Maxim Raginsky

@mraginsky.bsky.social

7175 Followers 1083 Following

web: http://maxim.ece.illinois.edu substack: https://realizable.substack.com

“Game-Theoretic Foundations for Probability and Finance” by Glenn Shafer and Vladimir Vovk
“So, the world that differs from ours “only” in one respect (ultraintelligent machines exist in that world but not in ours) is not a small world in Savage’s sense, it is a large world with huge indeterminacy in just about any realm we can think of: sociology, economics, technology, science, psychology. Before we can even begin to deduce intelligence explosion, we are confronted with an explosion of differences that makes Good’s world utterly incomparable to ours. It has too many bridges we can only cross when we get to them.”
"Not for a minute did I put stock in any of the conjectures about the signal. The telegraphed individual, the blueprint of the “great brain,” of the plasmic “informational machine,” of the synthetic “ruler” who was to conquer Earth—­ all this was borrowed from the poverty-­ stricken repertoire of ideas which civilization, in its current technological form, had at its disposal. These imaginings were a reflection—­ much like the themes of science-­ fiction novels—­ of society, and of society primarily in its American version, whose export outside the States prospered around the middle of the century. They were either fashion- able novelties or else conceptions built on the game principle “it’s them or us”—­ and never did the insipidity of invention, its enchainment to Earth in the narrow channel of historical time, appear more obvious to me than when I heard these theories, seemingly bold but in reality pathetically naïve."
the book Terminological Twists next to a coffee combo of an americano and a flat white
cover of W.V.O. Quine's Ontological Relativity and Other Essays
100 Year Old Cigar cocktail
Quote from a post at https://realizable.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-as-sorcery: "Every phenomenon identified by Andreski is on display here, including the neverending stream of academic publications where researchers interact with massive models like ChatGPT or Claude and deploy loaded terminology to promote the view that the only way to predict or to control the functioning of such systems is by an intricate system of charms, spells, and incantations. When Herbert Simon wrote in The Sciences of the Artificial about approaching the scientific inquiry about computers as a subfield of natural history, where we would “study them as we would rabbits or chipmunks and discover how they behave under different patterns of environmental stimulation,” he was probably imagining something closer to ethology in the spirit of Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, not papers about sparks of AGI or the evil vector. Alas, the technocratic impulse is wedded to crude animism."