SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
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User ID: 225
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
Can't have losses if you never put money in the market. taps head
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
No idea. It's just something I've seen kicked around on the motte in the past; I'm way too ignorant of Chinese goals to say if that's something they'd want even if offered it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
The relentless naked blood libel from my "betters" directed towards me is insufferable. If any other country attacked the US with intentions to conquer it, I'd at least be willing to hear them out.
Yeah, I get what you mean. We've had some posters talk about how they wish China would take over the country, and on the one hand that's an obviously bad idea. The Chinese government really is a repressive, authoritarian government with a culture very foreign to ours. It would be rather miserable to have them rule us. But on the other hand, I get why people say it. There's only so much naked hatred and contempt you can see your countrymen show for your values and your way of life before you go "fuck it, maybe at least those other guys would consider letting me live the way I want. I know this group never will".
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
And once you understand such a thing, and understand that “the news of record” has no interest in telling unbiased news, and will happily distort, misreport, play up or down different stories in order to create the impression that they want you to have. Learning that basically killed my trust in mainstream news.
Agreed. The mainstream media is a joke - even "reputable" institutions like the NYT have very little interest in providing balanced coverage of things. What interest exists is generally from an older generation of journalists, who are aging out and being replaced by young zealous partisans. And by and large, people not only have no interest in fixing it, they don't even have interest in seeing the problem! See smug slogans like "reality has a liberal bias" - that sort of attitude is just not indicative of genuine intellectual honesty and willingness to see things from other points of view.
If that were the case, it seems that at least some of them would come out t9 be socially conservative, or economically libertarian.
In fairness there were libertarians in the economics department where I went to college, so that does happen some of the time. I don't know how often, but it does at least seem that some academics do come out the way you describe.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back?
The same way you get trust back in a normal human relationship: you apologize unreservedly, make concrete steps to prevent the issue happening again, and accept that it will be a long time (if ever!) before the trust is rebuilt to what it used to be.
In this case, that means that first, everyone who repeated this false evidence needs to retract it, and apologize for their error in repeating it. No holding back because they think that fighting racism is a noble goal, no minimizing to try to avoid reputation damage, nothing. Full on admit the fault and apologize. Second, this man himself needs to be banned from ever doing research again without supervision from someone more trustworthy. Third, publications which repeated this falsified research need to brainstorm a plan for how they will catch future problems like this, and that should include a good honest look at how their own biases helped it to happen (because I have very little doubt they didn't check too closely because this research confirmed some editors' biases).
The medical profession needs to do that not only for this case, but for any other cases that come to light. And then wait. They will no doubt be beaten up in the short term by people who are angry at having been betrayed. They will get this thrown back in their faces from time to time. But eventually, if they are patient and keep acting with integrity, the wound will (probably) heal and the trust will be back. It's not an easy or fast process though.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
Oh, the other was "obligationship" - ie when you spend time with someone because you have to, not because you want to. Think stuff like hanging out with your significant other's family.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
You believe that the Rationalist movement is an "utter failure", when it has spawned the corporations busy making God out of silicon. Even if they fail at their ultimate goal, they've proven you can get staggering intelligence out of stirring text into a pot and applying heaps of linear algebra to it.
I'm not seeing the connection here. How did the rationalist movement spawn any of that? They're just garden variety tech industry dudes as far as I am aware.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
It's ok, "methgineering" still made my day. Honestly one of the top two words I've heard recently.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
I kept hoping for an "all craftsmethship is of the highest quality", but didn't see one. I was sad.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
I think that's just Texans. The rest of the country doesn't much care.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
They arrested Lance Silva and another transient, Robert McCaffrey, living in the house. Both were charged with ID theft, financial crimes, and homicide. Through DNA, the mutilated body was identified as that of Brian Egg. An autopsy concluded he was murdered and died from blunt trauma... Lance Silva and his friend were released.
What the hell? They were released? At minimum, they are plainly guilty of trespassing on property that isn't theirs. And there's good reason to suspect them of murder (in my opinion they definitely murdered the guy, but due process and all that) so they should be held for an impending trial for both those things. That's the minimum that needs to happen here. What kind of feckless idiot was in charge of that situation, that they went "eh let em go"? Is it always that bad in SF these days, or was this some kind of isolated incident based on a particular DA (or whoever) being bad at his job?
SubstantialFrivolity
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4d ago
For what it's worth, it isn't just the trendy international cosmopolitan cities (ie NYC, Chicago and LA) which have insane house prices in the US. I live in Denver (nice city but not really trendy) and we have the same problem.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4d ago
I definitely agree. Kerrygold is wildly overrated. The only thing that's really different about it to me is the color. I can't say I notice a difference in taste.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5d ago
I don't agree we've had rapid improvements over the last 12 years. We haven't really had any noticeable improvement since the introduction of ChatGPT (2-3 years ago? I forget), and we didn't have anything to write home about for a long time before that. From my perspective, we had a big spike of improvement once, and nothing since. Therefore it doesn't seem likely to me that huge progress is about to happen any day now.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5d ago
I don't see how it's begging the question at all. Why shouldn't it be the null hypothesis, rather than the claim that we will see AI eclipse humans soon? Why is it begging the question when I do it, but not when someone else chooses a different theory? I'm willing to agree that the choice of "what is the appropriate null hypothesis" is not one which can be proven to be correct, which is why I said "to me" the correct null hypothesis is that we won't see that soon. But I'm not willing to agree that I'm committing some kind of epistemological sin here.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6d ago
Gotcha. So it's not that you're opposed to those things per se, but that you're opposed to pretending like they are reaching the goal (when in fact they aren't).
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6d ago
Because right now we're not even close to AI being able to equal humans, let alone exceed them. And because this is cutting edge research, we simply cannot know what roadblocks might occur between now and then. To me, the correct null hypothesis is "it won't happen soon" until such time as there is a new development which pushes things forward quite a bit.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
7d ago
I'm not a fan of gender reassignment surgery, or hormones, or putting on a dress.
I'm actually kind of surprised by that. As a transhumanist, I would've thought you were all in support of gender reassignment surgery (since it fits in nicely with the idea of breaking out of the limitations of the meat body one was born with). Can you expand on your thinking there?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
7d ago
You're right, it is amazing that we can even consider that. I don't think anyone disagrees on that point. The disagreement here is that our resident AI hype posters keep going past that, and claim that AI will be able to outshine us in the very near future. It's possible, as I said in my other comment. But we simply are not there yet, and we (imo) don't yet have reason to believe we will be there real soon. That is the point of disagreement, and why people sound so skeptical about something which is nigh-objectively an amazing technical achievement. It's because they are responding to very overblown claims about what the achievement is capable of.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
7d ago
It doesn't need the holocaust and slavery museums though...
To be fair here, the national Holocaust museum in DC is one of the most powerful and memorable experiences I've ever had in my entire life. That museum is great, or at least it was 23 years ago when I went. Maybe it has gone down the drain since then, but I would be in favor of keeping it assuming it's still the same quality. We don't need more than one, though.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
7d ago
As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.
Your make a good point overall, but it is an overreach to claim that this is entirely the fault of the right. Even when things weren't as bad as they are now in academia, there was still a bias (as you yourself said). I myself saw it when I was an undergrad student: conservatives were shamelessly (if clandestinely) mocked in ways that would never fly if it happened to other groups. I remember people leaving taunting messages on the chalkboard used by the university Christian group, or vandalizing political signs for conservative candidates. Nobody cared. But I strongly believe that if, say, the black student group had someone put derogatory messages on their chalkboard, there would have been a campus outcry and investigation of it.
That is the kind of environment conservatives faced, and even though it wasn't as bad as it has become, it wasn't remotely welcoming either. Would you make your career in an environment that was tacitly hostile to your beliefs and way of life, just to try to fight the good fight? I certainly wouldn't, and I can't really blame those who wouldn't either. I think it's fair to say that the right-wing culture which is suspicious of academia and other "not real work" kind of jobs is their own fault. But there are other factors here which aren't their fault.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
7d ago
I wish I had a dollar for every time people use the current state of AI as their primary justification for claiming it won't get noticeably better, I wouldn't need UBI.
He didn't say that. He said that the state today is not very good, not that being unimpressive today means it will be unimpressive in the future.
Besides which, your logic cuts both ways. Rates of change are not constant. Moore's Law was a damn good guarantee of processors getting faster year over year... right until it wasn't, and it very likely never will be again. Maybe AI will keep improving fast enough, for long enough, that it really will become all it's hyped up to be within 5-10 years. But neither of us actually knows whether that's true, and your boundless optimism is every bit as misplaced as if I were to say it definitely won't happen.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
8d ago
Why hasn't it already?
In my opinion, it hasn't because (contrary to what AI hype proponents say) it can't. AI simply isn't very good at doing things yet. To use the specific example I know well and actually have interacted with, LLMs don't write good code. It has wildly inaccurate bits that you have to check up on, sometimes to the point that it isn't even syntactically valid. It actually slows you down in many cases to try to use LLMs for programming. A skilled programmer can use AI tools as a force multiplier in some situations, so they do have a (fairly narrow) use case. But the idea that you could replace programmers with LLMs is just plain laughable at this stage of the game.
I'm not an expert in every field. But given that AI is not actually very good for coding, one of the things its proponents claim it to be good at... I don't exactly have high hopes that AI is good at those other things either. Maybe it'll get there, but there's not sufficient reason to believe "yes it will definitely happen" just yet. We have no way of knowing whether the rate of progress from the last few years will continue, or whether we are going to hit an unforseen wall that blocks all progress. We'll just have to wait and see.
So, I think that is why the great AI replacement hasn't occurred. It isn't able to successfully happen yet. At best, right now you would replace humans with AI that does the job extremely poorly, and then (in a few years, when the hype dies down) humans would get hired back to fix all the stuff the AI broke. Which is a distinct possibility, as that is what happened a couple of decades ago with outsourcing jobs to India. But as painful as that would be, it's not "all these human jobs are over now".
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
8d ago
In our case... nobody, nobody and nobody. I think that like you said, this comes down to personal style differences.
Down thread, @UnopenedEnvilope said that this particular power was delegated to the president by an act of Congress. Maybe this will wake people up to the dangers of Congress abdicating their jobs and giving control to the President, but I somehow doubt it.
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