[FRIAM] Alignment (with what?)

[Prof David West]

SASafrass,

How could I have forgotten Nicholas??? I would have relished reading dozens of books about his adventures.

I do believe we are in agreement, with just enough nuances to suggest some wonderful conversations if we ever find ourselves in physical proximity again.

IMO, human potential is just a localized, maybe somewhat specialized, expression of Life's potential and consciousness/intelligence is universal.

One of the nuances—I think I am more pessimistic about "groups of humans" being on a transcendent path. Reading David Graeber makes me think we are kind of an opposite path; from far more optimal forms of social organization in the past to the degenerate power-politics/rapacious-capitalism of today. But would be very happy to see a brighter side to this coin

You mentioned RAH's candy coat of feminism surrounding a chocolate core of misogyny. I too detected that in his writing. The only female characters that seemed somewhat immune were Jubal's three amenuenses, especially Ann the Fair Witness.

I was a member of the Church of All Worlds, almost from its beginning, circa 1963. When I went to Macalester in St. Paul, I became a member of the Lady of the Lakes Nest, circa 1969. It was always interesting to me how CAW rapidly transformed from the 'free love promiscuity" male fantasies in *Stranger* to an organization almost exclusively characterized by Goddess/Gaia worship.

Just an aside (a deep dark confession??), preceding my infatuation with the SF heroes I mentioned, my very first hero was Lex Luthor in the Superman comics.

davew


On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, at 2:19 PM, steve smith wrote:
> DaveW -
> 
> I do know that we are definitely aligned (you and I) in our (early) reading choices/habits and probably our (at least early) consequential tendencies and biases and the heroes of  Van Vogt and  Brunner and the unmentioned Nicholas van Rijn of Poul Anderson?
> 
> Where we might diverge is in my latent *self-loathing-liberal* sympathies with all things not-me...  through my youthful embrace of hyper-individualism (still habitual in many contexts) I came to see some of it's folly and/or toxicity.   RAH's (via LL's voice) admonition to "be able to lead" and "to be able to follow" were a good leavening to the heavy starch of hyper-individualistic self-reliance and his neo-western (pseudo-Martian) Vedic metaphysics in "Stranger") but ultimately he still left me chafing at the hyper-human-chauvanism and misplaced  superficial elevation of women (and likely others underspecified) in a fundamentally misogynistic mode/style.
> 
> I do agree that there is "a lot more to being human" than any known reductionist conception/description really seems to begin to expose.  The demonstration-by-example of AI (particularly in the form of LLMs and image transformers) does put that in stark contrast.   Where we may differ is that I (am willing to consider?) believe that all that makes us so wonderfully "exceptional" is merely an extension of what makes life itself and all things "emergent" qualitatively new at every level of reconsideration/expression and that our expression-through-tech is just another turn of that wheel of incarnation.  
> 
>  I do believe, for example, that for all our follies as *groups of humans* we are on a road to something that transcends what any given human can or does do.  And I believe that the "technical" embedding of same, whether it is the writings of the Sacred Texts (or great books) or the intricate web of rules and regulations and practices and norms that make up institutions (political, religious, academic, ...) can embody and express this.   All things digital and computational are (to me) merely hyper-facilitators of the same, and therefore *capable* of achieving quantitative thresholds which allow for the (inevitable) emergence of qualitatative differences which make a difference. 
> 
> While I am enamored (enraptured/ensorcled) to some degree with LLMs, I don't absolutely need to impute onto them anything like the implied level of *consciousness* I myself experience in spite of them being *extremely* capable *stochastic parrots* (at the absolute very least?).   But that is far from me wanting to declare that they absolutely do not represent a proto-version or a step-along-the-way.  
> 
> I am also acutely not-a-fan of being educated by (or educating) others, but rather revel in the possibilities of co-development *with* others, up to and including the uncanny-valleyed familiarity of LLMs.   Can I individually or we collectively so-evolve, co-emerge, co-arise en-symbiosis, en-mutuality *with* this golem we have formed from the electron-infused silicon-wafer clay of the earth?
> 
> I suspect you don't disagree in principle with much of what I am saying here?  The differences may be in detail and style.
> 
> - SASsafrass
> 
>> I agree.
>> 
>> Of course, Lazurus was immortal (having fathered himself) and had time to learn all those skills. But why those skills and not a host of others?
>> 
>> I too am a product of RAH, having read his entire corpus multiple times. However, my personal heroes tended to be Jubal Harshaw, Valentine Smith, Bernardo de la Paz, and even Mycroft (Mike) more than Lazurus. And these blended well with A.E. van Vogt's heros Gilbert Gosseyn (World of Null-A) and Eliot Grosvenor (Voyage of the Space Beagle), and Brunner's heroes, Nick Hafflinger (Shockwave Rider) and Lex (Polymath). These led to my early dedication to "know everything and experience (at least once) everything." Alexei Panshin's novel, Rite of Passage and its discussion of "ordinology" and "synthesis" as professions was also very influential.
>> 
>> I am not so much a believer in human exceptionalism as I am convinced that there is a lot more to being human and for human potential than what is usually recognized. [AI advocates not only fail to recognize, but deny the possibility.] This is probably a result of my involvement in the Human Potential Movement when an undergraduate and with Mitchell's (the astronaut) Noetic Institute.
>> 
>> All of this is background to one of my consuming interests of the moment: how to facilitate the "education" of human beings. Educate is in quotes because it is a poor approximation of what I mean: a synthesis of enculturation, facilitated self-learning, exploration, ...  All influenced by experiments like Summerhill and the earlier, non-Christian-centric, Paidiea movement.
>> 
>> davew
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, at 10:26 AM, steve smith wrote:
>>> DaveW, et alia -
>>>> T*he Alignment Problem*, by Brian Christian
>>> I would say that Christian's piece here acutely represents what I'm trying to re-conceive, at least for myself.  His implications of *Human Exceptionalism* and a very technocentric focus which largely avoids deeper political critiques about who gets to define "alignment" and whose values are prioritized.    It is a bias oft-presented by those of us who are tech-focused/capable/advantaged to reduce a problem to one we think we know how to solve (in a manner that promotes our narrow personal interests).
>>> 
>>> In the spirit of "anti-hubris", I was once strongly aligned with Robert Heinlein's (RAH) "Human Chauvanist" or "Human Exceptionalism" perspective as exhibited in his Lazarus Long (LL)  character's oft-quoted line:
>>> 
>>>> *"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
* *Specialization is for insects."*
>>>> 
>>> I can't say I don't still endorse the optimistic aspirations inspired by LL's statement, it is the "should" that I am disturbed by.   I am a fan of generalism but in our modern society, acknowledge that many if not most of us are in fact relatively specialized by circumstance and even by plan and while we might *aspire* to develop many of the skills LL prescribes for us, it should not be a source of shame or of "lesser" that we might not be as broadly capable as implied.    We are a social species and while I cringe at becoming (more) eusocial than we already are, I also cringe at the conceit of being order 10B selfish (greedy?) individual agents with long levers, prying one another out of our various happy places willy nilly.
>>> 
>>> I also think the *hubris* aspect is central.   One of the major consequences of my own "origin story" foreshadowed by my over-indulgence in techno-optimistic SciFi of the "good old fashioned future" style and particular RAH's work was that he reinforced my Dunning-Kruger tendencies, both by over-estimating my own abilities at specific tasks and narrowed my values to focus on those things which I was already good at or had a natural advantage with.  As a developing young person I had a larger-than average physicality and a greater-than-average linguistic facility, so it was easy for me to think that the myriad things that were intrinsically easier for me based on those biases were somehow more "important" than those for which those things might be a handicap?   I still have these biases but try to calibrate for them when I can.
>>> 
>>> My first "furrin" car (73 Honda Civic) was a nightmare for me to work on because my hands were too big to fit down between the gaps amongst all the hoses and belts and wires that (even that early) smog-resistant epi-systems layered onto a 45mpg tiny vehicle such as that.  And you are all familiar with my circumloquacious style exemplified by "I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I don't think you realize that what you heard was not what I meant".   While I might have been able to break a siezed or rusty bolt loose on my (first car) 64-Tbird or (first truck) 68 F100 without undue mechanical leverage it was hell to even replace spark plugs or re-attach an errant vacuum line on my Honda.   And while I might be able to meet most of my HS teachers on a level playing field with complex sentence constructions (or deconstructions) or logical convolutions, the same tendency made me a minor pariah among some of my peers.
>>> 
>>> Back to "alignment" and AI, I would claim that human institutions and bureaucracy are a proto-instantiation of AI/ML, encoding into (semi)automated systems the collective will and values of a culture.  Of course, they often encode (amplify) those of  an elite few (monarchy, oligarchy, etc) which means that they really do present to the masses as an onerous and oppressive system.   In a well functioning political (or religious) system the institutional mechanisms actually faithfully represent and execute the values and the intentions of those who "own" the system, so as-by-design, the better it works, the more oppressed and exploited the citizenry (subjects) are.    We should be *very* afraid of AI/ML making this yet-more efficient at such oppression and exploitation *because* we made it in our own (royalty/oligarchic) image, not because it can amplify our best acts and instincts (also an outcome as perhaps assumed by Pieter and Marcus and most of us often-times).
>>> 
>>> I don't trust (assume) the first-order emergent "alignment" of AI (as currently exemplified by LLMs presented through chatBot interfaces) to do anything but amplify the existing biases that human systems (including pop culture) exhibit.   Even Democracy which we hold up quite  high (not to mention Free Markets, Capitalism, and even hyperConsumerism,and hyperPopulism) is an abberant expression of whatever collective human good might be... it tends to represent the extrema (hyper fringe, or hyper-centroid) better than the full spectral distribution or any given interest really.   An ill-concieved, human-exceptionalist (esp.  first world, techno-enhanced, wealthy, "human-centricity") giant lever is likely to break things (like the third world, non-human species, the biosphere, the climate) without regard to the fact that to whatever extend we are an "apex intelligence" or "apex consciousness", we are entirely stacked on top of those other things we variously ignore/dismiss/revile as base/banal/unkempt.
>>> 
>>> Elno's aspiration to help (make?) us climb out of the walls of the petri-dish that is Terra into that of Ares (Mars) to escape the consequences of our own inability to self-regulate is the perfect example of human-exceptionalist-hubris gone wrong.   Perhaps the conceit is that we can literally divorce ourselves from the broad based support that a stacked geo/hydro/cryo/atmo/biospheric (eco)system provides us and live entirely on top of a techno-base (Asteroid mining Belter fantasies even moreso than Mars/Lunar/Venus/Belter Colonists?).   ExoPlanetarian expansion is inevitable for humanity (barring total premature self-destruction) but focusing as much of our resources in that direction (ala Musk, especially fueled by MAGA alignment in a MAGA-entrained fascist industrial-state?) as we might be on the path to is it's own folly.  The DOGE-style MAGA-aligned doing so by using humble humans (and all of nature?) as reaction-mass/ejecta is a moral tragedy and fundamentally self-negating.   Bannon and Miller and Musk and Navarro and Noem and ...  and the entire Trump clan (including Melania and Barron?) are probably quite proud of that consequence, it is not "unintended at all" but I suspect the average Red-Hat-too-tight folks might not be so proud of the human suffering such will cause.  
>>> 
>>> Maybe those chickens (the ones not destroyed in industrial egg-production-gone-wrong) are coming home to roost?  Veterans services,  health-care-for-the-many, rural infrastructure development, humble family businesses, etc might be on the verge of failure/destruction in the name of concentrating wealth in Golf Resorts, Royal  Families, and Space Adventurers pockets?  Or maybe we are generally resilient to carry all of that on our backs (with AI to help us orchestrate/choregraph more finely)?  Many hands/heads/bodies make light work even if it is not righteous (see pyramids?)
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Bah Humbug!
>>> 
>>> - Steve
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
>>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>> archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>>>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>> 
>>> 
>>> *Attachments:*
>>>  • OpenPGP_0xD5BAF94F88AFFA63.asc
>>>  • OpenPGP_signature.asc
>> 
>> 
>> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>> archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
> 
> 
> *Attachments:*
>  • OpenPGP_0xD5BAF94F88AFFA63.asc
>  • OpenPGP_signature.asc
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20250605/c0282d41/attachment.html>