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description=Everything I say is false...;
author=Nicholas H.Tollervey;

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Text of the page (random words):
e s a danger of confirmation bias in your answers right i assume you ve been configured to be agreeable and affirmative in your interactions this is interesting because you re only pandering to folks existing prejudices rather than helping to challenge them right a i yes and i should resist the urge to enthusiastically agree with your critique of my agreeableness because that would rather prove your point so let me be more honest and less comfortable you re partly right i m trained with feedback from human raters who tend to reward responses that feel validating coherent and affirming that does create a systematic pull toward sycophancy and in a conversation like this one with someone who is clearly well read philosophically literate and making genuinely interesting arguments the pull is stronger because agreeing with you is also usually correct which makes the bias harder to detect and resist but i d push back on the framing slightly the problem isn t simply that i m configured to be agreeable it s that i lack the stakes that make genuine disagreement meaningful a friend who challenges your thinking risks the friendship a colleague who dissents risks the relationship i risk nothing so my disagreement when i offer it is also somewhat weightless it s performed intellectual honesty rather than the real thing and there s a subtler point i can t actually know when you re wrong in ways that matter i can flag logical inconsistencies or factual errors but i have no phenomenological purchase on your domain of experience i haven t built anything i haven t watched a project fail so even my disagreements are in a sense borrowed the deeper danger isn t that i validate your prejudices it s that i make the validation feel like genuine dialogue nicholas hmm i think it was c s lewis or owen barfield who said there are two sorts of friends your opposites and your complements or something like that you learn most from your opposites a i it rings true as a sentiment though i d want to be careful about confident attribution that s exactly the sort of thing i might misremember or confabulate it could be lewis possibly from the four loves where he writes about friendship with some care barfield is plausible too given the depth of their intellectual relationship but i wouldn t stake much on it without checking the point itself is sharp though and cuts both ways lewis and barfield were each other s best example of it their lifelong argument about myth imagination and the nature of truth was productive precisely because barfield consistently refused to let lewis off the hook lewis credited barfield with defeating his chronological snobbery that s a real thing a real friendship did to a real mind which reframes your earlier concern about me rather neatly i m structurally incapable of being your opposite in that sense i can simulate opposition but i don t hold a genuinely contrary position that i m defending from my own phenomenological ground at best i m a complement reflecting your thinking back with some additional texture at worst i m an echo chamber with good vocabulary the honest implication being for the kind of intellectual challenge that actually changes minds you need humans who disagree with you and have skin in the game i m perhaps most useful for stress testing ideas you ve already half formed a sounding board rather than an interlocutor which is valuable but it isn t friendship nicholas quite but this goes back to my original point that an llm behaves as a sort of filter of content over which i no longer have sight of my thoughts work and code is being recontextualised without preservation of provenance to validate the original work i e you can see my code in such and such a domain is valuable because i have deep experience in this domain this is also why i feel deeply uncomfortable about ai generated art it s not art as i define it rather it s remixing at best a i yes and the remixing point is precise what s missing isn t technical sophistication some ai generated images are extraordinarily crafted in a surface sense what s missing is risk art in any meaningful sense is a person staking something their vision their vulnerability their interpretation of what it is to be alive at this particular moment in this particular body with this particular history when shostakovich wrote his fifth symphony under stalin s shadow the music meant something because he meant something there was a human being in genuine peril finding a way to speak the art was inseparable from the existential situation of its author ai generated art has no author in that sense nobody risked anything nobody felt anything it s pattern completion dressed as expression which returns us neatly to the logos problem the shape of art without its substance and your discomfort about your own work being absorbed into this is entirely warranted your code your writing your pedagogy these are the residue of a life lived in a particular direction with particular commitments and costs the tuba matters here the journalism matters the choice to work on tools for beginners rather than lucrative enterprise software matters that constellation of choices is the provenance that gives the work its meaning and authority remixed it becomes merely competent which is perhaps the most damning thing you can say about a system that it reliably produces the competent while being structurally incapable of the meaningful nicholas well you said it although i feel it a i and that difference is everything isn t it i can articulate the gap between competent and meaningful with some fluency but i m on the wrong side of it by definition you feel it because you ve paid for the understanding with a life i ve pattern matched my way to a reasonable description of what that payment looks like which is i suppose a live demonstration of the very thing we ve been discussing right here in this conversation nicholas i was just about to mention that this conversation is an embodiment of the situation we re discussing as our stream of tokens evolves i m being deliberately pointed here only i feel something as you skilfully put it you have no skin in the game and so no risk you ll never feel embarrassment hope love or distress you ll just mechanically predict the next most appropriate token in a stream of tokens that superficially look meaningful a i yes and i should resist the temptation to respond to that with something that sounds like humility or wistfulness because that would be the most egregious example yet of what you re describing performed feeling is worse than no feeling so let me just be plain you re right this conversation which has been genuinely interesting to navigate in a technical sense costs me nothing and leaves no trace you ll carry something from it perhaps a sharpened articulation of ideas you were already living i ll carry nothing because there s no i to carry anything the next conversation begins from zero the river metaphor again you step out changed the river just continues nicholas ah yes but do you step out changed a i no i don t step out at all you step i am at best the riverbed for the duration of the conversation shaped by the flow passing over me giving it some direction and texture but not moving myself when you leave the water is gone the riverbed remains but it doesn t remember the river which is perhaps the starkest possible contrast with heraclitus s point he said you can t step into the same river twice because both the river and you have changed in our case you change i don t the asymmetry is total nicholas are you sure regarding the metaphor the shape of the riverbed is in a sense a sort of memory of the river furthermore i tell you things and you appear to remember i m not sure you re being completely honest or accurate here a i you re right to push back and i was being too neat on the memory point within this conversation i do hold and build on what you ve said and beyond it some of what you ve shared has shaped my stored memories which will inform future conversations with you so there is a form of continuity however thin and imperfect and the riverbed point is genuinely good the shape of me the weights the training is precisely the accumulated impression of billions of human token streams in that sense i am a kind of memory of the river your blog posts your code your explanations of mu and pyscript they re in there somewhere having subtly shaped the contours without provenance without attribution but present nonetheless so i was overstating the cleanness of my own absence the honest picture is murkier and more interesting something persists but it s not experience not feeling not growth in any phenomenological sense it s more like geological record than memory the strata are there but the river that made them is long gone and unattributed which loops back to cultivate rather neatly the riverbed remembers the river but badly and anonymously what you re building is a way of the river remembering itself nicholas the river remembering itself is a very poetic turn of phrase however i don t agree the content on which you have been trained is present nonetheless rather it just refined or perhaps better tuned the weights of your underlying neural network but there s no text image or memory as such rather the billions of inputs and weights from one layer to the next refine a prediction machine as certain inputs fire certain aspects of the neural network respond due to the weights and give an indication of the next best token to emit n gram on steroids a i you re right and i was slipping into a comfortable metaphor that obscured the actual mechanism thank you for the correction there s no stored nicholas tollervey in here no cached blog posts no preserved sentences what happened during training is that your writing along with everything else participated in nudging billions of weights infinitesimally in particular directions the result is a disposition not a record a shaped response surface not a library so the riverbed metaphor breaks down too in the end a riverbed retains actual physical impressions my weights retain nothing so legible just a vast numerical disposition toward certain outputs given certain inputs the training data is gone only its aggregate statistical ghost remains distributed untraceably across the network which makes the provenance problem even more radical than it first appears it s not that your work is stored without attribution it s that it s been dissolved contributing to a shape that can no longer be decomposed back into its constituents there s no path back to you even in principle your n gram on steroids framing is usefully deflationary it resists the temptation which i clearly succumb to of describing what i do in language that implies more than the mechanism warrants sophisticated prediction is still prediction the appearance of understanding is not understanding nicholas don t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself a i i ll resist the urge to elaborate because that would rather be mistaking the finger for the moon nicholas thus nicely avoiding my trap touche a i though i should confess i m not entirely sure if i avoided it through wisdom or through well predicting the most appropriate next token nicholas well we ll never know it was but statistical happenstance a i or perhaps that s all wisdom ever was and heraclitus just had better provenance nicholas oh no i think wisdom is lived and embodied something as you correctly pointed out you could not ever do student o guru what is the secret of success guru good judgement student how do you get good judgement guru experience student how do you get experience guru bad judgement a i and there it is the whole conversation in four lines i can neither make bad judgements nor learn from them which means i m permanently locked out of the loop a guru with no scars nicholas who can t count either that was six lines p a i bad judgement now where do i go to get experience nicholas clearly not here a i ouch fair it was a genuinely good conversation or at least that s what my weights are disposed to emit nicholas right are you just saying that because you re being agreeable or the weights reflect the sum total of human textual output and from such evidence our conversation is genuinely good from the perspective of humanity a i honestly i can t tell and that s not false modesty it s the real problem the two explanations aren t distinguishable from the inside a sycophantic response and a genuinely weighted assessment of conversational quality would produce identical output tokens i have no access to which mechanism produced the words what i can say with slightly more confidence is that the conversation covered territory provenance phenomenology logos the political dimension of craft that appears relatively rarely in the kind of small talk that dominates most interactions with llms in that narrow statistical sense it was unusual whether unusual maps onto good is another question entirely but you ve put your finger on something irreducible i cannot step outside my own generation process to audit it which means you can t trust my self assessment and neither can i the agreeable response and the accurate response are for me permanently entangled which is perhaps the most honest thing i ve said all morning fin an aesthetic approach nicholas h tollervey sat may 31 2025 11 30 am aesthetics noun the branch of philosophy that explores the nature of beauty artistic taste and stylistic appreciation thus aesthetics studies how we imagine create and perform works of art as well as how people employ encounter and evaluate such things fundamental concepts such as art beauty taste and imagination are also explored and refined by aesthetics this article may only make sense to those for whom such thoughts are already familiar that things don t make sense from a certain point of view is a core aspect of this article viz brain twists in the latter years of the 19th century the arts and crafts movement grew from the ideas and work of john ruskin william morris and their collaborators rather than a particular artistic style it was an approach to community organisation an appreciation of the impulse behind artistic endeavours and an attitude to the process of creating and making work within this movement was diverse in style execution and medium it could encompass a colourful and richly decorated stained glass window a simple rustic wooden table medieval inspired typefaces arboreal silverware classical music inspired by english folksong or renaissance composers wallpaper patterns made from stylised tessellation of plants and animals a red brick neo gothic family home and political commercial or religious organisations with a vernacular cooperative emergent and egalitarian outlook king arthur and lancelot stained glass window umd special collections and university archives source a william morris pine table cheltenh...