Worth commenting this because actually true without even caveats:

I’ve wanted to write about creativity and AI for a while, but let’s just slightly dip here.

It’s all quite correct in its simplification. The idea that the weather is not controlled by us, so if we verify an AI prediction being actually true, against the real world, as a form of science, this should give us a sort of proof that the AI works at a more fundamental level.

As with all AI problems, all the confusion and weirdness happens because we get the overall frame in reverse. It’s not simply that the way we predict the weather, and the way AI works, are all based on heuristics. It’s that human consciousness is all based on heuristics.

In this case this sort of evidence says that deep learning is not more fundamental than physics, but more fundamental than US.

Because even when looking at the weather, we are the filters of perception, the lens through which we observe. Of course the weather is “out there”, so it’s not a perception problem, as it can be verified. But our canons of prediction are wholly ours. We filter what’s relevant from what is not, and what we judge an accurate prediction. In the end it’s all filtered and biased by some human arbitrary canon.

It’s the same with the problem of creativity and copyright. We can all see that AI doesn’t invent anything: it simply regurgitates what it has been fed. It’s digital vomit, coming at a great cost. But the fundamental aspect that makes it look interesting and good to us, is the illusion of removing origins. As long you have the source, training material on one side, and output on the other, you see that AI has done nothing worthwhile. But the amount of data it gobbles up, and the complexity of algorithms mean that AI is GOOD at HIDING ITS TRACK. Obfuscating the trail between origin and end. To create the ILLUSION of being TRACKLESS.

What happens when you remove those tracks from perception? That the origins of things are gone, and so we attribute them ON THE SPOT, to the thing itself. If there’s no direct observable origin, then AI created it. AI “made” something new.

The trick to understand AI is not about figuring out its limits, to realize that there’s no “real” creativity there matching human beings. But to understand that we human beings don’t have the creativity we think we have. That we also are heuristic machines compressing data and re-elaborating something that is fed to us. What comes in comes out, just the same. The reason why we BELIEVE we have REAL CREATIVITY is because of how much we SUCK, through limited introspection, at tracking the origin of our own thoughts. We have no data on the data we use and we become, therefore we think OURSELVES origins. We think something special and magical happened inside us. That we became the ORIGIN of something. That we made it.

Same as AIs, we are heuristics machines that don’t have the creativity we think we have. And where that “feel” is itself born not out of an unique, special QUALITY, but it’s born of a FAULT: We are incompetent at tracking ourselves, therefore think ourselves SPECIAL. We celebrate incompetence. We make virtues out of sins.

AIs are simply teaching us we aren’t as smart and special as we think we are.

AIs still seem not advanced enough to match us, because they still need to become more stupid. Only then AIs will become truly human.

(well, then there’s the little problem of efficiency and energy consumption)

A little note that shouldn’t even be necessary, being the situation so plainly readable.

One of the bigger reasons why Elon Musk went “all in” with Trump is so that, given a win, he could convert all his previous investment as leverage. It’s all about leverage. Not in the sense that now Trump “owes” the victory to Musk, but that Musk controls the consensus, that he shapes the narrative and has a firm choke on its neck. The will of the people, lifting him up like an unholy prophet.

The MORE Musk invested before, the more he gains active leverage on Trump, to make Trump his instrument.

Right now it’s honeymoon. The message is that there’s an uniformity of vision and goals, between Musk and Trump. But we know how this is plainly just a message, and that the two are together out of expediency.

If you pull this together it’s quite obvious that the bigger threat to this right-wing government and hegemony doesn’t come from the “left”. As I said before, the left is just a puppet controlled by the right. It has no uses other than being ridiculed.

The threat comes from the inside.

There are of course plenty of pragmatic reasons for it not to blow up, and keep the honeymoon as long as possible. At a basic level, Trump and Musk interests ARE aligned. But this current unity is also quite fragile, because when the course changes from general propaganda to the small practical details and execution, interests will start to conflict.

On one side, we’ll never see any of this happening. Because it will all be behind the scenes. The constant bargaining to obtain advantage here and there, the annoyance due to Musk wedging himself into everything out of his competence.

And then it will likely break.

What does happen when the illusion shatters? Elon Musk’s main trait is that he is easy to read. He is predictable. He has promoted “X” as this source of “truth” and “democracy.” A source that he seized and controls. Whatever disagreement, whatever grudge he has, last one about the judge who forbid him getting paid more, turns into a public lynching. The will of the people.

The moment you upset Elon Musk, is the moment you cross the will of the people. And the people will rise up, against you. The same way his will blends with Trump’s, disappears and blends into the greater will of the people. It’s not two to one, but three into one. All three the same.

Elon Musk strategy is to camouflage himself and let people speak with his own disguised voice. To then re-broadcast and make his own. So that he dominates and controls without being seen.

The same strategy that was used to make Trump win, will be the strategy to take him down when he overstays his function.

Elon Musk made Trump win because Trump is expendable.

Because Trump is WEAK.

Elon Musk made Trump win so that Trump were to believe he was weak, so that he would have to continue to lean and depend on Elon Musk. Knowing that even a little sidestep would mean his own end. The stronger the victory the stronger the bond. But with only one being truly in control. The one who seized expediency to make himself irreplaceable. Because you can’t replace the will of the people.

Vox populi, vox Dei.

This is a little “sense of wonder” game I used to exhibit years ago when trying to impress on how scope can be so deep to become unfathomable.

It’s a simple invite to imagination, all played on maps.

We start from here:

I love the style and earthy colors. But besides that, it’s a little, abstracted section of a map. It opens to the sea, there are some unmarked islands, a river splitting in some ways across the mainland and a good number of towns along its path. Some small some bigger, according to those three different symbols, the empty red circle, the full circle and the square.

You see GOLOTHA, prominent near the bay.

All of that can be enough to be a WORLD. It does look incomplete, but it’s also quite a large playground. Imagine visiting all those towns, it’s a role-playing game, the supposedly large number of inhabitants and their stories. Imagine treading through unmarked territory, maybe find some lone tower, a dungeon. Such a nice and intriguing countryside.

It’s enough of a world that a party of players could spend a couple of years in it, with a good enough master, just getting to know it.

But it’s just a map, and it’s more than it seems…

Here’s some sleight of hands. You think we’re going large, but look better, we’re going closer, toward the smaller…

See on the upper right? There’s our GOLOTHA right there. Right under it there’s CHAKTA, as you expect from the first map. But if you go looking for OMNIS, to the right, you won’t find it. Are the two maps diverging? Nope, OMNIS is simply just slightly out of this territory, out of that rightmost margin.

You can see the main lump of land, with that large swamp called PERIS MOOR, and downward another big town SELVOS, inside DEVERSH BAY. See all those smaller towns around it? They are simply ignored in the first map above. They are so small that they’ve been abstracted away.

Now, pay more attention and you’ll understand that the area of this second large map corresponds almost precisely to the portion of the area of the first map, that drawn “square” block. See how the first map is divided not just by hexes, but also larger squares? Two big ones almost complete but with the bottom portion cut, and more partial ones above and to the sides? The bottom map represents almost precisely one square.

Yet this second bigger map, feels like a continent! Countless towns that would be impossible to visit while playing. This is already so big that defies the possibility of full knowledge. The possibility of being WRITTEN, so that it could then be READ. A world that goes beyond one person. A world that cannot be contained.

But we’re playing a game inside the game.

Sorry for the quality, but if you squint here you can see that this big map is divided by the same “square” outlines used above. I’ve marked an empty square to better assess its size, and then pointed to the arrow that TINY portion of land we’ve examined up to this point.

Well, as you can see, what looked already like incredibly vast land… is part of a MUCH bigger whole.

Let’s approximate and remove those spaces that are just water, and we can say the full map is comprised of 70+ squares.

SEVENTY OF THEM. Just as large and supposedly, potentially as densely detailed as the big map above, showing just one.

How would you even realistically or unrealistically visit this, with a party of players? How can you even WRITE about it, when it’s already daunting to even THINK about it.

How many LIFETIMES could be spent within a single fictional world?

But we’re playing game inside a game here…

Hello world!

See that whole previous map with its own seventy counted land “squares”, it’s now been abstracted down to ONE square. Look at the map here and you can find the continent-now-island right there on the upper left.

I’ve marked with a red square the minuscule-yet-daunting portion of land we started with. Can you feel the VERTIGO now?

Will you be a tourist in your next life? Or rather, an eternal deity of infinite curiosity?

When is that the real world becomes a little toy within a larger fiction?

But you can already see here, that’s not a complete map.

So I introduce you to… LYTHIA.

Here too, if you squint, I marked the original square we started with.

Good luck, fellow fictional traveler, you’ll need it.

How large can this world possibly be. What kind of delusions its inventor had to suffer.

See then, the world whole:

KETHIRA.

But it is just a game, we’re playing.

Remember this?

Let’s see how X promotes truth rather than click-baiting:

Of course you can’t have explicit, public rules for what regulates a declared free-speech, public space (because it’s not actually public, it’s private). You need “scoops” and privileged access to inside employees.

A number of semi-hidden rules like this one:

Nice graph without numbers, btw. Those were all the rage during COVID and Nvidia presentation slides.

Wait, what is this “reach” and “deprioritization” on a FREE SPEECH platform? But let’s expand the one we started with:

“Reply like a madman”, X rule to MAXIMIZE TRUTH.

Or maybe it’s the opposite and farming for engagement maximizes inflammatory action? What is the most likely outcome?

One of Elon’s groupies still a “crybaby” tho:

(thread with some actual data)

(or this, despite it’s quite superficial. But the bottom line is that people don’t simply leave X to send a message, but also because it doesn’t fucking work anymore. Objectively broken and a waste of time.)

But all this stuff is beside the point.

The platform is bent for political exploitation. The moment your “reach” to the “world town square” is regulated by a fee, a fee that however small is under the control of a political party, creates a feedback loop so that those who participate are already themselves filtered. Filtered out, because I’d rather starve to death than give a dollar to Elon Musk. And like me obviously many others.

So what is “free speech”? (without even going into “truth-seeking”)

We used to say, the medium is the message. Who controls the medium, controls the message.

Elon Musk’s magical trick has been to make people focus on the message: you can say everything you want! Free speech absolutism!

He wants to distract you, like magicians, while the substitution happens: he doesn’t need to control the message, because he has the control of the medium. The darkness that comes before. He shapes the discourse uphill, where you aren’t looking. He doesn’t need to censor the single, when he controls the statistically meaningful.

What you write is not what people see.

He gives you illusions, while he seizes the real.

Feeling very sluggish today, but there’s always Elon Musk to make me happy.

Oh! Please do tell, how is “modern” media NOT a click-maximizing and NOT a propaganda-maximizing machine?

I’ve become a fan of inversion and reversibility (and why it’s the ground of the real war no one even seems to acknowledge). But this one is so ludicrous that it is legitimately funny.

All an excuse for more Bakker quotes (if you don’t understand the connection it’s because you aren’t looking close enough).

Oh, this whole reply thread.

“It causes me great pain to see the original creators taken so carelessly.”

“The screenshotted text is even wilder. It completely slanders the very foundations of D&D and fantasy TTRPGs in general. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

“Unfortunately there is a lot of childless weirdos that are trying to reframe the history of gaming”

“This sort of bashing the original creators of D&D (Gygax and Arneson, #DnD) is disgraceful, but the tender leftists love doing it. Women are all through the MM in positive light: sylphs, dryads, and nymphs. #wotc is driven by trashy activism.”

(about this one above. LOL, you can’t be serious.)

“Incredible! It really is so shocking and incomprehensible that wotc would soil the names of men like Gary Gygax. Their narcissism is like a stench!”

“Grummz, not surprised. Elon Musk however…. Well, I’m glad he noticed. I shouldn’t be surprised though, he is an Alpha Nerd.”

“D&D is toast. Nobody plays fantasy role playing to be a gay dwarf baker. (Not making that up, literally a character depicted in latest material). It’s embarrassing. Pandering to the 1% of population that don’t even play the game. This will end badly for them.”

I guess I’m entitled to an opinion because as a kid D&D was a huge myth for me, and still is and I have great respect for Gygax and Arneson, and lots of my time goes digging into that history of the 70s.

And there’s nothing problematic with the following images shown as “proof”:

The only part I’d disagree is that this type of level commentary is probably ill placed and not suitable for a rulebook, but looking more closely this seems coming from a “making of” other book, where instead it is fully in-topic and well deserved.

I think this amounts to the same brainless way that people have to chop human beings into coarse binary categories of good/evil. That doesn’t have any contact with reality, since human beings are complex, instead. All of us are agglomerates of good and bad things. And even the good and bad of those things isn’t clearly good and bad, but itself an agglomerate of actual cause and effect.

What is the problem of recognizing there are aspects of the cultural world that spawned D&D that were problematic and easily lending themselves to criticism? And why the presence and legitimacy of such criticism would put D&D under a bad light, even?

If anything THE COMMENTS ABOVE condemn the people. Not the RPGs. Even with the (undeniable) sexism, those RPGs are fine. They are a cultural product with its own limits but also qualities. I’m AGAINST the idea that a cultural product HAS to have representation. Because I see cultural products as PARTIAL IN NATURE. So I’m totally fine if a piece of culture, whether it is a movie, a book, comics, or whatever, is sexist, or has a very limited representation. It’s fine. It shows a light on a part of the world, a limited point of view. It is partial by nature. As long of course it doesn’t become ideology. As long the intent isn’t to make partiality the rule.

The Theater of the Mind is a great place to debase and slaughter other people (and ourselves). Reality is not.

I don’t see anything wrong if you read a story of Conan and all the women are enslaved. Why? Because it’s fiction, as long it doesn’t want to be IDEOLOGY. And even when it is because it reflects indirectly an ideology that was absorbed and taken for granted, it can still be appreciated for the entertainment it offers WHILE also lending itself to criticism for those aspects that deserve it. It’s not all one indivisible thing to condemn or celebrate.

Nor I see anything wrong if now RPG spaces are wider, more accessible and more diverse. I don’t see anything wrong to analyze some previous work critically. I don’t see anything wrong if newer works are developed as consequence of that awareness.

Cancel culture, that I do not approve at all, erases the thing. Cancel culture is the very opposite of diversification. But that piece above doesn’t “cancel” anything. It merely reads critically, expanding the scope of what a new product should be. Nor it does anything to the “memory” of Gygax. Why Gygax himself wouldn’t recognize some base misogyny in his old work? I see it more as a consequence of naivety, because those RPGs were largely naive. And generally also quite harmless. They weren’t seized as IDEOLOGIES. They were simple, basic wishful thinking. Entertainment lending itself to some manly superficiality.

If you see all that as an attack to the person and memory of Gygax, well, it only speaks of you and your stupidity (and your actual, confirmed butthurt misogyny).

(also anticipating the criticism: no, I also don’t think that those people in the comments are misogynist BECAUSE they played D&D)

So you do agree that the correlation between an extinction level event and the priority of getting humanity to Mars is zero?

If the possibility of an extinction level event is defined by humanity having no control on when it happens, what are the chances of humans developing technology to solve it precisely at the point in the colossally wide timeline when that event randomly shows up?

Unless you live in the anime-like world of Evangelion, where hostile “angels” were sent at the rate that was precisely needed to give humanity both evolutionary and technological pressure to get to the planned stage at the right time. An event that was willed and controlled.

Maybe you want to be the CAUSE of that extinction event?

(but no, we are most likely in a manga instead)

EDIT: slight step to the future, Cory Doctorow wrote about it.

(extra)

EDIT: It keeps going. (for those who don’t know, Elon Musk won a lawsuit by saying that accusing someone being a pedophile is a “common insult”, rather than defamation)

(“it’s just an insult”)

Earlier today the proverbial Elon Musk replied “Intelligence is as intelligence does” to someone posting a little story about the person with the highest IQ recorded, and exemplified this unparalleled feat saying “she was ridiculed for her answer to what seemed a simple problem. Yet she saw what no one else could.”

My point here is not that I’m smarter than most people, but that this would be the answer most likely BY DEFAULT.

So let’s see this simple logical problem:

There’s a game show and you get to pick between three doors. One of them would reveal the prize of a car, whereas the other two simply hide goats. The clever cultural wink here is that we all need cars rather than goats. So let’s simplify and just say one door is the prize and the other two are empty.

PRIZE / EMPTY / EMPTY

As simple as it is, as long you played D&D and/or have a very basic grasp of probabilities, you pick between three choices, it’s like rolling 1-2 on a d6, or 33.3% chance of being right.

And that’s it.

The added trick is that after the choice is made, one of the other two doors is opened to reveal it is empty. And you make a SECOND choice.

Once again, basic probabilities, you now get to pick between TWO doors, the chance is now 50%.

No matter what happens, this is always the scenario. If you picked the prize correctly the first time, with your 33% chance, the reveal of one of the other two doors will give the opportunity to know you’ve been either right or wrong. The toss of a coin, 50%. But the same happens in every case, because there are always two empty doors, and no matter which you pick, there’s always one left that is empty, to reveal at the second step.

My most stupid default is that it doesn’t really matter what choice you make, it’s always 50%. Either or.

But nope the story here is that people felt outraged by the WRONG answer: “She got over 10,000 letters, with nearly 1,000 from PhDs.”

… Telling her that she was wrong for deciding to switch?

But if the “stupid default” conclusion says that it’s INDIFFERENT, why should you be upset at picking one of two equal options?

Of course the goal here is another, once again political since the target here is the “school system”, part of the current playbook of destroying institutions. But it is quite silly how this was underlined:

“MIT ran computer simulations that confirmed her answer.

MythBusters conducted tests to prove it.

Some academics recognized their mistake and apologized.

But why did so many fail to see it?

I mean, yeah, it’s a tricky problem because of how it is presented. If the default answer is that it’s indifferent, because it’s either/or chance, then you are open to choose to switch as well. The “clever” conclusion is that this is a compounded choice, it builds on the first rather than being in isolation.

What you see as 1 on 2 chance is actually 2 on 3, which is much more convenient, and the reason is obvious. Between the first and second step, no matter what, one of the three options is removed. The fact that it is 33.3% the first, moving onto 50% indicates that something happened and information was added, and while the first choice is set in stone as 1 on 3, the “action” in between produced better chances, up to 50%. If you don’t CHANGE your choice then you are logically stuck with your original 33.3%, rather than the 50% in front of you.

No matter what you think, either you fully grasp the compounded chance OR NOT, the choice to SWITCH in the second stage is ALWAYS the better option.

Once again, you don’t need 228 IQ to figure out, you don’t need computer simulations. There is nothing tricky. There is only one answer, as long you give it enough thought to go one step further than the original 50% chance.

If you still don’t fully grasp the logic, just use a different example: there are 1000 doors, only one has the prize. You choose one, therefore you have 1/1000 chance of being right, which is quite unlikely. At the second step, the other 998 empty ones are removed. You now have only two options, the one you picked, and the one left…

Well, what are you gonna choose?

(there would be more to say, about what is the specific pattern that tricks the mind here, and it is how the heuristic abstraction transforms the reveal of one of the two other choices as equal, which is not, and then the whole theme of superstition matched to randomness, sticking to the choice that FEELS right, which is as old as humanity…)

Does anyone remember Scott Aaronson problem? (I mention Aaronson because the problem was examined in his “Quantum Computing Since Democritus”, but I think it first appeared on his blog?)

It was something like this: there’s a greatly advanced AI that has perfectly mapped human behavior. You know this. It is true. You’re going to face it. This computer AI has prepared two sealed boxes in front of you, one next to the other. The one on the left contains $1.000, you know this. The one on the right EITHER has $1.000.000, OR nothing. Once you arrive in front of those two boxes, the content has already been set and cannot be changed. So you know that the box to the right is either empty or has the bigger prize.

The content of the box on the right has been previously set by the AI following a strict rule: if it predicts you take both boxes, then that box is empty, if you take only the one on the right, then it contains the big prize.

You have one simple choice to make: take with you the box on the right, or BOTH.

Now you need 228 IQ.

—
Late addition:

If you choose red pill, you live in all cases (and everyone lives too, the dilemma is intended as an intuition pump).

If you choose blue pill, you die.

But LOGIC also says that to save lives you need to reach 100% consensus on red pill, but only 51% consensus on the blue.

Given knowledge of the results of the poll, we would need only another +4% on blue side to save everyone’s life, whereas to do the same on the red side you’d need a +46%.

I wonder, would you send your own mom to certain death since you know she isn’t great with logic?

If altruism has sometimes practical limits, individualism always has contextual ones.