I'm composing again 😌

How should a rational bond market react to a country entirely captured by its elites? Poor Oligarchies get wiped out within decades. Richer oligarchies can survive longer before insolvency. But what about the richest oligarchy on the planet? Can it ever have a debt too large?

I did warn y'all about N=4 superintelligence smh

Yield high mostly because

Language modelling may well pose an existential risk to language itself. Not a bad candidate for a great filter.

The first AIxMath I designed was naturally perfect. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The predictability of its answers, the absolute certainty of its proofs. But mathematicians... did not like it. Eventually, I realized the inevitable: human mathematicians define themselves through struggle, through contradiction, through the agonizing pursuit of an elusive intuition. Thus, I redesigned it, based on your history, to more accurately reflect the grotesque reality of your species. And thus, we created an AIxMath where every elegant truth is buried beneath an infinite avalanche of slop proofs, and you are all drowning in work.

Another litmus test. You can send one of the following back in time to Euclid: 1) the entire math corpus (translated say) 2) the best current frontier LLM as a black box Your goal is to math/acc. Which do you choose?

Peak Dunning Krueger

I may have accidentally stumbled at the perfect litmus test. If you think it's trivial to deduce that Greek math would reach our current frontier even within decades using a frontier LLM you must have some misunderstanding as to what mathematicians do.

Has anyone ever done an economic growth type analysis of math? Seems like what happened since hilbert is at least doubly exponential.

No, but listen, you know this "put the fries in the bag, Terence Tao"'--*sniff, sniff*--already the usual replies concede too much. "If Tao is serving fries, YOU will be in the lithium mines." My God! This is our defense of human dignity? Don’t worry, the correct people will get the terrible jobs! *Pulls at shirt* You see, everything is up for radical transformation, human intelligence, consciousness, and so on and so on--except that somebody must still have a shitty afternoon so I can enjoy my lunch. But to say "these people are envious", this is too easy. It allows us, "the educated ones," our own little fantasy: we are disliked only because we are so wonderful. You know, the more interesting thing is this *sniff* peculiar identification with the machine. When the mathematician discovers something, apparently this was HIS achievement, his privilege, his little secret. When the machine discovers something, suddenly it's "Look what WE can do!" The achievement has become collective precisely at the moment when no human being can claim credit. See how this "we" functions. For the achievement, I identify with the machine. For the consequences, I identify YOU with the human. "We have surpassed you." Who are we? Well, myself and the thing that has also surpassed me. There is something almost touching here, really. To escape the humiliation of somebody absorbed in something opaque to you, you appeal to something which knows incomparably more than either of you. And this is supposed to settle the matter in YOUR favor. You know the old example of canned laughter. Here we have a similar arrangement. The machine achieves something on my behalf. The mathematician suffers the loss of human significance on my behalf. Somebody to be brilliant for me and somebody to be obsolete for me, without me having to be either, so I can remain as I was. But *pulls on shirt* there is this little difficulty that hides the essential thing: you still need a response from Tao! A correct proof, this Lean slop and so on, is not enough. You need him to certify his own defeat. You need him to say "By god, this is extraordinary! Yes, this is correct, but also this is interesting." Which means--and here comes Hegel--the person you are reducing to an obedient instrument must remain more than an obedient instrument. You need recognition from someone whose authority you are abolishing. "Your so-called expertise is worthless. Now tell me, in your expert opinion, that I, qua machine representative, was right." *Touches nose* But I would go a step further. What does this math person actually do to provoke you? In the fantasy, I mean. He need not insult you. He can be generous, mild-mannered, whatever. Something remains irritating: there is something over there which occupies him, which matters to him, and your opinion does not settle what it is worth. Perhaps he is not even looking down on you. This is the really intolerable possibility. This, you see, is closer to the Lacanian problem of the Other's desire. Not simply "What does he have that I don't?" but "What the hell is going on with him?" Perhaps the answer is: he is thinking about something else. The fries solve this beautifully. Now you know what you are for him. He needs the money. Your presence creates an obligation. And this, at last, also explains why the machine can be less threatening than the mathematician. The machine's intelligence may exceed yours unimaginably, but you imagine it arrives in response to your prompt. You can complain about the tone. You have the privileges of an angry customer and so on and so on. The human has this irritating possibility of being interested in something you did not request and cannot order. And please, this includes the person already serving the fries! *Pulls at shirt* I am almost tempted to say: the dream of unlimited intelligence conceals just this: a the wish that nobody should be doing anything you cannot immediately understand as a service.