nathan_compton

"more in women than in men"

This is not true, in my experience. Men are just as, if not more, emotional and impulsive. Most women I know think way further ahead than the men I know, and improvise much less often. The idea that men are the rational ones is just a silly fantasy to make men feel better, I would argue. Rationality is much more correlated with socio-economic status than gender, I would bet.

I think it depends on the person. As a teacher, I see this. Some kids (the gifted ones) use AI to multiply their efforts. Most kids use to just get by and are actually coming out of the class with less knowledge than they would have without one.

I think this is a deeply flawed interpretation of the original commenter's post. They are suggesting that we think very carefully about imposing our standards of what constitutes a "good" person on the unborn. I don't see the problem, honestly.

The answers are not obvious. Arguably, putting anything into the water supply is seriously ethically questionable, whether it changes only your hair color or lowers your IQ or raises it, for that matter. People have the right to accept or deny medical treatment. For treatment which occurs before birth clearly they cannot do that, but if you were meditating upon whether to apply a procedure or not, and you had adults who could understand the question and to whom the procedure would have been applied, taking their opinions into consideration on the subject is entirely valid.

You think of a person with Downs' as less than a person without it, clearly. But why should your opinion matter? If we accept treating Downs' in utero, should we accept genetic treatments to lower criminality? What about independent thinking? What about other "inconvenient" personality traits. Like why not allow some "authority" to eliminate any "negative" trait they wish from the population?

Obviously these are extremes and your position that considering the question with respect to Downs' leads to a straightforward conclusion: on balance, it make sense, but I think we should approach any question about modifying people with serious consideration.

I hope this doesn't mess up their shoes. I am allergic to the plastic/leather in most shoes and allbirds is one of the few brands that typically is ok.

I think the good news here is that very soon, parroting some shit an LLM wrote will be a sure sign to everyone that that person is a moron or lazy or otherwise useless. If all you do is repeat what an AI gives you, then you can be replaced by the AI. I can't imagine why anyone would want to signal that to potential employers or, really, any other human being.

I really, genuinely, do not want a replacement for git developed by a company that raised money to build it, since it will inevitably be a walled garden of one kind or another that enshittifies as it tries to make the money back. Git is fine and there is one thing no VC funded effort can get: freedom from the vampires.

Like all I see here is "We want to build a fence around git and then charge you to go through it." I mean this as kindly as I can mean it: no thank you.

Their product could literally teleport gold into my hands and I wouldn't use it.

I don't get apps. Apart from Audible, I don't have any installed and don't use any. I've never enjoyed using smartphones to do anything.

I studied physics and mathematics and finding analytic solutions to problems is still useful and enlightening.

There is much more to life than engineering.

People say this in a very large number of other contexts. Mathematica has been able to do many integrals for decades and yet we still make students learn all the tricks to integrate by hand. This pattern is very common.

Is that what "academia" wants? Last I checked "academia" is not a dude I can call and ask for an opinion or definition of what it was interested in.

I will make an explicit, plausible, counterpoint: academia wants to produce understanding. This is, more or less, by definition, not possible with an AI directly (obviously AIs can be useful in the process).

Take GR as an example. The vast majority of the dynamical character of the theory is inaccessible to human beings. We study it because we wanted to understand it, and only secondarily because we had a concrete "result" we were trying to "achieve."

A person who cares only about results and not about understanding is barely a person, in my opinion.

A month is nothing. Embrace limitations. Make something with just two colors. See shapes, not things.

I can't understand why any person at any point in time would ever think that computers make sense in a classroom unless the class is specifically about using computers.

Honestly, I'd rather see the internet wither and die than live with ads. True hate and contempt for them.

I don't think so.

Fine tuning works on an input/output basis. You are rewarded for producing a plausible output _now_.

RL rewards you later for producing the right output now. So you have to learn to generate a lot of activity but you are only rewarded if you end up at the right place.

In SFT you are rewarded for generating tokens plausible to the proof, one token at a time. In RL you are expected to generate an entire proof and then you are rewarded or punished only when the proof is done.

Sounds lame and boring to me.

Because religion in particular involves the public proclamation and veneration of of bullshit as truth. At least most kinds.

People might be afraid for all sorts of reasons and seek religion as a way of allaying their fear, sure. "I want a pre-made community" is just another way of saying "I am afraid of being alone."

There is nothing wrong with wanting a community, but there is something wrong with telling people something is true when it is not just to get one. I get that people benefit from religion in a lot of ways. I just don't think that undermining basic questions of what we do and do not, what we can and can not, know, is worth those benefits.

A person who, in the privacy of their bathroom, looks in the mirror and repeats comforting lies to themselves to make themselves feel better is substantially less offensive to me than someone who publicly professes bullshit to make themselves feel better. If this seems blunt, ask yourself why we live in a world which gives automatic credence to ridiculous beliefs if and only if they happen to align with the ridiculous beliefs of a few sanctioned groups.

More technology is probably the solution to this!

Open to suggestions.

Yes, I believe the OP is responding to the books suggestion that returning to religion is part of the solution.

I don't care that its 2026 and people are tired of atheists. I still think religion isn't the answer. I refuse to believe that pretending things, no matter how good they make us feel, is the right thing for human beings to do. I'll be ground up by the machine before I bow down again to an imaginary god.

I've never met an adult convert who gave off any other vibe than "I am afraid of grappling with the world as it is, so I am turning to a comforting fantasy." They can and do often dress it up in various fancy phrases. They decry the awfulness of modernity and claim religion is the solution. But it is rhetoric. People don't become religious as adults because they are dumb or lack eloquence. They convert out of fear of the world.

Its libido. The alternatives are not fun and they won't make anyone rich. They present no drama and, I think, drama is the primary thing little minds want from their ideology.

And yet I can sympathize - the world seems sometimes almost absurdly inhumane at the moment, the people in charge seem both incompetent and to have a death grip on power and not out of any particular skill or strength, but because we cannot articulate any real alternative. The fantasy that we can fix this problem by embracing tradition or some other dumb shit is appealing because it doesn't force us to grapple with the real problems of the world.

In the broadest strokes I tend to agree that we will need to return to the human, but I think that doesn't have to look like Christianity or any other made up bullshit. I can be humanism, but we must be willing to do things which might lower GDP to get there. We have to be willing to restrain ourselves and others for the benefit of harmony. Tough sell for Americans.

Please god stop letting LLMs write your copy. My brain just slides right over this slop. Perhaps you have a useful product but christ almighty I cannot countenance this boring machine generated text.

Actually, I want to add something to this. The general vibe in this research area is NOT that you cannot compare IQ with genes. Indeed, its more or less an accepted fact that some portion of IQ and measures like it are indeed heritable. The specific issue this person faced is in the use of race. I'm not suggesting that we accept all the woke orthodoxy whole cloth, but race really is a socially constructed concept. No person out there in the world is "of a given race" as a scientific fact. People have genes, they don't have races. The scientific community recognizes that genes influence intelligence, but has no interest in promulgating the frankly dumb idea that humans have distinct races, probably because the last time people got really into that idea it lead to concentration camps, apartheid, and the pointless destruction of vast swaths of human potential.

The main issue with the research described is that it uses genes to construct a racial narrative. If that is the world you want to live in, you do you, I guess, but I would prefer that people not be pigeon holed on the basis of (for example) arbitrary qualities like "European Ancestry," which the person explicitly states they constructed a sort of genetic fingerprint for. In a meritocratic society people should be judged on their performance, not some inference people make about what genes they have on the basis of their level of melanin, to refer to the study this guy is talking about.

"How to lose tenure with one sentence": "Maybe it will be fine to pursue my career in Florida."

Anyway, my point stands - there is plenty of research on IQ. Only if you are specifically interested in correlating IQ with genetics have ethicists at large determined your research may be harmful. We can debate about that, I guess, but the idea that one cannot use IQ in research is a hyperbole.

This is just some claim by a person. I appreciate the context but as far as I can tell no such policy was on the books. The person making the claim has a clear motivated reason for claiming such and its all pretty vague.

The FAA never had any such policies as far as I can tell.