If he were in this thread, I think he'd warn us to avoid nonfree LLMs and not to let LLMs lull us into being comfortable while we still lack software freedom.
> people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society
That may be broadly true, but it's descriptive, not prescriptive.
There are many relatively poor people (with physical needs met, but not always) who are far happier than most of the top 1%. The secret is character -- things like contentment, thankfulness, and showing faithful love to family and people in general.
It's an interesting metaphor, but the math is not directly applicable to software engineering, because the shape of the problem (not to mention the terms) doesn't translate.
The main problem is that shannon-nyquist is concerned with discrete representation of a continuous/analog signal. But TA is applying it backwards: software is discrete and human understanding is analog. So human "sampling" of software is not something an A->D theory can speak to.
I read this mostly as a metaphor pointing at social systems and dynamics. You cannot have /informed/ decision making below a certain level of polling. What do humans do when /informed/ decision making is off the table? They posture, predict, brag and brawl. I’ll go sociological and historical for a second: a thing like ordered religion is an institutional solution for stability when the (scientific) polling rate is too high.
That’s what we see in corporations. The YOLO one-shot bros have taken over Wall Street and all firms are expected to follow in the talk of the end of humans in corporate processes. OP gives a nice hint about why we are back to pre-scientific times in corporations.
AI, us humans or any "thinking" subject is drumroll subjective. Unless you are an all-knowing god, there is no objectivity. This means that AI/humans have to be heuristical in their approach to tackle complex reality and you can see traces of this everywhere, be it software or eg. messy tax law or regulations.
IMO, "scientific times" are a noble ideal as a guideline to circle back and question previous assumptions (falsification) but we have never really been in such a time. But you are right, the finance/corporate bros are further away from it then ever.
I dont know if AI can help us rectifying past mistakes or whether we humans reject deep systemic criticism from it and call it woke AI.
I'm not sure that's right. The "changes in tech" can be regarded as almost continuous (in the same way as a gas is made up of discrete particles, but can still be treated as a continuous medium because there are so many particles).
And human understanding of tech is discrete - nobody understands "software", say. They understand a number of individual features of individual languages, and some of the ways those features work together.
That doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good analogy. But I can kind of see it in, say, the new versions of C++. Many people can't or don't learn all the implications of all the changes before the next version comes out.
There's a modern macOS port of Lemmings here I've been playing for a few weeks (and several other classic 68k Macintosh game ports): https://roytinker.com/68k-ports/
> And then here comes Erik Veland with a port of... well, all of them. The original game. The semi-sequel games. The three different holiday games. Preview support for the two full sequels. And six thousand fan levels.
> What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?
That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.
But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.
> But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus
Right, but that's the problem with it. It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.
Betting that Pascal's god exists isn't the safe choice that the wager makes it out to be, because it's equally possible that some other god exists (or just some other version of the Abrahamic god, say Allah or the pre-messiah god of Israel) and your faith in Jesus is just going to piss him off.
Believe in Jesus all you want, but Pascal's Wager is a pretty terrible reason to do so.
Edit to add: Your description is also not even the only possible New Testament god. Some (myself included) would argue that that particular image of god was painted more by Paul than by Jesus.
> It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.
I don't think so. It isn't concerned with giving any description or shape to the negative case, just an invitation to consider a particular positive case.
There are positive cases for other gospels and worldviews... there's nothing wrong with invitations to engage with one or another.
As science has shown, the truth is best discerned by considering each theory individually (and continually) against evidence. Not "dark matter sounds cool, I think that's true, not MOND" but rather considering each individually for internal consistency and against observation and predictiveness.
"It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." --Richard Feynman
Sure, you can consider the issue in isolation: If you accept the axiom that there is either no god or the Pauline Christian god, then Pascal's wager makes sense (assuming that that god doesn't care about sincerity, which is certainly not my reading of the gospels, but that's a different issue).
If you want to do a fun thought experiment, you might accept that axiom.
If you genuinely believe that an eternal future of unbearable torture hinges on your choice, you might want to cover your philosophical bases a bit more thoroughly.
That may be true, but embodied human life and history provides a base set of axioms by which to evaluate further axioms -- starting with the 5 senses.
So yeah, Christianity has some axioms, but it doesn't ask people to merely accept them on faith; that's a mischaracterization. The invitation is to consider (a) how good the evidence really is for your current worldview, and then (b) how good is the evidence for Christianity's truth claims.
Pascal goes one further and suggests considering what you have to gain and lose either way -- which may have been helpful for some when the alternative was mere atheism or unbelief in Christianity, but I disagree that it's helpful in all cases. People coming from Islam have a tremendous amount to lose, including their family, community, livelihood, reputation, and the risk of being condemned eternally by Allah for committing shirk in embracing Christianity, if Islam is true.
I think a better question to ask, whatever someone's background, is "do you want to know the truth, even if it turns out you don't believe it now, and are you willing to follow it no matter what the cost?"
> I think a better question to ask, whatever someone's background, is "do you want to know the truth, even if it turns out you don't believe it now, and are you willing to follow it no matter what the cost?"
I don't understand. Is it a rhetorical statement from your part?
How can you know that what you are being told is the truth? If it can be proven, then there is no need to be told or to doubt it. If it can't be proven (or at least observed), then by definition, it is a belief, not a truth.
Also why would you agree to learn the truth if you're not going to believe it?
I'm just hoping to clarify how I think Christian evangelism (or indeed any sharing of a worldview) is best received -- a desire to know and follow the truth, because it's the truth, regardless of consequences.
> If it can't be proven (or at least observed), then by definition, it is a belief, not a truth.
If you believe Socrates and Alexander the Great existed, do you say those are "truths"?
The evidence for those people is, relatively speaking, scant compared to the evidence for Jesus - his recorded words, death, and resurrection.
Historical events aren't something one can "prove" in any scientific or mathematical sense. We believe what we believe about history based on strong consilience in informed observation of artifacts. By design, Christianity supplies just 1 empirical foundation upon which everything else is built: the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
Are you saying the case for Scientology can't fail when considering its internal consistency and correspondence to reality?
I would think its positive case isn't that strong... it's more like an attack chain with an arbitrary payload (including money extraction) for minds with certain vulnerabilities than a coherent set of truth claims (let alone truth claims with at least some evidence in favor).
I'm not sure what you mean by "attested" there, it's doing a lot of work.
Certainly there are specific propositions that someone will or has attested to that a god exists that will punish you for believing in the Christian god.
Sure, if you insist there is more reason to suspect the existence of the Christian god than other gods, then your decision is already made for you; it was not my understanding that Pascal's wager was based on that assumption, but I guess it was implicitly, sure, while explicitly claiming to be based on a clean slate of assumptions. Which makes it even sillier.
Pascal's wager was not at all anchored to any specific attestations, you are taking his wager and reinterpreting it to give it some kind of legitimacy that it never originally held. The entire point of the wager was to justify belief in the absence of sufficient evidence, by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost. If your now arguing that Christianity is more credible because of historical evidence, so be it and stick to it but you've abandoned Pascal's wager and moved on to an entirely different argument.
> by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost
The supposed asymmetry only holds in a framework that assumes the Christian God as the only possibility. The point is that it's possible for there to be a god that isn't Yahweh, and that god might sentence you to eternal torment for believing in Yahweh, so in fact believing in Yahweh can result in infinite cost, destroying the value of the wager.
>The asymmetry holds whenever the other possibilities don't introduce an opposing infinite penalty for belief.
Or in a stronger argument. It only works when you're the only possible infinity that exists with the set of possible requirements. The moment another infinity exists that has even a single conflicting requirement then it falls apart.
Using language we can create infinite conflicting infinities which makes Pascals wager a weak argument in a generalized set.
Now, if someone vibe coded up Roko's basalisk into a real entity that was copying humans and torturing them for eternity that's a different story, at least until someone made a second incompatible basalisk.
I agree Pascal's wager is generally weak. But I think the strongest reason it's weak is because people in other worldviews, particularly Islam, have a tremendous amount to lose if they convert to Christianity but it turns out Islam is true.
According to MOND theorists, a dwarf galaxy like DF9 doesn't prove dark matter, since it's sitting in the gravitational field of a big neighboring galaxy (NGC 1052) and thus its boost is suppressed. They call this the "external field effect".
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