Being right smack in the middle of the Investment Banking Industry in the 2008 Crash and after that and seeing how those who did the worst shit got rewarded and everybody else got to be squeezed to pay the bill.
Before that I actually believed the “merit” bollock from Neoliberalism.
(It’s more than that, but that certainly brough me back as a thinking adult to my younger leftie roots).
Things in generally seem to be getting worse for at least a decade, especially for those born in this century.
Granted, the whole Ecological problems thing has been going on for longer, though there were some improvements in the 70s (polution controls that stopped acid rain) and the 90s (replacing CFCs and reverting the hole in the Ozone layer) but even some of those things were partially reverted in the last decade or two (the whole Diesel Emissions Scandal is to a large extent about emissions of the very same stuff that caused acid rain and hole in Ozone layer is growing again apparently due to CFC use in China).
As many have pointed out, the reversal of the trend of improvement in the median quality of life is probably because we’ve reached Late Stage Neoliberal Capitalism.
Now do the same Maths for just the last decade, and then compare it with, say, the 80s.
Human’s judgment of “how things are going” is anchored on what they have lived through, not on how things were long before they were born - nobody is going “Well, we must live in a wonderful World because Ghengis-Khan’s Great Horde isn’t just surrounding cities and killing everybody inside if they don’t immediatelly surrender”.
Further, our Economic systems are massivelly biased for First Mover Advantage: bought a house in an big city back in the 80s - congratulations, you’re now one of life’s winners; you great-grandpappy moved to a plot of land in the 1800s that turned out to have oil - congratulations, you were born one of the greatest winners in life.
So when the trend of improvement reverses you’re going to hear people complain, starting by the ones who were born too late to benefit from the “good times” that are now over, which I why you’re hearing it from Millenials.
But worry not, if the trend downwards continues, eventually even the average peons with the “merit” of having been born in the 60s will be wiped out since in a downtrend Wealth tries to preserve its position and that’s generally done by leveraging political influence to take whatever little bit of wealth the peons have managed to accumulate (which is why you’re seeing indebtness go up: that’s generally how people’s assets end up legally getting taken - they were forced to use it as collateral for loans because cost of life exceeded income)
Also don’t get me started on how most of the “prosperity” was achieved with unsustainable practices: it’s like overexploiting one’s farmland to get a couple of years of bumper crops for sale only to end up starving because the land has become unfertile. Sure, if one only looks at at those bumper years and totally ignores the consequences after those years, it’s all wonderful.
Even events that happen with perfectly uniform randomness will cause situations were the event happens multiple times in close proximity.
It’s just that we humans just love to see patterns were there are none (and suck at spotting true randomness) and will focus on the purelly coincidental “many of the same within a short time frame” whilst for example ignoring longer than “normal” periods when the event did not happen.
Not saying “doom and gloom posts” have purelly uniform randomness (frankly, I doubt it, as most human stuff tends to have Normal or similar probability distributions), just pointing out that without actually having measured both the events and the non-events, your (and everybody else’s) natural perception will be heavilly skewed by the tendency to notice seemingly unusual patterns of events and assigning them meaning when they might have no meaning at all because pure randomness will on occasion by pure complete chance produce such patterns.
In summary: there might be an explanation, but it can also just be pure chance, so beware of expecting such things to have a reason.
Well, amongst the English-speaking World the US does have more population than all of the others combined (even including South Africa’s 60 million people) so it’s kinda undertandable that in an English-language forum sooner or later an American will come and start talking about the stuff within their own life experience.
That said, having lived in Britain for over a decade, I for one loved the joke :)
It’s not about lacking the hardware for thinking through complex things, it’s about thinking habits (non methodical, not validating conclusions, operating at a pure language level rather than at a very concrete and precise meaning level - which is why you see people dispute scientific conclusions based on their own definitions of words) and being emotional about it without the needed introspection to spot that and stop doing it (becoming wedded to the conclusions one reaches and take it really bad when they’re disproven, overestimating one’s knowledge and being unable to reevaluate that estimation because it feels unpleasant to admit one might not know something, wanting to feel one is winning the argument hence digging into ever more illogical arguments and basically ignoring the full picture when trying to “win by attacking the words of the explanation”).
In the old days, people would yield to authoritativeness on domains outside their expertise, which is something that was abused (for example, look at how experts were paid by tobbaco companies to say that their products were no dangerous for Human Health or if you want a more recent example, look at the field of Economics) so now we have the problem that a lot of people think they’re as good as any expert even while not understanding even the most basic of basics of that expert domain (a quite common problem I see is people simply not knowing basic Statistics and assigning meaning and even motive to coincidences of random events or misreading as causation something that can just as easilly be correlation or even reverse causation).
Most people don’t have training in Analytics or Science, so it makes sense that they just apply their day-to-day way of thinking (which has no method and using “common sense”) to any and all subjects including domains which are highly structured and can’t just be understood on face value or which are heavilly probabilistic and you can’t just apply the mental shortcut from day to day life (of the “if I thrown a stone it will fall” kind) to draw conclusions.
Nothing quite spoils even the most awe-inpiring experience than being surrounded by people who “just have to” vocalize (worse, as some kind of performance for those around them) how much awe inspiring the whole thing is.
Mind you, I’m an introvert, so maybe it’s just me having trouble appreciating socially performative “awe”.
Somebody from Behavioural Economics has actually shown a nocebo effect for something with genuine positive health effects when people tought it was an ultra cheap version.
The story of that is in one of the Freakonomics books.
Obviously it works up to minus and plus infinity on one of the axes, possibly the Z-axis, though that’s not guaranteed (maybe it’s a longitudinal or latitudinal moisture remover?)
A parrot can be trained to tell you how to stack things on top of each other the best way to get a high tower.
This is just an electronic parrot, millions of times faster to train than the biological parrot, specialized in repetition alone (can’t really do anything else a parrot can) and which has been trained on billions of texts.
You’re confusing one specific form in which humans externally express cogniscence with the actual cogniscence itself: just because intelligence can produce some forms of textual communication doesn’t mean that the relationship holds in the opposite direction and such forms of textual communication require intelligence, or if you will, just because you can photograph a real pizza to get a picture of a pizza doesn’t mean a picture of a pizza is actually of a real pizza and not something with glue to make it look like it has stringy melted cheese.
I’m actually a domain expert on AI whilst your “assertive denial without a single counter-argument” answer to my simplified explanation together with your “understanding” of the subject matter shown in the post before that one, shows you’re at the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve on this domain and also that you do not use analytical thinking or the scientific method in any way form or shape when analysing a subject.
There is literally no point in explaining anything to somebody who reasons like that and is at that point of that curve.
You keep your strongly held “common sense” beliefs and I’ll keep from wasting any more of my time.
Re-read it: it says AI is capable of “originality” and does not mention “thought” at all.
You’re the one presuming that “originality” requires cognition and hence understood “originality” as meaning “original thought” even though they’re different concepts (specifically the latter is a subset of the former).
In your interpretation of that paper you did the exact same logical mistake as you seem to be doing in your interpretation of LLMs - you made assumptions backed only by gut feeling thus taking a leap to reach a conclusion ultimately supported only by your gut feeling.
“Freedom of Speech” is not “Freedom to get a free soapbox anywhere you feel like whenever you feel like”.
In your version, anybody in the World has a right to address Congress whenever they feel like, in which case it should be first come first served and Netanyahu can join the line just everybody else (as giving priority to some would interfere in everybody else’s “Freedom”).
I’m sorry but Free Speech is exactly about anybody, a.k.a. random, persons having a freedom, and there is no mention about “allies” or any other special groups having any more right to it than anybody else exactly because you can’t have one Freedom for some and a different Freedom for others: Free it’s for everybody, otherwise it’s not Free, it’s Controlled.
You claim this is a Free Speech matter and then your entire argument is about speech for some people controlled by an invitation of a specifica person, the very opposite of Free.
As I said, if Congress should be treated as a Free Speech space then ANYBODY has a right to go there and speak (and Netanyahu can join the queue), if only some people are allowed to go there, controlled by an invitation by a specific person, then it’s not Free Speech, it’s about a space with access limited by rules, be it to speak or something else, so it’s about Congressional Rules and your entire “argument” is total bollocks.
You can’t try and bypass the rules by claiming it’s all about Free Speech at the very same time you want it for just this one person just this one time - that’s just complete total hypocrisy.
“I’m in favour of Freedom as long as it doesn’t negativelly impact the priviledges I was born into when I popped-out of the right vagina”.
It’s the “Fight For Equality” that very purposefully keeps away from the one kind of discrimination of treatment is which bigger than all the others combines by quite the margin: Wealth Discrimination
Ah, the good old claiming that “everybody not with us is a commie” so beloved by Fascists coming from the guy who posts memes where the toon who doesn’t agree to vote for Zionist-Genocide-loving Biden is wearing a red shirt with a white sickle and hammer.
It’s really interesting to see neolibs using the same kind of argument Nazis (I KID YOU NOT!) used which was basically calling everybody not with them “Communists”.
Well, it does make some sense given that the pro-Oligarchy politics of Neoliberlism aren’t that much away from Fascist politics, the main difference being that Fascism thinks the State should be above the ultra-wealthy and then after that comes the powerless riff-raff whilst Neoliberalism thinks the ultra-wealthy should be above the State and after that comes the powerless riff-raff.
I detest hypocrisy and bad faith mindless tribalist propaganda slogans.
(In fact in the country I live in, there are actual Communists who were even Stalinists until not that long ago, and that’s exactly what I dislike about them: hyprocrisy and bad faith mindless tribalist propaganda slogans. Curiously I detest the neo-Fascists for the very same reason: it’s a judgement and opinion I hold quite which applies independently of the supposed political side of those doing it)
So I pointed out the hypocrisy and the tribalist, parroty, propagandist and even unimaginative nature of the slogans that poster uses, not for them (in my experience people who operate like that either do so in bad faith or don’t actually seriously analyse the tribalists slogans they hear before they parrot them, so logic won’t affect them in the least) but for anybody else who ponders about politics (rather than be a mindless follower of a tribe) who happens to go by and who might not have noticed this yet.
PS: Funnilly enough, the post below this one on my profile is also on a chain were I engaged with another parroty, slogan throwing hypocrite, of the other tribe of American politics (not that those tribes are politically that far apart, IMHO) for a very similar reason: that one was throwing around the “Free Speech” slogan demanding that Netanyahu gets to address Congress, but apparently wasn’t so keen on my suggestion that if Congress is indeed a place where speech should be free then anybody should be allowed to speak there whenever they want and hence Netanyahu can join queue rather than get ahead by invitations (which interfere in the Free Speech of everybody else). Tribalist slogan throwers are invariably hypocrites.
“The only time that something” is the logical “might something” not the logical “must something”
Also you weren’t like me right smack in the middle of the Finance Industry keenly observing what Obama (amongst others such as Cammeron in Britain and Merkel in Germany) did in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash and how they did it, or were living under a rock when the suppression of Occupy Wall Street happenned, if you think Obama is in any way form of shape leftwing, center-left or even center-right: you need to go way back, before Bill “I repealed the Glass-Steagal Act so that Finance can do whatevere the fuck it wants and thus caused the 2008 Crash” Clinton to find a Democrat with even the mildest touch of merelly center-left thinking.
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