A Wicked, Foolish Lie

I received a message in the flood. Words for a new weapon. Named after an extinct deity. I have a name for you. (old, 18+, which bears saying)

[multiheaded1793]

Communism will win.

[afloweroutofstone]

I feel like I hate AI slightly less than the average Tumblr user, but it still scares the shit out of me to see how many people now engage in internet arguments by submitting their opponent’s argument to an AI bot and saying “explain why this is wrong and I am right.” It is concerning first because most AI models are sycophants that will tell you exactly what you want to hear, which makes then extremely potent delusion-confirmers. But it’s even more concerning because learning how to argue for yourself— how to evaluate claims, to assess an argument, to find and check sources, to spot flaws in someone’s case— is one of the most important skills you can have in life. If you don’t have that, you are unable to evaluate what is true for yourself. You will walk right into the arms of the first crackpot or cult that talks to you when you don’t have Claude available. Extremely grim portent that many people seem to find this acceptable

[afloweroutofstone]

An anarcho-syndicalist American analytic philosopher and linguistics professor was teaching a class on Bertrand Russell, known logician.

“Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Russell as the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, even more influential than Jacques Derrida or any other continental philosopher!” At this moment, a brave, psycho-analytic, Hegelian Marxist philosopher and cultural theorist, who fully recognized the weaponisation and ideological basis of instrumental rationality, boldly stood up and tugged at his collar. “My god, pure ideology! How can you ignore the work of Lacan and the Frankfurt School and so on and so on, like that?” 

The arrogant professor smirked quite arrogantly and smugly replied, “Continental philosophy cloaks trivialities in fancy language and uses the scientific-sounding term ‘theory’ to describe propositions that could never be tested empirically.” 

“Wrong. If empiricism is so important, as you would say, then how come you were so empirically wrong on the nature of language, and so on and so on?” 

The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He stormed out of the room, crying those unironic empirically verified crocodile tears. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Noam Chomsky, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than an outdated linguist and blindly analytic philosopher. He wished so much that he had an argument to save himself from embarrassment, but he himself had advocated for truth derived from empirical investigation! The students applauded and all dropped out to transfer into the Ecole Normale Superieure that day and accepted French philosophy as superior to both German Idealism and the Anglosphere’s Analytic traditions. An eagle named “Critical Theory” flew into the room and perched atop a burning American flag and shed a single tear on the dropped chalk. Sections of Lacan’s Seminars were read several times, and the Spirit of Hegel himself showed up and demonstrated the nature of dialectics so vividly that everybody in the room progressed to a trans-physical state, transcending conventional notions of time and space. The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day and was forced to become a panelist on an MSNBC news show to make ends meet. The brave psycho-analytic philosopher’s name? Slavoj Zizek.

[multiheaded1793]

July 20 (Reuters) – The "Shame of Latin America", Lionel Messi, was sentenced to death in absentia by an emergency tribunal earlier this morning on charges of fraud and high treason, and is expected to be executed by firing squad at a Buenos Aires stadium as soon as the Argentine national team returns from the United States. Messi's brother, President Javier Milei, and their parents Adolf Hitler and Benjamin Netanyahu have expressed support for the court's verdict in a rare joint public statement, calling it "necessary".

[multiheaded1793]

THE EVIL IS DEFEATED

[multiheaded1793]

[multiheaded1793]

THE EVIL IS DEFEATED

[fridge-04]

Shoutout to my mutuals who I’ve never fucking talked to

[whysp]

[argumate]

4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.

5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.

some interesting thoughts (!) from "head of strategic futures" openai

[collapsedsquid]

3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex. I think open-weight is basically as diffusion-accelerationist as closed (maybe slightly more on the margin), but considerably development-decelerationist due to raising ai hyper scale cost of capital. By the way, I don’t ascribe moral or ethical valence to these terms; I’m being descriptive.

This is the part that interested me, production must be sabotaged in order to ensure accumulation, very Veblen.

[argumate]

models as a public good undermine the case for private investment! which leads to the worse thing imaginable: communism

[collapsedsquid]

It's not nationalizing the models though, they're open-weight, this will be AI Syndicalism, the people will replace the nation, state, companies and markets with AIs that we select.

[murkysealcaldera]

[multiheaded1793]

By far the most comforting thing about the black vastness of the future is indeed the vastness. Incommensurable, incomprehensible. A titanic creature that is the night sky.

[milliebobbyflay]

people like saying community when they mean demographic

[mzr-hsh]

We Walked The Earth - Uffe Isolotto

[qsycomplainsalot]

If you're worried about dumping gold plated mags you're not as rich as the Burgundians.

[ilovewhiterussian]

PESSIMISTS, WAKE UP!

It was optimists who took the water from your glass!

We must unite, KICK their ASS and reclaim what's OURS

[matsuba-illustration]

[smoke-in-the-winds]

I wonder if and when we’ll gradually make the shift from gay/straight to androphile/gynephile.

[flakmaniak]

I use those words often when I want to specify a group that is attracted to a particular gender but not really more than that.

For example, "this <thing> is really androphile-pandering" when I mean both the men and women who are into men. Or often I will ask "what do the androphile women think of this?", as in, I'm not specifying straight versus bi women, but just, they're women, they're into men, they're the people in whose opinions I'm interested in the given instance.

[multiheaded1793]

This is not the main thing, the main thing is the under-theorized observation that male and female gynephilic attraction are typically far more similar when controlling for dominant vs submissive preference (practically regardless of gender assignment even) than male and female androphilic attraction, which feel more diverse and more stratified by narration and point of view. There's no legible ideological angle here, even! People desire intimacy with a kind of woman and a kind of intimacy with a kind of man, and most frameworks that describe the differences also overfit and miss the similarities. To oversimplify, have you ever seen a gay man who'd be remotely interested in self-inserting into women's hetslop romance? Whereas cis and trans straight men and cis and trans lesbians find massive crossover appeal all over.