"It’s wild to me that on this topic people seem to see their own governments as largely equivalent to an outwardly adversarial if not explicitly hostile foreign power".
Because governments are adversarial to their general population in many cases. People live in reality, not in imagination land where the salt-of-the-earth type of people's voices are at all considered.
If you don't know or are unsure about something, you can simply not comment and leave it for someone else.
I don't understand what compels people to go "I don't know, but let me ask the often-wrong-bullshit-generator" and post it as a reply on a forum. The parent commenter could've done that...
Actually, yes. The summary is plausible enough to believe in the context of the discussion(which it doesn't know about via the prompt), and in fact turns out to be basically true.
> And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?
Yes. It devalues artists further (on top of only existing due to grand scale theft of art). It also is slop devoid of intention.
If that's not enough, it's ecologically devastating. I would rather not waste millions of gallons of water on slop that gets generated and thrown away.
Precisely - the amount of damage that openai and llms have done to human knowledge sharing and discourse is incalculable. Now we not only have to deal with humans manually writing junk due to perverse incentives, we also have to deal with people passing off machine generated junk at scale.
And we're destroying the environment through rapidly increasing resource consumption to do so. This situation is incredibly fucked.
Many people within niches have discord servers for researching and discussing specific things. There is a large wealth of information locked away behind them that can be lost pretty much whenever discord decides to start pursuing different monetization strategies.
There's always gullible marks. You could just tell them to open the web developer tools for their browser instead of pushing predatory products, though.
Deciding when features diverge enough to be a difference "race" is entirely arbitrary, and is largely for political reasons not scientific ones. The wikipedia articles on it are actually pretty good reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_society
I was watching the Olympics opening ceremony with my young son and he noticed that, at least in some cases, people from particular countries share a skin color. Was I supposed to tell him that he's mistaken and we indeed don't know why that appears to happen?
Yes, races can mix which also mixes their features, making them difficult to singularly classify. But is it necessary to not notice that in some cases larger populations have not mixed for a while and developed a common set of features?
The issue here is slight genetic differences and/or phenotypes are being construed as significant enough to mark people as a different -race- of human, which significantly plays into racism. Whereas my understanding is Africa itself has more genetic diversity than the typical races that been demarcated more for political reasons.
You should explain to him that when people live in certain places for many generations some adaptations to local environment happen in their bodies. Then you could explain how it's a fairly recent thing that skin of some people got white because of living in relatively low light environment for millenia. As people now have have ability to move freely and freely eat food from around the globe this artifact of being stuck in one place will eventually disappear. But for now we can enjoy how differently people can look while being generally the same.
A good explanation of how and why specific combinations of genes get concentrated in relatively isolated populations. What we call “race” historically got based on superficial features, not analysis of similarities in DNA. It turns out that sometimes those correspond, and sometimes they don’t. Indonesians and Brazilians have similar ranges of skin color (melanin) for the same reason — adaptation to sun exposure — but only distant common ancestors and very different histories.
Does anyone consider Indonesians and Brazilians to be a single race? I think that your comment addresses a strawman that nobody stated.
If you are discounting the idea that colour is a singular indicator of race, then yes I agree with you. But that does not mean that race, as a whole, does not exist.
I was pointing out that people can end up with similar superficial features without common heritage. I doubt anyone considers Indonesians and Brazilians the same race, but then again I’m pretty sure a large number of Americans would call both “black.” As evidence I offer the fake “race” Americans call Hispanic or LatinX, a definition that includes people with very different genetic and social heritages, and one mostly rejected by members of the supposed Hispanic race. That’s a political construct and convenience, not a real thing in any sense.
Race exists as a social construct. Collections of genes concentrated in a population describe something, I called it heritage. Sometimes the social construct and the heritage correspond, sometimes not. “African” only describes a race based on superficial features, not genetic variation.
I live in east Asia among people I (white American) always thought of as members of the same race, Asian. But I have learned that the people here have different racial definitions and boundaries, more tuned to their own social constructs and ideas about heritage and history. No doubt people from the African continent have different ideas about race than I got raised with. So in that sense “race” is a social construct, because different societies have different and conflicting definitions. Which do we call correct? My American/western notion of Asian as a race, or the definitions the people of Asia use?
I don't think anybody seriously considerd either "Indonesian" nor "Brazillian" to be racial categories or groupings.
What is the precise unambiguous definition of "race" in any case?
With Brazil you have a country in which a small few were rumoured to be exact clones of Hitler ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(novel) ) a greater majority who are descended from European colonizers and former African slaves and a small number who "pure" descendants from the some 2,000 different tribal groups once totalling some 7 million people prior to the 1500 CE European contact.
Indonesia is a similar construct - it's a political boundary about many many distinct ethnologies from some 17,000 islands and over a quarter billion people.
> I don't think anybody seriously considerd either "Indonesian" nor "Brazillian" to be racial categories or groupings.
I hope not.
That wasn’t the point I meant to make. The thread I replied in started with trying to explain skin color differences to a child. I had to do that with my own kids, because kids notice that people look different. I stayed away from the concept of “race” and instead tried to explain heritage and adaptation. At first glance a child might very well think Indonesians and Brazilians belong to the same race — it would depend on what features they notice. Sadly too many adults have the same level of discrimination (in both senses).
Sure, I'm further emphasising the point that much of what some regard as "race" is superficial or "familial".
Reading older English books many years past I've seen the claim that Scottish families could be distinguished by features, I'd accept that having recognised people as being from one family or another growing, however I doubt anyone would claim the MacThoseOnes are a different race to the McThemOnes.
I saw in this post some conflation of "Africans" and "(Australian) Aboriginals", both vey large groups with very many sub groups - it's worth a mention that of all the peoples on the planet these two are perhaps the furtherest apart on the family tree as it took a good while to walk (and boat a little) to Australia and arrive here some 70K+ years past - much of Europe is likely more closely related on the great human tree to modern Africans.
I'm from central Europe, so maybe the fine details regarding this topic escape my attention, but I would understand heritage as a much more social concept than race. For example, a kid born to Japanese parents and growing up in Poland may very well feel connection to Polish heritage. This obviously doesn't make them Slavic, but that's not a requirement to be Polish. On the other hand, some people deliberately escape their countries and may find the idea of implicitly connecting them to that heritage offensive.
You're referencing extremes to argue against the concept entirely which is absurd. DNA can identify groups of people with similar clusters of genes that make up a race with high accuracy. It's tracing the lineage of you and your ancestors which isn't arbitrary, and most people are sufficiently more than a drop of a given race making the delineation quite clear.
Deciding that those "clusters of genes" represent an entirely different race is arbitrary, and it's not "clear" at all. Tracing DNA of ancestors has little to do with that. Please read the articles I linked, they're long but address your concerns.
Maybe. People that spent hours in libraries back before the Internet would have said the same thing. Maybe it will be different this time. I don’t know.
I think academic literature and writing, and the internet as a whole being flooded with generated text by bullshitting LLMs is slightly different than humans manually recording things in books.
Because governments are adversarial to their general population in many cases. People live in reality, not in imagination land where the salt-of-the-earth type of people's voices are at all considered.