I want to be as available as possible on the Internet as that’s been the best possible path to being available to other weirdos for the longest period of time. I shift through a lot of chaff but the wheat has always been there. I’m not for everyone and everyone is not for me.
But the open human Internet is struggling under the weight of non-human actors. Machines create more and more of the content and so many interests groups, philosophies, nation states and general chaos agents are acting within the group mind and/or network state that we call the Internet.
You can complain about bots sure, and crypto folks are in the thick of it, but some of what’s going on is just the noise of people who are under the influence of algorithms. Humans are happy to be NPCs in the great game of life. And it’s much easier to play out a fantasy the Internet while you struggle to find meaning in your daily real life.
I like to intake as much information as I can but even I have my limits as to how much noise I can tolerate in the search for signal. Consider sending me an email. Maybe we go back to private corners of blog comments and email correspondence. Get a little more signal as a treat.
I like a little “woo” in my life. Anytime I hit a particularly interesting number in my daily writing I tend to do a bit of collective consciousness spelunking across the shared spaces of the internet.
Unsurprisingly, 1111 sparks quite a bit of interest across pop culture numerology depictions. The first search results were women’s interest magazines.
Women’s Health with the uplifting new beginnings represented by 1 before associating 11 as a doubling of 1’s energy as a “master number” with spiritual insight, enlightenment, and intuitive understanding.” Sure, I want an intuitive understanding of my life’s new beginnings. Good job magazine editors. Groundbreaking.
Because what good is hidden knowledge of divine intentions without an affiliate marketing link program with it? I’d love to know if search engine optimization on numerology combined with attractively curated e-commerce affiliate content hits the Cosmopolitan P&L in any meaningful way.
Glamor Magazine at least gently reminded readers that apophenia is an error of perception. Who knew Condé Nast was the publishing house for skeptics? Perhaps they need to be a trusted brand or nail salons won’t subscribe in bulk across the nation to their magazines.
But if you really want lean into your pattern recognition and the subtle schizophrenia of Internet apophenia, my original source Women’s Health helpfully leans into “service journalism” by sharing that Kabbalists 1111 is a sign from God or divinity itself.
This is because the ancient Hebrew name for God, Yahweh or YHWH, when written resembles four ones.
I will caution readers that I don’t know if any of this is true. Obviously my goofy posting shouldn’t be seen as having the same rigor as a LessWrong epistemic status post. While I like a post-rationalist, I don’t know if any of the consumer friendly versions of ancient wisdom is true. I wouldn’t be taking my reading of the Talmud from magazines typically dedicated to recipes and workouts myself.
Women browsing random bits of pattern recognition at the grocery store or on their phone really is the stuff of fluff and the stuff of fear. Who knows what bits of knowledge might lead us astray.
Best case scenario you end up with a nice Oud candle that helped keep Cosmopolitan quiz writers paid. Worst case scenario, you might summon a malevolent algorithmic rabbit hole determined to fill your feeds with angels and demons.
I’m upset. I feel it in my body. Soma apparently means “body” in Latin, somatic is “of the body” so to have a response in your body is a somatic response. I’m having a somatic response.
I’ve been surprised at the emotional campaigns that have been waged against technology in the general, and artificial intelligence in the specific, as of late. But I am starting to feel the emotional weight of the collective fear and emotion in my own body. Futureshock is here and the fear mongers are here to tell you and I that we should be afraid.
The o-ed was written by David Evan Harris who is a chancellor’s public scholar at UC Berkeley. He used to work a Meta on ethical AI. Now this not the opinion of IEEE which is calls itself “the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.”
You’d think that sort of mission would be a little more on board with new technologies. But maybe David is just an extreme voice. Op-Ed’s are meant to represent a variety of opinions after all.
But how should I feel about the benefits of technology when it’s presented to me like this? They used a skull to really get across the visceral fear. No friendly face to make a concession to our silly human anthropomorphic desires. Let’s scare the stupid hairless apes.
Don’t worry the government and regulations will save us from this psychedelic skull
I have an inherent skepticism when someone wants to sell me on the dangers of regular people having access to something new and potentially transformative. Why must we always default to the precautionary principle? Why is fear always our default?
I don’t want to let this sort of thing get to me. But I can see the narrative campaign being waged against artificial intelligence and the sheer volume and tenor of coverage leads me to believe that everyone is aware of its potential.
Claiming artificial intelligence is only for the knowledgeable few chosen by committee of expert sounds so sensible. But I think my body knows better. I should be upset by this.
I love to write. I love to read. I read, and then I write, and then I do all over again. That simple cycle repeating itself powers my life. It’s how I learn. It’s how a lot of people learn.
Being literate allows me to reach beyond the bounds of circumstances to anyone else who can also read and write. The word has been the protocol that connects us.
That we can share information amongst ourselves is a triumph of generations overcoming the desire to control the word.
I can share what I write with you because of a man named Matt Mullenweg. Maybe you know who he is and maybe you don’t. But if you are reading this post it’s because of him.
You gave our generation the tools to be heard and you have shepherded those tools well over many years. I value your efforts. I value it with my loyalty. I have for almost twenty years. And I have always felt that loyalty was respected by WordPress through the commitment to protocols we agree upon because they work.
The software that powers this blog has done so reliably for 1106 days in a row. And it’s not even my first blog. I started blogging in college using WordPress. I launched an entire career because I published my writing not in books or magazines or newspaper but on the internet.
In the intervening decades, I’ve used lots of software and many types of media. I’ve committed to many kinds of technology and adopted any number of platforms, systems and even new languages. But the home I’ve trusted most on the internet has been WordPress. Thank you.
My parents are both readers. That’s what I inherited from them. The true richness of my childhood was not in any material resources (which varied) but in its prioritizing access to information. In my lifetime that went from libraries to the internet.
Now I get to be both a reader and a writer. And that’s how I know things have improved. Thanks for being a part of building those improvements Matt. Happy Birthday. I hope I get to write you another happy birthday wish here again when you turn fifty.
I spent most of my day reading. I had a glorious backlog of essays, papers, and other sundry pdfs to enjoy on my Readwise Reader. They are my favorite new mobile app for keeping track of my library. And I enjoyed an afternoon dedicated to reading.
It is the anniversary of the January 6th capital insurrection. I remember being afraid to write about my feelings at the time and now I’m grateful I captured some of the intensity. It was early in my daily writing habit as day six.
Just by chance we had the same meal today as we did on January 6th. A wine braised short rib over risotto. An unplanned synchronicity.
I had another synchronicity. The essays I was reading was by FBI designated domestic terror group member. The human rights class I took in college was taught by the leader of the Weather Underground by the name of Bernadine Dohrn.
It was a day to be reminded that enemies of the state come and go.
It’s funny how the left wing domestic terrorists of the sixties went on to be tenured professors at top universities. I got introduced to Rawls and developed an interest in critical theory.
I can’t say what the January 6th insurrection folks will get up to in the future. Maybe one day someone’s daughter will hear Q Anon Shaman lecture about human rights at Harvard. I doubt it though. But you never know.
I’ve started some body work recently with an osteopath to see if more muscular skeletal fixes might be helpful. I’ve only had two sessions but I’ve already learned some very interesting things about my body.
I have a wider more open rib cage apparently. The osteopath noted that I’m on the wider side of ribs and that I could do some zipping to “close” them to impact my thoracic.
I did lot of singing and voice work in my school years. It was a requirement of Waldorf curriculums not any personal preference I had myself. Diaphragmatic breathing was a big part of voice training for me and it served me well over a number of athletic hobbies over the years.
I now wonder if I was born lucky with wider ribs on average (a reasonable assumption in my mind) or if the regular practice of voice work strengthened it such that it’s now now part of my affects and thereby reshapes my entire compensatory system. Either way my ribs are open and wide and I can breath and move my posture around this fact.
I wish I hadn’t had insomnia last night as clearly ever came back to work today. It was electric in the hive minds of Twitter today. I am revisiting all kinds of priors as the timelines of different subcultures return back online.
I don’t know if anything I saw will stick but it’s clear that influencing public opinion is on everyone’s agenda. Elon Musk may have absolutely no zero intuition for how his narratives will play and maybe he doesn’t care.
I don’t think he means ill for what is still the only really unsupervised place for elite opinion influence and people are running wild with it. I’m almost sympathetic to Russian troll farms. It’s got to require enormous compute to keep on top of billions of malleable propaganda ready minds.
WhatsApp having trouble with “gm” tweets overloading the application has to be an urban legend but you can almost see it being true. Can you imagine every timeline across every cosmopolitan center pinging online and interacting with all the pieces of content that came before it? It’s a glorious perpetual process and I need to step off the wheel to rest. But I’m glad we are so back.
Ego protection is innate. Humans have quite the capacity for engaging in defense mechanisms. As I do my end of year reviews to see what I have accomplished and where I have failed I see my ego everywhere.
The types of ego protection that plague me tend to be with those all too human relationships that are closest to me.
I had to admit to myself that I’d been engaging in entirely unproductive approaches in a close partnership. I wanted more from my partner and I’d express it again and again, but I didn’t seem capable of demanding the outcomes I needed. This was unproductive obviously.
Hard feedback was given to my partner. I had to look into my own motivations for enabling a cycle of letting outcomes that didn’t match our goals occur. My own part in it mattered. We had enforced errors, self doubt, fear and all the other typical buggaboos you might expect in a hard situation.
Emotional reactivity is part of our autonomic nervous system. It’s not always right. It’s only sometimes right. And learning to tune it is part of the fun. You want to improve your heuristics over time. You will get more clarity on the world and your place in it. If you wish to persist in feeling anxious and uncertain being passive will have that effect. It literally hurts you. You have agency in deciding to address how you feel head on.
Pope Francis has called for a legally binding international treaty to regulate artificial intelligence, saying algorithms must not be allowed to replace human values and warning of a “technological dictatorship” threatening human existence.
I have to say this is setting off all kinds of alarm bells in the pattern recognition hypophenia section of my mind. Who might be working to use artificial intelligence for institutional control? Why would the most powerful religious institution on earth have this position? Might this be a good time to reflect on how this institution responded to the advent of the printing press? Is the Catholic Church merely seeking the same power over science as it always has?
Who might benefit from this type of institutional pressure? Certainly at the national state level we have players like America, Europe and China. At the multinational corporate level we have Microsoft. Gatekeeping technological dominance through regulatory suppression is practically Microsoft’s metier.
Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of heretical books which were deemed immoral to Catholics. I bring this up because Johannes Kepler‘s Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae was one of them.
People who are bad at math are discovering that the future is entirely in the hands of people who are good at math, and that’s the culture war in a nutshell.
A tweet on math goes viral
It’s a source of power & leverage to be able to clearly articulate your goals and to create tools that can enact them.
To put it another way, being able to give clear instructions about what you want is what actually matters, compute and math are simply ways of extending that capacity. Anyone can harness it. And many more of us will.
That we can distribute this knowledge to our entire planet should be a source of pride. All children are heirs to this legacy of our species. We’ve never had more knowledge so openly held especially as artificial intelligence and machine learning has come into its own.
These tools can be life changing and I’d like to see them in as many hands as possible. Everyone gets mad at the engineers for asking specific questions but it’s not philosophical debates that solves the future. It’s building things we all use.
Engineers see the limits already being suggested in limiting our access to compute for AI and are rightly concerned. It’s in the current Biden executive order on the space. We are seeing limitations enacted in Europe. I believe freedom to compute will become as salient an issue as freedom of speech. Do not give up your power. Learn to harness these tools and coordinate with others who do.
