BrenBarn

This is what we get when we go all in on a monolithic bloated platform, and then let its direction be primarily determined by one company. We'd be better off with a simpler, albeit less featureful, platform, or at least one that's more modular.

I mean an obvious reason is that people tend to write rationalist blog posts if they're really into overanalyzing things and if you're into that you're likely to write a lot about what you're overanalyzing.

The real "how" is in the last section: Amazon pushes up prices by being so big that people feel they have to sell there. That is the root of the issue and the place to solve it, by destroying Amazon and breaking it up into small pieces.

In my view all of the conveniences that people are referencing in the comments (e.g., easy returns) are also consequences of that, and they are also bad, in the same way that it is more convenient to eat a bag of potato chips than it is to cook a meal, but the potato chips are worse for you. The convenience derived from large market share (Amazon's or any other similar excessively large market player) is not worth the downsides. We need to rip the band-aid off and accept that less convenience is better.

That isn't a problem with AI writing per se, at least not in the sense that it's a problem in a particular instance of a person encountering the writing. It's a problem with the existence and availability of the tools. I agree it is a problem, though, and it should be addressed by drastically curtailing the development and availability of the tools.

It seems to me there's a massive irony here that the article misses: the education system was supposed to cultivate "moral and cultural formation", "a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian", "religious and moral principles" . . . and the result was an elite that believed above all in the rectitude of its own supremacy and had no scruples about exploiting and oppressing millions of people across the globe. If the purpose of the Victorian education was to produce good people, it failed miserably.

> Also, the salt content was probably higher in the ultra processed foods, and that was not controlled for.

Salt is listed as among the things that was matched between the two meals.

Those are good ideas, but they are ways to prevent wealth accumulation, not to undo it. I think we also need to consider direct transfers of existing wealth to remedy the current situation.

> And our community will need to explicitly re-evaluate its criteria for education, publication, and career advancement, to reflect the "Math 2.0" era.

I think most academic disciplines would benefit from such a re-evaluation. AI is still a scourge on the earth, but I suppose if it spurs such changes that's a modicum of a silver lining.

Take wealth from rich people and give it to poor people. It's simple, although not easy.

Fortunately there's a pretty obvious way to address both those problems at once. . .

Are you saying that because no one told you it was wrong to punch people we should let it slide if you punch someone?

I'd say the problem is that the only way we seem to have to fix these situations is for someone to sue someone else.

There is a difference between "read my content and make it available to your users" and "make money by reading my content and making it available to your users". Terms of use like this are trying to say "we are the only ones who get to make money from this", and therein lies the problem.

I remember getting Tufte's book ("The Visual Display of Quantitative Information") and being really excited because I'd heard all these great things about it, and then being disappointed because it had no real justification for its claims. The "data ink" thing is a typical example. I'm willing to accept the general concept that many graphs are too cluttered. But there's no particular reason to suppose that quantifying the proportion of "data ink" and trying to optimize it is the best way to handle that. A lot of the book is just taking subjective aesthetic judgements and trying to frame them as some kind of objective truth.

If we really wanted reliable guidelines on how to format graphs, we would want to ground them in psychological research that actually demonstrates that, for instance, some versions result in better understanding or recall of certain information. But as far as I can see Tufte's book makes no attempt to do this. (Perhaps he or those who built on his works did it later on?)

A lot of the tests have the form of a goal ("the AI can do X") with a qualifier ("and the AI does not do Y"). I think a lot of the worrisome aspects of LLMs concern these latter qualifiers. We are used to human failure modes and those failure modes are to a large extent embedded in the complex system of physical reality, evolution, etc., giving them a certain stability. The LLM failure modes are often much more surprising. I'd like to see goalposts along the lines "people ask an LLM to do X 1000 times over a period of three years and it never does something bizarrely catastrophic". It's no good having it solve Navier-Stokes as long as it might also do the Huggingface breakout thing.

For me it's more that it doesn't matter whether it works or not, because funneling that wealth into those hands is reason enough to stop it in either case.

"Middlemarch", "Utopia for Realists", and various graphic novels.

Are we taking bets on how long before this gets jailbroken into making political statements?

Because the companies we have are just too big. Constant consolidation has left us with many economic sectors controlled by a small number of large companies, which then in addition exert pernicious influence on politics, etc. It is not healthy for either the economy or our society to have so much of the economy concentrated in such a small number of companies that are so large.

I'm saying destroying large corporations is part of what we need to do to fix things. Current regulations are woefully inadequate.

I'd say yes, but for a different reason. The specific types of systems that are creating problems are the political/economic systems in which these AI companies exist. The types of responses we ought to be taking would destroy not only the AI companies but also basically all other large companies with too much market power in various sectors.

It's science-based in a sense, but a pretty weak sense. I did some work with education researchers and my impression was that their methodologies were quite haphazard and they were sometimes just trying to find a way to "tell a story" that they already had in mind. Also, my impression is that a lot of the research on "best practices" is based on relatively limited comparisons between schools or teaching methods, and there is insufficient evidence that this or that is truly a "best practice" in a more general sense. I also interacted a good bit with education grad students when I was in grad school and they almost uniformly seemed to have no coherent sense of what they were doing or what their field actually knew. I've known people who had similar experiences with education schools elsewhere.

I've also read news stories and stuff that support the idea that a lot of "education education" is of questionable value. This story is pretty old by now but has stuck with me: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-may-10-la-oe-zi... . A relevant quote:

> Of the 1,300 institutions awarding graduate degrees for teaching, Harvard’s director of teacher education told a 2009 conference, only about 100 prepared students for the classroom. The rest, she added, “could be shut down tomorrow.”

Some of these experiences/articles are about teaching K-12 schools rather than teaching college, but there would have to be a pretty huge difference between the two for me to think that college-level pedagogical theory was meaningfully better than that for younger ages, and I've seen nothing to give me that impression.

They seem to test you're American. But really all they do is test whether Google or Cloudflare likes you. Until we have fully open CAPTCHAS (which we may never be able to have, it seems), or a genuinely diverse selection of them (which seems at least theoretically possible), we're just hitching our wagons to these companies' stars.

In my experience a significant proportion of "evidence-based best pedagogy practices" is hogwash. I'm pretty anti-AI, but going against education-school dogma isn't a reason to avoid AI.

> Why check it? It's obviously going to be correct.

And then when you stop checking it, the companies that run the service will tweak the model to benefit themselves in some way, possibly at your expense, and you will be none the wiser.

All the companies trying to get you to use AI are your adversaries. They can and will exploit your use of their systems for their own gain.

> Learning what is acceptable to discard is part of being a student.

You don't learn what to discard if you just have an AI do it for you.

I really hope the interior doesn't look like what the concept seems to show, with a bunch of functionality relegated to screens. Screens are terrible UI for cars.

The land value tax is a good idea, but the pure conceptualization that die-hard Georgists have, in which it's a flat tax, doesn't seem in the same line as the billionaire tax. What'd like is just a (drastically) revised version of Prop 13 in which those protections apply only to the first $N of property value. We can effectively tax the real estate of billionaires without having to tax everyone else. I would like to see taxes on luxury properties approach 100% of the property value, to make it extremely painful for anyone to own such properties, and encourage them to be split up among smaller owners.

I mean I think that points to a related issue of people only focusing on a short-term notion of utility. The point of being a student is largely to learn things that may potentially be of utility to you in some way later, not just to do what meet your immediate needs (in the sense of passing the class).

My point with these arguments is just to say that private property rights are not a steelman for private equity. I'm not saying that these are simple answers to the claim that we need private equity, I'm just saying that the concept of private property is also not a simple answer to the claim that we don't need private equity.

That said, I agree with you to some extent. I think it's not actually so hard to define what I think is bad about private equity, but it's true that that badness is not confined to private equity. In particular I think the distinction between public and private companies is almost entirely meaningless; what we should care about is what companies do, whether they are publicly traded or not. From that perspective private equity is not really different from publicly traded "holding companies" that do basically the same thing.

The crux of it, for me, is companies that are just doing "the business of business", and are not organized around human beings doing things that they genuinely care about and want to do a good job at. You can never run a good company by trying to run "a company", rather than trying to run a steakhouse, or a pet groomer, or a bank, or a car wash, or some particular company that does a particular thing. The problem of both private equity and public "holding companies" is that they value money to the point that they no longer sufficiently value the actual substance of the good or service that the business provides.