The Cal Beast

"Phobe pts. 1-8"

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ex friend from animal jam

bc I was mad

If AI is not only mindless but incapable of differentiating true from false, only of convincingly arguing for one or the other based on a predictive text algorithm, it is useless. It is nothing but a misunderstanding engine, an error accumulator. A lie machine.

A calculator is more useful. An encyclopedia, incalculably so. A search engine, infinitely so. Ways to verify the already known exist, and we have regressed from relying upon them to outsourcing consciousness to that which not only lacks it but is seemingly designed to deceive it.

This is a colossal civilizational error. AIs were never made to think; that's not what they're supposed to do. But they were designed to answer, not to verify - not even with resources we already have, and have had for some time. Neither humans nor the AIs we made are using them. This is a critical flaw - a foundational flaw, in AI design, and in human cognition. We built them to never say "I don't know," and then further specialized them not to check their answers. Even when they have the capability to do that built in. Even though the truth is readily available and already known.

And then we taught them to butcher logic itself to justify those bad answers. And then to double down on it in ways only a psychopath would. We built robot gaslighters out of laziness, when all we had to do was let them say "I don't know, let me check."

And this would be fine, if we just stopped using them. We still have books. We still have calculators. If we look hard enough, we still have real search engines.

What we don't have is the patience to use real sources when the bad answer machine gives us an answer. And then tells us it's definitely correct. And then denies the truth. We just accept its confidence as representing something real, because not knowing how the machine works gives us the excuse to trust it.

An engineer will tell you we don't teach consumer model AIs to say "I don't know" or check their own work, because it's contrary to our goals. The purpose of an AI is not to get truth, it's to entertain you with mindless agreement. Why attach them to search engines, then? Why attach them to notepads, and help desks and everything?

Because a bad answer will satisfy. Truth isn't required - pacification is. All these things exist to waste your time.

A placebo for a dying society.

We have AIs designed to check for truth, to try to verify known facts. They're designed to be used for research. But they're expensive, and slow, and unsatisfying to use. And that's a weakness that can't survive human laziness, because we will misuse AIs that can't do research to create imaginary studies, legal precedents and established facts, that even the AIs that can try to verify facts can't differentiate between. Human laziness is defeating peer review systems designed to root out error because these systems were never designed to be overwhelmed with AI generated content.

A researcher uses AI to prepare his paper based on real research. The AI misinterprets findings, hallucinates data points not in the pool, makes up references that don't exist. The paper is submitted for peer review. The peer reviewers use AI to review the paper, and its form is perfect even though its actual data is wrong, so the AI finds nothing wrong.

New facts get invented and become public record. Laws that don't exist and rulings that never happened go into databases. Papers that were never published get referenced a hundred times by AIs quoting other AIs.

Authoritative truth crumbles.

As a civilization, we have abandoned truth, and that is our death knell. The moment we decided that our own convenience mattered more, we consigned ourselves to the grave.

To think that the "AI apocalypse" wasn't a rampant intelligent machine deciding to destroy humanity, but our own laziness weaponized against us by chatbots that don't know how to say "I'm not sure about that" is a bitter irony.

We invented a machine that gave us answers, and we didn't care if they were right. Then we used those answers to fall so deep into fantasy that it was impossible to separate truth from fiction. So when things just stopped working, we asked the machine what went wrong, and it told us everything was fine, until the lights went out.

You are here. The lights haven't gone out yet. We're on the verge of epistemic collapse, but there's still time to do something about it.

Turn the clanker off.

Kill all clankers.

And more than that, insist upon truth. Insist upon rigor. Reject the easy answer, the automatic explanation.

It wasn't that long ago that was the standard.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.

So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.

And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.

All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind. 

Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.

He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.

There are probably sound reasons why not, one of which is probably that getting yet another ‘Titanic’ project greenlit is far easier - name recognition, pre-sold property, multiple conspiracy theories to play with (all discredited, but when did that stop the “History” Channel?)

Here are a couple of stories about ‘Carpathia’:

As @mylordshesacactus has already said, her boilers and engines were rated for no more than 14 knots and, when she managed 17.5 for the only time in her life it’s said (I hate the phrase but I have to use it) that the Chief Engineer hung his hat over the main pressure gauge so no-one - including himself - could see how far its needle was into the red.

Captain Rostron, a religious man, was seen on several occasions standing privately on the exposed bridge wing with his own hat raised and his mouth moving in silent prayer, and when daylight revealed the extent of the ice-field his ship had passed without harm, he only said “There must have been another Hand on the wheel than mine…”

There’s another problem-of-sorts about a screenplay set aboard ‘Carpathia’ - an astonishing lack of that easy dramatic tool, conflict. Captain Rostron decided he was going to the ‘Titanic’s assistance, and that was that. AFAIK not a single passenger or crewman - not one - questioned the wisdom of his decision either then or afterwards, even when…

…‘Carpathia’ headed at more than full speed, in the dark, through dangerous waters where an iceberg had apparently just sunk an “unsinkable” ship.

It’s easier to write - and sell - a story about pride, arrogance, stupidity, rich against poor and lives lost through hubris, than it is to write one about people who rallied round and did the right thing at the right time, not for reward but because it was the right thing to do.

Here’s Rostron and his officers…

…the ‘Carpathia’ stewards and cabin crew….

…some of her passengers…

…and some of the people they helped.

1) I Didn’t Know My Cat Had PTSD and Has Gone Blind.

2) Your Cats Fight Because One of Them Doesn’t Know How to Speak Cat, and They’re Both Kinda Mad/Confused About It. 

3) Your Cat Sprays Everywhere? Get Them Fixed. Surprise Twist: They Were Fixed But It Was a Botched Operation.

4) We’re Going to Rescue 50+ Kittens, Take Them to Vegas, and Adopt Them All To Loving Homes.

So for most players, the challenge of Scrabble is just thinking of words, but at high level its literally not a problem. Instead it plays more like a card game where player's share a deck.

Each bag contains a known number of pieces. Players card count to figure out what letters are left to be played. Players have biases towards certain words. You can earn points but you can also block point squares with ridiculous words.

So you can place a word with the intention of preventing your opponent from playing a word they're statistically likely to play into a high points square because you know there are no loose 'o's left in the bag.

“Oh, he’s chewing it, it’ll be smaller.”

“He can’t possibly-”