[FRIAM] Divergent Optimism

[Curt McNamara]

>From the latest Future Crunch newsletter:

In this week's *we're living in a simulation* news, two defendants are
going to traffic court somewhere in the US, where they will be defended be
artificial intelligence. Proceedings will be recorded via glasses, while a
chatbot built on GPT-3 will offer legal arguments in real-time, which the
defendants have pledged to repeat. Daily Beast
<https://futurecrunch.com/r/cd4b5ad7?m=66279235-e802-4d62-a851-0e3664455e42>

    Curt

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 5:14 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> Glen -
> > That's why I mentioned it, and focused on the word "simulation". To
> > me, the parallel worlds conceptions are *covered* by David Lewis'
> > possible worlds.
> More homework... thanks!
> > When I said that in the pub the other night, some rando objected and
> > claimed his PhD thesis (at St. Martin's) was on Lewisian possible
> > worlds and modal logic. He was insistent that the many worlds stuff we
> > get from QT was fundamentally different. Pffft. I shouldn't have (but
> > did) taken his word for it there at the pub. I'm glad he stopped short
> > of mansplaining the two, though. Nothing's more annoying than rando
> > PhD candidates mansplaining their theses when you're just trying to
> > quaff a pint or two. Now that I've had time to think about it, I think
> > he was just posturing.
> It is all posturing in some sense, no?   nevertheless I haven't had that
> kind of pub conversation in a long time (we don't really have proper
> "pubs" here) but that is on me for not frequenting them much and when I
> do not engaging with randos (besides the ones inside my head).   Your
> description makes me think of the "Good Will Hunting" Cambridge Bar
> scene that ended in "how do you like THEM apples"?
> >
> > The important point is that simulation is not *really* about analogous
> > reasoning. Sure that's a convenient lesson you might teach a budding
> > simulationist in the early days. But it's really about, as Marcus put
> > it, realizability ... or, maybe some might like "effective procedures"
> > better. I prefer "numerical solution" or "equation-free model". To
> > each her own. But in that sense, reality seems to me to *be* brute
> > force solutions, space/niche-filling Twitch. Everyone runs around
> > talking about beauty, efficiency, blahblah.
>
> On one hand, I have a lot more unpacking (unraveling) to do on this
> paragraph before I can pretend to grok it...  I'm not asking
> specifically for you to do that for me ( won't complain if you do), but
> acknowledging that I am still a few universes over from yours when you
> do "simulationist" talk...  I've built, run, and specified simulations
> for many years and think I appreciate your general use of the term, but
> there is a fine structure to your lexicon that is well beyond mine in
> this domain.   Maybe nothing to be done besides continue the bramble
> here... though listening in at your pub with a pint or two (do they have
> a good not-sweet Gose?) in me might help.
>
> On the other hand, my spirit IS aligned with your dismissal of "beauty",
> "efficiency", "parsimony", whatever... for perhaps similar reasons.
>
> > But what I see are brute force solutions, trial and error ...
> > computational indulgence. And that maps well enough to many worlds.
> As I moved more and more into ensemble-steering and exploration I would
> say I developed a more useful metaphorical target for this kind of
> thinking.   I like "computational indulgence" but also offer perhaps
> "computational fecundity" as well?  I'm not sure about the implications
> of the passive vs active voice in those choices...
> >
> > And to go back to Pieter's techno-optimism, Utopias obtain. And
> > dystopias obtain. But the distributions are biased toward the latter.
> > You can only hope that you're participating in those on the rarer side
> > ... in the thin tail, I guess.
>
> I think Utopia/Dystopia is in the "eyes of the beholder" or more to the
> simulationists vernacular "fitness function".   Depending on one's
> heuristics for pruning the infinitude of possiblities (the "stuff of the
> simulation itself?) it seems that the bias can be moved (at the risk of
> missing "interesting" things by risk-aversion in one's cut-and-try
> techniques)?    I also sometimes suspect that there is some kind of
> "conservation of topias" that requires them to be balanced in some way
> (one gender-ambiguous-person's utopia is another's dystopia)?
>
> Bramble,
>
>   - Steve
>
>
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