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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • the issue is that this is a lot of assumption on the comment’s intention in their response to OP. i feel the emphasis keeps moving back to how they misinterpreted OP, and their failing in doing so. i’m both recognizing their ‘failing,’ but also suggesting that it is more of an issue on how people are interpreting it as invalid via their own biases and preferences.

    not projecting the same preference becomes seen as ‘misreading the room,’ rather than a valid response for a different type of person. it becomes assumed as intentionally, or definitively ‘rude’ rather than just a different, and still valid way of responding to the information provided for some people.

    i assume nothing negative was meant by it, even if it wasn’t the implied commiseration op was looking for, this does not make it suddenly antagonistic. the issue is that so many view it immediately as antagonistic or ‘wrong,’ where it could have been entirely valid were i OP, and saying the same thing as OP. we all have many blindspots, and some things aren’t always salient.

    if you experience this reaction every time society sees that you interpreted things differently, you get a bunch of autistic people (or other groups in preference/experiential minority) hating life. this is also indicative of many other communication failures due to excess fitting towards homogeneity and unconsciously creating social rules to keep things simple and energy free. if you are a surprising element, you get chastised for making others expend energy interpreting your model, because you haven’t successfully been beaten into being less noticeable, even if it completely denies your lived reality. see gay conversion therapy/ABA (same source) for how that tactic is often applied.

    not to escalate, but a constant barrage of these experiences, often without such context being given, leads to many otherwise well-adjusted autistic people hating life, and opting out enitrely. this is why i feel compelled to promote understanding of the different styles of interpretation. i don’t want to lose any more friends.

    many autistic people are already trying, but the communication failure isn’t just on their side of the interaction. but it’s easier to tar and feather the person as an easy pariah than to try and consider how the perspective may have had intention less as a slight, and more as a valid recommendation for those who have a different dialect for interpretating “…see a movie.”

    i suggest looking up any autistic experiences, because a lot boil down to trauma of escalated antagonism just for existing and not already having the exact preferences of others, which makes predicting them impossible without a doctorate in non-autistic preference modelling, and writing that over your whole existence any time you interact with the public.

    also understanding the double empathy problem can help with many other communication difficulties in non homogeneous groups


  • makes sense. i’m coming to see how people do this, but it’s still baffling to me. by ‘this’ i mean socially affirming each-other, rather than trying to interact with the issue in any way. not just as preferred, but as a forced exclusive.

    also legitimately sorry that i can’t compress the whole picture to a quick quip.

    but what i meant by my comment was as much asserting that the comment being downvoted to oblivion was possibly more misinterpreted in intent and meaning than their own interaction with OP’s meme.

    i see it as low dimensional communication exacerbating the size of blindspots for the whole of what is being communicated, because everyone is trying to reduce the energy consumption of language by socially affirming heuristics built on salient preference. this can be mapped to first principles from friston’s free energy principle, into active inference. MITpress has a good textbook for it, although there’s been a lot of new work since then. those who don’t naturally share that preference become ‘wrong’ for communicating what they could interpret without having that same importance given tothings they might not think about, like social ego stroking over just interacting with the concept sans ego.

    more commonly, people are becoming familiar with the ‘double empathy problem’ basically a context and language equivalent to yelling at the autistic kid for not making levels of eye contact that they find painfully intimate and uncomfortable. yes, the local community can think eye contact is ‘just having basic manners’ or ‘just being a decent person,’ but forcing them to do it, and creating a majority salient confirmation bubble chastising them for not doing it constantly and confidently is salt in the wound.

    again, thank you for reading this far if you has. none of this is accusatory towards anyone, just an honest attempt at noting current popular communication failures and how to frame them.

    the double empathy problem also applies to most predictive models projecting in differently socialized spaces. it’s good for people to comprehend.


  • As an autistic person who sees information sharing as more valid and respectable than affirming possible ignorant perspectives for the sake of obtuse social saliency, all I see is a fact and a valid question.

    Also valid advice for those with money. If you can save money from a theater ticket to another Disney slop live action remake, and donate that money to independent artists trying to survive and simultaneously have a voice despite the Disney/warner types stranglehold over sellable cinema for most public spaces.

    People get so upset when anything questions their current trajectory, rather than saying “oh yeah, that’s a valid perspective to avoid the issue in context.”

    And gets a lot of autistic people yelled at for doing their job or trying to help, IMO.

    Is there a reason the advice and question aren’t valid? To me the only rudeness here is in the framing of the rebuke.

    This isn’t trying to one up anyone, this is an attempt to communicate, and improve people’s ability to communicate.

    I’ve even seen doctors excuse bullying of autistic children because the child joined discussion of test scores without pandering to the ego of people that were socially affirming how terrible the test must be, due to their performance.

    At this point people need to start trying to understand the double empathy problem, because it’s valid for more cases of communication differences than just autism.

    Thank you for reading!


  • 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.