spupe

The jump from 1080p to 4k is extremely noticeable to most people. At standard scaling you also get way more screen real estate, which is definitely a plus. I also think most people would easily pass a blind test and recognise which monitor has 120 vs 60Hz.

I have to say that while I disagree with your overall point - for example, I think the paralysis of the political system is derived from oligarchic economic control of the political process, rather than the distraction created by this culture war bullshit -, I think you made perfectly reasonable arguments, and should not be downvoted simply because they are unpalatable. In particular, the argument that abortion is popular and therefore should be legal does contradict several things that Democrats would like to keep illegal, despite being popular, as you illustrate with prayers in schools.

Are you suggesting that the average person should read Supreme Court decisions? And furthermore, are you implying that there are fundamental mistakes in the reasoning of Roe v Wade that emerged just now, 50 years later? Both seem unreasonable suggestions to me. It's akin to saying people should learn programming and read up on code/documentation if they want to have an opinion about Facebook.

She should be championed as a hero. I hope the scientific publishing industry collapses as soon as possible.

Neuroimaging has always had an issue with interpretability and susceptibility to statistical artifacts. I fear that moving to another black box is only going to complicate matters.

> Nope. I dare you to do it. Or at least intelligently articulate the model architectures for doing so.

It is obvious that we can in principle try to detect this. People are already attempting to do so [1][2]. I would be very surprised if Facebook and other tech giants are not trying to do that, because they already have a huge problem in their hands from this type of technology.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8049133/ [2] https://github.com/openai/gpt-2-output-dataset/tree/master/d...

I believe him, although his argument is rather weak. It's true that it would be prohibitive to run speech recognition at all times, but what if Google would choose to do so when detecting a particular pattern, like you are meeting a specific person? Even simpler, we could imagine it tries to detect speech for 5 seconds every 10 minutes; that way it could bypass a lot of the arguments listed here. We also know that the NSA can activate your microphone remotely, so the technical capability is definitely there and Google has the means to do it.

I think expanding our personal Overton windows, as the author suggests, is an extremely important skill in life. Social media has fragmented our mental experiences, and if you don't step out of your echo chamber, it will definitely feel like everyone else is simply going crazy.

That said, what if a sizable portion of people are indeed going crazy? How would that look like, and what would be the appropriate response? The author's framework only holds if we trust each other to be rational and well-intentioned, and at least in my feed that's not the type of people being promoted.

Thanks for the write-up. I would like to hear more about your experience in switching jobs so fast. When you started looking for a new position, did you try to maximize pay, or did you feel that you could really stay at each of these companies in the long run?

I am currently thinking of switching jobs, but I don't know if I should be playing a numbers game or genuinely looking for a good fit, or somewhere I could grow internally.

> You are literally evaluating psychoanalysis as a scientific theory in this response - which is exactly what I pointed out we should avoid doing if we want to understand its value. Lots of types of thought and culture do not have scientific content, and yet are valuable.

I'm not sure what other "types of thought and culture" you are referring to. A superhero movie certainly is entertaining, can make you think and it's not a scientific theory. However, the big difference is that a movie does not make empirical claims or promises to have access to a method of self-knowledge, nor does it try to explain mental disorders. Psychoanalysis is mainly a service that promises empirical effects, and therefore should be treated empirically. Furthermore, Freud certainly envisioned it as a scientific theory, and so did many of its followers. I just don't think that this defense of psychoanalysis as having some sort of entertainment value, despite its absurdity, is a saving grace.

Your second point only reinforces what I'm saying. If any type of therapy has the same effect, then they are all placebos. Their effect is comparable to homeopathy, which is none. Homeopathy is certainly a different "type of thought", that is, an incorrect one.

Because it's not easy to monetize a Reddit post. If you attract people to click on your garbage article, you can display ads and extract value. Meanwhile if you post the same bullshit on Reddit, you get nothing.

This is not to say that there are no bots, paid shills and other issues on Reddit, but it is definitely a good filter. It's the same with Stackoverflow vs most coding sites that just rip them off.

For the average mental disorder, it is equally as effective to be treated with psychoanalysis compared with any other psychological treatment [1], although it is notoriously one of the longer and most expensive forms of therapy. So, your hypothesis c is likely correct. However, I disagree that it is not harmful. For some conditions, you would find an effect for homeopathy simply because of the placebo effect. What we see with psychological treatments is very similar, but to straight out call them pseudoscience ruffles a lot of feathers. Psychoanalysis and other sorts of garbage take space in university, they get a lot of attention in media/culture, and in the end they are not delivering much at all.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22227111/

But we know several ways in which this way of thinking is incorrect. First, it is based on revelation, or the direct experience of one analyst with a handful of patients. We know that we cannot achieve any meaningful scientific conclusion for the broad topics you mention from this kind of data. Second, this way of thinking is averse to tests, and to the extent it has been tested, it failed. Psychoanalysis has been tested empirically, and it is simply not producing great therapeutical effects.

Your rather generous interpretation could equally apply to quantum coaching or any other modern fad that is clearly wrong, because even though we don't know everything, it conflicts with what we know.

In some places, remote learning can be far superior to locally available education. I love the Khan Academy and I hope they are successful in this project too.

> By the time the service was shut down, CNN+ had garnered around 150,000 subscriptions in a little over two weeks from launch.

This is baffling. Regular CNN has ~540,000 daily viewers, with less than 130,000 of those being younger than 54 years old [1]. It is just inconceivable in my mind that about a third of this largely geriatric audience would sign up for CNN+ in two weeks, AND that somehow they thought this was too few people.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2022/02/21/cnns-rat...

A lot of opinions and unverifiable statements (this and this company is X years ahead of everyone), and the whole piece is essentially about one person's job market. Skip

Look, this started with a claim that Twitter moderation policies are blocking us from addressing climate change. Then a separate claim, that any sort of moderation is harmful, was made and I challenged it. Now you are coming with a third position, which is that sometimes moderation is indeed bad. Which is true, but the real question is whether current moderation practices in Twitter are blocking us from meaningful discussion, in particular in regards to climate change.

Filtering can improve the signal-to-noise ratio dramatically. We have always had some moderation/editing on books, newspapers, scientific papers and many other forums of meaningful exchange for centuries, and we progressed just fine. I

That information is of public interest, because Musk is a public figure that constantly talks about climate change.

Are you saying that we cannot properly address climate change because of... checks notes Twitter's moderation policies?

The nomenclature is just wild... So concrete monoliths in architecture translate to high-contrast, colorful, fluffy graphic design?

I actually like the examples he has shown, looks a bit retro and futuristic at the same time.

I take issue with this kind of argument, because it implies that because we don't know everything that can happen in the future, we should not use nuclear power. We already know the costs of producing energy with coal and oil: thousands of deaths every year, potentially billion of deaths in the medium-term.

Like most things, this decision is about trade-offs. No, we have not figured out how to process nuclear waste in 1000 years. But if that's our major problem in 1000 years, we have succeeded in our most important challenge right now.

Somehow I'm more skeptical about their claim that electronics can withstand 30,000G than that they can make this launcher work. Very interesting approach anyway.

Wind energy is currently responsible for about 15% of the energy produced in Europe. So relying on wind is absolutely impractical even if we invest 10x more than we do, and you would have to prepare for days with low wind availability in the whole continent as well, because they do occur.

The problem you describe is serious, but I would guess over 90% of nuclear power generation in the continent remains unaffected, if not more. So a grid here makes a lot of sense, and works as a reliable alternative. It is also pretty easy to design a grid that does not rely on the same types of reactors.

The way it is going, future generations will be left with much worse problems that a few tons of nuclear waste.

And if there is no wind or sun for an extended period of time, I guess we just shut down our factories then?

The fact that the Greens have been flexible in some elements of their politics doesn't mean they are committed to a realpolitik approach when it comes to energy generation. They absolutely are not. In fact their record when it comes to science is really spotty, as they also oppose transgenics and even animal experimentation to a certain degree. They are clouded by preconceptions that are dangerous to us all.

What about prolonged weather crises that may affect supply for weeks on end? And how would that affect working hours in factories? How much of a GDP hit are we going to take by using "flexible consumption"?

There is no way to run a modern economy with intermittent energy supply.

> Bolsonaro's rise was partly due to the popularity of populist fellow-travelers like Trump, whose own rise (as per this thread) goes beyond social media. And surely the fall of Lula da Silva's government had something to do with the popularity of the right wing. Not to mention, their economic rise has since stalled.

It's not at all a given that Trump's rise was not due to social media, it is the very crux of this argument. What do you think is more likely, that people in Brazil voted for Bolsonaro because Trump was popular, or both Bolsonaro and Trump had a push from similar phenomena in highly disparate countries like Brazil and the US?

> As for France, the current Le Pen's own father made it to the second round of presidential elections as early as 2002

And that election ended with a 82% win for Chirac. I feel that both here and in many other places your arguments can be boiled down to "other factors than social media exist" and "crazy people/political movements existed before social media". Both are truisms. Yet we see their influence rising recently. The issue is not that people like Glenn Beck always existed, it is that they are electing presidents.

I disagree. If we find a particular architecture is good for Chess, and another for image generation, then so be it. We would still have solved important problems. We are seeing both general and specific approaches improving rapidly. I don't think the AI winter was defined by a failure to reach AGI, but rather that they reached a Plateau and produced nothing of great commercial or even intellectual value for some years, while other computer science fields thrived. I would say the situation is the exact opposite right now.

But what about the rest of the world? Brazil was growing economically and lowering poverty in that decade, and still saw a far right wing government emerge through social media. France opposed the wars, didn't bailout anyone, and now there's almost a 50% chance they will vote for an extremist. I also grew up with this fact-based way of analyzing politics, but we ought to start thinking of it as a less rational and more emotional phenomenon if we want to stop it. Most of these movements, like Qanon or whatever, are completely delusional, like a cult. Whether the US had made good or bad decisions 15 years before it is irrelevant.