The fascinating paradox: there are clearly "tells" (slop-smells, like code-smells?) of LLM-generated text. We're all developing heuristics rapidly, which probably pass a Pepsi challenge 95+% of the time.
And yet: LLMs are writing entirely based on human input. Presumably there exists a great quantity of median representative text, some lowest-common denominator, of humans who write similarly to these heuristics.
(In particular: why are LLMs so fond of em-dashes, when I'm not sure I've ever seen them used in the wilds of the internet?)
Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes.
There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).
Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
And the fact you feel a hole that religion fills for you doesn’t mean it’s there in everyone. Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
I don't disagree. I trimmed "religious and mythological memeplexes" down to avoid repetition. (Also worth considering: de-facto religious behaviors need not be supernatural or "mythological"; you can substitute your own examples of political ideologies that are difficult to distinguish from religions in practice.)
It is obviously a deeply complicated and complex phenomenon. Even the Dennett/Dawkins model of selfish replicators aren't necessarily sufficient, in addition to my claim that the relationship between genes and memes can sometimes be mutually symbiotic (and I'm aware of the great many counter-examples).
To be clear, I don't hold to a particular faith myself (and I've spent time at both ends of the spectrum). I suspect that the so-called "god-shaped hole" is one of many characteristics that varies in the human animal, not unlike those who have a mind's eye and those who don't, or those who hear their thoughts audibly and those who don't.
> Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
While what people crave obviously varies, I think most people do crave something like meaning and community (or flipping it around: selection pressures seem to have selected for meaning and community, presumably at least in part from a green-beard effect [0]). While those can exist independently of faith, we can empirically observe that they tend to overlap quite a lot (again, for good and ill).
While I'd agree with you regarding illiberal theocracies and religious totalitarianism, I'd problematize your framing in two ways: (a) "forced" implies that someone is doing the forcing, meaning presumably someone craves it, or is at least willing to play along [1]; but more pertinently, (b) there is a middle ground between the extremes of "explicit individual choice", and "forced participation": norms, culture, emulation, etc.
No one "forces" anyone in the business world to wear suits, or use LinkedIn jargon; but the incentives are in favor of doing so (and against not doing so), so people play along: some cynically, some internalizing norms sincerely. If we hit a magic History Randomizer Button that shuffled historical contingencies, I don't think we'd have an absence of those norms, but other norms with different details. And I suspect we'd see different churches and myths and holy books, not an absence of them.
To reiterate, I'm just talking Darwinian functionality here, not whether religion is good or bad in a normative sense. If the niche exists, "nature finds a way".
This is (tragically) the reason why I remain a tab hoarder: the UI carries an implicit nudge (a costly signal of visual real estate), for my future self to engage with it.
In a similar spirit to OP: it did help mitigate the hoarding, when I began thinking "how hard is it to find this resource/reference again, should I actually need it?". And if it's trivial to google (and mnemonically sticky enough I can trust my future self to remember it), I can close the tab.
The emails are bizarrely sloppy with spelling and punctuation, perhaps many usages of "don't" ended up being typed as "don t", triggering an automated find-and-replace.
The export itself is also sloppy, with characters like equal signs being added in weird places. Seems like they have it set to cast a wide and poorly set up net.
I don't like "Wrappeds" (low-key social hack to manufacture normalization of surveillance capitalism?), but with HN being public, I succumbed to temptation. Very fun, 10/10 no notes, surprisingly good for a small sample set this year.
> You write comments like you're trying to win a Pulitzer in Political Economy while trapped inside a middle-manager's strategy meeting.
"I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist... Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things." - Eddie Izzard
It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)
I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.
They're inherently different: creative work (especially in a digital, trivially replicated format) is non-rivalrous, and at least partially non-excludable. "You wouldn't download a car." [0]
Property rights are a social technology to balance incentives and peacefully negotiate scarce resources (including time and effort). It's helpful to think about them in reverse: that they encode legitimacy to use force (usually via the State) against anyone who violates the right. That doesn't make the force right or wrong, a priori; it simply describes what happens. Exactly when that force is legitimate is the question at hand.
"Intellectual Property" is a post-hoc neologism. What we actually have are three very specific institutions: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The last is arguably more like regulation than property: persistent brand identity to prevent fraud and confusion. Copyrights and patents are extremely clear in the Constitution, that their purpose is collective, moreso than an individual right for its own sake: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Hence why they expire: at some point, the incentive has already been provided, and the body politic benefits more by their being open-sourced.
Whatever "rights" framework one subscribes to, it is an extremely thorny question, whether they include the right to alienate those rights, to give them up on purpose. We allow people to alienate their labor, an hour at a time; but not to do so for a lifetime (voluntarily sell one's self into slavery). Many US states now refuse to defend "non-compete" clauses: that you cannot constrain your future self from working for a competitor for X years, even if you wanted to, even for very lucrative terms in the contract.
I'd argue that intellectual/creative works, are more like non-compete clauses: you actually create more bargaining power if you limit the scope, and take away the capacity to give up future bargaining power.
If it is the case that consciousness can emerge from inert matter, I do wonder if the way it pays for itself evolutionarily, is by creating viral social signals.
A simpler animal could have a purely physiological, non-subjective experience of pain or fear: predator chasing === heart rate goes up and run run run, without "experiencing" fear.
For a social species, it may be the case that subjectivity carries a cooperative advantage: that if I can experience pain, fear, love, etc, it makes the signaling of my peers all the more salient, inspiring me to act and cooperate more effectively, than if those same signals were merely mechanistic, or "+/- X utility points" in my neural net. (Or perhaps rather than tribal peers, it emerges first from nurturing in K-selected species: that an infant than can experience hunger commands more nurturing, and a mother that can empathize via her own subjectivity offers more nurturing, in a reinforcing feedback loop.)
Some overlap with Trivers' "Folly of Fools": if we fool ourselves, we can more effectively fool others. Perhaps sufficiently advanced self-deception is indistinguishable from "consciousness"? :)
>If it is the case that consciousness can emerge from inert matter, I do wonder if the way it pays for itself evolutionarily, is by creating viral social signals.
The idea of what selection pressure produces consciousness is very interesting.
Their behavior being equivalent, what's the difference between a human and a p-zombie? By definition, they get the same inputs, they produce the same outputs (in terms of behavior, survival, offspring). Evolution wouldn't care, right?
Or maybe consciousness is required for some types of (more efficient) computation? Maybe the p-zombie has to burn more calories to get the same result?
Maybe consciousness is one of those weird energy-saving exploits you only find after billions of years in a genetic algorithm.
The dilemma is, the one thing we can be sure of, is our subjectivity. There is no looking through a microscope to observe matter empirically, without a subjective consciousness to do the looking.
So if we're eschewing the inelegance / "spooky magic" of dualism (and fair enough), we either have to start with subjectivity as primitive (idealism/pan-psychism), deriving matter as emergent (also spooky magic); or, try to concoct a monist model in which subjectivity can emerge from non-subjective building blocks. And while the latter very well might be the case, it's hard to imagine it could be falsifiable: if we constructed an AI or algo which exhibits verifiable evidence of subjectivity, how would we distinguish that from imitating such evidence? (`while (true) print "I am alive please don't shut me down"`).
If any conceivable imitation is necessarily also conscious, we arrive at IIT, that it is like something to be a thermostat. If that's the case, it's not exactly satisfying, and implies a level of spooky magic almost indistinguishable from idealism.
It sounds absurd to modern western ears, to think of Mind as a primitive to the Universe. But it's also just as magical and absurd that there exists anything at all, let alone a material reality so vast and ordered. We're left trying to reconcile two magics, both of whose existences would beggar belief, if not for the incontrovertible evidence of our subjectivity.
And yet: LLMs are writing entirely based on human input. Presumably there exists a great quantity of median representative text, some lowest-common denominator, of humans who write similarly to these heuristics.
(In particular: why are LLMs so fond of em-dashes, when I'm not sure I've ever seen them used in the wilds of the internet?)
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