Reddit is awful. I used to absolutely love reddit in 2010, 2011. Back then, reddit was at a stage where it was just starting to be mainstream. Most of the people who had found reddit on their own or by word of mouth, and who had liked it, were cool and smart, so to speak. At the same time, reddit was becoming very popular and being seen more and more as a meme-ey social movement. As the importance of reddit became more apparent, it galvanized all those cool, smart people to work very hard to create excellent content and generally nurture the community. That was the key to the goodness of early reddit: a very high caliber subset of the user-base being driven to put tons of effort into content creation and community management — driven by the intoxicating idea that reddit was the next big thing more or less. I remember visiting a friend at UCSB in 2011, and everybody talking about reddit. One of his female roommates asked if I browsed reddit. It was just a very exciting thing back then. But now look at it.
So according to your logic, AI should be heavily controlled and regulated, and possibly banned? The effect of AI on society is much less predictable than GW and has much higher ceiling for how bad the outcome may be.
Edit: my mistake. Human or near human AI. But there are strong arguments for lower forms of AI.
Unlike greenhouse gasses, it matters a lot what type of 'AI' you mean. But until we reshape society to be ready for it, yes, it would probably be a very good idea to forbid or heavily regulate/limit the use of human-level or above general AI.
Freeman dyson, who is one of the smartest human beings ever to live, questions evolution and climate change. On climate change, I don’t think he opposes being proactive — he just disagrees about the completeness of the evidence. He also has an unconventional opinion about nuclear war: that it’s not a very big deal.
Freeman Dyson doesn't doubt climate change in the idiotic "CO2 doesn't lead to warming" sense, he just disputes projections around the impacts that AGW will have on humans and on civilization which is a very different thing.
A great example would be Linus Pauling, who later on in his career became a proponent of mega-doses of vitamin C as a cure for all sorts of stuff, including cancer. He remained obsessed with the idea in the face of repeated studies that have shown it's no better than a placebo (in fact mega-dosing may even increase your risk of some cancers).
History is full of really smart people believing some pretty stupid things, especially in areas outside of their area of expertise. We have a very one-dimensional view of intelligence that assumes that because someone is smart (or even a genius) in one way, or knowledgeable about one area, that this must automatically apply to every facet of intelligence or knowledge.
Smart people are still people, with all the same biases, preconceptions, ego and other human frailties.
For some reason some physicists in particular seem very prone to underestimating the complexity of other branches of science, and over-estimating the applicability of their ways of working to them, especially the biological sciences which are full of complex systems that often turn out to react in unexpected ways.
So we are supposed to dismiss dysons conclusions because he’s a genius? That is the most astounding contortion of logic I have ever seen. If you disagree with him, then go find out the logic he uses to justify his conclusions and discuss that.
Absolutely not. In fact I think Dyson is definitely worth listening to. Obviously I didn't explain myself clearly enough.
The point of my comment was that just because someone is a genius, does not automatically make them right. The fact that Linua Pauling was very wrong about vitamin C mega-dosing doesn't stop him from being one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and someone who was right about an awful lot of things.
While I am generally in favor of taking a very conservative approach to our impact on the ecosystems which we inhabit, you may want to reserve a little humility when saying things like:
> Sorry but you can't be one of the smartest human beings alive if you question settled science like evolution and climate change.
Climate change is not settled science. It's model building. It isn't really possible to set up experiments where you can control variables and test hypotheses (because there's only one Earth). In that respect, it shares more in common with economics than physics, chemistry, or biology. Everyone takes economists' projections with a grain of salt. Yet the complex inter-dependent ecologies that we call Earth are way more complex than the global economy. So maybe we should be a little more guarded in our statements about what we know about how climate works.
Why not? First of all, you are kind of forcing people to do one kind of thing in order to survive. Yes, it’s true that lots of people are not capable of advancing art or physics. But what is also true, and more important, is that most people dont want to do that stuff. Forcing everyone to be an “intellectual” for their survival would be downright dystopian. Second, it wouldn’t produce good results anyway. There would be a flood of bad and incorrect intellectual works. We would see problems arise similar to the ones we see now like the reproducibility crisis and the social justice double-think on campuses. When college becomes a right instead of an exclusive privilege for the intellectually gifted, it no longer serves the purpose of intellectual advancement.
>When college becomes a right instead of an exclusive privilege for the intellectually gifted, it no longer serves the purpose of intellectual advancement.
The amount of intelligence that constitutes gifted is an accident of history and economics. You can't divide people into those who can advance human knowledge and those who cannot, because everyone has some capability to do it. Presently there appears to be a "cut line" of competence that separates intellectuals from regular people, but that only exists because of economic forces that require us to limit the number of professional intellectuals. If budgets contracted the smart-ness of the average intellectual would rise as the lower performers were cut, and if budgets were expanded the smart-ness of the average intellectual would fall as hiring dug deeper into the baseline human population.
> is that most people dont want to do that stuff. Forcing everyone to be an “intellectual” for their survival would be downright dystopian
That wouldn’t be too different from the system today :(
It would be a different set of people, sure. But it would actually be a net positive if this subset is smaller than the current subset (of people who don’t want to do x). I’d expect the number of people who are able to find their niche in arts, science, philosophy,etc would be quite large.
It doesn't matter if you're drinking the "optimal" amount of minerals, distilled water has none so it leeches those minerals out of your body as you drink it. Drinking distilled water leaves you with less calcium and iron and etc than you had before you drank it.
So, you think I should be drinking water pumped out of the ground in Silicon Valley? First of all, the amount of naturally occurring mercury is very high. (The Almaden Quicksilver mine was the largest cinnabar strike west of the Mississippi, if not largest in North America.) Then there is 50 years of semiconductor fabrication. I'll take my chances with distilled, thanks.
... do you know what distilled water is? It's very different from filtered or reverse osmosis water. You can get filtered water in a water bottle that's not distilled water. Dasani, Fiji, Aquafina, Smart, etc... that's filtered water. Distilled water is really really bad to drink. It's acidic, has zero minerals, and has no electrolytes so it will not hydrate you.
Got a source for "really bad"? Because that would conflict with the above link. I stand by my comment above: distilled water, passed through a carbon-filter post-distilation, seems like a better bet than drinking water the city pumps out of the ground in Sili Valley.
>distilled water seems like a better bet than drinking ground water
Those are not the only two options. There is a third option that exists, it's called purified water and it leaves the important minerals and salts in the water. Water can be purified without being distilled, and even your own source says distilled water will leach chemicals from the plastic container into the water. Distilled water is what you put into a car's radiator or a home humidifier, not into your body.
Files in the Linux ecosystem are a mess. Files scattered everywhere and each instance of Linux uses some different arbitrary directory scheme. We really need a reboot. New micro kernel based OS with clear directory logic and dedicated directories for applications to keep stuff.
Files everywhere are a mess. Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, HP-UX, VMS, CP/CMS. Every corporate network share I’ve ever seen has been a dumpster fire.
There are actually consultants who advise organisations on cleaning up their file systems.
Vice is completely biased and it makes me happy to imagine snarky vice people being laid off. I hope that these layoffs are a sign that the clickbait model of journalism is failing. I would gladly pay for my news if it werent biased. But I haven’t found a news firm that is free of bias, not even the economist is.
What is the correct terminology for the binary blob that is a result of training? Is that resultant blob called “the algorithm?” I see people use the word algorithm to describe the training and the actual result of the training. I think the most appropriate term for the resultant blob is “agent” or something like that.
this website is supposed to benefit American military academics and by extension the interests of the United States. But posting these lessons and insights publicly advances all nations equally, including our enemies. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep all this stuff within the US military?
Some armchair philosophy (I have absolutely no valid credentials to justify the following points, but might be interesting to consider):
Similar could be said about allowing the free press to report on the government's deficiencies (Presidential scandals, bureaucratic mistakes, internal strife, Snowden, etc.)
One of the founding principles of a liberal democracy is that freedom to access information enables far more people to make far more attempts to innovate and invent new strategies/tactics/products that can help defeat the status quo. Even though your enemies may be able to access that information, the information is useless without brilliant minds capable of interpreting it and acting upon it. Hence the important role of public education / immigration within a democracy, ensuring that your citizens are the ones who e.g. come up with nuclear weapons before anyone else does.
The mistake you are making here is the same that North Korea makes when it allocates a majority of its budget to military operations. Sure, you can acquire shitty second hand tanks and submarines and guns, but the real winners - the quick thinkers, commanders, tacticians, improvisionists (all of whom are just as needed on the field as in the war rooms) - can only end up at your service if you build a society that provides prosperous education opportunities and also takes care of all basic needs to enable citizens to focus on their education. It is with this system that you can end up with great soldiers, great generals, and great supplying organizations (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, etc.) all under one flag.
That's been standard policy for some twenty four centuries now, as laid down in Pericles' Funeral Oration by Thucydides:
"Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him."
