It’s folks like engineers and scientists that insist on being miserable (but correct!) instead haha.
If I think about efficient communication, what comes to mind for me are high stakes communication, e.g. aerospace comms, military comms, anything operational. Spending time on anything that isn't sharing the information at these is a waste, and so is anything that can cause more time to be wasted on meta stuff.
People being miserable and hurtful to others in my experience particularly invites the latter, but also the former. Consider the recent drama involving Linus and some RISC-V changeset. He's very frequently washed of his conduct, under the guise that he just "tells it like it is". Well, he spent 6 paragraphs out of 8 in his review email detailing how the changes make him feel, how he finds the changes to be, and how he thinks changes like it make the world a worse place. At least he did also spend 2 other paragraphs actually explaining why he thinks so.
So to me it reads a lot more like people falling for Goodhart's law regarding this, very much helped by the cultural-political climate of our times, than evaluating this topic itself critically. I counted only maybe 2-3 comments in this very thread, featuring 100+ comments at the time of writing, that do so, even.
People cheer Linus for being rude when they want to do the same themselves, because they feel very strongly about the work being "correct". But as you dig into the meaning of correctness here you find it's less of a formal ruleset than a set of aesthetic guidelines and .. yes, feelings.
After all, that evidence matters, or that we can know the universe (or facts) and hence logic can be useful, etc. can only be ‘proven’ using things like evidence, facts, and logic. And there are plausible arguments that can tear down elements of each of these, if we use other systems.
Ultimately, at some point we need to decide what we’re going to believe. Ideally, it’s something that works/doesn’t produce terrible outcomes, but since the future is fundamentally unpredictable and unknowable, that also requires a degree of faith eh?
And let’s not even get into the subjective nature of ‘terrible outcomes’, or how we would try to come up with some kind of score.
Linux has its benevolent dictator because it’s ‘needed it’, and by most accounts it has worked. Linus is less of a jerk than he has been. Which is nice.
Other projects have not had nearly as much success eh? How much of it is due to lack of Linus, and how much is due to other factors would be an interesting debate.
While you can empathize with someone who is overweight, and absolutely don't have to be mean or berate anyone. I'm a very fat man myself. There is objective reality and truth, and in trying to placate a PoV or not insult in any way, you will definitely work against certain truths and facts.
I don't think I need to invite any additional contesting that I'm already going to get with this, but that example statement on its own I believe is actually true, just misleading; i.e. fatness is not an illness, so fat people by default still count as just plain healthy.
Matter of fact, that's kind of the whole point of this mantra. To stretch the fact as far as it goes, in a genie wish type of way, as usual, and repurpose it into something else.
And so the actual issue with it is that it handwaves away the rigorously measured and demonstrated effect of fatness seriously increasing risk factors for illnesses and severely negative health outcomes. This is how it can be misleading, but not an outright lie. So I'm not sure this is a good example sentence for the topic at hand.
No, not even this is true. The Mayo Clinic describes obesity as a “complex disease” and “medical problem”[1], which is synonymous with “illness” or, at a bare minimum, short of what one could reasonably call “healthy”. The Cleveland Clinic calls it “a chronic…and complex disease”. [2] Wikipedia describes it as “a medical condition, considered by multiple organizations to be a disease”.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/sympt...
[2] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/11209-weight-...
There’s been some confusion around this because people erroneously defined bmi limits for obesity, but it has always referred to the concept of having such a high body fat content that it’s unhealthy/dangerous
[1]: https://obesitymedicine.org/blog/ama-adopts-policy-recognize...
[2]: https://www1.racgp.org.au/ajgp/2019/october/the-politics-of-...
It's so illogical it hurts when they say it.
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/ama/39918
[2] https://www.newagebd.net/post/health/255408/experts-decide-o...
Even if you want to split hairs and say that it should be classified as a “syndrome” instead of a “disease”, it doesn’t make a difference because someone suffering from a syndrome with an unknown pathology is still unhealthy. This isn’t a useful definition because there are many diseases we don’t understand the pathology of, such as virtually all mental illnesses. Furthermore, this definition doesn’t apply to obesity at all because we do know what causes obesity: calorie surplus. The usual counterargument to this is “we don’t know why people overeat” but that’s sophistry because you can always keep asking “why” longer than you can come up with answers. Alcoholism doesn’t stop being a disease just because we don’t know why some people compulsively drink to excess and others don’t, and a guy who drinks a bottle of whiskey every day is not healthy even if he is yet to develop cirrhosis of the liver.
> it was done by a vote of the American Medical Association at its convention, over the objections of its own expert committee convened to study the issue
Yeah, it’s a lot easier for deranged ideologies like HAES to influence a single committee than the entire AMA. This kind of thing is a constant issue and is why I don’t just take institutions and “experts” at their word anymore when they make nonsensical pronouncements.
Once you use a CGM or have glucose tolerance tests, resting insulin, etc. You'll find levels outside the norm, including inflammation. All indications of Metabolic Syndrome/Disease.
If you can't run a mile, or make it up a couple flights of stairs without exhaustion, I'm not sure that I would consider someone healthy. Including myself.
That is indeed how it's usually evaluated I believe. The sibling comment shows some improvement in this, but also shows that most everywhere this is still the evaluation method.
> If you can't run a mile, or make it up a couple flights of stairs without exhaustion, I'm not sure that I would consider someone healthy. Including myself.
Gets tricky to be fair. Consider someone who's disabled, e.g. can't walk. They won't run no miles, nor make it up any flights of stairs on their own, with or without exhaustion. They might very well be the picture of health otherwise however, so I'd personally put them into that bucket if anywhere. A phrase that comes to mind is "healthy and able-bodied" (so separate terms).
I bring this up because you can be horribly unfit even without being fat. They're distinct dimensions, though they do overlap: to some extent, you can be really quite mobile and fit despite being fat. They do run contrary to each other of course.
That's not the actual slogan, or what it means. It's about pursuing health and measuring health by metrics other than and/or in addition to weight, not a claim about what constitutes a "healthy weight" per se. There are some considerations about the risks of weight-cycling, individual histories of eating disorders (which may motivate this approach), and empirical research on the long-term prospects of sustained weight loss, but none of those things are some kind of science denialism.
Even the first few sentences of the Wikipedia page will help clarify the actual claims directly associated with that movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_at_Every_Size
But this sentence from the middle of it summarizes the issue succinctly:
> The HAES principles do not propose that people are automatically healthy at any size, but rather proposes that people should seek to adopt healthy behaviors regardless of their body weight.
Fwiw I'm not myself an activist in that movement or deeply opposed to the idea of health-motivated weight loss; in fact I'm currently trying to (and mostly succeeding in!) losing weight for health-related reasons.
This was my reaction as well. Something I don't see mentioned is I think maybe it has more to do with training data than the goal-function. The vector space of data that aligns with kindness may contain less accuracy than the vector space for neutrality due to people often forgoing accuracy when being kind. I do not think it is a matter of conflicting goals, but rather a priming towards an answer based more heavily on the section of the model trained on less accurate data.
I wonder if the prompt was layered, asking it to coldy/bluntly derive the answer and then translate itself into a kinder tone (maybe with 2 prompts), if the accuracy would still be worse.
Anecdotally, people are jerks on the internet moreso than in person. That's not to say there aren't warm, empathetic places on the 'net. But on the whole, I think the anonymity and lack of visual and social cues that would ordinarily arise from an interactive context, doesn't seem to make our best traits shine.
Even Reddit comments has far more reality-focused material on the whole than it does shitposting and rudeness. I don't think any of these big models were trained at all on 4chan, youtube comments, instagram comments, Twitter, etc. Or even Wikipedia Talk pages. It just wouldn't add anything useful to train on that garbage.
Overall on the other hand, most stackoverflow pages are objective, and to the extent there are suboptimal things, there is eventually a person explaining why a given answer is suboptimal. So I accept that some UGC went into the model, and that there's a reason to do so, but I believe it's so broad as "The Internet" represented there.
Focus is a pretty important feature of cognition with major implications for our performance, and we don't have infinite quantities of focus. Being empathetic means focusing on something other than who is right, or what is right. I think it makes sense that focus is zero-sum, so I think your intuition isn't quite correct.
I think we probably have plenty of focus to spare in many ordinary situations so we can probably spare a bit more to be more empathetic, but I don't think this cost is zero and that means we will have many situations where empathy means compromising on other desirable outcomes.
As far as disheartening metaphors go: yeah, humans hate extra effort too.
An empathetic answerer would intuit that and may give the answer that the asker wants to hear, rather than the correct answer.
You can either choose truthfulness or empathy.
This statement is empathetic only if we assume a literal interpretation of the "do those jeans fit me?" question. In many cases, that question means something closer to:
"I feel fat. Could you say something nice to help me feel better about myself right away?"
> There is no need empathy to require lying.
Empathizing doesn't require lying. However, successful empathizing often does.
The problem is that the models probably aren't trained to actually be empathetic. An empathetic model might also empathize with somebody other than the direct user.