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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 e

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.

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.