07mk
6hr ago
I doubt your reaction would be similar if the shoe was on the other foot, e.g. if Biden suddenly tried to force 1 in 20 people to undergo a sex change in the name of diversity.
As rude and susceptible to partisan bias as it is to speculate on someone's partisan motivations, I find myself agreeing with your assessment of WhiningCoil in most of this comment, but this last part is pretty ridiculous. I'm not sure there's a level of behavior about tariffs that any POTUS could do that would come within an order of magnitude as extreme as actually forcing anyone to undergo sex changes, which would be legit authoritarian overreach in a way that the tariffs or even Trump's recent behavior with respect to deportations aren't. To say nothing of forcing millions of people to undergo sex changes. Like, even if Trump decided to enact Graham's Number% universal tariffs one second and then 0% the next second and varied wildly between them 3600/hour for every waking hour of his presidency, that wouldn't be anywhere in the same ballpark (though certainly it would provide a ton of legitimate fodder for conversation!). Yes, they're both examples of politically shooting oneself in the foot, but you're comparing doing so with an assault rifle and doing so with a nuke. And the precise examples of comparison isn't the point, but using such an obviously absurd hypothetical makes this comment appear in bad faith. Which is unfortunate, because, again, I think the main thrust of the comment is accurate.
I'm not sure what the equivalent of Trump's recent tariff behavior would be from the Democratic end. Something like a wealth tax on some ridiculously low amount of wealth that would apply to a majority of households, for the purpose of funding entitlements, maybe? That'd certainly be worth discussing plenty, and certainly there would be plenty of Democrat-aligned people trying to minimize the discussion as much ado about nothing as a way to distract away from something that made their side look bad, though I'd hope that no one on this forum would do so (and I'd honestly guess none of the regulars would do so).
07mk
1d ago
My layman's understanding is that dark matter was invented to explain the otherwise unusual expansion of the universe, has never been observed, and conveniently (like miracles) is believed by its nature to be difficult to observe because of the way it does (or doesn't) interact with regular matter.
You're probably thinking of some combination of dark energy and dark matter. IIRC, dark matter was invented to explain why galaxies weren't falling apart with its stars flying away from each other despite appearing not to have enough matter to have the gravitational pull to stay together. Dark energy was invented to explain why these galaxies appeared to be flying away from each other despite the gravitational pull, i.e. the universe appeared to be expanding.
07mk
2d ago
Because I don't think most citations of pundits here are met with this kind of backlash. I perceive Hanania to be singled out as particularly lacking in credibility. My response is not that Hanania is necessarily correct on any issue, but rather that he should not be dismissed for reasons unrelated to his actual positions.
No one's dismissing Hanania, though, and I don't perceive him as being particularly singled out here.
To your objections towards the end, I'm happy to revise any of the specific language, but I read you as suggesting that a person who has consistently advocated for a single position or narrative without changing it is less trustworthy than a person who has changed their position. This seems unintuitive, to me.
Your read of me is wrong. It's that someone who has consistently advocated for a single position or narrative without changing it in a way that is indifferent to actual evidence that interacts with such a position or narrative is less trustworthy than a person who has changed their position in a way that responds to actual evidence that interacts with such a position or narrative.
07mk
4d ago
The problem is that both these points seem compelling to me, to an extent, especially because for an overarching ideology like Catholicism, people are likely to adopt Catholicism for reasons unrelated to the merits of any given argument. This is less the case for a specific theory like evolution, though ideologies like rationalism, conservatism, socialism, etc., are more like Catholicism than they are like evolution. I think where I end up is that we should not rule partisans of a particular ideology out of discussions of that ideology, though we should be aware of their biases and take them into account. Thus, say, Catholics can and should be consulted on the subject of whether or not Catholicism is true (we can hardly expect anybody else to make the case for Catholicism!), but we should be more critical than usual of their assessments of new information.
Of course we shouldn't rule partisans out of discussions of that ideology, and we should be aware of their biases and take them into account. It seems that you are agreeing entirely with hydroacetylene's original point, that "You should, accordingly, downgrade the weight of evidence of him coming up with that take."
I guess I don't see a valid criticism of Hanania here relatively to other pundits.
Why would you think that this is a criticism unique to Hanania versus just most pundits in general? Most pundits in general should have their arguments for their preferred narratives discounted.
Can you think of any particular examples of this? The thing is, what this sounds like to me in practice is the idea that everybody should be presumed to be dishonest except for people who have radically changed their belief systems.
I don't see how you can jump from what I wrote to "dishonest," which is loaded with meaning that is lacking in "falling prey to confirmation bias." Likewise, "belief systems" implies a sort of system of belief in a way that someone's "preferred narrative" doesn't. I'd say Scott Alexander is an example of a pundit who does a decent (maybe even good! Definitely not perfect) job of demonstrating an ability to at least entertain undermining his preferred narratives in his essays, where he often tends to spend quite a lot of time at least appearing to present, in good faith, arguments that contradict things he believes to be true.
That seems like a heuristic that will easily lead one astray - it would imply, for a start, that inconsistent opportunists are more (intellectually) trustworthy than people who stick to their principles. Doesn't that seem bizarre?
Again, you seem to jump from "preferred narratives" to "principles," which is very bizarre. Someone can stick to their principles completely and jump from narrative to wildly different narrative, due to how their principles dictate their interpretation of facts. Likewise, there's no reason to believe that an inconsistent opportunist isn't sticking to his own principles, since his principles could be driving him to become an opportunist. So no, what I wrote doesn't imply that at all, by my lights.
07mk
5d ago
Again, it's not clear how this is any kind of valid criticism of Hanania - any more than "you're Catholic!" is a valid criticism of the pope.
"You're Catholic" is absolutely a valid criticism of someone trying to convince you that some piece of information proves that Catholicism is true. The piece of information truly might prove that Catholicism is true, but an already-believing Catholic can't be trusted to make that judgment call. No more than Trump can be trusted to make a judgment call on how good a president Biden was, given that he's demonstrated a penchant for characterizing everything Biden did as the worst thing any president did ever.
Fitting every new piece of information into a pre-set narrative that one likes is intellectual consistency only in the sense that it's a consistently confirmation bias. That's sort of what it means when some narrative is described as someone's "schtick."
Now, it's possible that it is factually not the case that it's his schtick, but rather that he genuinely takes a skeptical look at each new piece of evidence and is helplessly forced to conclude, despite his best efforts to prove otherwise, that his narrative is shown to be correct yet again.
As you allude to, distinguishing between these two things isn't particularly easy. In both situations, it's being intellectually consistent and believing that he is correct. This points to the fact that being intellectually consistent and believing that oneself is correct isn't actually worth anything: the value in such a thing only comes from the belief of oneself as correct having some actual basis in fact. That's something one can make arguments about by looking at the actual behavior of the person. I'd say that, by default, everyone should be presumed to be falling prey to confirmation bias all the time, doubly so if their preferred narrative is self aggrandizing, triply if that person is particularly intelligent and thus better able to fit evidence to narrative. It's only by credibly demonstrating that they are open to other narratives that they can earn any sort of credibility that their arguments have any relationship with reality. That's where showing oneself to be capable of undermining one's preferred narrative comes in, and there's no better way to demonstrate this capability than by doing it.
07mk
5d ago
Single player video games almost always require the player character to be the Chosen One, because in a meta sense, they're the only one with free will, and they almost always follow a unique set of rules compared to NPCs. I think, as storytelling in video games took more prominence, too many devs saw this as an opportunity to be clever by making the in-universe story reflect this, leading to it being done so much that many players got bored of it. There's something to be said about the power fantasy of being the Chosen One, but that also can make the player feel like their success in the game is pre-planned rather than earned.
This is why I personally didn't like Commander Shepard filling such a special role in Mass Effect rather than being the right soldier in the right place at the right time to save the universe. Doomguy in 1993's Doom was more that, and I was disappointed in the narrative of the 2016 Doom making Doom Slayer the Chosen One. I think From Soft games tend to do a good job at finding a good balance between the 2, where the player character is usually a member of a class of characters with special abilities including resurrection, but they're not a particularly special one of those, other than that the player controls them to accomplish special things which earns them the status of a Great Chosen One by the end.
07mk
6d ago
We can expect things like moral panics, jaywalking, stealing, genocide, rape, and crowd hysteria to be with us for as long as human civilization remains human. I don't expect that not to be the case. I still hold the individuals who perform these things accountable and blame them for partaking in them. In practice, on a forum like this, all I can do is to explain whom I blame, for I lack the capability to do anything to make that blame translate to actual negative consequences for the blameworthy.
07mk
6d ago
I haven't watched the show or plan to, but your description of the phenomenon surrounding it reminds me a bit of the Netflix show Jessica Jones from about a decade back. Not nearly as big a deal in terms of being talked about for ideological messaging as Adolescence, but I ran into more than a few mentions by people about it as some great demonstration of "rape culture." When I watched the show, it was a decent superhero dramedy that was so extremely far removed from anything approaching social reality that the notion that it was some meaningful social commentary to anyone who's not actively trying to twist it that way seemed utterly absurd.
Which, I think, points to why the people talking about these shows this way are doing so: they're actively trying to twist it that way. The mainstream ideology that these people follow posits that fictional works always and inevitably have political and ideological meaning, which is why the followers so often decrt media that has the wrong messaging and also try to create media that has the right messaging. This show Adolescence seems to have enough features that allow them to see the correct patterns that properly flatter them and their messaging, and it's apparently well made to boot, so they latch on to it.
The funniest possible thing to happen now would be the writer(s) of the show being proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be unremorseful sexual predators.
07mk
7d ago
This is a moral panic that Labour and the Guardian have ginned up out of literally nothing?
I don't know the answers your questions specifically, but it wouldn't surprise me if the answer to this one is Yes. Are you aware of how many actual children were confirmed to be ritually abused by satanists in the 1980s?
07mk
7d ago
Basically blame the framework for brain washing people, not the people who got brainwashed.
I blame both. The framework didn't fall from the Heavens on a tablet that we must follow lest we be barred from Paradise forever, it was formed by individuals making individual decisions. The framework of brainwashing is maintained in a large part by people who were - and continue to be - brainwashed in the past, and it is only maintained because people are willing to be brainwashed. Refusing to blame the brainwashed because of the framework just reinforces the framework.
Perhaps critical thinking in higher education is truly almost all gone - I'm skeptical that "almost all gone" is an accurate description, but it's not an absurd proposition - but it's not all all gone, and it's also something individuals can develop on their own. Anyone who's intelligent enough to become a doctor - or any other sort of high level professional in such an academic field - has the full capability to develop in their own. They can notice the framework and play the game while not being subsumed by it, so as to improve the framework in the long run. Yes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, as Upton Sinclair said - this is a fairly well known quote, and educated people ought to be expected to at least understand the concept and to counter it in themselves. After all, it's difficult, not impossible, and one of the entire points of being a professional in an academic-related field is that they're capable of doing things that are intellectually difficult.
07mk
7d ago
There was no Emperor of Medicine that made medical professionals overall trustworthy to the general public in the first place, either. I'm thinking that it was probably done piecemeal, by having doctors be credible by actually correctly diagnosing and fixing problems based on research that other doctors did, and having organizations that certified these people as competent being correlated with these doctors actually being competent, and the like. So this could be repeated, where whatever organization these researchers are part of taking the steps SubstantialFrivolity suggested, and this being repeated by other organizations whose employees and associates did similarly untrustworthy things. If the organizations are too big with diffuse responsibility, then we can get smaller, to the departments these researchers were part of. If the departments are similarly too big, then we can get down to the individual researchers themselves. It just needs to be done rigorously, each and every time, and eventually, over time, the overall credibility of the field will go back up, though perhaps never reaching what it once was.
07mk
7d ago
They are just as fooled as everyone else, even the bad actors in this case think they are helping and doing the right thing because "these things are true, if the data doesn't match we must have done something wrong!" after years of being brainwashed.
So I don't know if this is the point that Listening is getting at, my take on this is that anyone in academia - which medicine counts as close enough and people who do medical research certainly fit - who is brainwashed is entirely responsible for their being brainwashed. One of the core themes of academia is to be skeptical, especially of oneself. This requires checking things against objective reality and listening to people who disagree with oneself, especially when it comes to narratives that sound convincing. If they bought into the propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes, then they ignored these basic, fundamental "warnings" that are core to any form of higher education.
07mk
7d ago
When I'm giving my intake speach to interns and new hires I talk about "the 9 nines". That is that in order to have a minimally viable product we must meet or exceed the standards of "baseline human performance" with 99.9 999 999% reliability. Imagine a test with a billion questions where one additional incorrect answer means a failing grade.
I'm not sure what "baseline human performance" means in practice, but regardless of what actual objective criterion that means, we just have to get the error rate to be under 1/10^9 to be effective as a product, right? I don't understand how that, or any other rate you might choose, couldn't be reached, in principle.
Unimportant aside: I don't think 1 mistake in a billion is reasonable for any human or any tool, but, again, I don't know exactly what you're talking where the rubber meets the road - do you have any examples of interns who fail this or are just on the threshold, where you calculated that they fail at 1.1/10^9 or 0.9/10^9, to better illustrate this concept? But regardless, the exact number is unimportant.
In this context "Humans also hallucinate" is just not an excuse. Think about how many "visual operations" a person typically performs in the process of going about thier day. Ask yourself how many cars on your comute this afternoon, or words in this comment thread have you halucinated? A dozen? None? I you think you are sure, are you "9 nines" sure?
It's not meant to be an excuse. I'm actually not sure how many 9s sure I am that I didn't hallucinate anything in my commute today, and I'm not sure that anything in my life exceeds 9 nines certainty. I'm not sure what point this exercise is supposed to make, though. Could you explain how my not being 9 nines certain that I'm not hallucinating things like this very conversation (I'd guess I'm 3 or 4 nines sure at most?) affects the point about an LLM's ability to be useful as intelligent, semi-autonomous tools if we lower their error rate to be beneath that of a typical human serving a similar role?
07mk
8d ago
The "hallucination problem" can not realistically be "solved" within the context of regression based generative models as the "hallucinations" are an emergant property of the mechanisms upon which those models function.
What does "solving" the hallucination problem look like, though? Humans also hallucinate all the time - in fact, arguably, this is one of the core reasons for the existence of this website and specifically this CW roundup thread - and it is something we've "solved" through various mechanisms of checking and verifying and holding people accountable, with none of them getting anywhere near perfect. Now, human hallucinations are more well understood than LLM ones, making them easier to predict in some ways, but why couldn't we eventually get a handle on the types of hallucinations that LLMs tend to have, allowing us to create proper control mechanisms for them such that the rate of actual consequential errors becomes lower than those caused by human hallucinations? If we reach that point, then could we say that hallucinations have been "solved?" And if not, then what does it matter if it wasn't "solved?"
07mk
8d ago
From what I know about Rowling's past, I think the "ultra" part is overselling it, but not completely unwarranted from a certain point of view. But the bigger question is, is "so infected with ideological brainrot that they can't help but overtly infect their fictional stories with their ideology" just a part of the definition of "old school leftie ultrafeminist?" I feel like that's more a characteristic of the modern variety.
I don't know what Rowling was thinking when writing the books, but I figured she wanted to tell a good and market-appealing story first, which in this case involved a boy protagonist, and she did put in bits of 90s-feminist messaging like the hypercompetent Hermione as one of the core supporting cast. Like how the Disney cartoons in the 90s were clearly generally feminist but sometimes involved a male protagonist getting the girl as in Aladdin or the female protagonist finding love with a man as in The Little Mermaid.
07mk
9d ago
The point of my thought experiment was to demonstrate that in principle there can be cases where it's correct for a humanities teacher to mark down a student based on the positions they hold, and not just the quality of the argument. I'm not convinced that "any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar". Perhaps bringing HBD into it confused the issue - suppose a student handed in a paper arguing that the pyramids were built by Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta. Wouldn't that be pretty analogous to the flat-earther geology student? Wouldn't you want a serious history teacher to mark down the paper relative to an equally-eloquent one that presented a basically sane theory of the pyramids' origin?
I'd want the serious history teacher to mark down the paper only if the argument that the Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta built it was truly bad. Which should almost definitely be the case, if we're in reality. If it is the case that, somehow, the student was able to form an argument based on the best available empirical evidence and best available analysis using the best available methods that was exactly as rigorous and fact-based as another student's argument that it was built by Egyptian slaves or whatever, then I'd want the history teacher to give that student the same grade. I don't know why you write "eloquent" in this example, when eloquence has almost nothing to do with the quality of an argument.
If there is blame to be assigned, it goes to the architects of the conspiracy, not to people in unrelated fields who go by the mainstream scientific consensus. And if you go by the mainstream scientific consensus, then "racism explains Africa's subpar development" is trivially false and dangerous misinformation, in the same way as "the Earth is flat".
Perhaps my assignment of blame to the history teacher was more severe than is warranted. If it is indeed the case that the entire field of history (or humanities in general) is so biased that any typical history teacher can't be reasonably held to account for believing the bias, this speaks to even more horrific levels of incompetence in the entire field. What you're describing is a situation that's similar to what I described, but severely worse. As in, to refer back to my earliest comment in this thread, the situation in academia is even worse than the worst things that people here were criticizing with respect to ideological bias in academia and similar institutions.
What's unfortunate is, I think you're probably right on this.
In Thought Experiment Land, sure. But in the real world, it would be clear that the student had started from the bonkers conclusion and worked backwards, and I would want the teacher to mark him down, both to make it very clear to him that the claim is nonsense he should un-learn ASAP, and to teach him that you shouldn't assume the conclusion in the first place, let alone a crazy one.
You're the one who brought us into Thought Experiment Land, though. The point of TEL is that it's analogous to the real thing we're talking about, and so I was simply explaining the analogous setup. All analogies are faulty, and so comparing Flat Earthism with racism/homophobia is also faulty, and the fact that Flat Earthism is obviously and absurdly wrong by empirical evidence is something we'd have to accept as a fault in the analogy and work around, so that the analogy makes sense, i.e. that it's entirely reasonable for someone to use best practices and best evidence to come to the conclusion of Flat Earth. This would be absurd in the real world, but, again, we're not in the real world, we're in Thought Experiment Land, by your own choice.
That's a fair point. But to the extent it holds, to the extent that homophobia or racism are moral issues and therefore different magisteria from science - then students shouldn't be "arguing in favor of" them either - any more than teachers should be looking for the converse.
Hard disagree. The point of humanities is, in part, to learn to argue for squishy things like morals or politics or ideologies, and that's done in a large part by having students actually make arguments in favor of these things with the understanding that their grading isn't based on the "correctness" of their conclusions, but rather the quality of the arguments they make. This was pretty standard fair when I was in school, where, in history class, we did roleplaying to argue in favor of and against things like slavery, democracy, monarchy, and the like. Sometimes we were assigned roles, other times we chose roles based on our own preferences, and either way, the education occurred through our thinking through these arguments and we were graded on the quality of those arguments. I think this is a good thing and useful for students to learn. This goes double for concepts and ideas that are well outside the Overton window and specifically ones that people in authority find offensive or dangerous.
So when you wrote "arguments in favor of homophobia or racism" I assumed you meant answers to questions of fact where some claims are designated as racist or homophobic - "claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it,", as you say. "Why is Europe more successful than Africa" is a valid historical question, for example, but one for which some factual answers would be deemed racist - eg "because blacks are genetically dumber and more violent than caucasians".
(You might, of course, believe there is something to that, as a question of fact. But assuming we take the opposite to be definitive, demonstrated scientific fact on par with "the Earth is round" - or, simply, assuming the history teacher believes it to be so in good faith - then it doesn't seem to be wrong on the history teacher's part to mark down an essay which takes it to be true, no matter how eloquent it is.)
Right, if the history teacher is assuming this to be true, in good faith, that speaks to a truly horrific level of incompetence and bias by the history teacher, in terms of epistemic certainty about history or sociology or the humanities in general. There are very few things in reality that are as well demonstrated as "the Earth is round," and any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar. Anyone with any appreciation for academia, and especially one whose role is to teach students, ought to be aware of this. Especially if we're considering a case where the history teacher is judging the veracity of claims like "Europe is more successful than Africa because [XYZ]" based on the fact that [XYZ] was deemed to be racist, rather than on the specific scientific claims of [XYZ] and the empirical evidence surrounding it, which seemed to be the implication in the original situation and is certainly the case in most such cases I've observed both in and outside of academic settings.
07mk
12d ago
The modern iteration is…an activist
So fittingly enough, she was the paradigmatic young woman, in the context of the Modern Audience^(tm).
07mk
12d ago
If a geology student used all the best scientific practices and all the best available empirical evidence and all the best arguments by the standards of all the best geologists that somehow ended up with a convincing conclusion that the Earth was flat, then the geology teacher would absolutely be in the wrong for marking down the student.
In any case, questions of moral truths like "is homophobia or racism wrong" is categorically different from questions of empirical facts like "is the Earth flat," and to whatever extent academics conflate the two, they ought to be called out and actively denigrated for it. The purpose of humanities education is to teach how to properly think through these moral truths (as well as other things), not what to properly conclude about these moral truths.
A sociology class that deems certain moral truths out of bounds isn't a sociology class, it's a religious sermon. Sociology can make claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it, and the teacher can even make the argument that these effects are bad, but once they cross the line into demanding that students conform to their own judgments of what's bad and good, they're taking on the role of preacher, not teacher. "Deleterious" and "wrong" are not synonyms.
07mk
12d ago
Zegler isn’t ugly but next to Gadot Zegler looks like a soft 6. Relative casting matters.
Given how they apparently changed the way "fairest" meant in this remake, I actually wonder if the relative looks here was the point. Of course, they couldn't hire someone outright ugly as the lead, but making sure that she's significantly and noticeably less attractive than the Evil Queen (very easy to do when you cast Gadot as her) could have been consciously intentional for the purpose of sending little girls the message that good looks are bad, actually. It's interesting, though, that the original film had a pretty overt message about the evilness of vanity, which gets lost when you replace the Evil Queen's obsession about being the fairest-as-in-beautiful to fairest-as-in-just. I don't know how the remake justifies it, but it seems bizarre that a Queen who intentionally sends her King off to die and oppresses her happy subjects would obsess over a magic mirror's judgment of her as being fair-as-in-just. Perhaps there's some way the Queen's perspective is presented in a way to show that she actually genuinely believes that she is a just ruler? Given how much Disney's been into redeeming female villains like Cruella DeVille or Maleficent, this could've been a good opportunity to show her as a misguided soul who was traumatized by a man in her past that led her to an obsession with being a just ruler that nonetheless turned into evil. I haven't heard that from any reviews, though.
It sounds like much of the film was written with conscious messaging in mind, based on the descriptions I read and saw of the plot, which seems to involve pretty unambiguous pro-Communist messaging, and also an addition of a plot point presenting Dopey as someone unfairly bullied for his muteness and who turns out to be able to talk in the end.
07mk
12d ago
Assuming all of this is entirely accurate, it seems exactly as bad a situation as the worst things that people are complaining about here. In a humanities course, someone being marked down for making arguments in favor of open homophobia and racism is utterly horrifying. It defeats the entire purpose of a humanities education to judge students' capabilities based on the conclusions they land at, rather than the arguments and reasoning they use to land at those arguments. Some professors might claim that only bad reasoning could land at those conclusions, but that, in itself, would be even more perverse, in a humanities professor being that simple- or closed-minded as to hold such a belief.
07mk
12d ago
I didn't think that was the point of the dog analogy, but if that were, then indeed, you're right it's a poor analogy for this.
07mk
12d ago
The joke isn't a scenario where the dog plays chess under such unusual circumstances that it doesn't mean the dog is smart.
I don't think it would make sense for a dog to be able to play chess at all while also that not meaning that the dog is "smart" in some real sense. Perhaps it doesn't understand the rules of chess or the very concept of a competitive board game, but if it's able to push around the pieces on the board in a way that conforms to the game's rules in a manner that allows it to defeat humans (who are presumably competent at chess and genuinely attempting to win) some non-trivial percentage of the time through its own volition without some marionette strings or external commands or something, I would characterize that dog as "smart." Perhaps the dog had an extra smart trainer, but I doubt that even an ASI-level smart trainer could train the smartest real-life dog in the real world to that level.
And imagine that it's 1981 and someone is showing you their brand new ZX81. The exact same thing happens that happens with the dog, down to you saying that the chess program can be beaten nine times out of ten. Should you conclude that actually, ZX81s are really really smart because playing chess at all is impressive? Or should you conclude that even though humans use general intelligence to play chess, the ZX81 instead uses a very nonhuman specialized method, and the ZX81 isn't very smart despite how impressive playing chess is?
This last sentence doesn't make sense to me either. Yes, I would conclude that the ZX81 uses a very nonhuman specialized method, and I'd characterize its "ability" (obviously unlike a dog, it has no agency) to play chess in this way as "smart" in some real, meaningful sense. Obviously it's not any sort of generalized "smartness" that can apply to any other situation. If we were living at a time when a computer that could play chess wasn't even a thing, and someone introduced me to a chess bot that he could defeat only 9 times out of 10, I would find it funny if he downplayed that, as in the dog joke.
If a few years later the ZX81 was replaced with a Commodore 64, and you couldn't beat the Commodore 64 in chess, would you decide that the ZX81 is dumb, but the Commodore 64 is smart?
I'd conclude that the Commodore 64 is "smarter than" the ZX81 (I'm assuming we're using the computer names as shorthand for the software that they actually run on the hardware, here). Again, not in some sort of generalized sense, but certainly in a real, meaningful sense in the realm of chess playing.
When it comes to actual modern AI, we're, of course, talking primarily about LLMs, which generate text really really well, so it could be considered "smart" in that one realm. I'm on the fence about and mostly skeptical that LLMs will or can be the basis for an AGI in the future. But I think it's a decent argument that strings of text can be translated to almost any form of applied intelligence, and so by becoming really, really good at putting together strings of text, LLMs could be used as that basis for AGI. I think modern LLMs are clearly nowhere near there, with Claude Plays Pokemon the latest really major example of its failures, from what I understand. We might have to get to a point where the gap between the latest LLM and ChatGPT4.5 is greater than the gap between ChatGPT4.5 and ELIZA before that happens, but I could see it happening.
07mk
13d ago
Wokeness is a reaction to that memeplex and is part of the antibody response to further your analogy, it's actually part of the dealing with the overreach.
If we're going by this analogy, I'd say it's far more accurate to say that wokeness is a sort of autoimmune disease on the antibody that's making the antibodies less effective while also taking up the resources that the original infection would've taken up. Like, the principles that make the antibodies effective against the religious memeplex are being actively destroyed by wokeness, and though it's also attacking traditional religious memes, it's doing so by replacing it with progressive religious memes. It's clearly not the antibodies, but STRONGER, it's something else entirely that looks very similar to the original infection that the antibodies are attacking, but with the right signal proteins or whatever that causes the original antibodies to welcome them.
Assuming that this tariff war with China continues, I wonder what sorts of smuggling operations will pop up. A 100%+ tariff provides a huge amount of room for black market organizations to provide the same import service at a lower mark-up. What sorts of companies are best positioned to take advantage of such services without drawing law enforcement's attention (and how can I invest in them)? Assuming that other countries manage to make deals with Trump to make that 90 day tariff pause permanent, exporting from China to those countries before exporting further to the US seems likely to be the weakest points for enforcement, where America doesn't have the resources to deploy their own, and local law enforcement can be more easily corrupted or just have different incentives. And if smuggling infrastructures pop up in these spots, plenty of traditional black market products can use the same infrastructure as well. Could this tariff war end up increasing the amount of drugs or guns or slaves (or what/whoever else these black market smugglers tend to smuggle from China) smuggled from China to these other countries?
I'm probably speculating down way too many steps removed from the source on something I know very little about, though.
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