CurtMonash

If I counted corrected, Fischer went 24-3 in the world championship series around then. That excludes many draws and one forfeit vs. Spassky, a few draws vs. Petrosian, and nothing at all in his sweeps of Larsen and Taimonov.

I was thinking that his views were those of a philosophy student even before I got to the point, early on, where he said he was a former philosophy student.

To the extent my views are similar, they were first developed in philosophy classes as well. In particular, my most influential paper assignment from college -- by far -- was from a Philosophy of Religion course: "Choose an argument from your previously assigned readings, and disagree with it."

Perhaps the point is to signal virtue while they actively pursue the opposite.

Why do you think David Brin's Transparent Society proposals can't work?

A large fraction of the problems assigned in the Ross Program were of the form "Prove or disprove, and salvage if possible." The rest were usually a calculation, meant to motivate a general proposition you would encounter soon after.

I first heard that kind of story about a thesis defense at Princeton. The twist was that they had been short one person to judge it, so they roped in a professor who was available at that moment ... and he found a counterexample on the fly.

The professor was John Milnor.

No scale at which it really took off. Village-wide stuff requires a bit of politics, and anyhow there are donors out there for capital equipment and even a bit of organizing help. Factory-level stuff -- well, the product idea isn't the hardest part of a new business, is it? Etc.

I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.

My grandfather told me that it was deemed time to stop drinking when you couldn't see over the pile of coasters.

Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946.

JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made training films and so on. LBJ pretended to serve in the same war. (He went out on one bombing mission as some kind of observer and was awarded a Silver Star, after which he stopped bothering the military and went back to his real career.)

Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)

There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.

But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.

I first encountered it in the 1981 James Clavell novel Noble House. The character using it was a well-educated Hong Kong gangster, or something similar to that.

(The plot of the book revolves around massive favors that a certain character is obligated to fulfill. At one point it is argued that "the ask" for one of them, while greatly annoying, could instead have been worse yet.)

For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online.

There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the first set of sleeping bears in LOTRO.