TechTakes

I have also occasionally been tempted to try and get a Goncharov thing going, where everyone collectively recalls that Tommy Berry and the Forevernight Forest got them into reading.

It was just after an ordinary afternoon tea, on an ordinary Sunday, the first cold day of autumn, when Tommy Berry discovered that Time was no longer adding up in the ordinary way.

Tommy had only managed to drink one cup of very indifferently warm tea, and eat the last plain saltine from the bottom of the bag. Everything else had been gobbled up or drunk down by his uncle Myrvold, who was rotund as a boulder and about as kind, and his step-aunt Meredith, who was thin as a snake and considerably more mean. So, yes, it was altogether quite the ordinary teatime.

Tommy had a secret, you see. In fact, he had two, a big one that he knew about and an even bigger one that was just about to fall on top of him.

His first secret was that he had a library card. He had stolen an adult's library card. Or that is how Uncle Myrvold and Step-Aunt Meredith would have described it, if they knew.

Carruthers, who lived down the end of the lane and always yelled at Tommy to mind his hedges, and who let his dog chase Tommy and the other children, had made a big show of throwing his library card into the roadway because, he said, the library was full of immoral books. A car had then driven over it, and then a whole lorry, and then Tommy had snatched it up. Something told him that anything Carruthers hated, he should save, and anything that Myrvold and Meredith would be angry about, he should hold onto.

Tommy had heard adults say that something was "burning a hole in my pocket". He wondered if this was what that meant. It felt like he was carrying a hot coal in the pocket of his threadbare corduroy jacket, and no one could know.

The library had a new machine. He had seen adults use it. You could go up to it, wave a book under a red laser light like at the grocery store, then show the machine your card, and it would check out the book for you. Tommy made a plan. He would slip out of the house just after tea. He would walk the five blocks to the library. He would find a book that Myrvold and Meredith and Carruthers and every other grownup would not want him to read. He would wait until the librarian was busy dealing with a whole queue of people. And then he would use the machine.

Everything went perfectly until the very last step.

There was a girl at the machine.

He had a big fat book in his hands, a book he had picked because it had "Murder" in the title and would last a long time, and there was a girl in front of him at the library machine.

"Murder at Wizard University?" she asked him, right to his face, like they had already been introduced, like they had known each other since nursery school. "That's not a book for little kids." His stomach dropped, right into his feet. He didn't know that a stomach could do such a thing.

And then she tilted the stack of books she was carrying toward him, showing him the titles on their spines. "Neither are these," she said.

And she pulled out her own library card. It was black, like a rectangle cut out of the midnight sky.

That's all I wrote in the thread that prompted me to take a stab. Oh, I think I had decided that the girl's name is Elfriede? And the principal of magic school is nonbinary.

"Why, of course there's a potion for changing," said Professor Shade. "That is what potions do. I don't know where I'd be without it. It is ever so helpful to reach the top shelf, but on the other hand, men's fashions haven't been truly swank in a hundred fifty years."

On a purely rhetorical point, it seems like the whole counterargument from Gwern is just an argument-by-disorganization or something to that effect. He doesn't actually challenge the factual information presented, but does shift how those facts are framed and what the actual contention is in the background, and then avoids actually engaging with the new contention from the bottom up.

In a lot of discussions with singularity cultists (both pros and antis) they assume that a true superintelligence would render the whole universe deterministically predictable to a sufficient degree to allow it to basically do magic. This is how the specifics of "how and why does the AI kill all humans again?' tend to be elided, for example. This same kind of thinking is also at the heart of their obsession with "superpredictors" who can, it is assumed, use some kind of trick to beat this kind of mathematical limit in certainty (this is the part where I say something about survivorship bias). In the context of that discussion, the fact that a relatively simple arrangement of components following relatively simple, deterministic rules is still not meaningfully predictable past a dozen or so sequential events due to the magnification of the inevitable error in our understanding of the initial circumstances is a logical knockout.

Rather than engage with this, however, Gwern and his compatriots in the thread focus in on the tangent about how high-level pinball players are able to control for that uncertainty by avoiding the region of the board where those error-magnifying parts are. However this is not the same argument and begs the question of whether those high-chaos areas are always avoidable as they are in a pinball machine. Rather than engage with that question, Gwern doubles down on the pinball analogy, shifting the question even further from "how well can we predict the deterministic motion of a ball given the inevitable uncertainty of our initial state" to "how many ways can we convince a third party we've gotten a high score on a pinball machine". At this point we're not just moving the goalposts, we've moved the entire stadium into low earth orbit and gotten real cute about whether we're playing 🏈 or ⚽ football.

And given the conversation surrounding the thread and these topics on LW I'm not even going to assume that such a wild shift is the result of bad faith instead of simple disorganization and sloppiness of rhetoric. This is what happens to a community that conflates "it makes me feel smart" with "it actually communicates the point effectively".