[FRIAM] more evopsych

[steve smith]

> Both Dave's and Steve's responses are useful. Thanks.
>
> It hit me this morning reading the latest 404 media story: 
> https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-was-a-prolific-money-launderer-for-hackers-and-drug-traffickers-it-was-secretly-the-fbi/
>
> Joseph has done a LOT of work. The text I read is just a lens onto 
> that work. The same is true of good writers. I think in both 
> [non]fiction, but especially fantasy. It's become (to me) fairly 
> obvious when the author has built an entire world and the story I'm 
> reading is merely one of many lenses onto that world. I never feel 
> like the author has wasted my time if it's obvious they put a lot of 
> work into their story ... even if they're a terrible writer.
Thanks for the article link... i don't know the author, barely the 
404media publisher but I very much appreciate your references to "world 
building"...   which leads us to the point perhaps of the effect of LLMs 
(in particular) on this phenomena.
>
> This is also true of science articles. I have several colleagues who 
> seem to "phone it in". I guess it's akin to Brandolini's Law. What the 
> LLMs do in their chat mode just feels like phoning it in, vapid gum 
> flapping for no other sake.

To the extent that LLMs have no agency or volition I think this is 
accurate, on the other hand, I would say in trying to find/follow a 
submanifold in the training set they can very effectively adopt or 
project or amplify the "intentions" of one or (more to the point) many 
world-builders (e.g. Q-nuts, MAGA hats, maybe overly-woke folke).   
Under the term of art "intersubjective reality",  we have grown (at 
least as long as civilizations?) a self-supporting set of stories with 
enough internal consistency to be self-supporting/bouyant a bit 
likeFuller's Cloud9 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(sphere)> 
concept.   A thin skin of rhetoric managing to contain a large volume of 
concepts which are mutually self-supporting thermally to yield enough 
bouyancy to keep the whole mass somewhat coherent and afloat in spite of 
whatever infiltration/exfiltration the "skin" facilitates.

Kelley-Anne made "alternative facts" a household word and Nicolle 
Wallace pegged it pretty well by appealing to the DC? Universe concept 
of Earth1 and Earth2.

I suspect that for myself and other's who keep LLMs as their "familiars" 
that I am at risk of being scattered (even more) across too many 
submanifolds in the human experience, across too many Earth#s in the 
Multiverse to the point of losing all coherence.   A few years ago, I 
read PK Dick's posthumous collection of journal entries "the Exegeses 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exegesis_of_Philip_K._Dick>"  and 
found them wonderfully disturbing for just this courting of the edge 
between coherence and chaos.  I believe he was both drug and psychosis 
addled much of is writing career, but it yielded some fascinating 
near-adjacent worlds (e.g. the Adjustment Bureau).

> It doesn't even rise to the functions gossip implements. Of course, 
> some of us are less like idle gossipers and more Machiavellian, 
> planting seeds like your Allison Hargreeves 
> <https://umbrellaacademy.fandom.com/wiki/Rumor>. (Fun fact, we used to 
> live in walking distance from Dark Horse Comics.) When you prompt an 
> LLM, you *could* be like Allison or you could be like her victims.
Thanks for binding this properly for me.
>
> I'd much rather play Allison's role than have the LLM play her role. 
> When you chat with actual humans (or dogs), you're both a little bit 
> Allison.

Mary (even more than I) speaks to our dog Hank in exactly this mode... 
everything is a world-building exercise to help him know it is time to 
play, eat, potty, settle, sleep.  Like Gary Larson's universe where all 
he hears is "blah blah blah blah HANK blah blah", he listens to the 
emotional content and follows her lead very well.   I do throw in my own 
encouraging phrase now when her leading isn't enough.  "Better go See!" 
is my most common one. But my best experience with pets (and 
domesticates, and semi-domesticates like birds at the feeder) is to 
watch/listen to their world, to imagine their umwelt, their apprehension 
of the physical world we share and the intersubjective reality they 
build with one another (and I may or may not have a glimpse into?)

You and I have spoken of NLP offline before I think... and I find 
Allison's "power" very compelling, not because I want to manipulate 
others myself but because it is such a blatant thing to watch when one 
or more folke get entrained in someone else's nonsense, including 
myself... maybe most fascinating when *I* catch myself drooling and 
repeating after some "dear leader" (if only in my mind).  The WormTongue 
trope/figure?

> I guess what I need to build are facile heuristics for world-building. 
> That feels, to me, a lot like detecting the presence of latent/occult 
> structure ... evidence for intentional balance between over- and 
> under-sharing, and evidence that the occult structure is stable and 
> rich. Then pretty much anything that person/machine generates may not 
> be a waste of time.

I very much appreciate your reference here to "occult structure"... it 
is what I think I learned to appreciate about science and engineering as 
I got exposed to it growing up... the math/formulae were like spells and 
as I learned to chant (or write them) and fill in the variables and 
weave different ones together, it was powerful stuff... even though I am 
now neo-luddite feeling like most if not all is actually dark-magic 
(unintended consequences) or at least practiced as such 
(self-indulgent/gratifying greed-mongering).  I'm still fascinated by 
the myriad "hidden meanings" in the world-as-percieved as well as the 
models-of-the-world-as-applied, just less excited about exploiting them 
with too much fervor.  My main interest in manipulating the world with 
these "spells" is now to validate them rather than to obtain specific 
leverage from them...

Over/under-sharing is fascinating to me too, we know where I am biased 
on this.   You have acknowledged being a fan of Roger Zelazny's writing 
yourself... he used to hold free half-day writing workshops in Taos and 
Los Alamos every year.  I attended a few.  His best advice was "for 
every character, write a scene describing a pivotal moment/scene in 
their life/formation which you will never publish".   This style of 
undersharing and occult-gesturing was very compelling.   Once I 
internalized that I began to see it in his characters, realizing there 
were things he (the author) knew about the character that I could only 
guess at, and it enhanced the experience a great deal.

and if I'd had more time (discipline) I would have written a shorter 
response here...

- Steve

PS.(responding to DaveWs assertion, "I write because it is a compulsive 
addiction with reading having been the gateway")

> On 4/7/25 07:57, Prof David West wrote:
>> I read because it is a compulsive addiction.
>>
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