[edit: nevermind I see you already know about the following quotes. There's other evidence of the influence in Sedley's book I link below]

In De Reum Natura around line 716:

Add, too, whoever make the primal stuff Twofold, by joining air to fire, and earth To water; add who deem that things can grow Out of the four- fire, earth, and breath, and rain; As first Empedocles of Acragas, Whom that three-cornered isle of all the lands Bore on her coasts, around which flows and flows In mighty bend and bay the Ionic seas, Splashing the brine from off their gray-green waves. Here, billowing onward through the narrow straits, Swift ocean cuts her boundaries from the shores Of the Italic mainland. Here the waste Charybdis; and here Aetna rumbles threats To gather anew such furies of its flames As with its force anew to vomit fires, Belched from its throat, and skyward bear anew Its lightnings' flash. And though for much she seem The mighty and the wondrous isle to men, Most rich in all good things, and fortified With generous strength of heroes, she hath ne'er Possessed within her aught of more renown, Nor aught more holy, wonderful, and dear Than this true man. Nay, ever so far and pure The lofty music of his breast divine Lifts up its voice and tells of glories found, That scarce he seems of human stock create.

Or for a more modern translation from Sedley's Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom

Of these [sc. the four-element theorists] the foremost is
Empedocles of Acragas, born within the three-cornered terres-
trial coasts of the island [Sicily] around which the Ionian Sea,
flowing with its great windings, sprays the brine from its green
waves, and from whose boundaries the rushing sea with its
narrow strait divides the coasts of the Aeolian land with its
waves. Here is destructive Charybdis, and here the rumblings of
Etna give warning that they are once more gathering the wrath
of their flames so that her violence may again spew out the fire
flung from her jaws and hurl once more to the sky the lightning
flashes of flame. Although this great region seems in many ways
worthy of admiration by the human races, and is said to deserve
visiting for its wealth of good things and the great stock of men
that fortify it, yet it appears to have had in it nothing more
illustrious than this man, nor more holy, admirable, and pre-
cious. What is more, the poems sprung from his godlike mind
call out and expound his illustrious discoveries, so that he
scarcely seems to be born of mortal stock.

I find this very hard to believe. Shouldn't Chinese merchants have figured out eventually, traveling long distances using maps, that the Earth was a sphere? I wonder whether the "scholars" of ancient China actually represented the state-of-the-art practical knowledge that the Chinese had.

Nevertheless, I don't think this is all that counterfactual. If you're obsessed with measuring everything, and like to travel (like the Greeks), I think eventually you'll have to discover this fact.

I've heard an argument that Mendel was actually counter-productive to the development of genetics. That if you go and actually study peas like he did, you'll find they don't make perfect Punnett squares, and from the deviations you can derive recombination effects. The claim is he fudged his data a little in order to make it nicer, then this held back others from figuring out the topological structure of genotypes.

A precursor to Lucretius's thoughts on natural selection is Empedocles, who we have far fewer surviving writings from, but which is clearly a precursor to Lucretius' position. Lucretius himself cites & praises Empedocles on this subject.

Many who believe in God derive meaning, despite God theoretically being able to do anything they can do but better, from the fact that He chose not to do the tasks they are good at, and left them tasks to try to accomplish. Its common for such people to believe that this meaning would disappear if God disappeared, but whenever such a person does come to no longer believe in God, they often continue to see meaning in their life^[1].

Now atheists worry about building God because it may destroy all meaning to our actions. I expect we'll adapt.

(edit: That is to say, I don't think you've adequately described what "meaning of life" is if you're worried about it going away in the situation you describe)

Post the chat logs?

Priors are not things you can arbitrarily choose, and then throw you hands up and say "oh well, I guess I just have stuck priors, and that's why I look at the data, and conclude neoliberal-libertarian economics is mostly correct, and socialist economics is mostly wrong" to the extent you say this, you are not actually looking at any data, you are just making up an answer that sounds good, and then when you encounter conflicting evidence, you're stating you won't change your mind because of a flaw in your reasoning (stuck priors), and that's ok, because you have a flaw in your reasoning (stuck priors). Its a circular argument!

If this is what you actually believe, you shouldn't be making donations to either charter cities projects or developing unions projects^[1]. Because what you actually believe is that the evidence you've seen is likely under both worldviews, and if you were "using" a non-gerrymandered prior or reasoning without your bottom-line already written, you'd have little reason to prefer one over the other.

Both of the alternatives you've presented are fools who in the back of their minds know they're fools, but care more about having emotionally satisfying worldviews instead of correct worldviews. To their credit, they have successfully double-thought their way to reasonable donation choices which would otherwise have destroyed their worldview. But they could do much better by no longer being fools.

I wonder if everyone excited is just engaging by filling out the form rather than publicly commenting.

There is evidence that transformers are not in fact even implicitly, internally, optimized for reducing global prediction error (except insofar as comp-mech says they must in order to do well on the task they are optimized for).

Do transformers "think ahead" during inference at a given position? It is known transformers prepare information in the hidden states of the forward pass at t that is then used in future forward passes t+τ. We posit two explanations for this phenomenon: pre-caching, in which off-diagonal gradient terms present in training result in the model computing features at t irrelevant to the present inference task but useful for the future, and breadcrumbs, in which features most relevant to time step t are already the same as those that would most benefit inference at time t+τ. We test these hypotheses by training language models without propagating gradients to past timesteps, a scheme we formalize as myopic training. In a synthetic data setting, we find clear evidence for pre-caching. In the autoregressive language modeling setting, our experiments are more suggestive of the breadcrumbs hypothesis.