John David Pressman's Tweets - November 2022

@s_r_constantin @vgr Boomers: You're telling me high effort authoritative sources are malign?
Gen-X: You're telling me cable TV is malign?
Millennial: You're telling me viral news is malign?
Gen Z:

@s_r_constantin @vgr the labor theory of epistemology

@s_r_constantin @vgr The fact there can be credentialed experts who write huge papers full of useless/misinfo didn't clue you into this? I simply refuse to believe you didn't notice the sea of cruft you wade through during lit review took effort.

Many of the posts on your timeline right now are from people who are trashing Twitter on their way out and if you want to stay on the platform you should unfollow them so they don't succeed in ruining your experience.

I would like to register my prediction now that if Twitter goes nothing comparable will replace it in the same way that nothing really replaced Tumblr. x.com/jd_pressman/st…

@zetalyrae greaterwrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oH…

@baroquespiral IMO we need to map the latent space of art not just sample from it. I keep obnoxiously bringing it up to anyone who will listen because I think a semi-solution to this problem was recently invented and everyone is sleeping on it:

rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/

@AhmedMSamara @tszzl Are you telling me this has changed?

youtube.com/watch?v=Wl959Q…

@dystopiabreaker I continue to be shocked that nobody has modified a Mastodon or Pleroma instance to take its authentication from PGP-signed (or some other asymmetric crypto mechanism) messages.

@dystopiabreaker You could literally just keep the protocol and change the authentication so that it comes from a users crypto keys instead of the instance.

@Rumblesteltskin @dystopiabreaker Yeah that's the thing, this wouldn't even involve a blockchain, it's good old fashioned 90's web of trust stuff. You could have a mobile app to let you do low-trust signing of keys from people you meet, then bootstrap from a low trust network to a high trust network.

@Rumblesteltskin @dystopiabreaker This is the key flaw in PGP web of trust imo, that it starts with the wrong model. By now I think it should be obvious to anyone who is even vaguely familiar with how contemporary social networks work that high trust networks are bootstrapped from low trust networks.

@Rumblesteltskin @dystopiabreaker So the emphasis should be on figuring out a signing scheme that is as low friction as possible and provides nonzero increased trust over baseline. e.g. We meet and I tap your phone with NFC to sign your key.

@Rumblesteltskin @dystopiabreaker I still think possibly the optimal way to go from low trust to high trust is to send cryptocurrency back and forth, since this is a costly signal of both personal trust and unpwned hardware. Any group of people that credibly signal they trust each other with XXX dollars has

@Rumblesteltskin @dystopiabreaker a HUGE networking advantage.

Wrote a post about ontology translation:

greaterwrong.com/posts/HusJpx9m…

This is how it feels from the inside to have overindexed on things that share the same absent virtues. x.com/TheZvi/status/…

🌞The Cycle🌛
Virtue ethicists tame problems to create good times
Deontologists hide the original problems with systems
Utilitarians exploit the systems until hidden downside risks create bad times
Bad times make people too busy working to think harder than virtue ethics

@eigenrobot What if the consequentialist ethics are a symptom not a cause?
x.com/jd_pressman/st…

Prompt: coinage minted with Elon Musk's face https://t.co/Mb886G2f1f

"According to popular legends, when you get to the eye of a hurricane things slow down. Well I'm sitting here in the middle of a storm, and my watch keeps going faster. I figure either someone's been lying to me, or my watch is broken."

newgrounds.com/audio/listen/2…

If wireheading is always the global maxima you can always locate the reward function in the environment by pointing at it. https://t.co/XTgliGnH1I

greaterwrong.com/posts/jP9cKxqw…

@quotidiania - Bad Aesthetics
- Sense of superiority about the bad aesthetics
- Physically strong people generally don't go around physically dominating everyone all the time (because it's illegal, tbh), intellectually strong people aren't so polite

Basically this:

youtube.com/watch?v=to_jtt…

@quotidiania I'm very happy you've lived a life that let you unread what I just said about physical strength and replace it with something else:

Jocks do not normally go around choking people to remind them they could end their life at any moment. Nerds often do the psychological equivalent.

@quotidiania I think the most helpful crux then would be that ordinary people parse a loss of status as close to death and are going to have a more visceral reaction to the ways nerds exercise their power even if that's unfair. Especially when they have alien nerd values/aesthetics.

@robkhenderson Interestingly enough this is partially a self reinforcing effect. Most biographers can't write about the subjects childhood because neither they or their family talked about it, and they don't talk about it because it's not normalized (e.g. through books and media) to do so.

In case anyone else was wondering about this Re: SBF's stimulant abuse t.co/kmuJHSRZIN

@KelseyTuoc Alright I forgive you for the early COVID coverage. Incredible journalism, Pulitzer Prize worthy.

Little Domino:
SBF reads about this thing called "earn to give"

Big Domino:
The United States launches a full scale invasion of the Bahamas.

I wonder if you can detect Twitter induced psychosis early using deep learning and track its progress.

@oldtalesNFT @DanielTetsuyama These are beautiful, who's the artist?

@oldtalesNFT @DanielTetsuyama I saw the mint has been paused, does Scott Collins take commissions?

@oldtalesNFT @DanielTetsuyama Touching up an existing woodcut-style image. I wanted to use this AI output as the logo for The Ark, a project to take the visual historical record in Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, etc and cryptographically sign + timestamp it to protect it from future forgery. https://t.co/ElE6KMEwFW

@oldtalesNFT @DanielTetsuyama The idea is that because many institutions are going to be downloading multimodal datasets (ones with text-image pairs), if you can turn archives into a multimodal dataset and prove its authenticity with math you get a massively backed up comprehensive record of human culture.

@oldtalesNFT @DanielTetsuyama Basically it's The Pile but with images, focusing on royalty free and historical media to bring together the interests of people who want to train AI models (e.g. Stable Diffusion) and people who want to preserve history.

pile.eleuther.ai

@oldtalesNFT @DanielTetsuyama So you know, the overlap between people who work digitally and people who can draw the ferryman with the books in a plausible woodcut style probably isn't large and I was curious if Mr. Collins would be interested in being paid to make the logo starting from that canvas.

SimulacraBot is back! Generate images and rate images made by others using #stablediffusion to make a public domain dataset of human aesthetic preferences. Join on Discord using the invite below:

discord.gg/FeuckC3x

Prompt: a landscape painting of a grecian village at the dawn of time

(SimulacraBot [Method #13]) https://t.co/Ng3NLBYCOr

@xiombarg This was in fact used during the Stable Diffusion training:

github.com/christophschuh…

@alexandrosM @mattparlmer You would be very interested in the work of @PTetlock. In particular his book Superforecasting if you've never read it and don't know what a Brier Score is.

@alexandrosM @mattparlmer @PTetlock All I remember is that Tetlock ran a forecasting study I dropped out of after the first week or so because I realized the way I was modeling COVID was wrong and I no longer had alpha.

@alexandrosM @mattparlmer @PTetlock Tried to find it for you just now but the application form expired. @PTetlock Can we get an update on this?

Working AI techniques are now enduringly recognized as AI. On some silent day McCarthy's famous witticism passed from the discourse unnoticed. https://t.co/KBTfP0UkD9

@ArthurB horror fantasy illustration of a pilgrim being torn to shreds by a flock of angry turkeys https://t.co/9m1GUuoWO2

@ESYudkowsky x.com/jd_pressman/st…

Prompt: a swarm of probes constructing a dyson sphere in the sol system, national geographic, nasa, documentary footage

(SimulacraBot [Method #14, Stable Diffusion v2]) https://t.co/utqugryXMC

Prompt: Donald Trump sitting at an 80's CRT DEC VT100 terminal

(SimulacraBot [Method #14, Stable Diffusion v2]) https://t.co/OF2D8FbUIz

Previous attempt: x.com/jd_pressman/st…

Prompt: quokka in a spacesuit scifi illustration, 4k commission trending on artstation

(SimulacraBot [Method #14, Stable Diffusion v2]) x.com/jd_pressman/st… https://t.co/47K4lpMp5X

Prompt: otherworldly alien planet swamp in the style of halo 3 and venus scifi illustration

(SimulacraBot [Stable Diffusion v2]) https://t.co/DT3RJOaioy

So at this point Germany is de-facto allied with Russia, right? x.com/AngelicaOung/s…