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Are you joking? Learning nonlinearities by hidden representations ranks among the most important scientific discoveries of the past fifty years.

That you have to reach for such obscure examples kind of illustrates my point, no? Geoff Hinton isn’t known for ”using Lisp at some earlier point in time.”

It’s not my goal to denigrate Lisp. I think Lisp is great. I learned programming with Dr Racket. But Hofstadter’s contribution to our understanding of intelligence is somewhere between ”negligible” and ”counterproductive.”

Enlighten me. What has his research agenda resulted in? What did Hofstadter get right that others did not?

What did he get right? While Hinton, LeCun, and others were laying the foundations of deep learning in the 80s, Hofstadter was writing expert systems in Lisp.

> You actually need someone with vision and track record of doing right predictions and placing right technology bets.

Hofstadter does not exactly fit this description.

> empirically investigated if philosophy professors engaged with ethics on a professional basis behave any morally better or, at least, more consistently with their expressed values than do non-ethicist professors

The first investigation is just begging the question. The whole point of moral philosophy is that how to live is an open question.

The second investigation sounds more interesting, but it doesn’t prove much either. ”Knowing that” and ”knowing how” are different. Doctors smoke more than the baseline.

Why is the title clickbait? What were you expecting - that the philosopher had proposed a model of consciousness that got experimental confirmation?

Lots of discoveries are confirmatory. We already believed relativity was true before we observed observing binary pulsars obeying it.

Imagine if Einstein, Newton, and Maxwell had used LSD! They could have reached the heights of such greats as ”Humphry Davy” and ”Sigmund Freud” instead of wallowing in mediocrity.

The experts have been confident that AI is 30 years out for about 70 years now.

Cade Metz is the same hack who tried to smear Scott Alexander. This guy is the personification of journalistic malpractice.

No there isn’t

An observational study with controls chosen at the whim of the PI is not the same as an RCT. Presumably you could implement different controls and observe the opposite conclusion. What scientists end up doing will be driven by the incentive to publish something novel, rather than a genuine search for truth.

> if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much?

Yes

It’s simpler than that: typically there is an underlying factor that causes both the unemployment and the divorce. It could be depression, sustance abuse, poor impulse control, anxiety disorders, any number of things. You can’t control for all of these. Some are hard to measure, some will yeild inaccurate measurements because the men in the study lie (or don’t even realize they have this problem) etc.

> One new study of 6,300 heterosexual couples found that all other factors being equal, men who were not working full time were 33% more likely to divorce in the following 12 months than husbands who did have full time jobs.

You cannot control for ”all” other factors in an observational study. You can control for ”how people choose to answer your survey questions,” which is two steps removed from the truth.

The media is full of shit, but compared to the academic sociologists you’re referencing it’s not that bad.

This is a prescriptive definition that doesn’t fully correspond to common usage patterns:

- Some sports bettors apply advanced analytics and win consistently. We can still sensibly use the expression ”sports gambling.”

- Conversely, people ”invest” in crypto schemes that are sure to lose

The conceptual distinction you’re drawing may be a useful one, but I don’t think it perfectly follows the contours of the words ”gambling” and ”investing.” These words are used in different contexts for random historical reasons. On average, the contexts in which we would say ”investing” are a lot safer than the contexts in we would say ”gambling,” but it’s not totally cut and dry.

It’s almost as though news stories are calibrated to maximize clicks, rather than to convey information.

But crucially, they also decide who is in the union.

> Given that “the market” seems to have settled on LC as the only measure of skill

That’s not true and I suspect you know it.

Would you trust unions over markets to determine which programmers are skilled? How would they determine that?

WGA west has about 10k members, whole US has about 15k. (This is from Google, please correct me if I got the wrong number.) By contrast, there are over a million people building software. Will this model scale up two orders of magnitude?

I would spend some time focusing on search fundamentals. When I search ”James Ellroy” only one of four hits is a James Ellroy book. If I can’t even find what I like, how can you recommend similar stuff?

You make a good point regarding incentive structures in pharma - but this is nothing like what OP was saying. OP is asking for a “Frommian psychoanalytic approach,” whatever that is.

Your point about chronic pain increase is totally implausible. Automation of manual labor should result in less chronic pain, not more. The problem here is overprescription, and it’s my fault that my comment didn’t make that clear.

As regards:

> It's far weirder to suggest that "more people want to party for no particular reason"

I never said that. The number of people who want to party and have no foresight has remained constant. But access to opiods (and their normalization) has skyrocketed, due to aforeforementioned over-prescription.

> Why do so many people want to check out of life completely by abusing medicine?

This isn’t how it works.

Few people, if any, want to “check out.” What happens is that people are exposed to opiods via one of two channels (they are prescribed painkillers, or they party with someone who has acquired them) and they quickly get hooked because these drugs are cripplingly addictive.

So the only “why” questions we have to ask are:

1) Why do people take opiods the first time

2) Why do people continue

The answer to 1 is either because their doctor said so, or because they like to party and have no foresight. The answer to 2 is because if they stop, they experience the worst sickness imaginable.

Society is not broken and we don’t need weird conspiratorial explanations for any of this.

It’s not an argument, it’s just a positive claim. You’ve projected a bunch of normative angles on to it, but there are none.

The more interesting follow up questions are to what degree is this true, how do we know, and do we think this is a factor in back-to-office mandates.

This question assumes nurture is the lever driving behaviour, but it’s not clear that’s true. What if instead you asked ”what personality traits would you expect to find in people who become billionaires?”

> why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

Because those things, while dumb and simple, are not continuous in the way that visual art is. Subtle perturbations to a piece of visual art stay subtle. There is room for error. By contrast, subtle changes to source code can have drastic implications for the output of a program. In some domains this might be tolerable, but in any domain where you’re dealing significant sums of money it won’t be.

And the award for dumbest headline of the year goes to