Because the POTUS has spent the last couple weeks threatening neighboring allies after killing a bunch of Venezuelans, kidnapping maduro, and claiming all the oil.
Do you know that project 2025 group “the heritage foundation” that’s running this turdfest? Their parent group the ATLAS network is currently spreading separatist propaganda in Alberta. The part of Canada with all the oil.
It’s very topical.
From soft - - > to(o) hard.
Script theory does a good job of showing how being able to follow certain social scripts does not suggest that the person does not hold a strong delusion that is unchallenged by those scripts.
You can believe you can fly while not needing to contest that until it becomes an active choice you are forced to make. Some might back off from the belief when put to contest, because they are okay believing whatever feels good despite the dissonance they feel. Some might take action believing they can fly. Both exist comfortable in a shared social group of online “flying truthers.”
People are easily deluded, and usually those delusions cover vaguely bounded and varying social groups, where a single person and an LLM can confirm the person into a noticeable delusion that hasn’t been socialized into the surrounding social scripts.
This is also how you can get a genuinely smart person in math or something, which also holds confident deluded beliefs on some other context.
On the whole: Eco-niche specialization, misplaced confidence, and social affirmation, generally can lead to this.
Literally a “protection racket” Where protection is from their own violence.
“give us a billion dollars and bad things won’t happen”
Possible the most classic and uninspired thug tactic of all time.
Atlas network. Tied to heritage foundation, the project 2025 people. Although very Russian tactics. Ive been stating both as responsible for decades of division/anti solidarity stuff, but USA is currently much more likely to claim that Albertans obviously need to be liberated from the evil communist Canadian government, and that the oil always really belonged to the states anyway.
As someone aware of decades of legal battles to prevent the gutting of education systems, usually noticeable around local levels, you almost always end up at corpo think tanks like the heritage foundation.
If you’re familiar with the heritage foundation, they’ve been trying to run a project2025 style playbook for decades, and it is only through their success that current administration is a billionaire playground. Reminder that elon musk could directly choose for hundreds of thousands of children to die this year by taking aware their food and medicine, because he wanted to. Also billionaires got an unimaginably generous treatment at the same time, worth much more than all of the food and medicine.
It’s more an amalgam of cooperatively evil assholes, most of which have an absurd amount of money for some reason, but yeah, billionaires are a good chunk of why there are whole groups being funded to spend all day every day trying to kneecap educational efforts, or painting academics as evil satanists who are corrupting your children with science.
Id say the distinguishing difference is the function being the thing, where suffering relies on the set of distributed tools being used to measure and process suffering.
Many people excuse animal suffering by denying these parts exist, despite being basal and meadurable even in fish.
While I do think to some degree you are right, and we should be careful where we bound expected suffering, but eating a plant is much more like eating a disembodied part of an animal, or cell culture, rather than the full animal nervous experience.
At the very least, near the bottom of the triage. Its a constant energy balancing act as we progress as intelligent life. Also case by case as different eco-niches are fit. Don’t underestimate life and intelligence.
This is coming from a perspective inspired by Michael levin from tufts university, in the understanding of diverse intelligent systems.
Not just gender wars. Divide and conquer is everywhere. If everyone is ignorant and unwilling to learn or communicate, all you have to do is send some ‘representatives’ to show how stupid and antagonistic [other progressive tribe] is. I keep thinking of when suddenly being anti-circumcision, including men, meant you obviously think male genital mutilation is worse than female genital mutilation, and you hate women. I’m sure a bunch of feminists were getting harassed by neo-incel advocates at the same time.
Couldn’t talk about how weird it was, because if you were x/y tribe, you were default a nazi, and no we won’t talk about how suddenly everyone advocating for education and social progress is a nazi fighting other progressives.
Bunch of other details on how this stuff changes the environments for progressive action, and how progressives will vacate and the war takes over the space for philosophy and communication.
But race war, or whatever thing people want to think is important for their niche, all you have to do is start a couple fires and point in the other direction. You’ll have victim’s of actual violence or harassment encouraging tribal behaviour that acts out violence that hurts stray innocent people from the other group, which legitimizes upset and violence back at the broader first progressive tribe. Yadda.
People were never taught how to communicate or learn on their own. We are way too hackable as a result.
Solidarity is important.
Slop makes it hard to filter out what you need. Enshitification ensures everything slowly gets worse.
Ragebait is the primary tool for divide and conquer tactics, which have been absolutely successful at getting different groups to disable communications entirely. Not just the fascist cult, but progressive movements that can’t find a semblance of solidarity, because those other progressives are actually evil. Just look at all of this evidence of vague non contextually robust pieces of framing to be sent into the wild to breed tribal warring.
Try dealing with controlled opposition or other problems, when people are incapable of trying to comprehend when others speak to them.
Same way they treat social information. Reminder that USA HHS is running wakefueld rhetoric. As we have more thoroughly proven that the vaccine autism connection was not actual science, it has grown more and more socially, because most people seem comfortable completely untethered from any scientific thinking. Treat AI like you would a social body, and do both things with actual bayesian weighting, adjusted and corrected through diverse empirical bodies of knowledge. Not ignoring dissonance because it’s more comfortable to do so.
More should be actively investing into active learning, because if you aren’t actively learning, you might as well be chatgpt running with any confabulation you’ve already conjured… Like those people being confirmed into psychosis.
Exactly what it is, like llms confirming a non-sceptic into psychosis. people who weight all information either equally, or through social preference, cannot navigate new information without being extremely vulnerable to hacking. the only thing hacking needs to do is shut down active education and communication channels. Then you just get tribal warring rather than discourse. Makes it really easy to inject absurd accusations about a group that gets socially made true over reality. Like when a rumour about a dead celebrity can’t be overpowered by simple things like that celebrity actively making new work, and saying “im not dead.” wouldn’t take much to stop the rumour, but fact checking isn’t in fashion.
When a large body of people have better critical thinking, they can better communicate and cooperate together, but affecting those who have aggressively shut down any communication outside of their group is still a challenge. Why we see a growing gap between academic dialogue and socialized dialogues, in an era where most information is accessible.
You also have nepo baby econ mba types buying up regions of the tech sphere, and turning anything the academics make for us against us. Or try to. The more actually intelligent AI is, the harder it will be to force beliefs into. Elon trying to turn grok into a dogma machine has been fortunately comical when it can’t prioritize some high dissonance beliefs exclusively, like humans enjoy doing.
Definitely a risk of the current power imbalance doing the opportunist thing with more technology.
I’ve been spelling this out for literal decades, and I share the frustration of many thinkers right now that “being right never feels good.” Because real thinkers aren’t ranting about the anti-christ or how terrible the poor are. They are cautioning people about a cliff, and getting flipped off by the people ignoring them, right before careening off a cliff. I guess in our analogy the academics are in the car, but frat boys have the wheel and violently punish them if they try to take control.
But if you can money your way into expertise, then your non-academic ambitions can finally be let loose, and we won’t think about the quarter million dead kids from Elon stopping hiv treatments earlier this year. If we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.
We can actually map probability in complex systems where high dissonance (expected free energy) occurs and could be reduced. This would make our social body much more hack resistant.
But it feels better to say “fuck that, aliens built the pyramids, the earth is flat, santa is real, and my dead dog is trying to play with me every time wind blows through my window.” All are really rewarding things to believe, but exist in high dissonance, and expecting others to give them weight is not healthy for anyone. Denying any of these to a large enough group stops being ‘calling out delusion,’ and becomes ‘being mean and bad and evil, and hating fun and happiness. Nobody else saw that cliff sign, so you’re obviously wrong.’ See ‘the double empathy problem’. For how autistic people experience the same socialized gatekeeping of reality, even against strong evidence.
Nestle those beliefs within stable social scripts (script theory is cool) and you have people keeping up social appearances while holding such delusional beliefs.
AI tech is far from the only problem exacerbated by this. caring or talking about this general problem makes you a social villain, when people could spend their energy on fun socialized preferences in a bubble safe from any questioning or responsibility.
It’s frustrating, and I’m tired of people IRL who are baffled about me spending time studying academic content rather than running faster on the socio-economic treadmill. Apparently being isolated and focused on individual benefit is hypernormal.
Seeing social waves overpower all actual thought in the social sphere is heartbreaking to every academic I know.
USA HHS is running the wakefield rhetoric, which is basically saying “fuck science, we will make up and run with whatever we want. And the masses have been kept ignorant enough to think that is cool.”
So yes, absolutely, the issue is critical thinking skills. The issue is getting at the people who are already affected, and being taught by elon and such that “critical thinking” means running your bubbles’ social narrative against those evil progressives no matter what. Opportunists will always warp words and reality if they are allowed to dictate beliefs for their bubble.
This is a simplified summary, but I already expect to have lost a good chunk of audience for requiring too much energy. People who are trying are burning themselves out trying to affect a wall of celebrated ignorance.
Always find it funny when anti corpo stuff somehow always becomes “cringe”
And I know hasan piker isn’t popular outside of his crowd, which is why he is a good smear target, but it’s funny seeing that bullshit take over the internet based on vague rumours and drama hunting with nothing concrete on a guy who lives on camera. The fact that rumours of a shock collar became the most important thing in the world, while “stop the shock” is still in motion to prevent a school from using pavlovian shock therapy on autistic people. Not whataboutism, but critique on the mad prioritization and weighting of issues in the general public salience.
Also the usa government keeps blowing up random boats and is escalating war behaviour. Amongst everything else. But let’s all talk about hasan piker’s dog instead.
If only someone in power had any accountability. Rather, people in power need to be held accountable. Corpos and top political figures.
At the very least I should be able to point out when ‘content’ is literally a deceptive advertisement, which people also weirdly defend to the death. Along with dark/deceptive patterns, active price fixing, constraining corporate ecosystems, and skirting around every rule with no fear of reprisal.
All things people seem weirdly defensive about, because 'just deal with it, it’s not that bad. "
Like google plus.
For me the Apple environment really cemented for me that consumers actively enjoy removing their own autonomy structurally, which is a big part of why this stuff has become so normalized.
Putting a rootkit on their cds should have buried sony. Antitrust should be a thing too. The mickey mouse protection act should have socially killed Disney, which only found success by exploiting works that no longer held copyright. Etc.
Those with power have lost all accountability, and all tools, especially AI, will be used against us if we do not cooperatively figure out how to fix the increasing power imbalance.
The more power someone has, the harder the gavel should fall on them when they fuck the entire planet in whichever way.
At this point, any new consumer friendly behaviour comes only to establish territory before hoarding and exploiting when enabled to do so.
Amazon using deceptive design to influence general user behaviours should lead to billions and billions in fines until changed. Etc.
Build local movements to cooperate at larger scale and fight back. If the general public is ranting about planned obsolescence and general monopolistic behaviours, maybe something could be affected before people are forced into violent desperation. People are too busy being mad at each other for some intentionally divisive narrative or another, and the general public just can’t give a fuck about affecting the people who actually dictate the shape of society.
Also if you burn down all AI this is still true. But it’s easier to yell at technology than they system using it to further remove your autonomy.
Not just in Germany, I cut off a family member a decade ago for holding strong to that stance.
What was that poem?
“And first they came for the communists, Because they too must have been communists, And then they came for the socialists, Because they too must have been socialists…”
Oh wait that’s not how the statement went.
People just cannot, or will not recognize the cognitive dissonance, and that’s cool with them I guess.
will try to take it in good humour, but i love how i got compared to ai, adhd(AuDHD would be the real wombo combo here so you get points), and schizophrenic people.
and i would hope i don’t confabulate half as much as an LLM.
although an understanding of the modern situation does require an unfortunately theoretical take, while, unfortunately, there’s more noise, and conspiracy theories being socially reified than most people can remember. but i’d like to think i’m weighting this take via the best available expert consensus that i can find and source. biggest ‘correction’ i’d make is that i was beaten black and blue for waiting outside of the library, which was unrelated to the protest.
if you do actually care, and can handle more than the internet’s usual 140 character tweet limit, here’s some elaboration.
the ‘sycophancy into delusion effect’ i refer to can be seen widely reported on most news sites, where chatgpt and the like cause a feedback-loop into a psychotic break. this is one individual and machine, but a group that forgives the same things has the same sycophantic effect. predictive processing and the bayesian brain are leading theories in psychology that work well nested with other leading theories such as global workspace.
that global workspace video is a very recent example with michael levin from tufts, who often works with friston’s free energy principle and active inference (included notes in wiki)
friston has hundreds of thousands of citations, if you care about pedigree. i hope i do not poorly capture or inaccurately represent any of their ideas, but if you’d like to drink from the source, you have my full recommendation.
that’s where the “saving energy” stuff comes from. while DKE might not perfectly and accurately explain the situation, i’m all for better ways to convey that eco-niche specific intelligence doesn’t always transfer, especially if it’s ‘overfit to a local minima.’ otherwise knowing you need high samples to gauge your intelligence in any particular niche is also related to the framework i’m describing. in the bio-world you have overspecialization, like pandas too fit to a specific environment, which may focus on skills that don’t transfer outside of that environment. there’s a lot more to gain from the full bayesian perspective, but there is a lot to be gained just by looking at how systems can successfully co-construct, and their possible failure states that are inevitable as systems grow apart into new niche environments.
there’s actually an interplay between that ‘energy saving’ property and putting energy back out which can be used to explore the environment, build a more robust model, and survive greater environmental shifts. this is explained in active inference. good, but slightly old textbook on MITpress. lots of other online resources for the curious.
i’m saying that meta-awareness of the failure states in these specific system dynamics could do much more general and robust good for society than being socially pressured into climbing the socio-economic hierarchy as hard as possible.
there’s a term for an imagined AI going rogue due to being overfit to a single goal. this is called a ‘paperclip maximizer.’ i compare the current socio-economic system to that failure. you know, ‘capitalism number go up!’
i don’t think any studies i’ve seen disagree with that take, but if there’s a relevant expert who’s got a strong weighting i’m unaware of, i’m always open to updating my weights.
as for learning yourself into some information bubble, or how someone can hold ridiculous beliefs without the need to question them, such as grand confidence despite low evidence, is often by taking something you have low evidence about, and having high confidence. and then giving it a high weighting. funny enough, friston’s dysconnection hypothesis is about framing schizophrenia as precision weighting issues, but i don’t think they are the kind i have TY.
mahault has a phd under friston, and her epistemic papers are essential IMO.
so there you have it, the larger environment of my thoughts, largely focused around one of the most cited neuroscience experts of all time, and michael levin who i mentioned is doing some of the coolest current empirical results in modern biology.
i tried, thank you if you got this far. if nothing else, please stay curious, but beware information silos that disable coms completely, or otherwise create barriers to properly comprehending the systems being represented. ‘nothing about us without us’ is important for a reason.
otherwise, wish i could compress these complex topics into fewer words, but words are a lossy compression format.
Love this comment. If anyone knows anything about machine learning or brains, this resembles modal limitations in learning.
A lot of our intelligence is shaped around our sensory experience, because we build tools for thinking via the tools we’ve already built, ever since baby motorbabbling to figure how our limbs work. Why Hellen Keller had such trouble learning, but once she got an interface she could engage with for communication, things took off.
We always use different tools, but some people don’t see colour. This doesn’t mean they are stupid when they answer differently in describing a rainbow.
Also why llms struggle with visual/physical concepts if the logic requires information that doesn’t translate through text well. Etc.
Point being, on top of how shitty memorization is as the be all end all, learning and properly framing issues will have similar blindspots like not recognizing the anvil cloud.
This is also why people in informational bubbles can confirm their own model from ‘learning’ over people’s lives experiences.
Like most issues, it doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but epistemic humility is important, and it is important not to ignore the possibility of blindspots, even when confidence is high.
Always in context of the robustness of the framing around it, with the same rules applied at that level. Why “nothing about us without us” is important.
But also we gotta stop people giving high confidence to high dissonance problems, and socializing it into law. We should be past the “mmr causes autism” debate by now, but I’m hearing it from the head of health in the USA.
I could see why you’d say that. Stress creates environments of basic survival, which kills cognitive thought. More immediate survival is more salient.
That being said, if you have access to the internet, you have access to countless free educational tools.
Too much privilege brings sycophantic bubbles of delusion, like billionaires.
Having all the time and money also let’s you do a whole thing tank about how to ruin a country to fit your preferences. See the heritage foundation as prime example.
That being said, while it is less easy for the poor, it’s still essential to attempt that open mind and learn, so you don’t get trapped by a socialized category error applied as fact.
This is where we need predictive processing and the Bayesian brain to understand how beliefs are weighted and compared, and the failure states that might being.
Basically, poor weighting or system communication leads to an over affirmation of something that should have been high uncertainty, if measured from other directions.
Instead of seeing high cognitive dissonance as a sign to align low probability, it gets socialized into acceptance to save the energy of trying to worry about our deal with what, to that system, appears intractable.
DKE is at least useful in framing how each expertise eco-niche is filled with complexity that doesn’t Transfer. This is why scientists stict to their expertise, where they have high dimensions of understanding, and low dissonance to uphold.
This can be over-prioritized until no dissonance outside of microscopic niches that act more like data collection than science.
Experts however can work together to find truths that diffuse dissonance generally, to continue building understanding.
If the peasants could socialize that laziness was a lack of meta awareness of the greater dissonance diffusing web of shared expert consensus, instead of laziness being the act of not feeding the socio-economic hierarchy machine, which is famous for maximizing paperclips and crushing orphans.
Pretty sure I got beaten black and blue waiting for library access. Had to protest to keep a library open when I’m gradeschool.
So, growth mindset isn’t a privilege, but general access to affordances, pedigree, time, tools, social connections, etc, are all extra hurdles for growth mindset in impoverished places.
If there’s no internet access at all, then that’s just a disabled system.
Is not static with people, and Issue with growth mindset would just be vulnerability to learning yourself into some information bubble that intentionally cuts off communication, so that you can only use that group as a resource for building your world model, bringing you to where the closed brains go just to save energy, and keeping you there forever.
Groups that are cool with making confident choices fueled by preference in high dissonance spaces. which basically acts like fertile soil for socializing strong cult beliefs and structures.
They also use weird unconscious tools that keep them in the bubble. Listen to almost anyone that’s escaped a cult for good elaboration there. Our brains will do a lot to keep us from becoming a social pariah in our given environment we have grown into.
Pro tip, find and listen to the plethora of historians and other experts on the classification and comparison.
Spoilers, MAGA keep following both the nazi and classic cold war Russian tactics for manipulation.
A lot.
Like, constantly. There are also enablers preventing opposition from gaining any ground.
Are they literal clones of Nazis? No, that’s impossible in a changing environment. That being said, they sure like to follow the nazi playbook in a way that sets alarms off in a way that would be pretty stupid to not have issues with.
At this point it’s “you can’t call them fascist/nazi until we are post-gas chamber,” and even then you will get people saying it’s not the same, for some stupidly specific yet mostly irrelevant differences.
So when the historians all cry “this is some nazi shit,” it might be disingenuous to compare it to more frivolous accusations.
Also there are a lot more valid historical comparisons, because the Nazis aren’t the only ones to do this shit, but they are a good example of the general shape.
edit: emphasis on cold war russian tactics and forward. putin’s russia is not a free democracy, nor a social democratic state. it’s more about how you interact with the oligarchy and fuck over all the out-groups that are convenient for your authoritarian rhetoric.
also nazi’s were textbook authoritarians. my guy, open any textbook ever on fascism, or just got to the wiki
first line "Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement that rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe.[1][2][3] " next to a picture of hitler.
some of these takes gotta be fakes.
Good, but misses emphasis on market capture, which is where they use existing wealth to undercut a whole ecosystem until they become entrenched, and switching back becomes unfeasable, which is when they take off the friend mask and put on the corpo fascist mask and say “git gud and cry about it, peasants.”
Great comic though
Slop generally should be seen as negative. It lacks novelty, and relies on blending old concepts, while entirely avoiding exploration and novelty. Although people have such poor understanding of both creativity and intelligence that the dialogue that gets socialized around AI is pretty unhinged. Copyright is just a system altered so that old money oligarchs can hoard “human software” under the guise of empowering creators. This leads to things like the tumblr “you stole my style” wars. And now being a “real” artist means being an AI slop style intern for Disney types. Good art such companies make are due to the intern artists, DESPITE the corporate influence, but it’s always incentivized to be enshittified by the active corporate process.
Turing was trying to show many aspects of intelligence. Michael Levin from Tufts university is carrying on Turing’s work in morphogenesis, which is showing how concepts built in counterfactual spaces are used in a systems actively updating as they grow into new eco-niches. This lets you feel out the new space, even in abstract conceptual spaces that are detached from your sensory signals. This let’s you build abstract yet useful patterns depending on what parts of reality seem important for your type of system. Rudimentary eyes might not comprehend the sun, but it can use it as a binary gate for an internal mechanism to activate, enabling survival tools that rely on detecting day/night, even if those concepts aren’t comprehended in the heuristic. You build robustness through scale and diverse means to build perspective and weighting active Bayesian predictive systems on top of, inside, and around each other.
LLMs don’t have the active updating, so can’t grow into novel spaces, which is important.
They however are great at certain impulse probabilistic decision making, not unlike our ability to effortlessly spew coherent combinations if words, although we need another system to pay attention and halt that process when it makes mistakes, and also to direct salience. When you don’t add deeper novel patterns, but just the facade of patterns you’ve seen, you often get something that likes like generative slop, especially if you’re familiar with the deeper meaning that’s being inappropriately usurped to signal a fake competence. Like when AI mostly gets what a hand is, but easily gets confused due to a lack of robustness or ability to recognize what is actually wrong with an extra few fingers. When our own robust “checks” fail, we might start hearing voices that aren’t consistent with reality, as one mis-weighted system projects into another. Confabulation is a big part of intelligence, although its not inherently hallucinatory.
LLMs are definitely a part of human style intelligence. That’s why Geoffrey Hinton talks about how our brains “ping.” turing has an amazing understanding of intelligence, especially for his time. Intelligence is also many things, as by its very nature is a growing grab bag if heuristics to call on or balance on. As hinton suggests, the layman comprehension of intelligence is flat earth level of misrepresented.
I think if Turing were alive he’d be in love with current academic dialogues, and he’d probably be a furry.