Me think this good idea. Regular language unnecessary complex. Distract meaning. Me wish everyone always talk this way. No hidden spin manipulate emotion. Information only. Complexity stupid.
My interpretation of the newspaper image-counting experiment is quite different from that of the author.
My view is that unlucky people don't trust the system (for a good reason) so they don't trust the text; given the nature of the experiment, it is reasonable that they would think the text is a trap to mislead them. It actually mirrors reality perfectly because most people are constantly misled about everything... But a few lucky 'chosen' people are not. In terms of the experiment it would be like showing unlucky people text which shows an incorrect number and the lucky people would see text showing the correct number. That's what's actually happening in real life.
What lucky people don't understand is that merely surviving, without receiving special treatment, is actually very difficult and it requires constantly jumping over all sorts of hurdles and deceptions and you can't afford trust third-party information because every time you did, you ended up losing everything or wasting years of your life. Lucky people are wrong to trust third-party information. They only learn how wrong they were when they stop receiving special treatment; then reality comes as a shock!
What is shown to the majority is what the media wants to show them. The media's purpose is to mislead people. Only a small handful of people are actually lucky enough to have mentors who will tell them "The media is misleading, I know because I influence the media; here is reality: ..."
The reality is that nothing in life can be trusted but everything can be modeled.
For example, you never know what a driver going 60 miles/hr will do, but you do know that the laws of physics say that the driver can’t suddenly go backwards.
Once you figure this out, you realize you can work through absolute chaos because you can work with black boxes.
It doesn’t matter if the media is lying. For example, the source might say there’s this magic pill that has cured cancer, but if that were actually true, we wouldn’t have chemotherapy still. Therefore, without ever having to grapple with the question of the trust, the actual truth is bounded between “fake news” and “there maybe be potential new developments.” If you still care, you can still look into it, but 3 seconds of modeling already gave you a good black box answer.
What people mistakenly do is try to determine if the statement is true or not, but that’s a waste of time in most cases. It’s better to model the system enough to work within it and then move on.
Sure, but I think the media mostly misleads through omission and shifting the focus.
It seems trivial, but on a national or global scale, so many things happen that it becomes a powerful force.
Every day, the media ignores millions of events that happened in the country. It only reports on a few hundreds. The way it chooses what is important give it massive power.
Every day, some politicians somewhere act in a corrupt manner. The media covers a tiny fraction of those. Instead the media might fill the space with celebrity gossip. This creates a false impression that things are alright when they are not.
Unfortunately it's hard for us to get a general sense for how people in our society are doing because our perception is badly distorted.
My sense is that our current society is terrible and many people are harmed and left behind but the suffering is covered up and nobody is held accountable. This is based on what I've observed of people who I used to go to school with (for example).
Sure but I think it’s more a deeper structural problem.
When in human society have we had access to information at this rate? Yes there are bad people but there were have always and will be bad people (like people selling crock medicines 200 years ago).
We’re in this situation because it’s a brand new problem (information density) and we are still looking for a solution. I mean we now have a way to ensure medicines you buy are reasonably vetted, but it took us a while to figure that one out.
It just sucks that we have to live during the times where we haven’t figured it out, but there’s always going to some new problem grappling human society.
Fair to say unlucky people are skeptical/pessimistic/realistic and lucky people are naive/optimistic?
If yes, the question is why? What came first? Their luck or their perspective? Maybe a couple instances of things working out tips the scales early in life!
> Fair to say unlucky people are skeptical/pessimistic/realistic and lucky people are naive/optimistic?
Optimism vs pessimism is basically only a valid framing in very neutral times. If things really are significantly tilted towards up or down, then you either notice that or you don't, and only framing that makes sense is realism vs confusion/delusion
> and only framing that makes sense is realism vs confusion/delusion
I think it's very hard, if not impossible, to have objective realism. We all have a tilt. Most people are probably a bit deluded. The frameworks of pessimism and optimism maybe work given the broad inability to have objective realism?
I'm not talking about people's personal predispositions / decision strategies per se. I'm talking about the outcome-based labels that we stick on them after the fact.
Make a table where the world is 3-valued (up/down/neutral) and our subject is only 2-valued (up/down), you'll see what I mean. World up, person down: person is wrong/confused. World up, person up: person is correct/realist. Optimistic / pessimistic roles only work when the world is neutral. This is very silly of course; that's what I'm trying to point out.
In terms of discussing personal predisposition we need to address whether the individual uses strategy to determine appetite for risk, accepts and integrates feedback or doesn't, etc. But yeah.. a completely generalized and non-situational predisposition based on no trends in evidence, on no expected-value considerations, ignoring feedback.. is also called confused or delusional. Notice that the outcome doesn't matter here actually. Intent does matter.. if you're trying and failing to evaluate evidence properly, suffering from imperfect info, you might still be realist. Realists aren't perfect, they just try to align with what is real
People in my life routinely talk about how lucky I am. Its a big enough thing that it's kind of a meme. I think a big part of it is strategic disassociation. You can't do it with every decision in your life but if you pick and choose some focal points where you just pick the choice with the unknown but possibly positive outcome, commit to it fully, and internalize the value of the joy of discovery without worrying about it too hard you often come out ahead.
I'm pretty sure the luck came first because optimism/pessimism is a learned trait.
I say this as someone who considers themselves "Optimistic by nature, pessimistic by experience."
I was born in lucky circumstances but that luck turned in my teens due to factors outside of my control. I have seen firsthand how it works.
Even now, I constantly have to catch myself and force myself to think pessimistically... And my pessimistic projections are usually right or sometimes not pessimistic enough.
But I know I'm a natural optimist by the fact that I don't give up. I've built so much software and startups over the years; most of them I'm still running on the side and keeping up to date even though I know consciously that there is zero chance they will succeed. Deep down I have a deep optimism that something will change and all the opportunities will come at once. Consciously, I know it is delusional but I'm fundamentally motivated by emotions, not thoughts.
It's a weird feeling having built products that work very similarly to (or better than) other products which rake in millions of dollars but not being able to find a single customer due to all sorts of weird contrived socio-political reasons.
What did he do specifically to crater his reputation?
Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.
Two very public Nazi salutes without any attempt to deny it afterwards will certainly crater anyone's reputation. It's not really politics, but more a question of humanity, but then people don't become billionaires without having a contempt for others and a desire to underpay and mistreat everyone you come into contact with.
Fair enough, I see that online all the time. Here’s my take.
Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.
Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.
Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.
Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.
No they haven't. You've likely been misled by seeing still images of their hand in that position, whereas if you see the video, then it's clearly nothing like a Nazi salute. Meanwhile, the video of Musk makes it incredibly clear that it's a Nazi salute and he has not denied that as far as I know.
His politics also seem to align very much with white supremacy and the far right.
Here's video of Musk performing his fascist salutes. He did it deliberately, he did it with gusto, he grunted with the effort, and he did it twice just to make sure:
That doesn't seem like a denial from Musk, but instead he's just accusing others, but the article doesn't include specific quotes.
From what I remember of the incident, he specifically didn't deny that they were Nazi salutes, but merely hinted that they may have been a Roman salute, though that's pretty much the same thing.
I can't recall any time that he's tried to distance himself from Nazis or their ideology.
Although the ADL didn't think that it was a Nazi salute, most other Jewish organisations thought that it was and Germany very much condemned it, so on balance reasonable people should conclude that it's generally thought of as a Nazi salute. Also, former ADL national director Abraham Foxman described the gesture as a "Heil Hitler Nazi salute".
Reasonable people can simply watch the video and see for themselves - it very much looked exactly like a Nazi salute to me.
He did deny it multiple times on Twitter/X. Probably your news source of choice is the one which omitted this fact.
I think it probably did look a bit that way and maybe he did it for engagement, maybe he intended to create controversy or maybe it was none of these things. In any case, it wasn't an actual Nazi salute.
Yep and I think unfortunately people don't understand human nature because they look at themselves and look at their neighbours to estimate it... But human nature is very different when evaluated from the centres of power. Humans near the centres of power are fundamentally very different from those on the periphery. There are powerful selection mechanisms at play.
I used to think success was mostly about luck but now I think there are selection mechanisms but they're not selecting for what people think. Selection is not based on skill or hard work.
I think there are different life strategies that humans use. Some people need to survive based on skill more than others. The most obvious cases of non-skill strategies are the ones where people make a living based on having a certain physical appearance, or else live off of inheritance.
This might be controversial but I think rich and powerful people are usually skilled. The skill might be pretty far removed from the technical, of course. But I think I can safely say that most people don't fail upward and don't preserve or grow wealth when it just falls into their laps. The skill of investing well is really kind of a planning and information-processing skill. Society generally benefits from successful management of wealth at that level, even if we on the bottom of the pyramid detest extreme wealth of those on top.
Yep but there are strange undesirable characteristics that are being selected. Some of which we don't fully understand.
For example, it is my personal belief that there is a selection mechanism for high suggestibility (by social media and search algorithms which can monetize it). Basically suggestible people are helped in their careers because they act like a money pipeline which redirects money they 'earn' back to social media companies. Social media companies might be thinking of people as straight money pipes leading outward vs bendable pipes potentially leading back towards themselves. Which kind of pipe would they select to pump money through?
This has a side effect of creating strong social alignment over bad ideas. If you empower suggestible people to make decisions, then whoever is above them can bend them in any direction they want.
Suggestible people follow instructions and (sometimes) take fewer risks. It is simply infeasible to logically convince people of every single thing that they ought to know. I hate to infantilize people in this way, but even the most capable and inquisitive minds among us cannot reasonably investigate everything.
People socially align over a lot of things, not just ideas. They develop shared tastes and preferences.
Even very undesirable characteristics such as sociopathy have a function in society. It is sometimes necessary to emotionally detach oneself from situations to make the right decisions. These are not good for every role, but they are primitive survival mechanisms and still have a useful function in keeping the peace.
They really don't want people scraping their data with extensions. The LI API response is the worst tangled mess I've ever seen... It's so bad, I have to assume it's intentional. Took me 3 days to parse their responses. I had to build a special rules-based scraping engine which allows me to filter and map items layer by layer based the relative positions of those items with flexible rules. A bit like CSS selectors but more complicated.
The hard part is that some APIs return items in a different order or with different indentation so my engine normalizes all the variants into consistent objects.
It's quite impressive that LI works at all given the complexity.
Studies are extremely difficult to get right. I'm generally a little bit skeptical of data for this reason.
A bit of a tangent but still on the subject of environmental pollution; the other day I found out that CO2 sensor sensitivity naturally drifts over time... So when a CO2 sensor is replaced for long term climate research, if they try to calibrate the new sensor to the old one at the time of replacement, the drift would be carried over into the new sensor even if no actual real change of CO2 occurred... Apparently there are standards to prevent this but mistakes have been identified multiple times with the methodology for setting that standard... Anyway measuring data accurately is really hard.
What I'm hoping for is for more competition in the tech sector. I'm tired of companies foisting Microsoft or Oracle products on everyone! WTF! The current tech sector feels like all companies are subsidiaries of Big Tech... It's likely a direct result of passive investing... Everyone who has any money and controls a small or medium sized company likely owns stock of Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon... So they mandate their companies to use products from those big tech companies. So all the small-fish founders feel like they are dogfooding their own investments... And that's preventing new entrants from getting a foothold in B2B space... Feels like all the small companies are working for Big Tech.
Conflict of interests is the norm. It should be illegal for a company founder or director to own stock of a supplier. It should be illegal for shareholders to own stocks of two competing companies. Index funds should be illegal.
Unfortunately for me, I believe that the algorithms won't allow me to get exposure for my work no matter how good it is so there is literally no benefit for me to do open source. Though I would love to, I'm not in a position to work for free. Exposure is required to monetize open source. It has to reach a certain scale of adoption.
The worst part is building something open source, getting positive feedback, helping a couple of startups and then some big corporation comes along and implements a similar product and then everyone gets forced by their bosses to use the corporate product against their will and people eventually forget your product exists because there are no high-paying jobs allowing people to use it.
With hindsight, Open Source is basically a con for corporations to get free labor. When you make software free for everyone, really you're just making it free for corporations to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... They invest a huge amount of effort to suppress the sources of the ideas.
Our entire system is heavily optimized for decoupling products from their makers. We have almost no idea who is making any of the products we buy. I believe there is a reason for that. Open source is no different.
When we lived in caves, everyone in the tribe knew who caught the fish or who speared the buffalo. They would rightly get credit. Now, it's like; because none of the rich people are doing any useful work, they can only maintain credibility by obfuscating the source of the products we buy. They do nothing but control stuff. Controlling stuff does not add value. Once a process is organized, additional control only serves to destroy value through rent extraction.
Wow. This is theft. Should be illegal! It's like if I own a vault storage business and I am keeping other people's gold in my vaults and then I just take all the gold for myself and claim that the customers should have opted out of me stealing their gold but they missed the deadline...
This hints at something, that in my opinion isn't not discussed enough:
Say some personal data leaked into training data, where can I request surgical deletion of that data from the LLM? Not only license washing is done using LLM, but also PII washing and consent ignoring is done using LLMs. How will a service provider make sure to not ever have personal data in the training data set and fix earlier mistakes pertaining to personal data? Are they not obliged to have a way of deleting one's personal data? GDPR or something?
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