timr

Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it’s probably safe to go to a language meetup.

This is wildly off topic, but again, since you didn’t read it: there is no good evidence that the shots help you if you’ve already been infected. Not mortality, not symptoms, not transmission, nothing.

Get the shot if it makes you feel less anxious. It’s probably not helping you, but it’s not hurting you either.

It actually is how the human immune system works, and in particular, there’s a huge amount of evidence that humoral immunity is protective and long lasting for Covid. Worrying about this is roughly the same degree of reasonable as worrying about getting any of the other common coronaviruses that circulate.

I know you’re not going to accept this, but there is quite literally no good evidence that boosters for Covid do anything for otherwise healthy people who have already been infected.

Regardless, the point is, if you won’t go to a language meetup because you’re worried about this, you’re likely doing far more damage to yourself from social isolation and anxiety than the virus would ever do to you. It’s time to live your life.

There are so many tools now that didn't exist even when I started. I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example. Or in the case of Japanese, being able to take a picture of text, and select the kanji for lookup. Life. Changing.

I'm also old enough to remember when getting listening materials required going to the library for cassette tapes. Today, you can talk with a wide selection of native speakers, listen to essentially infinite audio and video content, and immerse yourself in a culture halfway around the world for the price of an internet connection.

Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2.

> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.

Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.

As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.

All of the the research I have seen on this topic have been observational retrospective studies, which are worthless and should be ignored. The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language (let alone a third or more) are so large that they cannot be overcome without a randomized control. This stuff is churnalism, right up there with "does coffee make you live longer?" [1].

But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy.

I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring.

[1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.

Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it's probably safe to go to a language meetup.

Honestly, the share lounge idea is not a bad one, at least in the major cities. It can be pretty difficult to find a working space that isn't a tiny pod or a monthly commitment.

That said, the only Tsutaya share lounge I've seen was basically a glorified Starbucks, which is not so appealing.

While informing yourself, don't skip the part where you find out that "the environment" was the security equivalent of a wet paper bag.

Yes, let’s not do any experiments at all. Then we’re sure to remain ignorant.

That always works well.

this reads like AI slop.

You can make whatever predictions you like. Don't expect other people to believe them and act on them unless you provide evidence.

> I am criticising the argument “every past apocalyptic prediction was wrong, therefore this future apocalyptic prediction is wrong”

That is not the argument being made. That is the straw man version you are presenting. Read the full paragraph, and the one after, and it's obvious:

> There are myriad policy responses. Whatever we do, those responses will require popular consent and careful deliberation. No one person, or one company, or one movement, knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong.

> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies.

Emphasis mine.

You're making a ridiculously improbable prediction that can never be falsified -- akin to beliefs in a vengeful God. Russell's Teapot is exactly the correct metaphor.

The philosophical burden of proof lies on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims. That is the point of Russell's Teapot.

You're arguing in favor of a teapot circling Mars. We can't prove it's not there, but telling me that "nobody has ever found it" is an invalid argument is obviously absurd.

In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong (which is 100% true -- the ridiculous doom has been going on since at least GPT-2. remember how that was "too dangerous to release"?) Show me why I should believe in this one.

By that logic, literally any ridiculous supposition must be taken seriously, because you can’t prove a negative.

But it doesn't do that. "Imagine how you'll be wrong in the future" is just as shiftable as anything else, and has the distinct rhetorical advantage of being unfalsifiable.

The substantive difference is that you're asking me to dream up ridiculously improbable scenarios, which is probably the actual point. Just like "The End is Near Accept Jesus" guy on the street corner gets what he wants as soon as I engage.

To quote a famous movie about doomy AI scenarios: "the only winning move is not to play."

No. The person making the improbable argument is required to provide an affirmative case for that argument.

It's not my job to make the argument for them.

For what it's worth, I have done your suggested exercise, and I find every causal link (including the ones brought up by luminaries like Amodei) to be outrageous and poorly argued. But it's not my job expend effort to make their outrageous arguments better.

I don’t know if you’re being facetious, but last time I checked, the world had not been destroyed by glob thermonuclear war.

So yeah, it has worked.

nono...it's "combined with a form of fusion", you see, so it's obviously based in science.

People obviously know this stuff is absurd on some level, but it doesn't stop them from cherry-picking the parts they "like" (i.e. fear) and ignoring the rest.

Read more sci-fi. The dystopian takes are not the only ones. They're not even the majority.

Pick up an Asimov book in the Robot series, or any number of novels written by lesser authors in the 1950s. Fiction reflects broader societal anxieties.

True!

See my comment on the sibling thread. This take has been repeatedly claimed online, but nobody brings any evidence other than fanfic.

Ironically, if you ask Google, the Gemini Annoyance AI [1] confidently asserts that what you're saying is true, but if you follow the links they give, none of them support the claim, and the further you click, the more it becomes people repeating each other's speculation and hearsay and calling it evidence. For example:

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...

Typical internet story.

[1] Aside: I am far more worried about the influence of AI gaslighting on mushy-brained humans than I am on AI destroying the human race. The dystopic future of AI is people.

No:

https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/1qatv42/is_it_your_...

There is some stuff online suggesting that the original script had that angle, but the movies did not, and AFAICT it's fanfic.

We should definitely use this stuff to guide our thinking about the real world, though, and not, say, Asimov (or a million other science fiction authors), who had an optimistic version of the same thing. Those are wrong.

The compute in the Matrix wasn't handled with human brains. They used the bodies to generate energy, and kept the brains occupied with the simulation so they wouldn't reject the pods.

It doesn't make any sense, of course, because it's a movie.

But hey...if we're going to extrapolate wildly from sci-fi, let's at least know what the stories said.

I don't know. But since we're talking about fiction, pretty much any answer is valid.

Obviously the doomers will tell you that the future looks like the Matrix, because most of what they predict is based on extrapolation from sci fi movies.

> Obtaining the knowledge is a process of trial and error, bruteforce, observation, search, etc. Humans follow that same process. Machines can do that too. If they discover or are taught the same heuristics humans use, and a computational capacity greater than that of all humans combined, they will outpace us in this endeavour.

Sure, you can reduce the 99.9% of research labor that matters to "a process of trial and error, bruteforce, observation, search, etc.", but that's like saying that nuclear fusion is only a few technical details away from implementation. We already know the theory!

The part where you're closest to being correct is "trial and error" -- it would be great if a robot existed that could do any experiment, tirelessly, with the mechanical fidelity, intelligence and creativity of a human. That robot does not exist. Moreover, the fundamental techniques to do the kinds of observation necessary to unlock the parts of science we don't know about do not exist. They must be invented. So now we have two problems. The problems are recursive and interlocking.

Biology and chemistry are the sciences I know best, so I will use those examples -- every major breakthrough of the last 50 years has involved invention of some fundamental new mode of observation, such as crystallography, NMR, mass spec, electron microscopy, various kinds of light microscopy, DNA sequencing, PCR, etc. Someone invents some innovative technique, and a wave of progress happens. Expert practitioners in in the lab are probably the second rate-limiting step, but the part that LLMs can do -- taking data and turning it into hypotheses -- is the part that carries the least value. Any postdoc has enough ideas to keep a lab going forever.

The thing you linked about Anthropic creating a "robot standard" for operation of lab tools is great for Anthropic, but that's about all. There's tons of lab automation tooling already. Having LLMs run the microscope is maybe a cool automation technique if you have the kinds of experiments that benefit from it, but those are rare, and they're still ultimately limited by people doing the upstream work.

AI will certainly help people be more efficient at their current scientific jobs, make better methodology more universal, etc., but suggesting that it will replace actual scientists is just science fiction.

Yes, you were guessing. That's the only thing you could be doing, since, as you said, nobody actually knows.

> There's nothing that AI won't be able to mine and accomplish (aside from being literally human), it's only a matter of hardware and scale at this point.

Sure there is: problems that require knowledge that simply doesn't exist yet. Until "AI" turns into general purpose robots that can develop new tools to explore the world, it is, in fact, pretty damned limited in what it can do without human help. The world is vast. Math is small.

Biology is replete with examples. Computers "solve" protein folding [1], and midwits immediately leap to conclusions that drug development will also quickly fall. But we literally have no idea how most of biology works, and simply getting to the starting line for drug development problems is often 95% of the battle. Come talk to me when you've done a million experiments to find the fundamental knowledge that unlocks the pathway(s) we didn't know about that makes a drug discovery program possible in the first place [2].

I am not pessimistic about humans running out of challenges. We'll just declare one class of problems "done" [3], and move on to the next frontier, as we always have. The problem with AI doomers is that they lack imagination that extends beyond computers, or perhaps more accurately, are so sophomoric in their thinking that they skip over the hard parts of any problem they don't fully understand. This stuff reminds me of the endless smartypants whinging about the end of human intelligence when chess machines started beating grandmasters. Chess was never really that great a measurement of human intellectual capacity, and we found new things to do with our big monkey brains.

[1] They did not solve protein folding, except in the minds of people who don't fully understand the problem.

[2] ...and invented new machinery to make the experiments possible in the first place.

[3] ...and we'll likely be wrong about that.