Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.

Funny! So we can say “‘kaput’ is(t) kaputt.”

Then null will be returned, as the value of b.

“Monad” is a shorter term though. “Structured data type” reads almost as bulky as “Curve of constant normal intersection points”.

Thanks again, though just for the record, that didn’t help either. It’s alright, I’m used to the Thunderbird lags. Let’s stop here :)

Then let me spell it out: If ChatGPT convinces a child to wash their hands with self-made bleach, be sure to expect lawsuits and a shit storm coming for OpenAI.

If that occurs, but no liability can be found on the side of ChatGPT, be sure to expect petitions and a shit storm coming for legislators.

We generally expect individuals and companies to behave in society with peace and safety in mind, including strangers and minors.

Liabilities and regulations exist for these reasons.

Do car manufacturers get in trouble when someone runs somebody over?

Yes, if it can be shown the accident was partially caused by the manufacturer’s neglect. If a safety measure was not in place or did not work properly. Or if it happens suspiciously more often with models from this brand. Apart from solid legal trouble, they can get into PR trouble if many people start to think that way, no matter if it’s true.

If it has the information, why not?

Naive altruistic reply: To prevent harm.

Cynic reply: To prevent liabilities.

If the restaurant refuses to put your fries into your coffee, because that’s not on the menu, then that’s their call. Can be for many reasons, but it’s literally their business, not yours.

If we replace fries with fuse, and coffee with gun powder, I hope there are more regulations in place. What they sell and to whom and in which form affects more people than just buyer and seller.

Although I find it pretty surprising corporations self-regulate faster than lawmakers can say ‘AI’ in this case. That’s odd.

I’m from your camp but noticed I used ChatGPT and the like less and less over the past months. I feel they became less and less useful and more generic. In Februar or March, they were my go to tools for many tasks. I reverted back to old-fashioned search engines and other methods, because it just became too tedious to dance around the ethics landmines, to ignore the verbose disclaimers, to convince the model my request is a legit use case. Also the error ratio went up by a lot. It may be a tame lapdog, but it also lacks bite now.

Interesting, may I ask you a question regarding uncensored local / censored hosted LLMs in comparison?

There is this idea censorship is required to some degree to generate more useful output. In a sense, we somehow have to tell the model which output we appreciate and which we don’t, so that it can develop a bias to produce more of the appreciated stuff.

In this sense, an uncensored model would be no better than a million monkeys on typewriters. Do we differentiate between technically necessary bias, and political agenda, is that possible? Do uncensored models produce more nonsense?

The obvious solution is to abandon your project not too late; leave on a high note.

I also found it very useful to document every step of my setup procedures, right after I figured out what works. At least the respective CL.

However, I think people should experiment with what I call “open source universes”, which is basically creating shared universes that are open source. Maybe even make some open source RPG system with it too, so we could have an open source alternative to the likes of D&D, WH40k, etc. At one point I tried to make something like this, but the issue was that it was based on an old webcomic idea of mine, which I started working on when I had totally different views on many things. Might revisit it with different ideas later on.

Haven’t played any of those, but I think they (and more) exist for a long time already: https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems

They’re used to a decade or longer on Twitter and Facebook. So any new and improved protocol would split the user base and so struggle to gain traction.

Could that be an inherent issue, no matter how you approach it? The issue might be that any social IT system which gains traction is already 10 years outdated. If true, it would mean we could start making something new now, which might be popular in 10 years, but then unable to effectively deal with whatever people deem essential in 10 years.

Yes, my favorite comment:

pulls out the power cord for the monitor

Job done!

followed by:

Attacker must have had 5 people on the keyboard.

I appreciated the advice! Found the setting, which was indeed low. Raised it to 200 MB and to require manual confirmation. Today I was asked if I want to compress. The sad part is, the freezes continued in between. So this was not the cause, but thank you still.

We also briefly discussed this in Games Master, if only to discover how wide and diverse the range of perspectives are. I feel it misrepresents the subject to talk about a “literal definition”, and to explicitly include “win conditions”. Because there are multiple attempts of a definition, and many do not include win conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game

One such example definition:

“To play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity.” (Bernard Suits)[14]

You seem to refer to Chris Crawford’s definition, which is in part:

If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.

Explicitly calling SimCity “not a game” is purely academic talk, detached from reality. For everyone else, SimCity is clearly a game. If you want to buy it, you look for games, not toys. I feel definitions are questionable which define something to be not what everybody thinks it is.

Was Minecraft not a game until it included “The End”? I loved playing Minecraft, but I rarely cared about The End, even after it was included. When a player cannot tell the difference between a version of a game which includes a win condition, and a version which does not, how can the existence of that condition be a decisive factor?

If we widen the scope to include any game, not just video games, we can also have a look at popular children’s games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Association. My theater group loves to play win-free games as a warmup practice.

From my point of view, win conditions are a common characteristic of games, but not necessary or defining. Coming up with a short definition which captures all games and excludes all non-games is surprisingly hard.

Headline:

TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED TO MONKEYS AFTER GETTING NEURALINK IMPLANTS, ACCORDING TO VETERINARY RECORDS

What are these terrible things?

Up to a dozen monkeys suffered grisly fates after receiving a Neuralink implant, including brain swelling and partial paralysis.

First is the case of the monkey “Animal 20.” In December 2019, an internal part of the brain implant being inserted into the primate “broke off” during surgery. Later that night, the monkey scratched at the implant site, drawing blood, and yanked on the implant, partially dislodging it. Follow-up surgery discovered that the wound was infected, but that the placement of the implant prevented treatment. The monkey was euthanized the next month.

Before that, a female monkey designated “Animal 15” began to press her head against the ground after receiving the brain implant, pick at the site until it bled, and eventually lost coordination, shivering when personnel entered the room. Scientists discovered she had brain bleeding, and in March 2019, she too was euthanized.

The following year, a primate called “Animal 22” was put down in March 2020 after its brain implant became so loose that the screws attaching it to the skull “could easily be lifted out,” according to a necropsy report.

“The failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection,” the necropsy states.

As Wired notes, that statement alone seemingly contradicts Musk’s claims that no monkeys directly died from Neuralink brain implants.

And so would the account of an ex-Neuralink employee, who told Wired that Musk’s claims that the monkeys were already terminally ill are “ridiculous,” even a “straight-up fabrication.”

“We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” the ex-employee said.

The testimony of an anonymous scientist conducting research at CNPRC seems to corroborate the ex-employee’s allegations.

“These are pretty young monkeys,” they told the magazine. “It’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason.”

Started smoking cigarettes.

As per the article, it goes like this:

1. AI is trained on publicly available data
2. AI does not credit or compensate original authors
3. People don’t like their work being used without
4. People share less publicly
5. Public spaces desert

And simultaneously, AI content of poor quality drowns what is left.

In terms of arguments, have you heard about control / alignment problem or x-risk?