If all these hysterical plebs would calm down and do some freaking Bayes-theoretic thinking for once they would definitely realize that the primary concern facing modern society is letting the text prediction algorithm achieve demonic apotheosis

It’s enduringly odd to me that Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist. I don’t really have any insights about this; I just think it’s kind of funny. All the psychiatrists I’ve seen have been mildly-eccentric-but-it-doesn’t-seem-to-really-matter, so I wonder if he is just a normal doctor who turns around and taps out a fucking Astral Codex Ten post. I wonder what posts my own damn psychiatrist is making

this isn’t really a sneer. and maybe it’s in the wrong place tbh. idk.

i have a long-time internet friend / “mutual” who is the only person i’m regularly in contact with that i think might be fully Seduced by the Chatbot. (i have a really good friend and long-time collaborator who’s all in on Agentic Coding, which is a real bummer, but he’s a strictly “I use this for computer stuff and do not ever talk to it like a human being” type of guy, plus the company he works for is all in and he’s sick of writing shopify websites for bullshit brands blah blah blah – anyway that’s a whole other genre of thing.)

anyway friend A is an incredibly kind person who’s been unbelievably supportive of me over the years. we’ve disagreed a number of times, i think we are good at doing so reasonably. and even though his arguments sometimes resemble those of more nefarious figures, i think he’s motivated by an earnest optimism about technology’s capacity to change the world for good – one i find very naive, but believe is coming from the right place

anyway i posted a link on mastodon to a long piece i wrote, he, like, read it a bunch of times, paraphrased my argument back to me to make sure he had it right, and then kindly said he disagreed. well and good enough. except it feels a little more personal than disagreements we’ve had before, because one of the implications of the piece would be that he himself is probably experiencing low-grade psychosis lol and is therefore not necessarily a reliable narrator of his own experience

idk. it’ll come as no surprise to anyone on this particular website that i feel very strongly that i’m right here – if not about this guy’s particular mental experience, i minimally feel that i’m adequately representing the interests of the constituency my piece represents. (it’s a newsletter i maintain as part of organizing i’m doing.) it’s also a genuine expression of my belief, which is that this bullshit article i was writing about was fucking bullshit

but not only does it go against all my Late Millennial Woke instincts to stake a claim that people’s Lived Experiences are not valid lol – it’s just kind of a bummer to ultimately genuinely believe that my friend has been ELIZA’d or whatever. he’s said i’m really helping him think through this moment but i also just kind of, idk. it’s just not a good feeling

lmao this is a great bit

God as someone involved with actual anti-AI organizing on university campuses this is increasingly scaring the shit out of me.

That said I wonder if I could somehow steal their money for nefarious Ludditic purposes. I don’t actually wonder this, really, but it does remind me of when, during my master’s degree at a university bombarded by culture war garbage, I was debating going to the well-advertised well-funded conservative groups’ fancy dinner book clubs about Plato or whatever. “Hey I’m here to chat about the Great Books! Don’t worry that my name is this but my voice sounds like this. It’s not a big deal bb” / “Oh yeah I’m soooo scared of the big brain computer. Like what if it gets too big lol. That would be sooooo bad! Here are my account and routing numbers”

GPT, mind, personality, imitation learning, Decision Transformer, Guardian Angel, AI mode collapse, AI safety, transhumanism

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When I found out he was already thirty (30) years old when he started writing it I had to physically get up and go for a walk

Obsidian got me like 60% of the way there but yeah, I was really just looking for Org-mode the whole time.

Orgzly + syncthing can get you a lot of the way there with org-mode on mobile, though I don’t really carry a smartphone anymore so I haven’t gotten a lot of mileage out of it. But yeah by the time you’re suggesting syncing your .org files across applications using syncthing I feel like we’re so far afield of “stuff that’s friendly for non-technical users”