In the first Foundation story, there’s a weird mention of applying symbolic logic to human language that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Campbell insisted upon it because

he felt in our discussions that symbolic logic, further developed, would so clear up the mysteries of the human mind as to leave human actions predictable. The reason human beings are so unpredictable was we didn’t really know what they were saying and thinking because language is generally used obscurely. So what we needed was something that would unobscure the language and leave everything clear.

Clear being a fortuitous choice of wording on Asimov’s part there, given, well.

TESCREAL and Scientology don’t just share methodology; they both descend directly from “Golden Age” science fiction. In this essay I will

“And a waifu is only a waifu, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

Mastodon has Reply Guys. Lemmy has Cater To Me Whilst I Am Literally, Not Figuratively, Taking a Shit Guys.

banned for obnoxious not-pology

If we trace one ancestry path back to science-fiction fandom, well, there’s John W. Campbell.

I’m trying to think of a polite way to say “in short, no” and “the linked tweet having “effectivealtruism” in it twice should have been a clue”, because I’m not that mean, but I probably need more coffee too.

I’m sure that taking a noisy average of everything posted on Twitter about Gödel machines will produce a Gödel machine, any day now.

Step 2: the Gödel machine becomes the monolith from 2001 that can do anything not explicitly prohibited by the laws of physics

“Pronouns” with a hard R

Bio people here are poorly informed. Just in general some of the presentations are factually incorrect

B-but rationalists are experts at covalent bonds

Also meeting people… as a woman I have never felt as ignored and disrespected as I have in some instances the pa…

I’m sure the feedback becomes more positive in the cut-off part, no doubt about it

More-crap-ter Projection

Yeah, that juxtaposition makes no sense to me. How does the machine that remixes existing text and makes it worse become anything that can “recursively self-improve”? Show your work.

It’s still hard to beat the dck pck

Technical terms can still be, technically speaking, dumb as fuck.

Lightcone (of shame)

My “I have no specific views on eugenics” T-shirt has prompted many questions already answered by my T-shirt

You are not worth responding to. Goodbye.

Quoth Yud:

There is a way of seeing the world where you look at a blade of grass and see “a solar-powered self-replicating factory”. I’ve never figured out how to explain how hard a superintelligence can hit us, to someone who does not see from that angle. It’s not just the one fact.

It’s almost as if basing an entire worldview upon a literal reading of metaphors in grade-school science books and whatever Carl Sagan said just after “these edibles ain’t shit” is, I dunno, bad?

Making an analogy to something more familiar, or to anything that actually happens in real life, is too pedestrian for a true visionary.

(It’s just a guess on my part, but given the extent to which conspiracy theorists are all marinating in a common miasma these days, I’d expect that a 9/11 twoofer would be more likely to deny relativity for being “Jewish physics”.)

whomst among us has’nt err’d?

Carl T. Bergstrom, 13 February 2023:

Meta. OpenAI. Google.

Your AI chatbot is not hallucinating.

It’s bullshitting.

It’s bullshitting, because that’s what you designed it to do. You designed it to generate seemingly authoritative text “with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence,” i.e., to bullshit.

Me, 2 February 2023:

I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like “how to interact with ChatGPT” is a useful classroom skill. It’s not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn’t have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it’s not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be right, not to sound convincing. It’s a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you’re a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is not to swim in it.