Houshalter

Terrorism didn't work after the civil war. The north was able to occupy the south indefinitely with minimal cost.

the number of shootings that involve misogyny, which is the enforcement mechanism for patriarchy

Please translate this to english

None of these examples got away with it, or even acheived any of their stated goals. If terrorism actually worked, it would be a lot scarier.

Also fortunately most political extremists don't want to kill just random people. Weapons of mass destruction don't discriminate, making them poor choices.

I love the idea we will soon have western and eastern open source projects. Even if internet isn't bifurcated, both sides will be too paranoid to install software from the other side. All software projects will have to pedantically vet every line of a commit, photo ID every contributor, to avoid subtle bugs intentionally committed and sent to millions.

Why stop at countries? How hard would it be to use ML to detect if the user has the wrong politics? Why stop at just deleting files? How about downloading as much illegal content as possible, sending embarrassing emails, etc? There's so many possibilities here.

Small NNs are very fast. This particular NN only has 4 inputs, 2 hidden, and 2 outputs. That's what, 12 multiplications per pass? If you can compress your input down to a few variables you don't need much computation. For an FPS you could probably get away with player coordinates and direction.

I've read that some game devs tried more advanced AIs in FPS games. And the players hated it because they thought it was cheating when it snuck up on them.

So far as I have heard, the UK went way harder into lockdowns and other measures than the US. And from what I saw, what happened to the US was insane. Everything was closed down for months (or longer depending on the industry.) Supply chains were incredibly disrupted. The government went deeply into debt and inflation is skyrocketting. There are still shortages of many things for the forseeable future. Unprecedented numbers of people have lost their jobs.

I literally can not imagine thinking this is comparable to any other economic event, since the world wars or great depression anyway.

The UK is still under covid restrictions and went into a huge amount of debt during the crisis. The events are not remotely comparable.

Just take the last thing in this article. It links to an obscure blog by some crazy person that hasn't updated in 4 years.

What's the point of this? Cruelly mocking some mentally ill person's posts from years ago, as proof that "the future is unpredictable"?

Or claiming brexit is economically worse than covid. Massively disrupting the world economy for 2 years is less bad than some regulatory changes in a single country? "A crewed moonbase by 2031"?

Predicting the supreme court would become more conservative during a conservative presidency and senate was not a hard prediction. Ginsberg was known to be in poor health, but I guess you could count that as a successful prediction.

But the other details are all wrong. There hasn't been a Protestant on the supreme court in awhile, let alone a fundamentalist.

Are we seriously going to criticize a tab completion engine because it doesn't perfectly calculate what the phases of the moon are? Can you? I'm amazed it even knows what that means and has a vague idea of what such a calculation should look like, even if it fails.

I seriously doubt that no one raised the concerns that are raised today during the development of Copilot.

I would be shocked if they did. The common wisdom in the ML community is that training data is fair use. GPT has been operating for 2-3 years now with no legal issues, and this is just a different fine tune of GPT3.

The pirate bay is very clear to not claim any responsibility for what people post on their site. That's how they get away with it.

If you do get sued, the Copilot page is written in a way that would make Github legally responsible for it, not you. "Just like with a compiler, the output of your use of GitHub Copilot belongs to you."

All of these issues have existed since GPT-2, maybe earlier. I remember the AI dungeon guys narrowly avoided a lawsuit from training on copyrighted novels. I find it amusing that the tech community was very pro GPT, but anti-copilot. Now that it affects them personally. Especially ironic because this place is usually very skeptical of copyright matters.

All AIs are trained on copyrighted data scraped from the internet. What you guys want effectively amounts to making most AI illegal. At least outside of big tech companies with large private datasets. Is that the world you prefer to live in?

How do you know it's "just a code search engine"? Or "not AI" or "not learning and producing new things", or all the other claims people are making about it? All of these are essentially untestable statements.

It has memorized one thing. That doesn't prove it's not intelligent. If anything it's the other way around, we would expect an intelligent being to be capable of memorization.

All I can think of is the Turing test and the AI effect. Eventually we will have an AI that is capable of writing code indistinguishable from a human, and people will STILL say it's "not AI" and "just a code search engine", etc. Obviously this isn't there yet, but it's clearly getting closer.

I fully admit that it is a back of a napkin estimate. I've yet to see a better attempt at an estimation, or any attempt really. If you have a better way I'm happy to hear it. I have a small dataset that breaks down COVID and nonCOVID deaths for the same time period, and gives ages for each death.

I have been paid $3,232 to sit at home and do nothing the last month. Not including the stimulus check I haven't cashed yet. I would have made about $3,000 in the same time. That is completely insane to me. I do not see how that isn't extremely generous. I don't see how it's sustainable either.

Even in your extreme example all of the deaths would have to be extremely old people to work out like that. People that statistically have very very few years left.

And for your extreme example to be true, it would have to be the case that the disease doesn't discriminate healthy from weak. But still somehow only kills old people. Because if the disease does discriminate healthy from weak, all of the deaths would be those that would die soon anyway.

Then you must divide whatever estimate you get from that by one hundred. Assuming the highest estimates that it kills around 1% of the victims, which I think are bit high.

I don't see any possible way you could run the numbers and get more than 2 weeks lowered life expectancy. There just are so few young deaths, and the total death rate is very low.

US unemployment is extremely generous.

The average age of death of coronavirus victims was about 10 months younger than the average age of death of non-coronavirus victims. So if you die it takes 1 year off your life expectancy. And maybe 1% of people will die that are infected (and lets assume everyone will be infected.)

So coronavirus decreases your life expectancy by 3 and a half days. For comparison, sitting in front of a TV for multiple hours a day (as many people have been relegated to doing) decreases your life expectancy by 6 years. Smoking is 8 years. Owning a car and driving it regularly is a few weeks IIRC.

Many would argue the kinder egg ban is uunconstitutional. And stuff like is supposed to be left up to the states. But who's willing to fight for the kinder eggs?

The account has falsely accused...The conspiracy theory..., has been widely characterized as "baseless",[11][12][13] "unhinged"[14] and "evidence-free".[15] Its proponents have been called "a deranged conspiracy cult"[16] and "some of the Internet's most outré Trump fans".[17]

I have no idea what this is and im sure its ridiculous. But wtf happened to wikipedias neutral tone and point of view style? Ive read articles about all sorts of ridiculous conspiracy theories, cults, political parties, etc, and never seen this kind of language. Using quotes like this isnt an excuse.

Rationalwiki isnt exactly an unbiased resource to put it lightly.

The papers abstract is a bit more interesting than this summary. It looks like they compared 14 studies of reaction time over decades, not just Galtons: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...

The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition. In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1889 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.16 IQ points per decade or − 13.35 IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.

It's not terribly convincing just by itself. He's done newer work showing that other proxies for IQ like vocabulary have also decreased over time: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4404736/ And math SAT scores have dropped over time: https://brainsize.wordpress.com/tag/michael-a-woodley/ But we are only just starting to be able to test for genes that correlate with intelligence to see if they have decreased over time.

From my point of view most western nations are extremely liberal politically. Compared to how they were historically and compared to other countries.

No there really was a time a few decades ago when republican professors and democrat professors weren't under or overrepresented by more than a factor of 2. Now it's something like 30 IIRC. And really a lot of the "conservatives" turn out to be libertarians, centrists, or even moderate liberals that are turned off by the more extreme people around them. That's at least in the social sciences, it's slightly better in less politically relevant fields.

You couldn't argue with an alien that doesn't share your moral feelings. You can't reference any objective fact or point to where your morality is written into the laws of the universe.

Maybe you could say humans mostly have the same moral feelings since we have 99% the same DNA. But we seem to have no trouble finding important issues we disagree about.

The author's examples are all moral issues. There is no "right answer" to a moral question. Morality is all just subjective personal feelings, biases and culture. But even in politics, there's an entire world of questions that do have objectively correct answers. You can't debate "should people be allowed guns" but you absolutely could debate whether guns statistically increase the murder rate. And there's all sorts of data and examples you can point to on that subject.

I do think you could make a more interesting argument for the author's view though. One thing that's always disturbed me is just how highly heritable political views are in twin studies. And that's after excluding the influence of family which share much of your genetics. If people's political beliefs are so predictable, then there can't be that much influence from reason and debate.

Perhaps this is just a consequence of the above. Perhaps most political issues are just about people's subjective moral feelings about things. And that could be mostly genetic.

He wasn't charged with trademark infringement, so its irrelevant. If he had removed the logos entirely they still would have sent him to jail. And that's the precedent they've set to anyone who might want to try this in the future.

Well for one thing it's much easier for an automated system to detect pornography.

Almost all of that is inner city gang crime. And looking at those reported incidents, most of them failed to kill even a single person. The big random shootings that make the national news are extremely rare and make up a tiny percentage of all murders.

The deaths from terrorism work out to around 200 per year. Which is on the same order and possibly greater than the mass shooting deaths. And that doesn't even take into account the massive amounts of money and effort we spend on keeping that number low.