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[silverspawn]

that is pretty smart!

[Awaclus]

This is something the producers of Sora no Woto learned the hard way. It has some of the most beautiful and touching subtext I have ever seen, but most people completely missed it and the franchise flopped hard.

(The basic principle, without plot spoilers, is that the direction is designed to very strongly convey the perspective of the main character, who is a bit of an idiot and pays attention to all the unimportant things while many important plot things are not particularly interesting to her and the absolute fucked-upness of the dystopian setting is just a thing that she takes for granted because of course the world is like that when you've lived your entire life in it. And so, if you just go along with the flow the direction sets, you too will be only paying attention to all the unimportant things, missing most of the plot developments, and probably not even taking a moment to consider that it isn't normal that 15-year-old girls have to join the military if they want to learn how to play music — and that's apparently exactly how most people watched it, before marking it down as an incoherent mess although an aesthetically pleasing one and never revisiting it again.)

[Awaclus]

Incidentally, not too long after that, they (Aniplex) produced Madoka Magica, which still has plenty of subtext, but makes it quite a bit more obvious to the viewer that there is subtext in it, and makes for a coherent and interesting experience even if you miss all of it. Which was a roaring success.

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

(The basic principle, without plot spoilers, is that the direction is designed to very strongly convey the perspective of the main character, who is a bit of an idiot and pays attention to all the unimportant things while many important plot things are not particularly interesting to her and the absolute fucked-upness of the dystopian setting is just a thing that she takes for granted because of course the world is like that when you've lived your entire life in it. And so, if you just go along with the flow the direction sets, you too will be only paying attention to all the unimportant things, missing most of the plot developments, and probably not even taking a moment to consider that it isn't normal that 15-year-old girls have to join the military if they want to learn how to play music — and that's apparently exactly how most people watched it, before marking it down as an incoherent mess although an aesthetically pleasing one and never revisiting it again.)

This sounds incredibly interesting. I'll definitely try watching that show.

I also liked Madoka Magica quite a lot. I mean I have my issues, but it's a well-planned, well-thought out story, much unlike most series.

And the entropy thing is hilarious to me, not least because they utterly bungle the explanation in the english subtitles.

[silverspawn]

From reading a bit of proper philosophy papers about C., my impression is that **even the really good ones** have needlessly complicated terminology and phrasing. Which I guess is exactly the common critique of philosophy so not surprising.

The issue is really that people have so so little ability to differentiate good from bad ideas, and you need to do SOMETHING to make your contribution look more high class. So fancy terminology it  is. But it's also straight up negative effect. There really is no reason to do this. ImE, the really smart people usually talk in a hybrid of very basic language mixed with a few precise terms. This is very different from generally-complicated language.

More broadly, I think there is such a thing as philosophical intelligence that's quite different from IQ (certainly correlated, but nowhere near perfectly) and academic philosophy just doesn't select for people who are good at it, at all. The people who study philosophy aren't the ones who are good at philosophy, they don't get much better while studying it, and in the field, good ideas probably have some systematic advantage over bad ideas, but it's such a small one.

[silverspawn]

Some people are really good at philosophy. Among those, some are philosophers. As a result, some academic philosophy is really good (though communicated sub-optimally). Most people are bad at philosophy. As a result...

[silverspawn]

There seem to be about three or four people in academic philosophy with about 10 papers between them who think consciousness is about electromagnetic fields, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853. The fringest of fringe theories. But not silenced in any way; they're published and get funding, even write books.

Also has a wikipedia entry which has previously survived a call for deletion

[silverspawn]

I have of course been too nice to Global Workspace Theory; it is, in fact, intended as a causal explanation for consciousness.

Why you would ever expect this to be true idk. "Here is one aspect (global access) in one system (human brain); we'll say that this is the cause for consciousness!" I happen to think that this aspect isn't even on the table for philosophical reasons, but even if it were, what are the odds of it being the decisive one?

One philosophical problem with it is that it's a totally quantitative concept. There's no qualitative "global" property. This seems to be a wide-spread thing, where to me it's obvious that you can't tie a qualitative thing to a quantitative property, but I haven't had too much success with this argument.

[silverspawn]

One important question raised by GWTs concerns what exactly is required for a workspace to qualify as ‘global’ 25,56 . Is it the number (and type) of consuming sys- tems to which the workspace can broadcast that matters, or is it the kind of broadcasting that occurs within the workspace? Or are both of these considerations relevant to what counts as a ‘global workspace’? These questions need to be answered if we are to know what predictions GWTs make with respect to consciousness in, for exam- ple, infants, individuals with brain damage, people who have undergone split- brain surgery, non- human animals and artificial intelligence systems

[silverspawn]

I'm not particularly on team god right now, but if he published a patch that made fruit flies avoid houses, I could change my mind.

Related:

PATCH 5776.11 IS NOW COMPLETE. WORK HAS BEGUN ON PATCH 5777.0. HERE IS A FINAL CHANGELOG FOR PATCH 5776.11:

1. HUMANS NO LONGER DEPLETE WILLPOWER WHEN ENGAGING IN DIFFICULT TASKS; GLUCOSE NO LONGER NECESSARY TO REPLENISH IT.
2. ROCKETS CAN NOW LAND ON PLATFORMS AND BE REUSED IF NEEDED.
3. USER FFUKUYAMA COMPLAINS THAT THE POLITICAL SYSTEM HAS BECOME BORING. IN ORDER TO MAKE THINGS MORE INTERESTING, FIRST WORLD COUNTRIES WILL OCCASIONALLY FLIRT WITH FAR-RIGHT NATIONALISM.
4. UK NO LONGER CONSIDERED PART OF EUROPE FOR PURPOSE OF ECONOMIC BONUSES.
5. VOLKSWAGENS NOW REPORT CORRECT GAS MILEAGE STATISTICS.

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

I'm all-in on ETH. Not literally all-in of course, I'm still financially responsible and stuff, but as invested as is reasonably justifiable. If the merge flops, I shall eat my nonexistent hat.

(The merge is essentially an event where ETH transitions from prove of work to proof of stake, which means that instead of solving math puzzles to realize transactions, you stake your ETH and someone gets randomly chosen with odds weighed by eth staked. Point being that right now ETH is ultra expensive, and the transition should reduce it to a fraction.)

[silverspawn]

by ultra expensive I mean computationally expensive, like the entire eth ecosystem burns through tons of energy and consequently has a large co2 footprint

[silverspawn]

So if the merge goes well and the proof of stake system works, ETH will be just as secure as bitcoin, have way more applications, and be clean. Seems like a better long term bet.

[silverspawn]

Of course all of this should be irrelevant if the efficient market hypothesis is true since then the above & way more is perfectly priced in by the market, which collective has a much better understanding of the technology than I do. But I don't exactly believe the EMH anymore after the pandemic. So it's kind of a bet on the EMH being sufficiently false.

[Awaclus]

I'm all-in on ETH. Not literally all-in of course, I'm still financially responsible and stuff, but as invested as is reasonably justifiable. If the merge flops, I shall eat my nonexistent hat.

(The merge is essentially an event where ETH transitions from prove of work to proof of stake, which means that instead of solving math puzzles to realize transactions, you stake your ETH and someone gets randomly chosen with odds weighed by eth staked. Point being that right now ETH is ultra expensive, and the transition should reduce it to a fraction.)

Thanks for the tip, I just invested 13.12€ in ETH for the lulz. I'm treating it more as a gamble than an investment really, but if you're correct, I guess even a small amount like that can turn out to become a substantial amount of money later on.

[faust]

So if the merge goes well and the proof of stake system works, ETH will be just as secure as bitcoin, have way more applications, and be clean.

"clean"?

As far as I know, even proof of stake systems use signficantly more energy than other commonly used means of transferring money, such as credit card transactions.

[silverspawn]

I've heard the number 1% floating around, as in 1% of what it was before. That's probably still much more than other systems, but it's negligible compared to proof of work

[Awaclus]

I made a 0.15€ profit by strategically converting some of my ETH into DOGE earlier and back to ETH just now.

This is surprisingly entertaining.

[silverspawn]

That's actually pretty impressive because an ETH transaction costs about 4$

[Awaclus]

It's probably worth noting that I'm using a crypto exchange with a hosted wallet, so there was probably no actual ETH transaction there.

[silverspawn]

yeah most likely

Great start into your trading career, anyway :-)

[silverspawn]

These days I'm split between "AGI is like 5-10 years away" and "all of these advances mean nothing because they're only solving the problems that don't require consciousness, and as a result the field will grind to a halt and true AGI may be 100 years away"

[silverspawn]

But either way it is unsettling to see a new post about amazing AGI development about once per week