farts_mckensy

And that's what's going to happen now. No amount of complaining about it online is going to stop it. They literally just passed a bill that prevents regulating AI. Rich people and their puppets in congress have some degree of agency. We don't. Sorry.

You chuckled silently to yourself as you posted this.

Whenever people claim that LLMs are not capable of reasoning, I put them into a category of people who are themselves not capable of reasoning.

The discussion is completely useless without defining what thought is and then demostrating that LLMs are not capable of it. And I doubt any definition you come up with will be workable.

AI is here to stay, and you do not have agency over that. You can choose not to use it, but that has zero impact on the broader adoption rate. Just like when the automobile was introduced and society as a whole evolved.

Watch out, HN. The em dash police are here. Hands up

If America's responsibility is deterrence, why do we invade countries that don't have nuclear capabilities? Don't you suppose that incentivizes every country watching this to develop nukes? They see that if they don't, eventually they'll get invaded. That's the opposite of deterrence.

What planet have you been living on the past 25 years? Iran has a population of almost 100 million as well as a sizeable diaspora across the world. If even a small percentage of the population engages in terrorism, that translates into thousands of potential actors. And unlike a state-to-state war, this is the kind of distributed, unpredictable threat that’s much harder to deter or contain.

Orwell was not a good writer. 1984 in particular is a slog. His work was mostly popular because it conformed to anti soviet narratives, so schools naturally added them to the curriculum to stamp out any communist sympathies. Now that the soviets are no longer a threat, it's not surprising that his work has gradually fallen out of fashion. Yet every pseudo rebellious edgelord thinks the ideological order of 1984 is being enacted because of progressive college kids and trigger warnings.

The idea that "power manufactures truth" sounds profound but it's ultimately a truism, and a somewhat unhelpful one due to the imprecise language of power and truth. Anyone who's worked at a small business with an authoritarian owner can attest to the distortion effect of authority. People trip over themselves to ensure such a personality remains placated. But truth, in any meaningful sense of the word, is something beyond the grasp of any single authority. Powerful elites may have sway over the narrative, but eventually the truth catches up with them, and that's when history starts moving again. The 2008 recession is a great example. Most financial authorities maintained that real estate was solid. Orwell's vision vastly oversells the true power of authoritarian states. At the end of the day, if you cannot keep a baseline number of the population satisfied, they will rebel in ways that will eventually undermine the status quo. It may not take the form of a full blown civil war, but people have a way of expressing their interests. For example, the birth rate is dropping in many countries. Increasingly, people do not see having children as viable. And for good reason. That undermines the present society. The upper classes need a working class to maintain their position.

I'm saying there's a cost to that mentality. There's a personal cost, which is you giving up a part of yourself--not just your time, but your personality--to grow your net worth. And there's a societal cost to this level of cynicism being so pervasive. When the intellectual laborers of a society just go through the motions instead of being invested in what they do, the society as a whole suffers.

If you have to repeat thought eliminating clichés to justify this, it seems like there's a level of self deception going on. The chickens will come home to roost eventually.

My preferred modality: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."

>CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But then, if it helps you cope, so what?

That's myopic. There's only so much "reframing" you can do before the tension begins to rear its head. Serenity now, insanity later.