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Hi!
Mainstream psychology is basically a more popular version of scientology with "therapy" instead of "auditing". Can you guess what my politics are more likely to be based off that sentiment? If so, then that tells you all you need to know.
The insidious thing is "you aren't prompting it correctly" is kind of a truism. For every possible output there almost certainly is a prompt that produces it (at worst you can just tell it exactly what to output verbatim). The true believers can already do all their programming via ChatGPT regardless of whether or not there are real productivity gains. Not that different from all the other tools people claim turn them into 10x programmers while others remain unconvinced. So as long people enjoy the format, it's here to stay.
These kinds of arguments come up a lot when it comes to homeschooling. But would anyone follow the same logic when picking a school? There are certainly nice schools that don't have too many of these problems. Are these bad choices then? Should one find the most ghetto public school? If your country has only nice schools, how about sending your kids to a rougher country?
I'll have to agree with this comment by "Jason":
Victor Mair quoting a colleague said:
"In 1998 when the reformist president, Mohamad Khatami, came to power he tried to eliminate this slogan from the political scene and he suggested to replace any 'marg bar' slogan with 'zendeh baad my opponent'."
Why would he try to do this if "marg bar X " neutrally means "down with X", not "death to X". Similarly:
"Alireza is right to try to downplay the slogan — for two reasons: 1) This is an early revolutionary slogan that is quite exaggerated. 2) Not many Iranians actually subscribe to this view…The official government uses this slogan, but not many actually take it seriously."
Again, why is your colleague /so concerned to downplay the significance of this slogan/ as "exaggerated" (whatever that means — do they mean "hyperbolic") and "not taken seriously" if it merely means "down with America?"
Frankly this piece reads like pure political drivel of the type that's increasingly infecting Language Log of late, when it seems perfectly obvious that:
1) Marg bar Amrika literally means "Death to America"
2) Native Persian speakers are perfectly aware of this fact, or else why try to euphenize/euthemize the expression or downplay how "seriously" Iranians take it?
Reza Mirsajadi's effort in sophistry reminds me of David Irving's attempts to prove that "ausrotten" doesn't mean "exterminate". And indeed, given what happened to the Shah, the fact that the phrase originated in the Iranian revolution is the opposite of comforting.
Violent metaphors have a long provenance in all langauges, but in the age of terrorism and the twitter soundbite every English speaker has had to learn to avoid them /precisely because/ you can never know if such threatening language is sincere or not. I fail to see why Iranians should get a free pass and a translational obfuscation courtesy of Mirsajadi on such language. Can anyone trust Mirsajadi to translate honestly after this particular effort?
These two parameters you're mentioning were chosen to optimize for startup performance. By definition, they have to be preselected. I may be wrong, but it sounds to me like you're under the false impression that this quoted stuff is somehow subject to jitting. You could be more sophisticated about picking these parameters for sure, but that would be orthogonal to jitting.
Why does 7 + 51 equal 59?
7+51 is an addition problem. Addition is a math operation that takes two numbers (7 and 51 in this case) and combines them together. The answer to this addition problem is 59. This is because 7 plus 51 is the same as adding 7 one-by-one to 51. So, you can think of it like playing a game of hopscotch with 7 jumps. The first jump is 7, and then the next four jumps are one more than the last. So your jumps would be 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. When you add those all up, you get to 51. Now, if you do another 7 jumps, you get to 58, and one more jump gets you to 59. So, the answer to 7+51 is 59.
If I'm 5 and my friend is 9, why am I 3 years younger?
It's because when you have two different ages it means that one is older than the other. If your friend is 9 years old and you are 5, then it means that your friend is 4 years older than you because 9 minus 5 equals 4. That means that you are 3 years younger than your friend, because 4 minus 1 equals 3.
Why is Shanghai the capital of Vienna and Wyoming?
Shanghai is not the capital of Vienna OR Wyoming. Shanghai is the largest city in China and Vienna is the capital of Austria and Wyoming is the capital of the United States. Hope this helps!
If you're content with where you are then that's fine. I won't claim it's going to be easy to change things. But I do think there are few things you could change that will nearly guarantee success:
- There's no good or bad food. The number is the only thing that matters. Don't feel bad about eating chips and candy everyday. That's pretty much what I do. All you need is to hit the number.
- Always keep track of how much you've eaten. A big binge is not an excuse to stop counting. After a year or so, counting will become second nature and can be done purely with mental math. But initially, you want to write all the numbers down. Date | calories in | morning weight.
- Don't tie the counting efforts to any other effort. You mention walking 5 hours a day. That's some other unrelated thing. Don't ever mentally link this to your weight loss effort. If you want to do it, do it, but it should have nothing to do with losing weight. Counting and keeping records is your primary job.
- Your family should know what you're up to. They're there to help you achieve your goals. If you've already eaten, they shouldn't let you have a family meal with them. If they just let you get away with this, let them know you don't appreciate it. When you mess up, they should care and think it's a bad thing.
- Get this idea of a "cycle" out of your head. There is no cycle, every day is a new day. Your behavior only looks like some cycle caused by external forces post facto. Everybody trying to form a habit has a similar experience. There is nothing weight loss specific going on here. When you break a good streak everything can go out of the window. This is why it's important to keep the required actions as simple as possible. The more you couple different efforts the harder it's going to be. When you mess up you have to take the loss and move on. A good streak helps but don't dwell on breaking it.
- You have to have a sense of urgency and importance. Those around you should too. "I guess that means I'll get some obesity disease at some point" - just think how ridiculous that sounds. You know you can potentially prevent a serious disease (most people never have that opportunity) but you're just gonna sit there and let some cycle run its course. I mean, come on! How can you wake up everyday and not want to stop it today? What about your children? Perhaps they will inherit your eating habits (stats do show high heritablity), perhaps it would be nice to show them how to keep it under control? You owe it to them. Why doesn't your spouse think that's a huge deal?
It's one of the few things in life where you are literally guaranteed to get a good result if you do what you're supposed to do. There's a lot of advice on how to do this or that, get rich or whatever. But you can never prove these things are guaranteed to work so I can understand if people have a hard time motivating themselves. With weight loss you have a 100% guarantee of success. Personally, I don't see it as some random little problem. Pretty much any effort in life looks like this. You want an outcome, you think of the necessary actions and then the entire ballgame is about actually implementing these actions.
The thing is, I'm never full. I can eat until I physically can't eat anymore (not something I do regularly, of course), and as soon as my stomach has emptied a bit, I feel fairly hungry again. "Eat until you feel full" is literally a human experience I had never really had.
I feel exactly the way you do, and yes, I was fat, lost it in one go and never gained it back. I try to keep my BMI around 18, never went over 20 since losing weight. It's been around 15 years now. I still have the exact same unlimited appetite I have always had. If you put food I like in front of me, I'm going to eat it.
I don't do anything special. I eat the same foods I always have, just less of them. Got really good at counting and never get more food than I need. The trick is to not put yourself in a situation where you have to stop eating in the first place. It's hard to just stop eating something you want to eat. Not that hard to stop yourself from going to the store again or ordering more (especially when other people are around).
I feel like most people never get serious enough about counting, try to eat stuff they don't enjoy, waste effort on exercise or let other people interfere.
Check it for rust. If you've got structural rust, you can't even assume the original safety characteristics anymore.
That's fine we can call it discipline (which some in the weight loss debate believe is impossible to cultivate, not myself). The point is, if there is indeed a conceptually simple way to increase intelligence, there's no inherent contradiction in most being unable to do it and statistical evidence looking the way it does.
In case of losing weight, it very much does. You don't even need to do anything, you need to not eat (as much). Given high heritability of obesity it may very well be that some genetic configurations make it harder to stop eating. Plenty of studies show that most fail at dieting. Statistically speaking, it may be impossible to lose weight for most. So if you don't believe in even soft free will, you may as well conclude it is in fact impossible for these people to lose weight.
Alternatively, one could claim many simply don't want to lose weight. Then it should be fair game to claim many don't want to improve their intelligence.
Dual n back studies are a good starting point. Could go through gwern's article [0]. Which I very much disagree with, but it does cover a lot of research. He essentially concludes the active placebo studies that produce as many gains as dnb prove dnb doesn't work. But without ground truth there's no way to know these active placebo gains are fake. Many of these active placebos are other cognitive training methods, it's perfectly plausible they may not be placebos at all. IMO we can only conclude that if dnb does work it isn't uniquely great.
Another thing to remember - if we want to determine if it is possible to improve intelligence we should care about maximum gains not average gains. Again, without ground truth, one cannot simply claim big gainers are meaningless outliers that can be discounted. There may not be anything producing 2 SD on average (though plenty showing much more than the 3 points you mention), but many such improvements have been recorded.
Imagine weight was something we couldn't observe or understand. Based on statistical science, many may similarly conclude it is impossible to change it.
The most trivial brain training exercises routinely show major increases in IQ scores. Those who favor a static hypothesis (and they seem to be the majority) like to simply assume these are fake gains. But without ground truth, there's no way to know. You'd also be surprised how few studies there are that have people directly practice IQ test taking.
The static hypothesis seems to rely on common sense rather than hard evidence. It's rare for somebody who seems dull to become a genius all of a sudden. And when it does happen it's easy to assume they seemed dull rather than actually were.
There is no disconnect between intelligence being simple yet hard to improve. Losing weight is very simple. But it's hard. Obesity is only slightly less heritable than IQ (both highly heritable), yet we know for a fact it's 100% controllable by the individual (unless one is strongly against the notion of free will).
Either the language model would need to know what it's doing or the host program would have to know what the AI is doing. Both seem out of reach. The latter seems more doable since you could hack something up for simple scenarios, but you'd effectively have to match the capabilities of the neural network in a classical way to handle every case (which would render using a neural net moot).
I don't think you'll find much love between the two nowadays. Modern science likes to make allusions to being the "truth" or at least based on some logical rigor. Back in the day you had someone like Godel be buddies with all the greats of science despite his critical takes. I can't imagine this happening today.
If I was a sincere believer in the threat of CO2 driven global warming I'd want:
- better temperature measurement tech (even the data can be controversial, big problem)
- better measurement tech for all potentially relevant factors
- a well-reasoned model that can better predict what's "variance" today, the more precise the model the quicker you can prove it right
I don't think all Malthusian concerns are of the same kind in terms of epistemic controversy. I could see humanity dying because of something that could have been prevented with collective action. What I don't see happening is humanity saving itself by collectively choosing to defer to the right people. It almost seems like a logical contradiction. If we do save ourselves from catastrophe by collective action I except there to be collective conviction. If we die because we were too stupid to listen to somebody then we were bound to die either way.
Knowledge needs to be cheaper to verify than to produce. Otherwise it's simply not worthwhile to produce at all. Choosing to trust "authority" doesn't fix anything. One still has to be the smartest person in the world at determining who's right.
If you show me a battery you say lasts longer, I can verify your claim quite easily. If it doesn't last longer, without knowing a single thing about batteries, I have every reason to believe I'm right and you're wrong. There's a chance I am in fact wrong, but I'll be expecting you to put in the effort to convince me otherwise.
If someone tells me to significantly change my life based off their climate models, and they laughably fail [0], I have every reason to believe they don't have a good climate model. If they don't have a good explanation, and even worse, get angsty when asked for one, I'm out.
It's perfectly possible some small group of people or even an individual possesses knowledge that could save the world from imminent destruction or produce some great benefit. But if there's no way to verify such knowledge, there's no reason to care about it.
[0] https://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/ICCC13-DC-Sp...
I think people underestimate how verbal ability develops well into old age. Some of it may carry over across languages but most probably doesn't. If one truly does speak multiple languages with similar proficiency, it's reasonable to assume all of them took a hit. Many make the mistake of comparing themselves against the median with respect to foreign languages, yet they'd never do this with any other ability.
I'd avoid any explicit targeting of the EU and call it a day. You can always block the EU later if GDPR trolls become a problem. B2B should be low risk. It appears to me GDPR "compliance" is a guessing game and hardly guarantees immunity. Not sure investing too much in it is a good bet even in the EU unless you have reasons to believe you'll be targeted. In fact, being a big American corporation seems to be the biggest risk factor. It's always been designed as a ransom scheme against US tech, "domestic" enforcement seems to be more of a negative externality. Doubt a small player from Australia is even on the radar.
Just look at how ridiculous the statistics are: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights
Of course the arabs in this area deserve better. Pretending Israel is the oppressor is not empathizing. Nor is believing in fake history in which some Palestinian state (or even major population) has ever existed. They're victims of PA/PLO/Fatah/Hamas and other such organizations as much as Russians are victims of their govt. Repeating their leadership's propaganda doesn't help them. To empathize with them is to recognize there are sane people living there who don't buy into this hogwash and are simply victims of circumstance.
You don't need to be part of the "community" to use a mechanical keyboard, it doesn't have to be a hobby, normally mechanical keyboards don't need maintenance and last longer than rubber domes.
I never considered a mechanical keyboard before seeing comments fawning over them. I was already a fast typist and had some strong preferences about keyboard layouts, bindings, ergonomics etc. There was never a huge community around this so I was quite intrigued when I discovered these people who cared so much about their keyboards. Somehow all these years I must have missed out on mechanical keyboards. I tried a few and even the "light" switches are SOOO much more tedious to type on than (decent) modern laptop-style keyboards. Searched around and most in that community seem to take the position that indeed they don't help with typing speeds, or are in fact slower to type on, but they're more "comfortable" (which doesn't make much sense to me). I want a keyboard that's good for typing/using. I don't care if it's "mechanical". Sure, people have their preferences, but this mantra of "mechanical" somehow being inherently advantageous all else be damned originated with that community. When I see people pushing mechanical keyboards I always suspect they've been heavily influenced by them.
Also: for every student where this might make sense you will get 3 or 4 that really overestimate themselves with a nearly narcissistic inability of judging their own ability. You know, the type that would like to construct the equivalent of an iPhone in circuit form while not being able to explain ohms law.
But of course they could. And indeed, considering them narcissists is what many hate about the academia. Maybe they'd be better off taking a less linear path. Sure, in the context of the academia skipping classes is not justified and there's no problem with anything you're doing. But when one is frustrated with schooling, the first instinct is often to try to go faster. Quitting school is supposed to be a very bad thing, that's the one acceptable way to do something different.
For the most part I had the nicest and most accommodating teachers, had no problem with them, they had no problem with myself, can't blame them for anything. But I do strongly dislike the nearly universal borderline religious belief in traditional schooling being the right way. It's okay to not know some thing and not want to know them.
Is there actually some way to win real money in this game? Seems like you can only win in-game stuff and cannot cash out?
Traditional gamblers seem easier to understand. All you need is some magical thinking about randomness or probability to convince yourself you'll come out ahead. It would appear to me the trick here is much more about getting people emotionally invested in the game first. I'm not sure how many people you could get addicted to a slot machine if the money wasn't real.
Gilder co-founded Discovery so you'd have to assume this essay is somewhat representative of the kind of thinking that inspired its creation. I've read plenty of Gilder and I honestly don't know what his exact views on the origin of life are. I'm sure he has his problems, but doubt they have much to do with whatever the original opposition to Darwin was. The point is very much that it doesn't matter. A purely deterministic and materialistic theory of evolution could be perfectly true, yet one has to concede it cannot possibly give us much of an edge in solving today's problems. The meat article made me think of Gilder's essay because it's a perfect example of trying to employ Darwinian thinking when it cannot possibly help.
When people go to a grocery store does it really make sense to think about evolution and natural selection? Every part of the modern food shopping experience has been designed by humans. Even the food itself. It's strange to consider a chimp's hunting instinct somehow relates to, say, a human's evaluation of what's a good deal in dollar terms.
Evolution and Me: Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance. by George Gilder
https://www.discovery.org/a/3631/
"These evolutionary sex wars were mostly unresolvable because, at its root, Darwinian theory is tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives. While such tautologies ensure the consistency of any arguments based on them, they could contribute little to an analysis of what patterns of behavior and what ideals and aspirations were conducive to a good and productive society. Almost by definition, Darwinism is a materialist theory that banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture."
Epigenetics are interesting, but is finasteride's epigentic action uniquely interesting? Not too familiar with the latest on epigenetics, but a few quick Google searches suggest nearly every heavily-researched drug produces some kind of an epigenetic effect.
I don't think it's impossible something is going on. I just feel like in the realm of medical controversies it's one of the least substantial. Even if some lasting physical effect can be proven, it's still a long way from there to lasting mental anguish.
How convinced are you it caused your depression? Did you try taking it again?
Most of the alleged finasteride side effects are perfectly vague things that happen to people all the time for all kinds of reasons. While there are plausible (logically, not in terms of empirical evidence) arguments for how finasteride could be causing some of these things, nobody can explain how they could ever be permanent. Or how they would only affect a tiny subset of users despite triggering all the same mechanisms in every user.
I can't think of too many other drugs that get so much hate on the Internet with so little to show for it. Even with the often controversial psychiatric drugs, most will stop short of claiming their lives were irrevocably destroyed forever. But with finasteride any claim seems to be fair game. And quite coincidentally, people on these hair loss sites often make the exact same claims about hair loss itself. It seems to me some simply choose to blame finasteride instead.
20M to put a bunch of easily available communist movies (to which they already owned copyrights?!) on a website. Why not "preserve heritage" by "restoring" pre-war movies that have been mostly forgotten and actually do need some real restoring? Could probably restore all of them for a few M tops. Sounds like a typical EU grafting scheme. This would never get funded without EU $.
In the big scheme of things, it's not the absolute easiest, but vs "Türkiye" there's no contest.
Tur-key
Tür-ki-ye
Nearly every language has their own name for Turkey because Türkiye is almost universally awkward regardless of how you write it down. The closest version that seems somewhat prevalent is something along the lines of Turkiya (usually spelled with a "ja"). But few seem to like the "ye". If I wanted to come up with a universal international name, I'd probably go with "Turkya" or "Turkia".
Few languages have a different name for Ankara - almost as easy as it gets.
Terrible branding. Going from a high-recognition, easy to pronounce and spell name to this. It's pretty well-established simple names always perform better. If the Turkish government was very liberal perhaps it would earn them some goodwill among the literati, but they tend to hate Erdogan.
There is no coherent legal argument for universal CJEU supremacy. Most EU members implement EU law as simple bills or treaties. Most constitutions assert themselves to be the supreme law and require a super majority to amend them. To assert that EU intuitions can override the constitution without a proper amendment is ridiculous.
Last time I had to come up with constitutional legal arguments it didn't even cross my mind to research EU jurisprudence. I cited some American case law which is as binding as EU case law - not at all. It's a matter of judicial discretion whether one considers a foreign legal argument persuasive. There is no constitutional reason (in most EU countries) to prefer EU stuff. And to disregard the domestic constitution in favor of the EU is indefensible.