TheVat

The notable act of aggression, so far, is the Portland Frog getting pepper sprayed in the costume's air inlet. Suggesting, for the umpteenth time, that the warfaring is coming from law enforcement.

Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/10/genetics-intelligence-charles-murray/684544/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYp4a6DXeDrYtky6k7igmezs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share (Above link is free, from an Atlantic subscriber) ...The bet’s premise was simple enough. Murray quoted himself on the podcast, arguing that “we will understand IQ genetically. I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks, but we’ll know basically what’s going on.” And he proposed that, in seven years, he’d sit through a lecture I gave on the topic: “Who Was More Right?” It is now 2025, and I am here to declare that I was more right. (This article can sub in for the lecture Murray proposed.) We do not understand the genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others. The more we have learned about the specifics of DNA associated with intelligence, the further away that goal has receded. Even given a softer goal of predicting, rather than explaining, intelligence differences, we still can’t do it very well. If anything, we are further away now than in 2018 to knowing “basically what’s going on” with genetic influences on intelligence. (When I reached out to Murray for his view on this, he insisted that he is still right. “Of course I think I won the bet, and I will lay out my reasons for thinking that,” he wrote in an email. He told me he plans to do so in a few months, when he has more time.)

Ah, I see the problem. And the FT arguer will say that leaves the door open to some role for some pervasive consciousness because one of their premises is that this is the only universe, so why should it just happen to have those optimal universal constants when it was just a random thing. Any setting of constants is equally rare, barring some other effect (like Lee Smolin's evolving constants conjecture), so the FT arguer would then ask why the rare one just happened to be bio-friendly. Which then kicks it back to some form of multiple universes where all settings on the constant dial are "tried out" at some point. No one hears about the dead ends, where say electron are in orbitals the radius of a solar system, because no baryonic matter can organize into sentient life. And we can't access such regions of the multiverse, either proving or falsifying. So the FT creationist can think there's a standoff.

Some entrepreeneur will surely try to make a nutritional supplement for cats which works on a similar principle.

Excellent thread, @studiot - these things can unravel trust and integrity so quickly that grassroots awareness is critical if the public is going to be able to have any control of this runaway locomotive. There can't be too many forums and social media gatherings where we get such caveats out there and people talking about them.

Yeah, the authoritarian versions of various ideologies seem dependent on the mythos of the protective "strongman," with all its rhetoric of dangerous enemies and attendant personality cult forming around someone who knows how to flex their biceps and promise quick action. I always thought the potential for this was high in the USA, where there's a culturally ingrained impatience and distrust with solutions that take time and nuance and complex structures. Sinclair Lewis saw this back in the 1930s, with his now eerily prescient novel "It Can't Happen Here." And then you have our apathy (half of Americans don't vote, and don't trust or value our political process), which means the Turnip being elected by slightly over one quarter of the adult population. Combine the cultist tendency with the voting deficit, and you can easily fall into minority rule. And then there's the truly rancid electoral college system for a presidential election... don't even get me started. The technical nomenclature is Swedinavians, iirc.

Ok, I was thinking the FTA was about how the fine structure constant and all was so perfectly set for organized matter etc. The counter to that was that life which can observe this can only happen in the universe where the FSC etc has that perfect ratio. In effect, bio-supporting universes are like lightning strikes - rare, but there pazillions of them. That's the "strong anthropic principle" IIRC. I am guessing the FTA you all mention is more about how planets give rise to life. I was thinking cosmic structure, you meant planetary conditions. In which case, yes, that just is a believer with poor understanding of probability.

Thanks, I guess there are some that aren't really "gap" arguments, though those tend to be the ones I hear the most over here. As @exchemist mentions, there are "logic" arguments like the fine tuning one, though even that sort of relies on a gap, where the strong anthropic principle is rejected because the proponent of the fine tuning argument assumes that we can never establish the reality of a multiverse (a multiverse which would then reduce the FT argument to a puddle argument - this depression in the pavement fits me ever so well!)

Yep, I had noticed that Israel had to convert the infrastructure of Gaza into gravel before marginally nobler sentiments could emerge. Quite difficult imagining the NPP board in Oslo saying, "hey, he bullied everyone (including us) and kept harping on threats of complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza - what a great way to forge lasting peace! Let's give him the prize next year!"

Is it fair to say they all boil down to one? Never saw one that wasn't some form of "explanatory gaps." Unless it was a really silly one, like "Jeff had a vision, and he is wise," that sort of thing, which is more on a lower tier of arguments that you don't see in science circles so much.

Yes. I occasionally reply as if these are real, to provide mods a little extra rope. We've an extended chat on the bot issues over in the Suggestion forum.

You need to provide citations to support this. Pick at least one of those and provide a peer reviewed paper demonstrating the use of AI analytics on data which is sparse or noisy. How about fluid flow?

I would consult Dmitri Jerkinov's seminal paper on the use of Markov Chains in analyzing both posterior and anterior distributions of Type Ia supernovae (white dwarves).

Thank you for your sharply observed take on new members, @exchemist . Your reporting on this trend shows your thoughtful and deeply scrupulous attention to the integrity of the website and is a timely reminder of how easily users can be deceived by automated software. And your prompt use of the reporting feature reflects an unusual diligence in addressing these serious concerns. (teehee)

Isn't the method of science to get to models of an objective reality which are not dependent on my view point and how I might want to see things?

Better than the gallows trapdoor, which has often been a less stable platform from which some last-moment interpretations are made. 😉

LoL. It's funny, my eyes have passed over that phrase many times and without fully absorbing the humorous implications.

We attended a Unitarian church after I was around 9, and I recall liking the replacement of a grisly execution as the primary church symbol with a flaming chalice. Most of the congregation were like my parents, lapsed Christians looking for a spiritual meeting that drew from multiple religions and was agnostic on the nature of deity. (This was the Universalist branch, which is the main one in the States) Isaac Asimov sometimes attended the UU church we attended in the Boston area. Once, chasing a fellow young hooligan around the parish hall, I stepped on Dr Asimov's foot. We both skidded to a halt, and I apologized. Asimov laughed and said, it's okay I step on them all the time.

I lived briefly on the edge of an Adventist community (surrounding an Adventist college). They were pretty quiet (Adventists really don't do the drinking/wild party thing in college) and there was an excellent vegetarian grocery by the campus, so that compensated somewhat for their stupid beliefs - you wouldn't want to study geology or evolutionary biology at an Adventist college. On the matter of Rapture, they reject the standard scenario (with the pre-tribulation grab) and instead believe in a physical Second Coming of JC after the tribulation period, which is loud (trumpets) and globally withessed. Jesus rallies all his followers and then loads them into sky buses or saucers or whatever is used for transport to Heaven. No empty pants or cars up on the sidewalk or any people just blinking out of existence while showering and the hideous waste of municipal water supplies that would follow.

An extra fill-up, Regal Lager pull - I fart, Xena. Naw, order not a tub Regal Lager, but a ton, Red Rowan.

As well as the Norse legend of a terrible sea monster, there was the movie quote "release the kraken," which become a popular catchphrase. Later, in 2020, we had a terrible Trump monster, Sidney Powell, who unleashed the phrase on journalists in regard to some harebrained election conspiracy theory. I don't know why "Ari" but sometimes jokes sail over my head, only later to seize me in their tentacles when I either finally get it or someone explains it to me.

Emily recently got this disturbing message from a fertility clinic: Cleveland sire suggests egg user is DNA, Level C.

My feeling has been that the OP likes to trumpet their humility while accusing anyone who points out their incomplete understanding of science or the philosophy of mind as arrogant or psychopathic. For me, the real discussion never really started, as there was no attempt to distinguish between concepts like AGI and consciousness. The former has well-established scientific criteria, the latter does not, and there lies the rub. One fairly clear summary of the Hard Problem is to be found in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (sometimes a little more accessible for the neophyte than the SEP): The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject. The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together. But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question, Why is it conscious? This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science. Consciousness therefore presents a hard problem for science, or perhaps it marks the limits of what science can explain. Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with so-called “easy problems” of consciousness: the problems of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness. These features can be explained using the usual methods of science. But that leaves the question of why there is something it is like for the subject when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present. This is the hard problem. In more detail, the challenge arises because it does not seem that the qualitative and subjective aspects of conscious experience—how consciousness “feels” and the fact that it is directly “for me”—fit into a physicalist ontology, one consisting of just the basic elements of physics plus structural, dynamical, and functional combinations of those basic elements. It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious. And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject. There seems to be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical world and consciousness. All these factors make the hard problem hard. The hard problem was so-named by David Chalmers in 1995. The problem is a major focus of research in contemporary philosophy of mind, and there is a considerable body of empirical research in psychology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. The problem touches on issues in ontology, on the nature and limits of scientific explanation, and on the accuracy and scope of introspection and first-person knowledge, to name but a few. Reactions to the hard problem range from an outright denial of the issue to naturalistic reduction to panpsychism (the claim that everything is conscious to some degree) to full-blown mind-body dualism.

Boston. Figures. Now I'm recalling a series where there's sort of a Rapture like event, not normally my taste, but it was so well done as a familial drama with great performances by Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon, among others, that I was sucked in. Or up, whatever applies. Had a great theme song by Iris Dement, "Let the Mystery Be." IIRC the narrative gets in some pretty sharp digs at the religious interpretations and reactions to what has happened, and them goes off on some more sci-fi direction mixed with magical realism. Really peculiar show. It doesn't spoonfeed you anything - you have to sort out your bafflement. Possibly the best familial drama that HBO ever did. The show addresses the question of numbers which @toucana mentioned in the OP. About 2% of humanity disappears, but there are no clear-cut moral attributes about them. And the title finally came to me: The Leftovers.

Well maybe. I don't think we can guarantee where intelligent discussion will go or if it will connect all this LLM chatting with Martin Buber. Buber, it is worth noting, was looking at human-human interactions in his famous I/Thou paradigm, and was wanting humans to acknowledge each other's full humanity rather than be transactional or objectifying each other. Buber wanted to diminish egoism in human interactions and have people be authentic with each other. I'm not sure how Bubers humanistic approach really can bridge over to a human/LLM interaction. I don't post in cases where I'm not interested. And I suspect you will find no shortages of intellectual curiosity - but it may be tempered with skepticism about any particular assumptions that are made about subjective awareness in current AI. This would I hope only serve to sharpen our understanding of both scientific and philosophical issues that swirl around machine intelligence and behavior.