3 captures, most recent first.
davidad 🎇 @davidad · 21h
i have great respect for Scott Aaronson, but apparently he too is a trapped in a complexity theory worldview wherein a stack of self-attention layers obviously has nothing to do with self-referentiality (because it has a finite depth limit, i guess)
[quoted post]
Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_ · Sep 2
Scott Aaronson delivers a eulogy for the idea that strange loops and self-referentiality were the secret of intelligence.
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In the same way, LLMs' ability to talk about themselves popped out as a byproduct of their ability to talk about anything in the discourse universe they were trained on. The big, old ideas about intelligence that ended up basically vindicated were the ideas about how intelligence is about prediction, and prediction is about compression, and compression is about finding better and better upper bounds on Kolmogorov complexity. Not the self-reference stuff. (Although, if you wanted to know why Kolmogorov complexity can't be computed perfectly, that negative statement would again require a self-referential argument.)
What's left? Consciousness and subjective experience of course remain extremely mysterious. For all we know, Hofstadter could be right that those have something to do with self-reference. (For all we know, even Penrose could be right that they have something to do with exotic physics accessible to biological brains but not digital computers!)
But the idea that you'd need explicit self-referentiality before you could get convincing and world-changing conversational intelligence? Let it be buried in a Westminster Abbey or Arlington National Cemetery for the most important wrong ideas in human history — geocentrism, Aristotle's teleological physics, aether, phlogiston, Freud's psychology, Marx's prediction of a workers' uprising followed by a classless utopia, etc. But buried it needs to be.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
davidad's critical quote-post of Andrew Curran's post sharing a Scott Aaronson passage arguing that self-reference/strange loops (Hofstadter) were not the secret of intelligence, which instead is prediction/compression/Kolmogorov complexity; consciousness left as an open mystery.
self-referencestrange loopshofstadterscott aaronsonkolmogorov complexityconsciousnessllm intelligencedavidad
david rein ✓ @idavidrein
"May you understand those entities well enough to cause them to be nice"
– Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance
[Embedded quote card]
And so, at this momentous era for the human project, and no less of an authority than that of the Vicar of Christ himself, the Supreme Pontiff and the Successor of Peter, I hereby throw myself on the wisdom and mercy of … uhh, Chris Olah and his team at Anthropic.
Chris, if I am soon to share the earth with entities that can prove the Riemann Hypothesis and solve quantum gravity after 30 seconds of thought, then may you understand those entities well enough to cause them to be nice.
1:54 PM · May 28, 2026 · 1,416 Views
💬 1 🔁 1 ❤ 19 🔖 1 ⤴
david rein ✓ @idavidrein · 6h
[Link card]
scottaaronson.blog
Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet quoting/excerpting a Scott Aaronson blog post, with a link-preview card (thumbnail of a painting) for the source blog at the bottom.
twitterscott aaronsonai capabilitiesinterpretabilityanthropicblog excerpt
Aryeh Kontorovich @aryehazan · 23h
I have vociferously disagreed with Scott Aaronson on a number of things
I'm not even willing to endorse everything he wrote in this latest post
but I'll fully endorse this bit, it's dead on
[Embedded quote image, presumably from Scott Aaronson's blog:]
"Let me make something clear: I don't focus so much on antisemitism only because of parochial concern for the survival of my own kids, although I freely admit to having as much such concern as the next person. Instead, I do so because I hold with David Deutsch that, in Western civilization, antisemitism has for millennia been the inevitable endpoint toward which every bad idea ultimately tends. It's the universal bad idea. It's bad-idea-complete. Antisemitism is the purest possible expression of the worldview of the pitchfork-wielding peasant, who blames shadowy elites for his own failures in life, and who dreams in his resentment and rage of reversing the moral and scientific progress of humanity by slaughtering all those responsible for it. Hatred of high-achieving Chinese and Indian immigrants, and of gifted programs and standardized testing, are other expressions of the same worldview."
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet by mathematician Aryeh Kontorovich endorsing a passage from a Scott Aaronson blog post arguing antisemitism is "bad-idea-complete" — the universal endpoint of resentment-driven worldviews, linked to hostility toward meritocratic achievement more broadly.
antisemitismscott aaronsonpoliticsmeritocracytwitter
