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rdevilla 3 hours ago

I think Andreessen's comments were borne of hyperbole and as a (deliberate) overcorrection against certain Bay Area rationalist types whose 10,000 word navel gazing screeds border on schizoidal personality disorder.

I have watched these people expend literally years getting into hypothetical arguments with strawmen they believe are active participants in their community when, at best, they are occasional lurkers, and will erect entire superstructures of theory and belief that make utterly no sense to those outside of their rationalist cult.

Lesswrong and motteizen type users fall squarely into this category, who also tend to cleave towards the pro-AI side of the spectrum now that, as with the rest of their lives, they are able to delegate the production of logorrhea at scale to the machine.

These people are mentally unwell, and reading their proclamations is not too dissimilar to browsing a deep web trans community discussing esoteric gender theory, or even merely the slashdot comment section in 2016 - just with an extra ten paragraphs of fluff and vapidity as if they had been fed on a steady diet of the New Yorker; none of which has any correlation whatsoever to material sensate reality. No wonder there is such reverence for the hyperreality of LLM literary hallucination in these circles...

Sent from my iPhone

mpalmer 3 hours ago | parent [-]

So not only is he not wrong, he's a keen social critic?

rdevilla 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Personally I cleave to the extremes of the hyperintrospective portion of the spectrum, so no, I think taken at face value his comments are absurd.

Nonetheless you need to understand the dark and less visited corners of the mental landscape whence these ideas and his (putative) target audiences were borne (Bay Area rationalism), and the strategic nature of this communication which is more intended to send a message to certain sects rather than reveal anything genuine about himself or others.

At these echelons communication takes on a different character. You must understand if you speak at this level.

mpalmer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

But why give him credit for subtext for which there's no apparent evidence? By all appearances he's saying this stuff in earnest. Why does it need to be "encoded"?

41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]
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rdevilla 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Information asymmetry is power in the era of abundant information.

simianwords 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why not give him credit? If you read his other work and the background, all this stuff is obvious.