Venkatesh Rao

metallophones vs xylophones are machines vs mandalas* in music?

* https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/between-mandala-and-machine

Something which I've only been vibing thus far is the idea that Morlocks/Children of Martha ought not to be worried about the mandalas of Eloi/Children of Mary (except when practising husbandry for sustenance!), which is a very machine orientation.

In the CH context, I hope we're aiming for the upper right quadrant, with Solidarity driving the caring and Know-how driving the knowing, with generally accepted ideas being that the more we know, the more we can afford to care, and the more we care, the faster we can make knowledge-positive adjustments across a society not all of whose members are particularly knowledge-adjacent. (the former emphasised on the centre-right and the latter on the centre-left)

As with other electorates, the centre is clearly weaker than it was two decades ago, but it still exists (if reduced to a single "the middle" party); when the far right truthfully claims to be the largest party, they mean they are currently the largest within a 5-major-party system. Also something I take to be a positive sign: when I first came here, the far right, as is customary, wrapped their candidates in the flag; part of their electoral success has been via moderation: making such blatant emotional appeals more rarely.

退火 :)

(placeholder for a more analytic response. I wonder if the best sota non-assaholic LLM [loss-loss-models?] with accompanying pinyin would be able to translate your duilian to the basin of the global optimum

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-gramsci-gap

How would you use 惑 in the argument that Elon is currently targeting the Opponent's/The (USian) Men's 气?

Fwiw I'd imagine it's got something to do with en-/dis-couraging tangping

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944256 )

Apologies, a quick search reports the earliest appearance (天保* (Edo) era)

https://kotobank.jp/word/%E9%9D%9E%E5%B8%B8%E5%8F%A3-610049

(Note the riverian(/internal?) boundary context) I don't know if the author was steeped in 蘭學

*欽崇天道、永保天命

(非 is becoming my favorite glyph, such unnecessary complexity and beauty (compared to the unmarked counterpart? 不))

Contrast that with the Chinese-favourite (with a Jiang ziya origin story)

天命靡常

with an internal 非 (<= internal contradiction/inconsistency?)-- this is not a natural abnormality!

Riverian connotations according to https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%9D%A1/8442635

The exciting and interesting to me is that we'll probably need to engage "chaos engineering" principles, and encode intentional fallibility into these agents to keep us (and them) as good collaborators, and specifically on our toes, to help all minds stay alert and plastic

If that comes to pass, we'll be rediscovering the same principles that biological evolution stumbled upon: the benefits of the imperfect "branch" or "successive limited comparison" approach of agentic behaviour, which perhaps favours heuristics (that clearly sometimes fail), interaction between imperfect collaborators with non-overlapping biases, etc etc

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/massed-muddler-intelligence

> Lindblom’s paper identifies two patterns of agentic behavior, “root” (or rational-comprehensive) and “branch” (or successive limited comparisons), and argues that in complicated messy circumstances requiring coordinated action at scale, the way actually effective humans operate is the branch method, which looks like “muddling through” but gradually gets there, where the root method fails entirely.

> the edge employees —- ie the people who interact with paying customers —- don’t own anything, and are 12 levels of management away from anyone who does.

Bingo. I found the breakdown in terms of the owner/renter/maintainer classes [0] very useful.

When the owner/renter/maintainer of a business/service/etc are the same person/community, incentives are aligned and quality tends to ensue.

When those 3 roles are clearly delineated and separated, no one gives a shit and owners care about maximizing their profit, maintainers care about getting the job done asap regardless of whether the maintenance will hold in the long term or not, and renters are left out to dry.

[0]: I first encountered it here, not sure if he got it from somewhere else.

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/getting-to-gnome-mode

Whadya think be a good word for activities that shall find common ground?

Off-the-cuff, I have.. "tug-of-peace", "centering",..

That said, the following left me wondering whether Jacobsian-type dichotomies* have anything to do with incompatible ways of building trust. Irrational Vs rationally motivated. E.g guardian/hypernormal syndrome seems to favor having comers find their place in the status hierarchy (etym: "rule of the holy") thru irrational actions (crystallizing communal superstitions, self-destructive peacocking, schlep, etc):

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12915-022-01496-9

* https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-new-systems-of-survival

Tangentially: a therapist might be well regarded as a neutral "third party" officiating "self-debates"

I first saw this point made by Venkat Rao more than a year ago in "Prompting is Managing" [1]. It was written in response to the "Your brain on ChatGPT" paper that was then making the rounds, about how LLM use is supposedly making people stupid.

Venkat argued that the study subjects did poorly not because LLMs were dulling their minds, but because the study subjects were freshman students with no management skills being tested on tasks that required delegation, quality gating and exception handling. The study put people in a situation that created role confusion and concluded that the poor outcomes were due to "cognitive debt" induced by LLM use.

[1]: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/prompting-is-managing