I'll also pick apart this question "The mainstream media gave Trump an 8% chance to win the 2016 election. Him winning clearly shows they were biased and wrong."
Well, defined biased. Pollsters weren't using perfectly random models, so there was systemic bias (as there always is when you can't have a truly representative sample). There was also a sense of group-think that "This couldn't possibly happen, this is beneath our country" from a lot of individuals in and out of media.
That said it doesn't prove a deliberate attempt to deceive, but it certainly was a wake-up call to many in the media.
Point here being -- almost all emotional discourse is taking very nuanced situations and trying to cram them into semi-arbitrary judgmental terms like "fair" and "legitimate" and "biased."
Well, he's threatening to jail reporters for reporting that an airman was down inside Iran, claiming that Iran didn't know until the US media reported it. He's not currently threatening reporters for claiming that the US was going after the HEU.
Just seems like baseless speculation, another attempt to rationalize what occam's razor can much more easily explain with long-established egomania or senility.
Mmh yes and no. There are two arms in this hypothesis and you can summarize the second one (the main one) as basically wanting to piss off / punish the Europeans. This is perfectly on point and fits the character.
Occam's razor might well describe actions of a cold calculating leader. But of Trump..?
I think despite the presentation this has some good ideas in it:
1. Formally calling out a concept for judgment-based skills that cannot be easily taught. I think everybody understands this, but having a word for this would be useful.
2. Opening up the conversation on the topic of which types of skills can/should be codified and how.
That said, everything else in the article is suss. "Dimensionality" is largely a distraction to try to sound smart, most of the claims in the article are unwarranted (e.g. processes & checklists can be great, even for disciplines with true experts like airline pilots).
For example saying that skill learning cannot be accelerated is just patently false in many domains -- take something like learning chess. If you have a coach and other tools you'll learn a LOT faster. But certainly I've worked places that wished they could automate away reliance on experts because it gives organization power to a few non-management individuals.
You teach the machine by asking it to solve some problems, and then whatever answer it gives you say "That's exactly right. Now we train on those answers YOU just gave me" (even if they are wrong) and repeat. Somehow THAT works over time.
This might sound paradoxical -- but any decent LLM will be happy to explain all the papers to you at great depth, and read new ones, and translate the math into simpler concepts and such. It'll also happily recommend relevant math to study, or give training problems, or whatever you want.
You use the outputs from the first run (right or wrong) as answers for the second training run, and repeat. Magically it works. That's what's so surprising.
I guess a theory is because there are so many diverse ways to be wrong that they don't accumulate error... still seems surprising and would be interesting to see if it works in other domains.
I think a lot of studies are actually illegitimate. I think scientists all admit this, which is why peer-review, disclosing conflicts of interest, sharing your data, reporting all your measures BEFORE you collect data, not lying with statistics, etc are all being asked for (and often not done). This is why scientists often weight for meta-studies and replication before trusting any finding.
Laymen also correctly have an intuition that the people doing these studies aren't entirely trustworthy. What they don't have is a clear picture of how much work goes into these studies, who's doing it, what their motivations are, etc.
In my opinion studies when they can, should record videos of all data and make it publicly available online. Watching somebody do 1,000 hours of research is more proof-of-work to lay-people than some semi-coherent summary-for-a-layperson article.
When a political party controls the science, you end up with say, Trump pushing one set of results, and Biden pushing another. It then becomes either pick the science that agrees with your politics, or throw up your hands in frustration. The average reader probably won't be able to dig into the fundamentals of the research and pull out the salient results, nor are they guaranteed it isn't policy pushed through overstated claims. It really undermines good science. It also falls back on the researchers who push science based on politics as well, so it isn't just the politicians.
That’s all true but it’s orthogonal to what i think you are responding to IMO.
I don’t think that studies are bunk because of corporate money, I think they are bunk because of how many studies I read. I am not a very fun person so when I see news reports about studies, I try to look them up. I find it more peaceful than memes or celebrity events. Think “coffee is good/bad for you again” style studies we read about daily.
These studies always suck. Ok, maybe 90% if I’m not being hyperbolic. It’s small sample sizes sure, but it’s also faulty logic, unsupported claims from evidence, lack of looking for alternatives, lack of ruling out confounding factors. And don’t get me started on soft-science an arts theses, I don’t have time.
I know that science moves forward mostly in millimeters, and I would agree that we have more and better scientific knowledge now than we have had in the past. But it certainly isn’t for the amount of publish-or-perish, p-hacking, storytelling, or outright fabrication.
In my experience the lay people aren't getting a great idea of the state of the field. Like you say coffee good/bad studies. It isn't that simple. People test all sorts of things in different contexts. But maybe some are genuinely bad studies. You don't know though because science journalism is so crappy. They don't care about the merits of the study. They go "people drink coffee, maybe that would drive engagement."
The most interesting papers are not going to get popular press releases because they are so many steps removed from the context that lay people understand. They can understand "coffee good/bad." They can't understand anything about the stories we are actually telling at the bleeding edge of a field, because even our undergrads working in our labs on these projects can scarcely understand them. Second year grad students struggle to understand them. How can a science journalist who only has a bs from communications department, or the lay public, possibly understand?
So, they don't reach for those papers when they seek to write articles for engagement. And the lay public doesn't learn the state of the art, and assumes the worst of the field from what they do read about.
Counterpoint -- Yes he's wrong and obviously so. But is some rich dude saying something stupid worthy of platforming?
It almost feels to me like acting as though a famous person being gasp wrong about something is implicitly suggesting that this is somehow surprising?
We should be surprised and write essays when the smartest people we know say something silly. Just because somebody's bank account has some zeroes in it doesn't mean it should be worthy of our focus.
These people have profoundly inflated egos, platforming them if only for the express purpose of mocking them mercilessly in front of the entire world is absolutely worth it.
These people are insanely powerful forces in the modern world. Of course we should talk about them (and usually how
Wrong, shortsighted, and self-serving they are).
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