clejack

Yes, I recently got access to an annotations platform for llms, and I've found many projects associated with generating chain of thought outputs.

These COT outputs are the same sort of illusion as the general output. Someone is feeding them scripts of what it looks like to solve problems, so they generate outputs that look like problem solving.

I can't remember if I mentioned it previously on here, but an llm seems to be an extremely powerful synthesis machine. If you give it all of the individual components to solve a complex problem that humans might find intractable due to scope or bias, it may be able to crack the problem.

Rest assured, if you force students to learn basic english and math, the vast majority of students will experience this as being forced to study things they don't care about.

The difference with what I'm suggesting is that they won't be forced to learn about 7 or 8 different things they don't care about at the same time.

The allocation of teachers' time will be better with a more constrained curriculum, and the classes where students choose to learn about a subject will be a more engaged.

Framing learning things you're uninterested in as "learning to get over yourself" is odd. This isn't an ego problem, and dictating personality traits to such an extent is a questionable goal.

I think you have the right question, but I think the answer is a resounding "no." Old thinking towards education seems irrelevant in modern times. Children should be taught the basics of mathematics ,language, and technology as a necessity for interacting in the real world. This should include arithmetic up to applied algebra, grammar, reading, and, ideally, critical thinking. These core topics should have traditional testing and homework.

Everything else should be about exposure. So children are lectured on science, history, or whatever other subject; but they don't actually need a grade in these subjects during elementary school. This would reduce the work burden on students and teachers. The only purpose is to light a spark in those with true curiosity.

In high school, students should be able to choose topics of interest that they learned about in elementary school to do more intentional learning with tests and grades. Everyone else continues on a general path with the core subjects being tested and non-core subjects simply being lectured.

In college, those who chose a specific focus in highschool accelerated their learning for that subject. For others, if they didn't find anything interesting, they can go into a trade or whatever else they choose. If they are late bloomers, they go to college and cultivate their newly found interests with a larger back log of pre-reqs.

There's no point in "teaching" children things that they immediately forget only for them to go on to become a generic office worker or retail employee. We should cultivate those with the desire to be cultivated, and stop pretending that it's actually feasible to have an entire society of "intellectuals." There is a place in the world for those who don't care about learning, but there is little sense in throwing significant education resources at them.

I think you all understood my point but for the sake of clarity, I said "take anyone from any group," and I was really thinking along the lines of "take a new born from any group."

Even if the creator specifically had eugenics in mind, I think he stumbled upon a greater truth.

Consider this. You can take anyone from any group in your nation, place them in a different nation, with a different culture, and they will adopt the mannerisms and accents of that culture.

We focus on race constantly, but it's clear that culture drives the norms that we see in any group. And culture may be persistent (especially now with technology allowing every culture to potentially spread everywhere), but it's not intrinsic.

With this framing, I interpreted Idiocracy's intro as being about a culture of intelligence or learning being harder to maintain in a modern world, than a culture of apathy or fun.

I watched this movie really late. Let's say within the past 2 years or so. After watching it, all I could think was, "This isn't a comedy, it's a tragedy."

It felt way too close to home.

I have to point out that your original post is technically correct because you specified "medical expertise" as the focus of your argument and psychologists aren't MDs. The field has some questionable aspects (and outcomes) to be sure, but I don't think it's completely without merit, and as a consequence, I feel the spirit of your argument is still wrong. You said:

> At the end of the day, this is a cultural issue, not a medical one, and needs to be solved via cultural norms, not via political intervention based on contrived pretenses

It is possible to consider people's subjective experiences in tandem with the consequences of those experiences and make an empirical judgement. The consequences can be quantified, even though the subjective experience itself can't.

If we found that people began committing suicide after using social media, would you suggest this can't be studied, and that a government wouldn't have good reason to want to legislate against social media in these circumstances?

This is really all I'm trying to get at. Replace suicide with depression, reduced quality of life, addiction. Whatever you like. If it holds in the suicide case, it holds in all of them.

Just to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding you, I double checked the meaning of "normative." This is the first result from google:

"establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behavior."

And other sources have something similar. I'm interpreting your comment as saying "(psychological) harm is subjective, and because it can not be measured empirically, it's not possible to have expertise on this topic."

Fortunately, there are real world consequences that can be measured. If I take an action that makes many people say "ow!" and we acknowledge that expression as an indicator of pain, even though I can't measure the exact level of pain each person is experiencing, I can measure how many people are saying "ow!" I can measure the relationship between the intensity of my action, and the number of people that respond negatively. There's plenty of room for empiricism here, and a whole field of mathematics (statistics) that supports handling "normative" experiences. They even have a distribution for it!

The foundation of law is not scientific exactness or scientific empiricism. It is the mechanism by which a state establishes norms. A law against murder does not stop murder, but it does tell you that society does not appreciate it.

When I was in my mid 20s, I interned at a machine shop building automotive parts. In general, the work was pretty easy. I was modifying things via cad, doing dry runs on the cnc machine, loading raw material, and then unloading finished products for processing.

Usually there was a cadence to things that allowed for a decent amount of downtime while the machine was running, but I once got to a job where the machine milled the parts so quickly, that I spent more time loading and unloading parts than anything else. Once I started the first part, I didn't actually rest until all of them were done. I ended up straining my back from the repetitive motion. I was shocked because I was in good shape and I wasn't really moving a significant amount.

If I talk about excessive concern for productivity (or profit) being a problem, certain people will roll their eyes. It's hard to separate a message from the various agendas we perceive around us. Regardless of personal feelings, there will always be a negative fallout for people when there's a sudden inversion in workflow like the one described in this article or the one I experienced during my internship.

The printing of money has primarily lied within the purview of the government from the start. Money is one of the few modern physical item, off the top of my head, that this statement applies to. Maybe there are seals or other official marks that this also applies to, but all of these items fall into a similar category.

So while the legislation, and implementation can be deemed problematic, the political desire to prevent counterfeit is not actually unreasonable.

Having particular objects be banned that aren't under the exclusive control of a government actually creates new precedent. Regardless of the technical feasibility that you keep bringing up, this legislation is undesirable because of what could come after.

"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption"

If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.

With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.

I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.