Micah Latty

Against reductionism

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@Benthamsbulldog Assuming there's nothing prophetic about that passage (which there very well might not be in a "futuretelling" sense), do you think the original author was saying that *he* was (literally) a worm and not a man?

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

Bentham’s essays (from my limited exposure) appear to be made up of paragraphs much like this, repeated ad infinitum, which is why they are hard to take particularly seriously

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

No, we converted sand into pseudointelligence

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Turns out alchemical dreams were real. We converted sand into superintelligence. Who cares about gold… We transmuted the most ordinary into the most extraordinary.

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@s_r_tarnmoor I just tried this with Opus 5.5 out of curiosity and the results are not good

taking an excerpt more or less at random:

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@pymandersghost Got some examples? (Legitimately curious about how good it can get at this point and whether I should be working on optimizing it)

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

Milwaukee brewers learn to throw to first challenge

[Pymander's ghost @pymandersghost]

The sole and ultimate test of our age is the cultivation of attention. This little is all that is asked of us, the final and shrivelled man—but how heavy it is.

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@ariyaariIL Maybe the one whose name is known worldwide should be given special attention

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@WASPmexicano the myth of martyrdom the canonical case of this in my mind

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

Apple app review process seems increasingly kafkaesque

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@BMcGrewvy This is certainly true of software development, at least in the short term. I think the long term effects on ability to problem-solve/think creatively are hard to price in though

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

Pseudointelligence, pseudosensicality, pseudosignificance.

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

STOP calling it artificial intelligence. START calling it pseudointelligence.

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@UntoldFortune But this is much less compelling imo than true vestigial organs or, say, junk genes would be.

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@UntoldFortune Evolutionary biologists typically just argue that if something has some *apparent* primary usage that it’s not being used for (e.g., running birds’ wings, used for balance instead of flight) it counts as vestigial and as evidence against design/purposiveness.

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@Benthamsbulldog @BMcGrewvy @kvallier We don’t actually know that if you have the physical system you get consciousness—and we definitely don’t know that without the physical system you *don’t* get consciousness.

[Jill Filipovic @JillFilipovic]

Why should she live in a nicer house than anyone else? Eat healthier food than anyone else? If her child gets cancer, why should she advocate for her child get better healthcare than anyone else? Progressives and liberals rightly push for a society that takes care of everyone’s children. But when you bring a child into the world, you create specific obligations to *that child.* What it means to serve that child well is complex and I think you could make the case that NHJ believed she was doing that. But this idea it is a moral wrong for parents to prioritize their own child is one of those things cults do to break your sanity and basic humanity, and it is not going to get you very far politically. It’s also race-to-the-bottom thinking instead of an effort to bring everyone else up.

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

@shagbark_hick In my admittedly limited experience, Catholics are much more likely to emphasize their allegiance to something other than/in addition to Christ than these various types of Protestants you’ve listed here, denominational naming aside

[Micah Latty @micahlatty]

Harry Potter and the Manuals of Scholasticism