this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

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[–] sus@programming.dev 11 points 2 days ago

Sorry for the following somewhat disproportionate aggression

Searle said

I feel somewhat embarrassed to give even this answer to the systems theory because the theory seems to me so unplausible to start with. The idea is that while a person doesn’t understand Chinese, somehow the conjunction of that person and bits of paper might understand Chinese. It is not easy for me to imagine how someone who was not in the grip of an ideology would find the idea at all plausible

As I was reading this I was screaming silently: YOU invented the chinese room. It was ENTIRELY YOUR IDEA to come up with a ridiculous, unphysical, implausible thought experiment where a single human somehow does the task of millenia in the span of minutes.
And now you object that it seems implausible???

Millenia is very optimistic by the way. If you tried to simulate chatgpt with paper and a pen, it would take much, much longer than that.
AND THE PIECE OF JUNK STILL WOULDN'T EVEN GET THE CHINESE CHARACTERS RIGHT.

Author echoes my thoughts by calmly stating:

Searle simply puts the cart before the horse. Let the high speed men with paper, pencil, and rubber commence using their rulebook to carry on a conversation, whether in Chinese or any other language, and then we can discuss the metaphysical implications."

Motherfucker, Sartre has set the cart on fire and shot the horse, and you are contemplating whether to dance on the remains!
Ok, ok, maybe it metaphysically makes sense. But you're exhaustively drawing a connection between the metaphysical and the practical! Now it can't make sense!

Interrogate our intuitions with one centillion shrimp.
incoherent screeching