On a Blindsight tangent, that's exactly what "techniques will occur when a void is found" was about: the passive is on purpose, encoding the philosophical zombieism of martial zen.
The conscious mind is useful (like s/w for resolving a TLB miss) for calculating useful things to have in the cache, but in an antagonistic situation, one needs to have a high percentage of h/w-served hits.
If one consciously decides to employ a technique, one will certainly not surprise oneself, and one will probably not (unless one's heart is very spherical indeed?) surprise an opponent who is practicing the 3rd of the "3 pwns"*.
(indeed, I find the evolutionary just-so for consciousness to arise from the 3rd pwn: once one has the grey matter in place to model others, modelling oneself would be a natural side effect)
[The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He commented: "Neither the archer nor the target is in motion; mind is in motion".]
Dx: There are more things in Heaven and Earth than allow a small (speak not of the 10'000 things) finite presentation: ignoramus et ignoramibus (as our light-cone expands we always encounter new information on its boundary)
Rx: Sheaves allow one to synthesise globalitites by coordinating handfuls of localities.
Px: The hacker will move amongst essential entropy as a fish (whale?) swims in the sea.
EDIT: the ironic (Kutznets哈哈）thing about Mongols, they overwhelmed the other barbarians with advanced tech (gunpowder, siege engines, biowarfare) but now we admire their neolithic technik.
I find it plausible, though, that compound bows might've been invented in the neolithic (assuming one already has the adhesive technology to haft spear points), but never became popular until the bronze-age development of horseback riding because until then having a smaller bow (that was both heavier and took over 5x as long to make) was little advantage for a lot of disadvantage.
Serovo is just before 5000 YBP (3000 BC), and locally late neolithic, but that's because Siberia has no chalcolithic, so neolithic gets directly succeeded by the bronze age. Given the uncertainty of dating back then (some people believe riding had already been invented, others that it would not be for some time after), I'm happy to consider those as possible or even likely compound bows.
Sorry for leading us in circles with the pedantry!
No prob, that led to my exploration of whether horses might have been used in the area around that time. Maybe you want to be a bit more killer to improve communication?
As for the chipping stuff, I'm quite certain (despite your PhD????) gaussian noise has been assumed somewhere, so right now I'm searching around for serious attempts (not just proposals) to try to use, say, squeezing, to get below the shannon(-hartley?) limit.
I had the choice of starting with Geroch or Bamberg+Sternberg and I went with the cleaner notation and crappier words, might not have been prudent.
Okay maybe you weren't as familiar with french academic activism as fencing (although maybe you might still ask your local experts about recent rule changes with respect to say Korean dominance in sabre -- curious about what is it that the Koreans know that is so unteachable, plus, people getting upset might be a good sign)
Point was, if Murderous Saint Ted was raised a physicist, he might have found socially acceptable ways to get his messaging out ( I don't know, preaching to pliant students?) buuuuut I would think that's still suboptimal.
Botai culture was before, but whether it was close enough to be in the area and whether they rode as well as ate their equines are both open q's.
Interesting, I had been talking about chipping not in the quantum regime, but in the classical[0] and metaphorical[1] regimes.
Sorry, I had thought I had the referent to be J-Y G, as I'm currently in the middle of The Blind Spot[2] and enjoying how he'll discuss something foundational in mathematical logic one moment and the next he'll make a social or political observation. (as does Körner, but Girard is more gallic and more so)
泰德干公 (am I doing this right?) might've done better as a physicist, but (unlike, say, Pol Pot) thankfully he combined revolutionary[3] fervour with a human-organisational capability unlikely to have been up to running a church bake sale[4].
Finally, I really enjoyed 187:
> in making such appeal care should be taken to avoid misrepresenting the truth or doing anything else that would destroy the intellectual respectability of the ideology.
I mean, nothing says intellectual respectability like claiming "I needed to do a few small bad things (like killing people) in order to publish my manifesto in which I worry about big good things (like upholding copyright)"[5]
[1] in which Algolia, rather than high dot products, allow us to reconstitute a more-or-less linear convo
[2] I'm not very convinced by the circularity argument, because if I wish to ground out boolean logic, I'm happy to either present either a truth table, or if I must, just define `∧` to be the symmetric, idempotent binary operator that tends to falsity, and so on... However, I am intrigued by his program to escape to the geometric (or at least topologic) from the algebraic, in an attempt to make the equivalent classes of proofs more explicitly syntactic and less implicitly semantic.
[3] TIL that "revisionist" may not (etymologically) have meant that someone had gone off-commie-message, but that they had gone off-revolutionary-message, in that they believed it might be possible, by making a series of incremental revisions, to accomplish the stated goals of The Revolution without bothering with all the unpleasantness that tends to accompany actual revolutions. In this sense I suppose I am both an earnest Bumble-Puppy[6] advocate and a card-carrying capital-R Revisionist.
[4] even on personal, not organisational, axes there are lacunae in dealing with volunteers; eg (exactly like certain segments of HN) Ted/"FC" advocates large family sizes for others, despite failing to adequately demonstrate any personal reproductive success.
[5] see his note to note 16.
[6] He was at least consistent in choosing to emulate "When Adam delved, and Eve(cf [4]) span" (although aren't postal services post-technological?), but I know quite a few people who have both pre-technological and "surrogate" interests, and while all of us enjoy visiting the pre-technological, we've all opted for living in the "surrogate" world.
There are many distracting falsities in "Industrial Society and Its Future", but I think the overarching problem is that Kaczynski had not watched enough "My Little Pony" to realise that his inability to develop his cutie mark[0] probably had more to do with the power process in Ted K[1] than with the "Power Process in Modern Society"?
[0] come to think of it, some accomplished entomologists have even managed to become widely known in the small circles of literature as well...
It's gonna take me a while to precisely measure the gap of our disagreement on strategy (or basic tactics!) but note that fanatics, possibly only the reproductively talented, of Ms Bechdel, ship this nonironically
I actually saw this non-ironically somewhere (The View From 80 perhaps?) in which it was suggested that, after a certain age, waking up with pain is a positive sign, with the rationale that if some part of your body doesn't hurt, maybe you didn't really wake up after all...
"Naughty" would rather be "anziehende" for Cantor; note Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.
EDIT: yet another GrIneq! Any motivation for it? Max Cut clearly has applications in fratricidal hardware (see Bombers, Strategic) and it's also dual use (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701284 ) in that pulling wholes apart (into parts which may themselves
be amenable to decomposition) is the analysis step which (in general position) precedes synthesis.
I'm guessing it's about the general rule of thumb that hw is faster than sw, and so can react to urgent situations in a timely fashion. As for why sw might be shorthand for consciousness: sw can modify itself (and thus react to strategic issues)
... so yeah, hw is more or less defined as something that cannot modify itself.
We're altricial, not precocial, so over our lifetimes we can (and hopefully do) alter many of our own "reflex" behaviours. In particular, details of the 4 F's are firmware configurable.
Also, there's lots of potential for failure (and I'd say it is overwhelmingly observable that we have and do) in "can (and hopefully do)". Who knows what our absolute capabilities are, especially if we hardly or maybe even never try (at least certain things)?
Writing the capabilities to firmware is a step after this, but only after the first step is accomplished.
Glad we moved the discussion into the Overton window of firmware.
Maybe it's too early to start shipping metaphors in wetware, but developing general heuristics for productive+reproducible+survivable self-fuzzing? (*)
"n X's" might still be a useful template to keep in mind, yes?
Here are some good resources to explore the pain-gain frontier. (Or its baby versions, the supplies-surprise dilemma, shiprate quantification, etc.)
[0] caveat lector: "nature physics" is where economics that's almost certain to be rejected for very good proboscidean-tail-wiggling reasons would be dumped.
(*) Going back to the "Blindsight tangent", the social-political plane might already be an ideal platform to begin quantitative experimentation. ("Bylaws as wetware")
>Who knows what our absolute capabilities are, especially if we hardly or maybe even never try (at least certain things)?
Ego quoque, for misunderstanding what you meant by "certain things" (>)
I stress that I manifestly do not want to see physicists and tech bros publish bio-meta-how-tos just yet, did you mean high quality professionally conducted BSL training?
As for 082349872349872, I think exploring the Taoist metaphysics of marginally injurious mutual surprise as an epsilon over Buddhist tainted reinterpretations could be at most a waste of time.
And what's more, I can vouch that he's not a physicist, not even vicariously.
>though an ideology taking root in the mind is necessary to exploit its capabilities to their maximum.
Upon reflection, I do share the physicists' annoying-to-everyone-else habit of believing I can take subjects upon which books worth of ink have been spilled, do some Procrustean projection, and address them (to zeroth order, anyway?) reasonably with dozens of symbols.
Physics is almost entirely deterministic (the exception being quantum mechanics, which seems just short of it).
Metaphysics on the other hand seems to not only be not deterministic, it is often the opposite of it (at least at the level we can discern, though there is no consensus on levels or perspectives).
> address them...reasonably
Is there an implicit epistemic assertion here, or are you using these terms colloquially (as most physicists / scientists do in my experience)?
defo colloquially, because (in the tradition of M Jourdain) I'm ignorant of how one might even make an epistemic assertion thus?
When I say "[I] address subjects reasonably", I guess I'm trying to implicitly communicate a few things:
(a) if I gave you a model of a large rock, and you find something physical that can be mapped onto what I claim to be a large rock, and thereupon proceed to kick it, then no matter what your (or my) epistemic views "reasonably" suggests the model predicts that your foot will hurt before long.
(b) this model is continuous: the "easier" it is to map your bundle of sense-perceptions onto my ideal rock, the "better" my theoretical prediction of pedal pain will hold up in practice.
(c) pace James, "you get what you pay for": given that it took you seconds or minutes to understand the cheap and cheerful model, don't expect it to make better predictions than another model that takes days or years to understand.
> I'm ignorant of how one might even make an epistemic assertion thus?
In this case: click inside white rectangle box, push some buttons on keyboard to generate a series of symbols, then click on rectangle with symbol "reply" on it. Easy peasy, so much so it is almost intuitive, or sub-perceptual.
> if I gave you a model of a large rock
Westerners (I presume?) and literally every single modern day ~philospher I've met do love their always physical based analogies!
Is red really red? Is a chair really a chair? Great stuff, surely a catalyst for great revolution (any day now).
For fun, now do "Coup d'état, at the object level, in an epistemically sound manner (in case not obvious: this is a reference to the Jan 6 mass psychological spectacle).
Or: "COVID", or "[The] Science", or "Democracy" (our Most Sacred Institution).
Say we wish to encourage, at best type 2 thinking, and at least confidence in the ability of others to use type 2 thinking: could we come up with simple models, well within the compass of a habitual type 1 thinker (and applicable to what they consider problems), but critically involving a single inference? If so, these might be the equivalent of gimme caps in that practicality leads to ubiquity leads to —at least with regard to simple argument— improved ability?
> In the case of vertebrates, this list corresponds to the motivational behaviours that drive the activity in the hypothalamus, namely: fighting, fleeing, feeding and sexual functioning. The hypothalamus responds to these motivations by regulating activity in the endocrine system to release hormones to alter the behaviour of the animal.
A powerful force, but we have some ability to transcend such things.
It is amazing how dumb studying science makes people. Even Curt (who seems to have lots of depth in philosophy) has fallen victim to it: "Physics is understanding what reality is" lol.
> but critically involving a single inference?
I was with you up to this point....I feel like you're hinting at something here? :)
Type 2 thinkers have a thesis and antithesis: "Water is necessary to cool the engine, when it runs" and "Water is sufficient to destroy the engine, if it freezes"
Type 1 thinkers have a motto: (upper left)
Water puts your tank at ease, don't forget the anti-freeze
Type 0 thinkers have a place to rest their eyes (upper right)
> Ego quoque, for misunderstanding what you meant by "certain things" (>)
> I stress that I manifestly do not want to see physicists and tech bros publish bio-meta-how-tos just yet, did you mean high quality professionally conducted BSL training?
How to say....more like curiosity about, and the pursuit of correctness (or at least, accurate representation) of affairs within the metaphysical realm. Something like "Enlightenment 2.0 - The Final Chapter" lol
> I think exploring the Taoist metaphysics of marginally injurious mutual surprise as an epsilon over Buddhist tainted reinterpretations could be at most a waste of time.
As a Taoist, I am very interested in whether you're interested in the truth value of this belief (and if so, to what degree). (Or were you perhaps using ambiguous language deliberately, for fun: "could be" could be a reference to a subset of the whole, or the whole itself....which did you mean? edit: "at most" seems to imply the whole?)
> And what's more, I can vouch that he's not a physicist, not even vicariously.
Can I trust you though?
> Okay so give me an example of an interesting ideology, as opposed to merely a conspiracy theory, such as "applying skepticism to your own beliefs" )
Ok: I am interested in ~"Non-binary, Comprehensive Truth". Not only is it interesting (to me), it is essentially blasphemous in Western Culture, 2024, so much so that I suspect it may lead to me getting banned from this forum some day (I've certainly been given fair warning at least, so "no one to blame but myself").
> as opposed to merely a conspiracy theory, such as "applying skepticism to your own beliefs"
As a Conspiracy Theorist and a Pedant, I lol'd. What a great start to the day!!
> I could hit the News, but I am interested in how you think.
Me too! I am extremely curious about what "thinking" is". I suspect it is quite other than what it seems to be, and is told to be (pardon the redundancy).
> E.g. did I misunderstand that you are interested in locating the precise quantitative boundaries of Systems I vs II?
I take a more vague perspective: I am interested in the nature of the distinction, and ways we could optimize it (individually and collectively). If you think about it, our current era (in the Blinded by Science and destroying our ecosystem as a consequence Western World at least) is fascinating: one one hand the humans have extensive knowledge that thinking is what separates us from other (known) life forms on the planet, and yet we pay it essentially no mind (at least at the public level...I suspect what goes on behind closed doors, perhaps within various Three Letter Agencies, perhaps elsewhere, is very different. But then that sort of thing is a conspiracy theory, and we all know what that means epistemically). I often what would happen if we were to do otherwise. But how to accomplish such a thing? How to even desire to try?
> Our (individual) absolute capabilities or our (collective) absolute capabilities?
Both, though the two are necessarily and intimately intermingled, and more so every day (except for exceptions, like for example if the United States government is successful in putting down TikTok, because {silly lies that easily fool child-like, conditioned since birth minds}). I'm thinking of it from a possible worlds perspective, so "capabilities" gets a bit complex due to ~multidimensional & temporal dependencies, but hopefully you get my drift.
I hope The Normies are enjoying our "word salad". ;)
If I get your drift, I think a precondition is that we need to figure out a way to keep the Bartle Taxonomy Killers (♣) happy just playing power-{possession/craving} games with each other, instead of feeling the need to drag everyone else into the Sith spirit; compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40019115
My sub-half-hour but supra-half-min take is that official non-sanctioning of bugs/exploits might be the interesting protomechanism to impede the evolution of granfalloony (vs karasserai)
System II & System I shades to be explored when cycles freed, but my basic thesis is that the bug discoverer/onlookers are trained to quickly direct reflexivity towards in-game rewards rather than towards tribal/purity considerations?
Post-mannichean millinery?
EDIT: which fencing weapon is most conducive to a healthy democracy?
> Unlike sequential games, such as tennis and table tennis, fencing is a type of simultaneous game.
One way to turn fencing sequential is to view "initiative" as the equivalent of a ball: generally either one player or the other will have possession at any given time. (given enough distance, then neither has the initiative, just like how in a field sports it's possible for neither to have possession)
The analogy falls down because fencing is more symmetric: losing possession of the ball near the goal you're attacking isn't bad compared to losing it near the goal you're defending, but in fencing losing initiative when you've nearly completed an attack, when distance has collapsed, is much worse than losing it near the start of an attack. (explaining why in both épée and kendō stronger players invite attacks)
Unfortunately determining who has initiative from the outside requires experience — and as the invited attack shows, it's very possible to believe you have initiative when you're actually being shaped by your opponent.
(the latter explaining why a king might wish to just "face south" and let all the ambitious people of the kingdom focus on modelling and exploiting his ministers instead of him)
When I have the initiative, I am threatening in such a way that you have to respond (counter or neutralise) to what I'm doing or you will get hit. When you have the initiative, I have to respond. (and, as in chess, the equivalent of pins and forks set up situations in which even when you make a good response I've gained something without losing initiative)
If neither of us threatens the other, neither of us has initiative.
"Right of way" formalises the concept, making it easier to teach, and easier to adjudicate: unlike the subjectivity of initiative, there are clear ways to gain and lose right of way, and an outside umpire can (and does) say who has right of way at each moment.
In theory, they're the same: what one has to do to gain and keep right of way is exactly what one should "by the book" do to gain and keep initiative. In practice, they have a large overlap, but it's possible to make actions that would gain right of way but not effectively seize initiative, and vice versa, it's possible to gain initiative without first taking what would —with a conventional weapon- be right of way, or keep it without first re-acquiring right of way.
Does that make sense?
EDIT: first impressions of the paper:
Cold war? They probably mean "Napoleonic" at the latest.
33 ms video frames are too slow. 40 ms is the "lockout" (time during which hits are counted as simultaneous) in épée, in my experience, this corresponds to about 10cm worth of distance (probably greater for more competitive fencers) and until one learns how to construct a point to set up a clean score, it's astonishingly easy for phrases to end in double hits — 1 frame of the video. And sabre is a faster game than épée.
> The proper use of tactics made up for [Szatmari's] lack of ability in this area, making it difficult to find a very effective way to beat him, so he won the championship at last.
I have heard it claimed that we have much less of a doping problem than other sports, because the sorts of drugs that increase physical ability (speed, endurance) tend to blunt mental capacity (choice and deployment of tactics).
The paper gives one story of Szatmari/Gu; here's a possible other story: (compare with the alien vessel in Blindsight) in the first part of the match, Szatmari explores, sacrificing some points to Gu to (a) take the edge off Gu's energy reserves, (b) learn exactly where Gu's strongest attacks go and how to trigger them, and possibly even (c) feed Gu disinformation about Szatmari's strongest actions; and in the second half of the match, he exploits, more than making up for whatever points he lost to get that information (or, if he did so, perform that shaping). [But note this is a very épée-tinged alternative telling]
Next time I stop by my old club I'll have to ask the fencing masters what they think about the ideas in this paper — it's very much outside the prisms the french tradition uses to analyse bout performance.
> using physics as a highly reliable guide to practicing metaphysics.
Have the professional metaphysicians done any better?
[I also suggest steering well clear of any work in which I paraphrase chapters of the 道德经 as advocating partitioning one's control budget among small neighbourhoods of the inflection points on the manifold in phase space occupied by the 10'000 things.]
> Have the professional metaphysicians done any better?
In my estimation, no, like hilariously not (at least as a function of execution of relative ability). I attribute this to them thinking like children or little babies on the matter, as all people do on an absolute scale in that specific domain.
Alright seeing that I have to do some major unrelated symbol-pushing in the toplevel today... I might have to take a few days to process what has been said here. I know folks do not mind, but thought a heads-up would be in order. Praying to the gods of HN to keep this thread alive )*
EDIT: the delvings into ancient "Taoist" texts, I would do so myself, if I didn't feel that my models have been heavily polluted by god-knows-what. Those conspiracy theories are very compelling. Maybe a search for the actual battle records of 姜子牙 is in order)[0]
*As a Procrustist or Protist lol
[0] https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_24715199 says (likely CCP propaganda, but sometimes fun to read)
史记 should be the first cache to look up. (The rest of that has mostly been quoted to me, but I iterate to motivate mistermann's possible context updates)
I concur that HN is a liminal superspace whose character is slippery and so fit for rummagings in the murk, dang is a Taoist best sovereign whose existence is only dimly felt*, etc etc but all I really want to for now is to uh serialize something bothering me since mistermann replied.. quite localized to procrustean-physicism...
maybe physicists are hedgehogs who imagine themselves foxes, but then it occurred to me that it might be true that most non-French non-logician mathematicians tend to stay away from wider sociopolitical commentary (unless prodded)
I can think of reasons, but some implications are clear?
1. Kolmogorov thought of himself as more of a mathematician than a physicist.
2. Arnol'd was heavily frenchified, but had to rationalize that. (In particular, his students didn't inherit his attitudes?)
3. Galois was pretty normal.
4. Grothendieck was special but found a way to resolve the inner and outer (cultural) game.
5. Kaczynski.. too much of a logician? (Dare I suggest he was special XD?)
Re: Kaczynski, I think he stopped being an analyst in 1969, and switched to being a non-mathematician prepper?
(and usually analysis is pretty far from logic in various people's maps of mathematics, but here's an exception, in which the "plains of analysis" [sic] are right next to the "ocean of logic": https://utenti.quipo.it/base5/scuola/mate_metafor_mathematis... )
(unfortunately going in the other direction, as with Yuri and Tonya Zhivago, I believe Vladimir Vysotsky might've done better —at least healthwise if not artistically— to have spent much more time in Paris with Marina)
Upon reflection, thanks for "♥ reflections"; I see the commentary there doesn't use the Star Wars Sith analogy I prefer, but instead talks (after Allison?) about a 修昔底德 trap.
Is there any english-language equivalent to this site? Did it grown organically out of the tradition of posting essays and counter-essays on village walls?
Could be! For some reason I was thinking of substack as more "subscribe to my newsletter" writing than "here's my bibliography" writing, but I could easily have prematurely stereotyped...
Btw.. I didn't want to look like I was the kind of person to put valproate [experimental protocols] in the same bin as psychedelics (which are tainted with profit and other motives)..
I just thought it would be a minor step forward if we could observe and manipulate our own learning processeses (as something close to sensations?)..
as opposed to being limited to observing what children or experts do.
Have psychedelics changed since my day? They used to be dirt cheap, which pretty much kept all the profit-chasers away. I guess th' freaks did have their own motives, tho
The conscious mind is useful (like s/w for resolving a TLB miss) for calculating useful things to have in the cache, but in an antagonistic situation, one needs to have a high percentage of h/w-served hits.
If one consciously decides to employ a technique, one will certainly not surprise oneself, and one will probably not (unless one's heart is very spherical indeed?) surprise an opponent who is practicing the 3rd of the "3 pwns"*.
(indeed, I find the evolutionary just-so for consciousness to arise from the 3rd pwn: once one has the grey matter in place to model others, modelling oneself would be a natural side effect)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39898001