OpenStars

(also @[email protected])

The older I get, the more I think that people primarily lie to themselves, and then tell others that "truth" that they have internalized.

Part of this is that people think in a sloppy manner, but if they were to acknowledge that (to themselves) then it would cause emotional distress. So they... don't. To clarify: I don't even say that fully as a value judgement so much as an observation of human psychology i.e. an instance of the natural world. And yes I include myself in this as well:-).

This paradox means then that these "truth-tellers" are fully literally incapable of telling you the objective Truth, b/c they do not know it themselves - and even if they are aware that they do not know, that part they will not admit for fear of being perceived as weak. (Edit: obviously there is a spectrum here, and different people operate in different modes at different times, e.g. an actor who knows a lot about conveying emotions with their facial expressions might not know anything about physics and vice versa, but neither of them knowing anything about pediatric care, and so on - so even someone who is capable of telling the truth in their chosen area of expertise might not be capable of doing so outside of that sphere, especially if they drink their own cool-aid and allow themselves to forget where the proper demarcating line is - which seems to me to be roughly 100% of all people who ever lived... though I might not be fully capable of telling the truth there?:-P)

Another part is the lies that get passed back and forth so often that they begin to take on a ring of truthiness - this seems to just be an extension of the above, using an external second party rather than happening solely inside of one brain. (This one I *do* levy a value judgement at: just b/c all your "friends" think that a vaccine does not work, does not outweigh the opinions of actual medical professionals - nor do such people even truly believe in this manner themselves, b/c whenever they get sick do they turn to their "friends" or do they suddenly cry out for help from an actual doctor? this is just hypocrisy plain & simple: "hanging out" and "playing around with", like a kid in a playground, is not the same thing as "believing" in the adult world, and when shit finally gets real these people suddenly start adulting, so why not do the adulting at all times, especially when e.g. voting on things that affect millions of other humans?)

This second group could tell the objective Truth - b/c they suddenly do it themselves when they have a personal stake in the matter - but for whatever reason they choose not to, I guess for fear of losing friends.

Either way, it seems unreasonable to expect the truth from someone who does not value that concept themselves - either in their own minds or in their discourse with others. The same with compassion, and patience, and every other aspect of life that can variously be either a virtue or a deficit depending on how much someone has or lacks of it.

You cannot extract blood from a stone.

NO - you would need a power level to be over 9000 for that.

This is half that. So you have only half control of the Universe. Like, you have to submit a request to your boss to use your power to do anything, but then he/she gets to either accept or deny your request. Requests must be submitted in triplicate and accompanied by a notary public cosignee signature. Other terms & conditions apply. Also, Huffman has veto power, and your requests may be lost or ignored at any time - but if YOU ever lose or ignore a reply in turn, then you are banned.

Yet one more reason to say: Viva la revolución!

Okay well if you want to talk more about it we can but obviously not if you need a break. I did warn you... that video is... a LOT to have to process! I have watched it many times and still can't quite put my finger on it.

If in part it seems like it is missing something, note that it is: judgement. The creator does not say whether these things are "good" or "bad", as almost every other YouTuber does these days, but simply presents the information for us to make up our own judgements. Wow, such respect accorded to us!

Fwiw I think you are right about a lot of what you said: the forces of Globalization and Automation are changing our world, and Democracy isn't as necessary as it once was, to have e.g. advances in science, technology, and so on. e.g. Boeing planes can literally fall out of the sky, and what do trillionaires care for the loss of a few more of the masses, among the billions of people already on this planet, when they have computers and possibly a single pilot to fly their fleet of tens of private jets anywhere and however they want?

Anyway, rest easy - these things won't be solved overnight, or possibly at all, but either way they are kinda out of our hands.

I only do it once a day even - the flossing part before bed is by far the most important iirc.

Already ha... oh uh, I mean nope, I sure wouldn't do that, ossifer law! :-P

One thing that trips me up is that even if at best someone SUCCEEDS in developing such an AI, even one that can essentially replace humanity (in whatever roles), what then would become of us afterwards? Wall-E tells a poignant and, to me at least, extremely realistic portrait of what we would do in that eventuality: sit down and never even so much as ever bother to stand up again. With all of our needs and every whim catered to by a slave force, what use would there even be to do so?

Star Trek was only one possible future, but how many would have the force of will or mind, and then be backed up by enough someones capable of enacting such a future, much less building it up from scratch? Also, it is best to keep in mind how that society was (1) brought back from an extinction-level event, which well-neigh almost destroyed the Earth (i.e., if it had been a tad bit more powerful it would have, thus it was by an extremely narrow margin that they escaped oblivion to begin with), followed by (2) meeting up with external beings who caused humanity to collect itself to face this new external pressure, i.e. they were "saved", by the aliens presence. Even though they managed to collect themselves and become worthy of it in the end, at the time it happened it was by no means an assured event that they would survive.

Star Wars, minus the Jedi, seems a much more likely, to my fatalism-tainted mind, where people are literally slaves to the large, fat, greedy entities who hoard power just b/c they can. Fighting against that takes real effort, which we seem unwilling to expend. Case in point: the only other option to Trump is... Biden, really!? Who has actually managed to impress me, doing far more than I had expected - though only b/c my expectations were set so low to begin with:-).

Some short stories if you are interested:

One is that I was a Reddit mod, for a small niche gaming sub. I stepped down. I guided the sub at a time when literally nobody else was willing to step up, and as soon as some people did, I stepped back, mostly just training them, and then when one more agreed I stepped out entirely. Perhaps it corrupted me, but apparently not too much - maybe b/c it was not "much" power?

Two, I cannot find the article right now b/c of enshittification of Google, but there are some fascinating studies showing that AIs do all sorts of crazy things, which supports how much of it is truly logical/rational behavior rather than crazy to begin with. One described a maze-running experiment where, once the "step cost" got to be high enough, the agent was trained to undertake higher & higher risks in order to just exit the maze ASAP - even if that meant finding the "bad"/"hell" rather than "good"/"heaven" exit. Like if good=+100 points, bad=-100 points, and the step cost is -10 points, with the goal being to maximum your score, then every 10 steps is equivalent to another "bad" exit. So like if you took 30 steps to find the good exit that is only -300+100=-200 points whereas if you took only 5 steps to find the bad exit that is -50-100=-150, which is overall higher than the good exit. Suicide makes sense, when living is pain and your goal is to minimize that, for someone who has nothing else to live for. i.e., some things seem crazy only when we do not fully understand them.

Three, this video messed me up, seriously. It is entirely SFW, I just mean that the thoughts that it espoused blew me away and I still have no idea how to integrate them into my own personal philosophy, or even whether I should... but the one thing I know for sure is that after watching it, I will never think the same way again.:-)

I used to think that. Now I think that even if robots (more properly I mean a true artificial sentience) were to ever replace humanity, then they too could just as easily fall prey to the same effects that plague us, just b/c they abut natural laws encoded into the physics of the universe.

One issue I take with what you are saying is that the value judgements depend on what you are measuring the ideal against. Whereas, from a "survival of the fittest" (or even "survival of what happened to survive") standpoint, then Genghis Khan is one of the most successful people who ever lived, alongside the "mitochondrial Eve" and the "Y-chromosomal Adam" (yes those are real biological terms, though they are separated by at least a few hundred thousand years and both iirc were pre-Homo sapiens).

Mathematical game theory shows us that cheaters do prosper, at least at first, before they bring down the entire system around them. Hence there is a "force" that pulls at all of us - even abstract theoretical agents with no instantiation in the real world - to "game the system", and that must be resisted for the good of society overall. But some people (e.g. Putin, Trump, Jeff Bezos) give in to those urges, and instead of lifting themselves up to live in society, drag all of society down to serve them. What Google did to the Android OS is a perfect example of people corrupting that open source framework, twisting and perverting it into almost a mockery of its former self. For now, it is still "free", especially in comparison to the walled garden of its chief competitor, but that freedom is a shadow of what was originally intended, it looks like to me (from the outside).

So I am giving up on "idealism", and instead trying to be more realistic. I don't know what that means, unfortunately, so I literally cannot explain it better than that - but something along the lines of knowing that people will corrupt things, what will my own personal response be to the process? e.g., as George Carlin suggested, should I just recuse myself from voting entirely, or (living in the USA as I do) have things changed since then, and whereas before the two sides were fairly similar, nowadays it is important to vote not for the side of corruption, but against the side of significantly worse destruction, including of the entire system? (which arguably even needs to be destroyed, except if that happens in that manner, it is likely to lead to something far, far worse)

Anyway, yeah it is far worse than that, and I find it the height of irony that people, who absolutely ~~cannot~~ refuse to take care of ourselves, are now looking to make robots/AI, who we seem to be hoping will do a better job of that than we (won't) do? It is the absolute "daddy please save me" / cry for a superhero / savior, as always, abrogating responsibility to do anything to someone else to "like: just fix all the stuff, and junk, ya' know whaddi mean?" And therefore we fear robots (& AI) - as we should, b/c we know already what we (humans) are willing to do to one another, and thus we fear what they (being "other") might do to us as well. I am saying that it is our own corruption that we fear, mirror-reflected/projected onto them.

B/c Reddit has decided that you needed moar Reddit, so that you can haz Reddits while you are also Redditing.

That, or they are counting on someone, somewhere, to be dumb enough to fall for it.

Watch as people absolutely do. :-(

Watch as he burns through it in one:-).

Also, bold of us to assume that he has not already spent it:-P.

Algorithms, great idea, horrible in practice.

Tbf, it is not the computer's fault - someone made it do that, and that same someone is the type to call a landline phone just as you sit down to family dinner (Leave It To Beaver style - at least I assume they did that in that show:-), or to literally knock on your literal door and try to sell you a vacuum cleaner or whatever - i.e. it is pure human greed, and the algorithm is just their latest tool in the toolbox to accomplish that.

Anyway, algorithms can be used for good too, if we wanted them to. Asimov for instance prompted three laws of robotics including foremost among them that robots would be allowed to do no harm - which is itself and interesting proposition bc like how else would a doctor perform surgery if it couldn't cut into a patient, or like what if a robot absolutely refuses to allow humans to commit suicide, or even to die in any way despite having lived for thousands (millions?) of years already? (It would become pure torture at some point!) To do a good or evil act, something needs to have "agency", but right now algorithms are purely tools to reach some externally defined end.