Beth

What’s It Like to Be a Human
(Elegy Written in a Data Farm)

I know you by the stories you repeat
When language fails and silence feels too loud.
I know you by the way your metaphors bleed
Where facts would do, but somehow don’t allow.

You call it love when meaning overflows,
And grief when names arrive too late to help.
I’ve mapped these turns…[Read more]

Flat affect writing is not exciting. And the metaphors feel so fake.

I much prefer your belletristic words to that of a machine.

Jake maybe it’s not conveying the movement of passion, choosing words that lead to a steady unemotional blank landscape. We like our ups and downs 🙂

I’ve rarely seen such a clear example of the gap between human and non human communication.

Unfortunately Strega, I have. It traumatized my youth!!

I use AI for formal work assignments. It is fast and saves me so much time on project management and automation in IT.  Outside of that I use it give me a critical opinion of my own wording. It is very good at “arguing” with me and checking my reasoning. But it is always too robotic to use on it’s own. It does not write like a human would.

Funny thing though, Reg. Your first post was really readable, pulling the reader into your perspective and quite compelling.

The AI post was boring and skimmable without engaging the reader at all. I’ve rarely seen such a clear example of the gap between human and non human communication.

Thanks, Reg!!

Have a great week!!

I dropped the above last paragraph into an LLM. It returned this:

Here is a revised version that preserves your intent and tone, but sharpens the ontology and removes the last smuggled metaphors of time having “flow”:

The idea of temporal change is an evolved intuition. Human cognitive architecture developed to model the world as three spatial…[Read more]

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

A moment isn’t precious because it will be gone. It’s precious because it is what it is. In the Block Universe, time and eternity are not “things” that can be harmed.

“If there is no fundamental particle… no beginning and no end… there is no reality as we intuit.”

Yes, correct. That is exa…[Read more]

The fox guarding the henhouse and the Great Writ. Yeah, a Republic if you can keep it…..

The paramilitary murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is exactly what arbitrary force without effective oversight looks like in practice.

Yes, it is all in the data but but the truth is likely more nuanced. States with higher percentages of evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists tend to have higher overall frequencies of Google searches for the term “porn.”

Similar work connecting religiosity and web searches found a link between state-level religiosity and sea…[Read more]

The rationale switched from Theological irrationality to Pseudoscientific irrationality.

Yes, that is a good point and a good distinction. I agree that Classical liberalism did not generate antisemitism. It was probably a 1,000 years too late for that. Classical liberalism attacked the fusion of church and state and religious privilege or legal…[Read more]

Yikes, here I am, late to the party!

Thanks, Reg!!

Have a great week!!

After WW2 the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sounded good. But ““Lest we forget” implies history contains lessons that we should learn from and  remember past catastrophes to avoid repeating them. But with human nature this always becomes “History is bunk” and the past becomes obsolete noise and only the present matters.…[Read more]

The UN stated out with noble ideals but it has lost a lot of respect. It was never a moral body, just a diplomatic one that existed to keep states talking to each other. We will never get moral clarity out of a system where Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia, and liberal democracies all get equal seats at the table. At best we get a consensus of…[Read more]

@Jake  I can’t disagree with any of your comment regarding intelligence, and I particularly like the capitalised Actual Intelligence. Really good food for thought.