An enormous machine The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King machinesconsciousnessbureaucracy
AI-art isn’t art An Essay by Erik Hoel erikhoel.substack.com AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful. …Just as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldn’t tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art. artconsciousnessbeautymeaningai
Rationality: From AI to Zombies A Book by Eliezer Yudkowsky www.readthesequences.com The Tao of rationalityEveryone sees themselves as behaving normallyArgue against the bestLet the meaning choose the wordPeople can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it+11 More Do not propose solutionsOne brickYour intention to cut rationalitythinkingconsciousness
Tiny robots A Quote "Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots.” — Giulio Giorello Rationality: From AI to Zombies soulconsciousness
Rationality: From AI to Zombies A Book by Eliezer Yudkowsky www.readthesequences.com The Tao of rationalityEveryone sees themselves as behaving normallyArgue against the bestLet the meaning choose the wordPeople can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it+11 More Do not propose solutionsOne brickYour intention to cut rationalitythinkingconsciousness
The Tao of rationality If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao: Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened. Mystery exists in the mind realityrationality
Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally. behavior
Argue against the best To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. It’s all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you can’t settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesn’t make it dark out. argumentideas
Let the meaning choose the word What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. meaningwords
Knowing the design Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design. design
Cutting through to the truth The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement. Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon. Your intention to cut intent
Joy in the merely attainable But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated. happinessdesire
I have failed my art The novice goes astray and says, “The art has failed me.” The master goes astray and says, “I have failed my art." experiencewisdom
Taboo your words Albert says that people have “free will.” Barry says that people don’t have “free will.” Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by “free will,” on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase “free will” at all. meaning
Your map of reality Reality is very large—just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don’t mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, “Oh, look, I’m compressing two things into one point on my map.” What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it. reality
What you're trying to swim There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what you’re trying to swim. words
Applause lights Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test. For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI. If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldn’t balance the risks and opportunities of AI. Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. “We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI” can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalist—the link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light. speech
Reality just seems to go on crunching I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answer—not just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answer—because at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculations—or if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward. physics
Mystery exists in the mind Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality. The Tao of rationality mysteryconfusion
Lost purposes There’s chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find there’s no chocolate at the supermarket, you won’t stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves. It’s another matter when incentives must flow through large organizations—or worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because that’s what’s measurable; and this person doesn’t care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving. So many tactics, so well entrenched metricsgoals