moravak1984

> Meh. Writing like this was formative for me (before Gwern; I'm old), but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else. It just manifests in a different way?

Could you point out to some examples? Is there any "rational inquiry" that shows a worldview bias from the rationalists, in your opinion?

I agree that the broader smarty-pants community may have this issue, just curious to read your examples.

I think this nicely pointed out in "The Big Bang Theory", where Sheldon Cooper says something like "If I would be wrong, don't you think I would know about it?" That sounds like something Elmo M would say with a serious face.

Oh, thanks for the correction. I misread the abstract indeed.

It is true for gun ownership, so I guess it is true for noise.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11143840/

The copy on the main page gives a first clue. "A daily reading club for language learners" available on 7 languages, on a .club domain...

Now, look at the number of books on each language. Does it sound reasonable that a no-name startup with no contact details (except an email to an aktivlang.com domain that redirects to storica.club) will invest in a serious effort to human-translate and adapt that many books to language learners, without anyone noticing?

I'm not going to argue about the writing style because we know it is an arms race. But look at the underlying business, that business would not exist without AI generated content.

oh, YOU go to your room and think about what YOU did.

You can't (accurately, beautifully and incisively) show us the real culpable in a very engaging way without repercussions.

Yes, but Claude (cleverly disguised as "storica.club") does not agree with the facts, and would rather show you a story with virality potential.

This is an obviously AI-generated site. There is no interest on correctness, just "engagement".

Yep, my thoughts exactly. This comment should be at the top.

The poster should disclose it is AI...

I was an avid reader, then I had to stop due to eye problems and because I did not want "staring at a thing" to be my hobby when it was also my day job as a data scientist.

While I still spend a lot of my working life staring at a screen, taking acting and filmmaking as a hobby has enabled me to enjoy many other aspects. Even if the plot/character is lousy (e.g. "Heated rivalry") I enjoy looking at the director's choices and analyzing them. My wife jumped ship and every time we watch something we have a discussion about it, which is something I had never done with books.

It truly is the level of engagement, not the medium.

> Same goes for HN, yet it does not take kindly to certain expressions either.

> I suppose the trouble is that machines do not operate without human involvement

Sure, but HN has at least one human that has been taking care of it since inception and reads many (if not most) of the comments, whereas ChatGPT mostly absorbed a shiton of others' IP.

I'm sure the occassional swearing does not bother the human moderators that fine-tune the thing, certainly not more than the violent, explicit images they are forced to watch in order for you to have nicer, smarter answers.

He did the best he could with the information he had at the time. Yes, it is sad, and it may even feel more a "selfish" life in many ways in a "modern" society. (I would say "Western" but that would include the retrograde, homophobic dictatorship the US is currently).

It is incredibly hard to judge actions taken in the past with a values system from the present.

You could add writing to that list of topics...

Yes, pedantry is justified in this case.

Froggies doing wrong cultural appropriation again... maybe the "Emilia Perez syndrome" is becoming a thing.

lol yeah... "tell me you are lefty without telling me you are lefty"

"Smrt" means "death" in Czech, so...

Yep. Good sleep makes many other decisions easy. Anecdata, but while I normally have a healthy Mediterranean diet (after many years of binge eating), if I don't sleep properly, hell unleashes.

If I eat well and I am well rested, I feel energized and positive, so I can go for exercise and then, why not, a meditative walk. If not, I die on my couch binge eating and watching nonsense.

Do whatever it takes to get your sleep done.

Its existence is irritating. Could we stop it from existing?

I remember a few years ago that an activist businessman started a campaign against a comically overpriced website for buying the highway stamps:

https://www.wmcgrey.cz/hackathon-znamkamarada/

Sure, it was a bit of a rant because said entrepreneur probably had his own bid rejected.

Click on the link and you will find the button for signing with Identita Občana

Sure, it's not. But often on AI papers one sees remarks that actually mean: "...and if you throw in one zillion GPUs and make them run until the end of time you get {magic_benchmark}". Or "if you evaluate this very smart algo in our super-secret, real-life dataset that we claim is available on request, but we'd ghost you if you dare to ask, then you will see this chart that shows how smart we are".

Sure, it is often flag-planting, but when these papers come from big corps, you cannot "just ignore them and keep on" even when there are obvious flaws/issues.

It's a race over resources, as a (former) researcher on a low-budget university, we just cannot compete. We are coerced to believe whatever figure is passed on in the literature as "benchmark", without possibility of replication.

In the end, what we all want is to have a good barbecue around friends...

Sometimes I can't believe how much money I make for that little input, and whether that is ethical at all. This idea popped in my mind while on "home office" (sightseeing on the village with my wife) and saw the waitress panic because we paid her with a 500Kč for a 360Kč bill and she didn't know how much change to give... I got my answer right there.

There's a lack of skilled workers *willing to jump through their hoops*. For at third-world country immigrant, jumping through hoops is a first-world problem.

I'd argue that Mastodon and Telegram hardly count as social media (and 450 contacts on WhatsApp... come on)

If someone with a site on X/WhatsApp/Instagram/FB repeats the experiment, then we might see something interesting.

> has been demonstrated in written and printed matter across the centuries.

which centuries are we talking about?

> It helps that written Spanish has been particularly well documented from the Age of Discovery onwards.

and that was how many centuries after the Arab occupation?

There are tons of Arabic-origin words in Spanish, (alcoba, aljibe, almohada, cerveza, naranja, zanahoria), so the hypothesis of "usted" sharing said origin is plausible.

Maybe you have some relevant evidence to your theory?

Oh, this is such a cliché, like all contemporary geniuses do is maximizing CTR...

Many others are doing R&D for companies producing harmful products (both for humans and the environment, even when they love to make people think they are not eco-unfriendly (looking at you, Elmo Musk)), figuring out how to "maximize profitability", even if said profitability comes from pushing people into debt, or simply keeping silent and inactive on meetings where very harmful decisions are made.

Absolutely. A former student of mine worked for a non profit in Afghanistan (his home country) for a few years. Said non profit was flying in McKinsey consultants for very short gigs at six figures (USD).

Same can be said about many LGBT non profits that have shifted their goals in the developed world on the "T" part of the acronym. On countries where marriage equality is a given, no one is going to fund an NGO focused on gay marriage... so they need a new cause to fight for.

All these articles read a bit like "well, just become the kind of person who doesn't need to be stressed by becoming so valuable to corporates that they will leave you in peace". Fuck all those beta's, become a look-like alpha (you can be a gamma yourself) and rest in peace, so to speak.

Well, you are not alone. As a Math PhD, I want to believe that there is something less trivial than glorified linear regression to this whole AI/ML mess, but well, there isn't... It's non-linear transforms + holy Mary's all the way.

Because they are "women engineers" (Silicon Valley sitcom reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY).