3 ms·

> precisely because you can't make head or tails of what they say using the apparatus of thought that you are familiar with. Just because someone is speaking i

> precisely because you can't make head or tails of what they say using the apparatus of thought that you are familiar with. Just because someone is speaking incoherently does not mean they are transforming our paradigms. Sometimes people are just bonkers.

d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
That is the reason for the predictive capacity test.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Frequently early adopters speak more clearly than their followers becaause they have to. Look at Einstein’s Relativity or the works of Sigmund Freud who does not at all come across as a ‘Freudian’. As a system ‘Freudianism’ is a bit discredited, I think of Otto Kernberg railing against homosexuality, but Freud himself refused to do conversion therapy because psychoanalysis could only increase the capacity for love, not diminish it. Therapy has moved on (Rogers, Bowlby, Kohut, Beck) but in Freud you often find zingers (his analysis of sadism) that seem valid outside of his system. With Freud (and even more so Marx) people’s objections are often to the content not the style. When a group becomes hermetic though it can degenerate to people hearing dog whistles and barking, which makes you a dog. ‘Truth’ is a dangerous concept in rhetoric and logic because of how it works with negation. I was told by a science teacher to never say “to tell the truth…” because it presupposes that I lie. A 9/11 truther is a lunatic’s lunatic. Kurt Gödel shows how much trouble you could get into with a function T(x) which determines the logical truth of a logical statement.
  - d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
    You come at this from and interesting psychology angle, so I can't tell if you agree, disagree, or something in between. I think Einstein and GR is a perfect example. He simply did what had previously been unthinkable by making time a dynamic variable subject to transformation. He arrived there by fantastical thinking involving riding light beams and what not. I can go on about Maxwell, etc.. The common theme is not truth-seeking but curating fictions for predictive capacity. Truth does seem dangerous while fiction seems innocuous and extremely useful.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      I think your position is a standard postmodern one and we’re definitely post- because modern theories in psychology and the social sciences and whatnot (Freud, Marx) were falsifiable and eventually falsified. There are still predicates that are determined through observation or inspection of the record (is it raining? Who won Super Bowl XX?) which are key to any kind of fact checking but the the project of an LLM that is an oracle of the truth is a project to build a god. I’m old enough to have had the experience that there is an “event” and I watched it live on TV and saw it in the evening news again and read about it in The New York Times the next day and then in The Economist next week but then 30 years later there is a really great book that looks at the primary and secondary sources and convinces me the account of it in my mind I got from ‘the first draft of history’ was essentially wrong. Some very good books in the phenomenon in accelerated form were written circa 1970 including Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 [1] and Schell’s Time of Illusion. It gets me branded a charlatan by some but I say being able to work within contradictory systems is a quality of the mature mind so one hand I am an arch-reductionist who is trained in theoretical physics and builds ‘database animals’ as a software developer. I can’t work an E-Meter but I am great with dowsing rods and ouija boards even though I don’t believe in them and can’t see how there is any channel for information to support ‘ESP’. [1] Totally stoned he’s the only reporter in the room who actually sees how McGovern got the democratic nomination right in from of them.

d4rkn0d3z 1y ago

That is the reason for the predictive capacity test.

PaulHoule 1y ago
Frequently early adopters speak more clearly than their followers becaause they have to. Look at Einstein’s Relativity or the works of Sigmund Freud who does not at all come across as a ‘Freudian’. As a system ‘Freudianism’ is a bit discredited, I think of Otto Kernberg railing against homosexuality, but Freud himself refused to do conversion therapy because psychoanalysis could only increase the capacity for love, not diminish it. Therapy has moved on (Rogers, Bowlby, Kohut, Beck) but in Freud you often find zingers (his analysis of sadism) that seem valid outside of his system. With Freud (and even more so Marx) people’s objections are often to the content not the style. When a group becomes hermetic though it can degenerate to people hearing dog whistles and barking, which makes you a dog. ‘Truth’ is a dangerous concept in rhetoric and logic because of how it works with negation. I was told by a science teacher to never say “to tell the truth…” because it presupposes that I lie. A 9/11 truther is a lunatic’s lunatic. Kurt Gödel shows how much trouble you could get into with a function T(x) which determines the logical truth of a logical statement.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
  You come at this from and interesting psychology angle, so I can't tell if you agree, disagree, or something in between. I think Einstein and GR is a perfect example. He simply did what had previously been unthinkable by making time a dynamic variable subject to transformation. He arrived there by fantastical thinking involving riding light beams and what not. I can go on about Maxwell, etc.. The common theme is not truth-seeking but curating fictions for predictive capacity. Truth does seem dangerous while fiction seems innocuous and extremely useful.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    I think your position is a standard postmodern one and we’re definitely post- because modern theories in psychology and the social sciences and whatnot (Freud, Marx) were falsifiable and eventually falsified. There are still predicates that are determined through observation or inspection of the record (is it raining? Who won Super Bowl XX?) which are key to any kind of fact checking but the the project of an LLM that is an oracle of the truth is a project to build a god. I’m old enough to have had the experience that there is an “event” and I watched it live on TV and saw it in the evening news again and read about it in The New York Times the next day and then in The Economist next week but then 30 years later there is a really great book that looks at the primary and secondary sources and convinces me the account of it in my mind I got from ‘the first draft of history’ was essentially wrong. Some very good books in the phenomenon in accelerated form were written circa 1970 including Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 [1] and Schell’s Time of Illusion. It gets me branded a charlatan by some but I say being able to work within contradictory systems is a quality of the mature mind so one hand I am an arch-reductionist who is trained in theoretical physics and builds ‘database animals’ as a software developer. I can’t work an E-Meter but I am great with dowsing rods and ouija boards even though I don’t believe in them and can’t see how there is any channel for information to support ‘ESP’. [1] Totally stoned he’s the only reporter in the room who actually sees how McGovern got the democratic nomination right in from of them.