[FRIAM] Theil

Steve Smith sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Nov 13 22:53:34 EST 2023 

On 11/13/23 6:42 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> Well in that case, definitely look up the interview he did with Sara 
> Walker and Lee Cronin.
>
> I will not comment further.
>
> Eric

Gah!

Coincidence that I just finished Stephen Webb's updated review of the 
Fermi Paradox.  I didn't choose to read it because I have a vested 
interest in the answers (roughly 75 whack-a-moles), but rather a 
fascination with the fact that the question hasn't been advanced 
significantly since the Eric Jones' LA-UR of 198 
<https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf>5  (Alias Smith 
and Jones?) on the topic,  which I read as a very young LANL  Staff 
Member when it was published internally.  Or the Drake equation since 
1961?   It was also fascinating to be re-introduced to Knuth's Up-Arrow 
notatio <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation>n for 
expressing excruciatingly large numbers....

At the time it seemed like we hadn't been asking the question long 
enough (~40 years) for the answers to mean much (have much 
relevance?)... 40ish years later is only 2X longer yet the technical 
progress (e.g. SETI/Hubble/Webb/Deep Machine Learning/...) the silence 
of the cosmos seems significantly more pregnant?

I've given Walker/Cronin/Fridman about 70 minutes so far and my head 
hurts (in the best way)...  and I'm clearly over my head in beaucoup 
ways...   though I may not be able to stop and it will be definitely one 
of those "4 hours I will never be able to, nor want to, get back?)

    she said /"the fact that we can even talk here is a result of the
    fact that we can exchange structures in assembly space"
    /

statements like this and implied references to abstractions like Godel 
Numbering on Assembly Indices and Kauffman's NK model, casual graphs ala 
Glymour or Perl,  L-systems, Wheeler's It-to-Bit and a spectrum from 
discovered to invented, leave me (yet more) painfully aware of how over 
my head I am...  I dismissed SFI's "interplanetary" announcements back 
when (2019) as unserious but with Ted Chiang's "Arrival" at SFI in light 
of his "Story of your Life" and the

In a few months/years I expect this type of discussion could as easily 
be actors reading a GPT-X script which entirely captures the stylization 
of a serious discussion without being (necessarily?) serious at all and 
perhaps *nobody* could tell?

The intersection of /possibility/ and /probability/ spaces seems to 
define/imply something about what I said at earlier about the difference 
between memory/imagination, past/future?  (/Will, Qualia, ???/)

I'm suspect I should follow your lead and not comment further (for 
entirely different reasons)...  If I really want to hurt myself (some 
more) I should probably cue up Fridman's interview with Wolfram back to 
back with this one.  At this rate I doubt I will ever get around to his 
interviews with Netanyahu and Kushner or Rogan...

Lex just commented "/discovering wisdom through nuanced disagreement/?" 
and it seems to be good support for Glen's agonism...

Argh...  "why does head hurt when Hulk try to think?"  maybe I should 
sign up for the Neuralink Beta and get the GPT-shield to go with it?  
With a power-tower count of components

                                            (./... must... stop... now.../ )


>
>
>
>> On Nov 13, 2023, at 5:57 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 11/13/23 12:06 PM, glen wrote:
>>> You might want to check the Gurometer. Lex has an entry:
>>>
>>> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Oe-af4_OmzLJavktcSKGfP0wmxCX0ppP8n_Tvi9l_yc/edit?usp=sharing 
>>>
>>>
>>> While Lex's scores are relatively low compared to some of the wackos 
>>> on the list, we are known by association. And many of Lex's guests 
>>> score relatively high.
>>
>> Fascinating resource,  thanks!  You are a veritable font (fount) of 
>> things like this that I should probably be able to find for myself.
>>
>> I had to look a little to find a key to the columns of the  table, I 
>> don't know if this is the preferred or only one, but it seemed close 
>> enough to be useful for my purposes:
>>
>>     https://techhenzy.com/gurometer/
>>
>> I haven't listened to enough of Lex's podcasts (did I mention 1-2 
>> hours each?!) to be able to evaluate what his "coupling" is with his 
>> guests... even without the GuruMeter I felt that theme ("known by 
>> association") from the more prominent/recent interviewees he has 
>> engaged... but my contingent judgement of the *content* and *style* 
>> of the interviews counterbalanced that almost to an extreme.   Which 
>> is why I brought it up here.
>>
>> Implicit but likely opaque/arcane to your own references to community 
>> (self) policing and ?agonism?, I feel (with limited experience so 
>> far) that Fridman may well provide a regulating role within some 
>> community (of Galaxy-Brain Gurus?)...
>>
>> I doubt I will get the 'round t'uits but it seems like there is a 
>> tensor product to be explored among these folks and their various 
>> interactions with one another...   something interesting might 
>> emerge? Maybe this only occurs to me because Lex is more of a 
>> coupling agent than a primary source of any ideas/theories/positions 
>> from what I've seen so far. I haven't investigated the GuruMeter guys 
>> enough to understand their methods but I take it for granted they are 
>> not unserious in this work.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> On 11/13/23 10:08, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>> It seems (maybe only to me?) that "will" is what defines the 
>>>> intersection of memory and imagination?   The 
>>>> free-will-less-ness-ers among us (ala Sopolsky 
>>>> <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/24/determined-life-without-free-will-by-robert-sapolsky-review-the-hard-science-of-decisions>) 
>>>> may find this an entirely specious thing to consider or discuss 
>>>> (though without free will, what means "specious" or "discuss" or 
>>>> "consider" sans free-will?).
>>>>
>>>> I recently discovered Lex Fridman's podcasts 
>>>> <https://lexfridman.com/podcast/> and was quite surprised by 
>>>> several things (albeit with very limited sampling... all of his 
>>>> most recent interview with Musk and a bit of his interview with 
>>>> Isaacson and about half of the Harari one):   I don't significantly 
>>>> disagree with the general mistrust of Musk in his Autistic-ish 
>>>> style and affect, but I'd say that Lex brings out the best in him, 
>>>> showing him to be capable of thoughtful and even empathetic-ish 
>>>> observations.  As I understand it (from my reading of Isaacson's 
>>>> biography of Musk) brother Kimball may also be a significantly 
>>>> similar "regulating influence" on Elon.   Grimes maybe, maybe not.  
>>>> The other mothers of his children, same-same... probably each and 
>>>> all of them for a period of time or within certain frameworks.   
>>>> And again, same with the children... though maybe projection on my 
>>>> part having been moderately well-regulated in several modes by my 
>>>> own children during each of their phases (right up to their current 
>>>> middle-agedness).
>>>>
>>>> As an aside, Fridman's other interviews also all sound potentially 
>>>> fascinating... though I cringe at the fact/thought of interviews 
>>>> with Netanyahu, KanYE, Kushner, Rogan...     the commentary I've 
>>>> read around those interviews tends to skew toward "how could you 
>>>> normalize (amplify?) those A**holes by even giving them the time of 
>>>> the day???!!!?". Lex's interviews are definitely long-form (1-2 
>>>> hours) compared to today's 
>>>> tik-tok/ad-jingle/bumper-sticker/snark-pith calibrated 
>>>> sound-bitery.    I find myself avoiding them for this reason (not 
>>>> wanting to commit to listening past some of my own prejudices long 
>>>> enough to hear what they are really about?) but recognize (and have 
>>>> already begun to practice) that as with long-form written 
>>>> journalism, I can take it in bits, like I might eat a rich holiday 
>>>> meal... not try to gulp it down quickly in one sitting like a 
>>>> TV-dinner (for you X-ers, "Hot-Pocket", and Millenials == "??") for 
>>>> the mind.
>>>>
>>>> My recent fascination with Deacon's "Teleodynamics", Jeff Hawkins' 
>>>> take on the structure/function of the neocortex and Ian 
>>>> McGilchrist's updated  take on brain bicameralism (Master and 
>>>> Emissary 
>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary>) feeds 
>>>> into this question of the intersection of memory and imagination 
>>>> and the implications of Transformer Models and other Generative 
>>>> Models in general.   My direct experience with GPT-4 and DALL-E is 
>>>> significant (many 10s of hours of engagement) but still a drop in 
>>>> the bucket.  There are times when I feel that all I've done is 
>>>> engaged with an incredibly high-dimensional french-curve/bezier 
>>>> spline and thereby been able to smoothly interpolate/extrapolate a 
>>>> handful of interesting (to me) data points into what feels like a 
>>>> powerful elaboration of what is implied by said curve-fit in the 
>>>> past (unknown knowns?) and future (unknown unknowns)?    When I'm 
>>>> not totally enraptured by the (apparent?) novelty (relative to my 
>>>> expectations/predictions) of it's responses I'm generally 
>>>> disappointed at it's limited creativity...   and left puzzling over 
>>>> the question of "novelty vs creativity".
>>>>
>>>> Bumble,
>>>>
>>>>   - Steve
>>>>
>>>> On 11/13/23 10:27 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>> It seems to me that neither Musk and Thiel are interested in the 
>>>>> unknown. They are interested in doing things they can already 
>>>>> imagine.    For Musk I thought that was because it is how he 
>>>>> raises money.   Now I think he is not imagining consciousness in 
>>>>> a, say, a transporter pattern buffer, he imagines life on the 
>>>>> Enterprise bridge in his body.   Rockets are comparatively science 
>>>>> fictiony for people that can't imagine transport without a car, so 
>>>>> he gets some points for that.
>>>>>> On Nov 13, 2023, at 10:11 AM, glen<gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There's an interesting parallel between the Stross and Gellman 
>>>>>> pieces: Stross both laments and implicitly appreciates the 
>>>>>> bureaucracy of getting a book published, where Thiel's aggrieved 
>>>>>> by the bureaucracy of societal evolution.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It reminds me of the engineering-vs-biology dichotomy (yes, 
>>>>>> false, like all of them) I came to appreciate after being exposed 
>>>>>> to enough biomimetics (to kill a horse). Some of us see the world 
>>>>>> and think about how to change it, build a better world ... or 
>>>>>> perhaps destroy the world, whatever floats your inner engineer. 
>>>>>> And some of us see the world and are awestruck, hypnotized, 
>>>>>> baffled by its qualities (whether beautiful or horrifying). It's 
>>>>>> easy to give the latter a pass and denigrate the former when 
>>>>>> confronted with, say, butterflies or the Grand Canyon. And it's 
>>>>>> easy to give the former a pass when confronted with poverty and war.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But the next time you're at the DMV or arguing with some poor 
>>>>>> sucker manning the phones at the IRS, it can be useful to 
>>>>>> remember the falseness of the dichtomy. Similarly, when all you 
>>>>>> want to do is sleep under the stars and those damned gnats keep 
>>>>>> homing into your ears, it can be useful to think like an engineer.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Policy and science fiction aren't that far apart.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 11/10/23 13:46, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>>>> original.png
>>>>>>> Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From 
>>>>>>> Democracy<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/peter-thiel-2024-election-politics-investing-life-views/675946/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share>
>>>>>>> On 11/10/23 11:26, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>>>>>>> Text of Charlie Stross' talk to Next Frontiers Applied Fiction 
>>>>>>> Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023, concerning where 
>>>>>>> the techno-industrial elite found their horrible 
>>>>>>> philosophies/secular religions.
>>>>>>> https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html 
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> -- 
>>>
>>>
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