Unearth can be used in a literal sense, which in this case is false.
It can also be used in a figurative sense, which in this case is almost certainly true.
2,850 karma · joined May 25, 2012
It can also be used in a figurative sense, which in this case is almost certainly true.
The Q article has exactly two complaints about the facts reported by the media:
1. The media claimed bodies were unearthed, when in fact only scans were taken.
2. The media claimed there were mass graves, when in fact scans only detected masses of individual graves.
However, in "social-panic" style, conservatives are taking these two quibbles over terminology and turning them into an Alex Jones-esque conspiracy to deny the graves existence altogether.
Note also the subtle racism in the article, where they compare a hypothetical instant-response to the murder of white children to the "very odd" response of the first nation people. The implication being that first nations people are incompetent, uncaring, or untrustworthy by not immediately doing a certain kind of investigation.
https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_integration_tests/reports...
The classic example is the "air conditioned room" thought experiment. Imagine feeding an AI model a dataset with a bunch of datapoints like this
Room hot | AC on full blast
Room cold | AC off
Room warm | AC on 50%
Then asking the AI how to make a hot room cold. The AI is very likely to say "turn off the AC" because "AC off" is a feature of cold rooms.
Maybe we think that if we give the AI more information, it could do better. Lets imagine that our room has a window and an oversized AC. We'll now be feeding it info about the source of heat as well as the source of cold, so surely it will get the right answer this time:
Window open | AC on full blast | Room cold
Window closed | AC off | Room cold
Window 50% | AC on 50% | Room cold
This dataset is going to have the AI thinking that neither the window nor the AC impact room temperature, and that you might be able to close a window by turning off the AC.
The key thing to understand is that control loops change the "physics" of your system and that knowledge about the control-physics does not transfer to the uncontrolled-physics.
For a time, this will be true. But at some point a company with an AGI CEO will start winning, and then the tables will turn.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001698629303700...
> Results indicated that parents perceived that their children were experiencing a decline in energy, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation to achieve at high levels and were beginning to disengage from the traditional curriculum [after elimination of the gifted programs].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...
> This review also found that the needs of many gifted and talented students are not addressed in many regular classroom settings across our country... A large body of research supports the finding that various forms of acceleration result in higher achievement for gifted and talented learners.
Jr Engineer: "Hey, I know we've always managed our little dotnet application via email and shared-network-drive, but I've been reading about a thing called "git" that we should probably use."
Sr Engineer: "Change is scary and bad, also we are not a software company. We're not going to learn some newfangled whatsit. Just email me the .vba files when you want me to review the changes with the one copy of visual studio 2008 that our team has access to."
Jr Engineer: "C'mon, give it a chance! We can leave everything the way its always been, but have better tracking of changes. Remember that time Bruno hard coded the tool to point to the C: drive? Git would let us just undo that, instead of having to search our emails for the last-most-recent version."
Sr Engineer: "Ok fine, I've got 10 minutes, show me."
Jr Engineer: "Ahh! Well I just got it installed, so let me go to the network drive... and then I think I have to git init our project folder... huh? Let me just... Maybe if I..."
Sr Engineer: "Times up! Looks like this "git" thing isn't compatible with our setup after all. Those modern dev types never make anything that works in a real enterprise environment."
I think this is the crux of the issue. The internet (including social media/the internet/blogosphere) originated in academia and was first populated by academics. People like PG (and myself) who grew up in that environment still feel like the internet is-and-ought-to-be a free marketplace of ideas, where academically-minded people can dispassionately debate on any topic. In our view, the Internet's virtues are the age-old virtues of the liberal arts, and that it would be a liberalizing and liberating force as it spread to the public.
But the internet has grown organically. It has been September for almost three decades now.
The internet is more representative of the population at large, and we are being reminded why academia is described as an ivory tower and concepts like tenure exist. Fundamentally, not everyone can be an academic, nor can they tolerate the existence of academics. The "towers" and "tenure" exist as a two way shield: it both mitigates self-censorship among academics by protecting them from mob backlash, and it prevents the "think with our gut" mob from getting indigestion and hurting themselves.
So I think both that you're right, and that it is a shame. The internet has not changed the public's unworthiness to engage in academic conversation despite the oceans of information it has made available. The public will misunderstand and misconstrue and mistrust and misuse academic ideas in ways that harm people, and that harm will be the fault of the academics for not knowing better than to keep their ideas to themselves. Just like it is the witches fault for admitting that they thought differently than their community.
Science does too, although the debaters are generally expected to be working towards developing empirical ways of settling their disagreements. I believe it was Gell-Mann who famously tells a story of holding on to his theory because of its beauty despite several experiments indicating it was wrong, and eventually being vindicated.
My parsing of the singularity is the point at which the speed of improvement exceeds our ability to understand it. "Predictability" is the usual term, but I think it introduces more problems than it solves.
The reality is that we humans have a finite rate for internalizing and utilizing knowledge. The singularity "happens" on the day artificial intelligence begins generating (and subsequently using) new knowledge faster than our human limit.
> "Cancel culture" is the belief that certain beliefs about race, gender, and equality are so utterly indefensible that anyone holding them is necessarily acting in bad faith and consequently deserving of punishment.
In practice, this means moral condemnation in place of consideration and argumentation, which is precisely illiberalism.
What distinguishes "cancel culture" from, say, the conservative hatred of communism, is the whiff of hypocrisy that comes from the use of mob rule to enforce what are ostensibly academic positions, and the frequent reference to inclusivity as a justification of social exclusion.
The video fakes are always blurry around the mouth and gestures don't match the words.
The audio fakes are too "clean" (too defined breaks between words and no background noise) and sound like caricatures.
Text is virtually impossible because politicians say "fake" stuff all the time (e.g. speeches someone else wrote) so you can't rely on uncharacteristic language.
It seems to me that we could fight Putin on the "internal politics" front in a way that A) forces a choice between escalation of the war and stabilization of his regime and B) Has enough plausible deniability that failure doesn't immediately trigger a nuclear response.
Google seems to slowly oscillate between thinking that I am a right wing loon, and thinking I am Joe Public who must not be shown misinformation. That is, sometimes google is perfectly willing to vomit forth results from the propaganda mills, even when I'm not specifically looking for it, and other times I can't get conspiratorial-minded results even when I am making an effort to find them.
This most frequently manifests itself when I am looking for sources for claims that I know exist. Like if I remember reading an earlier conspiracy that has just been invalidated, or someone posts some a video of someone reading a blog post. If google has decided I am an innocent bystander not to be shown conspiracies it can be nearly impossible to track down the original blog or posts about the conspiracy.
Recency bias is another huge problem with google results. Older content gets heavily de-prioritized, even when it is clearly what you want. Google is willing to give up on terms in your search before it is willing to show you old stuff. For example, if you tried to research early Ukrainian political corruption during Trump's impeachment, your results would be nearly entirely Trump-related content even if you tried to use google's date-filters and exclude terms like -Trump.
Now I certainly agree that there is no realistic scenario where any significant portion of people can just choose free fish in 5 or even 10 years[1]. But the automation of work tasks is like Mike's bankruptcy: it builds slowly until we have the sudden realization that we're over the cliff. Robots making and repairing robots, people watched over by machines of loving grace, the whole 9 yards.
Personally, I would like to have the UBI parachute strapped on before we find ourselves floating Wile E. Coyote style over an economic collapse. Given the rate at which new legislation passes in today's society, the time to start the fight is at least 20 years before you really need it.
[1] Unless those singulatarian types are right, and human-level machine intelligence is 7 years out: https://longbets.org/1/
Teach someone to fish and they can eat + sell the fish.
But if I make a fish-catching machine to catch fish for everyone, does everyone eat, or does everyone starve?
UBI is essentially a means of ensuring that in a world where the robots catch all the fish, people can still afford to buy a fish.
I agree that the link between online misinformation and real world harms is tough to measure. I've read some studies of radicalization that found meatspace was the primary avenue for radicalizing, even if cyperspace allowed extremist groups to raise more awareness, and I suspect the same is currently true here.
However, I don't think this is some "constant of human nature" and is more likely an accident of our current society. As people grow up with and on the internet, I would expect this to change: I would expect the link between online communication and radicalization to strengthen over time.
I think there are a handful of "obvious" interactions that should have been called out.
Politics + Space: Greater international competition for space-resources will likely begin, and we may see the end of first-come-first-serve orbits. The international inward-turning politics may be particularly poorly timed; we may see irregular military action in space.
Politics + Cyberspace: Inward-turning politics combined with greater awareness/impact of breaches (including on increasingly-autonomous vehicles?) will almost certainly lead to countries closing their digital borders a-la China. Its already been proposed in the UK, I believe.
AI: This is going to be the source of some huge wildcard, and I think everybody knows it. Companies have massive amounts of data on people regarding how they behave; eventually someone is going to give that data to an AI with the right/wrong instructions to make a noticeable impact on society.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses...