mtgp1000

Perhaps it is because "STEM types" understand the difference in rigor that mathematics affords hard sciences. That's not an opinion.

This is such ridiculous alarmism. This is one of the worst case predictions and is unlikely to occur.

Most likely you'll see gradual migrations over the next 100 or so years away from coastal areas, probably not too much larger than typical migrant and infrastructure turnover.

Please stop relying on journalism to make your decisions regarding climate change. It's pure dogma by completely ascientific liberal arts majors.

If you read the IPCC reports yourself (they're huge but you can read the introductory summaries) they're much less certain about the future. Meanwhile alarmism has a real cost now, if you foolishly allow it to influence policy.

And on the subject of habitability, why is it that media rarely, if ever, runs stories regarding the increase in arable land that comes with thawing permafrost? How much habitable land will be gained from climate change?

And just to emphasize the short sightedness of "banning" fossil fuels as you originally proposed, good luck getting food and medical equipment (and pretty much anything else) to the hundreds of millions of people living in cities without diesel for trucks.

Shutting down petroleum overnight would completely shutter the economy and starve/kill millions of people.

Not all animal species carry the same risk. This isn't about privilege - or at least not anymore. Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved after food shortages and famines caused by e.g. the four pests and such. This is cultural. as are the unsanitary conditions at wet markets, and completely unscientific "traditional medicine" and the common notion that live beings taste better if tortured before death.

Stop bending over backwards to excuse antisocial behavior. Not all cultural practices are positive and need to be celebrated.

I had no idea that all those stereotypes about moonshine turning people blind and/or crazy were real - I guess methanol alcohol was a common enough contaminant in bootleg alcohol during prohibition. And wherever they make moonshine these days, though I imagine even backwoods people are wiser these days.

Edit: it's complicated: https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol-history/prohibit...

It's kind of racist/sexist. Pretty obviously such.

I'm not personally offended but I am bothered by the casual double standard.

In places such as Siberia, a hotter climate can have devastating effects, not just on the local wildlife and people who live there, but also on the world’s climate system as a whole, for example through thawing permafrost, reduced snow cover and melting ice.

My biggest issue with climate alarmism is that sources universally consider only the negative outcomes of climate change. Thawing permafrost also opens up an enormous amount of arable and habitable land. Some species will benefit from warmer temperatures and extended ranges (and that's not just insects).

Not to mention that neither the change or the rate is unprecedented according to geologic data.

The world is very unlikely to end, human migration and economic impact will be gradual (≈100) years, and people need to consider that mitigation of climate change at this point is also not "free" when they ask people to go vegan (yeah, right).

mindless masses

Perhaps you meant this hyperbolically but I do not believe it to be an exaggeration.

What specifically makes them captive

They are captive because of a combination of their ignorance and the network effect. If all of your friends are on Facebook for example you'll have to leave them behind if you delete your account.

How many of them even realize that their worldview is potentially being shaped by the moderation teams of the tech they consume? And what alternatives exist to the major platforms (Facebook, reddit, etc)?

They're effectively a captive audience.

To all of the people who feel similarly, and have problems ruminating:

Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.

Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.

The prompts don't matter if the training data isn't up to par - more importantly I believe the nature of the training is such that the weight activations for the various prompts are unlikely to be independent.

In other words if 20% of your training data is scientific literature, even with appropriate disambiguating prompts the output will still be heavily influenced by the other 80% of your training data.

When you use GPT-3 to generate outputs, you're actually sampling from a learned subset of a super complex, super high dimensional space - and without human knowledge all the neural networks are doing is translating priors (input prompt) into points in the learned space. And the learned space is some complex topology of points between which the net interpolates - it's extremely difficult with current tech to control the shape of this learned space and that shape is influenced by all training data under a scheme like GPT-*.

This was hilarious, but it brings up a serious concern: if you train your AI on a bunch of shallow, clickbaity content from the internet, you're going to get shallow, clickbaity output, like much of the presentation - in other words this isn't just a lack of human knowledge to fill in gaps, the training data sucks because the internet is full of high level garbage dumbed down for clicks.

I believe it may well be possible to train GPT3 to write more accurate technical content with the existing tech and infrastructure, except we don't have a large enough body of technical content outside of academic papers, which isn't the kind of training data you want if your goal is to write prose.

In many ways, ML as it evolves and becomes ubiquitous will eventually become a dark window into the triviality of the average human's existence.

Define misuse.

Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Japanese Empire, Mughal Empire

Imagine, for a moment, that each one of these had nukes. What's the probability they'd use them to make a point as an aggressor/opressor? Even risking MAD?

You don't have enough information to go from this

that's only 80 mental mutations between us and the Homo species that made this axe.

To this

These guys were just about as smart as us.

You don't know how much of an influence any individual mutation could have made. Also there's no reason to suspect more than [or less than] one mutation per generation.

Just look at the range of "gifted" people in our society - mutations which likely enable savants and such. Men like Newton and Da Vinci, if their successes are due to genetic mutations (I suspect to a significant degree this is the case) placed in another time could individually make the difference between a stone and metal age.

Point being, 80 generations of mutation may be enough to drastically change the human mind - especially considering the immense selection pressure for certain kinds of intelligence, which varies with culture and technology (e.g. stone vs metal age).

Edit: I suppose this comes down to how much evolution you believe happens in the form of punctuated equilibria

It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show

I'm pretty sure this is the exact attitude that the poster was describing. You're just blanket dismissing out of mainstream science with accusations of bad faith.

Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.

No no no no no. It's high time we stop treating everything as black and white in this country. It's not just callously disregarding the dead - it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus. And the signal/noise ratio right now is absolutely tiny, especially considering how much damage the media has done by unambiguously turning this into an opportunity to bash Trump. Regardless of how you feel about the presidency, if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests (both left and right) began; and while I do believe it is shameful that we were caught with our pants down, scrambling to gather supplies nearly 3 months late, I'll remind you that so was everyone else.

Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. We also shouldn't be applying the same policies to urban and rural areas.

You know what would really answer this question to me? What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR? That's pretty much worst case exposure and seeing as I haven't heard of doctors dying in droves, I'm inclined to start believing that people do have and/or develop immunity and the fatality/complication rate really is extremely low, for whatever reason. But I need data to be sure.

So tyranny of the majority is fine

Perhaps it is preferable to tyranny by the minority.

authorization" stemming from? Did we explicitly authorize it? Or was it implied by our inaction?

Did you authorize the taxes you pay, or where they go? Isn't this the so called social contract?

And please, my family fled true tyranny, I assure you nothing the US is doing is quite comperable to the CCP. Westerners don't know tyranny. They've grown so comfortable that they can take to the streets for weeks and complain about the very government that supports them.

Try doing that in the USSR or any Chines state outside of Hong Kong or Taiwan.

At some point people become enough of a liability that we collectively as a society have authorized the restriction of their rights.

This is a literally subversive movement. I'm not exaggerating or choosing a side. Watch the livestreams yourself - these people explicitly seek to subvert, dismantle, and replace modern "power structures" (intentionally left vague).

Whether you agree with what these people think they're fighting for, the system has safeguards against such insurrection.

yet you're trying to convince yourself and everyone else that "illegals vote in large numbers"

Not once have I said anything like this. I've been trying to show that it's a valid concern.

tate law prohibits DMV from sending information for AB 60 applicants (undocumented driver license applicants) to the Secretary of State. For other applicants, state law requires each person to declare, under penalty of perjury, that they meet all voter eligibility requirements, including citizenship.

It took some 15 comments and multiple sources before this safeguard was posted - it's not even on the Snopes page. Don't presume I'm arguing in bad faith or dismiss my arguments as "feelings" just because I disagree with you. This is the only snippet in your entire argument that actually prevents illegals from being registered to vote, which was my entire point of contention. Penalties don't matter if no one is enforcing them.

And finally, once again, I'm not suggesting that proof of fraud exists, or is easy to find - what I am saying is that Wapo's laughable absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

That point is not under contention; let me reiterate

the “New Motor Voter Act,” which was passed in October 2015. The combination of these two acts, one allowing undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses, the other automatically registering citizens to vote when obtaining driver’s licenses, sparked fears (which have been periodically resurrected for more than a decade) that California was allowing undocumented residents to vote.

So there is no question that they are registered to vote. The remaining argument is whether they are sufficiently prevent from voting after being automatically registered (failing to opt out by accident or choice.)

Potential voters “have to demonstrate proof of age

But if we are registering people who should not be voting, that's one less safeguard, and now we are relying solely on the good faith of the people at the booths and the illegal/ineligible immigrants who shouldn't be voting.

At what point are you willing to admit that this is a glaring loophole and an opportunity for massive scale abuse? Are we really just going to blanket dismiss any attempt at securing this system as "voter disenfranchisement"?

Illegal immigrants should not be registered to vote. Period. That's halfway to voter fraud - not to mention that there are other types of voter fraud which are being deliberately conflated.

First off, this isn't a "study", the vast majority of journalists are non-technical people with limited understanding of statistics or science.

Second, they looked at 3 states out of 50. Yes I understand that's where the majority of mail in voting happens currently. That's about to change.

Third, they ignored states with larger populations of illegal immigrants.

Fourth, they ignored opt out motor voter laws which, combined with laws which give illegals drivers licenses (in at least 2 states currently) and automatically register them to vote unless they opt out.

Long story short, wapo found what it wanted find, consumers read what they wanted to read.

From Snopes, which generously labels this as "mixture" (because it is also dominated by partisan ideologues)

Some 605,000 undocumented immigrants who live in California were granted driver’s licenses in 2015...took effect on January 2, 2015...(DMV) expects a total of about 1.4 million people will get their license under the law by late 2017.

And here's the fun part

That announcement renewed interest in another California law, the “New Motor Voter Act,” which was passed in October 2015. The combination of these two acts, one allowing undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses, the other automatically registering citizens to vote when obtaining driver’s licenses, sparked fears (which have been periodically resurrected for more than a decade) that California was allowing undocumented residents to vote.

Oh, but don't worry, because as you also indirectly point out:

The law requires that applicants under the Motor Voter Act attest that they meet all voter registration requirements, but critics maintain that the law “lacks the necessary safeguards to keep noncitizens off the voter rolls.”

Which is a winded way of saying these illegal immigrants are bound by their honor to opt out of voter registration and/or not go out and use their IDs [and default registration] to vote.

So despite the downvotes, I'm not the one who has fallen victim to propaganda here. And the same incentive responsible for this kind of blatantly incorrect citogenesis gives cause to people to risk illegally voting against a man who has been painted by this same media as a literal far right white supremacist. And what risk is there, when media and fact check outlets create citations which allow politicians to claim that this isn't a problem, while potentially benefiting from it?

Also I don't appreciate that you've conflated legal and illegal immigration, though in both cases there is clearly potential for abuse. Under Cuomo a similar motor voter law was passed by the way. The Wapo "study" is intentionally myopic.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-motor-voter-act...

The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election.

Oh I see, well, clearly, if officials aren't reporting on it then it's not happening. Wapo and blue check marks make it official.

This logic isn't sound but people are happy to swallow hole anything anti-trump.

Edit: not to mention Colorado, Washington, and Oregon probably don't harbor anywhere near the same number of illegal immigrants as do states like California and Texas where this would be more of a concern.

In fact this whole debate is framed illegitimately. States like California automatically register voters when they receive IDs, they allow noncitizens of any legal status to obtain IDs, and we're supposed to pretend this isn't an avenue for illegal voting? Who's going to report these votes if they ostensibly conform to the California rules? But don't worry, Wapo and Huffpo will run their "analyses" and everything will come back squeaky clean.

We all need to hold all of our sources accountable and examine them critically, even when they tell us what we want to hear.

Wait, so an outlet which is openly at odds with the current administration performed an investigation into claims made by the current administration, found the claims to be false, and we're just going to take the conclusion at face value? Nevermind the fact that this was conducted by journalists (i.e. non specialists who have a propensity for misreporting technical information).

Conspiracy theory...what a convenient dismissal of a potentially genuine problem. All of our institutions are rife with abuse but we're supposed to believe voter fraud doesn't exist because WAPO says it doesn't and, more importantly, because Trump said it does...

Edit: and they apparently looked at 3 states. Unqualified journalists should stay away from statistics or "fact checking" - at this point they are actively harming society with their piss poor, agenda driven "analyses".

There's a difference between ideology and an ideologue. One may believe in something while at least attempting to compartmentalize it's influence over ones work. I feel like that sort of self-restriction is increasingly absent in much of the professional and academic world.

Yeah, sure, everything is political, but that doesn't mean you are obligated to inject your politics into everything.

Came here to make a similar comment. Scientists are not supposed to be activists - focusing on eliminating words that carry stigma from popular (or scientific) use makes me question not just objectivity but qualifications as a scientist.

Is there any space that ideologues haven't infested yet?

I have been trying to educate myself about the topic recently, though, and would strongly recommend looking into some of the excellent work on systemic racism in the US if you’re interested in learning more.

The fact that people write about this doesn't make it necessarily true. You should bear in mind that people are at least partly incentivised to write about this topic because it gives them soft power over individuals and society when it enters the mainstream - regardless of whether it's true. In other words you should recognize that you are potentially consuming propaganda.

The documentary “13th” (available for free on YouTube at the moment), the 2nd season of the podcast Scene On Radio (“Seeing White”), and the book How to Be An Anti-Racist are three things I can recommend based on what I’ve read/heard from them so far.

All of this theory is based on the assumption that any two demographics with different cultures (i.e. with different notions of good/evil and just/unjust, varied attitudes toward the prioritization of work/study/sport, gender roles, etc) are equally suited, on average, for any field where we expect demographic parity. This is a fundamentally unproven modern assumption - and it doesn't make much sense when you consider how much influence culture has over individual interests and practiced abilities.

Now we are extrapolating from this unproven (and I suspect unprovable) assumption and using it as justification for discrimination against whites. Not only that, but we don't even have valid metrics for the degree to which racism influences society - because again there is no scientific justification for equal representation of all demographics in groups of individuals selected by merit.

What you’re calling the “recent forced redefinition of racism” is not especially recent. I first heard this argument around 30 years ago, and at the time dismissed it, but now understand why people want to emphasize that over the definition I recall learning as a child which was structured along the lines of a belief in superiority of one group over another.

If you want to emphasize a new concept, you create a new word, you don't hijack an existing word and use it to denigrate or gain social power over others.

Having a system that is designed and reinforced to encourage disparate outcomes is far more impactful to that group as a whole

Even if it were true, that all, or even the majority, of outcome disparity in modern western society is due to a broken system, that doesn't change the fact that this movement is effectively labeling white people as implicitly, innately, and inescapably evil. Where does it end? Isn't this literally the foundation for violence and atrocity?

Isn't it ironically racist to assign negative properties ("white fragility" and racism in particular) to an entire group of people based on their skin color? Are we really just going to ignore that fact?

The treatment of racism in the book is tantamount to original sin (we are all born as sinners:we are all born as racists [whites only]). This book [and the affiliated movement] is laying the moral foundation for the oppression of white people, who will soon be a majority minority - and already are a minority globally.

What's worse, the very concept of "white fragility" is presented as a Kafkaesque, unfalsifiable trap. If you dare defend yourself against accusations of racism, well, we won't even address whether your argument is legitimate, we just dismiss your concerns as a "fragile whiteness". Just like the recent forced redefinition of racism (privilege+power), it is an intellectually dishonest concept designed to begin any argument from a position of advantage, not to actually communicate anything of substance.

If you replaced "white" with "black" or "Jewish" or any other race, this would be a blatantly, undeniably offensive and hurtful text - yet not only do we champion it, but it is being used effectively as a textbook for ramming diversity and inclusion down an increasing number of throats. The fact that this book is a best seller only proves that a growing faction in society has completely gone off the deep end.

Why are we letting irrational, self hating ideologues influence our society to this degree?