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Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
However I think that the comment is relevant, and you can see from the replies gathered before it was flagged that it did spark a relevant discussion.
Reminding that the speaker is a spiritual leader and not an authority on the use of technology is not a sneer and and not an ideological statement. In any context other than religion, which I understand is sensitive, a statement of that sort would be considered a contribution to the discussion, not an ideological battle. And that's precisely the problem - censoring a discussion about the relevance of religion to the matter is the ideological act.
Edit: it looks like I was wrong about this and Sam Altman has no formal qualifications. I still think he has probably picked up a lot of life experience over the years.
It's always possible (is in fact likely), that we have many (metaphorical) people who peer through (metaphorical) telescopes, but lack a (metaphorical) theory of gravity, preventing them from even considering the existence of (metaphorical) dark matter.
Imagine looking at a point in the night sky and say you want to check if there is a start at that point. You look at the most powerful telescope that we have, and yet you see no star.
Is that a non-strong evidence, as you put it, that there is no star at that point? I think not. There is no evidence one way or other. That is it.
But the scientific community of today is like "We have looked with the most powerful telescopes that we have, and yet there is no star, so it seems that there is really no star there".
This is ABSURD.
Because "most powerful telescope we have today" is an arbitrary claim. There is always the chance that the "Most powerful" is just not good enough for the task at hand. But the "scientists" (as well as the business that wants this proof badly to sell their products) don't like to admit it.
And that chance is not 100%, and so any given strength of telescope is in fact excluding some of the hypothesis space. That is the definition of evidence.
Every time I point a telescope that would be able to detect a star of a given brightness and distance somewhere, and it fails to see a star, that limits the remaining space for people who believe in stars to make claims about what stars can be, until they're finally at the point where they can only make the most esoteric claims about “stars” that have no observable effects on the world, at which there's no point even including “stars” in your physics model.
I'm at that point with respect to god: every concrete claim has either been disproven, or isn't actually a claim about the observable world, at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.
Not really, because in this case the "hypothesis space" is infinite, so your experiment exhausting some finite amount of space is not adding anything to the evidence.
So the point is when this "hypothesis space" is infinite or extremely large, if the best experiments that we can do right now can only explore a tiny fraction of that, then it is ABSURD to claim evidence of absence just because "We put our gold standard test and still didn't find anything".
>at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.
It is possible that this "thing" only interact with our world via events that we observe as truly random. Then you wouldn't go ahead and say random events have no impact on anything, will you?
What else is there?
Man is just an animal.
Has anyone actually directly encountered a single vatican sponsored charity or program in the wild? It seems quite a morally bankrupt organisation to me, and i’m not sure what if anything it really has to do with Christianity or Christians anyore.
Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.
Hm. In germany Catholic day care is funded by the state ie taxes by over 90%. Military chaplains 100%. Would be surprised if the difference is bigger in schools and hospitals. I heard that in France there is an actual separation of church and state and as a result the church is rather poor.
In the rest of the world the church is poorer but is still a leading provider of education and healthcare, especially in poor countries.
Hey, so does Peter Thiel!