Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Cognitive Dark Forest

ryelang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 301 posts

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#181

Post by pillefitz »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #69

I think this only applies to a rather narrow set of ideas. I'm not really interested in pursuing ideas that stop being good if somebody gets there first. If I bothered to design it its because I wanted it to exist and if somebody makes it exist then I'm happy because then I get to use it. So what kind of things does this apply to? Likely, it's zero sum games, schemes to control other people, ways to be the first to c…

Do you think there's enough such opportunities that we'll all be able to pay our rents?

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#182

Post by mekoka »

jrowen wrote: post #155

It is also asymmetric. If you announce your presence, even if 4 out of 5 civs that notice you don’t annihilate you immediately (but they probably should), the fifth might. It’s just a probability game, with permadeath. So hiding is the most rational - the only - strategy of survival. This is a paranoid and cynical strategy that doesn't win out in the known history of life. What works is grow, expand, mingle, maintain…

A typical outlook from 21st century human thinking. We love to draw from our still rather actual history of fear and addictions to zero-sum games, to extrapolate the far advancement of other civilizations. As millennia go by, species can obviously only evolve technologically, while remaining psychologically, philosophically, and spiritually stuck.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#183

Post by arionhardison »

I find the selective framing here very telling.

When there's higher violence and lower property values in a Black neighborhood, people like OP are quick to blame Black culture. But when the "Cognitive Dark Forest" emerges from a community that shares its own common characteristics, suddenly collective accountability no longer applies.

When discussing violence in the Black community, it's "cultural." But when the subject turns to financial crimes or exploitation — where the per-capita ratios tell their own story — proportionality and population-to-crime-rate analysis mysteriously stop mattering.

It's difficult to take the "Cognitive Dark Forest" seriously as an existential concern when the people raising the alarm are so selectively offended. The crisis only becomes real when their innovations, their livelihoods, and their moats are threatened. Everyone else was supposed to just adapt.

The "Cognitive Dark Forest" is and will be continued to be perpetuated by "them" and if you really cared about the issue you would have addressed them.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#184

Post by ohelm »

bsza wrote: post #111

The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect. The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even de…

I would suffocate it. Know the greedy snake idiom? A snake is so hungry and greedy that it suffocates on its prey?

Best you can do is to spread all of the goods it provides, as it is too greedy to not devour them itself. It will consume them and suffocate slowly.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#185

Post by Vachyas »

scottlawson wrote: post #4

The thesis that in the past it was safe to share ideas and projects because the execution was hard, and that now things have changed because of AI is an interesting AI, but I wonder if it is really true. It certainly seems true that for small projects and relatively narrow scoped things that AI can replicate them easily. I'm thinking specifically about blog posts where people share their first steps and simple progra…

> And now, with the assistance of AI, I can go much farther in 10 hours and deliver a more complex project. But that means that someone else trying to replicate this execution is still going to need around 10 hours to replicate it.

The blog post does touch upon this. The key difference, I believe, would be that compute scales in a way "meat-heads" doesn't, where if the other person has 100x the capital to throw at it, they could do the same 10 hour thing in 10 minutes.

Basically, what I got from it was that innovation has never been truly scalable enough to create the "dark forest", since hiring more and more engineers saturates quickly. But if/when innovation does become scalable (or crosses some scalability threshold) via AI, that could trigger a "dark forest" scenario.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#186

Post by mellosouls »

arionhardison wrote: post #183

I find the selective framing here very telling. When there's higher violence and lower property values in a Black neighborhood, people like OP are quick to blame Black culture. But when the "Cognitive Dark Forest" emerges from a community that shares its own common characteristics, suddenly collective accountability no longer applies. When discussing violence in the Black community, it's "cultural." But when the subj…

What are you talking about? You appear to be responding to a completely different subject to the essay.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#187

Post by causal »

nextos wrote: post #62
pugio wrote: post #21

Thanks, this helped crystallize something for me: the play the AI labs are making is anti-fragile (in the Nassim Taleb sense): > The very act of resisting feeds what you resist and makes it less fragile to future resistance. At least along certain dimensions. I don't think the labs themselves are antifragile. Obviously we all know the labs are training on everything (so write/act the way you want future AIs to percei…

You have a point but current LLM architectures in particular are very fragile to data poisoning [1,2]. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192

No idea why you're being downvoted. We can't yet even demonstrate that LLMs will withstand training on their own output as they pollute the Internet.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#188

Post by wasmainiac »

arionhardison wrote: post #183

I find the selective framing here very telling. When there's higher violence and lower property values in a Black neighborhood, people like OP are quick to blame Black culture. But when the "Cognitive Dark Forest" emerges from a community that shares its own common characteristics, suddenly collective accountability no longer applies. When discussing violence in the Black community, it's "cultural." But when the subj…

I’m sorry. Why are we talking about Black neighbourhoods?

Feel like we are trying to put the author in a bad (racist or classists?) light so we do not have to address the real issues touched on by the article.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#189

Post by arionhardison »

mellosouls wrote: post #186
arionhardison wrote: post #183

I find the selective framing here very telling. When there's higher violence and lower property values in a Black neighborhood, people like OP are quick to blame Black culture. But when the "Cognitive Dark Forest" emerges from a community that shares its own common characteristics, suddenly collective accountability no longer applies. When discussing violence in the Black community, it's "cultural." But when the subj…

What are you talking about? You appear to be responding to a completely different subject to the essay.

[dead]

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#190

Post by hal9zillion »

noident wrote: post #2

The LLMisms in the "thinkpad" section caused me to close the tab

Yep this was probably the most LLM generated thing I've read all day and that's saying something. Brutal.

Everyday I see dozens of huge posts where someone has generated a wall of text that's expressing a very simple, very derivative idea and I see tons of earnest people replying with posts that the they've written themselves seemingly unaware of this and it really pisses me off to be honest. If you are going to generate your thinkpiece like this there should be an international law that says it can't be longer than two sentences.

Post reply on HN