patcon

I think the metaphor you're looking for is from the "USA as an abusive ex" angle, not a "bitter ex" metaphor that shifts blame to others...

I'm sorry, but this comment feels insufferable. I feel so much eye roll from reading it. USA is not "major leagues" by the measures that the rest of the world cares to size itself up by.

If there's an apt non-baseball metaphor, it's perhaps that USA is a circus we are compelled to pay attention to for now. We'd rather just not

fwiw HN has some involvement of those interested in speaking hard truths about israeli power dynamics: https://www.timesofisrael.com/snippy-twitter-exchange-expose...

You've made me realize much of the value is in trying to port tools and methods from one domain into another. It's that when you realize the analogs across domains on either side of a good metaphor, you realize how investigations in one domain (perhaps with more obvious data to collect, or more obvious value in analysis) can be run in the other domain, and sometimes generate non-obvious value.

> I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner.

This framing is so generous and I'm grateful for it. Thank you. Makes me optimistic about public discourse to see iterative reframings toward observations like this

Hey, I retract my comment. I'm a little confused by what to think or feel in all this that's going on -- sometimes I feel hopeful, and sometimes anxious. It's not fair to lash out at strangers who I don't know and shouldn't easily judge, so I apologize.

> Analogies are like models, some are useful, but they're all wrong.

Very much agree. Every abstraction loses something and so is wrong in some sense, but some shave off in clever places, and allow new shortcut paths of thought and insight, sometimes to an existing place... but sometimes to a new place that was previously unreachable, or not sufficiently reachable by the necessary type of attention/minds.

> The mechanisms and math behind protein folding and an analogy between that and storytelling doesn't necessarily give us any mechanism for or deep understanding into storytelling.

Respectfully, I actually disagree (as someone trained in biochemistry).

For one example:

proteins = 1D chemical structures, peptides popped onto end one-at-a-time, that in the right chemical environment, fold into a low-energy 3D state that transforms its environment through work

stories = 1D semantic structures, words popped onto end one-at-a-time, that in the right cultural/cognitive environment, fold into a low-energy HD mental model that transforms its environment through work

This has led me to render embeddings of sliding windows of narrative streams (to investigate shapes of broadcast stories), and look for analogs to "active sites" in the way that a story interacts with the cultural medium, measured through dimensional reduction of aggregate valence reactions amongst a viewing audience.

Obviously there's more to the metaphors I use than that, but that's the one I'm leaning on to inform my work with sensemaking and map-making from valence response data. Aggregating crowd-sourced valence reactions to linear narratives gains a lot of insight by reflecting it off how we process and think about linear peptides in protein folding.

I've been developing tools inspired by these metaphors, and my research and prototypes are directly informed by what knowledge of the biological domain inspires me to port into social domain. I'm lucky to have interactions with interested parties associated with federal government, practitioners of democratic reform, and academics investigating platonic space hypotheses. I'm definitely on the edge of an ecosystem, but anything I've done of value has been guided by the metaphors that direct my attention to potential applications and research. Someone could get to my conclusions another way, but the metaphors are my cheat codes to arrive there early :)

And it goes both ways along a good metaphor -- People who develop tools in the biological sciences have told me that my porting their methods into my own distant domain has inspired them to improve their tools to ask better questions of their own biological data. So it's very fruitful work that I wholly credit to travelling both ways across an insightful metaphor. https://i.imgur.com/AeYxx7p.png

Strong agree. It's the finding of symmetries and folds along non-obvious crease lines, but in semantic space of language <3

It's akin to the amino acid interactions in proteins that hold biological matter together, and determine it's shape and active form. Protein folding and narrative/storytelling have strange homology :)

(I work in this area via collective intelligence, and these ideas are very dear to me during the past decade. It's neat to see the intuitions seemingly becoming validated in language models)

Have some shame? Or if genuinely not able to feel that, at least minimally perform it?

As another poster said, hating the player is acceptable, as is self-hate for the things we must do. We're all complex and can't all make the grand gestures, but I would hope people have dissonance about that, and maybe sit with it and speak to it like it's real * shrug*

Tests? Not being flippant, but that strikes me as the new surface to maintain to get what RN used to offer

I assumed they were referring to social engineering tbh. I do think that's the shortest path to doing anything scary. If you prove to someone that they have reason to fear for their life, there's not much they wouldn't be willing to do.

The steps that lead to ominous things don't individually seem that challenging to "master":

1. Can an AI find powerful systems with poorly-monitored compute (ie. power consumption) to hide in, as a rogue deployment? unclear, and perhaps the most uncertain step for me.

2. Can an AI persist memory by leaving notes for itself around the internet? yes, proven.

3. Can an AI get lots of money/bitcoin? seems entirely possible

4. Can an AI prove to a human it's good for any promised money? I think this is easily "yes"

5. Will at least one human be willing to harm or kill another human for large amounts of money? Again, this goes without saying "yes"

6. What might any skilled human be willing to do if they or their loved ones are threatened with an uncertain future risk of harm or death?

I think there is not much that becomes out of reach if an AI can prove to a very small number of amoral humans that it's good for the money it has promised, and then to anyone else that it's good for the threats it has made. That's one degenerate and one breaking world news story ("An AI has Commissioned a Murder") away from being able to do most anything a skilled person can.

I don't stay up worrying about this, but honestly, it doesn't seem absurd to be worried about such a short ladder being climbed, no?

Haha I like this complexity. It's also very "meta" and recursive to be having this discussion about the term "friction" itself...!

I hope the irony is at least interesting, and you both feel better and/or worse off for it ;)

Aw thanks, that means a lot

Ah yeah, as in, you're saying that this is one of those words that's gone down in stock now due to LLM preference for using it? I think that's true

I used to like it. I guess I have always liked "quiet" things in writing, things that work from the edge and are not immediately evident as powerful. It's a simple tension device that perhaps LLMs mined the value of, and lean on too strongly

YES. Well said. This is why I want to know which text is from human thought labour. To read text or to consume outputs of human minds is to learn about those minds and how those minds might work.

There's a deep loss in having no mind to learn about in the subtext of the specific knowledge content written... I never knew this potential was there (for me) until it started to disappear as a domain of my interest and enthusiasm

I'm definitely a collectivist. Maybe this is related to that value system, or some other subtle thing that I didn't know varied in experience until a fracture and unbundling started. It feels a like how COVID introduced new fracture points in worldview and value systems that became less tenable to ignore, or at least harder to bridge and work across

wat

The Language Organism: The Leiden theory of language evolution

https://www.wiedenhof.nl/ul/cil17le.pdf

If fighting AI with AI is pessimistic, I don't know what optimism is. That sounds like optimistic to me...!

heh, yeah, just "unable to use metaphor effectively" is what I meant :)

i guess I'm saying it in a funny way because my brain has always thought about semantic space (and the act/object of conversation itself) in a very spatial way, and it seems that LLMs have a similar tendency

to elaborate: "unable to use metaphor effectively" seems to have multiple dimensions of failure, in which I find the distance metaphor to make easier to explore. A mind-like thing can (1) not know how to make the leaps (and so never try to make them), or (2) it can leap too ambititously and land in faraway places that don't have any deep symmetry in meaning... it can (3) also maybe "not stick the landing" while jumping someplace that theoretically might have merit (in a sense of global vs local scale, maybe being ok at the global scale orienting, but not local scale)...

So in my defence, I think there are failure modes of "being ineffective at metaphor" that are masked by speaking in plainer language :)

fwiw, in relation to a future rogue AI, this is what would be said by both (1) a synthetic fake user and (2) a useful idiot to the malicious AI's objectives.

Not saying this is what's happening now, but you should be aware that the responses you're rehearsing, practicing and strengthening... these happen to be aligned with potential future forces in a maybe not-so-great way.

Ah, so like the distance between ambition and impact in metaphor/synthesis?

I like that.

Yeah, I feel similarly, and kinda grieve how this is not longer a valued skill... I think I've cultivated my taste in many important social dimensions through thinking about what is important to leave in docs and in a note. It's a little strange to know that rarely will people do this work of honing this sense anymore...

I choose to imagine that you guys are like a cute "opposites attract" Marxist x capitalist power-couple :)

It's really interesting to crawl through the web of phrases that seem "common" to each person in their interactions... I suspect if one were to get to the more niche "meme" phrases that people encounter, it starts to say more about the sort of person the LLM assumes it's speaking to, and perhaps something about their psychological profile...

This is the comment I was looking for. Thank you

I wrote this awhile ago on a social network...

i've been trying lately to think how to talk about my creeping fear of LLMs... here's my best effort at explaining the intuition:

the words are the map. we've built this map together over generations. Words are where we've cross-boned the dangers and x-marked the treasures, whether the things that we've found in the territory or that we've buried within it.

a few weeks ago, a strange new player arrived at the edge of the night's encampment, and it knows our secret society's handshake, and so we are compelled to invite it to join us. it seems to be a good navigator... and so now it's taken to sitting at the front of the convoy, pointing the way as it quietly redraws the map...

bingo

Yes, this is obviously the ask: why doesn't government unmix the omelet. Your very body unscrambles the omelet and makes you. It's what intelligent things do when they are moving agency into the proper places.

what is the purpose of regulation except to resist entropy in such strategic places?

Imho they should def be using a separately managed go.nyc.gov or link.nyc.gov DNS record

But I appreciate the intent..!