Donald Mitchell

The Soviet Exploration of Venus, Bossart: America's Forgotten Rocket Scientist. Bell Labs, Princeton University, Microsoft Research.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

Some links:
Rumble: https://t.co/8CnjhjzoxZ
Github: https://t.co/IxIkfH6I0m
Venus: https://t.co/g0UWTuZ0Ew
Tesla: https://t.co/7B3dumBi4M
Books: https://t.co/7ck2qHE2Bg
Blog: https://t.co/JaCE4itJ7W

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@Ne_pas_couvrir David Brin and Michel Foucault have argued for total surveillance and transparency. Zamyatin's dystopian novel _We_ criticized it and got into trouble with the Soviets.

Harvard Law Tech pissed on Brin's work from a great height:

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

The article: https://t.co/elz5LgI8pX

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

David Brin and David Shenk wrote about the issues of transparency and data overload. Both are naive about how the elite exercise power: Surveillance and censorship only disempower the masses and empower the rich.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@StefanMolyneux What new kind of social system will give people modern technology and prosperity but also true freedom as you imagine it?

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

Edison interview questions (I noticed Google has trouble finding them):
https://t.co/f2pbkJNeTa

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

Good interview with @PalmerLuckey. There is something about smart home-schooled people. I've seen examples, including Charlie Bossart, the rocket scientist I wrote about., The Edison interview questions touch on this too, clearly designed to detect autodidacts.

https://t.co/w5HUxirXYd

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@mandylu I though you meant we don't know how reasoning seems to emerge from just optimizing text prediction. Yes?
Maybe in very high dimensions, optimization takes you there -- reasoning is the most efficient compression/ prediction algorithm.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@mandylu There are a lot of mysteries, even defining "intelligence" or "consciousness" is problematic. There are some way-out ideas that human consciousness is programming that emerged recently - Julian Jaynes theory of the bicameral mind. Who knows.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@douglassmackey Cronkite always appeared objective, unbiased and credible. It was a step down with every replacement after him.
I mean, they were still lying to us about some things, but with a lot more class.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@Peter_Nimitz

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@BBCWorld What was it the pirate said to Alexander the Great?

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@WallStreetApes Even established peer-review systems fail. Soros's theory of general reflexivity says the best you can do is design a system that converges toward truth instead of diverging and becoming delusional.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@Ne_pas_couvrir @cremieuxrecueil They can make an egg from a male stem cell, it's been done with lab animals. But you cannot make a sperm cell from female stem cells; you need the Y chromosome.

So Ironically, two men can conceive a child, but two women cannot.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@axios Unlike natural intelligence.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@WendyDa41294479 @JonathanTurley We grew up watching Walter Cronkite. I watched CBS news until the era of Scott Pelley. I think MSM became more strident and heavy handed as it began to compete with social media.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@jenaj3 @JonathanTurley True. I think the 50+ crowd are still watching news on TV/Cable, so they are getting that jingoistic official narrative.
Intellectuals and techies also tend to be very brainwashed, because they seek out news media and propaganda -- something Shirer observed in 1930s Germany.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@AsteroidEnergy Yes, a few of them were kept in the USSR for several more years so their knowledge would become obsolete.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

He makes some of the points I've made, that Nazi super science is a myth.

The V-2 was technically interesting, but not something the US or Britain could not have built had they made the bad decision to pour resources into a nearly useless weapon.

When the Soviet Union put Sputnik into orbit, a popular comment was "their German scientists were better than our German scientists", but that was really an urban myth.

In the USA, Werner von Braun spent years developing Redstone, which ended up being considerably less powerful than contemporary Russian rockets like the R-5.

By the time you reached the ICBMs, the American Atlas and the Soviet R-7, there was almost no recognizable German design elements. By then, the Russians had deported all their German V-2 engineers, and the Atlas was built by Convair aircraft company under the leadership of Charlie Bossart from Belgium.

https://t.co/dSOnjb5Zj6

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@AsteroidEnergy Exactly. They were very methodical, because they were starting from scratch. First they refurbished and launched some V-2s. Then they built R-1, more or less an exact copy of the V-2. The point was to learn and build infrastructure. Chertok's books describe this well.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

Anthropic has put out some thought pieces about AI safety and ethics, such as the Claude Constitution.

But this alone cannot guard against the danger of a totalitarian AI surveillance state. The danger does not come from the AI, it comes from corruption and psychopathy in the halls of power. The danger is the political system going wrong.