[FRIAM] semantic convergence (was Free will—…)

[glen]

A friend of mine objects to my claim that our language (and maybe all culture) is, if not reducible to, emergent from, grooming. His last ... uh ... error (?) was to ask about the criteria for classifying a place as a "dive bar". I used the opportunity to repeat that all definitions of informal constructs are false (similar to all models are wrong). It's not clear whether he's clear on the (my?) distinction between [in]formal constructs. But whatever, it's all part of the game. Any demand to "define your terms" is strong evidence for Bad Faith.

I can't help but feel like the ability of LLMs to resolve ambiguous nouns in knowledge graphs (edges are a bit tricky) might help. There must be something like graph condensation that *scopes* language appropriately. E.g. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8908 On an ordinary day, the Rationalists condense into a single node with a few out links like those Aaronson mentions (to polyamory, AI Safety, etc. ... you know, normal things). But if you zoom into that condensed node such that the links in the component resolve, it can be fun and interesting. On Tuesday, a salvo against a Wolpert-style strong inference device and its ability to infer qualia <https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/p-zombies-would-report-qualia> just smells like bullsh¡t. But on Wednesday, maybe you're hooked and can't help thinking about it while you hoist pallets at the loading dock.

But curiosity is *never*, it seems, expressed well in definitions. This minor kerfuffle demonstrates that quite well: https://youtu.be/H16GBjvB3D4?si=OpriNScL6g9I1cyH

Ordinarily, I hold Jubilee in the same esteem as this guy: https://youtu.be/x3mRwqmJ6oE?si=IsA1soTT4KndkdeI. But O'Connor's generosity towards Peterson is a value I think I hold, thought I held, even if it's not The Value. >8^D (FWIW, it's weird O'Connor didn't catch, prolly because Peterson's incompetent at explaining it, that a formal system isn't really robust to decomposition. If God is a "fundamental, unified, Value", it has to be a *system* of values and value relations, not a singular one - robust to [de]condensation.)

Is it all a waste of time? Maybe. But it's a good distraction while my subconscious chews on why I can't get Llama, PHi, Tulu, or Qwen to detect the presence of the word "migraine" in a fscking transcript.

On 6/9/25 3:47 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> A node in a graph (like a social influence graph) that could participate in all kinds of unanticipated or dynamic edges demands a term.  But free will as a concept is unhelpful because people confuse the edges with the nodes.  If the neighbors of a given target node suddenly realize that many of the edges are not possible or completely predictable, what’s changed is the knowledge of the neighbor nodes, not the target.
> 
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