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I agree with you.

"Complex reasoning" without the guardrails of empirical tests and lived implementation is very error prone.

The number of variables is gigantic. In the armchair you can reduce them and tweak the remaining ones, and they will do whatever you like within the boundaries of your imagination.

That method seems just not very predictive of what will really happen.

They should make their campaign more targeted using their own tools.

"Hey, we know that you are the head of marketing of xyz, and we overheard that you are just discussing budget. We have a great idea for you..."

No doubt this will work well.

I probably don't understand clearly enough. Physics, chemistry, biology, even psychology have textbooks. Pick one, it doesn't matter much. It will teach you roughly the same basic things.

Philosophy on the other hand. Pick Searle or Derrida, pick Quine or the late Heidegger, and it is hard to conceive that they are even doing the same thing ("philosophy").

> Because what else would it be?

Usually if you make a point like this, you state the definition of philosophy and show that the very thing falls under the definition.

It could be reasoning, application of common sense, rhetorical play, use of large language models ftw, finding of a common opinion. And that is just a minute of brainstorming.

I hope we can all agree that science works reasonably well in gathering knowledge. Because we can use it to do things.

You are saying metaphysics is about the "why" of this.

I agree.

I disagree that there has been a way or method of producing metaphysics that seems to work well. The evidence is that we have so many incompatible systems that all claim to be true.

Do you have a reference for this claim?

That seems to be an argument also for religion. Plenty of people also survived extreme hardship using their beliefs.

Not saying there is anything wrong with this thesis, but I want to point out that this is not what philosophy usually thinks of itself, and it may not transfer. The philosophy the helped X may not help Y under similar circumstances.

I have a genuine question that seems to fit here. It's bugging me for a long time, so any feedback is very welcome.

I can see that the scientific method works well in producing knowledge. Because we can do something with it. Like fly to the moon, cure diseases, build nuclear weapons.

Philosophy however claims usually to also find knowledge. There are several methods, but none of them seems to have any evidence of working in any other circumstances than everyday heuristics. On the contrary, the lack of convergence in opinion seems to indicate that they do not work well.

There are plenty of takes what math "is" philosophically, and there are so many opponents and overcomers of Popper.

I agree that philosophy is nice to have, a playground for ideas, a collection of possibilities of systems of concepts. But I fail to see what points to it being a source of knowledge.

It's one thing to state "These systems are possible", and another to state "this system is the real one", specifically in ethics.

How is this study different from a study suggesting that taking off one's shoes before sleeping can reduce headache in the morning? There may be a hidden cause that leads to sleep reduction and dementia, no?

Once there was another republic and empire. It also had a Senate, the original one. In this republic populism became also strong, there were even civil wars. Later strong army leaders removed the republic (and then reinstated it on paper). It was not necessarily a dark time for their minions (Pax Augusta). In the end the empire broke down in the west. Much later also in the east, but some say it lives on in the Russian empire (for example Putin). Often enough in history though if a society moved fast in one direction, it would regress to the mean. We'll see.

Or you use numba [1]. Then you can use a subset of plain Python.

[1] https://numba.pydata.org/

In my company we have moved to using EPSS (exploit probability scoring system) on top of CVE's. That filters a lot of noise.

https://www.first.org/epss/

The article gives only anecdata as evidence that this is happening, mostly from astrologers themselves. I would question that it is happening at all. At least I found nothing objectively convincing for the thesis that "young people are flocking to astrology".

As the smallest prime number is 2 you probably meant "there being no largest prime number".

> is not fully consistent

Not being able to prove the consistency of a system within the system does not entail that the system is inconsistent (or not fully consistent).

A proof is usually some premises together with a conclusion, such that the premises are true or accepted, and it is not possible that the premises are true while the conclusion is not - usually for formal reasons.

I don't see why "life exists and no god exists" should be a contradiction for formal or other reasons.

Furthermore: the existence of which god? As you know there and have been many religions with different gods.

And lastly: if it was straightforward, how come so many people fail to see it?

Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

You have many good points.

Let me just say that Popper has been philosophically criticized to the point that some say it is a dead horse. Why are we still using this mixture of Fisherian and Neymar-Pearson hypothesis testing (that is if we don't use bayesian methods)? Because it practically works well, not because Popper was right or found a deep philosophical truth.

These methods just generate more often than not knowledge, as we can judge from the consequences.

I argue that nobody cares if the assumptions we put into the frameworks are philosophical true - they are possibilities, and we try some out. So far we seem to be doing pretty well, no matter what philosophers say about the truth of these assumptions.

I also think bending philosophy to apply to practical advice like "use the tool that works" will not leave much to the notion of philosophy.

But it's not that I have a fixed metaphysical position here. I really only use the tool that was most promising in the past for the task at hand. Never needed philosophy.

I can't say "been there, done that", because I know little about how you came to the position you hold. And I've had my share of burying hypotheses I've held for long times, so chances are I'm wrong.

But I held similar views. What moved me away from these views was the experience that in science you have methods that will let you see with high probability when your thesis is wrong.

Philosophy does not have such methods. You cannot only take the opposite claim for almost anything, but in my experience that claim has actually been taken by another philosopher for almost any topic.

The current consensus is in my experience lead by the people with the loudest megaphone. It's not the best theory given the things that really happen.

No philosophy (in the sense of actual writings of a philosopher) was causally involved in bringing the first astronaut to the moon; in building the first pacemaker - I would argue in none of anything where you could say: if you can do this with it, its probably on to something. Its methods seem to work.

As said, I cannot judge your thinking in any way, but this led me to question that philosophy is not practically relevant to me. How can I even judge if it works? And if I can't, is this not blind trust? Like an imaginary screwdriver for imaginary screws.

I fail to see what you mean exactly. Could you explain?

Specifically why the opinion is philosophical and not just some historic-pragmatic pattern matching and grouping?

I hold a master in philosophy and it was my first big love.

Over the years I came however to a conclusion opposite to yours.

> Also, philosophy underpins science. Whenever a hypothesis is tested, there is are philosophically-grounded assumptions being made. The epistemological implications for any given scientific finding depend on the underlying philosophical framework being assumed.

I think that is not true. Science does not get its merit from philosophical underpinnings, but from working in practice.

Methods that work to generate and test knowledge. Math is the precise language needed to speak about these methods and the knowledge. Also because it works. Look at the achievements of science. That is how you get convinced it gives us a grip on reality. Hic Rhodos, hic salta.

My working assumption at this time is that philosophy has no such methods. We are not further than when Kant said that no fighter ever won and could stand his ground in metaphysics on any topic.

The reason might be that philosophy is actually practically mostly irrelevant. I have not seen one undisputed statement of philosophy. And so it can neither test its statements, nor let others see their validity.

I concede it is practically relevant in another sense: world views have taken grip of groups and still do, and influence history one way or the other. But that seems at least to me more a social-anthropological phenomenon like support and resistance in trading.

I tried it using oobabooga's webui side by side with Alpaca 65B loaded in 4 bit on the same AWS instance with 64GB of VRAM.

While Alpaca produced 3 tokens/sec, Falcon produced 0.17 tokens/sec.

So it is very slow with the current tooling still.

You are right. I indeed thought only probabilities would matter here, when it is possibilities.

- 2x30 participants - Not chosen at random - No double blinding - Plenty of leeway for influence by conductors of experiment

I'm not convinced these results can be generalized into more than: some researchers could trick 60 handpicked students into seemingly believing a false memory for a short period of time. Let's wait if this is reproducible.

I find it always a bit strange if somebody says that something “could have” a large impact. The only way to prove this wrong is to prove that it is logically or after all we know empirically impossible that large impact could arise.

Also this does not give much information until we talk about probabilities and the exact nature of the impact.

I read the article thoroughly, but the findings seem actually only about the fact that there will be an estimated 40% slowdown in circulation.

My first thought was also: unfiltered marketing crap, and completely over the top. Starting with the sideswipe on Meta. Gentle reminder: Meta gives away LLaMa and Galactica under quite liberal non commercial license, OPT is even under MIT license if I recall correctly.

I’m not a fan of either company btw.

Then this is a court order based on laws and a legal process. In no way is this comparable to how Russia treats different opinions.

If a state can’t wait to regulate something of which it is quite unclear if it needs regulation at all, then you usually find lobbyists in the background.

As a citizen I think there is high value in keeping the set of regulations as small and concise as possible. A state should twice weigh the benefit of regulation against the (opportunity) cost.

I think going from the difference in environment in learning first words to the meaning of those words being fundamentally different for everyone is a non sequitur.

Specifically when not defining the ambigous concept „meaning“ and without sketching the assumed mechanism by which they are learned and turned into language.

This may well be true. But it also may well be not true to the extend that it can explain that decline in US and the differences to similar countries. So far I’ve not seen much data to back up the alleged causality in much of this entire discussion.

To make that useful to the question you may want to show that this is different than in US, which sees also a lot of immigration. I added a comment that shows the numbers are also quite normal in UK and France. That should also be accounted for.