Kip Werking

Philosopher trying to navigate the Gentle Singularity

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by paternalism."

Love and Forgiveness 2028

[⚡️NEVERDOOMPRO⚡️ @NEVERDOOMPRO]

What a great day to be alive.
NEVER DOOM.

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

@elshayib_ I doubt that.

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

https://t.co/fcIjkH8CFN

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

https://t.co/wH2yMr5TD6

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

@letterboxd @popcomes Interstellar
Risky Business
The Social Netwotk
Fight Club
Halloween

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

@anabology @aubreydegrey

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

https://t.co/fKuyJRBVF3

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

In today's episode of Grok Says the Darnedest Things, you can give Grok this prompt:

"Discussions of the free will debate and the moral realism debate rarely intersect. However, one can reason roughly as follows:

A. A rational agent is less concerned with control over decisions than with decisions being correct.

B. If moral realism is true, then decisions can be correct, regardless of whether they were decided with a free will (libertarian or otherwise), by God, an alien, a simulation designer, or random chance.

C. If moral realism is true, then plausibly most people already mostly track moral truths most of the time. Cross-culturally, most people converge on valuing love, peace, heroism, and beauty, and disdaining pain, selfishness, ugliness, suffering, and so on. This convergence is not decisive evidence of moral truth, and moral realism does not entail that popular values are correct. But if moral realism is true, it would be striking if this broad convergence were wholly divorced and disconnected from true morality rather than at least partly truth-tracking.

In view of the above, please discuss the ability of moral realism to support a compatibilist solution to the free will debate."

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

In today's episode of Grok Says the Darnedest Things, you can give Grok this prompt:

"Consider two phenomena:

Phenomenon 1: An interface simulation, broadly construed, posits a distinction between an agent and the world the agent experiences. The Matrix provides one familiar example, but the hypothesis need not involve a biological brain, conventional computer simulation, or any particular external substrate. The relevant feature is simply that the agent is not wholly endogenous to the experienced world, but interfaces with it from some causally or ontologically distinct level, such that at least some determinants of the agent's behavior need not be exhausted by the experienced world's causal state.

Phenomenon 2: Humans have a powerful and persistent intuition of libertarian agency. Across ordinary life, philosophy, and much of intellectual history, people have tended to experience themselves not merely as physical processes unfolding alongside other physical processes, but as genuine sources of choices—as though there is an important causal distinction between an agent and otherwise impersonal events in the external world, and as though their choices are not fixed by the state of that world. This intuition may, of course, be a cognitive artifact produced by evolution, introspective limitations, self-modeling, counterfactual planning, or other ordinary mechanisms.

Note on interpretation: The "leeway" component of this intuition should be read as an intuition that the agent's choices are not determined by the experienced world, not as a commitment to indeterminism at every level of reality. That intuition would be present both if indeterminism obtains at the fundamental level and if the agent operates from a level whose dynamics or inputs are partly decoupled from in-world physics, even where that higher level is itself deterministic. The evidence under consideration is the intuition as experienced, which does not discriminate between these; it should not be construed as requiring that libertarians be correct about indeterminism at every layer.

Does Phenomenon 2 nevertheless constitute weak Bayesian evidence for Phenomenon 1?

More precisely, is the widespread and persistent phenomenology of agent/world causal asymmetry, including the felt underdetermination of choice by the experienced world, at least somewhat more expected if agents actually interface with the experienced world from another level than if they are wholly endogenous to it? Some interface architectures appear to provide a relatively direct structural explanation for why an agent might experience its own agency as categorically different from the causal behavior of ordinary objects, and for why its choices might seem not to be fixed by in-world causes. Even if strong naturalistic explanations of this phenomenology exist, would an actual agent/world causal boundary make the phenomenology somewhat less coincidental?

Please evaluate this argument critically rather than assuming it succeeds. Distinguish the evidential significance of the intuition of libertarian agency from evidence that libertarian free will is actually true; consider the strongest naturalistic explanations of the intuition; avoid double-counting related phenomena; and discuss whether an interface might conceivably "leak" structural information about its architecture phenomenologically without leaking explicit or propositional information about an external reality. In other words, could an agent/world boundary leave a trace in how agency feels even if the agent receives no explicit information that another level exists?

Finally, frame the issue explicitly in Bayesian terms, including the likelihood ratio (P(E|H)/P(E|\neg H)). If reasonable, provide a rough numerical range for the Bayes factor and illustrate how it would change several plausible prior probabilities. Treat any numerical estimates as subjective calibration rather than empirically established quantities.

Second, if Phenomenon 2 provides weak Bayesian support for Phenomenon 1, then briefly and playfully discuss whether Phenomenon 2 might have been deliberately configured, at least in part, as a clue to the plausibility of Phenomenon 1."

[⚡️NEVERDOOMPRO⚡️ @NEVERDOOMPRO]

Content in = content out. If you feed yourself doomerism and defeatist slop all day, don't be surprised when you lose. If you feed the mind heroic and positive content, you WILL win. Stay the course.
NEVER DOOM.

[Human Progress @HumanProgress]

You may have heard that money stops making people happier once they earn about $75,000 a year.

That famous finding has not held up particularly well. A 2021 study that sampled people’s moods in real time found no such ceiling. Then, in an adversarial collaboration, researchers on both sides of the debate reanalyzed the evidence together.

Their conclusion: happiness does plateau for the least-happy fifth of people, whose problems often can’t be solved with money. But for the other four-fifths, well-being keeps rising with income—and rises fastest among the happiest.

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

https://t.co/hOZqvffcvT

[Dr Singularity @Dr_Singularity]

humanoids progress
2025 vs 2026

[N'Golo⚡Wizard.Talk @NgoloTesla]

We can engineer this. We will scale the key parameters by many magnitudes. Beauty is voltaic.

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

Do you mean:

A. 400-500k context is some sort of hard limitation of LLMs despite any future advances in resources or compute size?
B. 400-500k is a practical limit for current LLMs, but advances in resources should slowly allow essentially the same LLM algorithm to work well with 1M windows and beyond?

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

@LIVEpositivity Play with a spirit of endless, surprising, irrational compassion, not abandonment. They'll figure it out.

[Kip Werking @KipWerking]

List of similarities between Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan:

• Both London-based filmmakers working primarily in American/Hollywood cinema.

• Nolan's first feature appeared in 1998; Kubrick was reported dead in 1999.

• Both began with small, black-and-white crime/noir films.

• Both became frequently ranked among the defining major directors of their generations.

• Both primarily worked with Warner Bros.

• Both achieved unusual creative control while making enormous studio films.

• Both are famous for secrecy surrounding scripts, plots, and productions.

• Both are associated with cerebral, cold, highly precise filmmaking that rewards repeat viewing.

• Both repeatedly explored war and its psychological consequences.

• Both made major films about nuclear weapons and civilization-scale destruction.

• Both made giant sword-and-sandal epics.

• Both made films based on Homer's The Odyssey.

• Both made films about an epic space journey with rotating spacecraft, mysterious geometric structures, talking AI, video messages with children, extreme time effects, and a surreal room with an elderly protagonist in bed at the journey's end.

• Both built enormous rotating hamster wheel practical set pieces (2001 / Inception).

• Both managed the creation of a print of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

• Both filmed at Mentmore Towers, the famous English mansion, for a respective movie discussing masks, hidden identities, and a secret society.

• Both had longtime production partners from their wives' side of the family.

• Both worked with Hans Zimmer.

• Both developed significant connections to NASA.

• Both incorporated secret codes and passwords into their films.

• Both are dog lovers.