zug_zug

I've looked up animal farm in more detail, and it seems like you're fundamentally undereducated on the topic.

Animal Farm entered Anglo-American classrooms in the late 1950s, and its adoption was heavily influenced by the Cold War political climate . The book was seen as "useful" for teaching, but its political utility was part of the appeal—it provided "an easy use... as an anti-Communist and anti-revolutionary lesson" . This wasn't just a grassroots phenomenon; it was actively encouraged by intelligence agencies.

Both British and American intelligence services promoted the book as an anti-socialist message and supported its distribution . The CIA even arranged for a 1954 animated film adaptation that altered Orwell's story—emphasizing that animals on neighboring farms were content and changing the ending to have the animals overthrow the pigs . This film was widely shown in US and UK classrooms, embedding a distorted version of the story in the educational system for years

I agree that a lot of what I didn't like about Animal Farm could have been fixed in a different context (deep dive into the theory of socialism as a classless society, overloading of the word communism, actual history of Russia and how it didn't achieve a classless society, history of Orwell as a person and his own political beliefs, exploration of Animal Farm as polemic tool and analysis of its effectiveness as a tool, analysis of how it's misunderstood today as a criticism of the idea of communism, McCarthyism and how Animal Farm was introduced to classroom during the coldwar)

But here's my main thesis -- we have a situation where not-reading books is incentivized:

In an information-rich environment, I just learned more about animal farm in 10 minutes by asking AI all of the above questions than I did in 10 hours of reading without proper context back in highschool.

If reading itself (and not shaping the values of youth) is really just the goal, then we could solve this by assigning materials to kids that are likely to match their interests (I don't know slenderman, twilight, harry potter, ender's game, whatever).

You know that's not the chief goal -- if that's the chief goal, we'd all be assigned to watch Babe rather than read animal farm.

What matters is if you find research on what's true about this world like a responsible adult, or just try to come up with a zinger because you're not

$2000 are they serious?

For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.

And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.

1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...

Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."

And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."

Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.

What are you talking about? Like I've said I've been using finder for 15 years and most of these things people are talking have absolutely no discoverability.

Like is the mac UI really supposed to be "Get frustrated, google it, and read how to do these things and special keyboard shortcuts/drag-and-drop/etc"?

To be clear I think macs are by far the superior product on the hardware front, but nobody should be discovering new UI tricks after 3 years, let alone a decade.

I agree 100%. Been using macs for 15 years now, but the windows XP explorer in particular was fundamentally objectively better than finder, and it's nuts they haven't figured it out.

One of the things I find most baffling is that in order to "go to a folder by path" (e.g. ~) you have to hit command-shift-G ? What kind of hidden witchcraft is this?

It feels like it was designed for people who cannot understand a directory structure. But even that is done poorly, because it's not particularly useful. That said, this kepter thing looks pretty bad too.

Ultra processed food is about 50-60% of American calories, versus 38% in Japan [1]. Also try visiting a Japanese 7-11, there's tons of fresh-made food options with vegetables and such.

Still Japan is developing a weight problem too.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260628/

I understand that what it came up with sounds impressive (especially since I know 0 about Myanmar), but on the topics I do know about its analysis routinely have very fundamental problems (even this Myanmar analysis has % that add up to > 100). There's a chance it's just parroting the majority opinion on Myanmar, or making stuff up (and perhaps you could ask it to write a strongly worded opinion in the other direction that would sound equally plausible).

For example I asked it to do a full analysis on the AI bubble, and a full analysis on the risks of Glyphosate, and it came up with a lot of things that sounded credible, but within a few minutes of questing was admitting it hadn't even really checked for internal consistency in its positions, and even doing a 180. It certainly was much faster at gathering sources and reading but it fundamentally doesn't seem very effective at creating a consistent worldview.

And of course the funny thing is it says it did a 180 on one of these topics, great, except whatever it concluded will be discarded because it cannot learn. It's just bonkers to me pretend this is AGI, it probably couldn't even hold its own in this very discussion.

For example?

But you have to acknowledge how uneven the playing field is. The AI has read every book that's ever been written, and can spend hours of compute time in a few seconds.

I think if a person had those same advantages (e.g. could spend 5 hours thinking about what to say next) we could all hold outstanding conversations, or if we had read every book ever written I think many of us could write a very popular book, if we could read every singe company's P&L statement in a few seconds we could invest better than an index fund.

What I'm pointing out here is that these models appear to be intelligent when they really are simply unimagineably knowledgeable. When you drop the time-constraints it starts to become more and more apparent that human intelligence scales better with time than AI does (much in the same way AI can burp out tons of code but make your codebase entirely illegible within a matter of months).

Perhaps to simplify: my notion of intelligence is how much can you deduce with a constant set of starting context

> I'd be curious to hear takes on what would make you think Astra is yet to be AGI, and what would still need to be achieved for this to effectively be AGI from this point forward.

To me AGI is all about the "G" general (we already had the AI part). General meaning universal, everything. It's not a function of knowledge or specific hardcoded tests, it's that you could give it a test it's never heard of before and never been trained on and it would ace it (it might need a lot of time).

Currently LLMs can't even really learn within a conversation, they can add a note to context and try to not drop it. Example things an AI cannot do yet (but maybe someday will):

- write a well-received book, write a best-seller

- come up with a new company idea, Run that company

- actually have a decent conversation, maybe someday talk somebody out of suicide effectively

- come up with its own ideas or theories that nobody else has presented

- understand the stock market well enough to trade better than an index fund

- be an expert Game Master in a TTRPG (making no mistakes, getting a read on the players' fantasies, calibrating difficulty in response to emotions)

- come up with a theory of what makes games fun, make a popular game

- be able to sort through research and come to conclusions on complex geopolitical/sociological topics (e.g. theorize on whether AGI will result in mass poverty or mass abundance and be able to argue persuasively)

- be able to articulate what it knows, what it doesn't know, and what information it would need to have to answer complex queries

- exhibit metacognition (thinking about its own thinking) and self-optimization

- wonder about things

- observe contradictions and ironies in the social-consciousness, do a standup routine that makes you rethink how you look at things

Okay I'd love to hear your sales pitch as a theoretical customer. Imagine I'm getting tirzeptide grey-market as a peptide through one of the sites out there for ~$85 a month @ 2.5mg/wk. Suppose I've mentioned it to my doctor who was surprised but didn't raise any red flags, and I'm adjusting my dose to meet my own needs.

What's the best argument for me to switch? I also don't see any pricing on your website so I hypothetically wouldn't even consider signing up without knowing pricing in advance. It's also entirely acceptable that maybe this hypothetical version of me isn't the target market.

Well we tried it for alcohol and it didn’t go well, but enforcing the FDA limit on sugar would be a worthy experiment for a state that voted for it.

Well, once a state passes a law we'll have plenty of data to actually conduct a meaningful measurement on the topic. We'll see how things change for these teens once the law goes into effect - do they report being happier? do they get better grades? etc.

This sounds like a pretty reasonable bill to me. I like the implementation, I think it preserves privacy adequately.

I understand that someday (probably someday soon) some actors will try to ask for a worse version of this, one that doesn't respect privacy. And I remain ready to push back on that. This, though, I think is an adequate compromise.

> Why wouldn't he get into Harvard? He had 1590 SAT scores and it wasn't because his parents forced him to cram.

1600 is not enough to get into Harvard, AI estimates about 10-20% of those with perfect SATs do. I think he'd be more likely to get into MIT because he'd have extracurriculars and/or side projects that they'd value more.

> Read the autobiography.

I already have read his biography. I feel like you're getting really emotional about some pretty non-controversial claims. These aren't personal attacks if you're a big fan of his or something.

You just have to understand that there are only so many opportunities trillion-dollar companies per generation (just due to market dynamics). Being driven, having a high IQ, etc aren't as big predictors of success as having rich and connected family members.

I think gates is obviously a very high IQ individual with a skill for math and coding.

However very very few high IQ individuals with skill for math or coding end up running successful companies, let alone billion dollar companies. I imagine odds are if Gates was born in 2000 and went a public highschool with no rich parents, he may or may not get into MIT (but not Harvard) and would be working at google or something today, potentially hating it.

My proposal, once you complete your study, if you find a significant positive result you should be required (prior to publication) to describe your methodology in full, and have another lab (who you never have any contact with) blindly take your methodology, and repeat it (on video), and then do their own independent analysis of the data.

It's okay if it's $200k or so to do each of these, the university should pay. The point is if this methodology were applied people would have incentive to cheat anymore. It would also serve as an immediate replication.

Schools won't do this because they have a perverse incentive for big successes and quiet retractions. It's corruption all the way up.

I'd be curious, in the last year, how many front-page articles do you remember? To avoid recency bias, maybe let's ignore the last week. What % of CEOs do you think read HN?

I feel like there's a way to make a policy that is "We update all geographies within America at 4 years, once a rename has had time to make it into the common parlance."

But whatever, every such scar he leaves will just be on the list of reminders of why he was the worst president in history, and likely haunt the party for decades.

I do agree a "I'm watching this but I regretted it" would be a useful button, if the companies respected it. But my default presumption is that the already know this, and don't care, and that baiting engagement / addiction is at the very least "views" and possibly a deliberate strategy.

I think we need to start building intermediary feeds for all of our services (presumably via AI or something) that lets us customize how much we get of each type of content (e.g. no more than 5% about bad the economy is, no more than 5% about a new AI trick, 0% about 'drama of the day', 40% educational)

yeah absolutely. In theory that was supposed to be glassdoor (or blind) but I haven't found scores there to be meaningful signals.

>A lot of cultural problems also have quite easy fixes they just require shining a light on specific abuses of executive power which simultaneously hurt employees and destroys shareholder value. There is a lot more of this than I think people realize.

What do you mean? Who would "shine this light", on which executive, and who would they whistle-blow to exactly, the board? Short of embezzlement or sexual harassment (and not even all sexual harassment cases) I can't think of any cases where calling out an executive's behavior won't result in immediate retaliation. This is a genuinely tricky problem, but most of all I get the sense executives would rather own the wrong decision than have a subordinate get credit for swaying them to the right decision.

I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left.

But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random blog posts for constructive criticism?

Or even managers? I look at the market forces at play, and I just don't think many (any?) organization successfully create an incentive structure where performance on intangibles (specifically management) can be assessed well enough to make a bad culture into a better culture. I've worked at zero places where managers where seriously held to account for how "motivated" their employees were; when there were surveys of engagement engineers almost never truly believed they were anonymous (and why would they?) and were hesitant to give honest feedback.

In short, being a CEO is a skill of crafting and debugging a machine of people, a skill that I think life gives almost no training for, and a skill that most people with that title have no awareness or aptitude for. </rant>

I'm going to second you for a different reason:

I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.

Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.

To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.

Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.

1 - https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...

The complexity stuff is all absolutely true.

However I think it's aggrandizing what human engineers actually do with remarks like "Engineers own tradeoffs." My experience is that certainly less than half of the employed software engineers don't actually give a real analysis to questions like:

"Given these constraints, this team, this business, this infrastructure, this budget, these risks, and the expected evolution of the product, what is the most appropriate way to implement X, today?"

Thus I think AI is more able to replace the average engineer more than this article admits, however the inadequacy of "average engineering" will be much more apparent now: codebases can become large/complex enough to be unwieldy in months now when it used to take 5 years [a timescale where accountability is effectively impossible].

I recommend every youth take a week to a month to try to read and internalize the book "Once upon a number." It's full of those odd statistical paradoxes that seem impossible but once you really wrap your head around them you realize how oversimplified your prior understanding of probability was.

In this time of drones? I don't see that working out for them...