ace
2yr ago
Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists.
Yea, you're way off. I haven't done a poll or anything, but the general sense I get is atheism is overwhelmingly popular among people who consider themselves "rationalists". The exceptions are notable and eye-catching.
I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist.
Atheism-vs-theism is a set of beliefs (of varying confidences) about the way the world is actually is. A "good rationalist" would update their beliefs on the evidence to which they have access and try to minimize the influence of their personality categorization.
ace
2yr ago
low-probability really horrible things---tyrannical government
Yes, this is the standard conservative argument -- private ownership of guns is a check against government tyranny, and this is the original reasoning behind the second amendment. But conservatives would take issue with characterizing this as "low-probability". A common thread through modern history is governments turning against their citizens, and a goodly fraction of the world is currently suffering under totalitarian dictatorships.
The government is the last entity you'd want enforcing gun control or deciding who can legally carry. And no other entity has the power.
I've jannied plenty of mod comments, including plenty of yours, Amadan. At some point in the future, it's possible there will be a bad mod, but today it feels like a waste of my time to mod the people holding the Motte together. Maybe the solution is ignoring reports by users who abuse the reporting mechanism? (As measured by those reported comments subsequently being jannied as good comments)
ace
2yr ago
No discussion about fishing would be complete without a fish's perspective of course,
Did you originate this turn of phrase? It's brilliant.
ace
2yr ago
Are you sure that partitioning people along culture war fault lines is the primary function of churches? The culture wars breaking out over religious lines is a pretty recent (~50 years) development.
ace
2yr ago
Whether AIs "really think" wasn't really the topic under discussion. Dijkstra compared that question to whether submarines swim, and I'm content with his answer.
I was more referring to the fact that while ChatGPT can do some cute stuff, it's not commercially relevant for any application that can't tolerate a 3% fly-off-the-rails rate, and increasing the model size won't address the architectural limitations.
ace
2yr ago
It's telling that we'd have to tack on a calculator module to get ChatGPT to be able to do arithmetic reliably. There are probably a lot more less well-defined tasks, no more complicated than arithmetic, that ChatGPT can't do on its own, but the arithmetic is just the most glaring to see when it gets wrong.
My certainty is more of a gut feeling informed by Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and the connection between strange loops and cognition. You're of course right that if you can predict the next word in a sequence well enough, you can do any intellectual task, including human cognition. But "well enough" can be a stand-in for arbitrary amounts of computation, and the transformer models don't do the necessary work. In particular, they're not reasoning about their reasoning faculties, which I believe is a key component to any general intelligence. And more parameters isn't going to get us there. We're at least one more big theoretical breakthrough away from useful machines that reason.
ChatGPT's words are not even close to equivalent to a human's words. You have peek under the hood a little bit to understand why. ChatGPT is a prediction engine that predicts the next word in a sequence (as would be typical in its training corpus), and then applies that capability over and over again. ChatGPT has zero capability to abstract and apply its reasoning to its own thought process. ChatGPT can't wait and think about a question for a while before it starts answering.
The LLMs will continue to get better as researchers throw more parameters at the problem, but this avenue is ultimately a dead end for pursing general intelligence. ChatGPT is a neat parlor trick, but it can only make impressive-looking tech demos so long as the context is kept very narrow. Play around with it a little, and the cracks start to show.
All this is not to detract from your main thesis. Artificial general intelligence is still coming for lots of jobs at some unknown point in the future, but don't confuse ChatGPT with the herald of the jobs-apocalypse.
ace
2yr ago
ace
2yr ago
I also don't remember the name of the article, or where I saw it, but it was about how most newspaper articles get written. That there is a marketing agency or PR firm behind so much of the news that we see.
I don't know where you heard it, but Paul Graham's essay on submarine advertising is considered a classic.
ace
2yr ago
I run yt-dlp periodically on a cron job, then a python script collates the videos into an rss feed, and copies the videos and rss to a webserver, where a podcast app that supports videos can download it. (I use Downcast.)
The user experience from this is dramatically better than the default.
ace
2yr ago
Blue tribers seem to think the world revolves around them, and if they can't eat absolutely every food item at a pot luck, nobody should.
"Blue Tribe" is a huge swath of people, and this sweeping generalization doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority who are psychologically healthy. This statement has got to violate several site rules around being kind, being no more antagonistic than necessary, not weakmaning to show how bad a group is, and there's no evidence cited for an inflammatory claim.
ace
2yr ago
Yes, advocating violence is still prohibited.
Maybe this rule has more nuance? If I wrote something to the effect of: "Murderers should be arrested, even if they resist arrest.", I am advocating violence, but I don't think I'd be scolded on this forum for that expression.
ace
2yr ago
If you pose a hypothetical about the vaccine killing 25% of the vaccinated, you can't then use your hypothetical evidence to dunk on people for falling for a "psy-op".
It's plausible that the vaccine kills and maims some number of people, but reduces number of people killed and maimed by a larger number. Then it's rational to take the vaccine. But people weren't even working on that much information at the time, and it's a much harder problem.
ace
2yr ago
There's been no (serious) calls for justice for creating the virus, so my guess is nothing.
ace
2yr ago
It's fine if you want to argue against women's suffrage, but you should bring arguments in proportion to how far outside of the current Overton Window it is.
ace
2yr ago
I'm not a great cook, but it's not a difficult dish. Wash and slice some potatoes. Heat a pot or pan of oil until it's hot. I'm not exactly sure how hot, probably around 150-175C. (It should be hot enough that if you drop one fry in, the fry should immediately bubble and float. But if the oil smokes, that's too hot. I've never actually measured the temperature, but you get a feel for it if you do it a couple times.) Drop your fries in the oil. The oil doesn't necessarily have to cover the top of the fries, but you need to stir so that everything gets cooked evenly. Cook about 4-ish minutes, or until it's your desired level of crispiness. The time will depend on the temperature of the oil and the thickness of your potatoes. Then take the fries out and let the oil drain off of them. Add toppings to taste.
You get a choice of the oil you use. You can't use olive oil because the smoke point is too low for good frying, but I like grapeseed oil because it has a neutral flavor. My above suggestion is to use the grease which is leftover from cooking pork. I also sometimes mix grapeseed oil and pork grease if I don't have enough grease, but it tastes better the higher the proportion of grease in the mix.
ace
2yr ago
Whenever I fry pork belly, the leftover pork grease goes to making fries, and it's as good as or better than any restaurant fries I've ever had.
ace
2yr ago
If the pan is hot enough to say, sear meat, is that an issue?
Even if the chemical itself is stable (which AIUI is the root of the problem), is there a problem of the chemical leeching into the food?
ace
2yr ago
With 3M phasing out production of PFAS (Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl Substances) in the news, I'm reading a flurry of news about how these substances are found in human blood, break down slowly--if at all, and are linked to cancer, hormone disregulation, and immune disorders.
My question is: is this a health threat I should be worried about to the point that I should be replacing my Teflon cooking pans?
ace
2yr ago
I thought the same thing. It's just not that good of a comeback, and right in line with what I'd expect from someone on the spectrum.
A straight reading of the tweet is that Greta is saying she herself has a small penis. I think a lot more people would read it that way if the roles were reversed. If Andrew Tate said his email address was "smalldickenergy@getalife.com", there would be no end to the mockery.
ace
2yr ago
This is a cheap shot at China. It's of course possible to research corona viruses without doing gain of function research.
ace
2yr ago
Are you referring to Rebecca Mark, who was a CEO of a wholly-owned subsidiary of Enron? And in what way was she feted? You're not making your argument, and this is a bad comment. At most, women made up 1 out of 4 of the key scumbags of that operation, and the fraction drops lower if you look at people outside the top executives.
Yes, there's an inverse correlation between age and religiosity. You're implicitly pushing the idea that people become more religious over time. But the poll you quote is a snapshot of a particular moment in time. I submit to evidence more polling from the same organization that suggests that since the early 2000s, Americans in general are becoming less religious, and at quite a steady rate [1].
The alternative hypothesis is that ever since there was widespread penetration of Internet access, young people could easily research better explanations than "God did it". And that younger generations are less religious than ever and will stay so over their lifetime, because that's the best explanation for the available evidence.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/11/Detailed-tables-for-upload-11.11.19.pdf
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