1,405 karma · joined April 12, 2022
What is it about writing that makes it different than thinking?
Does the following meme resonate?
> Inclusion programs often trigger an “us versus them” mindset.
> Although diversity and inclusion training is prevalent in corporate America, its impact is inconsistent. According to the evidence, sometimes the programs even have the opposite effect of what they intend.
> One 2016 study of 830 mandatory diversity training programs found that they often triggered a strong backlash against the ideas they promoted. “Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance,” wrote sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in the Harvard Business Review, “and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.”
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"if you think AI chatter has reached an annoying level right now you're in for something else. it's going to be the only thing on anybody's mind starting shortly... i'm finding it a bit hard to communicate the urgency and heaviness of what's going on" https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1617317478987878400
"Personally I can give you a formal definition of intelligence and even a number of speculative sketches of how I think it could be implemented, but I will also tell you that strong AI is not within sight and that recent advances are not moving us in the direction of strong AI" https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1617579095885500416
> "recalibrate" means "increase" obviously.
> disappointing to see this six-week development. openai will continually decrease the level of risk we are comfortable taking with new models as they get more powerful, not the other way around.
How does this resolve?
OpenAI not releasing something isn't going to stop Google or another player from releasing it. Won't they have to recalibrate too or be overtaken? Pandora's box is already open.
It comes in waves. The last wave was in the 80s. But this wave is larger and more totalizing. Control of the internet and AI output is the ultimate hall monitor tool.
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I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room.
The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist
Coke gave millions to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation - both directly and through front groups like the American Beverage Association.
This picked up in 2011-2013 - when the Farm Bill and soda taxes were under consideration. https://nutritioninsight.com/news/cspi-report-criticizes-big...
The conversations inside these rooms was depressingly transactional:
"We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist."
The effort was successful, and the message was carried in thousands of articles between 2011-2013.
Coke's position was clear: soda is one of the cheapest ways to get calories - a flagrantly inaccurate statement when factoring in the health consequences.
I watched as the FDA funneled money to professors at leading universities - as well as think tanks on the left and right - to create studies showing soda taxes hurt the poor. They also paid for studies that say drinking soda DIDN'T cause obesity. https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-drinks-tax/soda-tax-war-t...
Soda companies are deeply embedded in the USDA - so much so that the agency carries discredited talking points like "there are no bad food, only bad diets."
This ignores fact that sugar is highly addictive and has negative nutritional value.
In the end: racial tensions flared, soda spending was kept in SNAP funding, and many of the soda taxes were defeated...
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Einstein was only subject to it once and didn't pass. Newton, Galileo and the rest were not subject to it at all.
Gone into universities as bright young people. They come out of them brain dead, not even knowing what science means. They think it means peer-reviewed papers etc. No, that's academia. And if a paper is peer-reviewed it means everybody thought the same therefore they approved it.
An unintended consequence is that when new knowledge emerges, new scientific insights, they can never ever be peer-reviewed. So we're blocking all new advances in science that are big advances. If you look at the breakthroughs in science almost always they don't come from the center of that profession, they come from the fringe. The finest candle makers in the world couldn't even think of electric lights. They don't come from within they often come from outside the bricks. We're going to kill ourselves because of stupidity."
— Allan Savory, Zimbabwean ecologist, research biologist, livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He originated the Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification.
Albert Einstein failed peer review the one time he was subjected to it. Newton was not subject to it at all.
The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy
> From 1996 to 2001, Purdue conducted more than 40 national pain-management and speaker-training conferences at resorts in Florida, Arizona, and California. More than 5000 physicians, pharmacists, and nurses attended these all-expenses-paid symposia, where they were recruited and trained for Purdue's national speaker bureau.
> One of the cornerstones of Purdue's marketing plan was the use of sophisticated marketing data to influence physicians’ prescribing.
> Purdue “aggressively” promoted the use of opioids for use in the “non-malignant pain market.” A much larger market than that for cancer-related pain, the non–cancer-related pain market constituted 86% of the total opioid market in 1999. Purdue's promotion of OxyContin for the treatment of non–cancer-related pain contributed to a nearly tenfold increase in OxyContin prescriptions
> A consistent feature in the promotion and marketing of OxyContin was a systematic effort to minimize the risk