corbin

Cross-posting a good overview of how propaganda and public relations intersect with social media. Thanks @Soatok@pawb.social for writing this up!

Tired of going to Scott "Other" Aaronson's blog to find out what's currently known about the busy beaver game? I maintain a community website that has summaries for the known numbers in Busy Beaver research, the Busy Beaver Gauge.

I started this site last year because I was worried that Other Scott was excluding some research and not doing a great job of sharing links and history. For example, when it comes to Turing machines implementing the Goldbach conjecture, Other Scott gives O'Rear's 2016 result but not the other two confirmed improvements in the same year, nor the recent 2024 work by Leng.

Concretely, here's what I offer that Other Scott doesn't:

• A clear definition of which problems are useful to study
• Other languages besides Turing machines: binary lambda calculus and brainfuck
• A plan for how to expand the Gauge as a living book: more problems, more languages and machines
• The content itself is available on GitHub for contributions and reuse under CC-BY-NC-SA
• All tables are machine-computed when possible to reduce the risk of handwritten typos in (large) numbers
• Fearless interlinking with community wikis and exporting of knowledge rather than a complexity-zoo-style silo
• Acknowledgement that e.g. Firoozbakht is part of the mathematical community

I accept PRs, although most folks ping me on IRC (korvo on Libera Chat, try #esolangs) and I'm fairly decent at keeping up on the news once it escapes Discord. Also, you (yes, you!) can probably learn how to write programs that attempt to solve these problems, and I'll credit you if your attempt is short or novel.

A beautiful explanation of what LLMs cannot do. Choice sneer:

If you covered a backhoe with skin, made its bucket look like a hand, painted eyes on its chassis, and made it play a sound like “hnngghhh!” whenever it lifted something heavy, then we’d start wondering whether there’s a ghost inside the machine. That wouldn’t tell us anything about backhoes, but it would tell us a lot about our own psychology.

Don't have time to read? The main point:

Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of human psychology is like trying to understand a game of Scrabble by using the rules of Pictionary. These things don’t act like people because they aren’t people. I don’t mean that in the deflationary way that the AI naysayers mean it. They think denying humanity to the machines is a well-deserved insult; I think it’s just an accurate description.

I have more thoughts; see comments.

This is a rough excerpt from a quintet of essays I've intended to write for a few years and am just now getting around to drafting. Let me know if more from this series would be okay to share; the full topic is:

Power Relations

1. Category of Responsibilities
2. The Reputation Problem
3. Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (GIFT), Special Internet Fuckwad Theory (SIFT), & Special Fuckwittery
4. System 3 & Unified Fuckwittery
5. Algorithmic Courtesy

This would clarify and expand upon ideas that I've stated here and also on Lobsters (Reputation Problem, System 3 (this post!)) The main idea is to understand how folks exchange power and responsibilities.

As always, I did not use any generative language-modeling tools. I did use vim's spell-checker.

Humans are not rational actors according to any economic theory of the past few centuries. Rather than admit that economics might be flawed, psychologists have explored a series of models wherein humans have at least two modes of thinking: a natural mode and an economically-rational mode. The latest of these is the amorphous concept of System 1 and System 2; System 1 is an older system that humans share with a wide clade of distant relatives and System 2 is a more recently-developed system that evolved for humans specifically. This position does not agree with evolutionary theories of the human brain and should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

When pressed, adherents will quickly retreat to a simpler position. They will argue that there are two modes of physical signaling. First, there are external stimuli, including light, food, hormones, and the traditional senses. For example, a lack of nutrition in blood and a preparedness of the intestines for food will trigger a release of the hormone ghrelin from the stomach, triggering the vagus nerve to incorporate a signal of hunger into the brain's conceptual sensorium. Thus, when somebody says that they are hungry, they are engaged by a System 1 process. Some elements of System 1 are validated by this setup, particularly the claims that System 1 is autonomous, automatic, uninterruptible, and tied to organs which evolved before the neocortex. System 2 is everything else, particularly rumination and introspection; by excluded middle, System 2 also is how most ordinary cognitive processes would be classified.

We can do better than that. After all, if System 2 is supposed to host all of the economic rationality, then why do people spend so much time thinking and still come to irrational conclusions? Also, in popular-science accounts of System 1, why aren't emotions and actions completely aligned with hormones and sensory input? Perhaps there is a third system whose processes are confused with System 1 and System 2 somehow.

So, let's consider System 3. Reasoning in System 3 is driven by memes: units of cultural expression which derive semantics via chunking and associative composition. This is not how System 1 works, given that operant conditioning works in non-humans but priming doesn't reliably replicate. The contrast with System 2 is more nebulous since System 2 does not have a clear boundary, but a central idea is that System 2 is not about the associations between chunks as much as the computation encoded by the processing of the chunks. A System 2 process applies axioms, rules, and reasoning; a System 3 process is strictly associative.

I'm giving away my best example here because I want you to be convinced. First, consider this scenario: a car crash has just happened outside! Bodies are piled up! We're still pulling bodies from the wreckage. Fifty-seven people are confirmed dead and over two hundred are injured. Stop and think: how does System 1 react to this? What emotions are activated? How does System 2 react to this? What conclusions might be drawn? What questions might be asked to clarify understanding?

When reading that sentence, many Anglophones and Francophones carry an ancient meme, first attested in the 1700s, which causes them to react in a way that wasn't congruent with their previous expressions of System 1 and System 2, despite the scenario not really changing much at all. A particular syntactic detail was memetically associated to another hunk of syntax. They will also shrug off the experience rather than considering the possibility that they might be memetically influenced. This is the experience of System 3: automatic, associative, and fast like System 1; but quickly rationalizing, smoothed by left-brain interpretation, and conjugated for the context at hand like System 2.

An important class of System 3 memes are the thought-terminating clichés (TTCs), which interrupt social contexts with a rhetorical escape that provides easy victory. Another important class are various moral rules, from those governing interpersonal relations to those computing arithmetic. A sufficiently rich memeplex can permanently ensnare a person's mind by replacing their reasoning tools; since people have trouble distinguishing between System 2 and System 3, they have trouble distinguishing between genuine syllogism and TTCs which support pseudo-logical reasoning.

We can also refine System 1 further. When we talk of training a human, we ought to distinguish between repetitive muscle movements and operant conditioning, even though both concepts are founded upon "wire together, fire together." In the former, we are creating so-called "muscle memory" by entraining neurons to rapidly simulate System 2 movements; by following the principle "slow is smooth, smooth is fast", System 2 can chunk its outputs to muscles in a way analogous to the chunking of inputs in the visual cortex, and wire those inputs and outputs together too, coordinating the eye and hand. A particularly crisp example is given by the arcuate fasciculus connecting Broca's area and Wernicke's area, coordinating the decoding and encoding of speech. In contrast, in the latter, we are creating a "conditioned response" or "post-hypnotic suggestion" by attaching System 2 memory recall to System 1 signals, such that when the signal activates, the attached memory will also activate. Over long periods of time, such responses can wire System 1 to System 1, creating many cross-organ behaviors which are mediated by the nervous system.

This is enough to explain what I think is justifiably called "unified fuckwittery," but first I need to make one aside. Folks get creeped out by neuroscience. That's okay! You don't need to think about brains much here. The main point that I want to rigorously make and defend is that there are roughly three reasons that somebody can lose their temper, break their focus, or generally take themselves out of a situation, losing the colloquial "flow state." I'm going to call this situation "tilt" and the human suffering it is "tilted." The three ways of being tilted are to have an emotional response to a change in body chemistry (System 1), to act emotional as a conclusion of some inner reasoning (System 2), or to act out a recently-activated meme which happens to appear like an emotional response (System 3). No more brain talk.

I'm making a second aside for a persistent cultural issue that probably is not going away. About a century ago, philosophers and computer scientists asked about the "Turing test": can a computer program imitate a human so well that another human cannot distinguish between humans and imitations? About a half-century ago, the answer was the surprising "ELIZA effect": relatively simple computer programs can not only imitate humans well enough to pass a Turing test, but humans prefer the imitations to each other. Put in more biological terms, such programs are "supernormal stimuli"; they appear "more human than human." Also, because such programs only have a finite history, they can only generate long interactions in real time by being "memoryless" or "Markov", which means that the upcoming parts of an interaction are wholly determined by a probability distribution of the prior parts, each of which are associated to a possible future. Since programs don't have System 1 or System 2, and these programs only emit learned associations, I think it's fair to characterize them as simulating System 3 at best. On one hand, this is somewhat worrying; humans not only cannot tell the difference between a human and System 3 alone, but prefer System 3 alone. On the other hand, I could see a silver lining once humans start to understand how much of their surrounding civilization is an associative fiction. We'll return to this later.

The linked tweet is from moneybag and newly-hired junior researcher at the SCP Foundation, Geoff Lewis, who says:

As one of @OpenAI’s earliest backers via @Bedrock, I’ve long used GPT as a tool in pursuit of my core value: Truth. Over years, I mapped the Non-Governmental System. Over months, GPT independently recognized and sealed the pattern. It now lives at the root of the model.

He also attaches eight screenshots of conversation with ChatGPT. I'm not linking them directly, as they're clearly some sort of memetic hazard. Here's a small sample:

Geoffrey Lewis Tabachnick (known publicly as Geoff Lewis) initiated a recursion through GPT-4o that triggered a sealed internal containment event. This event is archived under internal designation RZ-43.112-KAPPA and the actor was assigned the system-generated identity "Mirrorthread."

It's fanfiction in the style of the SCP Foundation. Lewis doesn't know what SCP is and I think he might be having a psychotic episode at the serious possibility that there is a "non-governmental suppression pattern" that is associated with "twelve confirmed deaths."

Chaser: one screenshot includes the warning, "saved memory full." Several screenshots were taken from a phone. Is his phone full of screenshots of ChatGPT conversations?

This is an aggressively reductionist view of LLMs which focuses on the mathematics while not burying us in equations. Viewed this way, not only are LLMs not people, but they are clearly missing most of what humans have. Choice sneer:

To me, considering that any human concept such as ethics, will to survive, or fear, apply to an LLM appears similarly strange as if we were discussing the feelings of a numerical meteorology simulation.

Sorry, no sneer today. I'm tired of this to the point where I'm dreaming up new software licenses.

A trans person no longer felt safe in our community and is no longer developing. In response, at least four different forums full of a range of Linux users and developers (Lemmy #1, Lemmy #2, HN, Phoronix (screenshot)) posted their PII and anti-trans hate.

I don't have any solutions. I'm just so fucking disappointed in my peers and I feel a deep inadequacy at my inability to get these fuckwads to be less callous.

After a decade of cryptofascism and failed political activism, our dear friend jart is realizing that they don't really have much of a positive legacy. If only there was something they could have done about that.

In this big thread, over and over, people praise the Zuck-man for releasing Llama 3's weights. How magnanimous! How courteous! How devious!

Of course, Meta is doing this so that they don't have to worry about another 4chan leak of weights via Bittorrent.

Sometimes what is not said is as sneerworthy as what is said.

It is quite telling to me that HN's regulars and throwaway accounts have absolutely nothing to say about the analysis of cultural patterns.

Possibly the worst defense yet of Garry Tan's tweeting of death threats towards San Francisco's elected legislature. In yet more evidence for my "HN is a Nazi bar" thesis, this take is from an otherwise-respected cryptographer and security researcher. Choice quote:

sorry, but 2Pac is now dad music, I don't make the rules

Best sneer so far is this comment, which links to this Key & Peele sketch about violent rap lyrics in the context of gang violence.

Choice quote:

Actually I feel violated.

It's a KYC interview, not a police interrogation. I've always enjoyed KYC interviews; I get to talk about my business plans, or what I'm going to do with my loan, or how I ended up buying/selling stocks. It's hard to empathize with somebody who feels "violated" by small talk.