This is great. Maybe I should also read good books. I was intrigued by the similarity between the four bargains and Deleuze’s “four iron collars of representation”. They don’t map exactly but Claude did a halfway convincing job: https://claude.ai/share/41c599c9-0e55-4a65-858e-8c6ccab69083
(I don’t normally share random LLM conversations but it’s better than slogging through Deleuze)
I haven't thought about the four bargains as four bargains before and I love it. Regarding centralised control, there's that classic centrally planned economy tradeoff between coordination and accurately responding to individual needs which gets more difficult the further you are from the centre. For example, Siberian Sammy needs to produce X and he'll get Y, but that just isn't going to work for him this season. Central control without perfect knowledge across the whole system means lower efficiency (or something, maybe you just score fewer points). So it is autonomy, but maybe that cashes out as effectivenss in some contexts? Actually I guess it is just autonomy, but I'm putting some moral thing onto the value of having autonomy as opposed to just seeing it as a feature of a system.
Also I had the aha moment of "oh, so THAT'S why I decided to read Interesting TImes!" Thanks for the adjacent recommend in the walking through walls post, I really enjoyed it.
Also the cookbook is demonstrative of Kieran Egan's Ironic undestanding - the stage after Philosophic understanding.
My understanding based on my partner, her reading of Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and her subsequent cooking is that it's not actually that hard to get to Nguyen's mother's level - just tasting 20x more is possibly enough (and I guess yes, for years). I'm 70% confident in this, which in my experience means there's about a 40% chance it's roughly accurate.
I don't know if I understand hermeneutical injustice, but does some kind of LLM Allthing taking everyone's information and synthesising some meaning from it solve this? Of course, in that world we're likely not in the same four bargain situation and will having bigger fish to fry with no pan, fire or hands.
> My understanding based on my partner, her reading of Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and her subsequent cooking is that it's not actually that hard to get to Nguyen's mother's level - just tasting 20x more is possibly enough (and I guess yes, for years). I'm 70% confident in this, which in my experience means there's about a 40% chance it's roughly accurate.
I agree that the basics of this skill are easy to pick up! What I’m impressed by here is the depth of mastery, which I don’t think is easy.
I think there are also two overlapping but different skillsets here, based on how you’re evaluating the dish as you taste it:
* Does this taste good?
* Does this taste right?
There’s also a lot of difference about what you’re tasting when. e.g. it’s easy to taste a dish and go “This needs more salt” or “This isn’t sweet enough”. It’s much harder to taste e.g. the tomatoes in advance and go “These are going to need some extra vinegar to bring out the flavour when cooked”.
> I don't know if I understand hermeneutical injustice, but does some kind of LLM Allthing taking everyone's information and synthesising some meaning from it solve this?
Probably not tbh.
I think it can help in a variety of ways, but my experience of LLMs is that they end up pushing you towards very simplified versions of the interpretation. It’s if anything more of a homogenising force, because you end up with implicit pressure to be the sort of person an LLM can understand.
They also don’t help that much with the contributory injustice thing I mentioned in a footnote - LLMs can help give people hermeneutical tools that they ask for, but they’re not likely to encourage people who don’t ask for them to adopt them.
This is great. Maybe I should also read good books. I was intrigued by the similarity between the four bargains and Deleuze’s “four iron collars of representation”. They don’t map exactly but Claude did a halfway convincing job: https://claude.ai/share/41c599c9-0e55-4a65-858e-8c6ccab69083
(I don’t normally share random LLM conversations but it’s better than slogging through Deleuze)
I haven't thought about the four bargains as four bargains before and I love it. Regarding centralised control, there's that classic centrally planned economy tradeoff between coordination and accurately responding to individual needs which gets more difficult the further you are from the centre. For example, Siberian Sammy needs to produce X and he'll get Y, but that just isn't going to work for him this season. Central control without perfect knowledge across the whole system means lower efficiency (or something, maybe you just score fewer points). So it is autonomy, but maybe that cashes out as effectivenss in some contexts? Actually I guess it is just autonomy, but I'm putting some moral thing onto the value of having autonomy as opposed to just seeing it as a feature of a system.
Also I had the aha moment of "oh, so THAT'S why I decided to read Interesting TImes!" Thanks for the adjacent recommend in the walking through walls post, I really enjoyed it.
Also the cookbook is demonstrative of Kieran Egan's Ironic undestanding - the stage after Philosophic understanding.
My understanding based on my partner, her reading of Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and her subsequent cooking is that it's not actually that hard to get to Nguyen's mother's level - just tasting 20x more is possibly enough (and I guess yes, for years). I'm 70% confident in this, which in my experience means there's about a 40% chance it's roughly accurate.
I don't know if I understand hermeneutical injustice, but does some kind of LLM Allthing taking everyone's information and synthesising some meaning from it solve this? Of course, in that world we're likely not in the same four bargain situation and will having bigger fish to fry with no pan, fire or hands.
> My understanding based on my partner, her reading of Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and her subsequent cooking is that it's not actually that hard to get to Nguyen's mother's level - just tasting 20x more is possibly enough (and I guess yes, for years). I'm 70% confident in this, which in my experience means there's about a 40% chance it's roughly accurate.
I agree that the basics of this skill are easy to pick up! What I’m impressed by here is the depth of mastery, which I don’t think is easy.
I think there are also two overlapping but different skillsets here, based on how you’re evaluating the dish as you taste it:
* Does this taste good?
* Does this taste right?
There’s also a lot of difference about what you’re tasting when. e.g. it’s easy to taste a dish and go “This needs more salt” or “This isn’t sweet enough”. It’s much harder to taste e.g. the tomatoes in advance and go “These are going to need some extra vinegar to bring out the flavour when cooked”.
> I don't know if I understand hermeneutical injustice, but does some kind of LLM Allthing taking everyone's information and synthesising some meaning from it solve this?
Probably not tbh.
I think it can help in a variety of ways, but my experience of LLMs is that they end up pushing you towards very simplified versions of the interpretation. It’s if anything more of a homogenising force, because you end up with implicit pressure to be the sort of person an LLM can understand.
They also don’t help that much with the contributory injustice thing I mentioned in a footnote - LLMs can help give people hermeneutical tools that they ask for, but they’re not likely to encourage people who don’t ask for them to adopt them.