Would you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
Ripples…
from Astral Codex Ten SB1047
“My ex-girlfriend has a weird relationship to reality. Her actions ripple out into the world more heavily than other people's.
She finds herself at the center of events more often than makes sense.
One time someone asked her to explain the whole “AI risk” thing to a State Senator. She hadn’t realized states had senators, but it sounded important, so she gave it a try, figuring out her exact pitch on the car ride to his office.
A few months later, she was informed that the Senator had really taken her words to heart, and he'd been thinking hard about how he could help. This is part of the story behind SB 1047 - specifically, the only part I have any personal connection to. The rest of this post comes from anonymous sources in the pro-1047 community who wanted to tell their side of the story.”
Did you exchange A walk on part in the war for
A lead role in a cage?
One of my marketing profs in college used their lyrical lessons extensively. I remember him opening class one session with the line “Then one day you find 10 years have got behind you….”
The memory of his opening line remains, but the lesson which followed was less memorable, as I can’t remember what class was about that day.
We are often given the choice to sacrifice our freedoms and dreams in exchange for minor conveniences like a comfy job, income, and a false sense of security. Those decisions start off small, but in order to keep your position you will increasingly be asked to sacrifice more of your freedoms and dreams.
This is one of my ‘foundational quotes’.
the writer asks the subject if he compromised an albeit small role (walk-on part) in a bigger cause (war being synonymous with fighting for a cause greater than oneself), for a leading role where he would ultimately be held captive in a cage. So it suggests that the walk-on part is more noble than the leading role because one retains one’s freedom in the process.
Art Baur’s comment about “In life we are told we must chose God and a lack of choice means we “take the lead roll in the cage”. I wonder why must we chose one or the other? Why if we Don’t pick God must we follow the devil” I agree that some will tell us this is the choice, and that there is no middle ground. I do not think that is true. I think that choice; the whole concept of it is to ask one’s self how conscious are our decisions?
For me (and part of this is what I pick up from working in the mental health field) the choice in the song is between “a walk on part in the war” – basically participation in the joys and sorrows of the world (yes, I’m a fan of Joseph Campbell) and the realization that in the “grand scheme of things” we are NOT the center of the world’s focus.
Conversely I see the “lead role in a cage” as someone who is the center of their own little world/perception, AND that role/experience is a tiny little nonfunctional box not really connected to the rest of the world
***
One of the seminal lines in my young life, while in my twenties, was this line:
"Did you exchange, a walk-on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage?"
https://jzmurdock.blogspot.com/2012/01/did-you-exchange-walk-on-part-in-war.html
Translation into French
Diamond https://paroles2chansons.lemonde.fr/paroles-pink-floyd/paroles-shine-on-you-crazy-diamond.html
Brain damage the dark side of the moon
https://paroles2chansons.lemonde.fr/paroles-pink-floyd/paroles-brain-damage.html
Confirmation bias butterfly effect
Rosa Parks?
Famous important over built her part of the story
World is ruled by randomness
Small action or legend
Harai storytelling
Yes and no
We believe fictions, we need legends, we need heroes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin
Based on considerations like these, the bill made it through California’s Assembly and Senate relatively smoothly, passing the State Assembly 49-15 and the State Senate 29-9. It then went to Governor Gavin Newsom for signature/veto. He sat on it until almost the last possible moment, then vetoed it September 29.
His letter explaining his veto is - sorry to impugn a state official this way, but everyone who read it agrees - bullsh*t. He says he loves regulating AI and is very concerned about safety, but rejects the bill because it doesn’t go far enough. In particular:
By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB 1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology. Smaller, specialized models may emerge as equally or even more dangerous than the models targeted by SB 1047 - at the potential expense of curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good.
I’m not sure there’s a single person in the world who actually holds this opinion. Opponents of the bill worried that it could potentially crush innovation by regulating smaller models that weren’t dangerous, and demanded guarantees that this would only apply to the big companies that were able to pay the regulatory costs. Supporters accepted this was a risk and offered those guarantees gladly. The constituency for rejecting SB 1047 because it didn’t go far enough in regulating small models is zero.
Newsom obviously has no plan to come up with a stricter bill that also regulates the small models, so on the basis of “this doesn’t regulate enough” he is ensuring that nothing gets regulated at all.
O
But I prefer an ungenerous interpretation: Gavin Newsom is bad.
****
Did you know: the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India. I’m not sure what to think upon learning this. Obviously Gaza’s main problems aren’t economic, and being invaded and bombed is bad no matter how good your economy is. But I also had a sense that Gaza was a uniquely bad economic basketcase even before the recent war. How good a measure is GDP when a country is under severe sanctions? What about when one country is mostly rural and the other mosty urban? Or is this just another case of Westerners being unable to comprehend the scale of suffering caused by ordinary global poverty?
*
The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize; b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they “Platonify.”
Education in a Taxicab I will introduce the third element of the triplet, the curse of learning, as follows. I closely watched my grandfather, who was minister of defense, and later minister of the interior and deputy prime minister in the early days of the war, before the fading of his political role. In spite of his position he did not seem to know what was going to happen any more than did his driver, Mikhail. But unlike my grandfather, Mikhail used to repeat “God knows” as his main commentary on events, transferring the task of understanding higher up. I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you’re a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite. It is not just knowledge but information that can be of dubious value. It came to my notice that almost everybody was acquainted with current events in their smallest details. The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Excerpt from “The Black Swan; The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb