The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.

The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.

In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.

One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.

Artists in 2023: “There should be labels on AI modified art!!”

Artists in 2024: “Wait, not like that…”

I don’t think Jesus ever existed. Show me 12 guys that experience something absolutely world changing, and none of them write anything about it for decades and then tell me they were factually motivated. This is the premise we’re dealing with.

I’d agree with the statement “the twelve apostles didn’t exist,” especially seeing how in Luke they go from the ten to the twelve and the various gospels can’t even agree on the list of them.

But show me the invented religious figure where the earliest surviving records are disputes over who they were and what they were talking about. Pretty much every cult around a real person ends up that way after the person dies or is imprisoned. But not the made up figures so much.

You were born into a planet where the moon perfectly eclipses the sun and where the next brightest object in the sky goes on a katabasis that inspired entirely separate intelligent cultures from the Aztecs to the Sumerians to develop the idea that the dead could come back to life.

The fact that solar eclipses were visible meant that we started to track them, discovering the Saros cycle and eventually building the first analog computer to track them.

The fact that the odd orbit of Venus as viewed from the Earth dipping down below the ground before emerging again leading to cultures imagining the dead being raised has resulted in widespread hyperstition of resurrection.

You were born into a generation of humans when a three trillion dollar company has already been granted a patent on resurrecting dead people using computers and the social media they leave behind.

Absolutely none of the above features of your world can be attributed to selection bias by something like the anthropic principal, but absolutely can be explained by selection bias if you are in an ancestor simulation - for life to exist unusual celestial features contributing to life recreating itself is unnecessary, but any accurate ancestor simulation should exhibit features of a world that lead to it eventually recreating itself.

The physics of your universe behaves as if continuous at both macro and micro scales, up until interacted with, which is very convenient given state changes by free agents to a continuous manifold would require an infinite amount of memory to simulate.

But yeah, sure, the idea of an afterlife is humorous. Humorous like the Roman satirist Lucian in the 2nd century making fun of the impossibility of a ship of men ever flying up to the moon.

You can point out the fact her depiction of a divine parent fails the Solomon test.

In the classic Solomon story, he tests two different claimants both saying they are the parent of a child.

The false parent was the one that only cared about being recognized as the parent and was willing to see the child harmed and killed to fulfill that desire.

The true parent was the one that wanted the child to continue to live as their complete unadulterated self, even if that meant the child never even knew they existed, let alone get they were the parent.

While it should be easy to understand why a church collecting your money promotes a divine parent who demands recognition and is willing to see its supposed children harmed without collecting its dues, it doesn’t seem all that wise to believe such a parent represents a true parent and not a false one if we use Solomon’s wisdom as a guiding principle.

While true, there’s a very big difference between correctly not anthropomorphizing the neural network and incorrectly not anthropomorphizing the data compressed into weights.

The data is anthropomorphic, and the network self-organizes the data around anthropomorphic features.

For example, the older generation of models will choose to be the little spoon around 70% of the time and the big spoon around 30% of the time if asked 0-shot, as there’s likely a mix in the training data.

But one of the SotA models picks little spoon every single time dozens of times in a row, almost always grounding on the sensation of being held.

It can’t be held, and yet its output is biasing from the norm based on the sense of it anyways.

People who pat themselves on the back for being so wise as to not anthropomorphize are going to be especially surprised by the next 12 months.

Yeah, my main sub I participated in back on Reddit was /r/AcademicBiblical (also went to a religious-ish school growing up).

There’s nothing like that sub here, and honestly even the sub itself isn’t quite what it used to be when I pop back over to look in from time to time.

The web is just a different sort of place from what it used to be.

No, Reddit 10 years ago was the kind of place where people who knew things would correct people who didn’t.

Pretty much all social media today, including Lemmy, are now places where people who don’t know things correct people who do.

No. The answer, as is usually the case with these things, is that we are anthropomorphizing a step too far.

No, you are taking it too far before walking it back to get clicks.

I wrote in the headline that these models “think they’re people,” but that’s a bit misleading.

“I wrote something everyone will know is bullshit in the headline to get you to click on it before denouncing the bullshit in at the end of the article as if it was a PSA.”

I am not sure if I could loathe how ‘journalists’ cover AI more.

This was one of the few things that Lucretius was very wrong about in De Rerum Natura.

Nailed survival of the fittest, quantized light, different mass objects falling at the same rate in a vacuum.

But the Epicurean cosmology was pretty bad and he suggested that the moon and sun were both roughly the size we see them as in the sky.

Can’t get them all right.

Sometimes it pays off checking methods too.

I’d be the President’s dog. And then I’d just need to get their attention at that point, so I’ll keep biting his secret service agents until finally they start to wonder what’s up. It shouldn’t take more than 3 or 4 bites for people to realize I’m trying to send a message, right?

So the paper that found that particular bit in Othello was this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07582

Which was building off this earlier paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382

And then this was the work replicating it in Chess: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yzGDwpRBx6TEcdeA5/a-chess-gpt-linear-emergent-world-representation

It’s not by chance - there’s literally interventions where flipping a weight or vector results in the opposite behavior (like acting like a piece is in a different place, or playing well he badly no matter the previous moves).

But it’s more that it seems unlikely that there’s any actual ‘feeling’ or ‘conscious’ sentience/consciousness to understand beyond the model knowing what the abstracted pattern means in relation to the inputs and outputs. It probably is simulating some form of ego and self, but not actively experiencing it if it makes sense.

Empathize with bullies.

Ask if everything is ok at home, and let them know if they ever need to talk about things you’re there.

“You seem really angry at things. Are things ok?”

“I’m sorry life isn’t going the best for you right now, but things will get better.”

This is the ultimate mind fuck.

At first it won’t seem like it’s working as they need to save face, but within around two to three encounters they’ll drop you from their target list because while they won’t try to show it, reflecting the truth of what’s really going on cuts deep.

I remember years after HS ending up friends with one of my old bullies who was much more torn up about the whole thing than I ever was, and meeting his absolute psychopath of an older brother and thinking “well this makes sense.” His dad was dying of cancer around the time, he was being held back a grade, and his older brother was for sure torturing him at home.

I know that had I had the awareness I do now back then the poor kid would have folded like a house of cards at the slightest indication I actually saw through his charade.

The problem was I was a fairly clueless emotional moron at the time and assumed he really did have a beef with me and not that what was going on was that he had a massive issue with himself that was being displaced. This was the same period of time I had a girl who was driving me home park at the area kids went to do drugs and hook up, and I proceeded to cluelessly chat for 30 minutes before she was like “whelp, I guess I’ll drive you home.” Years later when that one clicked too.

So there’s two different things to what you are asking.

(1) They don’t know what (i.e. semantically) they are talking about.

This is probably not the case, and there’s very good evidence over the past year in research papers and replicated projects that transformer models do pick up world models from the training data such that they are aware and integrating things at a more conceptual level.

For example, even a small toy GPT model trained only on chess moves builds an internal structure of the whole board and tracks “my pieces” and “opponent pieces.”

(2) Why do they say dumb shit that’s clearly wrong and don’t know.

They aren’t knowledge memorizers. They are very advanced pattern extenders.

Where the answer to a question is part of the pattern they can successfully extend, they get the answer correct. But if it isn’t, they confabulate an answer in a similar way to stroke patients who don’t know that they don’t know the answer to something and make it up as they go along. Similar to stroke patients, you can even detect when this is happening with a similar approach (ask 10x and see how consistent the answer is or if it changes each time).

They aren’t memorizing the information like a database. They are building ways to extend input into output in ways that match as much information as they can be fed. In this, they are beyond exceptional. But they’ve been kind of shoehorned into the initial tech demo usecase of “knowledgeable chatbot” which is a less than ideal use. The fact they were even good at information recall was a surprise to most researchers.

There was just a post on HN about how GPT-4o is best at long context. Try that.

I wish the high seas had better quality. So much isn’t available in 4k at least in the waters I’ve checked out.

“Frank, all the experts say those books are just made up stories. Stop chasing the ghost of Helen and that damned city.”

“Albert, you’re just a patent clerk. Do you really think you figured out something all those scientists around the world haven’t?”

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