How is this framing unfalsifiable? It is up to you to demonstrate that. Otherwise, I question whether you even understand what falsifiability means and why it is relevant.
Something can be falsifiable without being false. F=ma is falsifiable but not false. With humanities stuff it's less clear cut, but I'm inclined to be skeptical of ideas that explain too many things.
Falsifiability is relevant because I'm not saying the framing is wrong (I'm not even convinced it can possibly be proven wrong), I'm saying it's not very useful. In practice this has the same effect as me saying that "corporate greed" is axiomatic, so blaming it for things is like blaming water for flowing downhill.
It would be much more productive to frame this as an example, say, of market failure. Or a discussion of short-term thinking, or lacking negative feedback. All would be interesting.
PS: the author has now stated his post was AI slop written to make the front page of HN. I feel extremely validated.
> and i don't want to pay my employees to learn, i want to pay them to produce output i can sell.
This can be a bad local optimum. It probably depends on what exactly your business does, but it can make sense to pay an employee to acquire knowledge and skills that are needed in the business. You can't buy this off the shelf in all circumstances. Of course, it also has to make economic sense and be viable for the company. Unfortunately, I often see employees doing things quite badly that they don't really understand because they are not given the opportunity to learn properly. I can't imagine that this burns less money in the medium and long term than giving paid employees adequate space to learn.
I am 40 and live in Germany. In my 20s I was too poor to start a family. Now I live with a woman who has no desire to go through pregnancy and become a mother. There are personal reasons for this, and I do understand them. I like children and would like to be a father. But I work full-time, as does my partner. I'm always busy after work: Riding or wrenching on my motorcycle, cycling, personal programming projects, gardening, etc. Yesterday I spent the afternoon cleaning a carburetor and pressing bearings into wheels. I spend the weekends doing sports or visiting friends. Becoming a father would be like a second full-time job.
I saw a homeless man lying on a patch of grass in a dirty sleeping bag on my way to work yesterday. The idea of bringing a child into the world and exposing it to the risk of ending up in a situation like that just makes me sad. We are currently buying a house. If I could have afforded this ten or fifteen years ago, I might have kids now. Looking back, I'd say I've had enough to do with growing up and providing for myself financially. I simply didn't have the capacity to start a family.
A friend of mine has two children. She barely has enough money and is trying to finish her university studies. Another friend is a chief surgeon and earns so well that his children are not a big financial factor for him. He is divorced from the children's mother and has another partner. Another friend is a pastor and has two children. I guess, for him it was always a matter of course to have children. He is now also divorced, so he no longer lives in the picture-book family world that he probably once dreamed of.
The other people around me are grown-up children like me, who for various reasons did not become parents. One friend of mine is a gay man. His sister is a lesbian. Both much to the annoyance of their parents, who would like to be grandparents. A couple at my office in their thirties mainly play computer games after work and have pets instead of children. One of my best friends is a woman who lives with a trans man. They are currently planning to become parents via in-vitro fertilization, which will cost a total of ~20,000 euros. The world is strange and apparently no longer properly calibrated for having children.
I am glad that there is no more social pressure pushing people into parenthood. But that has to be compensated for somehow and I don't see any socio-political willingness to tackle this. Raising children is a service to society! We cannot expect children to grow like grass in an unattended meadow. If society is not committed to guarantee healthy soil and to water the gras properly, then nothing will grow.
We're doing the homunculus again. Whether you wank into a test tube and add a bit of soil and grass, or sew together parts of a corpse and connect them to electricity: so far, every prospect of fulfilling this dream has turned out to be a delusion. Why should it be any different with the latest manifestation, this time in computational form?
The AGI drivel from people like Sam Altman is all about getting more VC money to push the scam a little further. ChatGPT is nothing more than a better Google. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but so far I see absolutely no potential for consciousness here. Perhaps we should first clarify whether dolphins and elephants are equipped with it before we do ChatGPT the honor.
It's not even trying to be a search engine. It can use them, but if that's what you think of them as, you're missing most of the cool stuff they can do.
> Perhaps we should first clarify whether dolphins and elephants are equipped with it before we do ChatGPT the honor.
Before either of those, we need to understand the question. Humanity uses the word "consciousness" for far too many things right now: some of these things, AI have had for a long time; others of which can never be had by anything, including humans.
I use search engines to get answers to questions and I use ChatGPT to get answers to questions. Except I can just ask ChatGPT like I would ask a person, whereas the search engine is more like a keyword search in a library catalog.
> Before either of those, we need to understand the question.
I don't think you can approach consciousness in this way. It's a bit like trying to derive Modus Ponens from propositional logic. I'm not sure if this comparison fits well, but I'm very skeptical that there is even a question to be explored that can be answered positively. Perhaps consciousness ultimately defies definition because it operates as a universal negation. It points to everything else and says: “I am different from that!”
There are other terms that defy definition rather stubbornly: Love, art, intelligence, nature, happiness, beauty, ... So it's not that unusual. My skepticism towards conscious AI comes from the fact that I don't want to take the lack of definition as an opportunity to hastily interpret the undefined into all kinds of phenomena, even if it seems tempting. In the end, it is probably an illusion.
> I see it as the gateway to people realizing that the left/right 1D line, and even the political compass, are ridiculous.
When this theory is used in discourse, it is always a matter of suggesting that the left fringe and the right fringe are equally to be rejected. Stalin and Hitler, communism and fascism, class struggle and racial theory, Das Kapital and Hitler's Mein Kampf, dictatorship of the proletariat and Nazi dictatorship: the righteous liberal democrat must keep his distance from both extremes in equal measure. The golden path lies in the balanced middle. I am tired of criticizing this nonsense. It is an ideological lie.
The trident means that there is just as much ideology, corruption, political dysfunctionality and all kinds of drivers of suffering, misery and resentment in the supposed political center. But it is very well hidden because it wears a kind of ideological cloak: the horseshoe theory.
So to respond to your sentence I quoted above: the horseshoe theory IS the political compass that should be ridiculed.
That is true. But the dubiousness of the whole thing starts a long way before that. Why is Musk there at all? Because we are sliding into neo-feudalistic conditions in which a court of the richest people steer the affairs of state and shape them in their own favor. And we've known what Trump is like all along. We didn't have to deduce that from the fact that he is now quarrelling with Musk.
Companies cut costs to increase their profits, not to pass the cost savings on to customers. If there is price pressure, they may pass on the savings. But at the latest when the market is sufficiently consolidated, they will prefer to keep these savings themselves. And even if this were not the case, there would still be no direct implication of affordability.
How do we keep "the incentives [...] properly aligned" when "the government can no longer control the market due to being 'too big too fail' and because it gave all control away"? And why can't I find anything about this in your generic pro-market answer?
My tried and tested remedy for disrespectful dogs is a hearty slap on the muzzle from above with an open hand. They don't expect it and it seems to hurt them quite a lot. I even put a rather dominant Ovcharka female in her place with this. (At the time, I didn't know how hard they can bite.)
Running away is not a good idea. Better run towards the dog. Then it will probably turn around, unless it is really sure of itself. In my experience, being convincingly dominant towards dogs is enough to fend them off. Grab something as a weapon if it helps you to be confident. If the dog bites, it will probably only bite very briefly and then let go again. Holding and shaking people like prey is unlikely if it hasn't been conditioned. I don't know what you can do in this case. Try as best you can to injure the animal. You are also dangerous and should let the dog know.
> In my experience, being convincingly dominant towards dogs is enough to fend them off.
The same holds for most non-herbivores, at least until they're so much bigger than you that they don't have to consider you a threat at all (e.g. brown bears).
There's something of an evolutionary angle to it: a carnivore with even moderate injuries might starve, while a herbivore who doesn't die of infection will probably live (grass has a hard time running away, after all). This makes carnivores way more likely to back off from the possibility of injury, with herbivores more likely to hold their ground or even reflexively go on the attack against an equal threat.
I fended up a genuinely scary pack of dogs with the arms up, yell, and be dominant approach one time. It worked despite being a genuinely dangerous situation. Not long after, I was scared shitless when a rat ran towards me (rather than away), despite me gesturing to it to do the opposite. Literally fled in full flight. Animals are funny.
I think you may have very very nasty suprise in western country. Dogs there NEVER wear muzzle. Plus touching a dog, who has not bitten you yet, is a crime there.
》If the dog bites, it will probably only bite very briefly and then let go again. Holding and shaking people like prey is unlikely if it hasn't been conditioned. I don't know what you can do in this case
Pitbulls have reflex to bite, and hold no matter of what. They were bread to kill bulls this way! Pit will not let go, even when stabbed with a knife!
Owners should carry "break stick", it gets stuffed into mouth to force it open (break the grip). 60% of deaths from dogs in west are because of this reflex! We have no rabies, we have pits!
Yes, I meant the dog's snout. I'm not a native speaker. Whether something is a crime or not is of pretty little interest to me when it comes to an aggressive dog. Last year I had to kick a dog hard and chase it away while jogging in the park. Against whom should charges be brought? I didn't leave my personal details.
Pit bulls are an exception. Most dogs are not pit bulls.
By the way, my life doesn't revolve around attacking dogs. That only happens very rarely here.
I assume they meant muzzle in the sense of snout (even though that's not really accurate). And if a dog is starting to attack someone and they touch it, absolutely no one is going to arrest or prosecute the person for it.
And the owner is going to be a lot more worried about their dog being put down and being in legal trouble themselves.
I'm German and I wish you wouldn't take offense at this “yo yo” word on our behalf. It's not the N-word. There is no wound or trauma here. It's just a word with a history. In the East, we are called Niemcy, Německo, Nimska, etc.: all words that derive from an old attribution that means something like “mute” or “unable to speak”. Is that relevant today? No, it is not! I understand that young people need a cause to stand up and fight for, but language policing is really garbage. Be a socialist instead. Or do something against poverty, homelessness, wars, femicide, racism, ... Take your pick. But please understand that language policing does not change anyone's material living conditions, but is a purely mastorbatory matter. It is the most low-threshold, apolitical and inconsequential way of making yourself feel progressive and standing up for something.
To add to the irony you might call the languages with terms related to the Polish "Niemcy" by another etymologically rich word like German "Slawisch" or in English "Slavic".
