Invitations are potential new social tax obligations. From: Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at 9:25 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com stock collapse?
Are all invitations coercions???? Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson> On Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM glen <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Sorry, by Vocal Grooming, I mean this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming,_Gossip_and_the_Evolution_of_Language <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming,_Gossip_and_the_Evolution_of_Language>> not merely "vocal". [⛧] Your defense of gridding the garden reminded me of road trips where you'd run across a tree farm or orchard where all the trees are perfectly lined up ... nauseating ... maybe akin to trypophobia, some deeply ingrained (false?) registration of toxicity. It also reminded me of Trump's claim that Finland rakes the forest. Granted, I recognize the satisfaction of Engineering, making the world in your image. My first real sense of that was the aircraft factory I got to walk through at Lockheed to get to the campus nurse for my drug tests. Watching all those robots do things like shaving aluminum blocks was transformative. Feynman's "what I can't create, I don't understand", ALife, and biomimicry all argue for a fuzzy boundary between science and engineering. I'm sure there are Dork tests out there similar to OCEAN that might ask whether you get in the flow more by staring at lichen or desoldering capacitors. But it feels a bit like the built environment has hijacked "wonder". I have a Quine atom tattooed on my left hand. And it's a beautiful concept. But thinking about it's uniqueness under different systems feels very different from, say, watching a batch of baby spiders spread out to discover the world. I expect that the dopamine circuits being exercised are different. Tech like AI, social media, gooning, etc. seems akin to alcohol or heroin. It hijacks your pleasure centers such that the rest of the world turns gray and boring. Conversing with a sycophant, even with the veneer prompt of "be argumentative", who never ghosts you (unless Cloudflare fails!), never has its own agenda trying to coerce you into their domain (Hi Nick), never dismisses your idea as a complete waste of time, etc. is a kind of hijacking ... very similar to professionally produced pornography or Hollywood movies where every woman is a bombshell and every man has a six-pack. Pffft. Gimme real sociality over parasociality any day. I've never really had a comfort zone and I'm not trying to find one now that I'm almost dead. Of course, we've tread this ground. There's a difference between factory farms and .... what was it? ... "husbandry"? "permaculture"? IDRemember. [⛧] However, cf Social tension after grooming in wild Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata yakui) is sex specific and sensitive to social relationships. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.23664 <https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.23664> On 11/17/25 4:11 PM, Steve Smith wrote: > > On 11/17/25 2:34 pm, glen wrote: >> There's a very real risk. > > guessing you are referring to the "entropy minimization strategy" reference? > >> The itch the chatbots scratch is partly (mostly, imnsho) vocal grooming. > I don't know about vocal literally but perhaps if you mean "verbal" or more > generally "linguistic"? This is a significant component of the "bar friend" > mode I've referenced. Someone I can "rattle on with" and get a variety of > disagreeable agreements and vice-versa... at best exercising social muscles > with the main reward being the tiny bits of fatty protein I find down in the > fur to pop in my mouth and down my gullet. >> But it's also partly co-construction/collaboration. I'm antipathetic to the >> former. So I don't miss that part. But the 2nd part is critical. >> Conversations with the chatbots *feel* to me like living in a planned >> community ... i.e. flat-out yucky ... no stigmergy ... no graffiti ... no >> crabs living in soup cans. > It does remind me from time to time of those all-agreeable conversations > (some) sports fans and political-awfulizing gaggles do when we get > together... on a good day it feels like chatting with someone who really does > want to understand my point of view and (if encouraged to be > argumentative)help me explore the negative/complementary space I've > neglected. A little like the conversations I'd get stuck in when I went to > college with Jesus Freaks (the hippy/jesus looking ones, not the overgroomed, > back-from-mission versions). >> In this case, no long-winded friend constantly polluting the air with >> tangent after tangent. >8^D No bent threads. Etc. > I resemble that comment! Just think of it as Performance/Graffiti Art? >> I suppose if you want your world to be all grids and bullet points, >> hyperreal veneer, then fine. Have your chatbot. > I rarely need help bulleting/gridding my unruly garden, but it is nice to > have a plow and seeder that normalizes the planting grid (a little) in spite > of being more of a one-straw-revolution kinda guy. My garden art is more > edward-scissorhands than Disney but ... not. a forest either? >> But the world's looking a bit grim to those of us who prefer the forest to >> Disney World. And if you run across someone who can't tell the difference >> between a forest and Disney World ... well, IDK ... that's "uncanny" to me >> ... like talking to a sociopath. > Maybe I have a fetish for drawing the inner sociopath out in people? Or just > recognizing it. Maybe not sociopathic but more socio-divergent, but not the > performative kind, the deeply ideosyncratic, unselfconscious kind... like the > roadrunner who seems to be trying to join my small herd of 6 chickens. I hope > she's teaching them some anti-wiley-T-Coyote tricks... on that note, I'd > better go run them into their coop before they freak out over the northern > lights again? >> >> On 11/17/25 10:41 AM, Steve Smith wrote: >>> I don't even know if I will send my response to this thread, I've come to >>> delete most of my "usual" offerings without sending, some without >>> finishing, others without starting. Some kind of entropy-minimization >>> strategy on "y'all's" side of my Markov Blanket? >>> >>> Lots of rich stuff here. I don't think I disagree with any sentiment here >>> (can they ALL be compatible?). Tom's original (implied) question is >>> probably as much about "should those of us with fat ETF portfolios switch >>> their mix from high-performing AI-fueled to some other place with better >>> risk/reward ratios?" as it is about "is there even a 'there there' in the >>> AI cascade of new affordances and competencies being offered (hyped) by >>> 'the market'. But maybe they are fundamentally the same question in this >>> highly human-conditioned manifold of intersubjective reality we inhabit >>> together? >>> >>> Obligatory anecdote: when a moved to my current property (2000), A huge >>> russian olive (50' tall, 3'diameter trunk, broad reaching branches) hosted >>> a huge magpie nest in one of the forking horizontal branches... maybe 6-8' >>> long made of branches from all over the property (area) and many other >>> elements. It had a half-dozen babies in it when I first came to review the >>> property but by the time we moved in, they had fledged and the nest was >>> fully abandoned (only for the season?) Within the year we took it upon >>> ourselves to remove the nest and found the myriad bits of interesting >>> detritus they had gathered. The structure of the nest seemed fully rhymed >>> and reasoned in spite of being opportunistic to the >>> branch/twig/grass/fur/??? at hand and wabi sabi in the extreme, but the >>> strange bright bits of yarn, string, fabric, bottle caps, broken glass, etc >>> cetera, were much more arcane/occult-to-me. But nevertheless alliterated, >>> rhymed and likely reasoned. As did our own >>> slow picking-apart of the structure with the help of Jays, Packrats, and >>> the weather which had it's own uses for these "objects of desire"? >>> >>> Within 3 years West Nile flared up the Rio Grande, killing (most notably, >>> but not exclusively) Magpies. Even now, 20 years later, the populations >>> have barely begun to recover in a small way, probably migrated back down >>> from the Chama/Rio-Grande headwaters and environs? This anecdote could >>> tangent into the (very few) people I know of who contracted (and one died) >>> of West Nile during that time, and the cascade of influences/effects that >>> had on the lives of the people I know, but except for a vague "where did >>> all the Magpies go?" I hardly registered the *devastating* effect it had on >>> the Magpies (and likely many other corvids/birds in the region?). Or >>> tangent to the "Rabbit Hemorhaggic Fever Pandemic" which coincided with >>> human's COVID 19 which devastated the Jack and Cotton populations here (and >>> many other regions globally)... >>> >>> This is probably an allegory or parable or something. Re:Cautionary Tales >>> starring NRA wankers - I did just (re) watch two Charlton Heston classics >>> from my "coming of age" era: "Soylent Green" and "Planet of the Apes" but >>> was spared (paywalls) from "Omega Man". I didn't tangent to "Ben Hur" nor >>> "Moses" for different reasons, but to quote Glen (who might have been >>> quoting David Byrne?): >>> >>> "Same as it ever was!" >>> >>> On 11/17/25 10:57 am, glen wrote: >>>> That's the point. Some of us line our nests with robust things like straw. >>>> Others line theirs with fantasies peddled by grifters and then expect the >>>> rest of us to share our nests when theirs collapse. We will *definitely* >>>> bail out the capitalists again ... and again ... and again, even >>>> after/while they['re] deport[ing] us, abusing us, killing us, sending us >>>> to kill foreigners, stealing our water to run their data centers, etc. >>>> >>>> We are the gift that keeps on giving. >>>> >>>> On 11/17/25 9:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: >>>>> I remember where I was when I saw Torvalds’ first Linux release. I >>>>> started downloading pretty much immediately and looking for a PC to >>>>> sacrifice. It was hardly capitalist hype. >>>>> >>>>> *From: *Friam <[email protected] >>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of glen >>>>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> >>>>> *Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 8:54 AM >>>>> *To: *[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected] >>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> >>>>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com >>>>> stock collapse? >>>>> >>>>> Exactly. That's Chris' basic argument. Even his point about fscking >>>>> Twitter. To argue that it's "running just as well as it did" seems a bit >>>>> discordant. But at some altitude, he's right. It's just as much of a >>>>> toxic wasteland as it was before. Every time it crosses my gaze, I wonder >>>>> why people still use it ... or bluesky, or reddit, or <arbitrary-tag>. >>>>> >>>>> My experiments with Cline have just about ended. I've decided to avoid >>>>> it. It works great with Claude (and some others), but not with gpt-oss or >>>>> codestral. Both of those work fine if *I* manage the prompting. Chris >>>>> also mentions linux, which I've been using as my daily driver since ~1995 >>>>> (?) ... IDK, maybe I was mostly using ultrix & minix in '95. But >>>>> sporadically, as with the Windows 11 update breaking recovery, all the >>>>> dorks get all riled up and talk about linux finally being ready for the >>>>> desktop. [sigh] >>>>> >>>>> The fact is that we're no smarter than rats or birds who'll fill our >>>>> nests with whatever stupid little shiny thing the capitalists bother to >>>>> hype. >>>>> >>>>> On 11/17/25 8:21 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: >>>>>> The first example that comes to mind are malls. Malls aren't needed now >>>>>> so many of them are closing. >>>>>> Some people see something bad about that. I see something good about >>>>>> that: Ruts get erased and new opportunities arise. Power gets >>>>>> redistributed. >>>>>> We're between cycles of exploitation and exploration, and there's some >>>>>> adaptation that is required. >>>>>> >>>>>> -----Original Message----- >>>>>> From: Friam <[email protected] >>>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> On Behalf Of glen >>>>>> Sent: Monday, November 17, 2025 8:02 AM >>>>>> To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com >>>>>> stock collapse? >>>>>> >>>>>> But Chris' argument isn't really about AI. Chris is as guilty of >>>>>> preemptive registration as the others. Short-term markets distort >>>>>> everything. The task is to free up the terms coercively bound by the >>>>>> grifters and marketeers. Once the terms are unbound, we can discover >>>>>> which formalisms fit and which don't. >>>>>> >>>>>> If we're charitable, Chris is right that *something* is amiss. The >>>>>> disagreement is about *what* is amiss. Same as it Ever Was. >>>>>> >>>>>> On 11/17/25 7:45 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: >>>>>>> But what ARE these investments right now? It seems to me they are well >>>>>>> established companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google. NVIDIA has >>>>>>> existed and will exist should AI revenue dry up, just like it outlasted >>>>>>> Ethereum mining. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> The new players aren’t yet public companies. OpenAI has a longer path >>>>>>> to profitability, but Anthropic (technical users) is already making >>>>>>> good progress @ $7B. AI has already penetrated education and will >>>>>>> likely spread more. People will become dependent on it like they are >>>>>>> dependent on cars. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> *From: *Friam <[email protected] >>>>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of Prof David West >>>>>>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> >>>>>>> *Date: *Monday, November 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM >>>>>>> *To: *[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected] >>>>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> >>>>>>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com >>>>>>> stock collapse? >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Marcus and Jon are not incorrect. I do see a problem that they do not, >>>>>>> the fact that the vast majority of users/adopters of AI are >>>>>>> dramatically less technologically compentent than either of these >>>>>>> gentlemen. The manager that is positive that AI will eliminate most if >>>>>>> not all of his human employees, the student using an LLM to "cheat," >>>>>>> the social media addicts taken with the latest AI fad bots, etc. etc. >>>>>>> almost certainly will become disillusioned and turn away from AI. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Perhaps more importantly, all the capitalists who see immediate—not >>>>>>> long term—return on investment are not going to remain invested. Lot's >>>>>>> of other peoples money will be lost as a byproduct. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> The market of Jon Marcuses is not large enough to sustain all the >>>>>>> current investment. Maybe one large AI company will survive (ala Amazon >>>>>>> that lost tons of money for a long long time). >>>>>>> >>>>>>> davew >>>>>>> >>>>>>> On Sun, Nov 16, 2025, at 3:51 PM, Jon Zingale wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> I mostly agree with Marcus' sentiment. The dot com analogy may be apt, >>>>>>> but it also smells too easy an analog. I find the K-shaped AI adoption >>>>>>> to be bizarre. Personally, I do not believe LLMs, nor any particular >>>>>>> architecture, to be the be-all-end-all. I suspect we will see a >>>>>>> transition away from throwing money at developing the most general form >>>>>>> and a move toward more idiosyncratic instantiations. For instance, I >>>>>>> continue to think that Deepmind did meaningful work going the RL path >>>>>>> with AlphaGo/Atari games and it has yet to come to my attention what >>>>>>> happens when Transformers attempt to replicate these successes. Almost >>>>>>> every LLM I have met is really really bad at go. This said, AI in their >>>>>>> current form, and from this perspective, has been here for a decade. >>>>>>> Some have adopted it and use it to surprising effect, others treat LLMs >>>>>>> as nothing more than a robust database querying language. What people >>>>>>> do with it and how they perceive it will undoubtedly have an impact. >>>>>>> In the >>>>>>> meantime, I am excited to see what happens as programmers learn to use >>>>>>> formal type theories as pidgins and LLMs become more amenable to >>>>>>> compositionality. >>>>>> >>>> -- ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω. .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. 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