Searching yarn

Twts matching #Philosophers:
Sort by: Newest, Oldest, Most Relevant
In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these đŸ€Ź companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

​ Read More
In-reply-to » @prologic hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him "do you support rape" he would not say "no", he'd go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I'm mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn't say "no" right away, he's saying "yes", except with so many words there's some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that's why I give him no slack.

@prologic@twtxt.net

Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can’t know what’s in these peoples’ minds and hearts. Personally I think it’s a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let’s say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you’d accomplish is to cement people’s resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don’t like. So you can’t do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of “rhetoric”, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that’s the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That’s how I think of it anyway.

​ Read More

Somebody apparently once went up the the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said “What a lot of morons people back in the Middle Ages must have been to have looked every morning at what’s going on behind me now, the dawn, and to have thought that what they were seeing was the sun going around the Earth, when as every schoolkid knows the Earth goes around the sun and it doesn’t take too many brains to understand that.” To which Wittgenstein replied, “Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth.” Point being, of course, is that it would have looked exactly the same. swans on tea » You See What Your Knowledge Tells You You’re Seeing

​ Read More

Very few people tend to look at the mind as a system, and also seem to ignore that depression, anxiety, panic disorders, etc. happen for a reason. The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life goals, that they wouldn’t achieve philosophical nor psychological satisfaction that they seek. Their mind has predicted the conclusion of their efforts, and the conclusion lies far below what they seek. Thus the mind desperately attempts to re-understand, re-configure, and re-model the world to achieve its goals. Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders | Hacker News

​ Read More

Babies love putting things in their mouths: dirt, insects, bits of grass, their own poo. They have no sense of fear or self-preservation, and come up with endlessly creative ways to place themselves in mortal peril. Once they learn to talk, their constant experimentation with the world transcends the physical to the philosophical. They want to know everything. They are bottomless pits of curiosity, with very little in the way of attention span or self-discipline. Your typical two-year-old can only concentrate on a task for six minutes at a time. Young children are not self-aware enough to feel much in the way of shame, or embarrassment. Nothing is off-limits. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0

​ Read More