> It’s time to accept regulation actually does work when you have a competent government.
Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent. Maybe the only requirement is that they're not totally in bed with the big corps making money.
I wonder to what extent in this instance it is driven by the EU regulating (mostly) foreign companies rather than (mostly) domestic ones.
Said differently, it is much easier for the EU to be impartial and competent when regulating Apple or Samsung than when regulating Volkswagen or Stellantis...
Well if you have seen how EU regulates domestic companies you would not wonder about that. There is no mercy.
US companies just hit that barrier more often historically because they got used to "lobby it and it goes away" attitude to law, and when it doesn't work we have harpy screeeching about EU using laws to tax US companies that do not want to abide to law in place where they are doing business
> it is much easier for the EU to be impartial and competent when regulating Apple or Samsung than when regulating Volkswagen or Stellantis
They are still regulating the auto manufacturers pretty harshly, and without any particular favouritism, even though that is letting foreign players like BYD eat the lunch of the domestic manufacturers (who mostly seem to have bet the farm on a US-led return to fossil fuel dominance)
> Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent
Context: I'm not a EU-native, I've migrated to here.
It disturbs me a lot when people keep repeating the "incompetent government" narrative when it comes to the EU, but when you compare it to the dictatorship that I escaped from, they still seem way more competent, surprising when the big advantage of a dictatorship is supposed to be increased efficiency while reducing personal rights.
Personally I cannot name a better government (or governing body, given that we are talking about the whole EU) anywhere else on this planet.
I feel I'm incredibly lucky to live here even when the economy is getting tougher. The only thing that worries me and makes me consider leaving is the right-extremes, which to this day, thankfully had limited influence.
Sorry for the digression, but I just wanted to address this repeating pattern. It's possible that you have very valid reasons to call them semi-competent and that I'm overreacting.
It's a bit of hit and miss, really. Like every big organisation, it's not a single, coherent entity, but has branches and departments filled by real, flawed people, so in practice it depends on which industry your're in. For example, digital policy bureaucrats are usually extremely competent, like, they do know how the stuff discussed here on HN works. (That they often have differen expectations from what people here want is orthogonal). Automotive industry is on the other hand squarely in bed with manufacturers (cars, but also accessories like child safety chairs). The average is suprisingly good, esp. in comparison with national bureaucracies.
Even here in Europe, most of Southern Europe was a bunch of Dictatorships up into the late 70s! Spain, Portugal, Greece...
Not to mention Eastern Europe until the wall fell. All dictatorships in different forms. So yeah we've had our share as well.
The problem with the EU is that it seems to be becoming more susceptible to industry lobbying. As of late they are reducing environmental laws (the banning of ICE cars), weakening GDPR and DMA/DSA etc. Not very happy with that. Ursula herself was all about her 'green deal' during her first administration and now she's breaking it all down.
>As of late they are reducing environmental laws (the banning of ICE cars)
I think that particular one is because they realized their timeline is impossible to hit without utterly crippling EU
> weakening GDPR and DMA/DSA
There was always a lot of push for that, it is very much "yes/try later" on those legislations, we got the biggest traitor of the freedom out (UK) but there are still countries either interested, or incompetent enough to think the pushed ideas are a good thing
When it has been the Left that has largely governed Europe for the previous few decades to bring it to the point where it is now where the economics and defence capabilities of nations that once ruled the world are now laughing stock on the global stage.
> nations that once ruled the world are now laughing stock on the global stage
...and yet it gets repeated!
I'm not worried about the right ideology. Last time I took a political test, it told me I'm slightly right-leaning, but that changes every time I take such tests :)
I said that I'm disturbed by the extremists who plan to take away my legally earned rights.
European countries have rules and requirements like most other countries. I looked at their criteria, it sounded fair, took the deal and now I'm here. I pay my taxes, obey the rules, even applied for citizenship (takes ages), and I expect my rights to be protected as well, as long as keep my end of the deal. Those people threaten that golden rule.
Some seem to be obsessed about ruling and military power, and from the outside, they seem to believe that you only are allowed to move in this world if you kill/defeat the previous residents.
In my local(?) community (like in my city, not my industry) there is a saying "if you had to ask for relationship advice, then you probably should break up".
There is some rationale to that. People tend to hold onto relationships that don't lead anywhere in fear of "losing" what they "already have". It's probably a comfort zone thing. So if one is desperate enough to ask random strangers online about a relationship, it's usually biased towards some unresolvable issue that would have the parties better of if they break up.
> So if one is desperate enough to ask random strangers online about a relationship
I'd me more inclined to ask random strangers on the internet than close friends...
That said, when me and my SO had a difficult time we went to a professional. For us it helped a lot. Though as the counselor said, we were one of the few couples which came early enough. Usually she saw couples well past the point of no return.
So yeah, if you don't ask in time, you will probably be breaking up anyway.
Most people engage in romantic relationships because they'd like to find someone to marry and settle down with. Nothing but respect for the people who've thought it through and decided that's not for them, but what's much more common is failing to think it through or worrying it would be awkward/scary/"cringe" to take their relationship goals seriously.
That's what people are pointing to when they talk about relationships not "leading anywhere". If you want to be married in 5-10 years, and you're 2 years into an OK relationship with someone you don't want to marry, it's going to suck to break up with them but you have to do it anyway.
It's kind of interesting in your original comment you used the words "doubter" and "believer", as if AI was some kind of messianic event of some sort and you are deciding whether to "believe" in it.
I mean, if you step back and think about it, there's nothing that requires faith. As you said, current AI can do a lot of things pretty well (transcribe and summarize meetings, write boilerplate code, etc.) Nobody is doubting this.
And AI is definitely helping in innovation to some extent. Not necessarily drive it singlehandedly, but some people working on world-changing innovation find AI useful.
So yeah, I think some people are subconsciously not doubting whether AI works, but kinda having conflicted thoughts about AI being our new overlords or something.
If you think about it, is having AI that's capable of innovating better than humans really a good thing? Like, even if we manage to make benign AI who won't copy how humans are jerks to each other, it kinda takes away our fun of discovery.
It might, but that would be an incredibly awesome problem to have, wouldn't it? If we really had the infinite innovation printer, I'd hope we'd have a lot more fun at that point.
By "believer" versus "doubter" I mainly meant I see it as more than a just a next-word-predictor. But the religious language is probably appropriate nonetheless.
There are already people dealing with AI intelligence scientifically. That's what benchmarks do.
It's the "it's just a stochastic parrot!" camp that's doing the theological work. (and maybe also those in the Singularity camp...)
That said, I do think there's value in having people understand what "Understanding" means, which is kinda a theological (philosophical :D) question. IMHO, in every-day language there's a functional part (that can be tested with benchmarks), and there's a subjective part (i.e. what does it feel like to understand something?). Most people without the appropriate training simply mix up these two things, and together with whatever insecurities they have with AI taking over the world (which IMHO is inevitable to some extent), they just express their strong opinions about it online...
> distinction between deductive and inductive knowledge
There's also intuitive knowledge btw.
Anyway, the recent developments of AI make a lot of very interesting things practically possible. For example, our society is going to want a way to reliably tell whether something is AI generated, and a failure to do so pretty much settles the empirical part of the Turing test issue. Or alternatively if we actually find something that AI can't reliably mimic in humans, that's going to be a huge finding. By having millions of people wonder whether posts on social media are AI generated, it is the largest scale Turing test we have inadvertently conducted.
The fact that AI seems to be able to (digitally) do anything we ask for is also very interesting. If humans are not bogged down by the small details or cost of implementation concerns, and we can just say what we want and get what we wished for (digitally), what level of creativity can we reach?
Also once we get the robots to do things in the physical space...
I don't want to do the thing where we fight on the internet. I don't know your background, but I'll push back here just because this type of comment that non-philosophers seem to present to me, which misses a lot of the points I'm trying to make.
(1) "intuitive knowledge" - whether or not you want to take "intuitive knowledge" as a type of knowledge (I don't think I would) is basically immaterial. The deductive-inductive framework dynamic is for reasoning frameworks, not knowledge. The reasoning frameworks are pointed in opposite directions. The deductive framework is inherited from rationalist tradition, it's premises are by definition arbitrary and cannot be justified, and information is perfect (excepting when you get rare truth values, like something being undecidable). Inductive/empirical framework is quite the opposite. Its premises are observations and absolutely not arbitrary, the information is wholly imperfect (by necessity, thanks Popper), and there is always a kind of adjustable resolution to any research conducted. Newton vs Einsteinian physics, for example, shows how zooming in on the resolution of experimentation shows how a perfectly workable model can fail when instruments get precise enough. I'll also note here that abduction is another niche reasoning framework, but is effectively immaterial to my point here.
(2) The Turing Test is not, and has never been, a philosophically rigorous test. It's effectively a pointless exercise. The literature about "philosophical zombies" has covered this, but the most important work here is Searle's "Chinese Room."
>The fact that AI seems to be able to (digitally) do anything we ask for is also very interesting.
I don't even know how to respond to this. It's trivially, demonstrably false. Beyond that, my entire point is that philosophy of language actually presents so hard problems with regards to what meaning actually is that might end up creating a kind of uncertainty principle to this line of thinking in the long run. Specifically Quine's indeterminacy of translation.
I thought I agreed with most of your original comment that I replied to, and here you are ready to fight. I'm not even sure what you're fighting, and I certainly didn't have in mind the things you responded to.
Well, I guess I learned not to talk to philosophers (especially those who went through school) the hard way. Sometimes I forget my lesson and it's always sad when this happens. Have a good day.
Searle's Chinese Room is a fallacious mess ... see the works of Larry Hauser, e.g., https://philpapers.org/rec/HAUNGT and https://philpapers.org/rec/HAUSCB-2
The importance of Searle's Chinese Room is how such extraordinarily bad argumentation has persuaded so many people open to it.
And the literature about philosophical zombies is contentious, to say the least, and much of it is also among the worst arguments in philosophy--Dennett confided in me that he thought it set back progress in Philosophy of Mind for decades, along with that monstrosity of misdirection, "the hard problem". Chalmers (nice guy, fun drunk at parties, very smart, but hopelessly deluded) once admitted to me on the Psyche-D list that his argument in The Conscious Mind that zombies are conceivable is logically equivalent to denying that physicalism is conceivable, so it's no argument against physicalism ... he said he used the argument to till the soil to make people more susceptible to his later arguments against physicalism (which I consider unethical)--all of which are bogus, like the Knowledge Argument--even Frank Jackson who originated it admits this.
Similarly, Robert Kirk, who coined the phrase "philosophical zombie" in 1974, wrote his book Zombies and Consciousness "as penance", he told me when he signed my copy.
> I don't want to do the thing where we fight on the internet.
Nor me ... I've had these "fights" too many times already and I know how they go, and I understand why people believe what they believe and why they can't be swayed, so I won't comment further ... I just want to put a dent in this "I'm a philosopher" argumentum ad verecundiam.
I would hope that philosophy would be exempt from accusations of arguments from authority. I say I don’t want to fight exactly because I don’t want to come off like a jerk because I’m arguing. If the Chinese Room is a mess, I welcome the argument, and will happily read the paper.
I’m less open to push back against philosophical zombies, as the argument seems trivially plausible, from a position of solipsism.
Philosophy may be exempt from accusations of arguments from authority--because that's a category mistake--but philosophers certainly aren't.
Hauser's papers are just a part of a large literature rejecting/refuting Searle's Chinese Room, but he has probably taken Searle more seriously than most. After Searle's well known response that waves away numerous objections, many people dismissed him as acting in bad faith. (It would have been even worse if they had known about the accusations of sexual assault. Sure, that would be ad hominem and intellectually dishonest, but we're talking about human beings, same as with arguments from authority.) See, e.g., https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c... where Daniel Dennett writes:
> For his part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain; he has just presented the basic thought experiment over and over again. I just went back and counted: I am dismayed to discover that no less than seven of those published criticisms are by me (in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993).
etc. If you've never read any of this literature yet can facilely write what you did above about Searle's discussion of the Chinese Room being "the most important work here", I don't expect you to start now ... but at least reconsider posing as a philosopher who is knowledgeable about such things.
Your reason to be less open to "push back against" (an odd formulation--the burden is on those who claim that they are conceivable, and therefore physicalism is false) philosophical zombies seems to hinge on another radical failure to understand the issue and unfamiliarity with the literature.
Philosophical zombies are completely independent of solipsism. The conceivability of zombies says that, if this is a world in which you are the sole inhabitant and you are conscious, then there is a possible world that is physically identical to this world and has the same physical laws, but the sole inhabitant (scoofy'), while physically identical to you and behaves identically, isn't conscious. That is, consciousness is not a consequence of physical laws and contingencies but is some sort of ethereal goop that accompanies physical entities. Of course Chalmers and other modern dualists don't subscribe to Descartes' substance dualism, but their attempts to formulate "process dualism" or some other nonsense solely because they need some alternative to physicalism--which they reject because they are hopelessly confused about the nature of consciousness and "qualia"--are frankly incoherent.
Apologies to others for the offtopic comment, but thank you so much for neovim. I started using Vim 25 years ago and I almost don't know how to type without a proper Vi-based editor. I don't write as much code these days, but I write other stuff (which definitely needs to be mostly hand written) in neovim and I feel so grateful that this tool is still receiving love and getting new updates.
Generally the perplexity charts indicate that quality drops significantly below 4-bit, so in that sense 4-bit is the sweet spot if you're resource constrained.
AFAICT, you retain the copyrights to your comments, but YC has a license to essentially do whatever they want with them.
So, you could additionally give a license to the world to use your posted comments freely. That doesn't mean HN can't add terms to say clients can't copy the site as a condition for use.
Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent. Maybe the only requirement is that they're not totally in bed with the big corps making money.
reply