PokerPirate
9d ago
Several wartime militaries have included large percentages of females. The obvious example is the Soviets in WWII, but the Chinese, Israelis, and many other modern-ish armies have fielded large percentages of female soldiers. In no case have any of these armies treated women as "fully equal" to men in combat, but neither does the US military.
I suspect that a look at the population graphs for these countries would support your thesis, but it seems disingenuous to talk negatively about women in the military without referencing these concrete examples and actually testing your thesis against data.
PokerPirate
11d ago
Thanks for replying, and sorry if I sounded hostile. I enjoy your posts :)
PokerPirate
11d ago
sûre
I could tolerate your accents on thé as a weird quirk, but now I have to ask: are all of these extra glyphs typos? do they have meaning to you? is it an experiment to see how long mottizens will go without mentioning it?
PokerPirate
19d ago
I basically learned Spanish by reading Harry Potter this way. I then tried to use Harry Potter to learn Korean (after >2000hr learning the language in other ways), and I totally failed. I took me more than an hour of looking up grammar points in the dictionary to make it through the first page. This was my sign that learning Korean was too much for me and so I decided to give up that dream :(
I've got the books in Attic Greek and Latin, and I'm toying with the idea of reading them in those languages, but maybe I should just re-read in Spanish.
PokerPirate
22d ago
This seems like a much better prompt for a philosopher.
My answer fits in a paragraph: I work with a lot of undergrad philosophy (and other humanities) majors at a top-5 liberal arts college known for humanities. Without exception, they suck using AI. They all think it is magical pixie dusk that can be waved on any problem to solve it. Philosophy professors aren't any better. A number of phil profs have commented to me about the decline in student quality due to students using AI as a crutch for their writing assignments, but it's not clear to me how much this is AI vs the secular trend of more sucky students vs just old professors being crotchety.
Okay, I lied, here's another paragraph: For philosophers to actually be able to make use of AI, or to provide insights into how humans work based on metaphors from AI, they need to understand the basics of computability. Scott Aaronson made a valiant attempt getting philosophers to recognize computability problems with his papers NP-Complete problems and physical reality and Why philosophers should care about computational complexity, but AFAIK the only people who have read these papers are computer scientists with a passing interest in philosophy. I have tried to start conversations on this topic with about 20 philosophers (both continental and analytic) and their eyes all instantly glaze over.
Damn it, I'm writing a 3rd paragraph. Way back in grad school (~10 years ago) I took a bunch of philosophy grad classes because I was interested in the problem of "what made people different from computers/AI". The most interesting result of this was me writing a paper What if Aristotle had been a Robot? that (roughly) tries to show how a robot could implement a virtue ethics system as an optimization problem (which is normally how people think of consequentialism). It's basically a badly written less-wrong article, and exactly 0 academics are interested in anything like this because it won't get you tenure because existing philosophers don't recognize it as philosophy.
Okay, fine, here's a 4th paragraph conclusion: There's been enough interesting stuff for the past 50 years in AI research for philosophers to get excited about, and they haven't. So I predict the LLM trend will not change anything.
Damn it again, here's a 5th paragraph: I'm just remembering my philosopher friend at a different university who has made the prediction that as writing "gets cheaper", more writing will be expected, and so tenure in the philosophy world will require much more output. This push for quantity will drive quality down, make tenure much harder to get, and make philosophers even more siloed/specialized than they already are. I agree with all this, but I think it applies across the board in all of academia, and these trends have been going on for so long that I don't think they can be attributed more than like 20% to AI.
There you go. You tricked me into an effort-ish post :)
PokerPirate
23d ago
This is just obviously false. There are tons of Catholic schools. If that's not "enclave" enough for you, there are tons of Amish schools as well. You probably haven't heard of the Bruderhof communities (they're basically Amish without the name recognition), but they run this school which I've been to (not as a student): https://www.mountacademy.org/. I can attest that their lives are as enclave as you could possibly get and that they are doing just fine.
PokerPirate
23d ago
TED talks on Sundays
Haha... this is the best description of an evangelical church service I've ever heard. Did you make this up just now or is this a meme floating around Catholic circles that I haven't heard before?
PokerPirate
23d ago
We get pretty regular effort posts about AI research around here. If there's something specific that you'd like that's not been covered then I'll consider it.
Maybe something we could do is a series that's a little bit more structured about specific careers people are in around here. Something like the user focus series that people were doing a while back. A structured set of questions might be less intimidating to get started on and might help people write about things this community would actually find interesting... maybe I'll start thinking about what those questions could look like at least for myself.
You're too humble... or more likely probably too much of an expert to realize how little all of us know about the process... c.f. https://xkcd.com/2501/.
I have a couple of undergrad students who want to be "AI patent lawyers". That seems like an obviously farcial job to me and not something anyone should aspire to (for many reassons, but the simplest is because as an AI-researcher patents have not affected any of the work I do and I don't see how patents will ever have a material effect on anything remotely related to AI). I would love it if your effort post could either change my mind or was a resource I could point them to explain why they career choice is stupid.
Two exceptionally reasonable decisions that give me confidence that the justice system works like it should.
I hope John had to pay the court+Frank a shitload of money for wasting their time and being a shitty neighbor.
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