I wasn't going to post this article, but this part caught my attention:
"In an earlier post, I asked whether scientists might soon be forced to consider the occult as science. Perhaps some readers think the concern far-fetched. But consider: Science is as dependent on the concept of public truth as the great religions are. In an age when private truth is rapidly gaining in power, it is just as vulnerable as religion."
Per my other reply, i am curious about the content of article and how (formerly) prominent biologists have been affected and punished. The story about carol hooven, the former harvard scientist, was especially disheartening.
richard dawkins was no creationist either. the article mentions how his award was taken away for stating his opinion. Any thoughts on that?
"When OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm last year, it caught many power brokers in both Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, by surprise. The US government should now get advance warning of future AI breakthroughs involving large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT.
The Biden administration is preparing to use the Defense Production Act to compel tech companies to inform the government when they train an AI model using a significant amount of computing power. The rule could take effect as soon as next week.
Why would informing the government kill the industry? The government needs to be informed if you intend to sell a car, has that killed the automotive industry?
You should check out "The Darkening Age" by Catherine Nixey. Once Christians became the majority, and especially after Constantine, the direction of persecutions reversed, and was then by Christians towards the remaining pagans. Many of the broken statues we now see were vandalized by zealous Christians eager to remove the vestigial influence of the pagan Rome:
Rome was in significant moral, cultural, and economic decline and those that chose to hold on to that failing and disturbed culture are not the ones you should be sympathetic to. They willfully and knowingly drove themselves into ruins. Christianity and it's doctrines (as they are understood in the mostly conventional, trinitarian, organized fashion) are very clearly formulated in direct opposition to late Roman culture and it's vestigial but pernicious influence throughout history.
Yes, it is true that the Christians destroyed Rome. That clearly the intent.
Your comment has merit. Even at it's peak Roman culture was marbled with cruelty and violence. During its decline, these aspects only got worse and became coupled with corruption and decadence. But I think we should see them relative to their historic peers (Gauls, Carthaginians, Parthians), not relative to modern societies to truly see what their contributions were, of which there were many, including in law, engineering, and medicine.
> You should check out "The Darkening Age" by Catherine Nixey.
Please do not waste your time:
> Her publisher’s blurb informs us that Nixey’s book tells “the largely unknown – and deeply shocking – story” of how a militant Christianity “extinguished the teachings of the Classical world” and was “violent, ruthless and intolerant” in an orgy of destruction and oppression that was “an annihilation”. On the other hand, no less an authority than the esteemed historian of Late Antiquity, Dame Averil Cameron, calls Nixey’s book “a travesty”, roundly condemning it as “overstated and unbalanced”. And Dame Averil is correct – this is a book of biased polemic masquerading as historical analysis and easily the worst book I have read in years.
> For basic facts that Nixey lies about—she states that Aristotle was erased by Christian monks. Clearly, she has no knowledge of how Aristotle was incorporated into Catholic thinking from the first centuries of the church, visibly in St. Gregory’s Pastoral Rule (or the fact that it was monks in France who preserved copies of Aristotle in the Latin West long before he was “reintroduced” by Muslims either). […]
> Nixey also cherry picks her facts concerning supposed Christian iconoclasm and militancy. It was the Roman military, rather than Christian mobs, who were responsible for the destruction of the library at Antioch which Nixey paints as evidence of Christian iconoclastic and anti-intellectual mob violence. The Roman military was also one of the last institutions in the post-Constantinian settlement that was Christianized. […]
> Likewise, Nixey’s claim that Latin literature and literacy collapsed after the Christianization of the Roman Empire is the most egregious of cherry-picked examples. Barbarization and the internal moral decline of Roman society on its own accord were the more guilty culprits—especially considering the Gothic and Frankish tribes that settled into an already decadent Roman Empire didn’t speak Latin, didn’t write, and didn’t produce the same litany of great works preserved by Christianity that were already in decline by the 2nd century A.D. long before the rise of Christianity. […]
"Over the past decade, Meta
—itself and through its flagship Social Media
Platforms Facebook and Instagram (its Social Media Platforms or Platforms)—has profoundly
altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans. Meta has
harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare
youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has
repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its Social Media Platforms. It has
concealed the ways in which these Platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable
consumers: teenagers and children.2
And it has ignored the sweeping damage these Platforms
have caused to the mental and physical health of our nation’s youth. In doing so, Meta engaged
in, and continues to engage in, deceptive and unlawful conduct in violation of state and federal
law"
Yes, and moreover, the important point in the article that some people seem to be forgetting is that Meta itself believed that certain design choices led to addictive products and worked to incorporate those designs despite harmful consequences to children and adults alike. It matter much less that anyone on the outside believes this or not.
Additionally, saying that children and adults should be wholly responsible for this is like saying the Chinese and not the British should be responsible for their opium addiction (see Opium War) and that homeless in San Francisco should be responsible for their Fentanyl addition. They can always just say no, right?
I worry that if nothing is done, this will only get worse, addiction will become the norm, of one sort or another, and you can just look at history of the Opium War to see where this leads.
> Additionally, saying that children and adults should be wholly responsible for this is like saying the Chinese and not the British should be responsible for their opium addiction (see Opium War) and that homeless in San Francisco should be responsible for their Fentanyl addition. They can always just say no, right?
This is why I find it funny that FAANG people call themselves software engineers. In the real world, an engineer is wholly responsible for the projects they bring into the world. Imagine a bridge collapses and someone dies. Then in court the family is told that the person was responsable to research bridge designs before using it. These social media companies are just run by money hungry a-holes.
> This is why I find it funny that FAANG people call themselves software engineers. [...] Imagine a bridge collapses and someone dies. Then in court the family is told that the person was responsable to research bridge designs before using it.
They are software engineers though. Engineers build all of our weapons.
The bridge collapsing isn't accidental-- it was the intended outcome. It's a carefully-engineered trap.
This is what happens when you start using the word "addiction" outside of contexts where it applies. You get these kinds of invalid and dangerous arguments comparing actually addictive substances that hijack incentive salience directly on the physiological level to a screen and speakers that most definitely do not.
As someone who has had issue with addiction (a real one by your definition as well as screen based one), it's plainly obvious that the brain mechanisms at play are the same.
So does listening to enjoyable music or viewing an impressive art gallery. I assume you're talking about glutamergic activity in populations in the shell of the nucleus accumbens. (edit: after reading the paper, https://www.nature.com/articles/tp2016256 , I was correct).
And that's funny because in the incentive salience theory of addiction, which they cite at the start of their paper, the nucleus accumbens populations don't encode for wanting, those populations encode for liking. The actual voxels of the brain this study should have been watching would be the ventral pallidum and ventral tegmental area. Those are necessary and sufficient for wanting(craving). The nucleus accumbens is not.
You'd think the director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic who cites the incentive salience theory in his first paragraph would actually take the time to understand the neurological correlates of the theory he's citing (but then again, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."). This lack should make you question the other aspects of this study.
Like how a 19 person MRI studies might as well not be studies at all in the neuroscience sense. They're for getting more funding to do a study with actual statistical power to make inferences. And note that in the actual paper they don't call it addiction, it's gambling disorder.
“Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.”
Putting aside the way in which the OpenAI firing happened, I was curious to at least hear Ilya Sutskever's point of view in a coherent way. I think this video is a good start.
