Thank you for the epistemic humility here. It's a breath of fresh air amongst the polarized declarations we seem to have upregulated amongst ourselves for whatever reason these days.
The problem of the polarized camps is that actually they're only on the surface opposite; in reality, they can perfectly cohexist: AI can enable major technological breakthroughs - but that doesn't exclude that can bring doom at the same time.
Surprisingly, there are combinatorial systems with just a single combinator[0]. Also, NAND along with a single axiom[0] can reproduce all of propositional calculus. By Curry-Howard-Labek, these are related facts and suggest that a universal tree likely exists in the tree calculus.
Thanks for the Niven reference. Neutron Star was a fun read. I'm currently working through a collection of 80s SF shorts[0]. It's an entertaining lens into the narratives mores of the time, and or own in contrast.
Your call for clarity has merit, but I think you have backed yourself into a corner, honestly.
In 1900, there was no evidence of the kind you seek that lighter-than-air flight was possible. Good thing some people were foolish enough to ignore you then. Why you would cordon yourself off from the kind of reasoning that predicts legitimately new things, rather than just scaled up versions of the present?
Not to put too fine a point on it, every example you give is based in concrete evidence, some try to think through the implications farther than others, resulting in larger or smaller error bars around the conclusions.
Let me back up though. Maybe in the collaborative human effort here, we are better off having very concrete thinkers, like you seem to be, along with abstract thinkers like the "divorced-from-reality" Rationalists. Personally, I wish we had a stronger culture of collaboration and assuming good-faith and competence in our peers. In my experience, blanket dismissals are very rarely grounded in reality and mostly grounded in fears.
Heavier-than-air aircraft, yes. It is instructive to read actual contemporary arguments. Flighted birds seem to be limited in size well below human loading capacity; Helmholtz power-to-weight ratio calculations suggest that vultures are at about the size limit; birds are all muscle with very little relative carrying capacity; bird reflexes vastly outpace the reaction times available to a human operator; etc.
Please show us actual evidence from 1900 or earlier that human flight will be practical or even possible.
Birds are neither real evidence nor real at all[1].
There is also a large incentive for OpenAI to fold user conversations into the training process. Proving this happened is unduly hard, and given that professionals are using frontier LLMs for daily work, such training would make it easier for labs to scoop said professionals.
I have seen private correspondence between one mathematician working on Navier-Stokes and OpenAI that makes it sound like OpenAI deliberately scooped this Navier-Stokes result. The alleged correspondence also contained veiled threats if said mathematician went public.
What about oats and an assortment of nuts? These go pretty well with cold milk or hot water alike, and you can flavor any which way if desired. Or are oats in the US also "fortified" with sugar?
I like to buy raw pecans in bulk from Costco for cheap, lightly roast the nuts in the air fryer for several minutes, and then chop them and add them into the oats. Great delicate flavors and aromas that can't be replicated with shelf-stable ingredients. Maybe add a tiny bit of butter and some cinnamon. So good
Actually that's what I usually eat. But its a bit more work than opening a box and pouring out the contents.
I really just want to check the "morning nutrients" box without having to do a lot of bother, its something I really don't want to care about or pay attention to. I just want a very fast, convienient breakfast without added sugar and that's not available in a lot of stores, which is crazy.
I buy bob’s red mill muesli and eat it with milk. I don’t soak it or anything like that. I call it “horse food” but it is fast, nutritious, and satisfies the “breakfast cereal” craving.
From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be. IMHO, this should be read as a campaign to improve and add precision to a political narrative more than an indictment of existing statistics.
In particular, the BLS in the US reports 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, each measuring something slightly different. LISEP adds another to the bunch; this is their operationalization:
> LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in January 2020 dollars.
The white paper gives their rationale for the $20,000 cutoff. The "true" name here is marketing, which might honestly be the right play here. My gut says that we already have better statistics than TRU but they smell dry and academic. I would be interested to hear more about their political strategy and philosophy.
> From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be.
But their own defined measure shows the opposite. The first graph on their website shows that their True Rate is currently at its lowest level over the past 30 years.
The point is that it's still high and stagnating. And the living wage calculation is using a CPI adjusted fixed level, so inflation that's heavy on critical sectors for lower income people (housing, fuel, groceries) will show up less than the real damage it's causing.
They set it up this way because TRU is a conservative measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.
Agree. Add to that that usually those ideological metrics have some telling blindspots.
In the case of their white paper, while being very thorough in defining which workers should be deducted from the workforce bucket, they have no adjustment towards when someone should be eligible for this triage in the first place.
Students for example.
Who studies out of virtue, and who just because the job market is still closed off to him?
Specifically urban governments used this statistical trick to downplay youth-unemployment for decades while also benefiting themselves with providing employment for their political base. Funnily though, these social-worker-slash-educator jobs are often themselves not viable enough to make it into the „true“ workforce bucket
It's because most real numbers are uncomputable. That means, most of the time, the only way to check that two numbers (i.e. names) are the same is to spend infinite time looking at all their infinite digits.
This is interesting. You're gesturing at the idea that individual security practices can be at odds with those needed for group security. I'll be pondering on this.
Yep. If a security team sees 96% of credit card fraud is coming from users on Tor they are more likely to just block Tor than they are to try to figure out how to safely let the other 4% keep using it.
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