foxglacier

Nurture does almost nothing for intelligence other than severe abuse reducing it. It's mostly random and inherited. If we knew how to nurture intelligence, don't you think every parent would be doing that?

I used to think that about geniuses but now I think another person would have done what Einstein did, and every other genius. They appear when they environment is ripe for their work.

It sounds like you're not aware of the randomness that comes along with inherited traits.

Don't you ever wonder why you can't quantify those predictions and what they would look like if you did? They're all things that already occur and have always occurred to some extent, what's the difference?

What exactly are you worried about? OpenAI/etc. gaining too much power? If they use it, the government can stop them. If you worry about the government, isn't it better that than rando terrorists? Seems similar to the early days of nuclear and rocket technology. It took stupendous amounts of money and smart people. It was barely accessible to many countries let alone people.

Saying something for years doesn't make it right. Has nobody ever challenged you on that? Our brains prefer to read enjoyable bits, not raw information. If you only got those 300 bits, you aren't going to bother putting them into your LLM to generate 700 bits to make it a more enjoyable read, you're just going to struggle through the 300. Maybe when browsers come with built-in automatic text puff-uppers, then you'll have a case but almost nobody does that now.

Here's a clearer example - would you rather learn a concept from a research paper or a textbook or blog? You say the research paper but they're dense and hard to wade through where-as blogs and textbooks are more wordy but hold your hand, which is something that helps humans learn.

If they're not trying, it's because it would fail due to lack of "faithist" Muslims to support them. Islamist politicians do push for that when they have popular support, and they do have popular support in Muslim majority countries, as well as local areas in other countries. The average Pakistani might not know much about that jurisprudence thing, but the law still prohibits him from having gay sex or insulting Mohammed.

Where are all the secular Muslim countries? Turkey? Why are they so few and so weakly secular?

It's not honest in AGI timelines (only biological ones). It just accidentally supports your unsubstantiated belief. Your belief isn't magically true because you're somehow able to see the future when others can't. You're just arrogant.

It's funny that your kinds of ideas were heresy a decade ago. Back then, we weren't supposed to think there was anything we could do about the effects of global warming in case we started to think mitigation was possible and stopped panicking. I suppose now that's politically permissiable?

It surely resonates if your reason for working is to extract wealth from others (ie. be a parasite) but if it's to improve things for everyone, then it's wonderful. You might still work just as much and get paid just as much but produce a lot more because of technology.

Writing about your Neo-Nazi beliefs, or even being a Neo-Nazi doesn't make you a terrorist, and I'm sure none of those you're talking about are. So no, by his definition, Substack shouldn't be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown.

Yes, information is not copyright protected. It's mostly free. The rival company isn't allowed to train on AI output because it didn't buy the AI output, it agreed to a contract where it said "I won't do that".

I'm justifying (via spleen venting) why someone would have the habit of reflexively closing popups without reading them. That that habit carries on even in the rare case where it would help is separate but shows how strong it can be.

By the way, I've seen the exact same thing in a student I was teaching how to use computers. He was asking me what's wrong and demonstrated that an error popped up, which he immediately closed - several times in a row! At the time I thought he wasn't really trying to solve it himself so he didn't bother with the message but now I realize it's just how people have reasonably adapted to the obnoxious way computers keep jumping in front of you screaming for attention.

It's easy to criticize other cultures through the lens of your own. If you're not a moral relativist, then find the best culture as your benchmark, not your own - you're not going to be magically lucky enough to live in the one morally right culture in history. Some of your own beliefs about right and wrong are going to be backwards - if you can't face up to that, stop being a cultural supremacist.

Or accept that every culture does things that look bad to outsiders and that doesn't change the fact that they may have gilded ages - no matter how good social mobility is for black people today, it's still crap for chickens.