We live under two parallel governments. There's the classical government of the constitution, and then there's this whole other thing with its own laws, taxes, and citizenship in the universities, bureaucracies, media: the Cathedral. These two regimes are now at war. For a long time the Cathedral was engaged in a semiconscious slow-rolled revolution against the republic: undermining citizenship with mass immigration, undermining free discourse with censorship, undermining the authority of public officials via bureaucracy etc.

The scaling thesis stated this way is obviously untrue. A humble spider has millions or billions of times less compute than a GPT, but more agency. There is very obviously an algorithmic gap between here and AGI.

https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1865173856736124998

The scaling laws observation is very interesting and is probably somewhat true, but it's better stated like this: the bottleneck for any network capable of representing some function is compute and data, not algorithm. Note the qualifier: capable of representing the function.

We're officially in the post-Moldbuggian era now. The Cathedral regime is collapsing and about to be routed over next 4 years. Political economy fundamentals remain, but the specifics of the progressive consensus look pretty busted over the course of this year. Maybe I'm just hyped on election comedown, but I've been seeing this all year. Elon going all in, the rest of silicon valley breaking right, no big election violence, no wall-to-wall elite "resistance", no funding for journalistic persecution of random commenters, etc.

The fundamental problem with totalitarianism, of communist, fascist, or liberal variety, is that when it dies, it takes the whole civilization down with it. It bends all its effort to killing and looting anything that might survive its end. Of course the viability of the "liberal totalitarianism" construction should tell you that injunctions against totalitarianism don't work. The only thing that works is very creative insurrectionary resistance.

The philosopher's diet (attested throughout history by many different philosophers as being what the strongest and healthiest peoples ate): milk,eggs, meat, and fruit.
See Tacitus, Plato, Homer, ibn Khaldun, etc. Tacitus, Germania:
"Their food is simple; wild fruits, fresh venison, or coagulated milk. They satisfy hunger without seeking the elegances and delicacies of the table."

I'm a "have kids" guy but 8 billion is too many right now. Most are just a waste of space. The actual problem is differential fertility. *They* are having too many kids. *You* are not having enough.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1784781486584918089

But in degenerate societies, there's too much abstract fake value available that competes with basic biological realities. Most high quality people today would have to be almost coerced to reproduce.

Hominid brain volume on a log scale. Huge inflection point 2 Mya. Who wants to be that's the advent of complex society? The cause can only be a social arms race wherein an ape-person of superior intelligence was able to get access to vastly more/better sex and resources by climbing a complex social hierarchy. This implies socially enforced boundaries, and significant intrigue: Society.

This same argument applies to an AI future: it's too easy to force conformity when everything is engineered.

Whether this is true or if there's some way that conformity never actually works is the most important theological problem of all time; it determines the whole future.

https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1595675395201933312

This is the "singleton question": is it possible for a global power to permanently wipe out variation in ambitions and thus lock itself into an arbitrary value system, or is such a tower of babel doomed to become confounded and fragment?

RE: Cicero
AI researchers are maximizing for fear-induction. Same as metaverse, etc. Tech has stopped having utopian ambitions for years now and is now gunning for "unavoidable dystopia from which you cannot escape" as its marketing image. Facebook/Meta especially so.

Wrong. In His infinite wisdom and benevolence, God created a hard world that could be conquered only by virtue, in which things come to goodness by their own free logic, not fiat. This world is vastly more meaningful and good by NOT simply being a theme park for your ego.

https://twitter.com/jweisber/status/1593245947584163840

The hidden fourth axiom in this fork is hedonistic utilitarianism. God is not a hedonistic utilitarian. He does not want you to be a minimally conscious rat-brain on a morphine drip. He wants you to conquer and grow in righteousness by your own will and power.

The principal contradiction of our time is that democracy is ideologically mandatory and structurally illegal. You have to say you're doing democracy. You're not allowed to actually do it. To actually do it threatens the oligarchy. To honestly deny it threatens their legitimacy. To actually do democracy looks like some populist demagogue rousing the middle class to invade the carefully managed public consensus and smash the place up. In practice, this would amount to a caricature of fascism, which is why it gets called out as such.

Introspection is demonic temptation. You will not find salvation or improvement in any form of naval gazing, only insanity. The way up is to focus on external goals and get your ass kicked doing hard things. Trauma salesmen don't want you to hear this, but every time I meet someone who's into that self-care spiritual searching trauma processing stuff, I can't help but notice it has made them a worse person: fragile, unreliable, untrustworthy.

AI is genocide tech, but I guess some people are into that. You build something cheaper and smarter than humans that can do everything humans can do, to unleash economic growth from human limitations and drive the price of resources above what humans can afford until all humans are "decommissioned". Genocide.

The Queen is dead. Long live the King.

Operation Spring Tide covers the accession of Charles III. First legal power. Next ceremonial power, with proper coronation over the coming days. Finally, if we are lucky, will come the reconstruction of real power. To assert his sovereignty over Britain, and Britain's sovereignty in the world, the King needs a cadre of new nobility who will form the power elite of his new regime. He will quietly build up key contacts until he is ready to strike.

No really, are there other poles? Seems like the answer is either Kaczynski, Land, or Yudkowsky. Yud's program is unfortunately dead, possibly misguided. Kaczynski's is pointless: what is man without technology? Land is horrifying but at least it's an ethos...

https://twitter.com/wolftivy/status/1432462181631733761

So let's engage with @Outsideness a bit. The basic contradiction in accelerationism is why we as humans, operating in self-aware darwinian competition, ought to aid (perhaps by inaction) something that will destroy us, especially if it's basically cold inhuman doom.

Reading Ted K "Anti-Tech Revolution" for computing book club. The interesting thing about axiomatic thinkers like uncle Ted is that they are extremely consistent, but thereby put undue weight on their premises. Kaczynski is wrong about a key premise. It's easy for a smug normie to say that some radical thinker got something wrong. But inevitably, flipping the premise leads to some other radicalism that is also far beyond comprehension by the normal.

Real AI risk is not some silicon ubermensch killing us so it can colonize the galaxy without interference. That would suck but at least be cool. It's GPT-k blindly bullshitting its way into nuking everything including itself into glowing ash because it saw it in a movie once. To be clear this is disturbingly plausible of an outcome.

We were promised a bicycle for your mind. We got a prison pod with a glorified telescreen. We needed a chariot. I'm assembling a team to study how we can use new computing systems to accelerate the reawakening of the noble spirit. I am recruiting for an ongoing fortnightly book club seminar on the intersection of spiritual philosophy and operating systems research. If you're interested, get in touch. Welcome to the Mystic Computer Club.

Rationalism as a historical phenomenon driving out the mythic in favor of the calculative is basically "seeing like a state" applied to all knowledge. Much actual depth is lost by forcing bureaucratic legibility. In practical terms, there is little reason to require wisdom to explain itself. It works just fine, even much better, given the nature of the mind, as local self-trusting intuitive superstition.

Legibility is only necessary for certain kinds of large-scale coordination.

This looks great but it's also exactly what's wrong with modern software. "Apps within apps" ie every app becomes its own self-contained fully-managed ecosystem with increasingly general capabilities to make up for the poverty at the OS layer.

https://twitter.com/alexcornell/status/1521124986412445697

The two poles are basically represented by original unix vs the iphone: user-facing general purpose computation giving users lots of power, or creating a really slick experience and attracting app developers by giving developers lots of power.

Let me know if you're interested in this project. No promises but I have some ideas and would like to talk to other people who also have ideas.

https://twitter.com/wolftivy/status/1499892474986303490

Things I think are cool in this direction:

ploum.net/the-computer-b…