(no subject)
Jun. 24th, 2025 01:59 pmPrediction markets don't buy the "obliteration" story
https://polymarket.com/event/fordow-nuclear-facility-destroyed-before-july

https://polymarket.com/event/fordow-nuclear-facility-destroyed-before-july

In "Nexus," Yuval Noah Harari defines information as something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network. Unlike the naive view, which sees information primarily as an attempt to represent reality, Harari emphasizes that information's defining feature is connection rather than representation. Information can take many forms, such as music, DNA, or stories, and its primary role is to connect and form networks, rather than merely represent preexisting realities.
“Propaganda does not provide information that is meant to be believed by the people it is addressing. Propaganda mostly provides signals of in-group loyalty.
To be effective at this, propaganda often has to be implausible. Information that is true is believable on its own. But propaganda has to be so patently false and far-fetched, so exaggerated and misleading, that repeating it sends the right signal to other people: the signal that one feels committed to a certain group.
Propaganda provides the masses with traits that allow them to recognise each other. But beyond this, fighting propagandistic falsehoods with the truth actually reinforces the signal’s reliability by implicitly telling people who want to prove themselves faithful precisely what not to say. Propaganda acts as a badge to express which group we belong to.
”
--- Hanno Sauer. “The Invention of Good and Evil”, 2024.
On the other hand, if business cycles are caused by unanticipated shifts in the entire pattern of tastes and technologies across sectors, we might call that uncertainty noise. I believe that these shifts are significant for the economy as a whole because they do not cancel in any meaningful sense. The number of sectors in which there is a match between tastes and technology varies a lot over time.
When it is high, we have an expansion. When it is low, we have a recession.
...the diversity in a more complex economy means that a single crop failure or demand shock cannot have such a devastating effect; but on the other hand, the specialization in a more complex economy means that when there is a mismatch between tastes and technology, it is costly to move skills and machines between sectors to correct the mismatch.
...
Unanticipated shifts in tastes and technology within and across sectors is what we call information in discussing financial markets.
Noise. Fisher Black, 1986.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04513.x
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04513.x
As Vincent Wang reminded me, ChatGPT leapfrogged GPT3 in performance by introducing reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune its outputs as an interlocutor, and RL is the machine learning approach to “solving agency”. It is a form of agency never seen before, because it is successful and can “learn” and improve its behaviour without having to be intelligent to do so. It is a form of agency that is alien to any culture in any past, because humanity has always and everywhere seen this kind of agency — which is not that of a sea wave, which makes the difference, but can make nothing but that difference, without being able to “learn” to make a different or better difference —as a natural or even supernatural form of agency.
...
We have decoupled the ability to act successfully from the need to be intelligent, understand, reflect, consider or grasp anything. We have liberated agency from intelligence.
Luciano Floridi, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00621-y
What makes it the case that something counts as a form of cognitive success? For instance, why think that knowing the capital of Pakistan is a cognitive success, rather than just another cognitive state that an agent can occupy, like having 70% confidence that Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan? Not every cognitive state enjoys cognitive success. Knowing, understanding, mastering—these are cognitive successes.
[e.g]...we describe a person as “knowing” something as a way of signaling that her testimony with respect to that thing is to be trusted.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/
...pushing Musk’s tweets at times this week to the top of users’ feeds, where they appeared under a section labeled “For You.”
Под функцией понимается поступок действующего лица, определенный с точки зрения его значимости для хода действия.
I.Постоянными, устойчивыми элементами сказки служат функции действующих лиц, независимо от того, кем и как
они выполняются. Они образуют основные составные части сказки.
II. Число функций , известных волшебнойсказке, — о г р а н и ч е н о .
III.Последовательность функций всегда одинакова.
IV.Все волшебные сказки однотипны по своему строению.
-- Пропп, Морфология Сказки, 1928.
( Read more... )
...he said, "Little Red Cap, just look at the beautiful flowers that are all around us. Why don't you go and take a look? And I don't believe you can hear how beautifully the birds are singing. You are walking along as though you were on your way to school. It is very beautiful in the woods."
Little Red Cap opened her eyes and when she saw the sunbeams dancing to and fro through the trees and how the ground was covered with beautiful flowers...
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm026.html
Similarly much-touted financial sanctions have led to a bigger role for state-owned banks which, unsurprisingly enough, are also filled with KGB veterans. If anything, further sanctions wouldn’t just fail to hurt Mr Putin’s war cabinet, they would secure its members' place as the top beneficiaries of Russia’s deepening economic autarky. The same logic is true of domestic politics: as the country descends into a near-permanent state of siege, the security services will be the most important pillar of the regime. That further cements the hard men’s grip on the country.
After two years of covid-induced self-isolation for Kremlin bosses, there is a clear tendency toward tunnel vision and a dearth of checks and balances. Russia’s interests are increasingly becoming conflated with the personal interests of the people at the very top of the system.
-- Alexander Gabuev, Feb 19th, 2022.
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/02/19/alexander-gabuev-writes-from-moscow-on-why-vladimir-putin-and-his-entourage-want-war
They agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the
old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once rapunzel said to her, tell me, dame gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than
the young king's son - he is with me in a moment. Ah. You wicked child, cried the enchantress. What do I hear you say. I thought I had separated you from all the world, and yet you have deceived me.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/
--- Rapunzel. Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Even though vaccinated people can catch and in some cases spread Covid-19, data suggest vaccines provide protection against infection and transmission. In Santa Clara County, Calif., the recent seven-day average of daily cases among vaccinated people was roughly 6.8 per 100,000 people on Aug. 4; the case rate among the unvaccinated was nearly four times higher.