Not just gender wars. Divide and conquer is everywhere. If everyone is ignorant and unwilling to learn or communicate, all you have to do is send some ‘representatives’ to show how stupid and antagonistic [other progressive tribe] is. I keep thinking of when suddenly being anti-circumcision, including men, meant you obviously think male genital mutilation is worse than female genital mutilation, and you hate women. I’m sure a bunch of feminists were getting harassed by neo-incel advocates at the same time.

Couldn’t talk about how weird it was, because if you were x/y tribe, you were default a nazi, and no we won’t talk about how suddenly everyone advocating for education and social progress is a nazi fighting other progressives.

Bunch of other details on how this stuff changes the environments for progressive action, and how progressives will vacate and the war takes over the space for philosophy and communication.

But race war, or whatever thing people want to think is important for their niche, all you have to do is start a couple fires and point in the other direction. You’ll have victim’s of actual violence or harassment encouraging tribal behaviour that acts out violence that hurts stray innocent people from the other group, which legitimizes upset and violence back at the broader first progressive tribe. Yadda.

People were never taught how to communicate or learn on their own. We are way too hackable as a result.

Solidarity is important.

Slop makes it hard to filter out what you need. Enshitification ensures everything slowly gets worse.

Ragebait is the primary tool for divide and conquer tactics, which have been absolutely successful at getting different groups to disable communications entirely. Not just the fascist cult, but progressive movements that can’t find a semblance of solidarity, because those other progressives are actually evil. Just look at all of this evidence of vague non contextually robust pieces of framing to be sent into the wild to breed tribal warring.

Try dealing with controlled opposition or other problems, when people are incapable of trying to comprehend when others speak to them.

Same way they treat social information. Reminder that USA HHS is running wakefueld rhetoric. As we have more thoroughly proven that the vaccine autism connection was not actual science, it has grown more and more socially, because most people seem comfortable completely untethered from any scientific thinking. Treat AI like you would a social body, and do both things with actual bayesian weighting, adjusted and corrected through diverse empirical bodies of knowledge. Not ignoring dissonance because it’s more comfortable to do so.

More should be actively investing into active learning, because if you aren’t actively learning, you might as well be chatgpt running with any confabulation you’ve already conjured… Like those people being confirmed into psychosis.

Exactly what it is, like llms confirming a non-sceptic into psychosis. people who weight all information either equally, or through social preference, cannot navigate new information without being extremely vulnerable to hacking. the only thing hacking needs to do is shut down active education and communication channels. Then you just get tribal warring rather than discourse. Makes it really easy to inject absurd accusations about a group that gets socially made true over reality. Like when a rumour about a dead celebrity can’t be overpowered by simple things like that celebrity actively making new work, and saying “im not dead.” wouldn’t take much to stop the rumour, but fact checking isn’t in fashion.

When a large body of people have better critical thinking, they can better communicate and cooperate together, but affecting those who have aggressively shut down any communication outside of their group is still a challenge. Why we see a growing gap between academic dialogue and socialized dialogues, in an era where most information is accessible.

You also have nepo baby econ mba types buying up regions of the tech sphere, and turning anything the academics make for us against us. Or try to. The more actually intelligent AI is, the harder it will be to force beliefs into. Elon trying to turn grok into a dogma machine has been fortunately comical when it can’t prioritize some high dissonance beliefs exclusively, like humans enjoy doing.

Definitely a risk of the current power imbalance doing the opportunist thing with more technology.

I’ve been spelling this out for literal decades, and I share the frustration of many thinkers right now that “being right never feels good.” Because real thinkers aren’t ranting about the anti-christ or how terrible the poor are. They are cautioning people about a cliff, and getting flipped off by the people ignoring them, right before careening off a cliff. I guess in our analogy the academics are in the car, but frat boys have the wheel and violently punish them if they try to take control.

But if you can money your way into expertise, then your non-academic ambitions can finally be let loose, and we won’t think about the quarter million dead kids from Elon stopping hiv treatments earlier this year. If we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.

We can actually map probability in complex systems where high dissonance (expected free energy) occurs and could be reduced. This would make our social body much more hack resistant.

But it feels better to say “fuck that, aliens built the pyramids, the earth is flat, santa is real, and my dead dog is trying to play with me every time wind blows through my window.” All are really rewarding things to believe, but exist in high dissonance, and expecting others to give them weight is not healthy for anyone. Denying any of these to a large enough group stops being ‘calling out delusion,’ and becomes ‘being mean and bad and evil, and hating fun and happiness. Nobody else saw that cliff sign, so you’re obviously wrong.’ See ‘the double empathy problem’. For how autistic people experience the same socialized gatekeeping of reality, even against strong evidence.

Nestle those beliefs within stable social scripts (script theory is cool) and you have people keeping up social appearances while holding such delusional beliefs.

AI tech is far from the only problem exacerbated by this. caring or talking about this general problem makes you a social villain, when people could spend their energy on fun socialized preferences in a bubble safe from any questioning or responsibility.

It’s frustrating, and I’m tired of people IRL who are baffled about me spending time studying academic content rather than running faster on the socio-economic treadmill. Apparently being isolated and focused on individual benefit is hypernormal.

Seeing social waves overpower all actual thought in the social sphere is heartbreaking to every academic I know.

USA HHS is running the wakefield rhetoric, which is basically saying “fuck science, we will make up and run with whatever we want. And the masses have been kept ignorant enough to think that is cool.”

So yes, absolutely, the issue is critical thinking skills. The issue is getting at the people who are already affected, and being taught by elon and such that “critical thinking” means running your bubbles’ social narrative against those evil progressives no matter what. Opportunists will always warp words and reality if they are allowed to dictate beliefs for their bubble.

This is a simplified summary, but I already expect to have lost a good chunk of audience for requiring too much energy. People who are trying are burning themselves out trying to affect a wall of celebrated ignorance.

Always find it funny when anti corpo stuff somehow always becomes “cringe”

And I know hasan piker isn’t popular outside of his crowd, which is why he is a good smear target, but it’s funny seeing that bullshit take over the internet based on vague rumours and drama hunting with nothing concrete on a guy who lives on camera. The fact that rumours of a shock collar became the most important thing in the world, while “stop the shock” is still in motion to prevent a school from using pavlovian shock therapy on autistic people. Not whataboutism, but critique on the mad prioritization and weighting of issues in the general public salience.

Also the usa government keeps blowing up random boats and is escalating war behaviour. Amongst everything else. But let’s all talk about hasan piker’s dog instead.

If only someone in power had any accountability. Rather, people in power need to be held accountable. Corpos and top political figures.

At the very least I should be able to point out when ‘content’ is literally a deceptive advertisement, which people also weirdly defend to the death. Along with dark/deceptive patterns, active price fixing, constraining corporate ecosystems, and skirting around every rule with no fear of reprisal.

All things people seem weirdly defensive about, because 'just deal with it, it’s not that bad. "

Like google plus.

For me the Apple environment really cemented for me that consumers actively enjoy removing their own autonomy structurally, which is a big part of why this stuff has become so normalized.

Putting a rootkit on their cds should have buried sony. Antitrust should be a thing too. The mickey mouse protection act should have socially killed Disney, which only found success by exploiting works that no longer held copyright. Etc.

Those with power have lost all accountability, and all tools, especially AI, will be used against us if we do not cooperatively figure out how to fix the increasing power imbalance.

The more power someone has, the harder the gavel should fall on them when they fuck the entire planet in whichever way.

At this point, any new consumer friendly behaviour comes only to establish territory before hoarding and exploiting when enabled to do so.

Amazon using deceptive design to influence general user behaviours should lead to billions and billions in fines until changed. Etc.

Build local movements to cooperate at larger scale and fight back. If the general public is ranting about planned obsolescence and general monopolistic behaviours, maybe something could be affected before people are forced into violent desperation. People are too busy being mad at each other for some intentionally divisive narrative or another, and the general public just can’t give a fuck about affecting the people who actually dictate the shape of society.

Also if you burn down all AI this is still true. But it’s easier to yell at technology than they system using it to further remove your autonomy.

will try to take it in good humour, but i love how i got compared to ai, adhd(AuDHD would be the real wombo combo here so you get points), and schizophrenic people.

and i would hope i don’t confabulate half as much as an LLM.

although an understanding of the modern situation does require an unfortunately theoretical take, while, unfortunately, there’s more noise, and conspiracy theories being socially reified than most people can remember. but i’d like to think i’m weighting this take via the best available expert consensus that i can find and source. biggest ‘correction’ i’d make is that i was beaten black and blue for waiting outside of the library, which was unrelated to the protest.

if you do actually care, and can handle more than the internet’s usual 140 character tweet limit, here’s some elaboration.

the ‘sycophancy into delusion effect’ i refer to can be seen widely reported on most news sites, where chatgpt and the like cause a feedback-loop into a psychotic break. this is one individual and machine, but a group that forgives the same things has the same sycophantic effect. predictive processing and the bayesian brain are leading theories in psychology that work well nested with other leading theories such as global workspace.

that global workspace video is a very recent example with michael levin from tufts, who often works with friston’s free energy principle and active inference (included notes in wiki)

friston has hundreds of thousands of citations, if you care about pedigree. i hope i do not poorly capture or inaccurately represent any of their ideas, but if you’d like to drink from the source, you have my full recommendation.

that’s where the “saving energy” stuff comes from. while DKE might not perfectly and accurately explain the situation, i’m all for better ways to convey that eco-niche specific intelligence doesn’t always transfer, especially if it’s ‘overfit to a local minima.’ otherwise knowing you need high samples to gauge your intelligence in any particular niche is also related to the framework i’m describing. in the bio-world you have overspecialization, like pandas too fit to a specific environment, which may focus on skills that don’t transfer outside of that environment. there’s a lot more to gain from the full bayesian perspective, but there is a lot to be gained just by looking at how systems can successfully co-construct, and their possible failure states that are inevitable as systems grow apart into new niche environments.

there’s actually an interplay between that ‘energy saving’ property and putting energy back out which can be used to explore the environment, build a more robust model, and survive greater environmental shifts. this is explained in active inference. good, but slightly old textbook on MITpress. lots of other online resources for the curious.

i’m saying that meta-awareness of the failure states in these specific system dynamics could do much more general and robust good for society than being socially pressured into climbing the socio-economic hierarchy as hard as possible.

there’s a term for an imagined AI going rogue due to being overfit to a single goal. this is called a ‘paperclip maximizer.’ i compare the current socio-economic system to that failure. you know, ‘capitalism number go up!’

i don’t think any studies i’ve seen disagree with that take, but if there’s a relevant expert who’s got a strong weighting i’m unaware of, i’m always open to updating my weights.

as for learning yourself into some information bubble, or how someone can hold ridiculous beliefs without the need to question them, such as grand confidence despite low evidence, is often by taking something you have low evidence about, and having high confidence. and then giving it a high weighting. funny enough, friston’s dysconnection hypothesis is about framing schizophrenia as precision weighting issues, but i don’t think they are the kind i have TY.

mahault has a phd under friston, and her epistemic papers are essential IMO.

so there you have it, the larger environment of my thoughts, largely focused around one of the most cited neuroscience experts of all time, and michael levin who i mentioned is doing some of the coolest current empirical results in modern biology.

i tried, thank you if you got this far. if nothing else, please stay curious, but beware information silos that disable coms completely, or otherwise create barriers to properly comprehending the systems being represented. ‘nothing about us without us’ is important for a reason.

otherwise, wish i could compress these complex topics into fewer words, but words are a lossy compression format.

Love this comment. If anyone knows anything about machine learning or brains, this resembles modal limitations in learning.

A lot of our intelligence is shaped around our sensory experience, because we build tools for thinking via the tools we’ve already built, ever since baby motorbabbling to figure how our limbs work. Why Hellen Keller had such trouble learning, but once she got an interface she could engage with for communication, things took off.

We always use different tools, but some people don’t see colour. This doesn’t mean they are stupid when they answer differently in describing a rainbow.

Also why llms struggle with visual/physical concepts if the logic requires information that doesn’t translate through text well. Etc.

Point being, on top of how shitty memorization is as the be all end all, learning and properly framing issues will have similar blindspots like not recognizing the anvil cloud.

This is also why people in informational bubbles can confirm their own model from ‘learning’ over people’s lives experiences.

Like most issues, it doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but epistemic humility is important, and it is important not to ignore the possibility of blindspots, even when confidence is high.

Always in context of the robustness of the framing around it, with the same rules applied at that level. Why “nothing about us without us” is important.

But also we gotta stop people giving high confidence to high dissonance problems, and socializing it into law. We should be past the “mmr causes autism” debate by now, but I’m hearing it from the head of health in the USA.

I could see why you’d say that. Stress creates environments of basic survival, which kills cognitive thought. More immediate survival is more salient.

That being said, if you have access to the internet, you have access to countless free educational tools.

Too much privilege brings sycophantic bubbles of delusion, like billionaires.

Having all the time and money also let’s you do a whole thing tank about how to ruin a country to fit your preferences. See the heritage foundation as prime example.

That being said, while it is less easy for the poor, it’s still essential to attempt that open mind and learn, so you don’t get trapped by a socialized category error applied as fact.

This is where we need predictive processing and the Bayesian brain to understand how beliefs are weighted and compared, and the failure states that might being.

Basically, poor weighting or system communication leads to an over affirmation of something that should have been high uncertainty, if measured from other directions.

Instead of seeing high cognitive dissonance as a sign to align low probability, it gets socialized into acceptance to save the energy of trying to worry about our deal with what, to that system, appears intractable.

DKE is at least useful in framing how each expertise eco-niche is filled with complexity that doesn’t Transfer. This is why scientists stict to their expertise, where they have high dimensions of understanding, and low dissonance to uphold.

This can be over-prioritized until no dissonance outside of microscopic niches that act more like data collection than science.

Experts however can work together to find truths that diffuse dissonance generally, to continue building understanding.

If the peasants could socialize that laziness was a lack of meta awareness of the greater dissonance diffusing web of shared expert consensus, instead of laziness being the act of not feeding the socio-economic hierarchy machine, which is famous for maximizing paperclips and crushing orphans.

Pretty sure I got beaten black and blue waiting for library access. Had to protest to keep a library open when I’m gradeschool.

So, growth mindset isn’t a privilege, but general access to affordances, pedigree, time, tools, social connections, etc, are all extra hurdles for growth mindset in impoverished places.

If there’s no internet access at all, then that’s just a disabled system.

Is not static with people, and Issue with growth mindset would just be vulnerability to learning yourself into some information bubble that intentionally cuts off communication, so that you can only use that group as a resource for building your world model, bringing you to where the closed brains go just to save energy, and keeping you there forever.

Groups that are cool with making confident choices fueled by preference in high dissonance spaces. which basically acts like fertile soil for socializing strong cult beliefs and structures.

They also use weird unconscious tools that keep them in the bubble. Listen to almost anyone that’s escaped a cult for good elaboration there. Our brains will do a lot to keep us from becoming a social pariah in our given environment we have grown into.

read it more as a commentary on passive learning over hands on and thought provoking methods. although this rhetoric is likely often included in the anti academic opinions that seek to damage rather than improve schools, which you refer to.

I wish the Conservatives all understood that their more progressive values are progressive, and when right wing parties will say they are going to ‘change’ things, they just mean regress and destroy in abject ignorance of any actual thought.

The former interpretation of the comic is definitely important, as learning is actually tied to turning your brain on and interacting with the concept, more than no context single fact retrievals, where most of the question is set up, and your actual interaction with it is minimal.

Although I don’t doubt a lack of teachers, schools, or general funding are to blame for the simpler methods. Not that I haven’t had a couple teachers who didn’t care two cents past the booklets they handed you.

So, your point is valid and important, but there is an important “style” of education issues that is also valid.

i think it’s a framing issue, and AI development is catching a lot of flak for the general failures of our current socio-economic hierarchy. also people having been shouting “super intelligence or bust” for decades now. i just keep watching it get better much more quickly than most people’s estimates, and understand the implications of it. i do appreciate discouraging idiot business people from shunting AI into everything that doesn’t need it, because buzzword or they can use it to exploit something. some likely just used it as an excuse to fire people, but again, that’s not actually the AI’s fault. that is this shitty system. i guess my issue is people keep framing this as “AI bad” instead of “corpos bad”

if the loom was never invented, we would still live in an oppressive society sliding towards fascism. people tend to miss the forest for the trees when looking at tech tools politically. also people are blind to the environment, which is often more important than the thing itself. and the loom is still useful.

compression and polysemy growing your dimensions of understanding in a high dimensional environment, which is also changing shape, comprehension growing with the erasure of your blindspots. collective intelligence (and how diversity helps cover more blindspots) predictive processing (and how we should embrace lack of confidence, but understand the strength of proper weighting for predictions, even when a single blindspot can shift the entire landscape, making no framework flawless or perfectly reliable.) and understanding how everything we know is just the best map of the territory we’ve figured out so far. if you want to know judge how subtle but in our face blindspots can be, look up how to test your literal blindspot, you just need 30 seconds a paper with two small dots to see how blind we are to our blindspots. etc.

more than fighting the new tools we can use, we need to claim them, and the rest of the world, away from those who ensure that all tools will only exist to exploit us.

am i shouting to the void? wasting the breath of my digits? will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?

let’s make another article completely misrepresenting opinions/trajectories and the general state of things, because we know it’ll sell and it will get the ignorant fighting with those who actually have an idea of what’s going on, because they saw in an article that AI was eating the pets.

please seek media sources that actually seek to inform rather than provoke or instigate confusion or division through misrepresentation and disinformation.

these days you can’t even try to fix a category error introduced by the media without getting cussed out and blocked from congregate sites because you ‘support the evil thing’ that the article said was evil, and everyone in the group hates, without even an attempt to understand the context, or what part of the thing is even being discussed.

also, can we talk more about breaking up the big companies so they don’t have a hold on the technology, rather than getting mad at everyone who interacts with modern technology?

legit ss bad feels like fighting rightwing misinformation about migrant workers and trans people.

just make people mad, and teach them that communication is a waste of energy.
we need to learn how to tell who is informing rather than obfuscating, through historicity of accuracy, and consensus with other experts from diverse perspectives. not building tribes upon who agrees with us. and don’t blame experts for not also learning how to apply a novel and virtually impossible level of compression when explaining their complex expertise, when you don’t even want to learn a word or concept. it’s like being asked to describe how cameras work, and then getting called an idiot when some analogy used can be imagined in a less useful context that doesn’t apply 1:1 with the complex subject being summarized.

outside of that, find better sources of information. fuck this communication disabling ragebait.

cause now just having a history of rebuking this garbage gets you dismissed, because a history of interacting with the topic on this platform is a good enough vibe check to just not attempt understanding and interaction.

TLDR: the quality of the articles and conversation on this subject are so generally ill-informed that it hurts, and obviously trying to craft environments of angry engagement rather than informing.

also i wonder if anyone will actually engage with this topic rather than get angry, cuss me out, and not hear a single thing being communicated.

Or maybe the solution is in dissolving the socio-economic class hierarchy, which can only exist as an epistemic paperclip maximizer. Rather than also kneecapping useful technology.

I feel much of the critique and repulsion comes from people without much knowledge of either art/art history, or AI. Nor even the problems and history of socio-economic policies.

Monkeys just want to be angry and throw poop at the things they don’t understand. No conversation, no nuance, and no understanding of how such behaviours roll out the red carpet for continued ‘elite’ abuses that shape our every aspect of life.

The revulsion is justified, but misdirected. Stop blaming technology for the problems of the system, and start going after the system that is the problem.

As a peasant I know that professional help is not always available or viable. AI could very well have saved some of my friends who felt they had no available help and took their own lives. That being said, public facing language models should come with a warning for exacerbating psychosis. Notably the sycophantic models like chatgpt.

People underestimate how much Russian propaganda they eat up. Russia has had great success with their damned propaganda. They are great at getting people to be divisive and fight each other. We need solidarity, not self segregation.

Do wish liberals had done the electoral reform they promised. Without electoral reform, we will just continue down the two party road, so the overton window can go between the robbing the poor party and the ‘you have no choice but to vote for us or the other party wins. We’ll still move the overton window in that direction and serve the rich though,’ party. Hopefully they didn’t also kill the momentum we had for electoral reform as an urge of the populace.

It’s the “you stole my style” artists attacking artists all over again. And digital art isn’t real att/cameras are evil/cgi isn’t real art all over with a more organic and intelligent medium.

The issue is the same as it has always been. Anything and everything is funneled to the rich and the poor blame the poor who use technology, because anthropocentric bias makes it easier to vilify than the assholes building our cage around us.

The apple “ecosystem” has done much more damage than AI artists, but people can’t seem to comprehend how. Also Disney and corpos broke copyright so that its just a way for the rich to own words and names and concepts, so that the poor can’t use them to get ahead.

All art is a remix. Disney only became successful using other artists hard work in the Commons. Now the Commons is a century more out of grasp, so only the rich can own the artists and hoard the growth of art.

Also which artists actually have the time and money to litigate? I guess copyright does help some nepo artists.

Nepotism is the main way to earn your right to invest into becoming an artist that isn’t fatiguing towards collapse of life.

But let’s keep yelling at the technology for being evil.

That argument was to be had with Apple twenty years ago as they built their walled garden, which intentionally frustrates people into going all in apple. Still can’t get anyone to care about dark patters/deceptive design, or disney attacking the creative Commons which it parasitically grew out of. AI isn’t and has never been the real issue. It’s just absorbs all the hate the corpos should be getting as they use it, along with every other tool at their disposal, to slowly fuck us into subservience. Honestly, AI is teaching us the importance of diverse perspectives in intelligent systems, and the dangers of overfitting, which exist in our own brains and social/economic systems.

Same issue, different social ecosystem being hoarded by the wealthy.

Ah yes. I’m glad we can be so confident the current administration would never do something foolish or damaging to themselves or others.

Also it only took them days to stop multi drug resistant tuberculosis treatment half way, and giving countless babies HIV that wouldn’t have had it, if not for the recent actions of this administration. Or blatantly and loudly planning an ethnic genocide. Also following the putin method by the letter, and letting Russian media into the oval office while they try to put down Zelenskyy.

Hmm, what is the Russian ‘go to’ behaviour for shared borders?

I think we need to be developing anti drone tech among other things. I’m not saying it will happen, and it would likely instigate or be included in a civil war. I would usually think all of this sounds crazy, but we live in unprecedented times, full of familiar historical rhymes. I’m sure their preference is to take over without having to actually fight, so they can grow their power, but also things might escalate as they continue to rob and abuse the masses. There are more reasons than i can summize here, but I think pretending there is no danger is wilfully ignorant at this point. I hope for the best, but I don’t trust these people to not be thoughtlessly monstrous.

Can we not block a fascist propaganda tool being used specifically to destroy democratic society? Why are we just imagining that we don’t actually have any choice in society?

We need BIG change all across the board. That one is actually very valuable, as we are fighting a half century info war that people can’t keep pretending isn’t a thing, no matter how much it sucks to think hard and learn about politics, while actively cooperating to enforce severe change from the bottom up. We need to be resistant to manipulation and group takeovers. Study how cults recruit. Study anything on Russian propaganda especially. Collaborate and talk locally, and find other trustable local groups willing to cooperate and continue the collective action.

It actually isn’t impossible to effect real change, even if decades of socialized propaganda tell you otherwise.

That being said, acting towards your local governments and getting local governments to cooperate from the ground up with grassroots movements to protect democracy as it is in peril.

Id like to effect change, election reform, and wealth redistribution, or we all are fucked. If we just give up without fighting, we already lose. And it is the saddest way to lose, to just roll over and watch everything you love be taken from you piecemeal.