> With my techhead hat on I am inclined to imagine that AI will help me (well, not ME anymore, but people vaguely like who I once thought I was or wanted to be) solve micro-techonomic problems like the ones that lead to Teflon(tm) and Velcro(tm) and higher density/faster-charge EV batteries, and higher density/dynamic range pixel-displays, and neural lace to wire (grow?) into my brain/ganglia, and microbes that can convert moon/mars-dust to Soylent/Huel/Water/??? etc.
>>>> My PsychoHistory hatted self (Asimov - Foundation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)>and thenon-fictional variant <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#:~:text=Psychohistory%20is%20an%20amalgam%20of,stated%20intention%20and%20actual%20behavior.>) is inclined to imagine that AI *can* help with the "big problems", the ones nominally too large, too interdisciplinarian, too obtuse, too "wycked" (In Complexity Science jargon), possibly too counter-intuitive for most (any?) human or group of humans to grasp.
>>>> My Ned Ludd (very tight by definition?) hat has me thinking more down the rabbit holes of worst-case scenarios where all the arrogant, narcissistic @$$h0ii3z of the world (starting at the top with those whose names start with Pu Tr Be Zu Mu(r/s) Ne De ... and staggering down the hierarchy of potency and scope to most of us here most of the time) think they "know what is best" and put their resources to using the AI lever to "make it so"...
>>>> Even (especially) me, I constantly imagine that "if they made ME King" (or to the point, if *I* was the/wormtongue/in the AI Overlord's ear) that I would "make the world safe and happy for everyone, ever after with no unintended consequences or unpleasant side effects".
>>>> One *might* guess that the smartest thinkers in the most grounded, thoughtful, gentle think-tanks (e.g.  in a Tibetan Lamasary or the "Club of Rome" or SIPRI or CESR or the Justice League of America or the people who task "jewish space lasers" or ??? ) would be practicing their AI-whispering skills right now. Maybe tasking Marcus' Quantum Computer with "the hard problem of universal consciousness"?
>>>>
>>>>  An up-to-date version of Asimov's9 Billion Names of God <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God>?
>>>>>
>>>>> ---
>>>>> Frank C. Wimberly
>>>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>>>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>>>>
>>>>> 505 670-9918
>>>>> Santa Fe, NM
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:48 PM Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org <mailto:rec at elf.org>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>     Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today.  It's headlined "Society's refusal to have enough babies is what will save it from the existential threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt says".  The headline is accompanied by a very serious head shot of Eric.  Nice try, Google, but you're not sucking me down that rabbit hole.
>>>>>
>>>>>     Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the rationality of disaster prepping and wrote an epic novel about it 40 years ago in Catalan.  The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol is available in English translation and as an ebook onoverdrive.com <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2foverdrive.com&c=E,1,qiLuQHPdYM-73PUnxLjrSTzI76V8rfL6yb0_zHcdufFpFa1_kCTZkOyfYIh_N_0ysaWtjxXmwlL7kj8mmwGK2wfSP_01M-8QKT_yUEwBhHUL1Wuk-x_ACQBsspQ,&typo=1>at your local library.  The narrator crosses refugee swamped Barcelona to check on his mom and gets sent off by her to a McMansion'ed medieval monastery high in the Pyrenees where the elite are amusing themselves with stories while awaiting the resolution of the first war of entertainment.  Lots of stories about themselves and their friends and acquaintances.
>>>>>

-- 
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