I am not a traditional anything, but the usefulness of the concept of "demon" - as the personification of a vice, or misfortune, or cultural problem, or even mental illness - is shown I think by its durability across traditions as a useful explanatory model (and a metaphor.) They exist like an uncollapsed wave function - you will never meet one, so the validity of its existence" is always somewhat unclear, but it can be very useful to act as if it is quite real.
My experience is the opposite - kids have a natural sense of fairness, which is of course heavily bent by self interest. Assuming you yourself are not transparently full of sh_t, you can usually get them to appreciate your position if you can explain it to them on their level.
Adults, having the advantage of decades to cultivate our twisted bonsai tree neuroses, can be literally impossible.
Some of this can last into adulthood—a common problem for small business owners and contractors is charging too little, because they know their costs and time and what a fair price seems like it should be.
They have to have that innate child’s sense of fairness trained out of them. The notion that “what the market will bear” is fair rather than (often) screwing people over is something that has to be taught, more often than not, from what I’ve observed.
This has been the winning strategy so far, as using the map (theoretical model) leads to excellent agreement with experiment, while the territory (ground level reality) steadfastly defies common sense interpretation.
Well let me know when someone reproduces someone else's time traveling experiment. Until then I'm going to bet that the plethora of (untested, often philosophical) exotic QM interpretations are based on an incomplete model and are as misguided as they seem.
The problem with QM isn't that it isn't predictive, but that people in the field often seem incredibly sure of fundamental nuances of reality that have never been experimentally tested.
>Some legitimate references were also lost, meaning they were not present in the metadata.
It's possible that some of the inconsistency between metadata and text could just be due to incompetence - it's harder to find a profit motive for dropping legitimate citations. Why wouldn't this sort of metadata auto-generated from the text (aside from enabling fraud, of course)?
Which is harder to detect: replacing reference 17 with the one you're trying to pump, or adding reference 35 when the bibliography in the original paper clearly stops at 34?
Do you think that mathematicians are drama queens because "2a = 4, solve for a" is a "math problem"? Just because something is intuitively simple doesn't mean that you don't have to account for it in a formal system. The intuitive solution for a lot of simple questions is incorrect in some cases. (How do you determine the length of a word?)
In your example, "here" is semantically different from the "here" in the answering machine case and doesn't result in a paradox.
You probably haven't thought deeply about the problems. Usually they expose some issue with our concepts or assumptions. Things we take to be obvious and simple aren't always on careful reflection.
On the one hand, these puzzles often arise as counter-examples to a theory within analytical philosophy, and unless you understand what they are a counter-example to, they seem pointless and even ridiculous. For example, when Russell posed his famous paradox to Frege, he was not trying to find out who shaves the barber.
On the other hand, perhaps we should consider whether analytical philosophy, following the linguistic turn [1], is creating problems for itself when it tries to find metaphysical truth by analyzing human language as if it were a formal system. For example, when David Chalmers says "even God could not create a male vixen", is he mistaking an accidental lexicographical fact for a metaphysical insight?
This may be true, but if it is the canadian journal of philosophy is doing their reputation no favors by publishing the "answering machine paradox". Paradox. Paradox. That's a funny word, isn't it? Paradox.
No, that's pretty much what the word "paradox" used to mean, but logicians of the late XIX–early XX century had hijacked it.
PARADOX, in philoſophy, a propoſition ſeemingly abſurd,
as being contrary to to ſome received opinion, but yet true
in fact.
No ſcience abounds more with paradoxes than geome-
try: thus, that a right line ſhould continually approach
to the hyperbola, and yet never reach it, is a true para-
dox; and in the ſame manner, a ſpiral may continually
approach to the point, and yet not reach it, in any number
of revolutions, however great.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1771,
Vol. 3, p. 455
I was being glib, of course. Presumably there's some legitimate technical philosophical issue, and actual philosophers are capable of using answering machines and even landline telephones without having all their assumptions about reality collapse around them like a PKD novel (those born prior to 1980, anyway). But, like Jay Z, I've got problems of a more pressing nature, and legitimately don't see how this matters.
(See also the 'Problem' of Induction, which I had to spend a great deal of time on in college, and even after reading centuries of debate about it, is the least problematic 'problem' I've ever encountered. Maybe this is a linguistic issue, and philosophers should stop calling things 'problems' when the rest of us have to make rent.)
The implication here seems to be that people can't think about and discuss philosophical problems and also take care of more immediate physical concerns at the same time. Do you feel that way about other intellectual endeavors without immediate applications, like "pure" science and mathematics?
>But what this simple experiment demonstrates is that Llama 3 basically can't stop itself from spouting inane and abhorrent text if induced to do so. It lacks the ability to self-reflect, to analyze what it has said as it is saying it.
>That seems like a pretty big issue.
I would argue that LLMs are artificially _intelligent_ - this seems an easier argument than trying to explain how I am quite clearly less intelligent than something with no intelligence at all, both from a logical and an self esteem-preservation standpoint. But nobody (to my knowledge) thinks these things are "conscious", and this seems fairly uncontroversial after spending a few hours with one.
Or is the subtext that these things should be designed with some kind of reflexivity, to give it some form of consciousness as a "safety" feature? AI could generate the ominous music that plays during this scene in The Terminator prequel.
"NPR goes woke, loses listeners" is a great viral narrative, but I think it's causally backwards. NPR, like every media entity, is now in constant completion with endless social media influencers pretending to be rich, videos of every possible permutation of interspecies baby animal cuddling, tweaking Minecraft streamers, logorrheic racists and paranoid schizophrenics with enormous research budgets, an infinite amount of disturbing pornography beyond the nightmares of de Sade, ISIL/Los Zetas beheading videos ... all of this I can personally attest to, and rumor has it that on the very darkest corners of the web there exists video of Ben Shapiro rapping. There is no such thing as "the news" anymore, it is just one niche in the monolithic media marketplace in ferocious completion for your drooling, doomscrolling attention, and "sober presentation of the facts" has never gotten anyone to bang that subscribe button.
Now, I don't listen to NPR anymore, and it is for exactly the reasons described, but my media consumption at this point is limited to 3blue1brown videos (veritasium can sometimes get a bit sensationalistic). Outrage politics and in group/out group signalling is a perfectly valid competitive strategy in the modern media monomarket, and the Old Media graveyard is littered with previously esteemed names in journalism who were too principled to let trending Twitter narratives drive their reporting.
Marius and Caesar were populists. Having leaders (who are frequently themselves of the elite class) is almost a prerequisite, or else you've drifted into anarchism.
They were demagogues and elitists (and dictators, actually literally).
They made promises they knew couldn't be fulfilled or without nefarious consequences to the Republic.
They made exalted ridiculous promises to the public as an excuse to acquire more power for themselves. At the other end of the spectrum, Populism seeks to directly distribute power.
I have questions/concerns.