aero-deck

Cowardice.

engaging w/ someone is different from discoursing with them. "engagement" is what social media companies say they provide - but really they just offer "discourse".

the public's inability to engage with epistemological problems on systemic scales

The public's inability? What about everyone's inability. No one deals well with epistemological problems on a systematic scale, not even the technologists who delude themselves into thinking that they're driving anything.

I am exactly talking about psychological limits. The difference is that I don't think the psychological limits of the creators are any different from those of the users. If anything, I think the creators are more psychologically limited than the users. This is because the creators need to explain to themselves why they are creating the thing - everyone else just puts up with it. When you say ppl will either be duped or completely check out of discourse, don't forget about yourself.

Also, of course I didn't read the article....

dunno what "TFA" refers to here, but it seems like we're heading into a argument regarding epistemology, which is not a discussion that HN handles well.

IMO "truth" is distraction here because what is at stake here are people's values, not their understanding of math and physics. When people worry about "post-truth", they're worried about liberal values no longer being the unquestioned default. It is absolutely a marketplace, and if people switching marketplaces en-masse makes it harder to launch rockets and develop vaccines, then it probably means those activities are making people net unhappy. People are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, even the dumb ones.

We want an an appropriate degree of emotional engagement with discourse, which is 1-1 with how much discourse is happening. People being too angry is caused by people discoursing too much and vice-versa. There are opposite problems associated w/ too little discourse, but we don't suffer from those.

Things are hyper-polarized right now and there is no magic political synthesis that is right over the horizon if only we could just keep discoursing a little bit more. This is like a heroin addict thinking they'll cease being addicted after that last fix. The solution is to cool things down.

Because there are actually multiple "arenas of discourse" and people will simply switch the "marketplace" they're using.

It's technocratic hubris to think that there is just a single such arena and that all the others are illegitimate/dangerous.

right - like how the stock market behaves nowadays w/ quant traders - which then motivated people to construct darkpools of liquidity where the real trading happens.

No one has ever cared about factual accuracy except for the military. All other social benefits of "facts" trickle-down from there.

The chilling effect may actually be a good thing, given that discourse these days is overheated.

There's a weird magic trick that social media companies have played on people to convince them that the text and images consumed on their websites are socially/culturally/politically relevant. Once it becomes clear how easy it is to fake that text people will come to understand how cheap and irrelevant "opinion" has become and this magic trick will become weakened.

Tech can start out as an extension, but what people fail to understand is that it can become slowly become autonomous over time, kinda like how a party gets out of control and people start putting holes in walls.

I think technologists rarely, if ever, talk about this because a lot of what enables our blind pursuit of technology is to say that technology must be an extension of humans and so it can never become autonomous. When ppl talk about AGI and paperclip maximizers, I think it's a way of pushing the problem far into the horizon and ignoring that the boundary is fluid and pushing.

Imagine if all the people at Google and Facebook stopped thinking that they're making the world a better place?

It's really arrogant to think that any argument for a moratorium must be based in lack of information.

all the correct observations about averages aside, quantity!=quality

and we're just soooo much smarter nowadays than we were 1000 years ago...

Denial of what? That AI is as important as AI-fans think that it is?

This is list of ways that Pope Francis behaved differently from how a narrow section of catholics would prefer for him to act. Sucks that catholicism seems to be too difficult for people to swallow. There is always a temptation to dumb the message down, but that should be resisted.

I'd love to see demographic data on sedevacantism, but it's probably pretty difficult to gather. It def seems like the phenomena is enabled by the internet, and demonstrates the same kind of ideological radicalization to be found in other political/cultural domains.

I'm not Pope Francis's biggest fan, but even a cursory look into ecclesiastical history reveals that the stuff happening nowadays is mild compared to what's come before. It breaks my heart to see people who are reacting so strongly against modernism embody modernism so thoroughly by insisting that the "now" is so tremendously unique and special from "the past". To the point that it's OK to ignore that history, because what is happening now is unprecedented. I think this willful disconnection from history/context/embeddedness/belongingness is essentially what modernism is, and people are low-key starting to figure out that the result of this mindset is mostly depression and misery. There's a lot of money and influence to be had by boosting this mindset, but that crap has never been known to make people happy.

That negative self-conceit (i.e. "nowadays is the worst") is still self-conceit, and manifests itself in a fetishism/idolatrazation of the "the past". It's all very strange, but I can understand the allure.

Seems like this is more about millennials getting old than it is about the internet changing. Especially since it embodies millennial's FOMO + fragile sense of self.

I suppose it makes sense that I'd find sedes on HN, since this place is mostly about hubris.

you're ignoring religion.

The whole trajectory of history would have been different if a butterfly didn't flap it's wings.

The bomb had effects, but it didn't change anything. We still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about things we can't control.

For a moment, stop thinking about whether bombs, AI or the printing press do or do not affect history. Ask yourself what the motivations are for thinking that they do?

cool - so AI is gonna dramatically reduce the number of emails that get misunderstood... still gonna still be sending those emails tho.

Opinion falls into two camps because opinion falls into political camps.

The right-wing is tired of the California ideology, is invested in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy, and has learned to mistrust claims that the technology industry makes about itself (regardless of those claims are prognostications of gloom vs bloom).

The left-wing thinks that technology is the driving factor of history, is invested in the tertiary and quaternary sectors of the economy, and trusts claims that the technology industry makes about itself. Anytime I see a litany of "in 10 years this is gonna be really important" I really just hear "right now, me and my job are really important".

The discussion has nothing to do with whether AI will or will not change society. I don't think anyone actually cares about this. The whole debate is really about who/what rules the world. The more powerful/risky AI is, the easier it is to imagine that "nerds shall rule the world".

I think academics are much, much more naive than we like to think. The same trick that pharma played on doctors is being played here.

Just because you can do fancy math doesn't mean you understand how to play the game.

It doesn't matter who wrote it, it got picked up, had a good argument and affected market opinion. The execs now need to respond to it.

Humans also don't grasp that things can improve exponentially until they stop improving exponentially. This belief that AGI is just over the hill is sugar-water for extracting more hours from developers.

The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything. But in the end nothing changed, we just got more of the same.

We have an LGD on our hobby farm and figuring out socialization is really hard. Despite raising her in the barn among goats, I did give her a fair amount of affection and now she is very people-motivated. What I realize now is that if you want the dog to be an employee then you must treat the dog like an employee. What makes this difficult is withholding the human desire/instinct to treat the dog like a pet. This is especially hard when friends and family come over and want to pet the big fluffy dog - telling them that they can't makes you seem like a monster.

that means there's no money in making foundation models - the economics are broken.

Disagree. What you have in mind is already how the masses interact AI. There is little value-add for making machine translation, auto-correct and video recommendations better.

I can think of a myriad of use-cases for AI that involve custom-tuning foundation models to user-specific environments. Think of an app that can detect bad dog behavior, or an app that gives you pointers on your golf swing. The moat for AI is going to be around building user-friendly tools for fine-tuning models to domain-specific applications, and getting users to spend enough time fine-tuning those tools to where the switch-cost to another tool becomes too high.

When google complains that there is no moat, they're complaining that there is no moat big enough to sustain companies as large as Google.