btilly

It's clear that you're discussing this from an ideological bias that I do not share.

I see no reason to engage further in your assertions about what content is worthwhile.

If this does not fit your personal experience, then I have no percentage in trying to convince you.

It does fit the personal experiences of a wide variety of people that I've talked to about it. Including therapists who are having to deal with the fallout within families of these dynamics.

If you wait a few years, I'm sure that peer reviewed research will catch up with the current social phenomena. But by then there will be some other fairly new social phenomena where common experience is ahead of the research.

The AI is available when humans aren't. We should not reduce how much we talk to humans. But we should not avoid using AI where it makes sense.

As for why optimize, we should each decide what we care about, then optimize for that. I have personal reasons why I want to be a better speaker. Why I want to be able to stand in front of people, and have them connect with things that I care about. So it likely makes more sense for me to optimize building that skill, than for most.

You probably want to optimize on something else.

If that is what you think of Derek, then you really don't understand Derek.

The video that I linked to is over an hour on why new technologies never transform education. He has a number of videos that critique what capitalism has lead big industries to. For example he has one on Monsanto's war on farming, another on how forever chemicals are poisoning us, and a third on how short-sightedness on protecting the health of rubber trees could be an existential threat to civilization.

Your model of him says that he should have done none of those things. The fact that he did is strong evidence that you've got a cardboard cutout that you're using as a strawman. Because it's a convenient punching bag. And not because it matches a real human very well.

Not everyone did. But many now talk less. Why?

AI psychosis is real.

People who talk to LLMs too much, get used to them sucking up. Real humans feel jarring after that. (Just like people who get used to being in echo chambers, stop wanting to interact outside of those echo chambers.)

After someone has an answer from an LLM, often that replaces reasons we would have talked to others. (See the OP for examples.)

Odd. I never had any friends, families, or coworkers who were willing to be available for a dozen rough drafts. I've only had ones who were willing to talk during the idea stage, or after it was closer to a final speech.

For me, AI gives me feedback at places that I wouldn't have received it before. It does not replace the human feedback that I still look for.

The problem is that professors say "learn to think critically", then actually just want the students to learn to sound like them, and agree with them. Actual critical thought has been on the decline for some time.

This is especially true in the humanities and the social sciences. Where truth is hard to ascertain, and therefore it is easier to substitute political correctness for critical thought.

I am reminded of Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning (original video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70) from a year ago.

"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."

AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.

Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.

So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.

When we are put into a catch-22 situation, we should not expect sympathy from the ones who created the catch-22 situation.

Three more factors matter a lot, and get missed.

The first is corruption. When the Iron Curtain fell, every country behind it suffered from corruption. The Russian word for how it worked was блат, pronounced blat. When the official way of doing things doesn't work, the way that works is informal favor trading. I have a friend, who knows a friend, etc. This acts as grit in the economic system, and makes everyone less productive.

The second was the pressure to not stand out too much. One proverb is Инициатива наказуема, pronounced initsiativa nakazuema. It translates to, "Initiative is punishable."

Why? Well, imagine that you're a middle manager. It's a dog eat dog world. You know that everyone below you, wants your job. Everyone above you, knows that you want their job. You got your role by sucking up to the people above you. Those below you, got theirs by sucking up to you. You don't want your employees to be utterly incompetent - then you won't be able to look good. But you also don't want any of them to shine - then your boss might think that they should have your job. This encourages bland mediocracy. Everyone strives to be just good enough for their job, while sucking up well enough to keep it.

The result is a kind of learned incompetence. But a nation filled with this kind of incompetence, will be unable to sustain innovation.

The third is alcoholism. Russia is basically a very large, very dysfunctional, alcoholic family. It is hard to overstate how true that is. The most popular vodka at the end of the Soviet era came in 750 ml bottles, that did not have a resealable cap. Because no true Russian would leave a bottle half-full. Anyone who didn't drink, was odd. A group that got together without drinking might be suspected of plotting revolution. This is yet another drag on Russian society.

Polymerization is a slower exothermic action than combustion. So if we have to choose between them, that's the one.

Solids generally take less volume than liquids. Water is very unusual in this regard

It is also a slower exothermic reaction. Which makes it possibly manageable.

They are having valve problems. One of the possible reasons is that it may be turning into a solid plastic.

If so, that could be one of the best outcomes. As long as it does not blow up before the process completes.

You can make the best product, or hire the best lawyers. If you've slipped on product quality relative to the competition, the lawyer option starts to look really good.

The problem with that is that there are certain kinds of users that like to take control of community projects. And then they take control of more, and bigger ones.

There are a lot of political tricks that get used.

What is scary is that one of those kinds of users are malicious state actors. Like North Korea and Russia...

ELO is shockingly easy to manipulate. For example there was a literal jail with a decent chess player in it. He created a pool of players who got great ELOs by beating him, then used them to boost his rating higher. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

Given any manipulatable scheme, AI will figure out how to manipulate it. For the OP, what happens if a single AI manages to get through to contributor? Then it starts elevating other AIs to contributor, and we're off again. There doesn't have to be a purpose to this. Trolls will troll, and trolls armed with AI bots can devote endless energy to doing so. The more you work to keep them out, the more fun it becomes for them.

I wish I had an answer for that problem. But I don't.

My first ever paper was a pretty good entry at this. https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/66... 16 lemmas, one theorem. The theorem makes all of the lemmas obvious. Though, in retrospect, I should have separated out the characteristic 0 case into a second theorem.

But the fact that most lemmas are like this, does not mean that all are. Whether we call it a lemma, or something else, the more important ideas are the ones that result in thinking differently. And something like Zorn's lemma, makes us think differently.

I am curious why the killers didn't eat more. Is this just the choicest bits - another pup is easy to find?

I completely agree. Lemmas are simple, obvious, and yet they completely change how you think.

How many proofs cite the Axiom of Choice? How many cite Zorn's Lemma? Which is more important, the axiom that we're relying on, or the restatement of the axiom that allows us to actually prove things?

It is not just mathematics that values simple and obvious ideas that change how you think. We all should value that. Like Stein's Law, "Things that can't go on forever, don't." And Davies' Corollary, "Things that can't go on forever, can go on longer than you think they can."

Yes, it is valuable to have more than zero information.

But often we don't have the information that we wish. Even more often, the information that we have leads us to a story, that severely misleads us. Reminding ourselves of the zero information version of the story, can be an antidote to being mislead that way.

Therefore it is valuable to know how to make the most out of zero information. And if we have information, to think about exactly why it leads to a different conclusion.

You speak about laundering ignorance into precise-seeming mathematics as if it was a bad thing.

But that's the entire idea of Bayesian reasoning. Which has proven to be surprisingly effective in a wide range of domains.

I'm all for quantifying my ignorance, and using it as an outside view to help guide my expectations. Read the book Superforecasting to understand how effective forecasters use an outside view to adjust their inside view, to allow them to forecast things more precisely.

The analysis in the article explains why it applies to any phenomena that we might be able to notice.

The argument given is the same as the one that I first ran across, not by that name, in https://www.nature.com/articles/363315a0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument claims that it was a rediscovery of something that was hypothesized a decade article.

I hadn't tried to give it a name, or thought to apply it outside of that context.

As for the mathematical qualms, I'm a big believer in not letting formal mathematical technicalities get in the way of adopting an effective heuristic. And the heuristic reasoning here is compelling enough that I would like to adopt it.

Lindy’s Law is an absolute gem, that I'm keeping.

If we don't understand the fundamental limits to any particular kind of trend, our default assumption should be that it will continue for about as long as it has gone on already.

We can, in fact, easily put a confidence interval on this. With 90% odds we're not in the first 5% of the trend, or the last 5% of the trend. Therefore it will probably go on between 1/19th longer, and 19 times longer. With a median of as long as it has gone on so far.

This is deeply counterintuitive. When we expect something to last a finite time, every year it goes on, brings us a year closer to when it stops. But every year that it goes on properly brings the expectation that it will go on for a year longer still.

We're looking at a trend. We believe that it will be finite. Our intuition for that is that every year spent, is a year closer to the end. But our expectation becomes that every year spent, means that it will last yet another year more!

How can we apply that? A simple way is stocks. How long should we expect a rapidly growing company, to continue growing rapidly?

Hanlon's Razor applies here. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Pretty much anyone can get onto the free tier for Cloudflare. The fact that someone is, doesn't mean that there is a business relationship with Cloudflare. There isn't.

In order to make this business model work, Cloudflare does essentially no due diligence. Getting onto the free tier before you need it, is cheap. And then if you really need them, you have every reason to start paying.

Ideally you'd hope that they would allow third party takedowns. But the ability to do third party takedowns provides a target for the exact attackers that their business is trying to protect against. They wouldn't have a business if they made that a viable target!

But the result of these business decisions, made for their main customer acquisition flow, makes them a tempting place to host malicious content, as well as good. Black hats make a sport out of taking each other out. And so have every reason to use Cloudflare.

Still doesn't indicate a relationship between Cloudflare and the bad actors who are taking advantage of the setup.

Once people have gotten used to not having to conform, forcing them to conform is an uphill battle. Doubly so when, as happened with Microsoft and IE, the vendors would like to encourage vendor lock-in. The only time to reasonably do it is at the start.

That said, we are paying a huge complexity cost due to our efforts to allow nonconforming pages. This complexity is widely abused by malicious actors. See, for instance, https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/XSS_Filter_Ev... for ways in which attackers try to bypass security filters. A lot of it is only possible because of this unnecessary complexity.

Opinions vary on how good an idea the robustness principle is. That is why, for example, the XML standard requires a conforming validator to throw an error on invalid XML.

In our modern world, the robustness principle has become an invitation to security bugs, and vendor lock-in. Edge cases snuck through one system on robustness, then trigger unfortunate behavior when they hit a different system. Two systems tried to do something reasonable on an ambiguous case, but did it differently, leading to software that works on one, failing to work on the other.

The odds of random porn purchases being reversed are very different than the odds of random porn purchases by 14 year olds getting reversed.

Source, I have a number of friends who worked on the web side of online porn a long time ago.

Yes. There is a reason why a family of languages is known as Indo-European.

For something completely different, try learning Mandarin.

People were wrong.

We pay money online mostly through credit cards. Credit card transactions can be reversed. If children spend money on porn, those payments are likely to be reversed. This is really bad for the ability of the porn sites to continue receiving credit card payments, and continue making money.

An age header is a trivial step that can reduce the odds of the adult site receiving payments that later get reversed. Win, win.

But if someone is willing and able to pay, then the adult industry wants the choice of whether to access content to be up to them. If government tries to regulate them, they'll engage in malicious compliance - do the minimum to not be sued, in a way that they can still reach customers.

For example Utah tried to institute age verification. The porn industry blocked all IP addresses from Utah. Business boomed for VPN companies in Utah. Everyone, including porn companies, knows that a lot of that is for porn. But if you show up with a Nevada IP address, the porn's position is, "You're in Nevada. Utah law doesn't apply." Even if the credit card has a Utah zip code.

If you live in Utah, and you're able to purchase a VPN, the porn companies want your money.