If Google made hammers, each use would be accompanied by 5 screens warning about the dangers of hitting things (and 2 ads) until I gave up and used a brick.
149 karma · joined March 9, 2022
We could suppose that someone could see the entire spectrum inverted, but that causes other problems that we could test for. There are more hues between red and blue than there are between green and yellow. Instead of seeing brown (really dark yellow), they'd see dark blue.
https://www.wisebond.com/blogs/epoxy-blog/is-epoxy-food-safe
This is a difficult fact to accept. We have all been told that people are generally equal, especially in intelligence, if given the same opportunities, but it becomes more clear in time that some problems are intractable to some people and no amount of training or exposure can change that. However, it's a better answer to the problem of why some people like Cleese's example do not absorb information. The alternative is to apply malice and laziness to them when it just isn't so.
We all have these intelligence holes that gives some insight into the mechanism. Eg. I'm bad at remembering names. As in the example, if you tell me someone's name, I'm likely to forget it 5 minutes later. I just spent 3 years reading Douglas Hofstadter's book and had to look up his name to type it here. This seems to happen because I don't see an application to remembering the name. I'm never going to meet Doug and rarely will anyone need to be told about the book, so why remember it? There's definitely a parallel to state capitals in that example.
The problem comes when we fail to point out the importance of a problem, or when we do so reflexively which means that we tell our brain that everything is important and it simply cannot process all of the requests.
Setting your thinking requests before doing a non-thinking activity is a good way to start. Think about the problem consciously and then specifically ask for an answer to a question. Then go do something physical or mechanical: take a walk, sleep, mow the lawn, watch a non-challenging movie, etc. Be prepared to accept whatever result you get. A common response is: non enough information, but it should point you toward what that additional info looks like.
Maybe the entire process isn't like feeding an LLM, but that step is. Relevance identification is an interesting part of the process. The LLM can do a decent job of making connections, but it doesn't know what is relevant. In the longer time frame of the thinking process, we constantly throw out data as irrelevant or identify previously unknown relevant data that needs to be added. It's a part of the process completely outside of the LLM.
The article avoids a bigger concern which is the size of government spending. In 1960 (I couldn't find older data) federal government spending was $144B. If we adjust for inflation, today's spending would be $1.6T. It's $9.7T.
Perhaps the rich are paying less, but a government that increases spending by 6x is certainly contributing to the problem.
Population has doubled size 1950 explaining some of the spending increases and spreading out some of the costs, but not all. It would be interesting to see if the number of "millionaires" has rise proportionally.
That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.
Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.
The fact is that people with positive influences and role models will do better. It would be great if we could maximize that, but who chooses who is "better," one of the majority who didn't have those role models themselves?
That is what the law says. It is not what they do.
Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.
The biggest challenge we face is that the best way to protect wealth is to own assets and properties are assets we can live in. If wealth didn't naturally sublimate this would be less of an issue. Likewise if it were easier to protect wealth by doing something productive, it would happen.
However it's limiting for detailed lists of things to do (e.g. great for travel, lousy for packing list), and it's terrible for time-independent data: notes from talking to my heating contractor, screenshots of setting for my media player, etc.
People do use the Easterweb to accomplish things: find out how to fix your car, code a mobile app, or buy parts for your refrigerator. If people cannot accomplish these things, traffic and the number of useful sites will drop.
The mindless fear-inducing echo chambers will always be there.
What we need is a reasonable way for people using AI to determine which parts of the text or images they have are subject to copyright.
The only companies that treat their employees poorly are those that have people lined up to work for them. The employees must think the tradeoff is worth it.
Employees should be able to choose a company with stability and lower pay or higher pay and less stability. The other option is to take the high pay job and pay for additional private insurance to cover what your employer will not. The people who want stability shouldn't force it on the people who are comfortable without it.