Dissapointed Kolkhoznik

Schrödinger's Debater

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Section 29, ‘Of the Tarantulas’ #Nietzsche

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@DerAchsenZeit The age of Ignorance does not mean lack of literacy, it means a condition of moral, religious, spiritual disorder. It’s a moral category not an educational one

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@evikokalari @tanvi_ratna For Trump, yes, it is.

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@CodyKakpo @bronzeagemantis The blond beast

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@millerman Was revolutionary socialism a form of Christianity or was Christianity a form of revolutionary socialism?

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@SketchesbyBoze All books are children’s books. If they can read.

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@ALBwonk It still is a low blow. One of those old school commies (one would say like Berisha) have in their playbook. There are plenty of things to accuse the man of. This says more about us than about him tbh

[Guilherme José @guilherme94jose]

One of Kierkegaard's finest jabs at Hegel: "In relation to their systems, most system-builders are like a man who constructs a vast castle and then lives in a hut beside it; they do not inhabit their own magnificent systematic edificies."

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@MorEdge_Insight @elonmusk The problem is not that the Arab mind is captivated by a ‘backward’ religion. The problem is that the Arab mind is captivated by an inferiority complex. If anything it was that religion that made their civilization a radiant one. Stop bitching about it.

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@DerAchsenZeit Protagonism is a double edged sword

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@Dr_TheHistories @archeohistories Jugframing

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@DerAchsenZeit Yeap

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@DerAchsenZeit Her definition of tragedy as pain that does not depress but lifts the soul is pretty much on point. I read her book recently. She’s a fun read. No one reads books like that anymore, unless they are written by women with tattoos deconstructing ad nauseam.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Berkeley philosopher published a book in 1972 warning that AI would never understand the world the way humans do, got laughed off campus for it, then watched the entire AI research community spend 50 years slowly proving him right.

His name was Hubert Dreyfus. The book was called What Computers Can't Do.

And the story of what happened to him before, during, and after he wrote it is one of the most important things nobody tells you about the history of AI.

It started in 1965. RAND Corporation hired Dreyfus to study artificial intelligence. He turned in a 90-page report comparing AI research to alchemy. Not as a compliment.

He argued that AI researchers had made the same mistake over and over for a decade. They would get a narrow system working, predict it was the first step toward general machine intelligence, and watch it hit a wall nobody predicted. Simon said by 1967 computers would be world chess champion. They were not even close. Dreyfus called the whole thing a pattern. Early wins, massive promises, quiet collapse.

The AI community did not take it well.

Herbert Simon called the paper "garbage." Dreyfus taught at MIT at the time and later wrote that his colleagues "dared not be seen having lunch with me." The entire building avoided him.

Then they challenged him to a chess match against a computer.

Dreyfus had never claimed to be good at chess. He had only claimed that AI chess was weak, which it was. But MIT researchers organized a public game between Dreyfus and MacHack VI in 1967. He lost. The Association for Computing Machinery newsletter ran the headline: "A Ten-Year-Old Can Beat the Machine. But the Machine Can Beat Dreyfus."

The entire field celebrated. They had not answered his argument. They had just beaten him at chess. Nobody seemed to notice the difference.

Dreyfus expanded the paper into a full book in 1972. What Computers Can't Do laid out something deeper than chess criticism.

His argument was philosophical, not technical. He said human intelligence was not symbolic manipulation. It was not rules and logic trees. It was something more fundamental that no one had cracked: the ability to understand context, to act in the world through a body, to make judgments that depended on being alive and embedded in a situation.

He called it know-how versus know-that. A doctor who can feel something is wrong in a patient before naming what it is. A chess grandmaster who sees the right move before calculating it. A person who walks into a room and understands the social dynamics in four seconds without running a single algorithm.

These were not tasks you could formalize. Not because they were mysterious. But because they were rooted in physical embodiment and years of embedded experience in the world. A machine sitting inside a server rack had none of that. It had never touched anything. It had no body. It had never been afraid or hungry or confused in the middle of a city.

The AI community kept dismissing him for 20 more years. Then quietly, things started shifting.

The symbolic AI approach he had criticized started breaking down exactly where he said it would. Language was too ambiguous. Common sense was impossibly hard to encode. Systems that worked in narrow domains failed completely the moment the real world showed up.

By the 1990s, the field had largely abandoned the approach Dreyfus had attacked. When MIT Press published a new edition in 1992 with a long introduction updating his position, historians of AI started writing sentences like "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of Dreyfus's comments."

In 2007, a journalist asked him whether he thought he had won the argument. He said: "I figure I won and it's over. They've given up."

He was right and wrong at the same time. Symbolic AI did collapse. But something else rose in its place: deep learning, trained on massive amounts of human-generated data, learning patterns from the bottom up instead of the top down. Systems that were not programmed with rules but that absorbed something about language and images and tasks from raw experience.

That is where the argument gets genuinely interesting and genuinely unresolved.

Dreyfus spent his last years thinking carefully about whether deep learning addressed his critique or just circumvented it. He had always said the problem was not intelligence as pattern recognition. He had always said the hard part was something else. Situatedness. Meaning. The ability to care about outcomes in a way that comes from having skin in the game.

A model trained on a trillion tokens of human text knows a great deal about what humans say. Whether it knows what humans mean is a different question. Whether it can act in the world the way a human acts, with a body and a history and stakes in what happens, is the question he spent 50 years trying to make people take seriously.

He died in 2017. GPT-2 was released two years later. GPT-4 was released six years after that.

The question he raised is still open. We build systems now that would have seemed miraculous in 1972. Systems that write, reason, code, argue, compose, translate, and explain. And the AI researchers at every major lab spend an enormous amount of time trying to figure out exactly what these systems are missing.

Dreyfus spent 50 years on a campus where people refused to eat lunch with him for saying that question mattered.

The man who was wrong about chess was right about almost everything else.

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@AlbertBikaj You cannot fight for a “greater cause” without knowing yourself. If the 20th century taught us anything is that this approach is a recipe for nihilism. Those who don’t know themselves bring to the cause their blind spots ie. the unknown self.

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@dysangelistes @MartinCothran The issue with ‘critical thinking’ is that there so much of the former and so little of the latter.

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@DerAchsenZeit Of course they were. That was the political horizon of the time. It’s not like they were parsing out ideological differences scholastically. It was a mixture of opportunism and youthful idealism

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@RnaudBertrand @novussubsole That actually says more about the lack of culture of individualism in China than anything else.

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@Osint613 The secretary of hair gel plays the secretary of war well. But that’s all he does, plays.

[Dissapointed Kolkhoznik @DissapointedK]

@Arberikon Mimetic rivalry at its purest