I don't see how this doesn't equally apply to the pre-AI economy. The results there have been quite stark, with the "entrepreneurs" ending up far better off than the "employees".
3,993 karma · joined June 26, 2021
I imagine many of these efforts benefitted the community as a whole, but it does make sense that the owners will have these orgs at least prioritize their own internal needs.
All of them (even Gemini, the worst of the bunch) far outclass Grok on everything I've thrown at them, especially coding.
Grok is good at summarizing what's happening on twitter though.
That said, the novelty of this, the unknowns, the mind reels at all the possibilities here and it frankly makes me nauseous.
What hells of existence could we create? I have no doubt that we could create an all encompassing misery that is beyond our comprehension.
Just, truly disgusting to me on a deep level.
We know that neurons can produce subjective experience.
This is the first time in my life that I've felt a scientific avenue of research should shut down.
That said, to address your comment in some detail:
> What really drives distrust in science is claims of infallibility and demands for total trust
This is one hypothesis. Here's another -
If we look at COVID and the anti-vax movement in general, it seems apparent that a much greater driver of that distrust is grifters and kooks actively and profitably pushing emotionally satisfying misinformation. Ironically enough, they do this with far greater claimed certainty about the veracity of their conclusions than the doctors, with far less data to substantiate those conclusions.
This is pushed out to an audience which is desperately looking for explanations for the unexplainable like why their child got autism. Reasoning and nuance goes out the window and they latch onto anything that will give them a sense of certainty.
A second element of this, is that these conspiracy theories are specifically intended to stir up distrust of scientists, "educated elites", and public institutions, and to exploit the pre-existing distrust of the aforementioned that has been steadily cultivated by the right over decades.
Finally, in the case of COVID especially, we had a whole bunch of selfish motivations that were at play which resulted in people finding it expedient to believe anything that would align with their desires to do whatever they like without anyone telling them what they can and can't do (especially business owners whose financial incentives all aligned with not shutting down, and being in positions of power, they leaned into boosting this messaging).
The CDC and the medical field has for decades very clearly communicated the statistical nature of their specialty, the rate and severity of side effects, the uncertainty of prognoses and outcomes of treatments, etc etc. Quite painstakingly. There was no industrywide claim of infallibility, and yet here we are.
> Downton Abbey [...] the first doctor, he turns out to have been wrong,
Love Downton Abbey!
Climate scientists constantly communicate error bars around their measurements and the outcomes of climate change. Creating a model that predicts with any certainty how all the countless systems of the Earth will interact in such a dynamic process is insanely difficult, especially as numerous feedback cycles individually look poised to accelerate the whole process.
These many, many, many measurements and models all tend to converge around certain facts though, which leads to the probability of those being the case being as close to truth as science is capable of getting.
As "true" as 9.8 m/s^2, the heliocentric nature of our solar system, the spherical nature of our planet, the speed of light in a vacuum, plate tectonics, evolution, germ theory, etc. etc.
These truths are that the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere have been steadily rising since industrialization, that this is primarily driven by anthropogenic emissions, and that as the concentration of these gases increases, more energy from the sun will be trapped within our atmosphere resulting in a heating world.
This heating world is already, and will continue to, melt the ice caps, reducing the albedo of the poles as the darker water underneath is revealed and begins to absorb more of the sun's energy, accelerating the effect.
This heating of the world is again already, and will continue to, melt the permafrost which stores ~1.4 GT of methane, which is ~80x as potent a GHG as CO2, and whose release would represent a ~2x increase of the concentration in our atmosphere, again further accelerating the process.
This heating of the world is again already, and will continue to, lead to tropical forests like the Amazon beginning to emit more CO2 than they absorb, again further accelerating the process.
Etc. etc.
The consequences of all this are already, and will continue to, drive more and more extreme weather, with the 10 hottest years on record all happening in the last 10 years. This has negative consequences for food production, for the habitability of the equatorial regions, and will lead to mass migrations of people unless we think they will be content to just sit around and die, and thus destabilization of societies.
While we're on the topic of entertainment media another one came to my mind, it's called "Don't Look Up".
As opposed to your Downton Abbey example, the meteor turns out to be real, and it does hit the Earth, and everyone dies.
The reason humanity doesn't take this seriously and unite to address it is because there are countless predictable incentives to distrust the scientists and ignore the inconvenient truth of an incoming meteor. Financial incentives for the rich and powerful, engagement (and ultimately financial) incentives for the grifters and kooks pushing distrust of the scientists, a deep emotional desire in much of humanity to outright reject the horrors of this potential reality...
Anyway, not sure what made me think of that or how that's at all relevant here, but you should watch it if you haven't!
It's not -
"hey, we can argue about the best way to address climate change and the details of how it's going to play out"
it's -
"this entire field is biased" (you said "it's absolutely the case that entire fields can be biased"), the "independent verification of empirical data is actually untrustworthy and primarily motivated by personal dislike", "they make their scientific conclusions with cursory examinations", and "they're as reliable as the social sciences".
I'm sorry, but it beggars belief that you are not aware of what you're doing.
It's not the communication style of an engineer just trying to be technically correct, it's filled with subtle and not-so-subtle accusations and implications all driving in a single direction which is the discreditation of the entire scientific field.
Try to create a brand new twitter account, you'll find that 80+% of the accounts that get suggested to you are right wing propaganda with climate denial being one of their greatest hits.
Quick guess, do you think more tax dollars have gone to the fossil fuel industry, or climate scientists?
Political power, just again, amazing.
Who do you think wields more political power in the world? The fossil fuel industry and petro states, or climate scientists?
It's such a blatant, weird attempt to invert reality. It's the whole "accuse your enemy of that which you are guilty" approach.
I don't understand how this propaganda talking point sticks in anyone's head and doesn't fall apart with two seconds of critical thought.
> affected by bias to such a degree
Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.
> the overall conclusion is wrong
What about the specifics of the conclusion, which specifics, what percentage of the assertions, 20%, 50%, 80%? This again allows the reader to fill in the blanks with their own biases which are likely far less rigorously tested than the conclusions of the field of climate science.
> it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased
This statement, on the topic of climate change and climate science, immediately following your above two statements, serves to further reinforce the idea that climate science is biased.
> the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination.
The quotes around the independent verification of researchers serves to undermine their work and cast doubt on it. You then state they are unreasonable in their skepticism of results they "dislike", implying these are emotional decisions rather than empirical measurements of reality.
Of course, extremely ironic as the reader meant to consume this is of course the one actually looking for emotional reinforcement of their preconceptions, but in this framing gets to project that onto the scientists.
And yeah, "cursory exmination" of course in no way reflects the reality of the last several decades of climate science, but is added in as another unsubstantiated slight.
> case in e.g. social science
And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.
The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.
Every attempt to message the reality and consequences of climate change, and the possible avenues for blunting it, has been tried. From the sugarcoating "everything will be rosy and great and abundant, look at all the benefits of green industry" to the milquetoast watered-down try-to-please-everyone messaging of the major political parties, to the desperate attempts to communicate the brutal reality of what we're facing (and still failing to match the reality that is consistently worse).
None of it works.
1) People are selfish, myopic, and stupid. They think about their short term personal needs and wants above all else. Large scale coordination on this issue is virtually impossible, see the Prisoner's Dilemma. Human psychology is simply not fit for this task.
The satisficing nature of evolution means we are the dumbest possible animal that could otherwise achieve the technological civilization that we have, and this is another example where it really shows.
2) The wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations on Earth have spent decades pushing propaganda attempting to sow doubt about climate change, because genuine action on it is directly against their interests.
Those poor multi-trillion dollar industries underpinning all modern society and power structures are the altruistic, honest bastions of truth, it's those evil corrupt post docs on minimum wage that are the truly corrupt and greedy ones, twisting the truth for their own financial gain and machiavellian ends!
And they've been far more effective than the cigarette companies of the early 20th century could have ever dreamed.
The heliocentric model of our solar system "argument"?
I guess general relativity is only a "theory" in the end, geodude420 on twitter has an awesome thread debunking that Einstein schlub's whole career!
Substituting in social science as a proxy for your criticism takes the wind completely out of your sails.
"Physicists are super untrustworthy and biased, it's a cabal, I mean just look at astrology and these articles criticizing it!"
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/this-study-calculated-t...
Virtually all economic activity consumes resources and energy, directly or indirectly, and in the process creates ghg emissions.
If we want to curb climate change and our emissions, it necessarily means we're going to take an economic hit.
We either do that willingly with some degree of ability to exercise control along the way, or be forced by physics to take an even worse economic hit and face vastly more death and suffering without our hands on the wheel.
There's no option where we don't get our pockets hurt.
Multiple errors and issues along the way, now I'm on `gws auth login`, and trying to pick the oAuth scopes. I go ahead and trust their defaults and select `recommended`, only to get a warning that this is too many scopes and may error out (then why is this the recommended setting??), and then yeah, it errors out when trying to authenticate in the browser.
The error tells me I need to verify my app, so I go to the app settings in my cloud console and try to verify and there's no streamlined way to do this. It seems the intended approach is for me to manually add, one by one, each of the 85 scopes that are on the "recommended" list, and then go through the actual verification.
Have the people that built and released this actually tried to install and run this, just a single time, purely following their own happy path?
Codex 5.3 Xhigh > Opus 4.6 in my work to this point.
Hoping for Opus 4.7 or whatever comes next to rectify this as I'm a bit annoyed over having to drop to a lower quality model.
So the Gov could very well rely on it alone, purely on ideological grounds, but then they'd be condemned to using inferior tech at a time when everyone is really nervous about staying ahead in AI usage (rightly or wrongly). Not sure they'd be willing to accept that, and it does put pressure on them.
There are a huge number of people coming into agentic coding with no real background in software dev, no real understanding of git, and even devs with years of experience will readily reach for convenience and polish even when they could otherwise implement it themselves, see: Vercel's popularity.
> Dismantling government bureaucracy/corruption
Trump has done more to benefit financially from the presidency, to offer access and influence to anyone who will funnel money into his enterprises or give him gifts, than any president in our history.
How could you possibly write this in good faith? When Trump said he could shoot a person on 5th avenue and people would still vote for him, do you recognize yourself at all in that statement?