The benefits of a Game of Thrones education.

Accidentally replied to a sub post!

I cannot comment on the content of your post because I simply don't know the history of India,

and your comment does remind me of a book by Steven Pinker called The Better Angels of Our Nature where he details, in gruesome descriptions, the fact that humanity's past has been filled with barbarities.

We have gradually on everage become more peaceful and more empathetic through our evolution.

Humanity's history is full of horrors, and these happened pretty much everywhere, as far as I understand it.

What's extremely confusing today, I think, is that not everywhere has changed to the same amount of empathy at the same time. Just like in any population or country in the planet, a certain percentage of people are going to be psychopaths.

Where a lot of, perhaps, let's call them liberal views, get it a bit wrong, is imagining that absolutely everyone in the world holds the exact same liberal values and attitudes as the best liberal people of the West do.

Actually, it's a vast tapestry, and some areas are more liberal, and other areas are less liberal. And some people in amongst groups are more liberal, and some are less liberal. Some parts of the world are more violent, in their systems, their attitudes, beliefs, etc. Some do violence in different ways -- USA and Russia have 13,000 nuclear warheads pointed at each other -- that's violence also.

And this is a challenge for globalization, but I think it just means that globalization needs to happen -- to get all its benefits -- gradually, perhaps slowly in a moderated way, rather than massive changes which are perhaps a little bit counterproductive.

There is a common humanity but we also have a common barbarity in our collective history and -- as the saying goes -- the future has already been invented but it isn't evenly distributed yet -- so have to include that in a way that works, not in a way that's chaotic and catastrophic. It just needs doing with moderation.

But this also means being moderate in how we go about making generalizations about groups. That becomes labeling and othering, and that, if done in a blind way, doesn't really help anyone.

It's better to just look realistically at peoples and situations and context. As they are now. As you find them right now. Try to see everything fresh -- we can all still make judgments, we just have to be careful that they are good judgments rather than blind judgments.

Every judgement is only a piece of the picture, a partial truth.

For example, it seems to be in the interests of the world's superpowers to promote and back the most extreme and violent groups amongst developing countries as a way to keep those countries destabilised, fragile, and easier to control and influence.

If the world's superpowers had been actively backing and promoting the most reasonable, modern, forward-looking groups amongst the developing countries, I think the picture today would be quite different.

And that doesn't negate the barbarities of the past from across the world, be it the Roman Empire, the British Empire, various Chinese dynasties, etc.

looking forward to reliving the rich text email versus plain text flame wars with the waiter!

Yum!

What do you say to the people who claim that we need gas because it is flexible and fast enough to cope with the high variability of renewables and we need nuclear because we're always going to need base load in quantities that are hard to get otherwise?

Europe has the kind of choice where everything comes with spam. Yes also a Europe citizen.

Yes, I was going to add that, after all, probability is something we conceptualised, as humans, and then we built machines that work on that principle! we worried that the robot will want to kill us and what's the first thing we do when we can build drones? Use them to kill.

I agree that humans mimic LLMs with respect to probability judgements. Marketers know that if you see a "fact" written in a few different articles or sources, you come to assume it's true, for example. We rely on what our culture feeds us and we internalise it as beliefs.

But the other words you mentioned are actually very difficult and deep questions which smart people throughout the ages have wrestled with and we still don't know the answers today. Sentience/the ability to have an experience is the most obvious and direct reality we each have, yet nobody knows how that works.

Yes our minds can remember things we've heard and repeat them like a photocopier or an LLM, but we don't know what is experiencing the whole show.

A carbon price built into the economy, perhaps that means, eventually, resource rationing for every human being. Most of what we do causes pollution or just using something up, even if just fresh water. This is the look in the mirror moment.

We kinda use money but it's so abstract now that it has no connection to the natural environment. And yes what's sand until someone invents a process to coverts it to something useful. But many processes deplete.

Some regenerate, like soil regeneration. So maybe the concept of money creation should be environmental creation insofar as the environment in the end supports humans. If we don't need pandas or house cats then they're not part of the equation except as liabilities. Some environmentalists say we should eat the cats and dogs.

But regenerative farming would be actual wealth creation, as would any environmental intervention which supports our ecosystem for eventual human life.

I imagine this how eventually it'll have to go.

  And having children would have to be costed in as well. Are your children going to be a net contribution to our economy of ecology, or a net drain? It may be that you have to borrow theoretical credits to have children and then train them to be, as an example, regenerate farmers, so they can repay your debt.

So you'd have to show you could train them well in that and that their skills are needed where you live. Dense cities might become a kind of weird luxury as they are mostly consumption machines.

Sounds crazy but the notion of externalities is ultimately about how our money symbols don't represent the environment but a weird story about who is permitted to make promises.

The science around climate change, because it involves complex systems, is so convoluted, that it's going to keep many expert witnesses well paid for a long time to come, if in any way the law has to establish whether it is "true" or not. It's one of the reasons the anti-climate change voices will never go away -- ultimately it is too complex and people simply take a view on what they think is the more likely truth.

Sounds like an emotional reason, so maybe that is the right answer. Often people don't care to admit the real reason as that's a different part of the brain. But who knows.

Everyone now focus on compromising the device instead.

The word communication gets vastly overused, as if the environment will force you to communicate and that'll just work.

What's really meant is empathy, intelligence, and buying into the values and goals and attitudes.

If people are already compatible then you DO NOT NEED TO BE IN THE SAME ROOM. You'll naturally find each other online or on calls as and when needed.

If you have to force people into the same airspace in order to get white collar work done then you don't have a team, you have reluctant and undriven and incompatible people.

That's an extreme example. How about an ordinary example? She seems great, and I feel in love (factually I don't know her whole life story, nor whether she has the genes which make her prone to addiction, nor what psychological damage is lurking in her sub personalities, nor whether she will have fertility problems etc.)

My point is we rely on narratives far more maybe than we realise. Which is why everyone who wants to manipulate, can just focus on using narratives. Hence more "valuable".

That's how I use it and I find it works really well as a lossy search engine.

The brain is not one model trying to do everything.

I think maybe the big mistake that's been made is imagining that intelligence is just one model.

You only have to introspect a bit to realize that when you go through your day you're flipping and changing states between what I guess would be different intelligences.

It probably makes no sense to think of the brain as being a single model.

We have lots and lots of models which are all "trained" or good in some way at doing certain things.

We have mathematical intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical intelligence, and so on.

That's probably because the brain has all these different specialist regions, and there's some interesting new work on the left and right hemispheres as a whole representing two entirely different modes of attention -- ways of attending to the world.

(The old left-right brain thing apparently got it wrong but the new research thinks they've got the real answer.)

I think AIs should be designed as highly specialist models which are really good at doing specific things.

I'm sure it has an uncanny ability to recognise patterns where humans can't see them, given enough training.

Maybe these models are breaking down because they're trying to bring together too many disparate things and they lose structure because there is no one structure which can do them all.

Specialist models with specialist real world problems. The AI "apps".