Ideally the answers aren’t just political soapboxing.
Most people here have been using AI in some form for their entire lives without knowing it. It just did its job quietly with nobody noticing. Then venture capital (or just capitalism itself) ruined everything and broke the contract: publicly acquired data must be given back to the public for free.
I could pontificate at length about the terminology and how it has gotten fucked. The blending of the terms itself is part of what makes it difficult to have a reasonable and nuanced discussion.
Let’s take a moment to separate out AI from machine learning from deep learning from LLMs.
AI is fucking old. It used to mean “any algorithms that create intelligent behavior”. Not a particularly useful definition these days, but it used to mean things like pathfinding and searching.
Machine learning is a more useful phrase: a set of algorithms to solve problem where we don’t know “how”, but we have examples of inputs and outputs. For example, I don’t know how I would define cute, but if someone showed me a bunch of photos I could probably say which ones were cute, not cute, and unsure.
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses a specific set of algorithms: neutral networks.
LLMs are a subset of deep learning that use “transformers”. Which is a specific architecture that does a lot of things quite well, like determine how proteins fold, how drugs interact, how words interact in a sentence, etc.
If you’ve used Google Maps at any point since it was created, you’ve used classical AI.
If you’ve used email, you’ve used machine learning.
If you’ve used a photos app that lets you search for similar pictures of people, you’ve used machine learning.
If you’ve had more than one prescription filled in the past five years, your pharmacist has used AI (even if they don’t know it) to check potential drug interactions.
Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate that the field I spent my whole life researching has been coopted into a way to siphon money from people into the coffers of the richest fucking parasites, but when people say “fuck AI” they have either lost the nuance or never had it. Everyone that hears the message experiences on the surface and it does them a disservice.
When the luddites broke the textile looms, did they hate the machines or did they hate the loss of their livelihoods?
When the early industialists broke into factories and smashed their equipment, did they hate the machines or did they hate the captains of industry that forced them to work inhumane hours in terrible conditions?
When people say “fuck AI” do they hate the math that, until this point, has led to a better world for us all, or do they hate the system that has enshittified it into one of pure exploitation?
This whole mess feels like a distraction to me. Tech should be a social good. It should be helping people. Not to say it’s without problems, but now when we say “fuck AI” it leads us to pushing back against technology itself rather than the system that’s using it to hurt people.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that internet discussion is political action.
11/10 answer
Money is real.
Pandas reproduce just fine in nature. The myth of them being bad at fucking and making babies was a myth started from before we understood zoochosis. No animal wants to have babies in a prison, it’s not just pandas.
many people still ignore, or dont believe white privilege is still pervasive in western countries. aside from the racists, some people of those groups do not want to discuss it ever because they still benefited fom all that abuse, strip mining of resources centuries ago.
White people often forget (or don’t realize in the first place) that, if you’re a black person in USA, the police is actively looking for an excuse to put you in jail so they can make you do slave labor
That “intelligent” and “smart” mean the same thing.
Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is knowing to not put it in a fruit salad.
Tomatoes are both a fruit (botanically) and a vegetable (culinarily). “Vegetable” doesn’t have a botanical definition, so the old aphorism about tomatoes “not being a vegetable” is trying to conflate terms from two different domains and hoping you don’t notice.
Either a strong religious belief or the belief that success is the result of hard work.
Conservatism.
Just…all of it lol.
Being hesitant to change and wanting to temper out things and make sure things are implemented effectively is one thing. And ensuring we respect tradition and culture is another (though progressives are more in line with that lol.)
Today’s conservatism is just hate and bigotry. And they don’t even recognize it as such.
Yeah this drives me crazy. I grew up where the old white men loved boating and fishing in the rivers, bringing the family out to enjoy nature. Now that it’s all getting contaminated and turning gross, even the dumbest person who actually valued ‘conserving’ would realise we actually have to do something.
Instead, we’ve got billboards up and down the country trashing the Paris agreement and the old white men are only interested in attacking the other tribe. Not a hint of concern for the environment. They’re not interested in conserving anything other than their social status and corresponding power.
That they need to buy cases and cases of water in plastic bottles which they throw in the landfill instead of just drinking their perfectly good tap water.
Plenty of people saying their tap water is not good. Just buy/install an RO for your tap ya dummy. They aren’t that expensive or difficult to install. Or some kind of brita-type filter. I’m lucky enough to have an in-fridge filter. Cold, clean water on tap. It’s the best.
Bottled water companies don’t produce water. They produce plastic bottles.
They probably don’t even produce the bottles. They probably just put the water in the bottles.
Good point. And it’s often just municipal water too. So uh… Tap water.
Ummm, my tap water isn’t “perfectly good.”
Ummm, my comment was addressing the millions of people whose water IS perfectly good but they buy bottled water anyway.
In most of Europe, it is.
Depending on your municipality, sure.
Don’t know why you got downvoted. I drank tap water in India and threw up 3 times before leaving the office. I’ve seen the data center water and it looked worse.
I live in the US, I’m not drinking the tap water lol. That being said you don’t have to buy cases of individual plastic water bottles either.
And yet millions do. Maybe there’s something actually wrong with your water, but the vast majority of municipal water in the US is perfectly fine.
If the tap is chemically fine, but still tastes awful, I get buying bottled water instead
Why would you buy bottled water? Buy a filter
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That science is rational and objective.
In reality, the way that science works is much muddier than most realise. It’s full of subjectivity, and this isn’t a bug, but a feature. Intuition and tacit knowledge play a big role in basically any research (and this is why I am confident that AI can’t replace scientists). Politics are also present at every stage of the process. Science is at its least objective when scientists convince themselves that they’re being objective. We can’t escape our biases, so we need to actively acknowledge them and embrace the subjectivity of our situated perspectives.
The problem is that talking about this is a great way to piss off other scientists. I’ve been accused before of “betraying the side”, by a scientist who was aware that science has a disproportionately large epistemic platform (epistemic means pertaining to knowledge — basically just that as a result of the huge benefits of scientific advancements in the last century or so, science has been on a bit of a pedestal in terms of trusted expert knowledge in society. Criticising this is seen by a betrayal by some because of the concerning rise in psuedoscience and anti-scientific rhetoric.
However, I’m of the belief that some of what has driven the rise of psuedoscience is that the average person doesn’t like to be told “shut up and do what the smart people say”. They feel a lot of mistrust towards society (which, in many cases, is entirely reasonable, especially in the case of marginalised groups who have been heavily exploited by science and scientists),
The problem goes far beyond just science, but I think this is certainly an aspect of it. I sympathise with scientists who want to continue to have the privileged position they hold, but I don’t think that’s helpful in the long term.
I still haven’t read it myself but you might be interested in the book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn
in pseudoscience, person will seek answers they want to hear, and not ones that will contradict them at all. an example, chronic lyme which is a pseudoscience, is a belief that Lyme is a ‘permanent infectious disease’, and you can get it numerous ways other than the known vector, a deer tick(it is the actual way to get lyme) theres a whole industry built over this surprisingly, and hazardous because MDs have jumped into the scams too, and its primarly amongst MIDWESTERN white woman/men, how this scam works is the “patient” will go seeking online forums, sources and eventually end in the office of LLMD(“lyme doctors” which are actual doctors peddling the fake disease) which often charges alot of money per visit, usually several hundred and they dont take insurance(red flag) or the insurance rejects the DOCTOR and they give all thESE BS excuses why you have this symptoms and then prescribe you a blood test for lyme(another red flag), and then have you multi-month ANTIBIOTIC regiments, which can be hazardous because of the side effects. i happened to find these forums along time ago. most of these people have underlying mental issues, or a psychosomatic illness.
Looking up scientific papers of any kind will immediately blow up the notion that science is rational and objective lol
well i’ve made good experiences with the papers of NTRS (nasa technical report server) especially with regards to water on mars. some are very well written. but yeah, in general, there’s a lot of papers that suck, especially in psychological medicine and sociology field.
Yeah, I wholeheartedly encourage constructive debate and skepticism. However, it doesn’t excuse repeating shitty arguments without doing anything thinking or research just because it makes you feel less bad and lets you not do anything.
One example that particularly bothers me was “humans affect on the climate is less than a single volcanic eruption”. There are a lot of things you could not trust about scientific reporting, but the base premise of 8 billion people flying around the world using decomposed dinosaur mass is at least an order-of magnitude larger in scale compared to a single volcanic eruption. At that point, you’d have to believe that there isn’t really 8 billion people or that oil is actually from somewhere else.
In summary I agree, I just want to add nuance that this doesn’t excuse people acting in bad faith. It’s important that everyone, not just scientists, recognize their emotions and bias and challenge their own arguments against these (I.e. am I just making this argument because I feel defensive?)
volcanic eruptions can be pretty big btw
this one here caused a famine as a side effect for example
The phrase I’ve heard is “epistemically privileged.” And deservedly because from a standpoint of pure ethics, “science” has done way more good than damage than competing ways of looking at the world.
But let’s say someone asks you how a car works. You go into a bit about the internal combustion engine. You explain how little explosions make pistons go. They ask you about these explosions, so you have to take them to a chemist to explain. Then they ask the chemist why does this reaction happen, and the chemist sends them to the physicist. You go through the Newtonian bit, which seems intuitive enough, but when you ask about atoms, you have to go into subatomic physics. Which is something you cannot experience without special equipment that you trust the physicist is telling the truth about.
So, yeah, while the empirical method is fantastic and the best model we have, in the end it relies on faith as much as any religion.
You had me up until,
So, yeah, while the empirical method is fantastic and the best model we have, in the end it relies on faith as much as any religion
I feel like faith is the wrong word because the works that science hath wrought upon our world are due in part to its repeatability. When you follow the steps to build an engine and refine fuel for it, that engine will always run, and if it doesn’t, it’s due to a parts issue or a fuel issue that can be remediated. It always works because the laws of physics always apply (local variables notwithstanding).
I don’t have faith that my engine will start; I have absolute confidence based on my limited understanding aligned with repeated observations. I have evidence; where faith is often analogous to belief without or in spite of the evidence. Not that you may use that definition of faith, necessarily, and that’s fine; but that’s the definition I’m accustomed to thanks to being raised in a Protestant cult bubble.
Great answer.
One of the big ones: motivation.
Most people when talking/thinking about “motivation” are referring to extrinsic motivation.
Even if they make a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic, they basically assume these add together to create “more” motivation.
However, they don’t sum together. One crowds out the other, like in a neverending battle.
i’ve always thought that it’s really simple. there’s extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation
extrinsic motivation is when somebody stands next to you and beats you with a stick when you do something that they don’t like. the result is i will do the minimum slop required to fit their criteria, like when i’m asked to do the dishes, i’ll just make them look clean without actually scrubbing them.
intrinsic motivation is when i see the meaningfulness of an action, at which point my body starts acting towards that goal automatically.
Tax Brackets. “I got a pay raise and will now be taxed more and make less money than before the raise”
If <=30k was taxed at 25% and 30+k taxed at 30% and you go from 30k to 31k a year, only the 1k is taxed at the higher rate.
This depends on the country
Benefit cliffs do exist however.
I get that this might not be super intuitive. but how can one not notice that this is untrue? don’t people check their accounts and see that there is still more coming in and not less? just not as much as one might want, but still.
You assume people look at their accounts and do some form of account keeping?
Actually, yeah. I just cannot fathom how one could not at least check what goes in and what comes out. Nowadays you get push notifications for everything anyways, so I just do not get it.
Is this really a common misconception?
Very very common in Australia.
Yes, unfortunately.
That the world is a zero sum game. That in order to have something, someone else has to go without. That in order to be great you have to drag others down.
It’s the driver for misogyny, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, and so much else.
A lot of those aren’t necessarily a “zero sum game” strategy and more of just that many people are genuinely judgemental, ignorant piles of shit.
It’s a mix of things! Many racists don’t think of themselves as racist and primarily worry about actions to empower minorities because of the zero sum thinking, not so much because it’s helping “the wrong people”
Exactly. If we could lose that somehow the world would be so much nicer to live in.
These people must fail to understand how consensual sex works
Probably never had it
It has been my experience that, if you could identify these people, they are the best to avoid. Excising these people from your life can very quickly prove it.
Capitalism is worse. It’s literally Monopoly. We’ve all played that shitty fucking game. With capitalism you get perpetual inflation. A negative sum game. A zero sum game at least implies some basic conservation mechanics, perhaps even a fairness. A negative sum game is a total debt based economy. Waste is a feature. Disposability and commodities go together like peas and carrots, and that ethos sadly reverberates across ecosystems until the planet is dead but you got those pounds or dollars or pesos or whatever. Can’t eat them. Can’t really do Jack shit with them.
The rich gonna wake up some day soon and find the farmer has a well oiled rifle. They’ll make rich fertilizer… 🤑
Yeah I agree that isn’t true
People tend to assume if someone is smart in one thing, they’re smart with everything else too.
That’s not usually the case.
And also assuming that someone who’s not smart in one area is not smart in any area.
Yup this is me and my dad, he’s great with handy work and has built numerous homes. I am good with technology and can build a server and make my own software. Put us in opposite roles and were both dumbasses.
Or if they are rich, they must be smart or a genius, because they got rich while everyone else did not, its further from the truth, since most of these people come from wealth to begin with. adjacent, same goes for these succesful youtubers/streamers/influencers, these top ones we see all the time dint come from rags to riches, they came from being rich or very well off.
Good point I like that answer. Conflating knowledge on a specific topic with general intelligence.
Similarly, people who assume that anyone who struggles with English as a second+ language is an idiot
This one always surprised me
Sure, but without this flaw engineers wouldn’t have any personality at all.
This effect was described by Dunning and Kruger.
I can differ 17 different kinds of glue by taste!
