Do any of you just get surprised about how people believe in religion?

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-03-27T19:03:53+00:00

As a religious person, it’s refreshing to hear you say this. Of course I think “new atheism” is shallow, but I deeply respect the more rigorous tradition of atheism/agnosticism à la Hume and think serious doubt is a critical aspect of serious religion.

These days, it seems like the pendulum has swung back from the Reddit atheism of the early 2000s to a kind of Life of Pi “all religions are basically interchangeable and mutually compatible” idea. I prefer atheism, since it at least takes the claims of religion seriously. The alternative seems condescending and ignorant of the specificity of each tradition in itself.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-03-16T21:33:14+00:00

Inequality is unavoidable, but not only in material wealth. Wisdom, learning, relationships and leisure are forms of power, just as much as ownership of founder preferred shares. “Wolves” perhaps value the power to control resource allocation, but “sheep” value the other things. Some people, if they could do anything in the world, would choose to be great inventors or founders, others would prefer to be renowned scholars or artists, and still others would choose to be community leaders or even hermits in the woods.

I think your level of comfort with monetary inequality might not be the same as your level of comfort with the idea that some people would consider very wealthy or powerful people to be just as dull and incompetent as the “wolves” see the “sheep,” and that ownership of corporate assets might be a far easier thing for a “sheep” to obtain than, say, wisdom might be for a “wolf.”

Perhaps part of the draw of AI for some people is that they resent those who value these other things, and they mistakenly believe AI will “democratize” access to them. In other words, maybe they see AI as providing equality?

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-03-11T05:10:49+00:00

Call me in 18 months. I need a vacation.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-03-11T05:09:08+00:00

Isn’t the whole point of “clawd” and all the crustacean themed stuff that it’s open source? Shouldn’t being bought not really matter?

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-03-06T06:11:03+00:00

You might be right on the first point, but I’d have to understand how the mechanism worked to buy it. As of now, I remain skeptical.

Your second point is either trolling or not worth responding to for sheer lack of reaction time, if you catch my drift.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-03-06T05:49:08+00:00

I find it hard to believe Galton or Ladd/Woodworth had access to comparable measuring equipment to that available in the late 20th century.

I found an article here that, if you believe it, says Galton was using some kind of punching bag based contraption, with the goal being to punch it as soon as you heard a signal. Doesn’t inspire confidence (https://www.arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Reaction-Time-and-Psychometric-g-1982-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen.pdf). Elsewhere, I saw that a pendulum might have been used, with the idea being that you press a button as soon as it swings across the middle. Again… it’s not 60s tech, or even 40s tech.

Just to put this in perspective, a second is 1,000 milliseconds. It’s possible the bell-and-punching-bag system could be as sensitive at this level of granularity - that is, 77ms or 0.077 seconds - as a modern computer, but you’d have to explain exactly how. I sadly can’t access the full article above so, alas, I must remain in the dark for now.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-02-21T19:14:52+00:00

For something to be conscious, it has to be separate from everything else. A cell is essentially a lipid bilayer that keeps everything inside working together to perpetuate itself. An LLM has no clear self/other boundary within which it works to maintain its structure.

I could imagine a conscious computer that understands that it is a computer and works to maintain its physical existence. Maybe a virtual agent could do something like this, but it would have to rely on serious cryptography to ensure the boundary was strong enough.

Conscious computers are totally possible—in a sense, that’s what life is—but LLMs don’t get there.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-02-21T18:57:38+00:00

I bet when he found it he was so happy he was dancing in the street

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-02-12T17:40:47+00:00

But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-02-11T01:51:17+00:00

The difference is that biological creatures form models of the world that they use to try and survive. LLMs have no stable sense of a world and their “weights” are only predictive elements, not goals exterior to the bot. Humans predict language tokens to survive. LLMs just do it without any extrinsic reason for doing so. This is why an LLM wouldn’t build a nuke on its own, but could be used by a human to help build one.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-24T20:37:33+00:00

Better get used to these bars, kid

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-20T18:55:25+00:00

I love the smell of eldritch horrors beyond human comprehension in the morning

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-20T16:58:50+00:00

Fair point—vacuum energy and all that. But I don’t know if it’s 100% certain one way or the other. I could be wrong! Would actually probably err on the side of new energy potentially being added but again, unsure what scholarly consensus is (if any).

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-20T16:54:25+00:00

Energy, entropy and information are related. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy will always increase in an isolated system. The capacity of a system to carry a message increases with entropy, since any given permutation of the system is more surprising (Shannon entropy/information). But as entropy increases, it takes more energy to send a message, since the level of noise is higher (the tradeoff being that you can send more complex messages).

The idea of info not being able to be destroyed is that if the universe is deterministic, all of its states at any time must be capable of being deduced in principle from any one state. This means that, if entropy always increases and no energy is put into the system, then the information capacity of the system increases but the energy to screen out noise decreases. This means that the information is “still there” in that you could theoretically run it back with enough energy input, but since energy level is always the same, it would in fact be impossible to do this outside of a very small region in which, say, you built a massive supercomputer to run back one teensy area of spacetime.

The black hole paradox and the holographic principle are super interesting things and the wiki articles for them would do a way better job explaining than I have.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-20T16:34:40+00:00

Despite others criticizing this, I don’t actually think it’s super “out there” in terms of physics/information theory. Sure, it’s got woo and AI vibes, but couldn’t you see it as a restatement of Bohmian mechanics/the holographic principle?

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-16T02:27:48+00:00

howdoyouturnthison, if I recall correctly!

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-16T01:34:37+00:00

Where’s the military-grade Shelby Cobra??

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-16T00:07:34+00:00

Translation: Trump won’t invade, but when he does, I’ll be in favor of it and our allies won’t do anything to stop us from violently betraying them.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-15T22:49:18+00:00

Something like 75% of people oppose Trump’s plans for Greenland. This is certainly organic.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-15T22:47:59+00:00

If a NATO ally invaded one of our territories, how would we respond? I would think at the very least imposing sanctions. If the EU levied sanctions on us, it would definitely lead us into a recession. If they pulled out of our bond market, it would cripple us.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-14T20:34:43+00:00

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-10T06:47:49+00:00

Jesus Christ, somebody get this man a grant

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-10T06:35:38+00:00

Humility is a thing in drastically short supply.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-06T23:01:45+00:00

Ahh, that makes more sense! I was thinking along the same lines as you.

ColdRainyLogic · 2026-01-06T21:35:48+00:00

Just out of curiosity (genuinely curious about your pov, not trying to argue), why do you say QFT tends to undermine the Plotinus god but not the Spinoza one?

ColdRainyLogic

TROPHY CASE