I think they're pointing to the fact that RLHF means that the intention is from humans and not random.
I'm not sure if it's their intent, but I wonder if one could still consider these artifacts as "intentional", but not individual attention creating them, and rather an aggregate, soupy collective attention.
Obviously, important signal in the human experience is lost there, and we get a soupy middling sort of creation. But it's not random, as I believe the parent was pointing out.
EDIT: overall, I align with the article. am just thinking aloud about the contrarian positions, though not committed to them
Heh, I like this. but it should be pointed out that from the other point of view, software developers were the supernatural beings (dare I say demons), which the sorcery of a good project manager could tame (with more or less success) to perform the desired magical effect
And now everyone is a sorcerer: they can trap small demons inside metal boxes and force them to do their bidding. As before, any supernatural effects are performed by those beings (which were willed into existence by siphoning the wisdom from the wizard's own grimoires...)
Where someone has spent years in the texture of a topic that others only pass momentarily, their ability to increase resolution of their models on that corner of reality and project models forward in time (to imagine), that is the origin of both their generous offers and their compromising biases they might make to the public discourse. It doesn't make them reliable, but what they can imagine is an important in-road to more general social inquiry. Imagination and model-testing is what comes before data in science. If the world moving fast is the danger, maybe we could make more space for imagination in order to survive the acceleration?
You downplaying "imagining", when it is literally one of the gifts of intelligence that makes us worthy of distinction... That feels like a strange posture, I guess? I'm a scientist, but I think data fetishism is one of the dangers to wary of in this accelerating world and culture
At least this is the bias of my brain in this world. I certainly know your perspective is not uncommon, esp in tech and other spectrum-biased spaces.
I agree with your premise, but writing things down is not "better" but "different". Oral histories have a strange rapid way of evolving by only preserving structure that matters to many and contributes to fitness of many. Cultures that didnt know how to transmit the "right" parts of oral history, they ceased to be that same failed culture, and became another culture made of those new stories.
Writing locks in and requires the evolution of other forms of evolution, as the Word can no longer evolve during transmission.
I say that while being firmly on your side in the larger back-and-forth exchange here :)
I was thinking about this when I almost had to walk under a ladder the other day (and get bad luck). That one seems like an oral story that arose from people being hurt, whereas crossing the path of a black cat, while also supposedly bestowing bad luck, seems to have no plausible rationale.
I like this thought. Maybe some things are just like astrology, just Schelling points that everyone decided meant something, and simple "heightened awareness" gets scaffolded into it. That heightened awareness is the selective pressure for a set of observations to persist, even if arbitrary :) but sometimes there's a rhyme to the reason, and something that cant be clocked to one thing is somehow at the center of an idea
I'm sorry, but this comment feels insufferable. I feel so much eye roll from reading it. USA is not "major leagues" by the measures that the rest of the world cares to size itself up by.
If there's an apt non-baseball metaphor, it's perhaps that USA is a circus we are compelled to pay attention to for now. We'd rather just not
Heh sorry, I didn't realize I'd grabbed on from so long ago. You're right. But just saying someone who doesn't tow the line with Israel laid a big part of setting out the culture of a whole network, and continues to role-model his declining to tow the line
> I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner.
This framing is so generous and I'm grateful for it. Thank you. Makes me optimistic about public discourse to see iterative reframings toward observations like this
I'm not sure if it's their intent, but I wonder if one could still consider these artifacts as "intentional", but not individual attention creating them, and rather an aggregate, soupy collective attention.
Obviously, important signal in the human experience is lost there, and we get a soupy middling sort of creation. But it's not random, as I believe the parent was pointing out.
EDIT: overall, I align with the article. am just thinking aloud about the contrarian positions, though not committed to them
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