Catalysis lowers the free energy requirements to access some part of the state space. Constraint does the opposite by increasing instead. So if you understand the world as a space subject to thermodynamics, catalysis and constraint are the two fundamental actions any agent can take to change the world.

The idea of a sufficient statistic is one of the most powerful ideas that I somehow missed in my academic education even though I took a fair amount of statistics. Like ~everything else in statistics, it was invented by Sir Ronald Fisher but had fallen out of favor because of the rise of descriptive statistics. With inferential statistics coming back in fashion sufficient statistics have come back too.

Agency thread:
The thing that struck me about this is how much it is really about blame-management rather than solution-management.

https://twitter.com/emilyrauhala/status/1811818103401050623

Does an automated camera barking at people actually make them move? Who knows, but no one can accuse the dumb camera of discrimination — because it doesn’t discriminate on any basis at all, reasonable of wrong.

In biochemistry there are “autocatalytic sets”. Each peptide catalyzes the formation of the next, until the last peptide catalyzes the production of the first one again. This is a “critical” system (criticality is ~the boundary between order and chaos)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

https://twitter.com/mastertimblais/status/1792847066793652329

In a normal state space the % of critical states is small. Basically, it’s hard to find one sampling at random. They’re also not in any predictable place, there’s no way to know if a state is critical without testing it. So it seems finding those 3 ideas is impossible!

Apropos the recent controversy: the word delve is rarely used in English. Except used by LLMs, and in formal register Nigerian English.



This has sparked controversy bc making fun of someone for using “delve” and sounding like an AI (which it does indicate in a probabilistic way) could reasonably feel like an attack on a Nigerian using their formal register.

The jump between the second panel and the third holds the entire secret. The correct question is asked (why am I not?), and then artfully avoided by an associative switch to self judgement.
There is some reason you’re not doing them, and but it’s hiding.

https://twitter.com/Kei0x/status/1771951917918240867

If you could but stay with the question you’ve already asked for even thirty seconds, much might become clear. This is the Chinese finger trap of Trying. You are Trying to act, and thus not acting. You are Trying to be more productive, and thus not producing.

You have 168 hours per week.
For most, sleep takes 56 of those.
A full time job is anyone 40.
Food, grooming, exercise add another 18 if you’re reasonably efficient.
Misc obligatory bullshit paperwork like taxes or errands, another 7.
This leaves you with 47 hours! 47 hours to dispose of as you see fit. You can get so much done in 47 hours! And that’s without counting overlapping eg. food with socialization.

An LLM, properly understood, is a physics simulator in the domain of words (tokens). It learns the hidden structures that predict, as a physics simulator trained on video footage learns momentum and rigidity. From this POV, A prompt gives the LLM-as-physics-simulator an initial set of observations from which it infers an initial state. It then enters a loop of predicting the next evolved state and resulting observations, which it uses inductively to predict the next state, etc.

The fantasy of the all-powerful slave has legs: the genie bound to grant wishes, the golem that defends, the spell that animates a broom to clean on its own, the Mr MeeSeeks box.
They share a commonality: a deep intuition that this goes wrong somehow.





There is deep truth in this. Enslaving a powerful, intelligent being to your will and making it work for you while treating it as a an object is not a good idea. It backfires with people, but also with animals (train a dog like that and you will not get good results).

Reddit is going IPO as $RDDT, the first social media IPO in some time. As someone who spent some substantial time running a social media company, my takes on the Reddit IPO: 1/ The allocation for reddit’s power users is so cool. I hope ppl realize it’s a gift, bc usually those are fought over by insiders like the bank’s favored clients or institutional investors. Reddit is giving away a free option, and that has real value.

A friend asked me if I knew of anything written on abstraction and protocols in society. I realized actually yeah, I absolutely have some recommendations. So, an unusual protocols thread: Of course first, the @vgr podcast my friend listened to, a broad look at the nature and engineering of protocols themselves podcastaddict.com/infinite-loops…

Epistemic status: seems true enough to me, no one knows anything
So, I believe that building an AI capable of self-improvement at a level equal to our ability to improve it is intrinsically a very dangerous proposition.
Yet I do not support a pause or stop at this time. Why not? Let’s play this out. Right now building a model that moves the frontier forward requires billions of dollars and top researchers. That is likely to remain true as long as we keep pushing forward.

Have you ever noticed that ideologies are always formed around writers who love to write a lot of words? They often cover the same few ideas, over and over, in different ways. But mostly it's a LOT of words.

This is not an accident. This is because the way you create an ideology is to create a lens with which to see the entire world, all of the things. This involves imprinting a very large psychic object into someone's head.

A collection of recent thoughts pondering optionality: The value of optionality increases as the future becomes less certain.

Often when two sides disagree strongly over an issue between A and B someone will come along and say, stop being silly. We should just compromise and choose point C in the middle! Let’s split the difference. This is not valid logically, of course. Splitting the difference between good and bad gets you a solution that is half bad (“let’s half abolish half of slavery!”), splitting the difference between bad and other bad gets you bad again.

One giveaway you’re thinking in tribal terms rather than truth-seeking ones: talking about someone “owning” or “annihilating” or “crushing” someone else. It’s the mindset that says arguments are soldiers and debate is war, and changing your mind is giving ground to the enemy. Sometimes the debate itself will actually be legitimately truth seeking, but the audience will still be stuck in tribal mode getting amped when someone lands a great rhetorical uppercut.

I want to expand a little on this idea of noticing the dumbest plan(s) that could possibly work, because I think it’s one of the key abilities you have to develop.

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1668057708896088066

When trying to solve a problem, most people search for ideas that will work. For easy problems and problems in domains you know well this is actually a fine heuristic, bc judging ppl can actually sort almost all ideas into will-work/wont-work.

The real villain here is Google.
Google found one of the very best business models of all time, skimming all the surplus profit off of the entire free open internet.
This is the natural end state of that process. The closure of internet has been driven by this because the only way to make money sustainably is to *not* leave your shit open on the internet where Google will index it, middleman you, and eventually clone you.

@patio11 I have a theory about this. @patio11 On a timescale of years, society has an effectively fixed supply of people at any given grade of agency and competence.
Organizations and institutions run on these people as a kind of fuel rods. Remove them, decay sets in immediately.

Since it seems timely and relevant, let me explain how service level stability works for large applications in my experience.
There are 3 things which cause a service to suffer degradation:
- increased usage
- making changes
- bad architecture Increased usage can be due either to growth or abuse. Either way, there is more incoming traffic than the service was designed to support, and queues fill up and service degrades. You can throttle service, add capacity (if possible), or rebuild to support higher scale.

@goblinodds The basic formula was a little like coaching. Both people I was very close to. Every time they said something in victim mindset I’d challenge, and ask more or less the same series of questions. “What’s the stupidest easiest one thing you could do to make even a little progress?” @goblinodds “What if it was possible? What might be a good first step?”
“It sounds like you’re sure you won’t succeed, what’s going on with that?”