Yet there was zero evidence to suggest it would work for COVID, and people like him going around saying it worked, or they had "good results", based on nothing. Then they caused a shortage of the drug in places it was needed. So he actually caused harm with his BS.
I also got a fairly early strain of COVID and didn't have Ivermectin and I got over it pretty easily too? I just thought I pushed it too hard in the gym and felt a bit tired. My cousin got it, ended up in hospital on Oxygen.
iirc, this is what caused the hype with ivermectin. I went to Fleet Farm and bought several tubes as soon as I read this. Because why not? By the time the Joe Rogan types started talking about it, my stash was already expired. I've periodically taken it when I've been exposed to bed bugs and fleas. And as a preventative thing when I'm going into areas with a lot of ticks. The apple flavored horse paste is nasty.
When you talk about politicians… are you including Donald Trump in that, who said that if you stop testing, we would actually have very few cases?
Donald Trump, who talked about injecting bleach and sunlight into people to treat COVID, doing real time word association instead of educating the public during a pandemic?
Donald Trump, who promoted hydroxycholoroquine as the miracle cure for COVID despite no evidence that it was?
Donald Trump, who had his son-in-law run a team of unqualified volunteers for a “supply chain task force” during a pandemic, who announced that the federal stockpile of medical supplies (previously understood to be available for the states) was only to be used by the federal government?
The pandemic was ended by the vaccine. Donald Trump could take credit for that, but he won’t because his base of supporters is knee-deep in conspiracy theories about it. How sad.
I didn't say the response was perfect and all advice was accurate, but neither is selling bullshit like Ivermectin for COVID with zero evidence it was effective.
It's wild to suggest the best way to deal with the next pandemic is less science, less experts. No it's more science and more experts, that's what's required to solve the next pandemic and climate change, and super bugs and more.
Your comment seems to suggest that we should throw away all knowledge and faith in institutions because the knowledge we had at the time of a very dynamic situation wasn't perfect or to your liking.
It's painful to read honestly.
Next pandemic, we should just try random off the shell treatments until we find something that sticks I guess. Screw the experts?
Not the author of the comment you replied to but I don’t believe that is the point. No one is saying that it is not important to listen to experts, but in fact many experts tried to say these things and were quickly shut down by the main stream media for not going along with what we were supposed to believe.
Versus the experts, politicians, and media who in the exact same time period were still confidently stressing the importance of achieving herd immunity because if you got vaccinated you couldn’t get COVID, and therefore couldn’t transmit it to others.
The issue for me is that comment starts with a lie, the initial clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines were designed to measure efficacy against symptomatic disease, not transmission prevention. Health officials and scientists generally communicated that while vaccines showed strong protection against severe illness that wasn't the scientific consensus. Therefore I never took the vaccine thinking I would never catch COVID, I took the vaccine with the understanding that it would better protect me from the worst outcomes. A lot of people seem to like hearing an "alternative view" because that often suits their own worldview...which is sometimes, the vaccines are a form of population control by the rich elite, or something like that.
So to your point, they absolutely are suggesting we should ignore experts by buying into nonsense and using false claims to question the science behind vaccines and medical trials.
So on March 29th 2021, when the Director of the CDC Rochelle Walensky said:
“Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real world data.”
Or on May 16, 2021 when Anthony Fauci said:
“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community… In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere.”
Or on July 21st 2021 when Joe Biden said:
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
Tell me, exactly what was I supposed to take away from that messaging, if indeed I’m apparently lying?
I suppose Rachel Maddow didn’t say the following on March 29th 2021, while her show was routinely hosting government officials and health experts to talk about COVID:
“Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person. A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else. It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.”
Imagine if Pfizer’s CEO tweeted the following on April 1st 2021:
“Excited to share that updated analysis from our Phase 3 study with BioNTech also showed that our COVID-19 vaccine was 100% effective in preventing #COVID19 cases in South Africa. 100%!”
I must have quite the active imagination to hallucinate these things and arrive at a bizarre conclusion that differs so much from what you recall.
Once again, the answer to these problems is not more bullshit...it's less. As I already acknowledged there were fuck ups, incorrect messaging, and the response had flaws. Yet scientists and medical experts were the best chance we had at getting through it, and they will be instrumental in handling the next one.
The reason you're not dead from Ebola spreading is because scientists know that Ivermectin doesn't work for Ebola, for example.
We're not ready for the next pandemic, we're in a way way worse position and let's say it was an even more serious virus, we're sure as shit not just going to podcast our way out of it next time.
So you’re just going to hand-wave away falsely claiming I’m lying about the experts and media explicitly spreading wrong information under some nebulous belief that putting blind faith in authority is still better than believing anything else?
I might find the whole “scientists know better than you or I do” drivel cute if I wasn’t one myself, or if I didn’t witness my peers repeatedly exaggerating or downright lying because they thought it was for the greater good.
No. Next time people like yourself should listen to what he actually said about certain topics versus what you were told he said by those with an axe to grind. Then you might temper your language and accusations of propaganda, or at least properly aim them in the opposite direction.
Since 2016 I've listened to hundreds of hours of his podcast, maybe more. He is a useful idiot. At this point he has to know that, but continues doing what he does for the money. He is an entertainer and his show is entertaining, sure, but that is all it is. It's not factual, he does no journalism, he will repeat whatever nonsense suits his world view.
I now listen to it just to see what kind of BS I should expect to find in my daily interactions with other "bros. If you think he is offering some kind of alternative view point to the MSM, you've just not realized he is the MSM. He is the "swamp".
Ah, now we get to the crux of it. Despite him being a comedian, who hosts a podcast in pretty much the same format he has since 2009, just doing unscripted long-form unedited with friends and people he finds interesting, and despite him saying ten thousand times he’s not an expert and not to take his advice just because something worked for him:
You’ll now pivot to some narrative that because he’s popular and people might take the wrong message away that he has a duty not to talk about certain things, not have certain people on, have others on to balance it out when someone says false things, push back on his guests and argue with them etc.
Yes, and there are licensed MDs working for RFK specifically to demonize vaccines (while there are many other licensed MDs who see vaccines as being very positive and efficacious). A license doesn't make you right.
It's not about lack of knowledge, it's greed. For doctors with flexible morals, garbage medicine is a shortcut to wealth.
Since non evidence based treatments aren't covered by health insurance, these practices are cash only. And cash only = $$$ because the doctor is getting the full payment and not just a fraction of it.
Dr. Oz is a good example. He was a CT surgeon at Columbia, which is considered the mecca for American CT surgery. But even if you are at the very top of your field as a doctor, there will be a cap on wealth, and you will never find fame. Oz gave up surgery, started hawking essential oils and is now very likely the only CT surgeon in the country with a net worth in the 9 figures.
They definitely will. JP Morgan for example charges SOFR+1.85% for 10M+ accounts[0], which is better than the mortgage rate they offered me. Or depending on what you mean by wealthy, you might be able to afford having someone get you a better deal by trading on the markets (e.g. selling SPX box spreads) assuming you don't have the expertise to do that kind of thing yourself/aren't interested in doing your own wealth management.
Why would you borrow money and use it to buy a house and leave it vacant? Now you're paying interest on top of everything else. Do you think wealthy people just light money on fire for no reason?
If there are more buildings than people who want to live in them, then the owners have no leverage. They have to compete for renters. You make that happen by building more housing.
But once you own a house, it's in your interest financially to stop others from building them. Either as a bloc or as a massive corporate landlord, pressuring cities to "retain the historic character of a neighborhood".
It's not unreasonable to conclude that humans work the same way. Our language manipulation skills might have the same flaw. Easily tipped from one confabulation to another. The subjective experience is hard to put into words, since much of our experience isn't tied to "syllable tokenization".
In a Chinese room sort of way, sure. The problem is we understand too well how it works, so any semblance of consciousness or self awareness we know to be simple text generation.
Again, there's no real measure for consciousness, so it's difficult to say. If you ask me, frontier models meet the definition of intelligence, but not the definition of self-awareness, so they aren't sentient regardless of whether they are conscious. This is a pretty fundamental philosophical question that's been considered for centuries, outside of the context of AI.
ChatGPT knows about the ChatGPT persona. Much like I know the persona I play in society and at home. I don't know what the "core" me is like at all. I don't have access to it. It seems like a void. A weird eye. No character, no opinions.
To the extent it "knows" (using that word loosely) about the persona, it's deriving that information from its system prompt. The model itself has no awareness.
The sooner we stop anthropomorphizing AI models, the better. It's like talking about how a database is sentient because it has extremely precise memory and recall. I understand the appeal, but LLMs are incredibly interesting and useful tech and I think that treating them as sentient beings interferes with our ability to recognize their limits and thereby fully harness their capability.
Not the parent, but I understood it as them saying that the model has as part of its training data many conversations that older versions of itself had with people, and many opinion pieces about it. In that sense, ChatGPT learns about itself by analyzing how its "younger self" behaved and was received, not entirely unlike how a human persona/ego is (at least in part) dependent on such historical data.
I mean it in the way an Arduino knows a gas leak is happening. I similarly like the Arduino, I know about my persona that I perform. I'm not anthropomorphizing the Arduino. If anything, I'm mechamorphizing me.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in the original link, can you please paste an excerpt?
But thinking about it - how about this, what if you have a fully embodied LLM-based robot, using something like Figure's Helix architecture [0], with a Vision-Language-Action model, and then have it look at the mirror and see itself - is that on its own not sufficient for self-awareness?
Some people will adapt, the same way people adapted to flamebait. But even today new marks still end up taking the bait.
The more annoying issue to me is that the kind of sycophantic writing style seems to end up spreading to all LLMs. Maybe it's because they're all optimizing for lmarena or maybe because all those outputs become part of the training data. But the random bolding/italics, creepy-friendly car salesman vibe seems to be getting more common, and custom prompts seem to be getting less effective at keeping them away.
Maybe this won't be. How long do you think a machine will be able to outdo any human in any given domain? I personally think it will be after they are able to rewrite their own code. You?
Seems like this will be one of the areas that will improve with multi-agentic AI, where groups of agents can operate via consensus, check/test outputs, manage from a higher meta level, etc. Not that any of that would be "magic" but the advantages of expanding laterally to that approach seem fairly obvious when it comes to software development.
So in my eyes actually think it's probably more to do with reducing the cost of AI inference by another order of magnitude, at least when it comes to mass market tools. Existing basic code-generation tools from a single AI are already fairly expensive to run compute wise.
Why not putting it earlier than that. Why not starting and running it's own LLC. I would think when that LLC is bigger than Google it might already be obvious.
A 90 year old is much more physically fragile than a 20 year old. If you hit a 20 year old and they are bruised you get an assault charge, if you hit a 90 year old and they die you get a murder charge, despite using the same amount of force.
I do agree with the sibling post that suicide would be weaponized which is the real problem.
A single comment is not really bullying. Continued harassment is.
And much like assessing how physical violence might contribute to the end result, so could this be actually assessed. I don’t know why people reach for binary classifications strawmans like this.
LLMs are also not understood. I mean we built and trained them. But don't of the abilities at still surprising to researchers. We have yet to map these machines.
I do partially agree. Though, it is at least tractable to understand why a LLM gave a specific output - but perhaps not practical. Understanding how a human arrives at a certain decision (by say simply looking at brain waves) OTOH is not even tractable as of yet.
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