Yolin

Lifelong student - most interested in emergence, complexity, information theory and computation. constantly updating my theory of how the world works 🌎

[Yolin @nilsengu]

What’s worse is that humans are getting dumber precisely when the machines are getting smarter

[Yolin @nilsengu]

Anthropic board should do everything in its power to make sure that Amodei is never allowed to directly speak to the administration again.

[Sophia Cai @SophiaCai99]

NEW: Inside the 24-hrs before WH slapped export controls on Anthropic
- Last Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns about Fable jailbreak to Trump admin
- Friday AM, Sean Cairncross, Bessent, Susie etc. held WH call to discuss
- Then White House started reaching out to Anthropic to speak with Dario Amodei, who was at a wellness retreat.
- When Amodei was finally available past 1pm, he had three tense phone calls with a combo of ppl including Cairncross, Bessent, Lutnick, Kessler, Will Scharf, Richard Walters, and Walker Barrett.
-Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He defended the guardrails and distinguished between universal and non-universal jailbreak
- Cairncross and Bessent were unmoved and asked Amodei to take down Fable and work with the admin to fix the vulnerabilities. (A WH official said Amazon’s findings were run past the NSA and they felt they had “proof.”)
- Amodei asked for more time and info, but he made no commitments to pull the model
- Bessent told Amodei directly at one point that he was making a “bad decision”
- By Friday evening, the Trump admin imposed its export controls.
- “Export controls were a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us,” senior WH official said.

W/ @cheyennehaslett
https://t.co/0Rwny9md3p

[alex fazio @alxfazio]

«you are not doing frontier llm research are you»

[Yolin @nilsengu]

If you start to accept time as an “epistemic dimension”, you get a fundamental split in ontology of two separate realms - indexicals (instantiations) of physics and symbols (abstractions) of computation. Perception and consciousness lives in a strange loop between the two through icons.

C.S. Pierce was very close..

[Yolin @nilsengu]

I’m not a panpsychist either, at least not as yet. However, you only need to “re-present” something in beings that separate thought from perception. A panpsychist might say pure consciousness isn’t thought but awareness which precedes thought and therefore is instantiated as a form of qualia without any abstractions or representations.

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@YiMaTweets https://t.co/toQrmZllHG

[Yolin @nilsengu]

Compression is the lookback of emergence.

[Yolin @nilsengu]

https://t.co/toQrmZllHG

[Yi Ma @YiMaTweets]

For intelligence, compression is not the goal. It is a means to an end. The true goal is to gain information that helps reduce uncertainty, which is entirely measurable. For any particular data of interest, to obtain a most informative representation of its distribution (also called memory or knowledge), an intelligent system tries to learn the most effective and efficient compressing operations (say layers of a network). This is what I have been saying: We learn to compress, and we compress to learn! This is precisely the main theme of our new open book.

[Dan Roy @roydanroy]

Warning: once you learn category theory, you'll never be able or willing to talk with people who don't know category theory.

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@paraschopra All representations and thought and language are computational models of reality (abstractions) and qualia may just be the closest we get to reality itself (instantiations).

[Yolin @nilsengu]

I’m not a panpsychist either, at least not as yet. However, you only need to “re-present” something in beings that separate thought from perception. A panpsychist might say pure consciousness isn’t thought but awareness which precedes thought and therefore is instantiated as a form of qualia without any abstractions or representations.

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@paraschopra Hah I actually think that qualia is the one thing that cannot be represented in principle. It’s the thing that only exists instantiated in being and in a sense computationally irreducible

[Stephen Wolfram @stephen_wolfram]

42 years ago today I made a surprising discovery that every year has been showing us more and more about the answer to life, the universe and everything...

https://t.co/z1uA3RyxYF

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@Plinz His podcast came out two hours ago on Apple?! How is this real?

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@Plinz What????

[Yolin @nilsengu]

This is the terminally online version of Vivek vs Vance at CPAC

[Balaji @balajis]

My view is: you’re not actually mad at me, but mad at the situation. I grant that it sucks, but I didn’t cause decades of money printing and the pending sovereign debt crisis, and neither did you.

But in short: if the Mayflower was American, and leaving England to build New England was American, then leaving the dysfunctional old world to build the new is the most American thing you can do.

A longer response follows.

(1) DID THE IRISH AMERICANS BETRAY IRELAND?
First, did the Irish Americans betray Ireland by leaving for America? Why weren’t they loyal to Ireland? Why did they "cut and run"? Why didn’t they stay and fight the Irish Potato Famine?

And the Puritans...did they traduce England by not returning and fighting with the Roundheads? Were the Virginians disloyal to the other side, the Cavaliers? How about the German Americans…how come they left Europe after the Revolutions of 1848?

Point: virtually every single US ethnic group, other than the African Americans and Native Americans, “fled” some issue in the old world. War, civil war, communism, fascism, fundamentalism. The whole point of the New World was to leave behind dysfunctional, bankrupt states…often caught in the throes of endless left-vs-right conflicts.

If almost every single American is descended from someone who left a dysfunctional state, how can it be un-American to leave a dysfunctional state? Why could your ancestors leave dysfunction, why are they free men... but others can’t move, and are locked to the land?

(2) LOYAL TO BLUE OR RED AMERICANS?
Second, if someone tries being loyal to “the American people”, does that mean being loyal to the 75 million Kamala voters, the Blue Americans? Because if you’re loyal to them, you are unfortunately no longer loyal to the Red Americans.

And that’s the rub. Just as Democrats use “democracy” to mean rule by Democrats, and are then stunned that ~50% of democratic votes keep going to Republicans, Republicans keep using “American” to mean Red American, and are then always angry that ~50% of US citizens are Blue Americans.

Today, Gallup reports only 36% of Democrats are “proud to be American”. They are, however, proud to be Democrats. They’re also not posting on X, but rather on Bluesky. The digital secession, the spiritual secession of Democrats away from a “United” States of America has already happened. That’s unfortunately what polarization means.

This Blue/Red conflict is exactly the kind of left-right fight that the Puritans and Cavaliers left behind in the 1600s, and the German Americans left in the 1800s. Just like there is no Korea, only North Korea and South Korea, there is unfortunately no America any more, only Blue America and Red America. And just like the Korean situation led to a Korean diaspora, the American situation is causing an American diaspora.

(3) STAY AND FIGHT, BUT WHO OR WHAT?
Then, if someone was to stay and fight, who do you want them to fight? Perhaps you want them to fight other Americans (namely Blue Americans), in the name of being an American. Or you want them "fight" a ~$175T sovereign debt crisis, which is like fighting a volcanoa, as it's just the largest bill ever due in history, and something even Elon couldn’t put a dent in.

TLDR: you can’t “stay and fight” a sovereign debt crisis. It’s not something you can punch in the nose.

(4) SHOULD INDIAN AMERICANS STAY OR GO?
Also, in case you haven't noticed, half of MAGA is yelling that Indian tech guys should leave the country, or never come, as they'll never be true Americans. Now others are suddenly mad that Indian tech guys are taking them up on it, and leaving America. Meanwhile, far leftists have begun just shooting at tech guys.

This is just a schizo and unstable situation.

(5) LOYALTY TO IDEALS WAS LOYALTY TO AMERICA
I am loyal to capitalism, democracy, free speech, free markets, science, math, wherever they are. I am loyal to peace and trade, small-l libertarianism, privacy, nonviolence, and technological innovation.

I am also loyal to a specific enumerated group of people, the many friends, coworkers, collaborators, and customers who I’ve worked with over the years, both US citizens and non-citizens, from the Stanford and Silicon Valley of a few decades ago.

These were essentially the mainstream American ideals for decades. Millions of Americans still support them. Indeed, millions of Americans think that blood-and-soil nationalism of the kind you implicitly propound is un-American!

(6) BLOOD AND SOIL, BUT WHAT BLOOD?
Finally, and now we really get down to brass tacks: what test do you propose to determine whether someone is a true American, aside from their current paperwork? Because unlike (say) the Japanese, there is no genetic test that correlates close-to-perfectly with US passport ownership.

Therefore, any definition of who’s American *has* to be civic nationalism from a purely operational standpoint, defined at the “software” level (in terms of law) rather than the hardware level (in terms of genetics).

Yet if you try to get N different rightists to define the “is_american” function you’ll get N different definitions, with and without different minority groups. One that went viral recently is the “Grade A American = Mayflower” thing, which is sort of like wokeness in reverse, but for MAGA.

And look: loyalty means symmetry. I am loyal to you if you are loyal to me. But the way you're talking about loyalty translates to servitude. I've been polite, and engaged you in good faith, but we are strangers. Yet you are demanding gratitude and even deference (!) from me, implicitly on racial grounds, because "you didn't build that, someone else made that happen". Moreover, you are doing so by invoking "the people" in a right-coded variation of the way the Soviets invoked "the people."

I'm sorry, that doesn't fly.

Why would anyone be loyal to a MAGA faction that arbitrarily designates countless millions to be Grade B, C, and D? You can't just redefine the social contract overnight, unilaterally, with some tweets, into a retconned blood-and-soil America that the WASPs themselves shut down...and then get extremely mad when others don't buy into it.

We're just going have to renegotiate these kinds of relationships from scratch, with new opt-in communities, where everyone is a grade A citizen. If that means rebuilding New America outside America, just as New England was built outside England, so be it. The next Mayflower is boarding.

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@Noahpinion Idk seems pretty marrytocratic to me

[Yolin @nilsengu]

Remember when the word artificial meant man-made, as opposed to found in nature? Now man-made is like this sacred thing.

[Yolin @nilsengu]

“Identity is both the thing that defines you, and holds you back”

Humans are meant to be on a constant path of self-transcendence planting flag posts along the way for others to follow but the journey is indefinite

[Ruben Laukkonen @RubenLaukkonen]

If you’re into predictive processing and meditation, this paper pushes the Overton window. From the quantum formulation of the free-energy principle, we show that an agent cannot define its own boundary from within. The realization of this irreducible indeterminacy is a principled definition of awakening. Ultimately, this extends to the separability of any object in experience, formalizing emptiness and engendering a “post-dual agent”.

Any persisting agent must minimize surprise by gathering evidence for its generative model. But all evidence available to the agent arrives through its boundary with the world. To prove that this boundary really separates “self” from “world”, the agent would need to step outside the boundary and measure the whole self-world relation. A finite agent cannot do this, as a scissor can't cut itself.

So the self-world boundary can be useful, predictive, and necessary for action, but it can never be known as an ontological fact from within. Meditation, on this view, progressively reveals the self-world split as a modelling prior rather than a structural feature of reality. This naturally shifts the weighting of self (inside boundary) and other (outside boundary), since both are seen to be inferences rather than grounded realities by virtue of an indefinable boundary. A more even-handed and compassionate orientation can arise.

A highly principled finger pointing at the moon!

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@PerellClips Yes, time is an epistemic dimension

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@dwarkesh_sp @SMcfarnell Highly recommend @JimRuttShow and opening up a new portal to the liminal web crowd for your audience. Not everyone will get the connection with complexity right away but those who do will be delighted

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@sporadica South Bay tanks, peninsula stays flat, SF and Marin moon

[Yolin @nilsengu]

@antoniogm @OpenAI Join already