Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Most Germans in 1933, for example, were not psychopaths. So why did they vote for Hitler?

Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

It will be very interesting to see what happens when Trump finally dies, and what will happen to this movement, how much of it is truly beholden to his unique celebrity status, which he has over any of the other members of this movement. If you remove that, what happens to the movement? Does somebody else manage to come in and replace him and be the new focal point of the cult of personality? I don’t know that any of them have the juice for that.

— Mike Duncan, to Nikki McCann Ramirez / “Are We Witnessing the Fall of the American Empire?” / Rolling Stone

As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish.
The fish was in my mouth.
My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out.

I fell like this for years,
in the fishy air.

— Edward Salem / “My Aerodynamics”

After that Hathney had been silently pensive sometime, he askt the Monk whether the Spaniards also were admitted into Heaven, and he answering that the Gates of Heaven were open to all that were Good and Godly, the Cacic replied without further consideration, that he would rather go to Hell then Heaven, for fear he should cohabit in the same Mansion with so Sanguinary and Bloody a Nation. And thus God and the Holy Catholick Faith are Praised and Reverenced by the Practices of the Spaniards in America.

— Bartolomé de las Casa / A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Large language models (LLMs) don’t have intentions or understanding, but they can scheme and lie. For example, tests have shown that various popular models would engage in blackmail, corporate espionage, and even actions that could lead to death in highly contrived scenarios. In a separate test, a model that was told it had control over a robot attempted to disable its ethics module, make copies of itself, alter logs, act dumb, break out of the lab, and hack a car’s computer. Researchers suggest part of the cause might be the fact that LLMs are trained on so many computer-betrayal stories — think Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey — and that papers describing LLM scheming could actually make the problem worse.

— Flora Graham / “AI models that lie, cheat and plot murder” / Nature Briefing

None of us asked to be where we are … What we control is our actions once fate puts us there.

— Hugh Howey / Wool 

The fact that the Nazi and Stalinist regimes were founded on cruel fantasies and shameless lies did not make them historically exceptional, nor did it preordain them to collapse. Nazism and Stalinism were two of the strongest networks humans ever created . . . In the twenty-first century, some new totalitarian regime may well succeed where Hitler and Stalin failed, creating an all-powerful network that could prevent future generations from even attempting to expose its lies and fictions. We should not assume that delusional networks are doomed to failure. If we want to prevent their triumph, we will have to do the hard work ourselves.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

What I’m Listening To:

I broke my finger
Playing middle C
I keep tryna get you
Just to notice me
Betrayed

— Jeff Tweedy / “Betrayed”