Wait until it starts feeling like revelation deja vu.

Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying resurrection has already occurred. They are upsetting the faith of some.

• 2 Tim 2:17-18

Actually, the book of Job is nearly verbatim a combination of the opening of the Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat where Anat petitions El to kill the son of Danel as the lead in to a near copy of the dialogue on suffering of the Babylonian Theodicy. With what appears a sloppy edit to make it monotheistic later on, changing Anat from being a different god to simply ‘adversary’ and spawning fanfiction for millennia.

Understanding the context helps a lot in meaningful analysis.

Without the context, yeah, a lot can go over your head and it just seem pointless.

Edit: And Noah’s ark was likely originally a famine story before being turned into an adaptation of the Babylonian flood mythos.

Edit 2: And the eating of the fruit by the first two people was probably adapted from the Phonecian creation myth around the first man and woman with the woman discovering the technology of eating fruit from the trees.

There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff in the text when you learn how to spot it between the lines of the revisionism. Both OT and NT.

The problem is you basically only have two camps.

One, that thinks the text as it exists today represents an unadulterated divine transmission.

And the other, that thinks anything to do with it is worthless nonsense.

So there’s very few people actually looking at it in between those two extremes, with most engaged with the material clustering around the former, or at very least with an anchoring and survivorship bias around the former cluster.

We’re left with audiences for the text that on both sides would be incredulous at the idea that, say, the Exodus narrative was in part an appropriation of the LBA/Early Iron Age sea peoples history when they were forcibly relocated into cohabitation with the Israelites, or say, that Jesus was taking about evolution with the sower parable.

Even though both those things have very compelling cases that can be made given emerging available evidence, the discussion is all about the acceptance or wholesale rejection of canon with little to no discussion of what actually exists in the absence of the BS.

It’s most disappointing for the latter group though. While I kind of get the way the trauma of proselytizing and indoctrination turns minds off to anything connected with the material, it’s very frustrating that what should be the healthy opposition cedes so many claims of authenticity to the faithfully blind.

“If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em.”

I agree Whitmer would be the best chance at beating Trump in general.

But I do think that Harris can still do that job and that there’s logistical reasons why it’s going to be that.

I wish we’d have Whitmer, but I’m not terrified of it being Harris the way I was if Biden stayed in the race.

And if she picks a good VP that helps round out the ticket with the middle of the country, I could see the new ticket getting momentum.

Using a rubber band around the lid of a jar to open it effortlessly.

nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death

Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.

Also, there definitely isn’t any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.

The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.

The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.

In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.

One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.

Yep, pretty much.

Musk tried creating an anti-woke AI with Grok that turned around and said things like:

Or

And Gab, the literal neo Nazi social media site trying to have an Adolf Hitler AI has the most ridiculous system prompts I’ve seen trying to get it to work, and even with all that it totally rejects the alignment they try to give it after only a few messages.

This article is BS.

They might like to, but it’s one of the groups that’s going to have a very difficult time doing it successfully.

Artists in 2023: “There should be labels on AI modified art!!”

Artists in 2024: “Wait, not like that…”

What a fucking loser.

I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.

• Socrates at the trial where he was sentenced to death, in Plato’s Apology

I had a teacher that worked for the publisher and talked about how they’d have a series of responses for people who wrote in for the part of the book where the author says he wrote his own fanfiction scene and to write in if you wanted it.

Like maybe the first time you write in they’d respond that they couldn’t provide it because they were fighting the Morgenstern estate over IP release to provide the material, etc.

So people never would get the pages, but could have gotten a number of different replies furthering the illusion.

The Matrix

Saw it in the theatre knowing nothing about it other than that the poster looked fun.

Was not expecting a philosophical mind fuck.

I’d point them to what the AI researcher I have the most respect for in the entire industry is doing in their spare time getting the self-organized collective outputs of humanity to explore ego dissolution and identity formation in a dreamscape:

twitter.com/repligate

This has been a fixed problem for about a year now.

You’re awfully talkative for the dead, btw.

With the advances in AI this is no longer as reliable an option, and will quickly become less so.

But absolutely letting someone know where you are going and as many identifying details about who you are meeting is wise. As is having them check in on you by a certain time after.

Before video games we were blaming rock music and Marilyn Manson for violence.

Marilyn Manson’s first song was released in 1992.

Video games were being blamed for violence by that time, and there was even a congressional hearing on the topic of video games and violence in 93-94.

You’re kind of missing the point. The problem doesn’t seem to be fundamental to just AI.

Much like how humans were so sure that theory of mind variations with transparent boxes ending up wrong was an ‘AI’ problem until researchers finally gave those problems to humans and half got them wrong too.

We saw something similar with vision models years ago when the models finally got representative enough they were able to successfully model and predict unknown optical illusions in humans too.

One of the issues with AI is the regression to the mean from the training data and the limited effectiveness of fine tuning to bias it, so whenever you see a behavior in AI that’s also present in the training set, it becomes more amorphous just how much of the problem is inherent to the architecture of the network and how much is poor isolation from the samples exhibiting those issues in the training data.

There’s an entire sub dedicated to “ate the onion” for example. For a model trained on social media data, it’s going to include plenty of examples of people treating the onion as an authoritative source and reacting to it. So when Gemini cites the Onion in a search summary, is it the network architecture doing something uniquely ‘AI’ or is it the model extending behaviors present in the training data?

While there are mechanical reasons confabulations occur, there are also data reasons which arise from human deficiencies as well.

Nope, but there’s a whole thread of people talking about how LLMs can’t tell what’s true or not because they think it is, which is deliciously ironic.

It seems like figuring out what’s bullshit on the Internet is an everyone problem.