on similar (I think) line of thought, but further along,
the reason to have property (also a tool, or social-technology to be slightly more precise), i.e. ownership over things is a byproduct of having a marketplace in which we can trade.
In this view, the marketplace (or trade, depending on your outlook) is THE WAY to come together and put all our skills together in order to co-create (con-struct) something much larger.
Alas, capitalism means that only a very few chosen elites (which are, by this point, mostly autonomous corporations) get to decide what we all work together to co-create. We as human individuals are only able to participate in this figurative "marketplace" (understood as a social-technology) as the part of merchandise, specifically as 'commodity'-style labor.
Do you have an alternative to suggest? Under most of human history the chosen elites inherited their positions from an ancestor who won an important war. Capitalism may not be an even playing field but the process that lets Elon Musk build landing Rockets is an order of magnitude more even than the process that let Kuresh build pyramids. Is there a model that might be more even still?
Ah, that's fair. I formulate a similar observation by saying that digital assets inhabit a post-scarcity economy which doesn't work the same as a resource-based scarcity one, and using the same money for both requires more suspension of disbelief than most of us are capable of.
Totally agree. The idea that ideas/bits can be owned is a slippery slope with bad policy at the bottom. Maybe it was once necessary as a sort of training wheels for innovation, but it has long since become more of a drag than it's worth.
all I see are more arguments for my opinion that digital assets + capitalist marketplace = human stupidity.
> you're giving away your business crown jewels to competitors that can then nearly-clone your model without all the hard work you did to build up your own fine-tuning dataset.
you're loosing the capacity to continue to earn money for work that is already done. This just means they're not gonna be able to charge rent on the done work for too long.
the work is the training of the model. I chose to reject this to way to frame the issue; i.e. I reject that it is problem that they're giving away that hard work. It's only a problem due to social (market) ideologies of ownership which are necessary only by the logic of trade (or commerce).
As I see it, Eliezer is pointing out hat people who use the "product API"/ "chaptGPT service" can use this in such a way that they can clone it so to stop being a customer.
I see some kind of divine comedy in this (due to my own ideological beliefs).
> OR can successfully sue any competitor that engages in shoggoth mask cloning.
this is just the legal, modern day equivalent of old school "break their knees unless they pay you"
> this is just the legal, modern day equivalent of old school "break their knees unless they pay you"
I don't EY is advocating for this, so much as saying "unless AI companies can find a way to establish such a racket, they won't be profitable". That's a factual claim, not a value judgment.
I've recently started to believe that known current legitimate governments are (and have always been) the legacy of people in history doing rackets like these in the now historical past.
> Being called a libertarian would be an enormous source of shame and disgust for my mom.
But you are not your mom. you don't have to share on the disgust and shame, however you may chose to do so if you want.
the points being: the disgust is your mom's not necessarily yours. whether to partake on your parent's shame of being called a libertarian is a choice.
Except no one thinks that a designer handbag is objectively better at carrying things or that designer jeans objectively makes walking easier and more fun. Audiophiles keep arguing that the things they do and buy are better for objective reasons.
Had they said "I bought these expensive network cables because I like the way they look and they match my furniture" that would be an entirely different thing.
Exactly, not just "objectively better", but "objectively better in a way only other bagophiles can tell, which makes no sense to anyone else". I could see different pants designs/materials making walking better, but this would be more like "these pants are more comfortable because the cotton was spun clockwise to match your DNA".
it's merely a different way to lay down the explanations.
it's not "in fact" like you say; you merely provide an alternative way to understand what's going on and to describe it.
it's incorrect to claim that either is wrong because of the other.
in the end, we gotta learn to have multiple ways to explain the same things and it's best to shift between these 'theories' of what is going on as it serves our purposes. It's stupid to have this alternatives "fighting each other"; see? I just have agency to the ways to conceptualize, understand, and explain phenomena.
When it comes to viruses, I think it is important to understand that they simply replicate because they can. The virus has no interest in keeping you alive or killing you; it just infects cells and that’s it.
I'm on a (possibly multi-)lifetime quest to understand this better.
all of what this music library does comes out of the concept of the music keyboard, which is (in my head) the same as the 12-note "meta"-scale which is a system that enables 12 different version of 7 note scales.
in this view, a scale does not begin in any specific note; this perspective of "scale" goes beyond the typical music theory view. understanding 'scales' like this implies that the major and minor 'scales' are the same 'scale'. I should choose another vocabulary term for this quasi-scale idea (semiscale?)
If you are talking about a set of seven notes, that is not a scale. C and Am have the same notes, but a different tonic, but they are different scales, so a scale is defined by the notes it contains and the mapping of scale degrees to those notes.
What you are describing, seven notes that do not 'start' anywhere, is the set of all scales that are enharmonic with a given scale, meaning they have all the same notes. These scales are said to be relative to each other: Am is the relative minor of C.
I think what you're trying to get at is that when you don't consider any note to be the tonic, and play freely in a set of seven notes, you can play more expressively. If you change the tonic without changing the notes in the scale, you are now playing in a different mode.
For example, if you started in C, playing the notes CDEFGAB, you are playing in C Ionian (much more frequently just called C Major). If you change the tonic to A, the scale is now ABCDEFG, or A Aeonian (much more frequently just called A minor). Now if you change the tonic to D, the scale is DEFGABC, or D Dorian.
One small correction: changing just the mode (i.e. keeping the same notes while changing the tonic) is usually called a modal interchange.
Modulation typically changes the notes, which is achieved by changing either the tonic or the mode or both. For example C major to D major is a modulation, but C Ionian (major) to D Dorian is usually called a modal interchange.
Also, to be honest, the last paragraph is very simplistic and makes me wonder if the whole comment didn't come out of ChatGPT.
Wow, ok. I think I'll take that as a compliment, at least my input looks good at surface level! :)
I'm not super knowledgeable about modal jazz but when I think 'mode', I think 'modal jazz', so I thought that would be good to throw in there as an example of music you can listen to if you want to hear these concepts in action rather than just reading about them.
Thanks for the correction, that's my bad.
edit: I removed the last paragraph, "This process is called modulation, and it is the defining feature of modal jazz.", since your correction explains it better than I could
What fooled me was going from an entirely correct paragraph to one that... had words that were consistent with the topic but a lot of inaccuracies. I think we can treat it as a reverse Turing test. :) I knew I was probably wrong but it seemed like an interesting observation.
Modes other than major or minor are very common in modern non-jazz music. A lot of minor songs are actually Dorian (not all! a couple examples are Boulevard of Broken Dreams or Wicked Game) or in the case of metal Phrygian. A lot of major pop songs are Mixolydian (all those that sound like Hey Jude, for example Sweet Child O'Mine).
Also Lydian is quite common in soundtracks because it has a very "suspended" feeling (due to the lack of a dominant seventh chord that can resolve to the tonic), for example Yoda's theme and the Back to the Future theme are both Lydian. In the case of Yoda it then goes to major (I don't remember if it's a mode change or a modulation), while BTTF remains Lydian.
David Bennett has videos on YouTube with many examples of songs for each mode.
yea, but for some reason I don't think I could explain very well (which is a problem), I am trying to somehow consider all those 7 notes (and their 7 modes) as the same 'scale'. As I said, I need to find another term to refer to this way to consider the intervalic structure as if it were one thing.
Essentially I'm trying to grab a 'scale' and combine it with all it's conjugate words (or circular shifts) [1,2] and I don't know what to call this thing but I'm interested in it.
Why? because of how I choose to understand the origin of the 7 note major scale:
you take any note (the base tone) and multiply the frequency by 3. this creates a fifth (plus one octave). I'll keep in mind that 'the octave' is defined by multiplying the frequency by 2.
then, fit the fifth (base tone * 3) into only one octave (3/2). And repeat 'recursively'.
This is the famous circle of fifths, but we all knew that. Finally, after twelve repetitions we're back on the same note, but an octave above. (but why? why stop at twelve? I'm still working through this answer, but it has something to do with convergence maybe? or just the fact that after 12 notes we have now landed within two notes which we 'found' already???)
With this in mind, we have two different ways to sort all notes. Sequentially within a single octave, like on the piano or a guitar. Or in the way which we generated them out repeating 3/2.
If we only did 7 notes (instead of 12) we would get these two ways to sort:
ABCDEFG;ABCDEFG; ABC...there are 8 octaves in a piano
CGDAEB... F# C# .... C
I just cannot yet get over the fact that this is not a conjugate (not a circular shift) but a full on permutation, a shuffling of the notes.
By this point, it should be apparent that the labels we use for the notes are but a minor detail. I'm trying to abstract all this away from the ultimately arbitrary names of the notes.
...I can keep going. this is just part of the setup.
when this starts to get interesting is when I go on to consider the rhythmic aspect of music using similar symbolic tools; but in a subtly different way. As I said upthread, I've been thinking about this stuff for a while now, and it adds up.
All this because I still do not understand (to my own satisfaction) what's going on with the 12 note system, up to which extent and how does it do? what I (almost but not quite) understand to happen with 7 notes and major/minor/other modes scales.
Note that different modes of the same scale are only enharmonic in the standard piano tuning (equal temperament). Under different tunings [1], the exact frequencies of the notes in e.g. the A minor scale and the C major scale do not necessarily match up. These different tunings are the reason why certain keys are ascribed a certain character (e.g. the E♭ scale was considered morose whereas the same scale in A was considered uplifting).
Then there's the octatonic scale, the double harmonic scale and quarter-tone intervals present in e.g. arabic music [2], or even more exotic scales [3]. So whatever "deeper logic" you're after, there will always be scales that do not match your preferred system. Be careful you're not straying into numerology, trying to find a deeper "truth" beyond what sounds agreeable to the ears of the listeners.
>Why? because of how I choose to understand the origin of the 7 note major scale: you take any note (the base tone) and multiply the frequency by 3. this creates a fifth (plus one octave). I'll keep in mind that 'the octave' is defined by multiplying the frequency by 2. then, fit the fifth (base tone * 3) into only one octave (3/2). And repeat 'recursively'.
This is called 3-limit tuning: https://en.xen.wiki/w/3-limit . 5-limit tuning is what standard western music uses: https://en.xen.wiki/w/5-limit (to include thirds as well as fifths) After reducing the ratios to fit in an octave, you get exactly 8 notes (7 if you subtract the octave itself). Note how https://oeis.org/A054540 shows that 7 notes are a good approximation of the ratios, but so are 12 (which shows why creating a 12-note system was an advantageous move, over 11 or 13). Technically in 12-EDO a fifth is not exactly generated by the ratio 1.5, it's slightly flat at 1.498307... but we choose the note closest to 1.5.
> This is the famous circle of fifths, but we all knew that. Finally, after twelve repetitions we're back on the same note, but an octave above. (but why? why stop at twelve? I'm still working through this answer, but it has something to do with convergence maybe? or just the fact that after 12 notes we have now landed within two notes which we 'found' already???)
Suppose we already chose a 12-note equal-tempered system. The closest note to the perfect fifth of a fundamental frequency `f` will be `f * 12th-root(2)^7`, (7 notes out just happens to be close to multiplying by 3/2). The next fifth after that would be `f * 12th-root(2)^7 * 12th-root(2)^7 = f * 12th-root(2)^14`. Going out by a fifth 12 times gets you `f * 12th-root(2)^84 = f * 12th-root(2)^(712)`. But we know that `12th-root(2) ^ 12 = 2`, simply from the definition of 12th root. Multiplication is commutative, so we can group the roots-of-twelve by groups of 12 instead of groups of 7, and we get `f 2^7`. Taking that modulo 2, we just get f, i.e. the same (enharmonically equivalent) note.
Now suppose we didn't make that choice, instead we chose a 31-note system (I'm a big fan of 31-EDO). In that case, we have the same construction. The fifth in 31-EDO happens to be an interval of 18 notes, and similarly we jump around the scale, but this time an interval of one note is `31st-root(2)`, so we have to do 31 fifths to get back to the same note.
This actually tells us something interesting - if we want to form a circle (made out of intervals, that end up hitting the original enharmonically-equivalent-note) to hit all of the notes in our scale the notes we hit must be a permutation of the original scale. It's a little beyond my math to tell you how this works, I think Fermat's little theorem and modular arithmetic has something to do with how it works. Something about how 7 and 12 (or 18 and 31) are relatively prime compared to each other, and it forms a group which generates a permutation.
> the major and minor 'scales' are the same 'scale'
Indeed, they are two modes of the same pattern. If you look at that pattern in a circle, sometimes called a "necklace", the major and minor scales are rotations of each other.
For this way of looking at music, I recommend the book A Geometry of Music by
Dmitri Tymoczko, who teaches composition and theory at Princeton.
> A Geometry of Music provides an accessible introduction to a new, geometrical approach to music theory. The book shows how to construct simple diagrams representing voice-leading relationships among familiar chords and scales. This gives readers the tools to translate between the musical and visual realms, revealing surprising structure in otherwise hard-to-understand pieces.
It's written by Godfried Toussaint, a computer scientist who discovered "Euclidean rhythms", a large set of rhythm patterns generated by a simple algorithm, many of which are common in world music traditions.
> In 2004 he discovered that the Euclidean algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor of two numbers implicitly generates almost all the most important traditional rhythms of the world.
well, at least they are aware they merely discovered this. Because so could I, in fact I am well (ok, not so well) on my way to also discover those same ideas, except I'm not at Princeton nor anywhere near it.
thanks for the tip on the geometry of musical rhythm book. I was aware of the other one but not this one.
I had this idea but I did not know about this portrayal of it
that there are two ways to 'have' an infinity:
- by a lack of something. the classic original infinity. there is not a biggest number, they just keep going. it's a 'negative' definition; infinity because NOT finite.
- by construction. intuitionist or constructivist infinity (?). like a cycle or a going-back and forth never stopping. or with a self-referential _next-state_ arrow.
but I'm a bong smoking graduate student. as to the connection between all this and intutionism and/or constructivism? I really wish I knew or where in a position where I can discuss this with people; however I also think that internet randos like me need to await for whiter, wealthier, and more european academics from truly prestigious universities to decide what's what. Which does get in the way of getting myself into a position where I can understand this.
You're probably trying to say something but I don't understand what.
The way you 'have' infinity in math is by postulating there exists an inductive set (axiom of infinity in both ZF and NBG), and constructing other infinite sets using that as a building block.
Your first point is a definition of an infinite set (there are a bunch of equivalent ones), your second point is a statement of the axiom of infinity I assume?
the reason to have property (also a tool, or social-technology to be slightly more precise), i.e. ownership over things is a byproduct of having a marketplace in which we can trade.
In this view, the marketplace (or trade, depending on your outlook) is THE WAY to come together and put all our skills together in order to co-create (con-struct) something much larger.
Alas, capitalism means that only a very few chosen elites (which are, by this point, mostly autonomous corporations) get to decide what we all work together to co-create. We as human individuals are only able to participate in this figurative "marketplace" (understood as a social-technology) as the part of merchandise, specifically as 'commodity'-style labor.