Mx. Chara Aznable of Pnictogen

Anyone who's had to deal with bullies in ANY domain--abusive parents or guardians or teachers, school bullies, aggressive Christians, techbro bullies, anywhere--knows that the bully has two chief weapons: extreme persistence and the habit of racing for the protection of the authorities at the slightest whiff of genuine trouble. The bully is counting on something very important: "polite society", the social mores that prevail throughout the United States, says that as long as someone isn't doing a crime, something officially regarded as a misdeed, there's nothing anyone else can do other than swallow their outrage. The bully therefore takes care to be friendly and obsequious to all authorities and their bullying frequently derives its power from the bully's assertion that what they're really doing is upholding social harmony. They're good citizens enforcing the rules and reporting anyone suspicious to the cops. (cont'd)

I feel grateful to Trainspotting for being one of the most convincing depictions of being on the edge of recovery, still unused to life without daily scrounging for numbing substances but sensing for the first time that there's a better life out there if you can get clear of the nonsense and the shouting. You can choose life, it's true. I have known many decades as an addict of one thing and another. Only by degrees have I outlasted the worst cravings. I'm determined to keep using marijuana at least. (etc.)

@memewarrior@hear-me.social when two elite human masters play chess in a featured match, they have also been playing each other constantly and learning each other's style and weaknesses. Computer opponents are not part of this pool of professional tournament play so the human masters aren't getting that valuable experience, and the computer players are also not forced to run through a whole gamut of other players before facing the human master

There's a phenomenon here analogous to Elo rating inflation in #chess, a phenomenon which makes direct comparison of Elo ratings between segregated groups (i.e. humans vs. computers, or men vs. women) worthless. If you have a segregated population of players all playing each other, they will inflate each other's ratings relative to how those same players would rate if they were up against the entire chess-playing population. (oop.)

The dopes who want to go on pretending that #chess is totally played out because #programming has done away with the game are fooling themselves in much the same way that the #GenAI people are: they're racking up immense Elo ratings for their favorite engines by simply playing them in computers-only tournaments, and huge numbers of games too so the ratings just go up and up and up. (cont'd)

Hence it should be possible to assign an IQ score to #GenAI. Why hasn't that been done? Why are the "Generative AI" boosters so shy about running comparisons of their #LLM installations with human beings? Instead they merely run endless "benchmarks" comparing one corporate product to another. That's sufficient to convince the #tech geeks that their machines are constantly getting smarter. (&c.)

This habit of ignoring the fictional aspect of texts and treating them as literal truths which ought never to be questioned, but rather accepted at face value as atomic statements of universal Truth or God's Truth, is pervasive in a reactionary political discourse that's forced to appeal to #fiction in order to find a landscape in which their worse ideas can be made to seem at home and sensible. This reliance upon fiction has led the "dark intellectuals" into pathways that can only be described as occult and esoteric, i.e. devoted to the idea that the truest meanings of texts is not to be found in the words themselves but in speculative interpretation informed by contact with gnostic truth, i.e. that impression of truth gained from personal spiritual experience. (etc.)

But if they're so confident that #Claude and #ChatGPT have surpassed the human brain then where are the head-to-head comparisons? These same geeklords talk about #IQ as if it were an infallible and empirically proven method of estimating not merely human intelligence but...everything, basically! They say IQ has immense predictive powers. (etc.)

They forget something important about all those Platonic dialogues: they're scripted. Plato isn't giving an eyewitness account and he takes care to sidestep his own presence in the conversations he's purporting to relate as the deeds of his friend Socrates. Really he's writing embellished and slightly fictionalized scenarios about idealized characters designed to be the vectors for chosen viewpoints. There's nothing wrong with this exactly, but it's susceptible (in basically the same way as the Bible) to misinterpretation along the lines of a false "literalism", i.e. acting as if Plato is giving us verbatim the words spoken in "real life" by Socrates. (etc.)

@memewarrior@hear-me.social I don't regard special-event matchups between human players and engines as meaningful or fair

@memewarrior@hear-me.social oh and I was gonna say about the IQ business: now I knew already that IQ is supposedly a quotient of ages, but is that actually the current definition? it's a questionable one because it roughly implies that people invariably get smarter as they grow older, without limit, as someone with a 200 IQ were "mentally" a century old. but no actual century-old person is at their peak intelligence I would assume no matter how spry they still are.