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md2020 commented on Most demographers now predict that human population will plateau   bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/quantified
Arainach · 2 years ago
Having children is a lot like religion: I have many friends with children and they're nice people and there is no issue, but there is a certain subset of the population that spends their entire life telling me how I'm an awful person making a huge mistake for not [having children/being religious] and they are utterly insufferable and not worth associating with.
md2020 · 2 years ago
On the other hand, not having kids is also a lot like a religion now. I want kids and have many friends who do not and they’re nice people and there is no issue, but there is a certain subset of the population that spends their entire life telling me how I'm an awful person making a huge mistake for wanting children and they are utterly insufferable and not worth associating with.

This is the dominant perspective on the social media that younger generations spend their time on. I’d argue that as a person in their mid 20s today, actually wanting kids is the bizarre position. I often feel alienated for openly stating it among good friends of mine.

md2020 commented on Rich Sutton joins John Carmack's Keen Technologies   twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack... · Posted by u/jasondavies
md2020 · 2 years ago
Clearly Rich Sutton is a giant in AI for his contributions in RL, but his recent brief talk "AI Succession" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgHFMolXs3U) made me worry a bit about the sort of perspective he has on what the "good" outcome here looks like. I say this as someone who is generally optimistic about the promise of AGI. I have no love for the machines as a "species", and by Rich's definition here, yeah, I am "specist" in favor of humans. I think we should use technology for our own benefit, and that it's not inevitable that machines "replace" us.

I also think his framing of the counterarguments is not charitable. The serious AI-risk arguments do not argue that a super-intelligent AI will necessarily be evil. They only argue that its motivations will be unaligned with ours, that it will be more competent in achieving goals than us, and that this will be bad for humans as a side effect. I think a good comparison is humans building a highway that incidentally crushes an ant colony. They didn't set out on an evil mission to destroy ants because they hate them, it just happened as a side effect of something the humans wanted. No evil required.

md2020 commented on The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble   doctorow.medium.com/the-a... · Posted by u/jrepinc
md2020 · 2 years ago
This is a terribly ignorant take and disappointing to see coming from a science fiction author.

> AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

This is just argument by assertion. We have no good definition of intelligence, so I have no clue how he can be so confident. "Machine learning doesn't learn" is a crazy take, since "backprop + gradient descent does learn" is close to the most well-supported thing you can say about the past few years of algorithmic progress.

> sophisticated autocomplete

Aside from this being an incredibly reductive sneer that clearly isn't true if you've honestly tried using ChatGPT, etc., his citation for this is a podcast, which I'm positive Doctorow would not accept as sufficient for basically any other technical topic.

I love Ted Chiang's stories, and some of his takes on AI progress are cited here. However, I also found his extensive conversation with the Financial Times (earlier this month, so published after this) disappointing along similar lines. The thread running through both of these is a complete lack of a positive vision for the future, replaced by an almost smug cynicism that asserts any more technological progress is simply hype, a grift, and bad. Are there any current science fiction authors with a positive vision of the future?

md2020 commented on Let's kill the universe   quimzy.github.io/random/t... · Posted by u/Quimzy
molticrystal · 3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay#Existential...

I check the revised calculations for the top quark and Higgs mass measurements every few years, as the accuracy increases it seems more and more that the universe metastable, though last I checked stable conditions were not eliminated.

md2020 · 3 years ago
Can you elaborate on why the increasing accuracy of these measurements indicates that the universe is metastable?
md2020 commented on ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections   apnews.com/article/2022-m... · Posted by u/geox
godelski · 3 years ago
This comment comes off as malinformation. Malinformation isn't information that is incorrect, but correct information used in a way to create a misleading context. There's 2 problems here. 1) You're implicitly dismissive of a foreign government interfering in our elections. I think most of us here will agree that any interference from any entity is not okay. 2) It muddles the conversation with more noise. A more in depth version of this wouldn't, and could add more context, but this comment is not doing that.

I don't think this was done on purpose, but I'm noting it because it seems to be becoming the common way we speak these days and that isn't healthy to our abilities to solve these issues. We need to discuss the nuance and complexities of these events or else others will control the narratives and make us fight within ourselves instead of uniting to solve these issues.

md2020 · 3 years ago
> malinformation

Please do not normalize the use of a term that is being pushed by the government to justify censoring information they don’t like [1]. I understand that there is such a thing as “true information presented out of context in a manner meant to mislead”, and I even grant that the comment might be guilty of it. But “malinformation” and “misinformation” are just becoming labels for “information that is inconvenient”, and I don’t think normal internet commenters adopting their use is doing us any good.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

md2020 commented on Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?    · Posted by u/re6tor
benwad · 3 years ago
One glaring omission from that article is any mention of per-capita emissions. The author keeps asserting that US-based measures to combat climate change are ineffective because China pollutes more, but the US (and all Western countries) have a far larger per-capita footprint than China. Policies to reduce this footprint could have a huge effect on emissions globally, even though the US isn't the total biggest emitter in the world.
md2020 · 3 years ago
Yeah the same author has a reply to that since the per-capita emissions point is brought up a lot: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-per-capita-emissions-i...
md2020 commented on The Cancellation of ‘Jihad Rehab’   nationalreview.com/2022/1... · Posted by u/exolymph
whymauri · 3 years ago
Similar article from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/us/sundance-jihad-rehab-m...

With a lot less whining about 'the woke mob'.

md2020 · 3 years ago
You need to realize that mobs are a real thing and in this case, they ruined a woman’s career for completely constructed, ridiculous reasons. This kind of behavior is disgusting. I don’t know why you describe this article as “whining”. This person had nearly a decade of her life’s work torn apart by people who only see the world through the lens of power and oppression, and whose only goals are to endlessly virtue signal to one another while creating nothing of value themselves.
md2020 commented on Wikipedia is not short on cash   unherd.com/thepost/the-ne... · Posted by u/nickpaulharris
socialismisok · 3 years ago
Democrats are not a left party. They are squarely center, maybe even center right.

As someone who is a communist, the Dems have nothing to do with Marx, and they are about as capitalist as they come.

md2020 · 3 years ago
Nobody said the causes the foundation is funneling money to are Democrat causes, though. They’re something entirely different.
md2020 commented on Head of election worker management company arrested for theft of personal data   da.lacounty.gov/media/new... · Posted by u/happyopossum
MichaelCollins · 3 years ago
md2020 · 3 years ago
Just a note to you and the other commenter with a similar comment, they said “counties”, not “countries” and linked to a piece about a county in the US.
md2020 commented on 90% of US adults say the United States is experiencing a mental health crisis   lite.cnn.com/en/article/h... · Posted by u/Bender
smt88 · 3 years ago
I take your point, but a lot of people are worn out from the pandemic, increasingly hopeless about climate change, and observing the decline of democracy in almost every influential country.

Those are all justifiable things to be more depressed about now than people were in the past. People are smarter, wealthier, and more educated now than they were in the past, and that causes them to think further into the future (which is depressing).

md2020 · 3 years ago
As a 20-something, I see a lot of people my age that way, way overestimate the negative impacts of climate change, to the point where they admonish and make fun of people who want to have kids. I can’t help but think their media diet is somewhat to blame. Climate change is not going to be good, but there is good news on the technology front that you’d almost never hear if you got all your news from the big news outlets. For example, the IEA predictions for new solar additions have been terribly out of touch with reality for nearly a decade now [1], and before I saw this all I had seen was doom and gloom about how we could never scale up renewables fast enough. Seeing even the IEA be so wrong really makes me wonder what other good news I’m missing out on seeing.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/experts-bad-forecasting-sol...

u/md2020

KarmaCake day288October 6, 2019View Original