Star Trek's Data was basically an earnest autist trying to be human, LLMs are sociopathic fabulists who couldn't care less about being human, the very notion is foreign to them.
— mtraven (@mtraven) August 17, 2023
For a man who is living fully, completely, for a man who is truly cultured, beliefs are unnecessary. He is creative. He is truly creative, and that creativeness is not the outcome of a reaction to a belief. The truly cultured man is intelligent. In him there is no separation between his thought and his emotion, and therefore his actions are complete, harmonious. True culture is not nationalistic nor is it of any group. When you understand this, there will be the true spirit of brotherhood; you will no longer think in terms of Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, in terms of Hinduism or Theosophy. But you are so conscious of your possessions and your struggle for further acquisition that you cause distinctions, and from this there arise the exploiter and the exploited.
Meaning occurs in the interplay between these two aspects of reality: what is the case and what may be the case. This is obviously true for an individual person. I'm arguing that it is also true of nature as a whole.
TL;DR: I worked on biomedical literature search, discovery and recommender web applications for many months and concluded that extracting, structuring or synthesizing "insights" from academic publications (papers) or building knowledge bases from a domain corpus of literature has negligible value in industry. Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web
**The key insight at the root of this entire series of essays is that polarization is intentional.** Many see polarization as something of a downward spiral: social polarization causes crises that further polarize society. I will not disagree. But in many cases large, impersonal socio-political forces like “polarization” are **not **the locus of agency. Societies can, and often do, polarize because small groups of committed radicals believe it is in their interest to polarize their societies. Strategy is as important to these stories as sociology.
We don't have values that are consistent, or invariant, or axiomatic, or fully known -- sure. But that's not the same thing as not having values at all.
— mtraven (@mtraven) December 14, 2023
IOW the rationalist model of values may be bad, but it's hardly the best or only one available.
To be freed from self-obsession – no imperative more urgent. But can a cripple abstract himself from his handicap, from the very vice of his essence?