All these people posting about Marx and astrology but did you know modern occultism and Marxism are both responses to the failure of the Paris Commune?
Marx turned to science and wrote Capital.
Eliphas Levi, another communard, wrote the Doctrine and Ritual of High mlMagick.
What is consciousness? It's like, "The taste of honey, the bitterness of aloe, the pleasure of sexual intercourse, love, passion, desire ... for these are the things that cannot be comprehended by the one who is incapable of them nor by the one who did not experience them."
The interesting thing about that Michael Jordan interview is how he divided the debate into the people who build AI and the people who talk about AI. I am learning much more about the nature of safe AI from listening to the builders than from reading speculative reports.
If the brain is a computer, it is not the computer of Von Neumann.
Computers are an unfinished quest to mimic the ineffable brain. When Reason learns at the feet of Nature, we have Science. When Reason makes idols of Ideas, we have religious totemism.
disabled-world.com/disabilit…
"There is only one imagination. There is a martial world and an immaterial world. Both worlds exist, but in different ways." - Alan Moore
"It was because men were grouped, and thought of themselves in the form of groups, that in their ideas they grouped other things...The relations of things could only be conceived as social relations... Thus, the cosmic order is only another form of the social order.” - Durkheim.
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
The made-up "AI escaped the sandbox* story is respun by the @nytimes in the most ridiculous way. The company that ran the "tests" clearly built them to fail. But now human error means AI is even more powerful? It's like saying my car is sentient because I drove it into a wall.
"A spell in essence corresponds to a code inserted into the sensorium of an entity which is able to alter the environment in accordance with the message. These entities are not necessarily 'intelligent', nor even 'sentient', and their conduct is unpredictable" - Jack Vance on AI?
Strong unions protect the integrity of the university's mission. Core instructors can do this because they are well-organized bargaining units.
Now if only we could get universities to offer students classes about how AI actually works....
All social science Core classes at UChicago will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students and professors.
chicagomaroon.com/53262/news…
This is a great insight into the pro-war open letter because it exposes the difference between real scholarship based on careful research of facts and bloviating "theory" that throws rumors and anecdotes into a kind of chicken soup for the imperialist soul.
Much has already been written about the hypocrisy of this letter. But one claim deserves particular attention. The authors repeat the story that Israel struck the ‘transgender section’ of Evin prison, purportedly housing 100 transgender prisoners. This false story circulated internationally after it was reported by the New York Times, before later investigations found no evidence to support it and the key source denied ever making the claim attributed to him.
Having spent my PhD years researching HIV in Iran, a subject that necessarily involved studying the legal, social and healthcare realities facing transgender people, I know full well that transgender people are not imprisoned in Iran for being transgender. Iran legally recognises transgender people and permits gender reassignment surgery. Furthermore, there are no dedicated prison wings housing 100 transgender prisoners.
Yet people who were willing to uncritically repeat such an implausible story are now writing open letters to Iranian prisoners, as though they possess a deep understanding of the people they claim to write to. It is another reminder of how often narratives about Iran are constructed from assumptions and second-hand mythologies, rather than from serious engagement with realities on the ground.
theguardian.com/commentisfre…
OSR twitter has way too many people who are demented with racism and homo/transphobia while OSR Reddit is flooded by people self-promoting their solo boardgame that has almost nothing to do with OSR.
Where do you go to actually talk about OSR games?
An underappreciated claim in Said's "Orientalism" is that certain discourses come to refer only back to themeselves. This circularity unmoors itself from the real even as it uses power to enforce its claims to represent reality. The same can be said of much "AI risk" research.
Replying to @Tyler_A_Harper
I agree with most of what you write here. Good article.
Btw, I'm sure you've already seen this article, but in case you haven't. It would be nice if someone at The Atlantic would cover it, imo:
realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/…
It's extremely twisted that the discourse on free speech at universities fixates on microagressions against centrist professors and not universities threaten their own students with police snipers.
Zachary Sheldon retweeted
Alleged research misconduct by Sabine Kastner, and silencing whistleblowers by the psychology department at Princeton Univeristy.
Multiple former members of the Kastner Lab at Princeton University, including former postdocs and graduate students, have formally reported research misconduct by Professor Sabine Kastner, including alleged data falsification spanning over 20 years.
They describe a culture where people feared speaking up. Some remained anonymous because they feared retaliation.
My own experience: after I raised concerns, I was removed from Kastner lab. I was explicitly told by the psychology department leadership that this happened because I raised concerns anonymously: they told me “you questioned her integrity. PNI is a community. You attack one of us, you attack all of us.”
Afterward, I could not secure a new adviser and my PhD enrollment was terminated through the “no active adviser” rule.
Many affected trainees were international students. Losing an adviser means losing visa status, and international relocation, creating enormous pressure not to report concerns. This is exactly why Kastner lab recruits a disproportionately high number of international trainees. And why the lab website has most former members erased.
The research involved is supported by active NIH grants of over $20m. Involved publications include papers in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron.
The departmental leadership has been complicit, by helping remove students who raised concerns instead of protecting them.
Over the coming weeks, I will post documents, timelines, and evidence so people can examine the facts themselves.
#ResearchIntegrity #Whistleblower #Science #NIH #HigherEducation #GraduateSchool #PhD #Retaliation #OpenScience #ResearchEthics #AcademicFreedom @ivanoransky @NIH @HHSGov
What is "open source" AI?
What is "open-weights" AI?
What is "OpenAI"?
Today, the word "open" is doing too much for too many different people in AI.
Read my essay for Project Pergamon, the Public AI archive, to learn about how we can restore clarity.
projectpergamon.org/field-no…
Am I the only one who feels like it's not to late for them to try to take the win away from El-Sayed? I have the same gut feeling I had during the FIFA/VAR situation...
Now NYT says "too close to call". The VAR room have sent the play back to the head ref on the field for a final decision...


















