fluoridation

>how silence would be used during an interrogation

No, not really. If anything that makes it more ambiguous, since I can imagine several different ways for silence to be used in such a scenario.

>or by the main character of an action movie

An action hero asserts dominance not by silence, but by physicality.

>Silence used to be a very popular choice by previous generations of extroverts and it wasn't "relaxing".

Was it? How do you know? Why aren't you giving those examples instead of these ones?

>The very first thing I mention: self-consistency.

So if I consistently tell you that that lithium atoms are heavier than carbon atoms, that would make it more likely to be true?

>QM scientists reading QM papers and experiment reports of other people, and talking with each other, are still relying on self-consistency to sniff their own (or other people's) mistakes.

Physicists don't need self-consistency. They can test consistency against reality itself. That's not self-consistency, that's just plain old empiricism.

No, it doesn't necessarily need to be applicable, it just needs to be testable. The size of the Earth for example may not affect you directly in any way, but it's something you can verify to some degree of precision. But if you just read about it, can you really say that you know it? What if all you believe about the size and shape of the Earth is from what you've asked an LLM? Do you still know it?

EDIT: Perhaps not the best example, because the size and shape of the Earth are data that are repeated often enough that an LLM would be unlikely to quote it grossly incorrectly, but I think my point still comes across.

>how do we even agree on what the boundaries of biology vs other domains of science are without participants agreeing on the rules?

Those boundaries are completely imaginary and don't exist in reality. In reality there's no biology, there's only elementary particles interacting physically. Whether you agree with someone else to classify a phenomenon as biological or chemical, you're not refining your knowledge of the real world, you're just performing an organizational task.

But, say, how many times the tympanic ear evolved independently is a real phenomenon that can be investigated, and it's something that you're either correct, incorrect, or ignorant about. If I tell you it evolved five times, what more can either of us gleam about the real facts by just discussing this factoid back and forth, if neither of us has access to any additional knowledge or way to put this datum to the test?

It's not the same thing. A language is a closed system, it just requires that the participants agree on the rules in order to be successful. Biology is not a language, it's a field of study of phenomena that exist independently of minds. If you read a biology textbook (or an LLM's output about biology) and then relate to someone else what you've read, you and the other person can discuss the topic, and be no closer to ascertain whether what you two understand has any basis in reality.

How do you do that with topics not directly experimenceable, like quantum mechanics or, as in this case, silicon manufacture?

We have to distinguish learning from, let's call it, recreational education. If you're learning a topic, you're not going to be using a single book. Not even schoolchildren do that. Regardless of whether you consider a book an authoritative source, if you read multiple books those books will have to agree with each other, and where they don't you'll experience some confusion until you can resolve the contradiction.

If you're only ingesting information from a single source, be that a book, a teacher, or an LLM, then you haven't really learned, because your knowledge base is unmoored. You can't learn history by studying Tolkien's mythos.

Because you can successfully use it to communicate with other people. That's the grounding truth. If you'd only ever read about it and never actually employed it then yes, you would not be able to make that claim.

Uh, yeah. That's what I said. Did you have a point or...?

>If silence becomes trendy amongst extroverts

That sounds like an impossibility, unless these extroverts are communicating non-verbally. How do you do the "extro-" part of extrovertedness without talking?

I don't understand. Do you mean they were lucid, but they believed they were living in a different year? Like thinking adults were still children in school and wondering when dead people were going to call? That kind of thing?

Both of you are being overly dismissive of yourselves. Without either a proof or a program that proves the statement in question, I wouldn't trust the LLM. I wouldn't even trust if it produced citations, because I've already come across LLMs citing sources to back up statements without being able to find that information in the source (not saying it wasn't there, just that I was not able to find it).

It's true in a very real sense, though. Without calibration, how can you tell whether you're learning something real or something fictitious? Imagine trying to learn a language from a single teacher, without ever talking to or corresponding with a native speaker. How could you tell whether you're actually learning the language, or the teacher's unique dialect? Yes, you indeed "learned" something, it's just something that might not bear much resemblance to the real thing.

Even if your conditions are granted, different LLMs can easily consistently hold divergent "worldviews". LLM A might consistently state that fact P is true (i.e. it will never hallucinate a string that states or implies ¬P), while LLM B consistently states that fact ¬P is true. You don't have a way out of this with these two, and adding a third LLM is an additional confounding factor, not a solution. You can't settle questions of fact by survey, you need to test or use reliable sources.

A programming language is a skill with an accessible source of irrefutable feedback. If the program doesn't work, then you did something wrong. What happens if you try to learn something less concrete or less testable, like quantum mechanics, as the GP suggested?

>So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood things. We went backwards and forwards for an hour, me asking questions, it correcting me, until I felt like I understood the whole picture.

If you're only checking your understanding against the one source you used to obtain it, how can you tell whether your understanding coincides with reality (or rather, with general scientific understanding), and not just with the source you read? And I'm not asking just about ChatGPT; the same question could apply to any source. Books are not exempt from containing errors.

Insightful and compelling. Tell me another one.

I'm not disputing the total effect. I'm asking if you'd rather describe ADD and JMP in this manner, in order to say that NOP does not in fact do nothing.

See my sibling response.

Because that's how technology goes from being new to being understood. People try it, see what it can do, what it's good for, and in what ways it's dangerous, if any.

Is that the case, though? This is all pretty new tech. Did people know the machine was dangerous and didn't care, or did they not anticipate such a behavior?

It's not an implementation detail, because the decoder runs before the execution of every instruction. If we're going to say that NOP increments IP by one, then we should also say that ADD "stores in dst the addition of src and dst, as well as incrementing IP by the length of the instruction", and JMP imm "increments JMP by imm + the length of the instruction".

I don't know about other architectures in as much detail. I know x86 NOP does nothing.

That's pretty cool. I've never needed to do that because Paint remembers the last canvas size set manually.

No, that's done by the decoder. It actually does nothing.

>a part of the past congestion was that people were stuck at home and gave up on the trip overall

That's not congestion. If someone opts not to make a trip, or uses a means of transport that doesn't use the road, such as a subway, then they didn't create road traffic. Congestion refers specifically to the failure of traffic to advance at an efficient speed along a thoroughfare.

>Then presumably comfort increased.

Again, "people scoff at road construction as a solution to congestion". Discomfort is not a component of congestion.

>The popular meme idea of scoffing at road construction because it will just make more people drive misanthropically ignores that driving isn't purely emissions but it also gets people to places where they want to go, like visiting family and friends or allows them to live at a different place from where they work if that's more affordable or more to their liking.

People scoff at road construction (or rather, road widening) as a solution to congestion. I don't think anyone is under the impression that kilometers driven would go down as road bandwidth goes up.

>The road capacity led to more cars on the road, but also to more real demand being met.

No, not necessarily. Maybe some people who would have otherwise used public transport opt to drive instead. Making roads wider could literally make them less efficient, in terms of humans moved per hour per meter of width.

>Back in 1865, it was obvious to every-one that the increased efficiency of steam engines would lead to a reduced demand for coal. Jevons pointed out that increased efficiency makes steam power cheaper.

Well, in that case you're talking about an entirely different phenomenon. Jevons's paradox (as defined by this post) happens when the cost of a resource decreases and the spend on that resource increases. You're talking about what happens to the spend on resource A when the cost of resource B decreases. Whether it rises or falls, it won't be Jevons's paradox.

It depends on the species. Some fungi like molds do directly sporulate from the mycelium.

I guess they're just trying to get the networks to interlace, not to reconstitute into a single organism and be capable of nutrient exchange, so I don't think it matters if they're identical or not.