God save us from grindset influencers who pedal all this ‘if you didn’t succeed it was down to you not trying hard enough’ m’larky. In some respects I appreciate the call to taking agency but the fact it results in people being unable to acknowledge the sheer extent of external factors in the world is crazy.
He did try to get out of buying it which everyone seems to have memoryholed. I doubt anything other than way too much ketamine is behind a lot of the chaotic decision making.
Tell me what happened to democracy when Hitler took power? And how democratic was the overall process? So was the decision to commit mass murder of millions of people really the democratic will of the people?
It’s like people haven’t even touched a history book sometimes.
You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on.
If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends.
Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism.
> Tell me what happened to democracy when Hitler took power? And how democratic was the overall process? So was the decision to commit mass murder of millions of people really the democratic will of the people?
It wasn't, but as I said, if the majority of voters do wish to commit mass murder, that is actually not trivially ignorable.
> You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on.
Congress is our representatives. They are philosophically us. The majority of them do not want to impeach Trump for these things. Also the majority of voters reelected Trump knowing how he is. The way things are going is how the people want it (if you believe in democracy and the philosophy of representatives).
> If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends.
There has been absolutely nothing to suggest that democracy, as in the literal sense of voting to determine representation, is at risk from inside the political apparatus. I don't consider Jan6 anything of that sort btw.
> Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism
Sure, but the crux of the issue is that the left is going beyond criticism. The vocal left continuously claims that the elected government, and crucially those people who voted for it, are in some outgroup (nazis, fascists, bigots et al) that does not deserve to have democratic power in the country by their very nature. They weild the 'paradox of tolerance' as a bludgeon to disenfranchise half the country. It's unhealthy for democracy, both in itself and because when a group feels under (politically) existential attack they will do heinous things to survive.
You’re mixing the principle of democracy up with the process which is necessary to uphold the principle. It’s quite clear that the issue with the democratic process in the US is not with the language used by Democrat voters. What’s unhealthy for democracy is the continued flouting of the process by Trump and the enablement of that by Republicans. I can definitely understand it feels bad when people compare you to fascists though but y’know stop enabling fascist things. The idea that it’s actually the language causing it is very silly.
Thank you for saying this. In particular people are often already on a journey of self radicalisation so blaming people reacting to their views for radicalising them further is seeking to soft soap that. On top of which the people reacting are often framed as “going too far” and thus becoming more radical is the only natural reaction. It removes all agency and generally I think is mostly deployed by people that agree already with the radical views but are too scared to say so.
Isn’t this just telling on yourself though? If you’ll flip the “bozo bit” over mere aesthetics of word choice you’re probably not a serious person to begin with.
I don't think it's merely an "aesthetic choice" when it comes to words like slavery or fascism, but even then: aesthetics matter. We all know the guy that always speaks in hyperbole. We learn to not take anything he says seriously.
The reason the advice is "do not flip the bozo bit" is because the default is to flip it. It's what people do naturally. If you're running around getting bozo bits flipped, you better know what you're doing.
Blow is an odd duck and clearly following a political descent into fascism after his SV tech bro heroes. Just that his political descent occurred after he started Twitch streaming and as much as he boot licks Musk so I can see him defending that (if that’s what you’re referring to) I don’t think it’s credible that he would support Hitler.
> If I've learned anything from my 40+ years on this earth it's that there are no guarantees that adults/grownups are more reality-based than late teens, but they are usually more convinced they are.
Yes exactly, we're just seeing the usual tired tropes making the rounds to dismiss this rather than trying to engage with the ideas.
The trope is youth being uninformed, and it's not the trope being dismissed, but their viewpoints as if they're less valid, but rarely discussed on merit.
And as for specific ideas, the root level parent simply stated
> The kids are idiots.
which I feel captures the trope perfectly. You then half refuted it, but later restated it not as an intelligence issue but an experience one, which is where I was curious what the basis for the assertion was.
OK but what evidence is there of the youth being more informed than tax paying adults?
You called it a trope but you haven't rebuted it.
Personally, I am now smarter than I was 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I was smarter than20 years ago. I am yet to meet someone who would admit they were smarter as a teenager than they are now.
1) I never claimed that the youth are more informed than (tax paying?) adults.
2) A trope is a trope regardless if it happens to be true or false.
What I was trying to convey is that you shouldn't dismiss a group on any basis other than the merit of a claim (usually by a member of a group and not representative of the entire group), which both assertions failed.
3) What should I rebut? One claim that the youth are idiots and one claim that they are uninformed because they have paid less tax yet? Ok, neither are logical conclusions to any premise.
4) You may be representative or you may be an outlier.
> I am yet to meet someone who would admit they were smarter as a teenager than they are
This is not a good basis to draw any conclusions from. Also it contradicts your initial assertion of your OP?
I support that freedom! I just think the idea that all employee-employer relationships are exploitative is wrong. It feels derived from Marx's long discredited labour theory of value.
It is of course possible for an employer to treat employees very poorly and arguably exploit them. But it is also possible for employers to lose money for years such that employees are effectively exploiting the employer.
I can imagine unions being a great force of good in the world, but whether they are or are not is largely down to how they behave, just like individuals, corporations and other organizations & institutions.
A union that bargains collectively for it's members sounds very straightforward and logical.
A union like the NYC hotel union that actively lobbies for fewer hotels feels insane.
Human brains aren’t magic in the literal sense but do have a lot of mechanisms we don’t understand.
They’re certainly special both within the individual but also as a species on this planet. There are many similar to human brains but none we know of with similar capabilities.
They’re also most obviously certainly different to LLMs both in how they work foundationally and in capability.
I definitely agree with the materialist view that we will ultimately be able to emulate the brain using computation but we’re nowhere near that yet nor should we undersell the complexity involved.
When someone says "AIs aren't really thinking" because AIs don't think like people do, what I hear is "Airplanes aren't really flying" because airplanes don't fly like birds do.
This really shows how imprecise a term 'thinking' is here. In this sense any predictive probabilistic blackbox model could be termed 'thinking'. Particularly when juxtaposed against something as concrete as flight that we have modelled extremely accurately.
that depends, if you explain the rules of the game you're playing and give the dice a goal to win the game, do they adjust the numbers they reveal according to the rules of the game?
That's a fallacy of denial of the antecedent. You are inferring from the fact that airplanes really fly that AIs really think, but it's not a logically valid inference.
Observing a common (potential) failure mode is not equivalent to asserting a logical inference. It is only a fallacy if you "P, therefore C" which GP is not (at least to my eye) doing.
Whenever someone paraphrases a folksy aphorism about airplanes and birds or fish and submarines I suppose I'm meant to rebut with folksy aphorisms like:
"A.I. and humans are as different as chalk and cheese."
As aphorisms are a good way to think about this topic?
I agree we shouldn't undersell or underestimate the complexity involved, but when LLM's start contributing significant ideas to scientists and mathematicians, its time to recognize that whatever tricks are used in biology (humans, octopuses, ...) may still be of interest and of value, but they no longer seem like the unique magical missing ingredients which were so long sought after.
From this point on its all about efficiencies:
modeling efficiency: how do we best fit the elephant, with bezier curves, rational polynomials, ...?
memory bandwidth training efficiency: when building coincidence statistics, say bigrams, is it really necessary to update the weights for all concepts? a co-occurence of 2 concepts should just increase the predicted probability for the just observed bigram and then decrease a global coefficient used to scale the predicted probabilities. I.e. observing a baobab tree + an elephant in the same image/sentence/... should not change the relative probabilities of observing french fries + milkshake versus bicycle + windmill. This indicates different architectures should be possible with much lower training costs, by only updating weights of the concepts observed in the last bigram.
ofc, and probably will never understand because of sheer complexity. It doesn't mean we can't replicate the output distribution through data. Probably when we do in efficient manners, the mechanisms (if they are efficient) will be learned too.
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