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One of the more depressing things of the AI boom is watching engineers and “atheists” get hoodwinked by mystic gibberish like this blog. There is nothing here b

One of the more depressing things of the AI boom is watching engineers and “atheists” get hoodwinked by mystic gibberish like this blog. There is nothing here but astrology: even Myers-Briggs is more scientific. I think 30% of atheists bothered to think carefully about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and recognized Pastafarianism as a funny commentary on epistemic uncertainty. The remaining 70% said “heh, stoopid Christians believe in a spaghetti monster!” and took it as confirmation of their tribe’s superiority.

jonnycomputer 2y ago
I have not read this blog except the linked blog post, but could you be more specific on what you think is mystic gibberish? Speaking as someone who works in clinical neuroscience, the basic picture being presented is similar in many respects to the informal model I carry around. It may be lacking in certain details, but big picture seems to me that it has a lot going for it as a guide to intuitions.
steveBK123 2y ago
Personally I've always found, ironically, some of my most ardent atheist friends to essentially treat the topic with a level of intensity you might expect from a religious evangelist. Often there's also a level of religious fervor they carry over to politics as well. I don't really care what other peoples religion/non-religion is anymore than what type of underwear they prefer, and yet...
- bedobi 2y ago
  i agree with your sentiment, but it bears pointing out that no one brandishes their underwear in people's faces screaming that they must wear the same ones, or use the political system to privilege people of the same underwear and punish others etc etc fwiw me personally i'm all in on uniqlo airism, there is no better underwear and if i could force everyone to wear them i would (for their own good, of course)
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Well there were the old Michael Jordan ads...
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  We already know that our science can simply not explain/understand what happened in the first 10e-33s after the Big Bang, which is just established science. There is nothing more "negatively religious" than believing that nothing caused that primal explosion of all that is. Unfortunately, they then proceed to throw out the positive aspects of some religious teachings concerning, e.g., compassionate concern for our fellow human beings. Regardless, religion is a personal thing; forcing any beliefs on others is always a problem and must be prevented. We are all free to choose our attitudes and behaviors. Behaviors that harm others, however, must -- in a just system -- be dealt with by the society, for the benefit of the whole, irrespective of belief system of perpetrator or victim. Using compassion to make such decisions is always the best way, for varying values of compassion.
  - jfactorial 2y ago
    > We already know that our science can simply not explain/understand what happened in the first 10e-33s after the Big Bang, which is just established science. Yet. There's a very big difference in "I don't know," vs. "I know that no one can ever know."
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      Absolutely. I actually know that (know that I don't know, but that my not knowing doesn't mean that no other person can know), but modern science will not be the source of such explanations. Those explanations can only be accessed once we understand that the universe itself is queryable (that is our joint purpose here, us and our expansive environment together) and that a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent such that we gain access to it. You could say that a person must learn of the challenge, accept the challenge, and then pass all the tests, thereby gaining access.
      - jfactorial 2y ago
        > once we understand that the universe itself is queryable We do understand that. "What happens when I push a rock off a cliff?" is a query to the universe. The universe's response is observable when the experiment is executed and the rock is pushed. > a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent I have no need for this hypothesis. We can query the universe at any time simply by observing it, proposing a falsifiable explanation for what is observed, and acting within it to test our explanations.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Feeling strongly about lack of belief in something wild without evidence is not congruent to strong belief in something wild without evidence. Even if the people in the former camp can be equally passionate or annoying. Suddenly there's this big unnamed (or is it named and I don't know it?) cognitive error that I see everywhere that is believing in an automatic symmetry between two opposing viewpoints. Sometimes one idea is better than another. No, you don't get "objectivity" points for virtue signaling that you're above the whole debate.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    It's funny that questioning evangelical atheism is getting me more downvotes than even questioning AI or Crypto..
    - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
      Well, again, believing that modern AI is close to what human consciousness and intelligence are, or that coders will fix society without running into Chesterton's fence, are good examples of huge beliefs that require huge justification. For which faith isn't a good substitute. You shouldn't be made to feel like you're extremist in the opposite direction for requiring that justification.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
chzblck 2y ago
Perfect comparison at Myers-Briggs being more scientific. like astrology with extra steps for dorks
jerf 2y ago
It's an application of chaos mathematics to personality development. It isn't a rigorous treatment of such, it's a blog post, but it seems fairly reasonable. Being a blog post and not necessarily intended to end up on Hacker News, shorn of any other context, the author never even used the term "attraction basin", which is the term you'd want to Google if you want to figure out what the author is saying. If you don't know what an attraction basin is, then yeah, this definitely comes off sounding bad, but if you know what it is it makes sense. Attraction basins are one of those basic concepts from chaos mathematics that, once you realize what they are and why they are, you realize that the world can't help but be full of them in all sorts of places, including human personalities. The world is fundamentally iterative, so patterns that arise in all iterations are relevant all over the place. Attraction basins are a good reason to expect in advance, sight unseen, that human personalities can actually be fit into a relatively small number of buckets relative to the conceivable number of buckets that could exist. In fact this is true of any generally similar set of entities living in a generally similar environment, including AIs (of similar architectures, not the entire space of possible AIs) and aliens, assuming they also have some sort of "species" categorization as we do. (Which doesn't have to be "DNA genetics", just, a bunch of similar being for whatever reason.) It doesn't tell you what those will be in advance by any means; it just gives you reason to believe that you won't in fact be looking at an "unbiased", uniformly random distribution of personality parameters, but that they will collect around certain attraction basins in general.

jonnycomputer 2y ago

I have not read this blog except the linked blog post, but could you be more specific on what you think is mystic gibberish? Speaking as someone who works in clinical neuroscience, the basic picture being presented is similar in many respects to the informal model I carry around. It may be lacking in certain details, but big picture seems to me that it has a lot going for it as a guide to intuitions.

steveBK123 2y ago

Personally I've always found, ironically, some of my most ardent atheist friends to essentially treat the topic with a level of intensity you might expect from a religious evangelist. Often there's also a level of religious fervor they carry over to politics as well. I don't really care what other peoples religion/non-religion is anymore than what type of underwear they prefer, and yet...

bedobi 2y ago
i agree with your sentiment, but it bears pointing out that no one brandishes their underwear in people's faces screaming that they must wear the same ones, or use the political system to privilege people of the same underwear and punish others etc etc fwiw me personally i'm all in on uniqlo airism, there is no better underwear and if i could force everyone to wear them i would (for their own good, of course)
- steveBK123 2y ago
  Well there were the old Michael Jordan ads...
MrMcCall 2y ago
We already know that our science can simply not explain/understand what happened in the first 10e-33s after the Big Bang, which is just established science. There is nothing more "negatively religious" than believing that nothing caused that primal explosion of all that is. Unfortunately, they then proceed to throw out the positive aspects of some religious teachings concerning, e.g., compassionate concern for our fellow human beings. Regardless, religion is a personal thing; forcing any beliefs on others is always a problem and must be prevented. We are all free to choose our attitudes and behaviors. Behaviors that harm others, however, must -- in a just system -- be dealt with by the society, for the benefit of the whole, irrespective of belief system of perpetrator or victim. Using compassion to make such decisions is always the best way, for varying values of compassion.
- jfactorial 2y ago
  > We already know that our science can simply not explain/understand what happened in the first 10e-33s after the Big Bang, which is just established science. Yet. There's a very big difference in "I don't know," vs. "I know that no one can ever know."
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    Absolutely. I actually know that (know that I don't know, but that my not knowing doesn't mean that no other person can know), but modern science will not be the source of such explanations. Those explanations can only be accessed once we understand that the universe itself is queryable (that is our joint purpose here, us and our expansive environment together) and that a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent such that we gain access to it. You could say that a person must learn of the challenge, accept the challenge, and then pass all the tests, thereby gaining access.
    - jfactorial 2y ago
      > once we understand that the universe itself is queryable We do understand that. "What happens when I push a rock off a cliff?" is a query to the universe. The universe's response is observable when the experiment is executed and the rock is pushed. > a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent I have no need for this hypothesis. We can query the universe at any time simply by observing it, proposing a falsifiable explanation for what is observed, and acting within it to test our explanations.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Feeling strongly about lack of belief in something wild without evidence is not congruent to strong belief in something wild without evidence. Even if the people in the former camp can be equally passionate or annoying. Suddenly there's this big unnamed (or is it named and I don't know it?) cognitive error that I see everywhere that is believing in an automatic symmetry between two opposing viewpoints. Sometimes one idea is better than another. No, you don't get "objectivity" points for virtue signaling that you're above the whole debate.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  It's funny that questioning evangelical atheism is getting me more downvotes than even questioning AI or Crypto..
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    Well, again, believing that modern AI is close to what human consciousness and intelligence are, or that coders will fix society without running into Chesterton's fence, are good examples of huge beliefs that require huge justification. For which faith isn't a good substitute. You shouldn't be made to feel like you're extremist in the opposite direction for requiring that justification.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

chzblck 2y ago

Perfect comparison at Myers-Briggs being more scientific. like astrology with extra steps for dorks

jerf 2y ago

It's an application of chaos mathematics to personality development. It isn't a rigorous treatment of such, it's a blog post, but it seems fairly reasonable. Being a blog post and not necessarily intended to end up on Hacker News, shorn of any other context, the author never even used the term "attraction basin", which is the term you'd want to Google if you want to figure out what the author is saying. If you don't know what an attraction basin is, then yeah, this definitely comes off sounding bad, but if you know what it is it makes sense. Attraction basins are one of those basic concepts from chaos mathematics that, once you realize what they are and why they are, you realize that the world can't help but be full of them in all sorts of places, including human personalities. The world is fundamentally iterative, so patterns that arise in all iterations are relevant all over the place. Attraction basins are a good reason to expect in advance, sight unseen, that human personalities can actually be fit into a relatively small number of buckets relative to the conceivable number of buckets that could exist. In fact this is true of any generally similar set of entities living in a generally similar environment, including AIs (of similar architectures, not the entire space of possible AIs) and aliens, assuming they also have some sort of "species" categorization as we do. (Which doesn't have to be "DNA genetics", just, a bunch of similar being for whatever reason.) It doesn't tell you what those will be in advance by any means; it just gives you reason to believe that you won't in fact be looking at an "unbiased", uniformly random distribution of personality parameters, but that they will collect around certain attraction basins in general.