Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
That includes a nontrivial number of chefs.
web: http://maxim.ece.illinois.edu substack: https://realizable.substack.com
6,497 followers 928 following 2,239 posts
view profile on Bluesky Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
That includes a nontrivial number of chefs.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Dear god, that entire subreddit …
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Maybe, but he’s not good at jokes either. bsky.app/profile/bart...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Vesper should be stirred, not shaken.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
The whole "clanker" thing is ridiculous.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Come on, AI nerds are too inept for that. Certain Girard-misunderstanding billionaires, on the other hand ...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Cosma has a good take (as usual): bactra.org/notebooks/ev...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
The best one so far!
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Farmers’ market haul.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGNI...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Where do consistent histories go?
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
But now it also includes culture war slop.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
We can have a bit of state capitalism, as a treat.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Seven decades of Soviet rule led to a deeply ingrained cynicism which, somehow, transitioned to willingness to believe any charismatic charlatan on the teevee. What @hannahgais.bsky.social described in this article I witnessed firsthand as a teen in Russia. thebaffler.com/latest/psych...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Where, it should be noted, their definition of communism has lost any anchor in reality and can mean whatever they want it to mean.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Relatedly, what blackpilled me regarding the purported immunity of American system against cults of personality is that, even though the fall of the USSR was in part precipitated by so many powerful exposés of the horrors of Stalinism, they decided, nah, they still want personalist dictatorship.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Many such cases.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
A lot of the ex-Soviets also learned to love the culture war slop, alas.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
You'd be surprised how many of them still yearn for the *right* kind of authoritarianism and at their mental acrobatics skills to justify the current moment.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Accidental circumcision by falling window sash ranks high up there.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance Bernstein, Against the Gods
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
This has nothing to do with whatever beliefs Weizenbaum may have had regarding humans' direct psychic access to the Akashic records or whatever.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
The problem of where to draw the boundary between judgment and calculation is a political problem, not an engineering one. bsky.app/profile/mrag...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Sure, writing a preface to Steiner is crank central, but what bearing does this have on Weizenbaum's distinction between judgment and calculation? This guilt-by-association criticism is every bit as ideological as the one put forward by Bender and co.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
And deeply ironic as well, because Scott is a true believer in the AI safety cause and an adept of vulgar rationality a la Nate Silver.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Yep.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social)
Lunch of champions: p’tit basque, roasted almonds, and chilled Crenshaw melon.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reposted reply parent
Also, it is worthy of note that, for the AI safety people, the ends (preventing the emergence of skynet and bioweapons) justify the means (among other things, immiserating huge quantities of people by normalizing runaway gambling in the guise of "predictive rationality").
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
An example of this grand guignol: an ML researcher who pivoted to AI safety and fully embraced all of the x-risk doomsday narratives was demanding quantitative evidence to the claims that gambling at scale is harmful. What is that saying by Scott Alexander? "Beware solated demands for rigor?"
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Also, it is worthy of note that, for the AI safety people, the ends (preventing the emergence of skynet and bioweapons) justify the means (among other things, immiserating huge quantities of people by normalizing runaway gambling in the guise of "predictive rationality").
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
I had a somewhat technical thread on Twitter about compression algorithms and underlying conceptual ideas right after Ted Chiang's "blurry JPEG" New Yorker article came out. I have deleted my Twitter account, but perhaps I should resurrect that thread from the downloaded archive.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
bsky.app/profile/mrag...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
realizable.substack.com/p/how-to-do-...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
With some minor modifications, that’s Husserlian phenomenology (you don’t have to be a Platonist to be a realist).
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Ah. Got it.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Traditional (Cartesian) dualism is substance dualism.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Keynes thought so :)
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Substance monism and property dualism. This is the way.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
As for Newton, he had enough epistemic humility to refrain from making hypotheses about the mechanism behind action at a distance.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
I personally prefer Philip Agre’s _Computation and Human Experience_. I don’t think he could be accused of being a crank.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
That may be the case, but so are the opinions of the AI safety crank club.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Which takes us straight back to the intentional stance.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
I’d love to do engineering science of universal next-token predictors, but instead we’re stuck here arguing about everyone’s brand of woo. bsky.app/profile/mrag...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Jack Parsons was a Crowleyite, yet he also founded the JPL. This is a weak argument.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
So instead of taking the time to understand transformers’ capabilities as powerful architectures for data-driven approximation of control policies, we’re consigned to this.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Yes, and it’s in large part because chatbots sell, whereas training transformer architectures on tokenized natural signs for applications in science would take much longer but wouldn’t enrich Sam Altman.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
One compelling reason why it may be different this time is that, unlike the past examples, here we are dealing with early-generation intentional artifacts (in the sense of Dennett), which novels and rock lyrics are not.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
realizable.substack.com/p/learning-f...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Sample-efficiency of human intelligence was paid for in aeons of evolution (“what’s a priori for an individual is a posteriori for the species,” like Konrad Lorenz said).
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
And this very recent thing as well: eschwitz.substack.com/p/minimal-au...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
As I keep saying, everyone should read this: dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721....
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Yes, that’s my idiosyncratic brand of constructivism too (that was Herman Weyl’s perspective).
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
To be fair, his Society of Mind framework was fairly sophisticated. But he did have a bit of a fanatic’s zeal in him.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Constructivism stays winning.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Yes, among others. It’s described in some detail in Pamela McCorduck’s _Machines Who Think_.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Not that they hadn’t tried, though. When the book came out, many of the bigshot AI researchers accused Weizenbaum of sour grapes on account of no longer being able to contribute anything original as a scientist.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Also, just like Ben says, you should all read @jessica.bsky.social's essay on the artificiality of alignment. joinreboot.org/p/alignment
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social)
Ben is right. The "AI Safety" cult is all bent out of shape about the hypothetical harm from AGI shoggoths, but the real, tangible harm is happening right here and now. I used to think the late Dan Dennett was too alarmist about the danger of "counterfeit people," but he was spot on.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Blackalicious Cannibal Ox Deltron 3030 Antipop Consortium Open Mike Eagle Shabazz Palaces
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
On the other hand, it’s more realistic than sandpiles or the Ising model.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Of all people, Chomsky had it right: why is everyone so obsessed with consciousness? Did anyone say anything new about it that wasn't already said in the 18th century?
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
mitpress.mit.edu/978093675610...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
No, no one owes anyone an article on Searle. Searle is irrelevant.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
This is primo content.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Helen Andrews. Of course.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Next step: know the difference between y’all and all y’all.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Frankfurt School remains undefeated
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Xunzi did it before Cicero (but after Xenophon).
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
It’s like if Asteriskmag and Vox had a child.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
As well as a great Emerson Lake & Palmer song.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
_Legitimation Crisis_ and _ Communication and the Evolution of Society_ are genuinely good analyses.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
constructed
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
We don't know how the brain *works* for more or less the same reason and with the same implications.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
(With the caveat that "modern AI" is machine learning/pattern recognition using very large, flexible model architectures. But the book does get into that.)
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
This is indeed a good book.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Everything is control theory, but not everything is optimal control theory.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
There's nothing platonic about it, it's pragmatism all the way down.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Everything is control theory. Always has been.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
I just subscribed to yours as well.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
realizable.substack.com/p/supertzar-...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
realizable.substack.com/p/how-to-do-...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
realizable.substack.com/p/aristoteli...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
realizable.substack.com/p/the-daoist...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
realizable.substack.com/p/the-daoist...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
realizable.substack.com/p/the-daoist...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
Here are some of my posts that touch upon the same ideas you were referring to (connections between intelligence, language, knowledge, cognition, systems, etc.) realizable.substack.com/p/c-west-chu...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
I tend to write long posts as well, which is why can only put them out once a month or so.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
What S&Z were saying is that either one doesn't need catastrophe theory to arrive at the stated conclusion or Zeeman's invocation of Thom's classification of elementary catastrophes goes beyond what the result says rigorously (e.g., as regards the meaning of terms like "generic," "local," etc.).
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
There were articles by Hector Sussmann and Raphael Zahler in Synthese critiquing Zeeman's ideas (basically arguing that the results he obtained using catastrophe theory are self-evident and that Thom's theorems don't support Zeeman's interpretation). Some of it even spilled out into popular press.
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social)
your daily dose of prog weirdness, enjoy www.youtube.com/watch?v=zflp...
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social)
Two different days, two different places to go for breakfast, and both are playing “Come on Eileen”? Reset the simulation please!
Maxim Raginsky (@mraginsky.bsky.social) reply parent
for the trollish terminology alone -- casino vs casinoe (rhymes with 'canoe')