> you asked a question into a black box, received a symbolic-seeming response, evaluated its truth post hoc, and interpreted its relevance
So any and all human communication is divination in your book?
I think your point is pretty silly. You're falling into a common trap of starting with the premise "I don't like AI", and then working backwards from that to pontification.
Hacker News deserves a stronger counterargument than “this is silly.”
My original comment is making a structural point, not a mystical one. It’s not saying that using AI feels like praying to a god, it's saying the interaction pattern mirrors forms of ritualized inquiry: question → symbolic output → interpretive response.
You can disagree with the framing, but dismissing it as "I don’t like AI so I’m going to pontificate" sidesteps the actual claim. There's a meaningful difference between saying "this tool gives me answers" and recognizing that the process by which we derive meaning from the output involves human projection and interpretation, just like divination historically did.
This kind of analogy isn't an attack on AI. It’s an attempt to understand the human-AI relationship in cultural terms. That's worth engaging with, even if you think the metaphor fails.
> Hacker News deserves a stronger counterargument than “this is silly.”
Their counterargument is that said structural definition is overly broad, to the point of including any and all forms of symbolic communication (which is all of them). Because of that, your argument based on it doesn't really say anything at all about AI or divination, yet still seems 'deep' and mystical and wise. But this is a seeming only. And for that reason, it is silly.
By painting all things with the same brush, you lose the ability to distinguish between anything. Calling all communication divination (through your structural metaphor), and then using cached intuitions about 'the thing which used to be called divination; when it was a limited subset of the whole' is silly. You're not talking about that which used to be called divination, because you redefined divination to include all symbolic communication.
Thus your argument leaks intuitions (how that-which-was-divination generally behaves) that do not necessarily apply through a side channel (the redefined word). This is silly.
That is to say, if you want to talk about the interpretative nature of interaction with AI, that is fairly straightforward to show and I don't think anyone would fight you on it, but divination brings baggage with it that you haven't shown to be the case for AI. In point of fact, there are many ways in which AI is not at all like divination. The structural approach broadens too far too fast with not enough re-examination of priors, becoming so broad that it encompasses any kind of communication at all.
With all of that said, there seems to be a strong bent in your rhetoric towards calling it divination anyway, which suggests reasoning from that conclusion, and that the structural approach is but a blunt instrument to force AI into a divination shaped hole, to make 'poignant and wise' commentary on it.
> "I don’t like AI so I’m going to pontificate" sidesteps the actual claim
What claim? As per ^, maximally broad definition says nothing about AI that is not also about everything, and only seems to be a claim because it inherits intuitions from a redefined term.
> difference between saying "this tool gives me answers" and recognizing that the process by which we derive meaning from the output involves human projection and interpretation, just like divination historically did
Sure, and all communication requires interpretation. That doesn't make all communication divination. Divination implies the notion of interpretation of something that is seen to be causally disentangled from the subject. The layout of these bones reveals your destiny. The level of mercury in this thermometer reveals the temperature. The fair die is cast, and I will win big. The loaded die is cast, and I will win big. Spot the difference. It's not structural.
That implication of essential incoherence is what you're saying without saying about AI, it is the 'cultural wisdom and poignancy' feedstock of your arguments, smuggled in via the vehicle of structural metaphor along oblique angles that should by rights not permit said implication. Yet people will of course be generally uncareful and wave those intuitions through - presuming they are wrapped in appropriately philosophical guise - which is why this line of reasoning inspires such confusion.
In summary, I see a few ways to resolve your arguments coherently:
1. keep the structural metaphor, discard cached intuitions about what it means for something to be divination (w.r.t. divination being generally wrong/bad and the specifics of how and why). results in an argument of no claims or particular distinction about anything, really. this is what you get if you just follow the logic without cache invalidation errors.
2. discard the structural metaphor and thus disregard the cached intuitions as well. there is little engagement along human-AI cultural axis that isn't also human-human. AI use is interpretative but so is all communication. functionally the same as 1.
3. keep the structural metaphor and also demonstrate how AI are not reliably causally entwined with reality along boundaries obvious to humans (hard because they plainly and obviously are, as demonstrable empirically in myriad ways), at which point go off about how using AI is divination because at this point you could actually say that with confidence.
You're misunderstanding the point of structural analysis. Comparing AI to divination isn't about making everything equivalent, but about highlighting specific shared structures that reveal how humans interact with these systems. The fact that this comparison can be extended to other domains doesn't make it meaningless.
The issue isn't "cached intuitions" about divination, but rather that you're reading the comparison too literally. It's not about importing every historical association, but about identifying specific parallels that shed light on user behavior and expectations.
Your proposed "resolutions" are based on a false dichotomy between total equivalence and total abandonment of comparison. Structural analysis can be useful even if it's not a perfect fit. The comparison isn't about labeling AI as "divination" in the classical sense, but about understanding the interpretive practices involved in human-AI interaction.
You're sidestepping the actual insight here, which is that humans tend to project meaning onto ambiguous outputs from systems they perceive as having special insight or authority. That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.
> It's not about importing every historical association, but about identifying specific parallels that shed light on user behavior and expectations.
Indeed, I hold that driving readers to intuit one specific parallel to divination and apply it to AI is the goal of the comparison, and why it is so jealously guarded, as without it any substance evaporates.
The thermometer has well-founded authority to relay the temperature, the bones have not the well-founded authority to relay my fate. The insight, such as you call it, is only illuminative if AI is more like the latter than the former.
This mode of analysis (the structural) takes no valid step in either direction, only seeding the ground with a trap for readers to stumble into (the aforementioned propensity to not clear caches).
> That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.
If the authority is well-founded (i.e., is causally entangled in the way I described), the observation is meaningless, as all communication is interpretative in this sense.
The structural approach only serves as rhetorical sleight of hand to smuggle in a sense of not-well-founded authority from divination in general, and apply it to AI. But the same path opens to all communication, so what can it reveal in truth? In a word, nothing.
> That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.
And regardless of how many words someone uses in their failed attempt at "gotcha" that nobody else is playing. There are certainly some folks acting silly here, and it's not the vast majority of us who have no problem interpreting and engaging with the structural analysis.
> So any and all human communication is divination in your book?
Words from an AI are just words.
Words in a human brain have more or less (depending on the individual's experiences) "stuff" attached to them: From direct sensory inputs to complex networks of experiences and though. Human thought is mainly not based on words. Language is an add-on. (People without language - never learned, or sometimes temporarily disabled due to drugs, or permanently due to injury, transient or permanent aphasia - are still consciously thinking people.)
Words in a human brain are an expression of deeper structure in the brain.
Words from an AI have nothing behind them but word statistics, devoid of any real world, just words based on words.
Random example sentence: "The company needs to expand into a new country's market."
When an AI writes this, there is no real world meaning behind it whatsoever.
When a fresh out of college person writes this it's based on some shallow real world experience, and lots of hearsay.
When an experienced person actually having done such expansion in the past says it a huge network of their experience with people and impressions is behind it, a feeling for where the difficulties lie and what to expect IRL with a lot of real-world-experience based detail. When such a person expands on the original statement chances are highest that any follow-up statements will also represent real life quite well, because they are drawn not from text analysis, but from those deeper structures created by and during the process of the person actually performing and experiencing the task.
But the words can be exactly the same. Words from a human can be of the same (low) quality as that of an AI, if they just parrot something they read or heard somewhere, although even then the words will have more depth than the "zero" on AI words, because even the stupidest person has some degree of actual real life forming their neural network, and not solely analysis of other's texts.
I can only agree with you. And I find it disturbing that every time someone points out what you just said, the counter argument is to reduce human experience and human consciousness to the shallowest possible interpretation so they can then say, “look, it's the same as what the machine does”.
I think it’s because the brain is simply a set of chemical and electrical interactions. I think some believe when we understand how the brain works it won’t be some “soulful” other worldly explanation. It will be some science based explanation that will seem very unsatisfying to some that think of us as more than complex machines. The human brain is different than LLMs, but I think we will eventually say “hey we can make a machine very similar”.
The logic is that you preemptively shut down dissenting opinions so any comments with dissenting opinions are necessarily not adding anything of substance. They made good points and you simply don't want to discuss them; that does not mean the other commenter did not add substance and nuance to the discussion.
The deconstruction trick is a bit like whataboutism. It sort of works on a shallow level but it's a cheap shot. You can say "this is just a collections of bites and matrix multiplications". If it's humans -- "it's just simple neurons firing and hormones". Even if it's some object: "what's the big deal, it's just bunch of molecules and atoms".
> People without language - never learned, or sometimes temporarily disabled due to drugs, or permanently due to injury, transient or permanent aphasia - are still consciously thinking people.
There are 40 definitions of the word "consciousness".
For the definitions pertaining to inner world, nobody can tell if anyone besides themselves (regardless of if they speak or move) is conscious, and none of us can prove to anyone else the validity of our own claims to posess it.
When I dream, am I conscious in that moment, or do I create a memory that my consciousness replays when I wake?
> Words from an AI have nothing behind them but word statistics, devoid of any real world, just words based on words.
> […]
> When a fresh out of college person writes this it's based on some shallow real world experience, and lots of hearsay.
My required reading at school included "Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen.
The horrors of being gassed during trench warfare were alien to us in the peaceful south coast of the UK in 1999/2000.
AI are limited, but what you're describing here is the "book learning" vs. "street smart" dichotomoy rather than their actual weaknesses.
There isn't anything objectively wrong with those. You can still derive a functioning society from selfish principles. I don't want to live in a society where I can just get murdered, so I am fine with outlawing murder.
This is philosophically valid, but also has the advantage of being how moral systems are actually constructed in practice.
NixOS builds on efforts of things like https://cloud-init.io/ no? Or was one before the other?
Its not a snarled mess if you understand what you are doing, imo. Though, when I first started using operating systems other than Windows (~1998), I was very confused, and made many of the same mistakes new Linux users make. Actually, way worse, as there were no resolution to my mistakes (using linux, was a big one back in the day if you were on newer hardware).
I understand where the sentiment comes from. I just don't appreciate the conclusion or the leech-like entitlement of the community. We used to fix and push.
Nix has been around since 2003, NixOS just takes that to its logical conclusion. cloud-init may have been inspired by it (I don't know), but certainly not the other way around.
By snarled mess of state, I don't just mean the way it works on first install, I mean the bundle of mud that imperatively managing a system inevitably turns into, with bits of this and that config left behind.
Try playing around with a few different window managers to feel the pain. NixOS makes it easy to try out new config and revert to the old config without muss or fuss.
Believe it or not, tons of people don't care about that. It's something that I have to constantly remind myself of.
They either agree with it, don't care, or it isn't important enough.
It's good when people openly admit to it because then an actual conversation can take place. When people make up dumb reasons or just won't say the truth it leads to pointless discussion.
One thing I've discovered is that capitalism has really beat many americans into submission. Add in the "American Individuality/Freedom" thinking and it's pretty toxic.
People have a million excuses for why they just can't be bothered to care about anything. We reinforce this mentality with the whole "you're doing your best, it's okay" mentality that many people have nowadays. "You're getting by in a hard time" type mentality.
People are "too tired" to give much of a crap about anything.
Now, whether they're actually all that tired or it's just a very convenient excuse I dont know, but that's the gist that I get from a large number of people. They don't want to care, capitalism offers them easy excuses to not care, so they don't care. Until it directly affects people's livelihood they just won't give much of a crap.
There are also many people who supply excuses too, such as "This is the way people are, don't try to change it" type stuff. We have a ton of excuses nowadays and it's really easy to take them.
Finally, a lot of younger people are simply burnt out on this stuff. People under the age of 30 don't see much of a future. It's not that they don't care that Elon and Co are parroting nazis, it's that there doesn't seem to be a point in caring when the environment is fucked.
Idk how much of this is true but I travel a lot and talk to a lot of people. This is the vibe I get when people finally open up and are honest with me about these things.
People troll on message boards because they are anonymous and there are no consequences. Trolling in real life, on the other hand, has consequences: try doing it at work, or with your partner (if you have one), and see how that works out for you.
The long-term consequences of his behavior have yet to reveal themselves. We will see.
The only reason Musk can troll and get away with it is because he is fabulously wealthy. (He didn’t do it when he was getting his career going.) If he were a 9-to-5 salary earner like the rest of us, he’d have faced a very different outcome.
I believe that Musk’s defenders like him because he says things they wish they could say, but can’t, because of the consequences it would bring. Musk is largely insulated from those consequences today. It’s the “things they wish they could say” that’s concerning. The ideological alignment speaks for itself.
You're so close! But you've got the conclusion backwards. People enjoy Musk's trolling because the culture has become so sanitized. There is a reason corporate HR departments have rigid rules--legal liability, the need to keep a diverse workforce focused on the job at hand. But the whole world shouldn't be like that.
> It’s the “things they wish they could say” that’s concerning. The ideological alignment speaks for itself.
The point of trolling is to say what will provoke the target of the trolling to have a conniption.
We’re well past the mere “trolling for lulz’s sake” phase. These people now have the controls and their actions can do significant damage if unchecked.
What a stupid take. Sorry to be blunt, but you need to be told that, because you should feel bad.
There's a reason for the quote "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company".
That's like saying the "far left media" is trying to paint NBA players as tall.
People have eyes and anyone watching someone give two perfect nazi salutes and at the biggest political rally of our time that still denies someone is telling the world they are a nazi is denying reality.
oh stop it. quit trying to stir up this nonsense. who even cares if he IS a nazi? he's acting like one and encouraging them. i know you are trolling, so no need to ask if you are able to understand this or not.
Assuming that prisons should be segregated by something like sex is shunting the problem off on women.
Even assuming your binary exists — it doesn’t — a heterosexual cisgender woman is, obviously, under no additional risk being housed with a heterosexual transgender woman… it’s not the genitals that are the problem, it’s whom do you intend to deploy those genitals on.
That laugh aside, I’m not sure you made your point; once more, the heterosexual cisgender woman is in less danger from a heterosexual transgender woman than she is from another otherwise cisgender woman who will aggressively pursue any port in a storm.
That's plainly false. Incarcerated women have already been raped, beaten, and impregnated by men in women's prisons. Men, including transgender women, are bigger and stronger than women and will use that to their advantage.
A heterosexual transgender woman intends to deploy those genitals on women. That makes it a problem for uninvolved women that shouldn't have to worry about men in women's spaces.
If you want to argue for not segregating prisons by sex, then you should just state that. If that ever happens you'll quickly find out how terrible of an idea it is.
Trans women are men that suffer from an unfortunate condition. We need to accept this. Trying to gaslight people into denying basic reality created a backlash that was partially responsible for giving us Trump.
I am not a man. I am a trans woman. I don't suffer from an unfortunate condition, unless that condition is ignorant people like yourself who cannot handle the complexity of how people can be different.
Blaming us for the backlash is the same abusive thinking as "i wouldn't hit you if you'd just do what i want." Trans people are just the easiest target. If it wasn't us, it'd have been someone else.
Sorry, but this is exactly what I'm talking about. Trans women are a subset of men. Taking cross-sex hormones and getting surgery won't actually change your sex. It's the best we can do for now until we figure out how to fix the brain-body mismatch.
Denying simple biological reality will get us more fascism. It's not the entire reason, but it's easy to whip people up about trans issues when you literally have men beating up women in sports. Your average person will never accept that, and that's something you just need to accept because you can't change it.
Note that I said "partially responsible". The fundamental reason is that the DNC doesn't give a shit about the working class and rejects actual leftist ideals, but trying to push unpopular social issues on top of that just killed their chances.
Some day, we'll arrive at a happy medium of "trans women are not women but that's fine and let them live their lives in peace".
I am not a subset of men and thinking in binaries isn't going to help you here. Even sex is not a binary when you consider that chromosomes beyond XX/XY exist and that the expression of chromosomes does not necessarily result in a genital configuration you might expect (not to mention the wide variety of configurations within the binary).
Calling it "biological reality" is a massive oversimplification of biology that is used to stir unease towards trans people. Trans people are not beating up [cis] women in sports. This is another story to stir up fear and hatred, and you're just repeating it thoughtlessly.
Most of what you're seeing politically is defending a vulnerable group from unwarranted attacks by a powerful political party backed by moneyed interests sowing division as a distraction from the real problems. If the right weren't so focused on taking away trans people's rights to bodily autonomy and existence, you wouldn't be hearing about us so much.
I am going to repeat some of what I replied to someone else...
Birth sex is not useful when talking about trans people, who may be on hormone replacement therapy or have had gender affirming surgeries. To fixate on that is to deny the reality that trans people don't necessarily fit into the gender binary (and at the same time many do). Our systems are structured by gender binaries and so accommodations need to be made for those who don't fit perfectly (which also helps cis women who do not present as traditionally feminine).
The notion that trans women are inherently dangerous to cis women, which is the conclusion you seem to be arriving at because you are thinking of trans women as men, is a false notion.
Cis men are the greatest danger to cis women. If the amount of attention being placed on trans women were instead being placed on that fact, maybe cis women would actually be safer.
Trans people exist and always have. Right now we are being demonized because we are an easy target. And when folks like you buy into that, you are doing the demonizing work for the people who are controlling through division. Trans people are not a problem to be solved. We're just fighting to keep our rights from being taken away.
Genital configurations are a distraction. You can get incomplete/malformed genitals in individuals with disorders of sex development, but that doesn't change their sex.
> Trans people are not beating up [cis] women in sports.
> During Fox's fight against Tamikka Brents on September 13, 2014, Brents suffered a concussion, an orbital bone fracture, and seven staples to the head in the 1st round. After her loss, Brents took to social media to convey her thoughts on the experience of fighting Fox: "I've fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can't answer whether it's because she was born a man or not because I'm not a doctor. I can only say, I've never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right", she stated. "Her grip was different, I could usually move around in the clinch against other females but couldn't move at all in Fox's clinch."
There's more examples here, but can we both agree that your statement is incorrect?
You almost understand the truth. Forcing people into strict gender roles based on social mores is bad. Men can wear dresses and women can wear pants, etc. What I hope you'll understand is that just because you don't follow gender stereotypes doesn't mean you can change your sex. A man taking cross-sex hormones and getting surgery is still a man. Let's not sell him the lie that he will ever be a woman. Let's enlighten him that he should live his life and engage in as many masculine or feminine activities as he sees fit.
Can we first agree that this case is a terrible one, in which a man intentionally identified as a woman in order to get the chance to rape women?
There's more cases, but if we can't agree on ground truth in such an obvious case then there probably won't be common ground for calculating statistics.
Does this person actually buy into the nonsense, though, or are they just being provocative? Both are reasons to mute someone, but only one is ideological.
Yep, just pointing it out. It's like a completely unironic version of that joke:
> Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
>
> Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
>
> Con: LOL no...no not those views
>
> Me: So....deregulation?
>
> Con: Haha no not those views either
>
> Me: Which views, exactly?
>
> Con: Oh, you know the ones
"Oh no, I keep getting kicked out of places for throwing around neonazi references"
This is braindead capitalist propaganda. Stop filling your head with garbage. At the very least, keep it to yourself so other people don't have to smell it. Gross.
Nothing I'm saying is particularly hard to understand or controversial - and that's with most economists being left-wing! If a field dominated by the left can't even find strong support for unions, then perhaps its actually you who lacks "any sort of understanding of how the world works".
So any and all human communication is divination in your book?
I think your point is pretty silly. You're falling into a common trap of starting with the premise "I don't like AI", and then working backwards from that to pontification.