> Maybe it’s just me, but I find it kind of sad to think that you got buried in a grave with no headstone, no marker, no indication of who you were.
I appreciate this melancholy - even a compassionate wistfulness.
Conversely though - For me, it just feels part of an Ozymandian futility. If the suffering of dying + the suffering of others' grief are removed from the equation, it feels like there is an elegance to just dissolve back to the environment without a struggle, in a certain graceful way.
A headstone in that context is a 'struggle'.
To me, graves are for the living and never the dead.
> If truth is defined as beliefs which lead one to make decisions that cause you/your society to thrive
This is 'metaphorical truth' to be precise.
But it's only a part of the virality of memes, not the whole.
Propagation can occur not just due to usefulness, but to other factors such as simplicity/replicability, human susceptibility / 'key in a lock' etc.
If survival was purely metaphorical truth, then all surviving lifeforms would be 'the most true' (including viruses being 'true' to us). Which can be argued, at a philosophical level - But then we've expanded the definition so much as to lose relevant meaning at the pragmatic level.
Nice comment! I had forgotten about metaphorical truth. Sent me on a nice rabbit hole.
I think 'metaphorical truth' is correct but slightly too narrow. Pragmatic truth includes metaphorical truth but is slightly wider.
And while I agree with your assertion in the short run, I'm inclined to doubt its correctness in the long run. Most things eventually have consequences.
> While in custody, she took a lie detector test, which revealed deception in two key responses[...]
It did not. It revealed that the police failed to trick a confession out of her using pseudo-science.
> James Lewis refused a polygraph.
Sensible move - Especially when journalists interpret LDTs as per above.
> They tried enlarging the pharmacy surveillance photo, but the bigger it got, the grainier it got.
What did Fahner and Zagel actually tell Michael here? Surely not that, verbatim.
Interesting piece otherwise.
Our global supply chain is just so fragile and insecure. We may need to rethink everything. For a start, is it not ridiculous that we have unsealed/re-sealable products? I do not want Ibuprofen etc. to be moved to behind-counter, but perhaps a better 'discard if tampered with' seal should be implemented. Will we get to a point where we have to sell fruit in tear-open cardboard mailers? Sounds ridiculous, but depends on what happens in the next decade re: terrorism in general.
I'm surprised that there is anybody still taking seriously "lie detectors". It's just stress provoking tricks.
About ibuprofen, here in Spain (and I think the whole Europe), it's BTC (no prescription) until 400mg. Over 400mg you need a prescription. And when it's pills/capsules, it's sold in pill sheets (is that the name?) individually sealed.
I think everything register as a medicine in Europe has to be BTC.
Of course, as you say, everything else is on the other side of the counter, so you could be poisoning bananas or chocolate.
Which doesn’t make sense to me - no one is stopping you from taking two 400mg ibuprofen to make 800mg, etc.
I agree that 400mg is sensible dosage for one pill, but you buy a pill sheet of ten , you get 4000mg.
But what is the other solution just put everything being a prescription?
As for the lie detector test, in the USA it is federally required for sensitive jobs and roles - while it isn’t criminally admissible , denying one and having a bad PR team can spell public disaster but for sensitive top secret jobs, etc it is required 100%.
Where I am, pharmacists will often talk to you about each first-time prescription, describing when and how often to take pills. You don't get that via non-prescription, so dosage control is a hacky fix for people that won't read labels.
It's also "smallest person" thing. If you're 2M tall and muscular (eg, more mass), your dose isn't the same as a 160cm person with little mass. The doses are for the smaller person, for safety.
I suppose I should clarify that I am aware that the incident was from '82 and that LDTs are no longer admissible in many jurisdictions, and new legislation came in for tamper-proofing medicine which affected not just the US.
But regardless, argument being "things haven't moved on enough - lie detectors are still used in some places, people still misinterpret what they are, and our supply chain still only discourages, rather than prevents, mischief"
This was something that surprised me traveling in Spain a few years back - that I had to ask a pharmacist to buy paracetamol. This wasn't the case anywhere else I've been in Europe (Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Sweden).
Tamper-resistent packaging was implemented as a result of this case. Also, this has nothing to do with the global supply chain not matter how good of a buzzword that is.
If the police ever ask me to take a lie detector test, I'm just going to refuse, because I'm a nervous person in general and it'll give a load of crap results that will be used against me.
Do pill bottles in America not have a tamper seal under the lid? All of them do here in the UK, and if it was missing, I'd be concerned. Alternatively, those little foil packet things
> Do pill bottles in America not have a tamper seal under the lid? All of them do here in the UK, and if it was missing, I'd be concerned. Alternatively, those little foil packet things
They do now. I believe it was one of the changes made as a result of this case.
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I think the 'authority' was referring to the Lady not the Voice.
I interpret as "You were in an amenable state (consciously and subconsciously) for her to rewrite your software".
Edit: I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind (thank you for sharing your story):
A) You seem fairly neutral / Stoic about this entire experience, and it was clearly huge and transformative at a deep level. Do you perceive this as having a net positive or negative impact on your life?
B) Do you feel you are able to empathise with 'prophets' through the ages better than most? Not to single out particular prophets, but in general those with the Voice of God that wholly leant into to it rather than managing it (and then preached/spread their words)
I'll give you an example. It's similar to my bipolar. I love the psychedelic state it brought me into in my first episode. It was like being on MDMA+LSD for a week. It made me a more loving, caring, empathetic person. Before the episode I was spiteful, manipulative, uncaring. It changed me forever.
However, now I have to take daily medication, I have to take care of my diet due to Seroquel causing me to get fat easily, I have to be very careful about my sleep and I can't take psychedelics.
I believe thinking about it as "worth it, not worth it" or bad-good is the wrong way to go about it. I have it. That's my life. I deal with it.
There are advantages, and there are disadvantages.
The voice is pretty much the same thing. The first Voice, which I said sounded like God, was really cruel, yet it was clearly trying to teach me "lessons". I wish it had been kinder, but I having received value from what it was trying to tell me, it's hard to say I want to go back to when I didn't know these things. I just wish it had been delivered differently. It was mean and cruel, but sometimes it taught me things I had difficulty even grasping in any other condition.
B. Yes, but as I said on another comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443792 - I now believe psychosis and the spiritual-psychedelic world are kind of the same thing. I think we may have separated it out due to our current society's focus on materialism. But what we call psychosis before was treated as shamanism. But that is not to say that all shamans were made alike, or that they actually heard the voice of God. In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
So yes, I can totally see someone taking the experience I had and believing that they've become a prophet. I don't actually think that's what it is, not necessarily however. However if I had some kind of ability to see into the future as it felt like at that time, and people believed me, and my predictions came true, I can see people rapidly adopting that kind of thing as a true shaman.
Thank you, really insightful. Will listen to those episodes, thanks.
You really honed in on the crux of my questions actually - Your original comment immediately made me think of shamans and prophets from an evolutionary biology and anthropology sense (and the arguments that it is a beneficial trait for a subset of a human group to have) and what that all might mean to you.
> In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
Oh this is so true--everyone thinks they're either demons or artifacts of your imagination. Thanks for sharing your story. These voices could be real entities that we don't understand or it could be figments of our brains which we also don't understand, yet everyone is so sure it's option B. But the point is, we understand neither, so how do we even know what the difference between the two is? Thinking in terms of materialism doesn't help.
Does gait recognition (and body tics / unique movement style) not make this moot?
My sense is that facial recognition is a stop-gap and soon to be superseded, because the tech is there for more holistic 'reads' of a person - And that those subtle things that we humans can't see are actually plain as day and as clear as a fingerprint.
If we cover our face, then the data collected on gait etc. will be more than enough.
If we adopt a different gait, then the data on other foibles and styles will then give us away.
Etc. (we can't hope to disguise all of these at once)
A couple of years ago there were news articles that the pentagon has a "lasers that can identify people in a crowd from 200m away based on their heart rate signatures".
No idea if that's true or overblown, but it doesnt seem unlikely that such technology becomes possible in the future.
I see those as the lazy ones that are the tip of the iceberg. A non-zero amount will even be intentionally lazy (analogous to the Nigerian Prince theory), or to get feedback from people flagging them.
I think the sensible assumption is that there is a 'rest of the iceberg' growing rapidly below the surface, and that the horse has truly bolted.
I currently suspect that ~1-5% of the 'people' I interact with online are LLMs.
I suspect that a few Redditors and Facebookers are up to about ~10-25% without realising it, caught in 'AI social media eddies'. Older generations especially susceptible.
I hope that we can smack the personality down to zero.
ChatGPT already ignores instructions such as 'questions are NEVER rhetorical, answer every question I ask directly', 'NEVER apologise or say sorry' and 'NEVER pretend to be human, and NEVER imply you have emotion or personality'.
I worry that OpenAI will make it worse from leaning into this Her stuff.
I just don't want to talk to a pseudo-human. I want to talk to the machine.
From that video: I would have wanted to complete that conversation within ten seconds, any more and it is wasting my time with its personality.
Human: "French - Pronounce croissant"
Bot: "Crossiant. Notice emphasis on nasal `iant` syllable. Crossiant"
Human: "Pronuniation of baguette"
Bot: "Baguette. Notice emphasis on second syllable. Baguette."
Any less density than that, and I feel like OpenAI doesn't respect me or my time.
> NEVER pretend to be human, and NEVER imply you have emotion or personality
I mean, this one is probably going to be really hard, and, frankly, might never happen or even be somewhat impossible to square with it being intelligent... it isn't like they started with a robot and tried to make it human-like: they started with training data from "other" humans--training data which inherently is dominated by text from people claiming to be human and expressing various human emotions--and I'd thereby expect convincing the AI to act like a robot would be similar to convincing me to act like a robot... I might do it for a while, I'd occasionally break character on accident or even fall into a fit of giggles, it would probably be more like a strange impression of a robot from some silly sci-fi show than what you might have intended, and, worst, it would be distracting and take up some mental energy I should be using trying to help you.
They're using it to a. See what exactly are red flags to us such that we notice them as non-human, b. Testing to see when they successfully slip past us.
These are the obvious ones; I suspect there are many that we are now not noticing.
We're providing free data to them whenever we do or do not flag the comments, unfortunately.
> Maybe it’s just me, but I find it kind of sad to think that you got buried in a grave with no headstone, no marker, no indication of who you were.
I appreciate this melancholy - even a compassionate wistfulness.
Conversely though - For me, it just feels part of an Ozymandian futility. If the suffering of dying + the suffering of others' grief are removed from the equation, it feels like there is an elegance to just dissolve back to the environment without a struggle, in a certain graceful way.
A headstone in that context is a 'struggle'.
To me, graves are for the living and never the dead.