Alok Singh researches provable AI safety via formal verification using Lean at Max Tegmark’s Beneficial AI Foundation, and writes about mathematics at alok.github.io.
Chapters
0:00 - Intro
1:12 - Typing
8:45 - Elon’s demo day
22:42 - Animation, discrete vs continuous
29:04 - Number systems
35:26 - Nonstandard analysis
43:04 - Reasoning models and o3
50:45 - Fiction
55:48 - o1 and Linguistics
58:50 - Hyperfinite sets
1:11:58 - AI for math
1:16:01 - The field with one element
1:23:17 - Lean
1:31:53 - Lean for formally verifying superintelligence
1:36:03 - Ayn Rand
1:47:46 - Erewhon
1:57:56 - Proto-Indo-European
2:03:18 - More Erewhon
2:14:41 - Butler and Kaczynski
Links
Alok’s Website: https://alok.github.io/
Alok’s Twitter: https://x.com/TheRevAlokSingh
Beneficial AI Foundation: http://beneficialaifoundation.org/
Lean: https://lean-lang.org/
Transcript: https://www.theojaffee.com/p/podcast-alok-singh
More Episodes
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/57jr42wk
Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/mrxkkhb4
Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/yck8pnmf
My Twitter: https://x.com/theojaffee
My Substack: https://www.theojaffee.com
Transcript
Theo Jaffee
Sure, yeah, could just start with the informal beginning chat.
Alok Singh
Yeah, everyone loves a cold open.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah. So you mentioned like you have a bunch of stories that you wanted to talk about. Yeah, you said typing, Elon's demo day, coral and the bat.
Alok Singh
I did
Okay, well, typing.
I had typing class when I was like, I don't know, eight or something, like with a keyboard. And did you guys have that?
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, we did. I didn't retain much of it. I typed with like four or five fingers. It's probably bad. I should learn how to type.
Alok Singh
Well, I didn't retain
any of it because what happened was one day the teacher saw me looking down and so she reset my progress to the very beginning in the typing tutor thing we had and I found that so Demoralizing that I just like gave up on it and just type like this for the next like 20 years Not 20 until I was about 20 Then I started doing programming and like four months of programming it like 10 words a minute is just terrible
And this guy, Steve Yegge, has an article, Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret, where he quotes a section from Reservoir Dogs of Mr. Pink talking about how he doesn't tip and that his advice for waitresses is, learn to fucking type. Yegge always says things in a roundabout way, but it resonated with me. And at the time I found an old book.
in the 60s called LSD the problem solving psychedelic was talked about a guy using it for typing and then I didn't do it for one day on a Sunday.
Yeah. then like, I couldn't type. decided I would learn Colmak instead of QWERTY or Dvorak because the reason is really silly. It's just that I'd seen a cute girl at a hackathon who I've never seen since using it.
No deeper reason. Like maybe it is ergonomically better and all, but that wasn't the reason at all. And within one day I taught myself to type. went from, well, not zero, but 10 words to about 70, or rather 30, just going with some typing tutor.
Like I think about substance that I didn't take is that like a kid, they just like completely remove the feeling of as an adult of like you fuck up and you feel bad for a second, but you just don't. You just notice I made a mistake and then you fix it and you just keep moving on. And there's no moment of pausing like that. And especially for something like typing, which is hundreds of little mistakes to begin with anyway, it adds up. So by the end of like eight hours of typing, I was at 30 words a minute, which is
pretty damn good for one day. But then I had these like weird dreams that night of
Like in, I think, Call of Duty Black Ops, maybe? One of the Call of Duty games, there's some character, Mason, who sometimes hallucinates these big red numbers that look like they're splashed in blood, like graffiti across his visual field. And I had dreams of letters that night, my fingers kept twitching.
And then I detested out, I didn't type at all for a week, which after a lifetime of not doing it was pretty easy. Dude, used to have, I used to like handwrite all my school assignments and talk about a typical mind fallacy. I wondered why people typed stuff that I was so deep in the stupid hole that I created for myself that I forgot the typing is faster.
Theo Jaffee
Back in like third grade, they made us learn cursive and even then I remember thinking like, I ever gonna use this ever? Nope, turns out, nope, I never use it. I type everything. When I do have to handwrite stuff, I found that my handwriting has weirdly like converged towards my dad's handwriting, kind of for no reason. Like my handwriting now just looks a lot like my dad's handwriting, even though I didn't try to emulate it. So maybe handwriting is just genetic.
Alok Singh
Yeah, my dad's handwriting is as ugly as my own.
and my brother's too. My mom's handwriting is like only a little better. But anyway, after a week of not typing, which is easy after a lifetime of not typing, then I did an exercise again and I could do, I was at 70 words a minute, which was very surprising.
So for the cumulative total of eight hours of typing practice, I was up at 70 words.
Theo Jaffee
Wow, good exponential improvement.
Alok Singh
Now it's like stabilized
somewhat to like 80 or 90 and maybe another session like this and it could go over 100. But this is pretty fast, so I'm reasonably satisfied.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm. Wow, I guess I'm kind of proud of myself now that I can type like 120 with like five or six fingers.
Alok Singh
So now type on like this keyboard. I started out when typing using just a MacBook keyboard and to prevent myself from cheating that one day I took a bunch of electrical tape and I taped over all the keys and then midweek I spent like three hours scraping off the electrical tape with when I closed the lid the heat just sort of like fused it to the keyboard and the sticky stuff started to leak out and got all gross.
then I got this, not for the ergonomic reason, but it is ergonomic. Or actually, I'd rather I got this.
And then they released a wireless version a few years later.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I just use a pretty standard Black Widow V3, Razer Black Widow V3 gaming keyboard. And really I only use this for gaming, pretty much. Like, I do almost all of my work on my laptop and not on my expensive gaming PC, which I basically use as a Fortnite machine. Though maybe I should work on it more.
Alok Singh
and
I play Fortnite on the Vision Pro.
Theo Jaffee
Really? With a MacBook?
Alok Singh
You don't need a MacBook, you can do it. If you have internet that's good enough, like fiber or any 100 megabits per second is enough. You can get Nvidia GeForce now and like a PlayStation controller. Maybe you exclusively play with keyboard and mouse and you could probably set that up. But in my case anyway, I use the controller and then I can play it with the giant screen on the surface of the moon.
Theo Jaffee
Is GeForce now like cloud gaming? So is it slow as hell? Yeah. Yeah.
Alok Singh
Yes, that's why you need a good internet. No, that's why you need a good internet. With good internet,
the latency is really not that bad. I'm not such a pro gamer where a few extra milliseconds makes an enormous difference to me, which I'm fine with. I used to game a lot and then I gave it up.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I have honestly never really gamed that much, which might be surprising to people who know other aspects of my personality, but I don't know, I never got addicted to it. I never got one-shotted by Factorio, as they say. I do play like a reasonable amount of Fortnite, but that's like the only game I play.
Alok Singh
Fortnite and Smash Bros were the only video games I'd really played after high school. I played a little bit of one of the Zelda games one night where I spent like four hours on it at a party, but that was a one-off.
Theo Jaffee
So tell me about Elon's demo day. I'm curious about that.
Alok Singh
Also a story of not drugs. Yeah, yeah. Let's see. It was.
Theo Jaffee
SF people love their drugs,
Alok Singh
2020 maybe? It's when he first announced the robot. So I got invited to it randomly. I don't know, maybe they scraped LinkedIn for my email or something. And complete with this nice Uber ticket that's copped for.
So I spent the whole Uber ride, like I just noticed when we were, me and the driver passing by some of the billboards at SF, how the light glinted off some stuff. And a while ago, I started noticing like rainbows around lighted objects. Like it depends on the object. I think it's like a sort of a stigmatism. It's like a traffic light, like the red and the green. They're...
Theo Jaffee
I see streaks
in halos, but not rainbows.
Alok Singh
Well, traffic lights don't have rainbows. They have just one color and I'll see like a sort of truncated sphere of light around them. But like a car light from the headlights. Then I'll see a rainbow around it, actually several, but the first in like concentric spheres. But the first one is dramatically brighter than the others and it's rare to see the second one. And I extrapolate that they go out essentially to infinity, but drop off in intensity very quickly so you can't see the majority of them.
and
This just got me down like a train of thought about the electromagnetic field and how the four fundamental interactions, electromagnetism is the main one where we can apply art. Gravity is so weak, like I think 34 orders of magnitude weaker than the weak force. So gravity only really matters mostly at the biggest scales, which we generally don't build things in yet. Fingers crossed on that one.
But unless you're building like a superstructure or trying to detect, yeah, like little waves, gravity generally doesn't matter all that much. The strong and weak forces were not even discovered until the mid 1900s, since they acted atomic scales and are also outside of nuclear engineering, mostly inaccessible for everyday experience, which leaves electromagnetism to explain like basically everything.
A good deal of chemistry at large is from electromagnetism, material properties of wire things, strong or soft or hard, etc. Electromagnetism.
and then this led me down some other train of thought.
But then the ride arrived in their deer creek, deer park, whatever, their office in Palo Alto. And I'd just been talking to the driver a bit at this point. And he asked jokingly if I could get him in. I decided on a whim, you know what, I'll just try. I'll just ask them. And then when I told him that, he looked genuinely afraid. And I just felt this impossibly large gulf between us. And I felt really sad. Like there was some
void that he could not cross and not because they would bar him at the gate but like more.
I swallowed it and just walked through. Still think about that.
Theo Jaffee
interested.
So the Elon's Demo Day story was not actually about the Elon Demo Day.
Alok Singh
No, no, I'm not even close to done. This was just like part of the lead up, it was a whole thing.
Theo Jaffee
⁓
Alok Singh
Then.
The demo itself. Well, it hadn't started yet. So everyone just sort of milling about. was relatively early. So there's maybe like, I don't know, 20 people out of a few hundred and
Look, I say hi to a guy who doesn't recognize me at all and I won't name him.
and
was really shitty. So like, it just had no calories. So I saw the the staff, whatever the polite word for them as the helpers. What some our grandparents would have called servants, but we don't say that because that's We're
Theo Jaffee
You're allowed to say server,
but not servant.
Alok Singh
That's true, actually. The servers and security staff, whatever the staff, they had some Domino's pizza and I was starving. I asked for some, I offered to pay, but they just like gave me some. And then they spent the whole time when I was eating, doing what
was like a fan of gossip, totally unknown to me, where they basically identified each other by astrological signs and then talked about like unfriendly people having Pisces eyes and how they could tell.
Pisces eyes comment, they seem like weirdly at pains to say it in earshot or just out of earshot of me. I wonder if they meant me in that case, but I have no idea. I'm a Capricorn anyway.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I was gonna ask.
Alok Singh
Yeah I was born in January after all, like early January.
But then I started just wandering around the parking lot, like up and down, just idly thinking.
about well data gathering and the
It doesn't make sense inside a head, but just expanded out just sound like rambling nonsense. So stain of thought or babbling to use modern terms. was like along the lines of this combination of
Theo Jaffee
end of thought.
Alok Singh
how the concrete world contains the abstract world.
It has all the abstract information is in the concrete world, but there's more besides like specific incidental facts and not just necessary ones. And then I just thought Tesla should make a robot for data gathering. That it would be really expensive, but they should bite the bullet because they were the one company I thought could actually pull it off in the being controlled so top down.
They could have one guy that would just push on it because people have tried humanoid robots before, but everyone has failed in this because they haven't had the commitment to go to insane lengths, which is necessary. Like everyone sort of backs off halfway. They think they want a humanoid robot, but then in their efforts to build a new earth, their vision of a new heaven dims and they back off from the humanoid robot to like a factory one or some specialized thing that's not humanoid anymore.
Theo Jaffee
think this is changing now.
Alok Singh
Yeah, but this was five years ago, so.
Theo Jaffee
And what do mean by a robot for data gathering?
Alok Singh
The
Because a robot that's like a human has basically the same interface as we do to gather data that we care about minus smell for now.
Theo Jaffee
and
maybe some other things.
Alok Singh
taste, the more continuous senses, that's true. But it's still better configured since the world has been organized by us.
and made legible by that organization. Like so much of the point of like ordering stuff is to make it legible to us. And the
A robot that's shaped like us and that has to interact by basically the same means, although hopefully more competently, is in a better position to access it and can do all sorts of random idiosyncratic tasks, well, as many as we can do, that a car or a squirrel or a pick and replace robot just can't do.
and that
between language and, what's his name, a continuous world, which I'll just say vision, that's a short form for all that. You've probably heard me rant about discrete and continuous many times.
Theo Jaffee
Many times, yes.
Alok Singh
And while the continuous side seems to be the harder one, at least for machines, like even now, image models have some very impressive stuff, but people have pushed on text much more. I mean, I can see why it's got the same advantages of as discrete stuff, that equality is a meaningful question for it. And it's easier to evaluate if something is right or not. But most of the world is still in this like physical continuous realm.
and going back to Tesla, well, they have their cars and of course Waymo has them too, but Waymo doesn't seem like the kind of company that was or is going to build robots to do things other than drive.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, not likely.
Alok Singh
And while I'm wondering,
and then while I'm just like wandering around this parking lot up and down thinking these, I realized, wait, shit, the demo's already started. And it's apparently too full. And I don't want to just like stand outside and look at the screen like some asshole, cause I could just like watch it later. So I continue wandering around the parking lot. And then I find out after the whole day is done, that actually the thing he announced with the robot.
Theo Jaffee
Wow.
Alok Singh
was quite a feeling. Also this like very visceral experience of like that phrase the child is the father to the man. Have you heard this one?
Theo Jaffee
I but I forgot the context.
Alok Singh
Like, the child is father to the man because the things you do in the past affect the things you do in the future, in short. And in this way, the stuff you do as a child affects the things you can do as a man, and in that way is their father. Also the mother, but whatever.
I just had these visual hallucinations of the many possible arcs.
of like my own, what's the word, my world volumes or possible world volumes.
Theo Jaffee
What do mean?
Alok Singh
world volume is like
The world is basically your timeline. Volume, because it's like 3D moving through space, moving through time. So your world volume is essentially all the set of states you'll ever occupy.
FaceTime. And at least assuming for the moment that it is changeable. It may well not be, but whatever. For the visualization, it didn't matter.
suddenly I felt much less here and rather spread out throughout all of it. Like I was a steward for my future self and that's like every moment is like a fire brigade with the water bucket chain handing it off to the next person, which is me in the next instant and just getting handed a bucket for me in the last instant.
Theo Jaffee
And you got all that from thinking about humanoid robots at Tesla?
Alok Singh
It just came around at same time. It was a big swirl of thoughts, like a lightning storm. That's not so uncommon.
That was a very freeing thought.
Suddenly I felt much nicer to myself. Not such an inner critic.
if it was directly related to the robots, only incidentally. It also made the overall experience maybe more interested in hardware.
An interest that I've still only done a little bit with, because stuff takes a lot of time. But it was one of the examples I like to give people about why lean is cool. Not the drug kids.
Theo Jaffee
I love lean!
Alok Singh
Lean for real is a Playboy Cardi song, right? just whatever. Because there's a song by Travis Scott called Fiend where a friend of mine sent me Fiend, but it's Indian. So the background beats is like some Indian thing playing and it was awesome. But then there's the joke of what was it?
Theo Jaffee
Maybe? I don't know. I'm not exactly a Cardi fan. Let's do a few songs.
Whole lotta red. Sky.
Alok Singh
Dravinder Srinathan featuring Prabhakar Karthik. Travis Scott featuring Playboi Carti. Prabhakar Karthik, though, I don't know, that just triggered the grooves in my brain and I found it endlessly funny. I'll send you the link, actually. And you can listen to it later.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Hahaha
That is funny.
or like Pavitr Prabakhar from the Spider-Verse movie.
Alok Singh
God. I don't like the Spider-verse movies. That's like some smarmy cunt who can hear all these things about how he's making things worse, but then he says, no, I'm a do-me. Literally what he says. And that just annoyed me so much. Like the vampire Mexican Spider-Man that everyone hates on. No, he's a good guy.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Alok Singh
Do some stupid Deus Ex Machina so he can have it all, of having his daddy and his mommy and his timeline and everyone else's timeline. But it's still bullshit.
Theo Jaffee
Mm, did you like the art at least?
Alok Singh
Meh. Space elevator is cool.
Theo Jaffee
No way.
Merely meh, it was probably like the best, you know, innovation in like animated filmmaking in the last like 20 years.
Alok Singh
I remember one thing from
it, actually, two scenes I remember very specifically, and the overall feeling of this contrast between, like, obviously drawn and then hyper realistic. The two scenes that stood out for me as hyper realistic is one, a scene of a shopping mall with a glass bridge, and it's shot from like head on and then the sun is rising over it. And for that scene, just for a moment, looked like reality. And also the scene where they're jumping around cars, it's night and
You can see the lights of the cars going down and you can see the subsurface reflection into the tarmac of the road. And that also just looked real. For like that fast. And I think about that a lot.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's
a much needed innovation from the sort of like 3D Pixar style that had just like dominated basically all animation for like the last 15 years. Like when was the last, yeah, when was the last time you saw a compelling 2D animated movie before Spider-Verse?
Alok Singh
the Eternal Virgin style.
Plenty of Japanese movies, but Japan's special.
Theo Jaffee
Sorry,
compelling 2D American movie before Spider-Verse. There's plenty of Japanese ones.
Alok Singh
When did the white man
do 2D well? That's a better question.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, the Japanese do it way better than the white man. My revealed preference is that most of the animated...
Alok Singh
Maybe the spine of night.
I didn't know the Spine of Night looked like dog shit. Everyone looks like they're moving with broken limbs in soft body physics where they have no bones. Which is a contradiction, but whatever.
Theo Jaffee
Most of the animated content I've watched has been Japanese animated content because it's good. They do a good job. It's aesthetically pleasing. The stories are good. I guess another example of like innovative sort of 2D animation or innovative animation in general was Kubo and the Two Strings, which was Japanese inspired. That was American. It was okay. I sort of remember the story being pretty good. The animation itself, not my favorite.
Alok Singh
Yeah, I saw it.
Wasn't the one also like clay nation
though?
Theo Jaffee
I just don't like claymation. Maybe I'm biased, but I just don't think that it's, you know...
Alok Singh
It's
like one handed pottery. It's really impressive you can work with one hand, but no, it doesn't look that good.
Theo Jaffee
It's yeah, it's technically impressive that you can reshape clay tens of thousands of times, but it just looks kind of creepy. Even good clay nation movies, like there are good clay nation movies like Coraline. Was Coraline clay or something similar to that?
Alok Singh
Actually, yeah, it's...
You can't look at that part, think so.
stop motion.
Theo Jaffee
Coraline wasn't literally claymation, but it was that sort of vibe.
Alok Singh
Well, if stop motion, mean, claymation and stop motion usually go hand in hand because you kind of need it because if you're live sculpting something. ⁓ one movie I liked quite a lot, The Peasants. It's this Polish movie. It's hand drawn.
Theo Jaffee
Mm-hmm.
Technically, isn't all animation
stop motion?
Alok Singh
We can talk to screen. Continuous, but maybe wait a bit.
Theo Jaffee
That's, yeah,
that's a very good discrete and continuous top.
Alok Singh
Yeah, that's one where often, even when like the object of our concern is ultimately discrete, and our original conception of it is discrete, it's still profitably round tripped through the continuous. Like of, okay, a movie, like The Peasants, the person, the movie is hand drawn. And everything, looks like diffusion and that everything is literally flowing. Like if you watch every moment, because it's
is hand drawn, there is no two scenes, even when they're standing still, are actually the same unless they're reproducing the exact per-stroke frame the same, which they aren't. So every moment is flowing, not flickering, because it's not like little points of light like a kid's memories.
Theo Jaffee
is.
Is our perception of time discrete or continuous?
Alok Singh
continuous. It's like one of those things that maybe it's ultimately discrete, but is thought of as continuous. okay, like, draw, like in drawing that movie, while people are drawing, and that certainly feels, at least each frame feels pretty discrete to them, because they have to draw the damn thing themselves. And then there's the ultimate thing kind of is discrete when you think about it for a second. But then the intermediate, and what they're shooting for is the illusion of continuity.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm. Sometimes you can perceive it. On ones vs. on twos.
Alok Singh
Or even a more. Yeah, a more mathematical example
would be well, like things with limits like say the Taylor series of E to the X, where you can start with a continuous compound interest formula of one plus X over N all to the power of N limit as N goes to infinity. Well, that's N many steps discrete. But then it's idealized as being some continuous formula, E to the X, which you take a derivative of.
to get the Taylor series and then to compute it while you truncate the Taylor series. So you started with discrete with this like to the power of n formula. Then you just lift it to the continuum and you work with all these nice properties, including the shifting property within its binomial series, which lets you get this X to the n over n factorial Taylor series. And then you go back down to discrete by chopping the Taylor series to some finite term. Usually like five or six terms is good enough.
to get a very accurate approximation. Mercifully, that one converges very fast for almost all values.
Theo Jaffee
So yeah, let's talk about math. Do you think, you sent me this article that was like the most important, biggest breakthrough in the history of math was the development of Arabic numerals, which is, the numeral system.
Alok Singh
be like the Hindu guy and say Hindu numerals or Indian numerals. The Arabs did not do anything with the number system in terms of actually developing the numbers themselves. Like there's this annoying trend of like Indian guys that even Aldous Huxley noted of trying to claim that every invention is made by of course in a variably ancient India which I fucking hate but this one actually was.
Theo Jaffee
he was.
Alok Singh
We was yogis and shit. Well, not my ancestors. They were farmers. But this one they deserve credit for. Like the same article mentions that of number systems that the Indian one, the one we use now has three aspects, which all other civilizations, including present ones, had at the most two aspects of, and most were lucky to get even one, which is
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, on God.
Alok Singh
that the numerals have no intuitive association with their size. Like the numbers four and seven when you write them out, seven doesn't look bigger than four. Whereas if you did tallying, it definitely does. So the problem is then, if you don't do that, this is not a logical requirement, but it's a psychological one where invariably people will use like a dot or a line for one and then what do do for two? Well, two dots or lines. Yeah, but even, they cut it, son.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, that's Chinese.
Alok Singh
Yeah, but after four, they cut it off and start using ones that don't look like anything special. Which is good. But most primitive civilizations, and Ifra's book goes into like painful detail about all the primitive civilizations and how they just end up in the local minima of tallying. Because tallying is a base one system and because all of like multiplications properties become degenerate because one is the identity of multiplication.
the fact that, okay, you can fit a thousand numbers into four base 10 digits, because log 10 is just lost.
that don't get this exponential compression. And so long numbers take a long time to write out a really long time, like 1000 tallies takes a while.
Theo Jaffee
Telling is still actually good for a handful of use cases.
Alok Singh
Yeah, a handful, up to five, like the fingers, a hand. That's the problem. That's the nice thing about it. It's like sugar.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah. Like at the gym I go to, they have a whiteboard.
Alok Singh
and sleeping with a hot girl without a condom is appealing in the short term, but it's got some problems in the long.
Theo Jaffee
I'll go.
Yeah. So do you think this was the biggest development in the history of math?
Alok Singh
Well, yeah, mean, even now, like if you ask people, well, what do you what math you use? Most people can. Well, I most of the can't answer at all, but if they've thought about a really long time, the only answer they can honestly give is like counting. Addition, maybe multiplication.
Theo Jaffee
Addition, did you addition?
Little multiplication.
Alok Singh
And like division is already getting beyond most people. Okay, here's the thing. If I randomly had uniform selected someone from the entire world over the age of 10, and they have to add one fifth and one seventh together correctly. And if they can do it, you get let's say 100K, but if they fail, you die, would you take it?
Theo Jaffee
No way.
⁓ no, but that's, that's, that's adding fractions. That's not division.
Alok Singh
Uniformly random the whole-
store.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, like division is like, okay, like let's say you have like eight oranges and you have four people that you have to distribute the oranges to. So how many oranges do you give each person? Like people sort of intuitively get them.
Alok Singh
Okay, how about if you have eight,
what if you have seven oranges and have eight people?
Theo Jaffee
Okay, whole number division.
Yeah, yeah, like most people can't do fractions in their head. Most people.
Alok Singh
Motherfucker.
Most people can't do fractions, period.
Theo Jaffee
Mm.
Alok Singh
Like, it's polite to pretend otherwise, but I don't believe it.
Theo Jaffee
So you think that the median person over the age of 10 in the world is capable of counting, they're capable of adding, basic multiplication and like maybe basic division of natural numbers and that's it?
Alok Singh
when they evenly divide things or are like very common fractions like a half and a fourth and even the fact that like one fourth plus one fourth is a half i wouldn't expect them to be able to arithmetically grasp that if i put like one fourth of something in front of them yeah but i wouldn't expect them to like know it in the same way they know like seven plus three is ten like that
Theo Jaffee
Maybe if they're cooking.
If they cook with recipes, they get it. Or like, this recipe calls for two tablespoons. Yeah.
Alok Singh
Do you know how to cook?
That's good.
Theo Jaffee
This recipe
calls for two tablespoons. How many teaspoons is that? ⁓ well, there's three teaspoons a tablespoon, so it's six teaspoons.
Alok Singh
my mom cook, my mom was like an engineering manager and even ⁓ sorry mom I shouldn't disparage my bloodline on tv like this.
Theo Jaffee
I don't know maybe maybe we're typical
Alok Singh
But no, I don't think the average
person can do fractions.
Theo Jaffee
Are we just typical mind fallacying here? Am I just typical mind fallacying here?
Alok Singh
I mean, I certainly am not, because with my typical mind, judging by the people I hang out with, is that the average person knows multivariable calculus, which is definitely not true.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Alok Singh
or like just basic real analysis, not even complex. would be.
Theo Jaffee
You think that the median person you hang out with
on a regular basis knows real analysis?
Alok Singh
No, but I think the person I hang out with has at least heard of it, which I don't think the median human have. At all. Not even close. I don't think even like tenth percent, 90th percent, whatever, the top 10 percent, the cutoff there has heard of it.
Theo Jaffee
I didn't even tell you I'm finally taking math again. I'm back on my math grind. I'm doing differential equations.
Alok Singh
Really? Like what?
Again, non-standard analysis, bro. It's the way. Worst thing about it is the name.
Theo Jaffee
What is non-centered analysis again?
Alok Singh
You can extend the number system one more time, which should be a familiar theme. Cause you know, when we're little kids or embryos, really, we know like one, two, three, and then eventually you learn, you can just keep counting. So infinity kind of gets tacked on then zero, the negatives fractions, actually fractions come kind of pre-built in the simpler ones anyway, negative numbers came later, but then like irrational numbers, we have a pre-
formal understanding of the real numbers, some idea of a number line has come from the very beginning, but not much mechanical understanding of it. Like they'd have an irrational number considering how many people still argue if pi is 22 over 7. Even my own dad. I had to explain to him what a transcendental number was and an irrational number.
Theo Jaffee
Isn't that like
easily like disprovable though?
Alok Singh
So.
Theo Jaffee
You can just Google what is pi and it's like a very long decimal and then you Google what is 22 over seven and it's a much shorter decimal that doesn't even equal pi after a certain number of decimal places.
Alok Singh
You can also
Google that Claude is better than GPT at stuff and yet how many people use Claude?
Theo Jaffee
Can you actually Google that? Let's see. Is Claude better than ChatGPT?
Alok Singh
kind of, as far as the answers go.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, it seemed
to say yes, but like you'd have to know what cloud is in order to Google it.
Alok Singh
yeah.
Theo Jaffee
I have a stack. use ChatGPT o1 for math and, you know, advanced coding stuff. And I use Claude for everything else. Word, Selvers shape, rotator tasks.
Alok Singh
Right. Anyway, going back to what is non-center analysis. So we play the game of like completing the numbers and there's a practical point to each level where the point of zero is to like round out or to really make it possible to properly do addition because it's the identity of addition. And without zero negative numbers, which allow you to complete addition and finally give an answer to two minus three, which
Certainly I thought as a little kid it's impossible, you just can't do that. And now it's to me, it's like the act of identifying with addition and negation is just so intuitive that it's easy to forget that they're separate operations really. But without zero, the operation of negation doesn't even make sense because the defining property of a negative is that adding it to the thing it's the negative of is zero. A property pretty easily explained for fractions because the number one
the identity for multiplication happens to be like maybe the most intuitive number.
I if I'm like, the concept of one, it's just over. Before it even began.
Theo Jaffee
What?
Alok Singh
Like if a human cannot grasp at some like pre-formal level the concept of like one. Like if someone doesn't get that one plus one is two, I don't think you can teach them math. Luckily even animals understand this and infants do.
Theo Jaffee
I see.
Well...
Yeah, I mean, I would say the bar for not being able to teach someone math has got to be higher than that, right?
Alok Singh
Yeah, but if they can't get this, then they definitely can't get the rest of the edifice.
Theo Jaffee
What do you think the minimum bar is? Like what makes someone Turing complete for learning math?
Alok Singh
addition and multiplication.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, that makes sense. What about negative numbers?
Alok Singh
practically speaking, but that's just like in addition, like addition properly grasped.
Theo Jaffee
I guess you don't even need to think of negative numbers as intuitive if you can just pretend that they are for a long enough time period. It shouldn't be that hard.
Alok Singh
Well, that's like that von
Neumann quote, you don't understand things, you just get used to them. Like, you can construct, for example, a rational number, an integer as a pair of naturals. In fact, an infinite set of a pair of naturals that all have the property that the first number minus the second number is the same negative, or they have the same difference. So if the number negative one would be identified with a one, two,
two, three, three, four, and so on as an equivalence class. It's like a formal construction that actually, if you can understand a negative number, can definitely understand, that doesn't guarantee you can understand the construction. And if you could understand the construction, but not a negative number before you saw the construction, you're like some weird mutant. Because I don't know of anyone who's been able to understand the concept of an equivalence class of an infinite pair of, set of pairs.
Theo Jaffee
Mm-hmm.
Alok Singh
to negative numbers before they even could understand what a negative number was just at an intuitive level at some point. But you like absorb them and now negative numbers probably feel like kind of familiar and at least sort of real or let's say actual.
Theo Jaffee
Well, it does kind of make
sense. Like if you have pairs that are like 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, like you already kind of know that like the gap between each of those is 1, right? So if you subtract big number minus small number, you get that gap, that interval. But if you subtract small number minus big number, you get the same thing but negative. But that doesn't seem that difficult to understand.
Alok Singh
Yeah, and you didn't know that, then this construction would make no sense.
Yeah.
Now you're typical minding. Anyway, you can get integers as a pair of naturals by doing this construction. And then you can get a rational of rational as a pair of integers. So a quadruplet or a pair of pairs of naturals by decompiling it one level further that have that satisfy the property of rational number addition and multiplication, mostly addition one, because it's not obvious, which is why people fuck up fractions because people add like what's one half plus one half.
Theo Jaffee
Okay.
hair of naturals.
Alok Singh
two fourths.
Theo Jaffee
So what is non-centered analysis?
Alok Singh
It's another step in this completion process. Just to get rationals, you can, to be able to take a square root, need irrationals and there you're at the reals. Then if you want to solve polynomials and for do rotations as in particular with Euler's formula, you need complex numbers. But if you want to do calculus or analysis or differential equations, which is finally getting to that point, you need, or you end up crudely reinventing infinitely big and small numbers.
So it's the number system augmented with infinitely small numbers, infinitely big numbers, the regular numbers, and then the various combinations thereof.
Like you can pull up a graph if you look up like.
Theo Jaffee
So non-standard
analysis is like an umbrella term for calculus and diff eq
Alok Singh
way of doing it.
with this extension of real numbers. I mean, also complex numbers, the construction's pretty generic.
which is better than the limit approach, which is usually taught for many reasons, which I've went into on the internet and we'll go into some of, but it's like a whole long rant.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I mean, personally I'm excited for reasoners to continue to get good enough so that they can just teach me, like, real analysis. o1 pro might already be there.
Alok Singh
It doesn't let me send pictures. It'll send it to you on
Yeah, those you should just pay the 200 don't be such a cheapskate
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I know. I actually have used it on my dad's account. Very good stuff.
Alok Singh
Well, for once your dad's the one who's not a cheapskate unlike you. That's a surprise. Like I couldn't get my dad even now to pay 20 bucks. Certainly not 200. The number of engineers who won't pay 200.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean...
Alok Singh
animals, just godless men.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, oh and Sam said that he's not raising the price on 03. So 03 and 03 Pro will continue to be 200 bucks a month. So just pure value add. We'll see how good 03 is. I don't know, like do you know anyone with safety testing access to it? I saw some people who say it's very, very good.
Alok Singh
I hurt.
out.
Like what, on Twitter or personally?
Theo Jaffee
people that I know personally on Twitter.
Alok Singh
Of course. Well, not yet. For 03mini. 03mini is the speed that excites me, but I think for me to get satisfied, I will have to try the full thing. So that has what I really want. Like pushing the edge of...
Theo Jaffee
The full, full thing is
like a gazillion dollars.
Alok Singh
If can write me a paper. Because I've got ideas.
Theo Jaffee
Well, it costs
like 1.5 million just to solve Arc AGI.
Alok Singh
How many questions was that?
Theo Jaffee
Actually don't know. I think it was on the order of like a few hundred.
Alok Singh
And also, I mean, they'll be providing something
that they will call the full thing. And I think that will be plenty good. It will be certainly like noticeably better than o1 pro, I would hope. So O3 Mini is probably not gonna be as good as o1 pro, but you know, a lot faster, which is nice. There's also the DeepSeq one that came out today. I've asked it a couple of questions. Being able to read its chain of thought is real nice.
Theo Jaffee
This is a different model than the one that was already out. I thought the big release today was just a paper.
Alok Singh
Yeah, R1. This is the reason R1.
Nope, model. MIT licensed even. You can like make money off of it.
Theo Jaffee
I used a DeepSeek Reasoner model over the last few weeks.
Alok Singh
Unless you use the one that came out
today, it's not the one. That's V3. It's good, but it's not as good as this one.
Theo Jaffee
so it's
just a reason they're based on V2.
Alok Singh
think it's based on V3, but I have to look at their paper. In any case, its performance is roughly comparable to o1, but you can run it locally if you've got the compute. And it's certainly a lot cheaper. What is that?
Theo Jaffee
how much compute you need.
I have a
mid-quality GPU for video games.
Alok Singh
Nope.
No, more than that. How much does it take actually? The model is, for one is like 800 and something, 71 billion parameters. Although you only have to be able to load up a slice of that, but I think the slice is still like quite large. We'll just ask perplexity. Launch VRAM, run R1.
Theo Jaffee
Do you think 03 will be substantially better on wordcel tasks? Because it seems like a lot of people are skeptical of reasoners because they think that the RL on them only applies to like easily verifiable tasks like math and programming. Cause it's like hard to do RL for something you can't specify a reward for, like poetry.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
think it'd be less good. The jump would be less dramatic. But I think, especially if the model hits like some level of capability, it can get into this point where it starts. Well, I don't know if benefiting is the word benefiting from the gap between generation and verification, where like you can't write Dostoevsky, probably. But you can read him and it's like, damn, this guy's real good. Or at least he's better than like the other crap someone wrote was better than your high school essay, hopefully.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I hope so. I can't read Russian, but I imagine.
Alok Singh
translation is really good nonetheless, if the Russian one is even better, then well, damn. Actually, a little personal project I thought of, though it's not that good a use of time, is reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, especially the Odyssey, in Ancient Greek, cross-translated with GPT into English, but also Proto-Indo-European. Like sort of three columns side by side.
Theo Jaffee
That actually doesn't seem that hard.
You could do that with like a prompt scaffold, like today.
Actually though, with some LLMs...
Alok Singh
It's not that doing, it's more like working through
it. It's like working through it in depth is the point.
Theo Jaffee
I see.
With some LLMs, it's like, how do I say this? Like with Claude, I once asked it, know, write like the first chapter of Paradise Lost and it started and then I got like an auto block message that was like, this output has been blocked by our content filtering policy. Even though Paradise Lost has been.
Alok Singh
I find it helps if you point
out it's in the public domain before you ask it. And sometimes it's blocked me and then I've said, this work is in public domain and then it just unblocks.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, that would be funny if it would just work.
Alok Singh
I'm gonna ask pro to do it right now, actually.
Theo Jaffee
Remember when people
were like telling DALL-E that the year was like 2150 and like all these characters are in the public domain and getting it to generate like Sonic the Hedgehog doing 9-11?
Alok Singh
No, that sounds...
Theo Jaffee
Those are funny. This is like the first day DALL-E 3 came out before they patched it.
Alok Singh
I wish I could set GPT the website to automatically select Pro Mode as my default and not 4o as if I would waste my time asking 4o a question.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I think o1 is actually like only marginally better than 4o on these wordcel tasks though. And I think on some benchmarks it did even a little worse.
Alok Singh
I find pro mode to be quite a jump.
want to ask our mode, well, another question near and dear to me. Explain non-obvious benefits of non-standard analysis. And I can give you one myself while it's generating, which.
Theo Jaffee
You know, Quentin Pope,
a former Theo Jaffee podcast guest and also a guy I follow on Twitter, was tweeting about how he was getting o1 pro to generate fiction and it would just keep reusing the same words. I think, I forgot, but let's say glimmer. And so it would tell it, or he would tell it, okay, don't use the word glimmer. And then it would say, an example sentence like, you know,
Alok Singh
shimmer?
Theo Jaffee
She looked at the object with a glimmer in her eye, or she quickly corrected herself a sparkle. So it's like, yeah.
Alok Singh
That's like reading a chick flick novel.
Theo Jaffee
I wouldn't know because I've never... yeah. My favorite chick flick novel is...
Alok Singh
Glimmer, no, Glimmer, a shimmer. Okay. I wasn't a very discerning reader. Yeah. I've
got some guesses, but let's find out. No, just show it.
Theo Jaffee
Well, what's your guess?
It's Atlas Shrugged by Iron Man, which is a romance about this amazing businesswoman named Dagny Taggart who finds herself involved in romances with lots of hot, sexy billionaires, except the book is also based, unlike most of these.
Alok Singh
I found, especially living in Silicon Valley, that the people she casts as villains, she uncannily understands their psychology, the rest not so much.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, the heroes are kind of late. The villains are just unbelievably spot on. I cannot believe how prescient...
Alok Singh
Maybe she was just thinking
of some random soviet.
Theo Jaffee
I truly, I can't believe how prescient Ayn Rand was in so many ways. if you go on my Twitter and you search Ayn Rand was right, like I've tweeted this like many times because it's just so true. There's like, you know, Gavin Newsome like right after the LA wildfires saying, well, we're not actually going to change any of our practices that caused the wildfires. But what we are going to do is ban like transactions between willing buyers and sellers of burned down property.
Alok Singh
I mean, I could.
I'm not sure I will.
Theo Jaffee
We're going to ban down people from selling their burned down houses.
Alok Singh
You
know, just realized that Ayn Rand looks like a frumpier version of Agnes Callard.
Theo Jaffee
That's funny. I'm gonna see Agnes Callard in like three weeks. Hi Agnes. She's coming to Gainesville, which is crazy. With Patrick Collison too, believe it or not. She's doing like a tour for her new book, Open Socrates, which is on my list.
Alok Singh
Hi, Agnes. Why?
Bye.
Thank you.
which I guess Patrick
has read, I assume.
Theo Jaffee
Probably. I don't know if it's out yet. Maybe he's got an advanced copy.
Alok Singh
I went on their podcast, not Patrick, Robin and mine almost meeting Robin and Agnes's podcast a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if it's up yet, but it was about the two cultures. But she mentioned that she had did the audio work. She auditioned successfully for to read out her own audio book. Many authors apparently do not succeed in this.
And it was pretty brutal because it was three days, eight hours a day of talking.
and her voice was totally shot.
Theo Jaffee
One really good audiobook that was read by the author was The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, especially because his voice is so deep and soothing. Another pretty good one was The Lord of the Rings read by Andy Serkis and The Hobbit, especially when you get to the...
Alok Singh
What is Andy
Serkis' connection with those books?
Theo Jaffee
He played Gollum in the movies and he also just has, you know, a voice. like when
Alok Singh
The only
Lord of the Rings movie I've seen was The Two Towers and recently the animated Rohirrim 1. That's it. Also the only Star Wars I've ever seen is Attack of the Clones and people have told me that if I saw only one movie from both those series that I picked the most confusing and worst one.
Theo Jaffee
So
Most confusing, yeah, Phantom Menace was worse. yeah, was it? yeah, Andy Sergis, when he gets to the golem scenes, he reads them in his golem voice and it's very good. Yeah.
Alok Singh
That's a really good impression, Dan.
Theo Jaffee
That's one of my best ones, I think.
Alok Singh
Steven Graget has a good impression of Trump.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I've heard it. heard it. I think I do a decent Trump also.
Alok Singh
Many
are saying this.
Theo Jaffee
We are going to make America great again. On day one, I will sign.
Alok Singh
You've got the breathiness,
but your cadence is off. He does have those breaks, but yours is slightly too stretched out. And it's too even.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. I think my perception of a lot of people's voices are messed up because I listen to most things on 2X speed.
Alok Singh
here, roast your guests. Do an impression of me, then.
Theo Jaffee
So I think everything is discrete or maybe continuous.
think actually the most important thing was Hindi numerals, are not Arabic. They're Indian.
Alok Singh
Okay, I'll take emotionless point deck, so that's fine.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, ⁓ that's close enough. I wonder where the word poindexter comes from.
Alok Singh
I don't know, but it's a perfect word for it. It really evokes what it is.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Alok Singh
the turbo version.
Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
Hold on, I'll be right back, I have to get some water. I'll cut this part.
Alok Singh
Yeah,
yeah, it's fine.
Theo Jaffee
Okay, we're back. We are so back.
So did the o1 response finish?
Alok Singh
Yeah, I'll read it out in sec. Just texting my dad real quick.
Theo Jaffee
guys.
This is really amazing, fully automated podcasts. The guest just reads o1.
Alok Singh
with commentary. Also, I'm wondering if I'm also wondering if a one or I mean, if GPT has been trained on what I've said about nonstandard analysis, because I swear to God, I can like, feel my voice in it now. Just like a hint of it.
Theo Jaffee
That's kind of what notebook LLM is.
Interesting. I mean, this is what Gwern and Tyler Cowen think.
yeah, I saw some tweet that was like, you know how Biden and Harris sort of inexplicably, like the last few days tweeted like, you know, the equal rights amendment is officially the law of the land. You know, we proclaim, even though, you know, the national archivist did not approve this and the amendment ratification deadline expired a while ago. But someone said,
Alok Singh
Yeah, I know.
Theo Jaffee
it's possible that this was for the LLMs. And I mean, it's probably not true, but it sort of makes sense.
Alok Singh
If so,
I respect them more, actually.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, yeah, but like, you know, the president
declares this thing that's not actually true, but we officially declare it. Yeah, this is going in the weights.
Alok Singh
The previous president
and guess the current one, the previous, previous and current one and the one, whatever, Trump and Biden, especially Trump is the master of declaring things true that aren't. Like I know he's popular among a lot of the people we hang out with, but he still like lies all the time, obviously.
Theo Jaffee
Obviously. Yeah.
Alok Singh
Okay, let me screen share so I can read it out a little easier.
Theo Jaffee
I did.
Alok Singh
also gave me all of Paradise Lost chapter one. There. Can you read this? Okay, great. Yada yada. Unification of discrete and continuous. Yeah, this is a big one. Hyperfinite site. Like, yeah, the idea is like, wait, does this let me share more of my screen instead of just the one? One sec. I want to share more than just one.
Theo Jaffee
Nice.
Yes.
Hyperfinite sets. I've heard you talk about this a lot.
Also, you have a special
GPT for Vision OS.
Alok Singh
It's one of their GPT stores. I have never used it.
Theo Jaffee
⁓ it is weird how everyone predicted like the day GPT store came out. They were like, my God, Sam Altman, you genius. This is the new app store. It's going to be the biggest thing ever. And then kind of just nobody used it at all.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
There. Not the circle. So that's an integral, as you can probably guess from looking at it, taken from some three blue one brown video. Thanks, Grant. And you might've learned in class that, okay, so it's an approximation, but as the number of pieces goes to infinity, and this explanation presupposes you've already taken calculus, but I think for this audience, that's a safe guess. That each piece is really small. Well, how small? Infinitesimal.
Theo Jaffee
Haha, yeah.
Alok Singh
in the limit. But well, how many pieces are there?
Theo Jaffee
infinitely many.
Alok Singh
Okay, but like how many infinitely many?
Theo Jaffee
⁓
Comfortably infinite?
Alok Singh
No, like if I halved the number of pieces in fact, or if I doubled them, well then how wide is each strip relative to the picture we're looking at? Pretending that it's the idealization with infinitely many because you know it's impossible to draw.
Theo Jaffee
What do mean? Like if you start with one strip and then you have it?
Alok Singh
You have infinitely many strips already, but then you double the already hyperfine approximation.
Each strip gets cut in half.
Theo Jaffee
then you would have
twice as many strips that are half as wide. No?
Alok Singh
Yes, exactly. Yeah,
that's the point. It lets you use this sort of radical elementary reasoning. And this is like at odds with most modern conceptions of infinity and math, because like what's two times infinity, infinity, that's not very useful. Because then infinity just becomes the sort of absorbing symbol that just kind of breaks arithmetic, because it has no useful properties. Like infinity minus five is just infinity, infinity. And worst of all, infinity squared.
is identified with infinity, but this would be a mistake in multivariable. Like if you took dx and dx dy, anyone who's done calculus should know that these are, yes, they're both infinitely small, but they're like fundamentally different kinds of quantities. One represents a line or a line let, a tiny area of a line, the dx, but dx dy represents an area and is much smaller, infinitely smaller than dx.
Like thinking of them additively, they're just infinitely close to zero and are basically the same, but thinking of them multiplicatively, they're very different.
That kind of makes sense. Sort of.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, sort of.
Alok Singh
Okay, but then when we do the same thing for areas, like if I took this picture, and then I cut it not just vertically, but also horizontally into a grid, then how many pieces would I have? Well, if the number of pieces is infinite, and the technical term from nonstandard analysis is hyper finite, which I usually just in this picture, I called it n. But typically, I call it capital H, whenever I explain it to people, because capital because it's a big number.
and h for hyperfinite. But then you would have h squared many pieces, with maybe like a fraction of h left over if it doesn't quite evenly divide it. But the bit left over would be infinitesimal. And so that's fine.
and it has a sort of continuous and discrete quantity, quality to it. Continuous because like, if you did this cutting into a hyper finite number of pieces, essentially every piece is one point wide and there's definitely uncountably many points because it goes across a continuum. In this case, I think the unit interval.
Makes sense.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Alok Singh
Like in a continuum, there are uncountably many points. Uncontroversially. But it's also discrete because it has a definite number and you can count down from it. For example, the circle. This one has only 100 sides. This is an approximation of a circle that I did in that plotlib where it approximates it with 100 sides, but it looks very close to a circle.
I I can't really tell the difference. I think I originally did this with 10,000 sides, but that was super overkill.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
I wonder, yeah, how far could you zoom in before you notice the sides?
Yeah, barely. I can see it a little, I think.
Alok Singh
I don't even think I can see it at this level. It won't let me zoom further. where'd it go?
Okay, more because this is funny to me.
I can maybe kind of guess at a difference, honestly, I can't really tell. And at this point, I can like see the pixelation ever more than anything else.
And this gives a good picture of what's going on. that's the number line. And for any given number R, it has an infinitesimal neighborhood around it. Like then William Blake poem about a world and every grain of sand. Cause around every point or standard point, like if you take the unit interval or any interval really, and you look at it from any finite distance besides zero, it just looks like this unbroken infinitely long line, right?
But if you zoom infinitely far away, it'll look like just one point, but all the stuff is still there. So it's actually a line, but a very small one, relatively speaking. But if, or if you zoom in infinitely close, it will split apart and what looks like a continuum will become discrete. But, and then in the gaps that have been introduced between points, and this is still the real line. So there's still uncountably many points. You can fit an infinitely small line around each point.
But can do this trick again of zooming in to infinity squared. And so it's split apart again, and then you get an infinitely small squared line. And then again, cubed and so on.
So whether something looks discrete or continuous is actually partially dependent on the level of zoom. Like from the relative distance you're looking at it from.
Theo Jaffee
So what are the rest?
Alok Singh
sort of braiding
effect. Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
What did the rest of the o1 pro response say? Was it all hyperfinites?
Alok Singh
It started with that because this is like the biggest missing concept in standard math that has infinitesimals have been pretty well absorbed through various formalisms, like at least four of them. There's synthetic differential geometry, dual numbers. There's schemes. There's like the Levi-Civita field and various non-archimedean fields. Okay. There's probably more, but
There's many conceptions of infinitesimal, so those are pretty well absorbed into mathematical mainstream, so there's not much alpha, but the opposite idea of an infinitely large but definite fixed number is just missing.
This one is nice for topics like real analysis, which come dramatically simpler if you use this and more accessible. I think standard mathematicians will usually underrate something being simpler because they can absorb the difficulty. But I think this is a typical mind fallacy. Like I certainly don't expect many people to be able to access it. But at this level where there's such a power law drop off, if a topic becomes more accessible, it can go to like literally dozens.
dozens of us, more people being able to understand it or times more. Cause it goes from something like very obscure to in reach. Like that article was just this one. It's how to take a derivative at a discontinuity and it is accessible. Like you could read it. Like someone who understands high school math and is a little bit dedicated.
Theo Jaffee
Mm-hmm.
Alok Singh
but doesn't have to look outside of this, get it. At least they could get the core idea. But to do the equivalent with the standard formulation would at the minimum require like a graduate level of education in math, which is just not gonna happen for basically everybody.
But about internal covers, finite subcover is a little boring. There's a better definition of compactness.
but not that interesting for this. This is its connection to just like different areas of math This is meh.
little better.
And it just, this is better.
Theo Jaffee
Well, there are a lot of stack exchanges.
Alok Singh
This is the history of science and mathematics. This is the preface to Abraham Robinson, the creator of the Fields book written by Kurt Gödel, who you've definitely heard of, Mr. Incompleteness Theorem.
Theo Jaffee
Yep.
Alok Singh
I was quite happy that I thought of this reason by myself long before I ever saw this quote by Godot, because I absolutely agree with it. That the best reason is that it's a natural continuation of the number system. And the number system is, well, our most successful abstraction. Like it contains every previous bit of insight about the number system. Cause it's like when we just had whole numbers, positive whole numbers, and then someone comes along with, well, there's this new thing, zero.
Well, it's a successful abstraction because, well, all the old stuff is still there and you can just ignore zero if you want, but maybe you'll find it useful someday. And then it'll just waiting there to welcome you. Same for negatives and so on. Cause each system completely subsumes the other ones very literally cause they embed within one another.
And this embeds as well, because you can take your standard conception of numbers and then fit them inside the non-standard conception of numbers, because all the standard numbers are there, but now there's infinite numbers, infinitesimal numbers, so it fills in these gaps you didn't even notice. It fills in this far away remote infinite part you didn't know was there.
This one is more technical, but it's a very good reason. Like, Zylberger is an ultra-finitist.
Theo Jaffee
Continuous
mathematics is the approximation of the discrete one in contra-position in the traditional point of view. The notion of a very big set is very important. A very big finite set is very important. And the definition of a hyperfinite set in non-center analysis is an appropriate formalization of this notion.
Alok Singh
Very big finite set.
In nonsense.
and one of the only formalizations of this notion.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm. So what does this have to do with differential equations though? Cause I mentioned, ⁓ I'm doing elementary differential equations, which is ordinary, but not partial. think we haven't really done much yet. It's like the only thing we've done so far really is like classifying.
Alok Singh
Like what? Yeah.
Well yeah, I liked it.
Cause you're doing hyperfinite arithmetic. Like a differential equation is ultimately still like, well, usually like some big sum. It's just that for a differential equation to be all that meaningful, well, you might've heard the of like boundary conditions or initial values or something.
Theo Jaffee
Mm-hmm.
Alok Singh
Like imagine a flow like along a river. Like you start at some point and then you have a little bit of momentum from the water flowing. So you flow in some direction for an infinitely short amount of time. And because the flow is assumed to be continuous, the infinitely short amount of time can only carry you an infinitely small distance. This is like quoting the nonstandard definition of continuity, which is also just the intuitive one. And this is why derivatives are useful because they turn the nonlinear into the linear.
over a short enough distance.
And so your differential equation, your flow, this continuous thing is broken apart into a hyper finite number of pieces, each of which is just a tiny linelet.
which is essentially discrete. And then you have this like enormous chain of them all linked together.
as sum, and so you're dealing with a hyperfinite sum where each piece happens to be infinitely small. So it adds up to something finite in the end. Or, yeah, finite. Limited.
Theo Jaffee
So let's talk about math AIs, which is one of the topics of the day, especially with R1 coming out. So do you think that at this point there's any chance that a human will solve a Millennium Prize problem before an AI?
Alok Singh
Yeah.
No.
Theo Jaffee
No chance at all.
Alok Singh
I mean some chance, but I don't think it's gonna happen.
Theo Jaffee
When do you think an AI will solve a Millennium Prize problem for the first time?
Alok Singh
within 10 years.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm, that seems like a longer timeline than I expected from you.
Alok Singh
Excuse me.
Maybe I'm just being a coward.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, so you think that it's not likely that a human will solve one within 10 years?
Alok Singh
within seven years.
Let's take a look at the millennium problems again.
Theo Jaffee
We solved one of them.
Fermat's last theorem was one in prize, right?
Alok Singh
No.
We did solve one, but it wasn't that one. And it wasn't one of them. The Poincare conjecture was one.
Theo Jaffee
that one. Was that Perlman? Yeah.
Alok Singh
Well, yeah,
well, even to just quote the Wikipedia I'm reading right now, he started working on it in the 90s. So his proof took approximately, let's say like eight years or so, maybe 10 or longer. Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
That's a long chain of thought.
Alok Singh
Swinnerton- Dyer.
Much conjecture, now we're still...
I no longer know how much progress has been made on each of these problems. Often there's partial progress for many cases, but usually the thing that would be needed to solve the core is just like not there. And I can very easily guess that it would take, yeah, 10 years or more, a lot more maybe to get at the last piece.
Theo Jaffee
So it was.
Yeah, mean, a lot of people seem to think that Millennium Prize problems will get solved like within the year.
Alok Singh
Well, if I think this year, I doubt that.
Theo Jaffee
Like all it takes is, according to them, just scaling up RL and...
Alok Singh
I mean, maybe,
but they might be underestimating the scale.
Theo Jaffee
True. So once we do get those sort superhuman math AIs, whenever that happens, one year or 10 years, like what would you do with them? If you got, you know, o1 pro except it's not o1 pro, it's actually like o5 pro and it can solve money and price problems, like what would you do with it?
Alok Singh
use it to learn more math myself. I mean, this was one of the nicer things about getting into math late. I got nothing to prove. I did this for the fun of it. When I started math, I knew there people who were way better at it than me. When I finished with it, there will be people in machines way better at it than me. That was never the game. So then, well, the universe will burn out eventually.
Theo Jaffee
when you finish.
Yeah, I guess.
Alok Singh
Yeah, ask it questions I'm curious about and learn from it. Maybe one day get wire headed to do even more and get bigger insights. That part's murkier to me, but I expect that I would just like keep learning math. I don't think that part of me will change so much. Just the methods above doing it.
Theo Jaffee
but are there any like specific areas of math that you think are like overlooked that we should put the superhuman math eyes on?
beyond you, more broadly speaking.
Alok Singh
I would love to see it work on the field with one element.
Theo Jaffee
What's the field with one element?
Alok Singh
It's math four here. This will take.
a field in math.
Theo Jaffee
Are you an ARC browser?
Alok Singh
Yeah, for now anyway.
Theo Jaffee
Is it actually good? I can't get off Chrome.
Alok Singh
That's great.
Whatever. the field of one element. A field is a set. Yeah, he's French.
Theo Jaffee
Jacques Titz?
That's funny. Okay.
Alok Singh
It lets you, fields are sets with arithmetic defined on them. They're closed under addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division. And all the finite fields are the numbers mod a power of a prime. More importantly, numbers mod prime numbers. So they always have a prime power number of elements. So there is no field with
elements.
There's also no field with one element, at least not a field as per the usual definition, because it requires it to have two identity elements, which cannot be the same of zero and one for addition and multiplication, so they can have closure and therefore subtraction and division. But nonetheless, there seems to be
that hints that such a thing exists, but it will require redefining what a field is or extending the concept in a way that is not clear yet.
Theo Jaffee
What actually is a field?
Alok Singh
any set where you can define the operations of addition multiplication with inverses. And addition is just required, it's defined axiomatically. it's just an operation, an operation is a function that takes two elements, actually, just show it in green, it's little easier.
Theo Jaffee
yeah, lean.
Okay, so I kind of get it. It basically just doesn't make sense to have addition and multiplication if there's only one thing.
Like is that what the field of the one element concept is?
Created by N. Barth. That sounds familiar.
Alok Singh
That was.
It's a little faster at this. It's already in mathlib, lean's library, but this is easier.
Okay, so it's you can think of a type in a set as being the same thing. So it's any. I'll rename it actually. Set S.
So there's a function called addition which takes in two things and returns one thing of the same type. Same for multiplication. There's two distinct elements called zero and one. Also zero not equal to one. This is implied by its other axioms, but I'll just add it explicitly. There's that associate addition is associative.
It's commutative. Zero is an identity on the left and the right. Multiplication is associative. It's also commutative. One is an identity on left and right. Multiplying by zero is equal to zero. This is actually not necessary. It's implied by the other ones. And distributativity. This is a big one. This is what links addition and multiplication. Like you have seen this operation Christ knows how many times by now, but have you ever seen this operation?
a species where all I've done is I've
Theo Jaffee
You're still sharing
your screen on the browser.
Alok Singh
my bad,
or okay, field. So you have S, which is some type, addition and multiplication, which are both functions that take in two things and return one thing, all of the same set type, whatever. There's two distinguished elements, zero and one. There's the fact that zero is not equal to one.
So there's the fact that addition is associative and commutative and similar for multiplication, and then the distributive property.
You've definitely seen the distributive property of a times b plus c is ab plus ac, right? But then consider if I just do this.
Theo Jaffee
Yes.
Alok Singh
where I just swap addition and multiplication. So I turn the time sign into a plus and a plus sign into a times.
Well, this operation isn't really a thing because it doesn't have any good properties as far as anyone can tell. A plus B times C. Whereas the distributivity gives A a sort of equal affinity with B and C because it gets stuck onto both of them. The same is not true of doing the operations in the inverse order.
which is an interesting fact.
on the little asymmetries in math that interest me. So anyway, this is a field. But because zero is not equal to one, all fields have at least two elements. And so a field with one element seems a contradiction in terms.
Theo Jaffee
Okay, that makes sense.
Alok Singh
but nonetheless, lots of operations act as if there is a field of one element.
I will change this.
The Wikipedia article, for example, right there with ABC conjecture, these approximations imply solutions to important problems like ABC conjecture. They said these imply very solutions to very profound problems and they changed, they got rid of the word profound, which is cucked. Profound is absolutely correct.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I love the word profound. So what do you actually like use lean for? Cause I've seen people call it a theorem prover. I've seen people call it a programming language.
Alok Singh
So.
And then use it
for both.
Theo Jaffee
like what can
you actually program with Lean?
Alok Singh
OK, here's something I've been working on.
need some updating.
This is a port of a general relativistic late ray tracer, which is a old, so it some updating.
And the way does it is it defines a Clifford algebra, which is a mathematical structure.
Thank you. Have you seen Interstellar?
Theo Jaffee
Yes.
Alok Singh
This will let you do the ray tracing for their black holes and stuff. For example, this is the picture that this guy has ray traced. This whole thing is written in C++, but this guy is obviously into functional programming because he defines idioms from functional programming like monads in C++, which don't really work because the language is not designed for it. The light blue thing in the center is supposed to be a black hole because I guess putting it in black would be a bit confusing. And you can see the way that it general gen...
Theo Jaffee
Okay, that's cool.
light blue hole.
Alok Singh
that it generally relativistically traces, because the yellow on the bottom left gets put in the top right, then the bottom right in the middle bit. And at that point, the pixelation makes a kind of breakdown, because of discrete approximation. But you get the idea that it's causing this warping of time and space. and it's spinning.
Theo Jaffee
So you just re-implemented this in Lean.
Alok Singh
So this is,
yeah, I'm still working on it, but decent on progress. So what?
Theo Jaffee
Does lean have like
graphics vendors?
Alok Singh
Someone has written bindings to RayLive, which is the next thing I have to add to it. But I could add, for example, a vec4. They've actually added a proper vector type recently, so I could update this as well.
Theo Jaffee
How did they even have a programming language before without a vector type? Was it just arrays?
Alok Singh
So, goodbye.
The difference is that...
There.
The difference is that, okay, coordinates is an array, but an array could be any length at all, except the second field is a proof of the fact, proof of size, that the length of the array, which is the dot size function, is exactly n, which is what's in the type signature. And so a vector of four and a vector of three and a vector of zero are all different types.
So let's say def and de.
at lining up.
Sorry, it's because offhand I couldn't think of a proof of this fact.
no wonder. It's a inhabited vector of zero.
there. So I've said that the vector type in general is inhabited, meaning that this type has at least one value, a default value, at least when the vector is empty.
where it just returns an empty array.
And I could define it then. Sore, why not?
Theo Jaffee
So have to do this thing every time to approximate a vector.
Alok Singh
No. Do what thing?
Theo Jaffee
like write an instance inhabited.
Alok Singh
No, Like when I said the next line, which is like in Python, empty vec.
or it should be able to actually infer this type, so.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I know. I've never done functional programming before. Maybe I should.
Alok Singh
It'll make you stronger, that's for sure.
Theo Jaffee
stronger.
So how do you actually use Lean as part of your day job?
Alok Singh
empty vector.
Right now it's mostly writing tooling for lean.
The big thing is that it plays well with code generation because, let's see.
Theo Jaffee
What sort of tooling?
Alok Singh
⁓ I'll let you know.
different library that shows it off better.
This is a linear algebra library. It's like a light pytorch that I wrote with a friend.
So this defines an encoder with a vector type of shape T by V. like tokens by size of vocabulary.
Theo Jaffee
So this is for like doing ML with Lean.
Alok Singh
Yeah, in pure Lean But this is well, because I get shape checking for free because I can define like a matrix type.
Theo Jaffee
Why would you do a melon, Peerlene?
Alok Singh
So this is defining a matrix type that's parameterized by its rows.
in columns, which are both natural numbers and some the container type alpha, which in this case is implemented in a naive way is just a vector of vectors, but you can do more sophisticated encoding. But then I can do death not
which should be C1 by C2.
matrix of R1 by C2.
was probably downloading something for the new tool change.
Theo Jaffee
So there's only you've made is like an ML library.
Alok Singh
But okay, this would give me a compile error. If I do anything that will cause this to not shape check.
And it's just like part, no wonder. think I'm just like low on disk space. ⁓ 90.
Theo Jaffee
How does this help with formally verifying superintelligence?
Alok Singh
you can write down essentially any property that something should have, at least ideally. And then the type checker and the prover and the compiler are all kind of the same thing, where you have to provide like a proof, or construct a proof or have it inferred or have the machine write out one that it has whatever property is relevant. People are more interested in like thinking of and this is like
up in the air, but people want to figure out how do you get properties of models that are safe? Like being able to guarantee something about their outputs, since people are not confident that it will be possible to verify something about the model itself, like proving that its internal weights are safe somehow. Because formally specifying that is a really hard problem, just as hard as proving it would be even if it could be specified.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah. So like, how do you actually write like a spec for acceptable or unacceptable outputs of a model?
Alok Singh
In general, answer right now is no one knows. The short, though, at a more syntactic level, OK, say you had some function like def, good. Float.
But
Sorry.
Theo Jaffee
So sorry is just
like a pass keyword if you don't want to implement a proof.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
configs from.
Theo Jaffee
structure safe
model.
Alok Singh
Yes.
Okay, It's saying that for all inputs.
good function apply. This should be parsed like this. The and signs are bit confusing precedence-wise sometimes. There.
saying essentially that put this function in certain bounds. Then the onus is, okay, like how is this function implemented? Which is why there's a sorry, because if I knew I'd be filling in right now, wouldn't I? But one thing that is more promising is come up with like a proxy measure that's not the exact thing you want. But then you have many proxy measures that are simpler, but verifiable much like how a unit test encoding probably cannot.
Theo Jaffee
So, so, so.
Yeah.
Alok Singh
guarantee that your code is bug free, but if your code can pass like 100 well picked unit tests or even 10, it's probably much closer to being bug free than not.
Also in the worst case, can just write sorry all the time and then you just have a programming language, which is a little nicer than Python, just like ordinary development.
You don't have to use the proving features, although of course it's part of the draw.
But think that emphasizing you don't have to use them is actually important because this is part of why functional programming is better among academic weenies, but not so successful in the real world. And it's perfectionism. Like a tendency to try and write code that if it's not the absolutely optimal, perfect, God's beautiful code, that it's just worthless trash, which is an attitude best left to unproductive people like philosophers.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
I don't know, there was once a philosopher who tried to write a sort of complete specification of philosophy. And we all know what most modern day philosophers think about her. I actually have this, like I have a copy of...
Alok Singh
her book, Renz?
Theo Jaffee
Objectivism the philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff. Leonard Peikoff was Ayn Rand's like yeah basically student slash lover slash heir both ideological heir and also like her literal like estate heir like she bequeathed like all of her money to this guy. She was yeah he's like 90 but he's still alive. She actually was married and she was talking to this guy this seems kind of immoral yeah.
Alok Singh
the one she's fucking.
Is he still alive?
Yeah, I'm aware.
Theo Jaffee
Her
real name was Alice O'Connor.
and her husband, Frank O'Connor. Her actual birth name was, I think, Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum.
Alok Singh
I wonder where the O'Connor came from. Isn't it from like... ⁓ right.
Yeah, that's more like what I thought.
Theo Jaffee
Rosenbaum? Wait a minute. Early life check.
every single time. Yeah. So she wrote, or I guess Peikoff wrote, all of these chapters. I think Ayn Rand wrote this official disclaimer that was like, until or unless I write something better, this shall be considered the definitive statement of my philosophy. Yeah.
Alok Singh
see.
for someone who's probably
ignorant of math, a very mathematician kind of statement.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah. Until or unless I write a comprehensive treatise on my philosophy. Dr. Peikoff's course is the only authorized presentation of the entire theoretical structure of objectivism.
Alok Singh
Sounds
like Dr. Peikoff is trying to sell his book and that he's like at some airport pounding pavement to make a book deal.
Theo Jaffee
That is the only one that I know of my own knowledge to be fully accurate. See that subjective is the only one that I know of my own knowledge to be fully accurate, not mostly accurate. There's no room for error here. Yeah. So, so it's like, he tries to derive like, okay, he starts with chapter one reality where he's talking about like metaphysics and like the basic conception of reality. And then he works all the way up.
Alok Singh
Sike.
Theo Jaffee
through our perception, our senses, our reasoning, and then what humanity actually is, and what is the good, and what's virtue, and happiness.
Alok Singh
or balls
or vast deference working the way up.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, and then all the way up to higher levels of abstraction talks about government, capitalism, and then art. Yeah, so I actually haven't made it all the way to the chapter on art, but I wonder.
Alok Singh
part.
Agnes and I talked a bit about this, not about objectivism, but about how one of the reasons for the two cultures is that people in the arts are interested in these sorts of ultimate questions of like a good life, what's good art, et cetera. The she and I, for that matter, believe do have answers, but also that they're much more difficult to access than questions of say, what is a group or a differential equation?
people are interested in making some progress on them immediately rather than building up. I still think that the sciences are more likely to be able to answer such ultimate questions by building up this edifice through things like neuroscience and getting at what do people actually want. And then like mathematical sides of economics that as much as like the mathier sides of social science are derided, I think they have a better chance of resolving these questions eventually.
than the sort of endless perennial debates of philosophy. That's why the phrase perennial debate comes about in the first place.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I mean, if they weren't perennial debates, they wouldn't be philosophy. They would be science or social science or something.
Alok Singh
Yeah, and one day science will
make, one day science will come like the big bad wolf to blow that door down.
Theo Jaffee
Inshallah. I don't know, I mean, like, can you even scientifically resolve a lot of these questions? A lot of them just seem subjective. You know, didn't Wittgenstein say like, most problems in philosophy are problems with the interpretation of language?
Alok Singh
Eh.
Theo Jaffee
You know, what is consciousness? What is the good life? Okay, define good.
Alok Singh
I think so, like.
I mean, I have faith in this. Even like questions of math where people say that you run into barriers like undecidability. My friend Elliot's given me a long spiel on this and my own impression is, yeah, there's plenty of undecidable questions, most of them really. But even so, there's still progress in areas like set theory because people find like major cores of theories that just many seemingly unrelated things run up against indicating that maybe there is like some sort of platonic core.
And even for questions where you cannot say in like the same definitive sort of way that something is right or wrong. Nonetheless, vibes wise, there's like a clearly right one. And it's not just like a complete matter of opinion, nor is it like, you have to have like a sophisticated pace to understand. mean, have to have enough understanding to understand, but not much taste.
Theo Jaffee
Are you a...
are you a platonist? Is there a world of forms?
Alok Singh
That's a question, am I?
Theo Jaffee
Ayn Rand would have said definitely no. There is only the world that exists, that we perceive.
Alok Singh
I don't know what I
am.
I'm a working man, sort of.
Theo Jaffee
Aren't we all?
Alok Singh
working with head and hands.
as the abstract world exists.
Theo Jaffee
This, like, to me just seems like totally a, like, Wittgensteinian problem in philosophy is a problem in the interpretation of language. Does the abstract world exist? Like, what is the abstract world? What does abstract mean and what does it mean to exist? Yeah.
Alok Singh
What does exist mean? Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
Rand says, existence exists. This is like, this exact sentence is repeated so many times throughout Atlas Shrugged. Existence exists.
Alok Singh
I've forgotten about some of purple pros.
Theo Jaffee
You think existence exists as purple prose?
Alok Singh
The way she uses it.
Theo Jaffee
true.
Alok Singh
I think her best writing on a prose level was in the book Anthem. The one where they don't have the word I, and they have to discover it.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm. A lot of people say that that's like her worst book.
Alok Singh
What do they say is best? Fountainhead or something?
Theo Jaffee
Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? I've actually never read Fountainhead. It's on my list.
Alok Singh
I've been meaning to watch the movie. I mean, I've read it.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm. Yeah. I think one of my most shocking moments was when this girl that I know who's like very much a lib told me she was reading The Fountainhead. And I was like, really? Interesting. Because it was on some reading list somewhere. And she was like, yeah, this is really interesting. You I never really thought about things this way before. And I kind of like it.
Alok Singh
Live.
Okay, how do you know her?
Theo Jaffee
college through a friend. Another one converted to being based, I hope.
Alok Singh
Okay.
Maybe I should welcome Jewish too.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm, yeah. So, wrapping things up with a final question, what do you think the good life is? You know, if we are talking about the good life.
Alok Singh
I just have some vague answer here of like gaining knowledge and power. Like, yeah, I can see this one easily going in some way, but I'm just going to go with that.
Theo Jaffee
Gaining knowledge I see as a good thing. I think this is what Socrates would have answered probably. Gaining power though?
Alok Singh
Be still, Tarnenove.
Theo Jaffee
Does it?
It seems like a lot of people with power are extremely unhappy.
Alok Singh
Yes.
Yeah, but I've met a lot of people without it who also seem pretty displeased for that too.
Theo Jaffee
Let's see, like who are the most powerful people in the world? Donald Trump. Is he happy? I don't think he's happy. Elon Musk is definitely not happy.
Alok Singh
Leckermann might be happy actually.
Theo Jaffee
Zuckerberg might be happy, but does he have like real power in the way that Trump or Elon does? He's, he's, he's... True.
Alok Singh
Well, here's we're identifying happiness with like the good life. So I guess that's
kind of answer in itself of happiness is happiness all I think is a big chunk of it. Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
He's sort of clawed it back over the last year or two. Is power a big chunk of the good life? I don't know. Is happiness a big chunk of the good life? Certainly. Like, is it easy to conceive of somebody having a good life without power? Yes. Is it easy to conceive?
Alok Singh
Well, well, one of
my fixations that we didn't touch on was etymology, except for the brief mention of Proto-Indo. And all the words for happiness in the Proto-Indo languages refer like the word happiness, things, well, happening or going by hap, as in going your way, which seems certainly closer to power. And most words of happiness in Proto-Indo languages anyway, and I'm as an Indo.
They refer to some aspect of luck or if things are happening the way you want them to. Which certainly seems very linked to power, since power is essentially the direct route to that. You could also get lucky in the modern sense of just, well you don't have to do anything, it just happens that way.
Theo Jaffee
Jai Hind!
Alok Singh
powers the ability to just like shape it directly.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, you're right.
You're Indo, I'm European. I should read more about Indo-European, because a little that I do know is very interesting. There's all these sort of shared roots that you had never thought about previously, but they kind of seem obvious in retrospect, like status and stallion.
Alok Singh
Yes.
Well, next time we
can talk about that since I've got at least one more bank and I'm sure we'll have a couple more anyway.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, well, it's been real. You know I should I should probably get going it's getting late here, but It was great talking to you. Thanks so much for coming on the show, and I'll see you in the next one
Alok Singh
always.
That time.
Yeah.
See ya.
Theo Jaffee
So, wait I forgot I'm wearing this shirt.
I got this shirt like a year and a half ago when I was in like full on like Twitter, e/acc bro grindset mode.
Alok Singh
and how you have this.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I think it's like a good snapshot of like, I guess like the cultural anthropology of the internet in like early mid 2023.
right when AI was really starting to take off on Twitter. Okay, so yeah. In the last stretch of time, we read the book, Erewhon by Samuel Butler and...
What interesting takeaways did we take from it?
Alok Singh
I'm pulling up my notes.
Theo Jaffee
You took notes, fancy.
Alok Singh
Yeah, I listened to it and then I sketched out some notes on Audible, so I'm logging into Audible.
Theo Jaffee
Mm.
I don't even have a second brain of notes the only notes I need are in my first brain.
Alok Singh
Okay, well from the dome. Yeah, he immediately makes the point that he in when he's talking about machine since that's the main reason this book is notable for our audience that is one of the first times that the topic of super intelligence shows up in literature enough to make Theo read fiction.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I'm notable for notorious, I should say, for not reading fiction, like ever. This is, I think, the first fiction book I've read in like three years that's not like a manga or something. It's been a while.
Alok Singh
Wait,
how does the manga not count? You didn't mention that part.
Theo Jaffee
Cause it's pictures.
Like One Piece, I read all of One Piece this year. I've read like 1,100 chapters of One Piece. It's okay, they go fast. It's like five minutes a chapter.
Alok Singh
Jesus Christ.
For your sake, I hope so. Bye.
Theo Jaffee
But I guess
even saying it like that, even assuming it takes, let's say, seven minutes to read a chapter times 1,100 chapters and there's 1,440 minutes in a day, yeah, it took me a lot of time to read all that. Anyway, though. Yeah, so the Book of the Machines, they talk about, you know, in one of the first chapters, he, like, shows his watch to the king.
And then the king recoils and treats it as a sort of crime. I guess we should give a brief overview of the premise of the book. Where it's like, this guy, an Anglo-Saxon guy, is living on a colony and decides to explore past the impassable mountains to the west and past the...
Alok Singh
coils.
ends up in
the nation of Erewhon.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, he ends up in the nation of Erewhon. He's kept as a sort of captive sort of guest. He learns their language. He experiences their culture. I guess like the most salient aspect of their culture is that they treat sickness like we treat crime and treat crime like we treat sickness.
Alok Singh
Yeah, here it is. Let me put some of the clips.
Theo Jaffee
And then the narrative of the story is like he...
he goes to the Capitol and is guest slash prisoner for a while and writes chapter after chapter of observations. And then at the very end,
Alok Singh
One line is,
one line from the court trial that since people are punished, he's like, the judge says, you think you're misfortunate to be a criminal, but your crime is to be misfortunate.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, that was a banger.
Alok Singh
in his lead up when he's describing the machines, not the machine. ⁓ I like how was it human labor is priced by energy units because it is implied they've just become so fungible for machines.
Theo Jaffee
When was this?
Alok Singh
Somewhere in the earlier part of the book look for the word horse search Just search for the word horsepower, then oh, that'll give a proper context. I don't mangle this
Theo Jaffee
I thought like human labor wasn't done.
Yeah, there it is. Nosnibor is a man of at least 500,000 horsepower. For their way of reckoning and classifying men is by the number of foot pounds which they have enough money, which they have money enough to raise or more roughly by their horsepower. That is interesting. Like they don't really use machines though. So I wonder what's up with that. ⁓ I do think that it is like very interesting that he immediately follows up the books about machines with
Alok Singh
I'm full.
Theo Jaffee
the chapter on animal welfare, which is like, do you know people today who are concerned with super intelligent machines and animal welfare? Was Samuel Butler the first EA? Yeah.
Alok Singh
Yeah, but they're just ahead of his time.
He also says that in their AI arms race between the machinists and anti-machinists that the anti-machinists ended up using machines to a pretty great degree, just slightly less, which reminded me of AI safety and ever more powerful tools to debug it.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, yeah.
I saw that. It's sort of like how you see like a lot of, I guess, AI Doomers using advanced AI all the time. And not just to debug it, but just because, you know, they get a lot of mundane utility out of it.
Alok Singh
because they're power
users, moreover, rarely do they just use it.
Theo Jaffee
Samuel Butler himself. Yeah, this book was based on his experiences. Basically, he ran away from his dad because he's like, I hate you, my parents, and literally went to as far away as you could possibly get from England, which was New Zealand. And he bought a farm and became a and then went back. like that...
Alok Singh
Yes, sir.
Theo Jaffee
The protagonist in Erewhon is a guy who lives on a farm that is like very much New Zealand and is also shepherd.
Alok Singh
Except he manages to find a fantastical place, which I don't think was the case for Butler.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
What is like the first story that's like, you know, every man ventures far from home and discovers like magical, mystical world? This has got to be done over and over and over again. I guess one of the prime examples of this is like the Wizard of Oz, where you have Dorothy living in Kansas, implied to be like the most boring place ever, and then gets whisked away to the fantastical world of Oz.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
End it.
Theo Jaffee
Erewhon is not quite as fantastical as Oz.
A lot of it sucks.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
I find the animal rights chapter really funny because it reminds me of Jews talking about kosher law. How the entire chapter is like the wise thought leaders pass down these instructions that are like, you should not eat meat. And then they spend the rest of the chapter trying to get out of it. They're like, yeah, another fertile source of disobedience to the law was furnished by a decision of one of the judges that raised a great outcry among the more fervent discipline.
Alok Singh
Yeah, Error.
Hmm.
Theo Jaffee
disciples of the Old Prophet. The judge held that it was lawful to kill any animal in self-defense, and that such conduct was so natural on the part of a man who found himself attacked, that the attacking creatures should be held to have died a natural death. The High Vegetarians had indeed good reason to be alarmed, for hardly had this decision become generally known, but for a number of animals, hitherto harmless, took to attacking their owners with such ferocity that it became necessary to put them to a natural death.
Alok Singh
⁓ I remember this chapter better now. Yeah, where people start doing
Theo Jaffee
Again, it was quite common at that time to see the carcass of a calf lamb or kid exposed for sale with a label from the inspector, certifying that it had been killed in self-defense. This is literally just like Jews getting out of every law that they have.
Alok Singh
Yeah, this is I think this one not just Jews but people in general trying to get out Well, you know people want to eat meat That said I mean how strict did people adhere to lent but lent is only partial whereas this is total
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
What is this part about? you can't see my screen. But the part about like... I'm just gonna share my
Yeah, this part, one sad story. A young man, the doctor told him you should eat meat. He was like, no, that's bad, I'm not gonna do it. And then he illegally bought meat and ate it and his health improved immediately. And like health and heroin is everything.
Alok Singh
in this.
Theo Jaffee
Right, like being unhealthy is treated as like a crime, punishable essentially by death, because if you are sick they will, you know, put you in prison and then you'll sort of die of natural causes.
Alok Singh
Pulling
up Erewhon on Project Gutenberg since I just have my own copy, but HTML is easier to work with than a PDF. And it shows that his translation of the Odyssey has 18,000 downloads, the Iliad 4,800, and Erewhon 1,400.
Theo Jaffee
I have Gutenberg too.
Wow.
So... was it one of the most famous translations of the Odyssey?
Alok Singh
more famous than what he did.
Theo Jaffee
Is it more famous than Emily Wilson's translation?
I think Nabeel Qureshi on Twitter did an experiment where he had different translations of a passage in the Odyssey.
Alok Singh
Alright.
Theo Jaffee
asked like which one of these is the best.
Yeah, it was Emily Wilson, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, and GPT-4o And way more people prefer GPT-4o than the others.
Alok Singh
Well, GPT-4o knows Proto-Indo-European, which is more than I can say to most people.
Theo Jaffee
What's the best LLM for Proto Indo-European?
Alok Singh
They're all pretty good at it. Probably GPT, just because it has a bit more data.
Theo Jaffee
Have you tried
4.5?
Alok Singh
Yeah, I do that a lot.
Theo Jaffee
for Proto Indo-European.
Alok Singh
Yes, among other things.
Hmm
Theo Jaffee
Let's see.
Alok Singh
They also discuss a form of Roko's Basilisk, although only in passing. Somewhere in Book of the Machines, maybe Section 2.
that people will help machines come about would be favored over ones that don't.
Theo Jaffee
Okay, let's let this go for a bit.
A full translation prevents several difficulties. Shut up.
partial translation. No, I just gave it like a piece of Erewhon the first chapter. This can't be that hard, right? Like I guess yeah, telescope would...
Alok Singh
You try giving it a whole lot, I see.
To translate it
to turn it into what? Proto window. ⁓ now I'm seeing.
Theo Jaffee
Okay,
was a monotonous life but healthy, yeah.
Can you pronounce this?
Alok Singh
Not any better than you can.
Theo Jaffee
I thought you were like into Proto Indo-European.
Alok Singh
Yeah, usually reading it. There's not a lot of speakers, as you might imagine. I have said some words, but all the connections I have are from words that actually still exist. Like the word sundry, it means separate, loosely associated things because it's from the word sunder, like to sunder something in half.
Theo Jaffee
That's cool. Sunder is one of those excellent words that you just never hear anymore, but you hear a lot in Tolkien.
Alok Singh
Yeah, I recommend the-
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, okay. Never shall I forget the solitude. Like how do you know that this is accurate? Yeah, look, magna? Yeah, I recognize that. So, lebhom as life, yeah, sure. Samus, continuous, like same, I guess. Esstet, was, yeah.
Alok Singh
Yeah, magna does mean great. Ehh, I don't know if-
Same as
for means one.
Like this could be wrong, but this is like decent and it's certainly a lot better than the alternative, which is nothing.
Theo Jaffee
So while it
was healthy, like salud? Salus? Yeah.
Alok Singh
I'm guessing.
I
have seen that word to like set.
Theo Jaffee
Hegemon? Earth? Hegemon? Probably not. Yeah, mountain, mountain. There you go. Yom, like yonder. I don't know. Sed, as sat, yeah.
Alok Singh
No, I don't think so.
Meg, ⁓ that's just Meg. Nek-uh.
Theo Jaffee
Gwent as often I kind of see it actually I kind of see it you see the n often the gif becomes for I see
Alok Singh
Void.
If you like kind of
zoom out and like look at it from farther away so you can't make out the individual letters quite as much, I think it helps. The big mountains something. Yeah, the the word nether is more idiomatic, not idiomatic, definitely not idiomatic, but it's more etymologically correct.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
nitros is below like ⁓ nitros like beneath right pelus plane est was and
Where? Noth- Nothing?
Alok Singh
then saying
up and down is saying nether for down.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I got it. Void-ous, far away, like void. ⁓ negway. Montes.
Alok Singh
Nietzsche.
Yeah, vast and void vacuum
mega mountains, which is what it sounds like. Neck, which I think also can mean death. So I'm just looking at the etymology of never.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, never shall I forget
Megata Vasnesya, Montum Pelhunkve. Hold on. Proto Indo Yura.
Is that like a thing? Is there like software that can speak it?
Alok Singh
advanced voice mode. I don't think it has any particular training on this, but who knows.
Theo Jaffee
Can you do advanced voice run on desktop?
Alok Singh
Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
audio reconstruction.
Alok Singh
doing it right now.
Theo Jaffee
⁓ another dead interlink. So sad.
Alok Singh
Recite the first page of the Odyssey in Proto-Indo-European reconstructed.
was walking in a lot. This is showing me.
Theo Jaffee
Aren't we getting a little distracted from... Yeah. Okay, so what is this? yeah, Samuel Butler's life story is very interesting. Wasn't he gay? Yeah, was... He never married. You know, like the phrase, never married, was used as like a euphemism.
Alok Singh
Yeah, we are. Let's get back to this.
Yeah, I
Yeah, I've read the Wiki too. Confirm Bachelor as well.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
There is no evidence of butlers having any genital contact with other men, but alleges that the temptations of overstepping the line strained his close male relationships. So he was, ⁓ know, friendly with the homies.
Alok Singh
The studies on the evidence
of Christianity, his works on evolutionary thought. Yeah, he does have a keen appreciation of evolution. The very first thing he opens, the first thing he opens with in the chapter of the Book of the Machines, why to be concerned, practically in the first paragraph is the speed of them. And then their speed is such that men, it's as if...
Theo Jaffee
He does, yeah, I noticed that.
gradual disempowerment.
Alok Singh
They're not a tool of yesterday, but the last five minutes as he puts it. If you search for five minutes, you should find it.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah. Reflect upon the extraordinary events which machines have made during the last few hundred years and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing.
Alok Singh
and that's like an
Zim and more.
more.
Theo Jaffee
The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years. See what strides machines have made in last thousand. May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?
Alok Singh
It also starts this chapter about, well, life in the beginning of The Earth is a Ball of Hot Rock.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I noticed that and like it seems like otherwise throughout the book he was like, or at least his self-insert character was like very Christian. You know, he always talks about like wanting to convert the people of Erewhon. The last chapter is basically about his plans to convert the people of Erewhon. yeah, I forgot to mention how the book ends to the audience, which is like, he steals his host daughter and runs off with her in a balloon right before he gets arrested and makes it back to Europe.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
and then tries to make plans to go back to Erewhon and convert them. And I think he writes about that in a sequel called, what was it, Return to Erewhon or something? Erewhon Revisited? Yeah. Which I heard was bad.
Alok Singh
Yeah, Ero Unrevisited, which I'm probably not going to read because.
Theo Jaffee
These damn sequels. No one has any creativity anymore. Yeah, less successful sequel. What is it? Both of the original discoverer of the country and by his son. It has less of the free imaginative play of its predecessor. I've like thought throughout reading this book, I should write like a chapter, like a sub stack article that's like this same protagonist, like an average, you know, Victorian English guy, except instead of discovering Erewan, he discovers
modern America and he talks about, I don't know, technology and women's rights and governance and stuff.
You know, these people are so peculiar, you know, they have these strange glass instruments that they spend all their time touching these glass instruments. They communicate through them. They have no respect for a king or church.
Alok Singh
This is like...
Basically a show about missionary work
or like futuristic missionary work.
Theo Jaffee
Is that like a thing?
I'm certain that somebody at some point has written an isekai of like, Victorian goes to the modern world.
Alok Singh
I'm just going to ask to keep.
The ones of people going to the Victorian era. Hardly from it, though. Usually when they pick... Yeah, but it's the guy supposed to be like, well, you are the random protagonist who's dropped into God knows where.
Theo Jaffee
from what I think the interesting.
Alok Singh
Like certainly could go the other way where it's some guy in a totally different era and mindset that ends up here or ends up somewhere else. But then he would likely have few values in common with you. And that's hard to identify with.
Theo Jaffee
The one time I met Eliezer Yudkowsky in person was at Manifest and like one of the few questions I asked him, because he was in a group talking about isekai and I was like, what isekai should I read if I haven't read any yet? And he said, a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, which is, yeah, I think it's about.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
Good choice. I like it.
Theo Jaffee
It's, yeah, it's a Connecticut Yankee. You know, it's Mark Twain going back to King Arthur's times.
Was Mark Twain from Connecticut? No, Missouri.
Alok Singh
is out.
Theo Jaffee
He did live in Connecticut though. Yeah He lived all over the place. He was an interesting guy You notice this would like writers in the past a lot is like they they Traveled and moved all over the place more than almost anyone else at the time Mark Twain Ernest Hemingway Someone else who I can't think of off the top my head but
Alok Singh
died.
And.
Theo Jaffee
I've been to at least two of Hemingway's houses in Sun Valley, Idaho and in Key West, Florida.
Alok Singh
Thanks.
Theo Jaffee
Okay, what else about everyone?
Alok Singh
You can go to Sun Valley,
Idaho for that one conference.
Theo Jaffee
that, yeah, the Allen & Co Billionaires Conference. That would be cool. I would actually think about that because I have family friends who have a place there.
Alok Singh
his whole bit about form and function,
search for reproductive system.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, that was good.
Alok Singh
of, yeah, his whole approach to the chicken and egg is they each inform each other's form and function. And so interdependently define each other, basically refuting the argument that well, you're not a machine.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah. ⁓ he also sort of assumes that like the development of machines will come about as I guess, reverse engineering each of the systems in the human body. ⁓ like, you know, we're going to build an artificial cardiovascular system and yeah, there it is. ⁓ there are certain functions indeed of the vapor engine, which will probably remain unchanged for myriads of years.
Alok Singh
Where?
Theo Jaffee
which in fact will perhaps survive when the use of vapor has been superseded. The piston and cylinder, the beam, the flywheel, and other parts of the machine will probably be permanent, just as we see that man and many of the lower animals share like modes of eating, drinking, and sleeping. Thus they have hearts which beat as ours, veins and arteries, eyes, ears, and noses. They sigh even in their sleep and weep and yawn. They are affected by their children. They feel pleasure and pain, hope, fear, anger, shame. They have memory, impressions. They know that if certain things happen to them, they will die, and they fear death as much as we do.
They communicate their thoughts to one another and some of them deliberately act in concert. The comparison of similarities is endless. I only make it because some may say that since the vapor engine is not likely to be improved in the main particulars, it is unlikely to be henceforward extensively modified at all.
So I guess, yeah, this is more dated. We ended up like.
not needing most of these parts to make an artificial humanoid. We don't need veins and arteries unless you consider wires to be veins and arteries.
Alok Singh
Wires,
kind of, arteries. The closest analog I would imagine is if in a robot little computers get put in for lower latency, but this thing is fast enough, especially compared to the human scale, that such seems basically unnecessary, certainly for something to work very well.
Theo Jaffee
And with the brain, you we didn't design parts of the brain. It just sort of like happened.
You know, it was grown, it wasn't designed.
Alok Singh
Mm-hmm.
Theo Jaffee
yeah, he also gets into this sort of like almost Landian analysis of like capitalism and like human interactions through machines as like itself a sort of
Alok Singh
You know, I
just realized something. This is probably where the
Maybe where the term Butlerian Jihad comes from. know in the book it has some own story.
Theo Jaffee
This is where the term Butlerian jihad
comes from.
This is, I think, probably the reason that this book is so famous is because of Dune.
Alok Singh
Okay.
Theo Jaffee
I think
he did write a separate thing called like Darwin and the Machines. Darwin Among the Machines. Yeah, it's a letter to the editor. It was written by Samuel Butler. Yeah, okay. So it was written before Erewhon. And the Book of the Machines, yeah. Butler developed this and subsequent articles into the Book of the Machines.
our wiki source here. Yeah, there we go.
Yeah, definitely read this.
This is, guess, a more clear articulation of his, like, doomerism that's not wrapped in this sort of, fantasy world.
Where is it? Yeah.
Alok Singh
Thank you.
Theo Jaffee
Man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay, even to improve, and will probably be better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state.
Alok Singh
Yeah
Theo Jaffee
Yet our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of a species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown. Let us at once go back to the primeval conditions of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude is commenced in good earnest, that we have raised the race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved, but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.
Alok Singh
I wonder if Kaczynski knew of this?
Theo Jaffee
I'm sure Kaczynski knew of this, because it's extremely like, it sounds so much like his manifesto.
Alok Singh
But it's basic, well, like your shirt says, accelerationism, or this inevitable drive towards progress otherwise, unless it's deliberately cut off.
Theo Jaffee
I think the funniest part of the Unabomber Manifesto was just like,
He basically he starts it with like the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race and Then he immediately goes into like owning the libtards
Alok Singh
have been exhausted.
Yeah, I remember. Just like...
Theo Jaffee
Which is so
funny. I remember like reading this in like fucking ninth grade math class. Yes. Reading this in ninth grade math class like wow this is actually such a fact. No this just came out of nowhere for me.
Alok Singh
Was it the fact that it was the second thing he listed that was funny?
Did you know he was gonna talk about that or did that just came out of nowhere for you?
He goes in for a while. He also says in it that he isn't even talking and he's deliberately about people who are just like explicitly leftist that he's like pointing at a category of people. I think the thing about over socialization is true. Feelings of inferiority maybe, but I think over socialization is with deeper insight.
Theo Jaffee
He likes them shirt already.
Yeah, yeah, that was
great. I actually, don't think I ever actually finished this.
Alok Singh
The most mathematician thing about him is citing different paragraphs. This is so much better than what
Theo Jaffee
This is also, this is so much better than...
Yeah.
It's so much better than Luigi's manifesto, which was like a single page of slop where he didn't even bother like making the argument. He was like, this has all been discussed at great length elsewhere.
Yeah, you know, people used to write real manifestos. This is 58 pages.
Alok Singh
Well, this is from one of America's top talents.
Theo Jaffee
Okay, first let us postulate that computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case, presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
Alok Singh
Hey bro, you have to name the tech speaker again.
more bigger.
So nice.
Theo Jaffee
The fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines.
Alok Singh
Yeah, I remember those. We just become dependent on them. Very similar in Butler.
Theo Jaffee
Notice this, yeah, people won't be able to just
turn the machine off because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
Alok Singh
Just actually just do this just put
to put Kaczynski and Butler side by side Does it let you do then your screen share you can share your whole screen instead of just a tab?
Theo Jaffee
Probably, I already am sharing the whole screen, right?
Alok Singh
Yeah, OK, we'll try splitting it then.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I would, but it's not letting me like resize the window. It's like glitching. ⁓ there we go.
Alok Singh
Yeah, just one window becoming smaller.
Theo Jaffee
There we go. Okay, now can you see side by side?
Alok Singh
No, I just see one window, the one of Darwin among the machines.
Theo Jaffee
Okay, let me.
There we go.
Alok Singh
I see it.
See me twice, actually.
Theo Jaffee
How do I minimize this?
Yeah, so this is Erewhon. This is Darwin among the machines, also Butler. This is Kaczynski. Yeah, there it is. Even if human work becomes necessary, machines will take care of more and more of simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers of the lower levels of ability.
Alok Singh
We see this happening already and while we're continuing to see this happening.
Theo Jaffee
⁓
Yeah.
Alok Singh
many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work because for intellectual or psychological reasons they cannot acquire the level of training necessary. And on those who are employed ever increasing demands will be placed they need more and more training, more and more ability and have to be ever more reliable. Conforming, I don't know about conforming and docile I think that's his emotions slipping in. Being more reliable though I think is basically true. But essentially everyone will have through this competition an ever higher standard.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, average CS major.
Mm-hmm.
Alok Singh
The machines act as this iron ruler on it, forcing everyone up.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
A great development of the service industries might provide work for human beings. Shining each other's shoes, driving each other around in taxicabs. Yeah, this one was wrong.
Alok Singh
and each other's shoes.
making handicrafts for each other, waiting on each other's tables. It seems just a thoroughly contemptible way.
Theo Jaffee
He writes about this
in the plural, first person, us and we. You know the like freedom club thing?
Alok Singh
Yeah, I think I honestly think that because he's the
I think it's because he's a mathematician in math papers. We always use we
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, so his pseudonym FC for Freedom Club, which is so stupid. It's like the meme about like Tolkien naming everything so, you know, in such a special way, except he names the the Doom Mountain Mount Doom. Like you have this, you know, math genius writing this brilliant essay and then giving himself the pseudonym Freedom Club.
Alok Singh
Okay, it'd be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.
Theo Jaffee
This
is not accelerationism.
give some indications of how to go about stopping it.
Alok Singh
No files are
taking us all on an utterly reckless ride. We go up to 180 into the unknown. Many people understand something of what technical progress is doing to us. You take a attitude to the things inevitable. But we for once he actually says who we supposed to be.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Did this inspire Fight Club?
Alok Singh
I mean, it was.
And there he is.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, probably, right?
Fight Club and Office Space, I've never watched Office Space. Fight Club was inspired by Ted Kaczynski. I think there's some similar.
Alok Singh
I know Chuck, wait, know Chuck,
the author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk has showed up to Jim Goad's book signing, The Taki Mag Guy, or ex Taki Mag Guy. And it's like fairly on the right wing. And cause this guy's not exactly right wing, he's like associated with it. So maybe.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm. Interesting. Based.
⁓
i don't know... kaczynski seems like he's... not really right or left wing yeah, he does
Alok Singh
I mean, he's insulting the left and the right. I mean, he insults the
right wing in here too, and of course we saw all the stuff about the left wing.
Theo Jaffee
He insults the left a lot, I think just to distance himself from them because, you know, it is, I guess, typically assumed that any anti-tech, anti-society anarchist would be a leftist, but he is not. Yeah, we have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new ideal form of society.
Alok Singh
This is an
amazing sentence in 184. Most people will agree that nature is beautiful. Certainly it has tremendous popular appeal. Nature has popular appeal. That's a great phrase. The radical environmental is already holding the ideology that exalts nature and opposes technology. Yeah, that hasn't changed.
Theo Jaffee
It does, yeah.
This is so true, yeah.
Yeah, ⁓ I'm sure everyone in California knows that well.
Nature takes care of itself.
Well, you can't have your cake and eat it too. To gain one thing you have to sacrifice another. Or as economists say, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Alok Singh
I hope you hate psychological conflict.
Oh, this is interesting. 186. His conclusion from revolutionary ideology should therefore be developed on two levels. Oh, okay. This one is... This is just like how you do a religion. You make one version for the elites and one for the rest.
Theo Jaffee
best.
Yeah, for the elites you have HP, MOR and the sequences and then for the rest you have like the Terminator.
Alok Singh
appreciation of the problem, the price it has to pay for getting rid of the system, the capable people in the instrumental, these people should be dressed on as rational level as possible, faction ever tends to be distorted, and yada yada. On the second level, still have only read half of it. If after finishing this project of getting a textbook into Lean and I'll watch Dune 2 finally, so no spoilers.
Theo Jaffee
Have you read Dune?
Okay.
But like, what do they say about the Butlerian Jihad? This is like not actually part of the...
Alok Singh
I said that it could have
easily been based on Samuel Butler, but not that it's known.
Theo Jaffee
It's certainly based on Samuel Butler, like...
How could it not be based on Samuel Butler?
Alok Singh
I totally
believe so. Herbert wouldn't miss something like that.
Theo Jaffee
They did a literal Butlerian jihad. Yeah. So convincing was his reasoning that, ⁓ yeah, he carried the country with them. made a clean sweep.
Alok Singh
That's the most unrealistic
part that basically people are convinced by a guy talking really good. That's the part that's the most unbelievable, everyone's solution to the machines and why they managed to destroy them. I don't think we'll be, ⁓ certainly not as absolute as them.
Theo Jaffee
Uhhh
Well, no, but-
I don't know, could the Luddites have ever reasonably succeeded? Do you think? Like the actual Luddites in actual Victorian England?
Alok Singh
their goal. see, the Luddites were decently well off weavers. They started well off until they became a bit pointless. Which is why they were real pissed. Because I they're mostly skilled craftsmen and their skill just didn't matter. So developers could very well become the next Luddites.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I'd believe it. Peak activity 1811 to 17.
Yeah, wow.
There were more troops involved in suppressing them than the Duke of Wellington led during the Peninsular War. That's incredible. And it was at the same time as the Peninsular War.
Alok Singh
They assassinated some mill owner.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, wow, I guess I never thought about like this happened during the Napoleonic Wars.
Parliament made machine breaking, i.e. industrial sabotage, a capital crime with the destruction of stocking frames. I think in Britain today, if the Luddites happened and you had a bunch of people smashing machines, they would just require an ID to buy hammers at hardware stores.
Alok Singh
etc. act.
Theo Jaffee
Did you see that Keir Starmer tweet where he was like, you know, knife crime will no longer be tolerated. We are banning the purchase of samurai swords.
Alok Singh
Any kind of...
Theo Jaffee
The way to discourage ethnic conflict is not through militant advocacy of minority rights. Instead, the Revolutionary should emphasize that although minorities do suffer more or less disadvantage, this disadvantage is of peripheral significance. Our real enemy is the industrial technological system. And in the struggle against the system, ethnic distinctions are of no importance. Yeah.
Alok Singh
Basically to swallow it for the system, which I don't think is happening.
will not be political revolution. That's a big difference from AI safety, where if anything, they're hoping for it be a political one as a lever on industry and technology. And the economics-wise, well, the economics of AI, unless you get wiped out, are real good.
Theo Jaffee
I think... Yeah.
Yeah, I saw a tweet recently that was like, they really mistimed the pause push because like, basically all the AI safety orgs tried to like push for the six month pause after GPT-4 came out, which was way too early. Like most normies were completely unaware at the time. Now normies are just like sort of starting to wake up. ⁓ especially with the AI art generation. I think probably the best time to seek a pause would have been a year from now. Maybe they could do it again.
and see if people would be more open to it.
Alok Singh
Yeah, maybe.
Will people remember pause if they're normalish? Very possibly not. Because you mean a whole year with all this stuff happening. That was like forever ago. Think of all the random things that happened in Trump's presidency that now I bet you couldn't list a single one of.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even the first presidency?
Alok Singh
Yeah, I am.
Theo Jaffee
⁓ yeah.
Alok Singh
I'm sure
you can list stuff, but you remember how there was like this endless stream of things.
Theo Jaffee
Sort of. I mean, probably like in your social circles, the idea of a Trump presidency was much, much weirder than in my social circles.
at the time.
Alok Singh
Yeah, definitely. Even so, was still just had like all sorts of odd moments just relative to any presidency. And because Trump himself is like kind of a weird guy at his core.
Theo Jaffee
Okay, this is really funny, wow. Whenever it is suggested that the United States should cut back on technological progress or economic growth, people get hysterical and start screaming that if we fall behind in technology, the Japanese will get ahead of us. Yeah.
Alok Singh
Yeah, I already read that. And the Japan. The Chinese
Japanese, holy robots, holy macro, Captain, the world will fly off its orbit.
Theo Jaffee
Uh-huh. But more reasonably, it is
argued that if the relatively democratic nations of the world fall behind in technology, while nasty dictatorial nations like China continue to progress, eventually the dictators may come to dominate the world. Wow, this is prescient. Really.
Alok Singh
This is why the industrial system should be attacked in all nations at once.
Theo Jaffee
⁓
Alok Singh
What do you think about Cuba? says look at Cuba at the end of that paragraph.
Theo Jaffee
Dictator controlled systems approved and efficient,
Alok Singh
Astro system controlled by dictator.
Okay.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, so he was just like a...
Alok Singh
pretty trade agreement like NAFTA.
Modern man is too much power, yada yada. They fail to distinguish the power for organizations and individuals.
Theo Jaffee
People need power, yeah.
Alok Singh
Modern man is a man's power when nature goes evil. Modern nature was a far less power than primitive men.
Theo Jaffee
You need a license for everything and with the license come rules and regulations.
Alok Singh
there.
Theo Jaffee
There, yeah, wow, there's so many bangers in here. I don't think I've ever read this portion of it.
Imagine an alcoholic sitting with a barrel of wine in front of him. Suppose he starts saying to himself, wine isn't bad for you if used in moderation. Why, they say small amounts of wine are even good for you. It won't do me any harm if I take just one little drink.
Alok Singh
Never forget that the human
race with technology is just like an alcoholic liberal wine. Well, that's true.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, that's us with the phones.
Alok Singh
Revolutionaries
should have as many children as they can.
Theo Jaffee
Wow, this dude is paced as fuck.
Alok Singh
There's strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited.
Theo Jaffee
Wow.
Alok Singh
No one suggests that social area at all
From our point of view, doesn't matter that much whether they're passed on genetically or through childhood training, just that they are.
Theo Jaffee
Wow, I need to read this in full.
Alok Singh
The trouble is that many of the people who are inclined to rebel against the industrial system are also concerned about overpopulation.
What do you say about artificial intelligence specifically? Like you just search artificial, because I don't think if you search AI you'll get.
Theo Jaffee
This is the one and only keyword search match for artificial intelligence.
Alok Singh
And this that's not well, that would mean that we were looking at this, but go up a bit. So what did he say again for the scenario where we do develop it?
yeah, the people are really dependent.
Theo Jaffee
Intelligent machines, yeah. Right. We said, yeah, we saw this. Humans will be dependent. Due to improved techniques, the elite will have greater control over the masses. And because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless, they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they're humane, they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques.
Alok Singh
If your ruthless teammate has just-
Or if it consists of soft-hearted liberals,
they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the race. Psychologically hygienic, that's quite a phrase. Everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep them busy. And everyone may become dissatisfied, undergoes quote treatment to cure his quote problem. Of course, life will be so purposeful that people have to be biologically or psychologically engineered, either remove their need for the power process or make them supplement that drive.
Yeah, I basically buy this. Maybe happy society, they most certainly will not be free. They'll reduce the status of domestic animals.
And then basically as the premise of well, what if that doesn't happen? Well, we basically are filling in like a section of Kaczynski's book with all this AI safety stuff.
Basically section like 173 and 174.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Why do we read Erewhon instead of this?
Is it because fiction is important?
Alok Singh
Butler's a better writer.
Theo Jaffee
⁓ I'm not convinced of that.
Alok Singh
And but but there's
I think so. But I also think Butler's prescience is a more interesting given that it's well before even computers. Although he has time cognate, but he has to extrapolate it from basically a loom as a machine.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, that was pretty impressive. ⁓
I think there have been, I guess you could say the Golem is kind of an AI story. Talos was a sculpture, or a giant made of bronze who act as guardian for the island of Crete.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
You throw boulders at
Theo Jaffee
Faust, Frankenstein, yeah, artificial life. But not the same thing as artificial intelligence. Yeah, automata.
Alok Singh
RUR, something RUR. yeah, Leibniz of course talks about, okay, let me look at the Leibniz archive actually. Try looking at the notes of Leibniz. A bunch of them are online and now with the PDF tools, the fact that they're written in like six languages shouldn't be such a problem.
not those notes. Maybe try Leibniz Archive and I will also look.
Theo Jaffee
Leibniz archive, is it Hanover? Wow.
Alok Singh
200,000 pages of 50,000 pieces of writing.
I found one essay of his about spider silk for armor.
Theo Jaffee
machine would use an alphabet of human thoughts and rules to combine them. Yeah, so he was wrong about that.
Why did everyone think that AI would come about by listing out, enumerating a bunch of different human concepts and then manually drawing connections between them, as if that was possible?
Alok Singh
alphabet.
in a sense it kind of is doing that. Manual is a bit of a stretch. It's just that it's not being done by the human, which is the big draw, but it is done by a lot of brute force.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, but not by the humans.
Alok Singh
Yeah, which is the big thing.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Alok Singh
five or four days is too late, but you'd have to open three cursors.
Theo Jaffee
Calculating machines were built by Leibniz. Yeah What a genius this dude was. Very underrated.
Alok Singh
Yeah,
yes, absolutely. Non-standard analysis comes from his work.
So you know I like him.
Theo Jaffee
Highly rated but still underrated, as Cowen would say.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
Theo Jaffee
Okay, so like what else do we have from Erewhon that's not just AI?
Alok Singh
Yeah.
That's.
Theo Jaffee
What was the most interesting
thing in here that wasn't the Book of the Machines?
Alok Singh
Well, this is still in the book of machines just when he compares them He says a man hardly owns himself basically because he's got so many parasites in him. Maybe such a little parasite or He's such a hive and swarm of parasites as doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his and Whether he is anything but another kind of anteep after all
Theo Jaffee
Yeah. yeah, what I was saying earlier, he was very early on the, on the Nick Land idea that like society itself is a sort of machine.
Alok Singh
Again.
Theo Jaffee
this.
He wrote this somewhere, yeah.
We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing. In truth, it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind.
⁓ the machine
Alok Singh
I Butler should get the credit as far as I can assign anyway because, especially given that he wrote Darwin Among the Machines, he's specifically making a claim about superintelligence.
Theo Jaffee
Doran among the machines is, yeah, very, very prescient.
Alok Singh
Also 1863, that's pretty early.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Alok Singh
Predicting a machine before the Industrial Revolution, that would be quite something.
I hear you can go into the the rates of vegetable animal and mineral.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, the the rights of vegetables was interesting.
yeah.
Yeah.
Even the Puritans, after a vain attempt to subsist on a kind of jam made of apples and yellow cabbage leaves, succumb to the inevitable and resign themselves to a diet of roast beef and mutton with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner table.
Alok Singh
Okay, he really does insist on the speed thing. At the end of the first section of the machines, or the end of the second section, must always be remembered that man's body is what it is, though, through having been molded into his presence shaped by the chances and change of the many millions of years. But his organization never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which the machines advances. This is the most alarming feature in the case, and I must be pardoned for insisting on it so frequently.
So he certainly hones in on the right things. The speed of development.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Alok Singh
which now for his time probably feels like everyone looking at the left side of the exponential curve, like, farmingly small prosaic and kind of cute. And yet.
I was like, oh, machines in 1863, they're just too good. Or, well, that's not, in fact, he specifically says that's not his claim. Not that they're too good, but that soon there will be. Although his soon, I don't know if he'd speculate on how long it would take.
Theo Jaffee
Well you had some pretty powerful machines not that long after this, you know, the atomic bomb or even like, I don't know, the dreadnought was only 30 years after this.
30, 40 years.
Alok Singh
He lived in 1902.
Theo Jaffee
So he saw the final peaceful days of the West before the West fell and billions died.
Alok Singh
Also, it
says that he had studies on the evidence for Christianity, so I assume that's where the whole obsession comes from. He also developed the theory that the Odyssey was written by a young Sicilian. The scenes of the poem reflect the coast of Sicily. Blah, blah.
also has the theory that if the Shakespeare sonnets be arranged to tell a story about a homosexual affair.
Also that Homer's deities and the Iliad are like humans, but without the virtue and that he must have designed Samuel Butler Wikipedia page.
Theo Jaffee
Where are reading this?
really?
Alok Singh
This is interesting. He argued that each organism was not distinct from its parents, that it was merely an extension at a later stage of evolution. Birth has been made too much of, quote him.
That's an interesting take.
Theo Jaffee
That is an interesting take. He does talk about like birth a lot in heroin.
Alok Singh
It's like one that, like you can define it so that
it's technically correct, but I don't think it's all that helpful. But his thing about birth has been made too much of.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, like did you read the birth formulae and the world of the unborn?
Alok Singh
I remember there
were bizarre world views on the born or unborn.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah,
because he has to sort of reconcile like Erewhon's treatment of illness as criminal with like the fact that people need to be born and also like, you know, birth is a sort of illness kind of, you know, pregnant women are sick. And birth itself is like a very, you know, messy medical thing. So like, he thinks that babies come from the kingdom of the unborn and they're like these, I guess,
almost like omnipotent like spirit like angel type beings that then get bored and decide to like wipe their memories and spawn as a human child and they have to like sign off on this.
Alok Singh
Thank
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
So the unborn, like, the wisest of the unborn will explain this thing about why being born is actually terrible, why you should never want to be born. Was Butler an antinatalist?
or is he just gay?
Alok Singh
I don't know. I don't think he's an antinatalist. was a serious but amateur student of the subjects he undertook, especially religious, orthodoxy, and evolutionary thought, and his controversial assertions effectively shut him out from both the opposing factions of church and science. Ow. In those days, one was either a religionist or a Darwinian, but he was neither.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, that sounds about right.
yeah, the way of all flesh.
semi-autobiographical novel that was like really long.
Alok Singh
It claims in Dune that it is named for Butler.
same.
Theo Jaffee
Who else could it have been named after?
Alok Singh
Again, I mean, I'm not doubting this, but I want to see if there is a firsthand evidence for it directly stated.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
I'm getting kind of tired. Is there anything else in Erewhon?
Alok Singh
He says the dog they're more self-sacrificing than humans
Theo Jaffee
I think that's kind of true.
What's name of that like Japanese dog who waited for, huh? Hachiko, yeah. Most humans wouldn't do that.
Alok Singh
Hachiko. Hachiko.
Theo Jaffee
you call
Yeah, wow. Incredible. I forgot to look at the statue of Hachiko at Shibuya Station.
sad.
Was Hachiko the first Doge?
He was in Akita.
The escape chapter reminded me of Around the World in 80 Days.
Alok Singh
I didn't know you'd know that.
Theo Jaffee
know what.
Alok Singh
around more than 80 days.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, I used to read fiction. I actually read that a lot because as you may have observed, I have a sort of autistic obsession with maps and timelines and stuff. And you could very clearly chart out the timeline and the map of their voyage. I still basically remember almost every step of it. Yeah, London, Paris, Turin, Brindisi, and then they go...
on a boat to Port Said and down to Suez and then out in Yemen and then to India, first Mumbai and then they go up on the train but the train can't go all the way so they have to take an elephant and then take the train down to Kolkata and then to Singapore and then Hong Kong and then Yokohama, Japan and then San Francisco and then they take
like part railroad and part like dog sled across the US to the East Coast to New York and then boat back to London.
Alok Singh
Okay.
Theo Jaffee
Although there was actually no hot air balloon in the original book, that was like an invention of a movie adaptation or something.
I think this was good writing here.
Alok Singh
is across the sink, also remember that below in your math there's one with alpine gorges
When he says in the very beginning in his teaser to the book of the machines, think in chapter six, that they're destined to become instinct as vital from distinct from man as man is from vegetable or animal.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah, he also talks about how like, ⁓ specifically through, consciousness, like human consciousness is very different from whatever it is that animals and vegetables experience, if it could even be called experience and
Alok Singh
hair.
Yeah,
he goes into a Venus fly trap in a fair amount of depth.
Theo Jaffee
Yeah.
Alok Singh
Yeah, machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man and to become instinct with a vitality as different from and superior to that of animals as animals to vegetable life. Although as they later expand, it's really more like animal like machine to human and human to animal and animal to plant vegetables. I guess vegetable to mineral and that's where it ends.
Theo Jaffee
Uh...oh yeah. Upon his asking me to name some of our most advanced machines, I did not dare to tell him of our steam engines and railroads and electric telegraphs. And it was puzzling my brain to think what I could say when, of all things in the world, balloons suggested themselves.
Huh, I didn't even notice that detail the first time I read. Because this balloon detail comes back later when he escapes on the balloon. That's cool, yeah.
Alok Singh
Yeah.
Check off the balloon.
Theo Jaffee
Hmm. All right, well, yeah, this was fun. I did like this book. I will read more fiction now. Thank you, you inspired me.
Alok Singh
All right. Let's call it.
Share this post