<div dir="auto"><div>Without knowing it this is related to why I majored in math.</div><div><br></div><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">---<br>Frank C. Wimberly<br>140 Calle Ojo Feliz, <br>Santa Fe, NM 87505<br><br>505 670-9918<br>Santa Fe, NM</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:09\u202fAM glen <<a href="mailto:gepropella@gmail.com">gepropella@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I've brutally snipped out the part of Eric's post that I want to focus on. And then I not so brutally snipped out a questionable part of Steve's post. Re: the churn being "closer" to the attention span of an organism and/or with global effect, my response is "Is it, though?"<br>
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I agree that it *seems* so because we can only work with what we can see. There's something like Gell-Mann amnesia at work, here. And those of us who think too much (or a lot) about linguistic things like computation are at MORE risk of this than, say, historians or plumbers. It's also akin to an evolutionary biologist claiming they're up atop some pyramid with the actual biologists who work for a living somehow beneath them.<br>
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We (perhaps) falsely assert that language is King merely because language is all we know, the only thing we CAN know. But there's a complex soup of mysterious forces (e.g. Hilbert's #6, or autocatalysis) turbulently thrashing about around it, generating it.<br>
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And this is where I agree with Eric's suggestion that argument is insufficient. Yes, the formalisms (special purpose language) are a pinnacle of achievement. But it's the implementation/embodiment that presents the real work (work as in social, psycho, physio, chemical, physical labor). AI Slop can be seen as fantastic by those of us steeped in "requirements satisfaction", quoted because it's jargon. I've spent most of my adult life implementing others' formalisms (to be generous with the word). Any old Tom, Sally, or Alice can dream up whatever nonsense requirements they want. Then as long as they can pay me, it's my job to make it happen - deliver to them the "credit".<br>
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But to those of us who demand some kind of frame or paradigm with properties like consistency, AI Slop looks truly *deranged* ... not even non-sensical. We have Socratic methods for kneading nonsense into sense. No, it's not nonsense ... it's just sensical enough to be batsh¡t crazy [\u26e7]. And this is where the "dopamine" (token for all the reinforcement learning biological subsystems) shows its effect. If we "get off" on the stimulus, then we'll want more of it. The analogy between AI chatbots and heroin isn't bad. I'd even argue that chatbots are less healthy than heroin. But there are functional heroin addicts. And Harm Reduction is a thing.<br>
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Anyway, rationality/argumentation is a nice-to-have. But the real work lies in the machinery that implements the "thoughts", whether that machinery is silicon or carbon based. The real enemy here is the preemptive registration of concepts like universal computation. And to be clear, it's the preemptive registration at fault, not its victims like universal computation ... the elevation of "thoughts" beyond their warrant.<br>
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I really want to tie it back to e pluribus unum. But any point I'd make about that depends on the above rhetoric. So I'll pause to allow derailment. 8^D<br>
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[\u26e7] It may seem that "batsh¡t" contradicts Eric's perception of "just void" from the other thread. But I chalk this up to how we each treat rhetoric we find in the wild. Those of us who choose their battles, it seems to me, rapidly triage rhetoric. We've got ~80 years of time. That's not a lot. Send that sh¡t to /dev/null if you can't make sense of it. Then there are those of us who "get off" on crazy with no regard to, say, our 401k. It's literally difficult for me to stop reading or listening to garbage like My Big TOE <<a href="https://www.my-big-toe.com/" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.my-big-toe.com/</a>> or Chris Langan's CTMU <<a href="https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Cognitive-Theoretic_Model_of_the_Universe" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Cognitive-Theoretic_Model_of_the_Universe</a>>. It's like pornography to me, a lifelong addiction I've worked hard to recover from. "Batsh¡t" isn't an insult but an attractive quirk.<br>
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On 8/17/25 9:25 AM, Steve Smith wrote:<br>
> /Accelleration of Scale/Temporal Compression/: This churn which once had a characteristic time/space scale of decades (life-phase) and region (scandinavia, northern/southern/western Med, E. EU, etc) is now scaled closer to the */attention span of a single human/* (hours, months) and geopolitically (nearly?) global?<br>
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> On 8/17/25 4:48 AM, Santafe wrote:<br>
>> It is hard for me to see using \u201carguments\u201d or other fairly fragile and low-dimensional tools to deal with problems until we have found ways to address these previous two big context-aspects.<br>
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¡s\u0131\u0279\u018e \u05df\u0131\u0250H \u22a5 \u0250\u05df\u05df\u01dddo\u0279 \u01dd u\u01dd\u05df\u0183<br>
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