I initially upvoted this post for the interesting way it was written. After reflecting more on the actual contents, though, I feel that style is being used to mask a number of claims I strongly disagree with, and that the momentum of cosmic eldritch vibes is cruising over them in a way that doesn't leave them any breathing space or opportunity to justify themselves. This could be fine, but the claims themselves are incredibly cynical, and I don't want them to be taken for granted. It is too easy, for those in despair, to let little irrationalities slip by because "everyone feels it", and treating that anguish with a grandiose literary style reinforcing all their darkest thoughts on top of 150+ upvotes doesn't help. So, I've switched to a strong downvote.
Here are some specific examples:
Through a Rightful Struggle, growing and triumphing against our Dark Impulses, we should Defeat Evil and Enact Good.
This is so tragically wrong, naive and pathetic.
No, it isn't. There is a lot of evil in the world, and enacting good at scale is hard, but this is not evidence that good and evil are ontologically broken. Malaria is still bad, and preventing the spread of malaria is still good. The rise of thievery in London is not evidence that The Rightful Struggle is a meaningless story believed only by the naive and clueless, any more than losing a battle would be evidence against the existence of a war.
I am lucky enough to live in a city where there are not many pickpockets, and I like this, and I don't expect that to go away just because the "adults in the room" are a "pathetic fantasy of the child". As it happens, "there are adults in the room who are capable of keeping petty crime to a minimum" is sometimes just true. It is not wise to believe that you have transcended right and wrong, just because you don't know what to do; and it is more pathetic, I would argue, to scoff at people who are trying to turn the vast confusing world into stories they can understand, without succumbing to despair, for being "naive".
There are more forms of escapism beyond fantasising about a Big Bad Guy. [...] Isolating oneself in the mountains, in a cottage or in video games.
These are not (just) forms of escapism, these are things people like to do. People live in cottages because nature is pretty, or because the quiet is good for studying or meditating, or because they just prefer to be alone. People play video games to escape their lives, sometimes, but others - including kids, who I am confident are not stressed out about The Economy - like the challenges of reflexes and problem-solving, or get lost in the strange geographies and complex systems, or the plots, or because their friends are playing them, or the basic pleasure of messing around on a computer.
This section really irks me, because it's taking something benign and pleasant and recasting it as a dangerous distraction from the all-consuming task of worrying about Economy And Culture. But videogames are culture! What is all this worrying for, if not for the ongoing interests of humans to take walks in the woods, to while away an hour on quiet daydreaming, to play games with each other and tell each other stories? What are you so afraid of being lost, if people take the time to enjoy themselves? Why does it all have to be "disconnected from everything that matters"? What could possibly matter more?
Most people do NOT have the expectation that if they study a technical topic, they will eventually understand how it works at a mechanistic level.
This is sort of true, but it's not universal, and it's certainly no excuse for you (the general 'you') to hold this expectation. The attitude I admire on Lesswrong is one that tells people, insistently, that you can "just do things", one which tries to compile the best textbooks on every subject because all the information is out there and nothing is stopping you from reading them. If 'normal people' assume that the world is made of magic and they can never understand it, so much the worse for normal people (this attitude would say). You can just learn how computers work! You can just develop the skills you'd like to have! It takes a while, but The Culture can't stop you.
We have built and migrated to an artificial world.
[...]
There is no myth that makes sense of it.
There is no one to fault.
No one wants this.
Everyone is lost, unable to find a home.
This is maybe a less photogenic disagreement than the above, so I'm probably making my overall comment weaker by including it. But, personally, I love living in the glitchy confusion of vast cosmic artifice, formed in the image of human desire, misshapen and distorted by their size, sprouting their own deranged interiorities. We are so small, and The Algorithms are so vast, and they care about nothing more than our petty little needs and fantasies. Tossing and turning in an endless machine of decontextualized desires, boiling alive in the ongoing manifestation of the collective unconscious. It's fucking cool. The cosmic horror of it all only makes it more alluring.
Don't tell me that "no one wants this". I want this. I like our modern eldritch deities - a hell of a lot better than the old ones, anyway. Not everything sacred has been destroyed.
Thanks, I noticed something like this for matrix multiplication (while using the builtin system monitor on my laptop to keep track of CPU usage) but assumed the fact that it couldn't do twice as much as it was doing at ~40% CPU meant I must've been doing something wrong.
Why do they call it 'stream entry'? Also, what is stream entry?
If I'm understanding, you're saying that being well-received by an online audience when sharing hidden things has less to do with the unacceptability of the thing itself, and more to do with the talent of the writer. Talent in selecting the right people to present to, framing the subject to pique their interest, and just in being plain good with words.
This seems probably true to me, but you might underestimate how big a caveat "having the skills to provide value to an audience" is. An established platform, with writerly experience and long-term feedback on what people respond well to and what they don't -- if you have all these things already, it seems to me you're already most of the way out of the thicket of feeling not-seen, not-validated, unsafe, etc. Without the grounding of confidence that you can provide value to an audience, revealing hidden things still seems pretty risky.
Plus, if one doesn't have writing talent, generalized-coming-out-of-the-closet seems like a bad way to try and build it. Then you're risking the bad feelings of having something shameful exposed publicly, in addition to the general badness of not being received well.
I think the skill of baring your soul to the world (successfully) is really admirable, so I hope I'm wrong and it's not as risky as it seems.
1Oh no, I use so many parens when writing. Am I going to be accused of having ChatGPT generate the things I say soon?? What did people who love em-dashes do when their favorite punctuation mark suddenly became cringeworthy?
This is really cool. It's interesting that many of them seem to be able to render New Zealand clearly as a separate landmass, but struggle to separate Madagascar from Africa. Actually, looking at it some more, the whole Indian Ocean seems like a serious weak spot for all but Grok.
It sounds like you're rendering each pixel in a separate context, right? So in addition to not being able to see Earth directly, the model can't "see" its own map. If so, I wonder how different answers would be if you were to try and ask it to render the whole thing in one chat, starting from the top-left and having it guess one at a time. (I'm sure this would be much more expensive to test.)
If the moral lesson here is not to render counterfactuals, because it's too painful to do so, then I sympathize. But if the moral lesson is not to do this because it is a dangerous new emotional exploit spawned by a cursed technology that mankind was not meant to know, then I wonder if you might be overstating the novelty some.
People have been rendering their counterfactuals for thousands of years. Before we had ChatGPT to draw the pictures for us, we would just draw the pictures ourselves, or ask another human to draw them for us. Or we would render them in words and let our imaginations draw the pictures. The fidelity is lower, but the feeling is the same. Even cartoon stick figures can make people weep.
I think interacting with the cutting edge of a new technology sometimes makes things seem newer than they are. And LLMs do add an element of creepy, uncanny computer noise to the dream. But ruminating on what-could-have-been has always been a painful, self-flagellating thing to do.
I hope you find peace.
What's the correlation between task horizon and useless sycophancy?
Would you still feel this way if you were, instead, a programmer in the mid 2020s? Or do you think the job market's changed enough that said fears are now more reasonable?
Asking for... a friend... who is thinking of quitting a miserable software job, but is afraid of job hunting.
I think the climate and biology are reasonably applied to the same category, and maybe plate tectonics(?), but I agree that astronomy, physics and chemistry are odd picks.
Biology is subject to natural selection and mutates and spreads. The climate doesn't exactly do this, but it is a dynamic self-maintaining equilibrium, and it responds to shocks by adjusting in surprising ways which can then spread, so it doesn't seem crazy to treat it as a Natural Eldritch Deity. (Plus, the climate was, literally, treated like an intelligent agent until it was understood/'conquered'.)