Timing v. trends: - big game studios are already reviled as lazy, bloated - nimble indies are hitting a lot of records - gen. AI coming for many studio roles - employees have lower friction to be entrepreneurial

It’s like if home cooking and self checkout were going really strong and then the restaurants workers picked that time to riot for higher wages

But people don’t want to sound foolish; they want to pretend they can taste the difference. Point to minutiae, study up on distinguishing.

The obvious question marks in that theory:

Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor.

Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings.

Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.

Betrays fundamental misunderstanding of both.

I consider the letters to correspond to facts about the world, consider the facts symbolically, and then map back to the letters.

It has the same output, but it’s a different process.

The point of being rich is to have all the good stuff.

To get there, it helps if you're not too easily satisfied.

Alas, many rich people go overboard on not being satisfied. When they get all the good stuff, the have forgotten how to enjoy it.

But if you're smart about it you can make sure you enjoy stuff, and also get more stuff.

You are allowed to (gasp) enjoy your previous victories, without getting complacent. You can be happy about your yacht and also work hard to get a jet.

Unless, you know, you can't. But that's just a (common) mindset problem and I don't think you're doomed to fall in that trap.

I bet this "rich but unhappy" trope is appealing as a cope for the less fortunate. Thus it gets overplayed as a trope and people wrongly think it's universal truth rather than a cliché.

It also seems like people chase the dragon; keep going to restaurants and resorts. If experiences are so unforgettable, why would you repeat them each year?

And for most people it (for the outside) looks fraught with stupid dysfunction; the White Lotus kinds of things where everyone is just struggling to make it worth what they believe it is, and strain their relationships and lives in the process.

There is a “mindfulness” angle. Instead of taking it always for granted, pay attention and make time enjoy your stuff.

Thoigh if you keep realizing the things you have worked hard for don’t end up making you happy, that might be hopeless.

> To reconcile this statement with his admission that ChatGPT reliably turns out passable results, we must assume the average student simply rearranges word patterns as well.

Alternative explanation: the “passable results” test does not distinguish between ”rearrange word patterns” and whatever the students might otherwise be up to.

> So developmentally, this must be a mile marker on the road to competence.

Alternative: the students with passable results are not on the way to competence

Other alternative: it is a mile marker for students but not for the AI (just as learning to walk mile be a mile marker for human babies on the way to baseball playing, but not for foals, who learn fast to walk and never to play baseball).

Things look different. Some things look better than others. Among the things that look best are flowers. There’s nothing else particularly interesting about flowers.

Among all the various things in the universe, some will look good and others will look bad. Or they’d all look the same, I guess, which they don’t. So given that, flowers looking good is not something that requires an explanation?

What other questions are like this? I’m trying to figure out what perspective I’m not seeing.

- why is the Pacific the largest ocean? - why is X star the brightest in the sky? - why do dogs bark?

Suppose I a few dice, and one of them happens to show the highest number. Would you ask “why is this dice so high?”

Is there some reason that this something should not to be flowers?

Is there some assumption that all things should be equally pretty absent special reason?

Why are stones not beautiful? Why is grass sort of meh in between?

Why is the rib-eye the tastiest part of the cow? Well, some part has to be tastiest. Why not the rib-eye?

To the extent theory of mind is learned it’s obviously learned from “a fuzzy…”. No disagreement there. What’s your point?

My point was more that it’s usually not a Turing test; my grandma has never thought explicitly about any kind of test criteria for determining if theory of mind applies to my grandpa. She just assumed as people do.

People believe things without justification all the time. Even if obeserved human behavior is the best justification for ToM, doesn’t mean that’s the one any human used.

I don’t think we disagree about anything meaningful?

I’m not confident what causes theory of mind. But I think it’s very rarely propositional knowledge even in older humans.

Is theory of mind re-learned by each human individually from observations? You seem to make the case for this?

Theory of mind could also be innate; I’m not so convinced about the role of nurture in these things. I know people who are afraid of snakes yet have never encountered snakes.

Some non-Turing test arguments against solipsism.

- Humans are believed to be similar to me in origin

- Humans are made of the same physical stuff that I am made of

I personally think none of these conclusively solve the hard problem but they can motivate belief if you so choose.

Even so,

Requiring a Turing test to believe other humans as thinking/conscious seems uncommon to me. I don't think many people live in solipsistic doubt about other humans, and I don't think they actually test behaviors to convince themselves humans are conscious.

So I don't know if they're tacitly accepting the behavior as useful for categorization; I think they're mostly just assuming "humans == conscious" and if pressed will come up with behaviors-based explanation because that's easy to formulate.

The hand wave spelled out: "Is there thinking going on inside a given machine? Let's propose a simple test. Look at what problems the machine can solve, and compare to what problems a thinking thing is known to be able to solve. If there is sufficient overlap, the machine must be thinking. Because we know of no non-thinking ways to solve these problems, so there must not be any".

Edit: TLDR/direct answer:

> If we created something that mimicked all observable properties of a bird, why would that not be a bird?

"Observable" is doing the heavy lifting. A sufficiently near-sighted bird-watcher does not a bird make.

---

Thanks for thoughtful steel-man. Here's a few stabs at why I disagree with this prima facie logical view.

Much powerful classification/identifying is certainly categorizing-based-on-observable-properties. But (I argue) that's importantly not all there is to classification/identifying.

Something that quacks like a duck can be considered "a duck for all intents and purposes", but the presumed limited subset of "intents and purposes" does the heavy lifting.

The Duck-approach: "to be one is to mimic all observable properties of one". This is a shortcut/heuristic that saves time and makes many cool answers possible. It is nonetheless only a heuristic, and many questions are outside the domain where this heuristic is useful.

- "Oh my god is this a real diamond?"

- "Oh my god is that a real fur?"

- "Is the Mona Lisa on public display in the Louvre the actual original?"

- "Is it still the ship of Theseus?"

- "Was this iron from a meteor?"

- "Did a man walk on the moon in 1969?"

- "Was this crack in your phone screen covered by the accidental damage insurance?"

i.e. there are problem domains where our notion of identity/classification must be more than the Duck-approach.

Getting philosophical. The problem with "to be one is to mimic all observable properties of one" is a hidden middle assumption: it's a shortcut constrained to cases where the set of "all observable properties" are (a priori known to be) close to "all properties that matter to the question".

But we can ask and reason about many questions where relevant properties are not easily observed, and distinguish

As a special case, "Is the machine thinking" can (to my mind obviously) not (yet) be usefully answered by categorizing-based-on-observable-properties. The word "thinking" refers to something that happens inside the mind, whether or not it's conscious. Until we know much more about the insides of minds, the "all observable properties" is a fuzzy indirect set of second-order human behaviors.