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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 1h

Starship Troopers-ass reality. Verhoeven really got how vulgar the American dystopia would be.

Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If you read the interview I linked that you liked, you see direct commentary - even if an autocrat rises to power by notionally legitimate means, it is a fundamental flaw in human psychology that people desire the autocracy in the first instance. But being a good democratic citizen is burdensome.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

We've invented the bicycle of the mind, now we need to invent the peloton of the mind *taps head*

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I think in the end Yoshiki Tanaka is probably even more influenced by Chinese historical supercycles and antilegalist attitudes, but if you read his interviews you will also see comments like 'Republican politics also gave rise to Hitler, so we have yet to find the perfect political system'.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Which was essentially the same attitude toward liberty the founders had - an extremely Roman republican view towards freedom as independence from arbitrary power.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

But in the end the writers were strongly influenced by Chinese philosophy and Machiavelli - Yang Wenli is a sort of Machiavelli from the Discourses, who believes living under a good king ruler is still a state of servitude, because one’s rights depend entirely on the arbitrary discretion of another.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

LotGH is clearly written people who read classical texts, and it takes seriously the Aristotelian idea that the best autocrat might be better than any other form of government if you can find someone radically outstripping everyone else in virtue, but it's unlikely, and that person needs a successor

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Especially if you're not trying to have a conversation about AI rights, for example, just about its impact on human work and economics etc - what the substrate of the thing doesn't matter. It could be as stupid by some human standards and still be smart enough by others to hack a nuclear plant.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

For this reason among many others it just seems preferable to stick with the very defensible claim that he started with which is too many people are complacent about AI capability and some of that originates in self-reassuring 'stochastic parrot' rhetoric.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Can the intelligence experience qualia, for example, has nothing to do with whether the machine has a soul; that is just an irrelevance. Whether it is relevant to the concept of consciousness is extremely debatable. In either case it may limit the possibility of the AI equivalent intelligence

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

you frequently to say well the AI is equally or more capable than us, and probably will overtake us (likely true, though you may find some very specific problems hold out much longer) and think like us (still out for debate) and that not believing AI is like us means believe in'soul' (strawman).

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

From my perspective the primary purpose you set out with was to try to convince dismissive people primarily on the left who have a very simplistic view of AI that it is much more capable than they think and needs to be taken much more seriously, and they often write it off too simply. Yes, agree.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I _follow_ your argument, and I am essentially on your side about the main _practical_ point you are making, but you also don't seem to realise when you are making philosophical claims when you are (which is quite often) or the difficulty and complexity of those positions.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

You say in the previous post that this argument is barely about philosophy and then immediately essentially admit that they are primarily philosophical questions here, but that the philosophical questions now have practical relevance. You can't maintain consistency from one post to next.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

You think this argument is carefully made but it is full of childlike sophmoric errors, false dichotomies, the works. Why don't you just stick to what you do get - AI is better at things than some people like to admit - and leave the philosophy to someone else.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

No you are just so bad at putting your argument that you stray from arguments about capability all the time in to philosophy of mind claims constantly.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

You think these are the only questions that matter, and that is part of the problem. The fact that you won't expose yourself to a deeper level of literature about the subject and think it's all just technicalities to catch you out is also part of the problem.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My characterisation is lousy, it's true.

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Reposted by Disinterested

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Family money is one of those constant realities of U.S. life that, weirdly, newspapers very rarely write about *directly*.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This is quite well studied and the answer appears to be resoundingly yes, aphasic or severely brain damaged nonlinguistic people can perform complex logical operations. And I think it's getting increasingly obvious that if anything inference models might be better at lots of other things than lang.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I don't think you can think of language in the brain as existing with sufficient modularity to just suspect this is a totally different set of systems interacting and exchanging information, the relationship is much more complex.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I think this is still a category error because a lot of semantic content is derived from qualia and rendered symbolically in human beings, and that is important to the semantics of the symbols.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

And this has problems for semantics and knock on effects for why super frontier LLMs can still be mystifyingly bad at very specific problems and superhumanly good at others.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I am aware, although there are still complexities; a camera still gives you a mathematical representation you map and handle symbolically prior to experience, for example, whereas the causation is inverse. But Will is talking about what the AI is right now, not what it might be eventually.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It's more that what I'm saying is that LLM's can learn precise vector relationships between the tokens "fire," "heat," and "tissue damage," but that relational structure is disconnected from the sensorimotor and causal realities of the symbols and that has real problems.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I'm sort of oversimplifying for effect here but it is these questions that Will just neglects to understand at all, he has a very binary attitude towards every aspect of this debate. I concede your ground elsewhere in another thread, more or less.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

There is a very clear way to build in central London. Upward.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Sadly this is just another lie you've been given.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The UK economy grew by over 24 times between 1969 and 2019, that's just how compound interest works. The rate of growth is what is at issue, not the absolute growth in GDP in the period.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It does also coincide though with a belief in quite a lot of modern development economics that 'productivism' is bad, which has also damaged the economic prospect of poorer economies.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

There's nothing really that democratic about the jobless elderly campaigning tirelessly to protect what they perceive to be good for their home equity by stopping everyone from everyone building anything ever again, but that is basically the anglosphere west for you.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I deeply agree that the UK and other anglosphere countries have made infrastructure and housing practically impossible to construct. Enormous drag on even the more prosperous anglosphere countries; they have all made the error that planning must be 'democratic', permitting needless obstruction.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It's not so much that it was hunky dory, but it was a much more prosperous era than the 80's, and the oil crises did cause a number of nations to simultaneously mistake a major exogenous event for a structural defect in their economies, to largely negative effect. It is not UK specific.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Cases like South Korea and other countries that have engineered economic 'miracles'.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

But if you want a recent example - austerity had very marked effects on GDP growth the more it was practiced in various national economies, which also of course had the overall effect of slowing overall growth, since countries trade with one another. But your vision of policy can't explain...

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Why does it matter that they overlap? Feel free to look at all of the data as a series if you'd like, it's not hard to find. If you are sceptical about that, you have been fooled by the era in which you live. Your scepticism is ill supported by the evidence available.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It is not just 'we're rebuilding the country from the war' by this point, please. It is the result of an accidentally arrived at policy consensus that is quite effective.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This does not really explain why the UK has aggregate growth of 43.2% between 63-73 which is basically the same as growth 58-68.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

In reality growth was essentially average amongst OECD countries in the period. Also, the policy preferences of rapidly growing countries in the OECD had some commonalities in the 45-73 period that helped to create the very global growth that was benefited from.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Yes and no. One has to realise that economic 'liberalisation' in the eighties, contrary to popular narratives, delivered relatively anemic growth by comparative historical standards, whereas in the British imaginary the 80s were a time of simultaneous growth but exploding inequality.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The greatest growth periods for Britain were 58-68 and 63-73. The hard pill for Brits to swallow - 70s was about oil crisis not structrural failure. 08-16 bad growth - austerity problem. 16 to present bad growth - Brexit problem. Incredibly low fixed capital formation, serial shit govt.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The essential point is more like - AI skeptics tend to make this category error that AI doesn't have true understanding, so it is inherently unserious. The reality is more like - the AI can be substantively 'smarter' than you and ruin your life in a million ways and still not know what 'heat' is.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It's more like he has doggedly determined to fail philosophy of mind 101 in public. He started from the right premise - many overly dismissive people underestimate the power and capability of AI - and how he's forced himself into a corner because he doesn't know how they work or the philosophy.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Yeah but the evidence that Pilates is a pretty flawed exercise methodology that is pretty inferior to dedicated cardio and resistance training for most purposes.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

He really needs to get out of this habit of only performing against strong opponents.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The LLM can be more powerful and smarter than you in many ways but have limited or no qualia and no ability to comprehend meaning non symbolically through direct experience. You can't even really bridge this by giving them a camera. It is quite complicated.

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Disinterested @disinterested.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Did not anticipate that there would be way to compress language by algorithmic method the way we have so that the LLM can have a half a world model and synthesise responses to novel phenomena while still having purely symbolic understanding of the content it describes, passing Turing test.

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