Awesome !
I'm however surprised that nobody seems to have tried the prompt :
"Do androids dream of electric sheep ?"
Not even with DALL-E 1 ?!
P.S.: The picture for this article (also used for Dick's book) looked promising, but seems like it was a "mere" "weird" human that painted it ?
https://www.fondazionesinapsi.it/orione/ma-gli-androidi-sognano-pecore-elettriche/ (it)
P.P.S.: At least one journalist (or more likely, her editor) had the same (again, pretty obvious) idea for an article title about AI, but even though it mentions DALL-E (1), they didn't think of / care enough to request DALL-E (1) for a picture !
https://katoikos.world/dialogue/frontiers-of-artificial-intelligence-do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep.html
Well, Pulp & Golden Age sci-fi was "discredited" by us actually landing a probe on Venus and realizing that it was not a likely place to find a lush jungle...
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-worlds-that-never-were/
Meanwhile SneerClub is a bit too current to LessWrong for that parallel to work ?
The above author has followed through on his project of resurrecting classic science fiction, "Vintage Worlds" is already on its 3rd volume :
https://www.solarsystemheritage.com/anthology-project-2017.html
Well, when reading this :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
Less Wrong & SSC => ACX clearly seem to me to be much closer to the empiricist side than the rationalist one ?
Wow, this was quite a surprise seeing your post here, and finding out that you've been reading Less Wrong for all of these years !
(On the other hand, probably not, an English speaker with similar intellectual tendencies and Silicon Valley tropism would probably have quickly found about it, my case not being very typical ?)
I hope that you are well ?
Heh, this reminds me of last week's jab from John Michael Greer :
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/
(And if it seems paradoxical to you that a Druid who prays to pagan deities and practices ceremonial magic should be saying [that the universe doesn't care about your feelings] in response to the behavior of people who by and large consider themselves practical-minded rationalists, trust me, the irony has not escaped my attention either. Thank you, and we now return to this week’s regularly scheduled post.)
As for me, I've been really into transhumanism in the noughties :
mostly I'd say that the interest came from the Anglophone science fiction (Foundation, Accelerando, Diamond Age...), but then also from Soviet science fiction -
it's interesting to look at the parallels between that "Homo Novis", the official "New Soviet Man", its representation in the early works of the Strugatsky brothers, and then later their slow slide from progressive utopia to progressive dystopia starting with the novels about their "Institute of experimental history" - which I now realize parallels my own intellectual path -
circa 2010 I switched from transhumanism to "peak oilism" - hence this nickname :
Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), Peak Oil Barrel, Archdruid Report (now Ecosophia), Tom Murphy's Do the Math, Cassandra's Legacy...
So I completely missed Less Wrong at it's peak - only discovered it (and SSC) in the mid 2010's - though since I was animated by a similar quest, in parallel I've took some (current, skeptical) Zetetic classes.
Also, despite liking the mandatory philosophy classes in high school, I was so put off by having to study Condillac's Le Traité des animaux in superior education, that my interest in philosophy pretty much disappeared... and only started growing back again through the epistemology of Physics.
And, having finally decided that my grasp of English language was good enough (and having been dismissed enough times for my amateurish knowledge of philosophy), I've been recently reading Russell's History of Western Philosophy - though I kind of hit a hard wall with Spinoza's & Leibniz' metaphysics...
In parallel, through Greer I've stopped completely dismissing occultism (though astrology is still a hard pass), but I haven't really followed through once he started getting into the very specific details of USA's history of Occultism - it's just too foreign to hold my interest.
(Thank you for reading through my ramblings.)
Why do you think that "relativism is in some ways the nemesis of LW philosophy" ?
(BTW, I hate the way the word is used, "relative" doesn't mean "equal" !)
From what I see, LW actually started out focused on Truth as the core value, but then since the community is pretty smart, it figured out that this way led to relativism and/or nihilism (?) and pretty bad outcomes :
https://samzdat.com/2018/03/07/everything-is-going-according-to-plan/
So, a strategic change of direction has been attempted towards "Winning" as the core value.
Did I get that right ?
Plato was not a "20th Century "Platonist"" ?
https://samzdat.com/2018/01/26/platonism-without-plato/
"Puzzle-playing" reminds me of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions :
https://samzdat.com/2018/05/19/science-under-high-modernism/
So, that's just academia for you, except it might be worse in the Philosophy department, for all the reasons that you outline ?
As long as it's not with a bulldozer...
https://medium.com/s/story/peterson-historian-aide-m%C3%A9moire-9aa3b6b3de04
Thanks !
It's kind of funny that DALL-E 2 is so amazing, and at the same time both DuckDuckGo and Google fail to find the above (and/or a related reddit thread) when prompted with :
but succeed with :
EDIT : Never mind, it was not only my failure of thinking things through about what DALL-E accepts best, but also about how search engines work - DDG (but not google !) gives me the following as the 10th result when using the quote-less query :
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/txnrrb/dalle_2/
(which links, among other things, to that tweet)