[FRIAM] Theil

[glen]

I'll choose not to listen to 4 hours of Lex's benzo voice. It's worse than vocal fry to my poor ears. But Anthropic's Claude summarized it for me!

$ ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=`cat ../anthropic_key` python3 complete.py ~/Downloads/lex_ai_lee_cronin_sara_walker.txt
  Here is a summary of the key points from the conversation between Lex Friedman, Sarah Walker, and Lee Cronin:

- They discussed the possibility of alien life, including whether aliens would care about or want to visit Earth. Sarah believes aliens would be curious about other intelligent life while Lee thinks it depends on aliens' technological capabilities.

- They talked about defining life, proposing ideas like "life is how information structures matter across space and time" and "simple machines constructing more complex machines." A key aspect seems to be life's ability to build complexity and memory.

- Assembly theory was discussed as a way to quantify life's complexity, with the "assembly index" measuring the shortest path to assemble an object. A high index indicates more steps were needed, suggesting a living system was required.

- They debated whether life could emerge more than once on a planet, with Sarah arguing planetary life is interconnected. Lee believes multiple unrelated chemistries are possible but Sarah contends their causal chains would overlap.

- Imagination and creativity were linked to life's ability to generate novelty, which may be detectable by experiments. This could allow communicating with aliens by understanding their "language" of assembly/causality.

- They reflected on the role of time, memory, information, and mathematics in physics and life. Time as fundamental and generating novelty seems crucial for life and intelligence.

- The conversation covered the origin of life, engineering new life forms, AI, consciousness, and the nature of reality. Overall, it was a wide-ranging discussion of life through the lens of physics, chemistry, and information.


On 11/13/23 19:53, Steve Smith wrote:
> 
> 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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