> Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.
Yes, that is a possibility, but it's also an entirely ridiculous argument to make to argue against veganism. If you want to argue that the nervous system is just a more specialized version of other tissue and consciousness could therefore, in principal, arise in any kind of organic matter, or inorganic matter even, then one obviously can't prove that statement wrong, but it also seems to entirely miss the point given our current scientific understanding. Obviously humans cannot live in a way that completely avoids any (theoretical) harm to our environment, but veganism is by far the dietary choice that minimizes suffering in this world (though there do exist differences in the kind of vegan diet with regards to its environmental impact).
Five years ago or so I decided to study some history and I've been reading roughly 5-8 history books a year (mostly history since the industrialisation) and it has completely changed the way I read and contextualize news. I feel that I'm in a much better position to filter out the noise and to grasp the significance of some news that really contribute to major trends. This is on top of generally completely transforming my view of the world, can highly recommend anybody who wants a better understanding of our world to get into history.
Well with respect to Go the fundamental difference afaict is that you can apply self-supervised learning, which is an incredibly powerful approach (But note e.g. that even this approach wasn't successful in "solving" Starcraft). Unfortunately it's extremely difficult to frame real-world problems in that setting. I don't know anything about protein-folding and don't know what Deepmind uses to try to solve that problem, so I cannot comment on that.
It never ceases to amaze me what you can do with these transformer models. They created millions of potential solutions for each problem, used the provided examples for the problems to filter out 99% of incorrect solutions and then applied some more heuristics and the 10 available submissions to try to find a solution.
All these approaches just seem like brute-force approaches: Let's just throw our transformer on this problem and see if we can get anything useful out of this.
Whatever it is, you can't deny that these unsupervised models learn some semantic representations, but we have no clue at all what that actually is and how these model learn that. But I'm also very sceptical that you can actually get anywhere close to human (expert) capability in any sufficiently complex domain by using this approach.
Not sure about the points of failure, but according to [1] only four deployment stages remain. So the large majority of point of failure should have been passed already.
Given that this will be at a distance of more than a million miles from earth, I would assume that missions to repair the telescope are likely not an option. So how long is jwst expected to live? Is it extremely unlikely to collide with any objects at such a distance from earth?
I disagree, over the summer they aimed for low infection rates, explicitly coupling openings to certain infection rate thresholds, knowing full well at that time that the virus was going to be endemic and without any good reason at all believing that sufficiently many people would be vaccinated in order to contain the pandemic in the winter. Other countries such as France or the Britain simply didn't care about high infection rates over the summer and face a smaller wave this winter.
Another factor is that the German government tried to keep infection rates low at all times, leading to very little natural immunity in the population compared to other countries.
I agree that it's easy to say this here, but I still fail to see what example a VC would want to set by doing what Draper has done here. Is this supposed to show that he's standing behind his founders even if they commit fraud? There's a huge difference between being founder friendly and doing what Draper did imo.
I didn't find the right video earlier. This was actually what I was looking for and since he said in the more recent video that he hasn't changed his mind on this, he probably still feels that Holmes is in some way a victim in all of this: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/05/10/vc-draper-theranos-fou...
Draper actually continues to back her [1], recently (2019 tbf, but after the release of the Carreyrou book) claiming that Theranos has opened the door for other companies to make progress in the blood test area.
Even if you use existing implementations, you can still use them in the wrong way and really screw up. Knowing how to correctly use implementations and what mistakes to avoid should be required for anybody using cryptography and that takes some familiarity with the material.
This gives a much better view into what everyday life must have been like at that time, it almost reminds me in some ways of movies such as Koyaanisqatsi.
If you regard affirmative action as more fair than an admission system based on merit, please tell me in what sense you consider it fair that the more qualified person loses out because of their ethnicity? There are literally hundreds of Asian students who completely dedicated their youth to the goal of making it to an elite US university and then you're rejected because your acceptance would violate some quota... that just seems incredibly absurd and cruel to me. Not even speaking of the negative societal repercussions that such actions will have.
I don't understand the argument of people who partly justify affirmative action in college admissions with the lack of a perfect meritocracy. So just because the ideal of a perfect meritocracy is illusive, decisions shouldn't primarily be based on merit anymore?
Can you explain why? Maybe I'm missing a lot here, but what is spacex going to do to justify a valuation of, say, $200m over the next 20 years? If starlink succeeds it might be able to capture probably no more than 5% of the Isp market, which will probably correspond to around $50bn of revenue in a year in a couple of years. The satellite launch market is currently around $5bn a year, I think, or spacex currently has revenues of that amount and I've heard Musk say that he expects that part of their revenue to roughly top out at that amount. Even if that industry, say, doubles in the next 20 years, that's not that much revenue to warrant a >$200bn valuation. Most of the other potential revenue sources are all in theory highly lucrative, but I would seriously doubt that spacex would see any significant revenue from a colony on the Moon or on Mars in our lifetime, though I might just lack the imagination. Can you explain why you would want to own this company?
It does apply to modern day humans in some aspects and is a reason for a lot of misery and suffering in our world. Obviously I'm not saying that we have a lower quality of life than our hunter and gather ancestors, but a lot of the things that go against our evolutionary environment are the direct causes for much of our suffering. But going back to the actual argument, the the degree to which our lives differ from that we evolved in is obviously much smaller than for livestock.
Yes pretty much all of the above. Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel. Even animals such as cows and chickens have social and emotional needs that were built into them in millions of years of evolution. A couple thousand years of domestication don't turn them into automata that can be treated as a product whose purpose it is to make our food taste a little better, but which we can easily find substitutes for.
Well a good first step would be to accept that societal changes take time to develop. We have made huge progress in areas such as women's rights. Asian immigrants, which were severely discriminated against in the past, have achieved tremendous upward mobility in our society. There are many other areas in which our society has progressed. All of this progress has occurred without any of the radical discrimatory tactics that are used today.
Some, even most, of the goals of that movement are commendable, with the exception of the more idealistic goals such as equality of outcome. What I find worrying, however, are the tactics that are used to accomplish those goals. I find it hard to understand how people do not see how discriminating against other people because of their views is not the right approach to solve discrimination.
I'm also generally sceptical of the current AI hype, but I don't see exactly how these results cut through the hype. Why isn't it seen as an accomplishment that 6% of those systems performed better than an actual radiologist?
It's obviously perfectly fine for you to feel that way about Covid, but in my opinion the correct thing for you to do would be to isolate yourself and try to minimize the chance of being infected instead of wanting further damaging restrictions to be forced on other people (I don't mean relatively non-intrusive measures such as mask wearing, but any form of lockdowns).
As far as I understand this actually would be a catastrophe. One collision creates a lot of debris, which then again increases the probability of further collisions and so on. You have an exponentially increasing probability of further collisions once you have one. In the worst case this could make rocket launches and satellites in orbit impossible.
Who offers those puts? I would imagine that no credible financial institution would do that and hence there would be significant counter-party risk with those puts.