didericis

Reminds me of Freeman Dyson’s “Frogs and Birds” categories for researchers

https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf

A different but more powerful method of ensuring reproducibility is more rigorous compilation using formally verifiable proofs.

That’s what https://pi2.network/ does. It uses K-Framework, which is imo very underrated/deserves more attention as a long term way of solving this kind of problem.

Likewise. I enjoy commenting here because it’s one of the few places online where there’s actually discourse, and I like to think conversations like these have trickle effects/lead to more cross pollination and rational outcomes. Your pushback is valid; there’s a very real danger of getting too much in bed with Trump’s base and letting dumb populism overrule any need for strategic pivots if this doesn’t end up working. There was also some interesting pushback about European market demand for US weapons being more important than supply chain security which I hadn’t considered from the strategic angle; I don’t think I agree that it’s more important than eliminating foreign chokepoints in US military supply chains, but that’s a point in favor of these tariffs being too blunt and extreme an instrument for addressing the need to boost domestic industrial capacity for the defense industry.

I’ll keep an open mind as well. I hope things eventually work out for the best, but we’ll see what happens.

Again, I'm explaining, not endorsing.

I believe the reason it feels like I'm pushing is that in a sense, I am: I'm not adding any caveats or disclaimers to that narrative or explaining why other narratives do or don't matter. I think counter narratives to the ones supporting these tariffs are already well understood by most people here. The original person I was responding to was asking why this happened (presumably because it seemed irrationally stupid, as I think it does to most people here), and what I'm pushing for is an understanding of the point of view which explains it. If you understand the concerns of MAGA and the strategic concerns of the US Military the tariffs make sense. They might not make sense in relation to other concerns, and maybe it's wrong to be so focused on those concerns at the expense of other concerns like relationships with allies. But they do make sense from that point of view.

In order to repair international relations with allies, the root causes of these tariffs first needs to be understood and addressed. If this is simply viewed as a madman irrationally leading a horde of rednecks to punish allies, and the other strategic concerns are just considered window dressing to excuse that madness, the grievances of those who empowered Trump will remain and the strategic weaknesses will continue to be an anchor weighing the US down and interfering with our capacity to maintain relationships and enforce international law.

The narrative of the MAGA base is that middle America and the rust belt was in fact victimized by global economic policy. The benefits you mention about the world buying American services and getting into foreign wars didn't benefit the MAGA constituency, it hurt them. Yes, everyone benefits from cheaper goods and America in particular is able to buy more of them due to the fact we issue the global reserve currency, but on net the average middle class American family in an industrial town lost more than they gained.

That narrative is not the whole narrative. I am well aware that there are more people in the world than just MAGA that are feeling the opposite about all of these tariffs, and they have legitimate grievances. But the MAGA narrative is not false. Just like the narrative about betrayal on the part of allies and economic partners is not false. Just like the narrative I presented about domestic supply chains and strategic weakness is also not false (and is the narrative I'm most biased towards/what I care about most). In order to look for a balance point that maximally benefits everyone, all of the different narrative threads need to be understood.

In order to prevent a repeat of this situation in the future (if any semblance of the previous order can be re-established after the US secures it's domestic supply chains and repairs it's middle class, and I have no idea what the likelihood of that is), any re-establishment of global supply chains needs to ensure it doesn't erode domestic capacity and that there's an actual plan for how to maintain the middle class through either some degree of protections for domestic industry or a more effective plan to transition the middle class into services.

You are correct that there is a lot of distaste for Europe within the MAGA base. Although it’s important to note most of the distaste is about subsidizing their defense so they can have welfare states at the expense of US taxpayers, and a distaste for EU leadership. A lot of MAGA are friendly with other populist movements in Europe.

Again, I don’t think it’s an either or, and I don’t believe this is a ploy. The desire to reduce commitments in Europe and to have long term changes in trade is genuine.

The core motivation of the base is simple: middle America wants their industrial jobs back.

The motivation of advisors like the people at Hoover, military strategists and other intelligent higher ups is to deal with the weaknesses (present and future) that both Covid and Ukraine made obvious.

These are in alignment.

And yes, the MAGA base desire for a return of manufacturing came before the understanding of strategic weakness. That doesn’t mean the strategic motivations are a cope: I don’t think it’s a coincidence the bureaucracy were only willing to go along with this after both Covid and Ukraine discredited a lot of previously held beliefs about the state of the global order and the need for a course correction.

It’s also important to note politics and “cope” are basically the same thing. Everything is compromise.

Yes, this is a real perspective. Again, I’m not endorsing the approach they’re taking, I’m simply explaining it.

I also don’t think even a moderate introduction of tariffs would have been viewed favorably. Reindustrialization is I think necessary/I agree with the desire to ramp up domestic production and secure supply chains in both America and Europe, but we haven’t done it yet because it’s going to be painful to reverse the current trajectory.

This could very well be a part of a kind of shock deal to get allies to know we’re serious as we negotiate down.

I’m not saying I agree with that tactic, either, and the complaints about the damage in trust are extremely valid.

The message is absolutely America first, and the motivation to boost the middle class through reindustrialization is a huge factor.

The desire to eventually back out of defense commitments in Europe is not in contradiction to that.

The political will to commit troops and to defend Ukraine simply isn’t there, especially not while Taiwan is looming. Wanting Europe to reindustrialize and handle it’s own defense allows America to focus more domestically and on potential wars more aligned with American interests (disruption of chip manufacturing affects America much more than Russian occupation of Ukraine).

I linked to a hoover institute interview with Niall Ferguson explaining a lot of the thinking. You can also just listen to what the administration has been saying themselves. You don’t have to agree with it, but the goal is reindustrialization of both America and Europe so America doesn’t lose it’s defense capabilities and so Europe can defend itself without relying on American support.

The USA already dictates the direction of much of the world economy through its position in the WTO, and you are correct that the tariffs will cause more independent production. That’s part of the intention. Europe specifically is underproductive and the hope is that these tariffs and the change of tone for defense agreements will bolster Europes domestic industrial and defensive capabilities.

I also realize how incredibly complex modern supply chains are and how disruptive these tariffs are. While it seems clear to me the previous trade situation was unsustainable and going to break down without some sort of change of course, that doesn’t mean I’m in favor of the blanket tariffs or the way this was executed, and I don’t know whether it will work. I’m simply explaining the logic behind it, which is also more complex than just “a bipolar old man stomping left and right”.

The current international situation as understood by a lot of people in republican circles is outline in detail here:

https://youtu.be/vDBZeHhx3YE

> The US reliably enforces international order and global trade now

Yes, which is why many believe now is the time to revamp our industrial capacity while we still have strategic dominance.

The war in Ukraine has illustrated the importance of mass drone production, and we currently lack a lot of the direct capacity to make them. A lot of our military supply chains are also based too heavily on components assembled and manufactured in China and in parts of east Asia that could easily be disrupted and cripple our ability to project power and play the role we currently play.

Because a rising power (China) backed a country (Russia) which didn’t bow to the dominant power (USA) that enables international trade, and intentionally blowing up international trade agreements now allows the USA more time to rebuild strategic supply chains to counter further violations of the international order.

If the USA doesn’t have a secure industrial base and can’t reliably enforce the international order then there is no international trade.

No, but I will. Thanks.

(link isn’t loading for me on mobile, will try again later)

"The Matter with Things" by Iain McGilchrist has the same effect. Highly recommend it.

I wouldn't be so dismissive of the objection.

That loop involves way more flexible goal oriented attention, more intrinsic/implicit understanding of plausible cause and effect based on context, and more novel idea creation than it seems.

You can only brute force things with combinatorics and probabilities that have been well mapped via human attention, as piggy-backing off of lots of human digested data is just a clever way of avoiding those issues. Research is by definition novel human attention directed at a given area, so it can't benefit from that strategy in the same way domains which have already had a lot of human attention can.

Company is an LLC registered in Austin TX, and am expecting mostly US customers. But I’d ideally like to support as many countries as is feasible.

Do you know of any books or guides that outline those sharp edges? Or is it too business dependent/am I going to need to consult with someone? If so, where do you think I should go to get credible advice?

I’m not tempted by ungrounded explanations lacking logic or reason, but I am tempted to wander off the reservation. History suggests every theory used to organize our understanding of the world will fail to adequately capture something, and that better theories with more explanatory power often require entertaining things deemed outside the realm of plausible explanation. Conscious experience appears to be one of those things we haven’t managed to adequately explain.

I can also think of many first and second order explanations for NDEs that don’t require any change in explanatory paradigm, but the fact that all physical phenomenon are based on observations of our conscious experience of the physical world makes any purely experiential phenomenon like NDEs a different class of phenomenon than physically measurable phenomenon.

> Features don't need utility to exist. It may be a weird state precisely due to the lack of selection on what happens when death is already occurring.

Totally agree.

But if you can't use selection pressure to directly explain NDEs the same way you can with "fight, flight, freeze", fear of the dark, sexual attraction to signs of physical health, etc, and you need to use other things we don't really understand (like how that "coherent feeling" gets created) to connect NDEs with selection pressures, selection pressures aren't really helping to explain things.

It's also not like explanations for NDEs based on some combination of information processing, known cognitive functions and selection pressures have to be 100% "wrong" for there to be better explanations. Cliche example, but the ptolemaic model of the universe actually predicted the observable orbits of the planets pretty well and explained the lack of observable motion of constellations without needing to appeal to seemingly absurd "special explanations" like stars being an enormously huge distance away and "unseen phenomenon" like stellar parallax that was unobservable to ancient astronomers.

All of the basic ingredients in the ptolemaic model like orbits, planets, and geometry were still relevant in the heliocentric model, even though their arrangement was radically different. That could easily be the same for the relevance of information processing, known cognitive functions and selective pressure in relation to a seemingly absurd "special explanation" that ends up proven correct by some as of yet unseen equivalent to a breakthrough observation of stellar parallax.

Thank you, appreciate the compliment. I actually just edited it/got a bit self conscious about the tone and added some references, in part because I think truly grokking the core of what I’m saying (which fits perfectly with what you’re saying/is a conclusion I’ve also come to) is both really profound and really easy for engineering minded people like most of this audience to dismiss if you don’t ground it properly. Was worried I was getting overly fluffy and people would then assume the evidence and strength of the argument was less grounded than it is, and pared it down before seeing your reply. Hopefully I kept enough to retain what resonated.

There’s something about acknowledging the extent of the unknown that’s extremely humbling, awe inspiring, and difficult to adequately articulate, and it’s something I think is important to spend extra effort communicating.

> as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer.

The more I think about survival based evolutionary explanations for NDEs, the less sense they make.

Obviously evolution is true, and there's an obvious relationship between the physical degradation of the body and the brain and hallucinations. I'm not trying to make a cheap appeal to mysticism and deny these things, but NDEs are profoundly weird and difficult to explain when you think about them from that angle.

Why would a body motivated to survive at all costs waste resources creating comforting hallucinations with some kind of internal coherence during catastrophic failure? Wouldn't a more logical and theoretically sound failure mode for a body trying to survive at all costs be some kind of increasingly incoherent descent into something like TV static as resources get diverted from sense making to repairing systems critical to survival? Or just pure unconscious blackness as with general anesthesia? If consciousness is purely computational, then any coherent internal experience implies the brain is spending biological resources maintaining the physical integrity of something, despite being increasingly severed from the sense input it needs to actually navigate the world to survive. And if the body is going through the trouble of maintaining some level of internal consciousness as it nears death, why wouldn't it simply create a hellish ever increasing amount of fear and pain until the moment of complete physical death to create the strongest possible motivation to avoid ever repeating the experience?

Many people who experience NDEs and survive report craving a repeat of the experience and losing their fear of death. That's profoundly counterproductive from a survival standpoint. There's an argument about group related benefits and a need to offset communal panic due to our knowledge of our own mortality that's easier to ground in a purely survival based explanation, and while that definitely fits better, I increasingly get the sense we're trying to overfit evolutionary explanations that assume a purely survival oriented computational theory of consciousness to things we don't actually understand nearly as well as we think we do, and that the fear of not knowing can just as easily be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we basically understand like computation and biology as the fear of death can be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we don't.

The history of all human knowledge is defined by an increasing ability to transcend and expand our theories to incorporate ever more detailed knowledge about previously unseen things. First we were convinced the world was made of unseen animal spirits, then we were convinced it was made of unseen combinations of the four elements in a world governed by a pantheon of superhuman deities, then we were convinced it was made of a hierarchy of unseen forces interacting with seen forces through God given, rationally discoverable natural law, and now we are convinced it is made of purely physical rules which may or may not be fully comprehensible given what we can observe, and those seen and unseen purely physical forces created complex biological systems that can model the world through different types of computation, some of which we understand, and some of which we don’t.

I think it's extremely unlikely that we've figured out the final and most comprehensive framework for understanding reality, and I think there’s a lot about conscious experience and our ability to meaningfully perceive and categorize things that are still deeply mysterious/poorly understood.

EDIT: Didn’t like my previous wording of this/changed it, and still don’t feel like I’m doing justice to what I’m trying to get across. Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things”, John Vervaeke talks about “Relevance Realization”, Freeman Dyson’s lectures/books about the importance of “heretical views” for the expansion of knowledge, Donald Hoffman’s work claiming evolved models of reality in every kind of environment never create accurate maps, and just observing how difficult the alignment/verification problem is in AI are all pointing in this same direction, and make a more compelling case for what I’m trying to say than I can.

> Sorry for the long post.

No need at all. I'm very interested in this area too, but didn't know all the OBJ lore. I got into this kind of thing after learning about Hilbert's program, which goes all the way back to the late 1800s. The history of formal logic in general is incredibly deep/very very interesting.

> Anything else worth knowing?

K framework

https://runtimeverification.com/blog/k-framework-an-overview

And Parmenides would like a word with you.

It’s amazing to me people agree on definitions for anything, given people have been having the same basic abstract arguments for what makes thing A thing A and distinct from thing B for thousands of years.

I think the casual dismissal of nuclear war has more to do with the artificial nature of most people's realities than a lack of a direct demonstration of the destruction of nuclear war specifically. People think it can't happen because the majority of people's lives in the developed world are heavily distorted fake marketed/filtered/scripted stuff optimized to do what they want. People love spectacle, they're used to being insulated from the effects, and they think past concerns are like boring stuff from an old season of a TV show.

I think wilderness camping is the best counter to that kind of thing. Sounds unrelated, but it's one of the most visceral, instinctual ways to get people to remember the reality of physical consequences. Those consequences exist no matter how frustrating or stressful they may be to deal with. If you leave food out, it spoils/you have no food. If you can't find water, you have no water. If you don't sterilize the water/check the source, you get sick. There's no grocery store, no cops, no social media to get support from, no emergency deliveries, no doctor, no credit to extend... nothing but nature and what you carry on your back. If you screw up, you're screwed.

I only did a couple trips like that, but when I got back to highways, cars, skyscrapers, restaurants, etc, I appreciated how amazing it all is, and how it's basically all just a very, very big, complicated campsite that's been built up over a long time. Nothing manmade is a given, and the only thing keeping it together is us. Nature is way bigger than you, and there are no guardrails. If someone launches a nuke, it's not a strategy game or a movie. That's a cliff you don't want to walk anywhere near.

A one or two week backpacking trip in the middle of nowhere should be a graduation requirement, imo. Would have lots of benefits beyond just added perspective about the reality of physical consequences.

It will rob people going through the motions and cheating from actually learning. The people who most benefit from education have never been the people just going through the motions and have at least some intrinsic motivation to actually learn.

Thank you, appreciate the compliment.

And yeah, are definitely a lot of open questions related to all of this. Love how its brought so many deep questions into focus.

> It might have been an interesting argument 20 years ago. It’s just silly now.

Is it?

These networks are capable of copying something, yes. Do we have a good understanding of what that is?

Not really, no. At least I don’t. I’m sure lots of people have a much better understanding than I do, but I think its hard to know exactly whats going on.

People dismiss the stochastic parrot argument because of how impressive big neural nets are, but it doesn’t really invalidate that argument. Is a very, very, very good parrot that learns from everyone at once doing basically the same as what we do? I’d argue no, at least not fully. It’s absorbed aspects of us extremely well/is a very weird, sophisticated mirror, yes, and is copying something somehow, probably in a way reminiscent of how we copy. Is it basically the same as what we’re doing when we think? Partially? Fully? Not at all?

A typical engineer would say “good enough”. That type of response is valuable in a lot of contexts, but I think the willingness to apply it to these models is pretty reckless, even if it’s impossible to easily “prove” why.

To be clear on the exact statement you made, I think you’re right/it’s pretty clear neurons play some very important role/potentially capture a ton of what we consider intelligence, but I don’t think anyone really knows what exactly is being captured/what amount of thought and experience they’re responsible for.

> You can actually hypothesize that a soul exists and that intelligence is non-material, its just that your tests would quickly disprove that hypothesis - crude physical, mechanical modifications to the brain cause changes to intellect and character. If your hypothesis was correct you would not expect to see changes like that at all.

That’s not necessarily a disproof. It’s also not necessarily reasonable to conflate what we call “the soul” with intelligence.

This is entering the world of philosophy, metaphysics and religion and leaving the world of science.

The modern instinct is to simply call bullshit on anything which cannot be materially verified, which is in many ways a very wise thing to do. But it’s worth leaving a door open for weirdness, because apart from very limited kinds of mathematical truth (maybe), I think everything we’ve ever thought to be true has had deeper layers revealed to us than we could have previously imagined.

Consider the reported experience of people who’ve had strokes and lost their ability to speak, and then later regained that ability through therapy. They report experiencing their own thoughts and wanting to speak, but something goes wrong/they can’t translate that into a physical manifestation of their inner state.

Emotional regulation, personality, memory, processing speed, etc… are those really that different from speech? Are they really the essence of who we are, or are they a bridge to the physical world manifest within our bodies?

We can’t reverse most brain damage, so it’s usually not possible to ask a person what their experience of a damaged state is like in comparison to an improved state. We do have a rough, strange kind of comparison in thinking about our younger selves, though. We were all previously pre memory, drooling, poorly regulated babies (and before that, fetuses with no real perception at all). Is it right to say you didn’t have a soul when you were 3 weeks? A year? Two years? When exactly does “you” begin? I can’t remember who I was when I was when I was 2 months with any clarity at all, and you could certainly put different babies in doctored videos and I wouldn’t be able to tell what was me/make up stories and I’d probably just absorb them. But I’m still me and am that 2 month old, much later in time. Whatever I’m experiencing has a weird kind of continuity. Is that encoded in the brain, even though I can’t remember it? Almost definitely, yeah. Is that all of what that experience of continuity is, and where that sense is coming from? I’ve got no idea. I certainly feel deeper. Remember that we all are not living in the real world, we’re all living in our conscious perception. The notion that we can see all of it within a conscious mirror is a pretty bold claim. We can see a lot of it and damage the bridge/poke ourselves in the eyes with icepicks and whatnot, and that does stuff, but what exactly is it doing? Can we really know?

Intuitively most people would say they were still themselves when they were babies despite the lack of physical development of the brain. Whatever is constructing that continuous experience of self is not memory, because that’s not always there, not intelligence, because that’s not always there, not personality, because that’s not always there… it’s weird.

I think it’s important to remember that. Whenever people think they have human beings fully figured out down to the last mechanical detail and have sufficient understanding to declare who does and doesn’t have a soul and what that means in physical terms, bad things tend to happen. And that goes beyond a statement to be cautious about this kind of stuff purely out of moral hazard; the continual hazard is always as empirical as it is moral. We can never really know what we are. Our perceptual limitations may prove assumptions we make about what we are to be terribly, terribly wrong, despite what seems like certainty.

Don't know anywhere you could get that for $100, but if you wanted to get hardcore about making that a reality you might be able to convince someone at a science center with one of these to make immersive challenges aimed at adults -> https://www.shudiscovery.org/programs-education/group-progra.... You'd probably have to offer to do at least some of the work/figure out how to make it happen and absorb that cost to have a chance of convincing them, doubt many people would consider funding anything like that.

Elite Dangerous in VR with a HOTAS is a more achievable way of scratching some of that itch. Might be VR games closer to what you're looking for, but it's the best spaceflight simulator I know of, though it's an unrealistic/sci-fi one (but it does recreate the entire milky way galaxy, which is awesome)

I’ve had the good fortune to work at a small place where the understanding between R&D disruptor types and get-shit-done GSD types was pretty good. When R&D types contain themselves/keep the playground from spilling over until whatever they’re playing with is ready/explored, and the GSD types don’t bulldoze the playground and let it feed them new tools/approaches/ideas when ready, it’s like an organization level flow state. Wish I had a formula for how to replicate that, is magical.

I’ve got a theory on the fermi paradox stuff I need to flesh out (and research, am assuming this isn’t original), among like a dozen other things I’ve been meaning to expand on that I haven’t: I think we severely underestimate how much we’re optimized to see what’s proximal to us.

I think there’s a strong possibility there may be “gray goo” all over the place, beings far bigger than us we’re inside of, physics that sits “parallel” to ours in whatever you’d call “space” in some construction we can’t comprehend, etc.

In short, I think the universe seems empty precisely because it’s distant, both evolutionarily and in terms of physical space.

Donald Hoffman’s been talking about a lot of stuff pointing in this direction.

I've examined similar feelings very closely and don't believe it to be a past centric nostalgia. I've found niches that give me that same energy. Most of what I enjoy lies outside of what's recommended to me by most front page/news feed algorithms/is stuff I find as a consequence of deliberate search/spelunking for different novel ideas.

I genuinely believe true creativity taps into something beyond our conscious experience, and is a kind of strange combination between premonition and expression of the collective unconscious. I think our systems and machine centric world is delusional about the ability to statistically predict how to deliver what people actually want/need, and those systems are unable to replicate extremely important hidden benefits of human curation. We've created systems that seem to be able to meet our needs "automatically", but they don't actually meet our needs/they're too self referential and too reliant on explicit metrics. Those systems have taken over most of the more natural avenues for discovery and end up over-selecting for things that are the average of existing material, and have little creative authenticity. AI recommended and generated movies/art is the final boss of this trend.

That trap is a consequence of the dopaminergic treadmills most of us are stuck on courtesy of recommendation algorithms optimizing purely for attention.