Mel Brooks did not even try to defend against this. He is a huge admirer of her. He thought it was appropriate to pay her and apologise for any offence she may have taken from the gag.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQef9PqjKbG/
No but one step further than OP went making unsubstantiated claims that actually contradicts the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.
>... the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.
Given that ChatGPT is still very much in a "trust, but verify" state (on a daily basis it confidently states falsehoods about subject matter I'm highly familiar with, for instance), I'm wondering if you followed up to confirm that the data at the sources provided by ChatGPT accurately reflected what it told you.
If you're going to insist that others revisit their research, I would hope that you're making a good faith effort towards doing the same.
This isn't an accurate picture of the Bay Area I just left after residing in for five years. It's almost like you're only familiar with one corner of it.
Boulder homeowners are not representative of the population of the city.
Like, a lot of the town is just kids at CU. Also, a lot of the younger families are in what little apartments or condos there are in the city and aren't homeowners. Also, like, you probably should only look at adults anyways as under 18s are very unlikely to have their own houses.
Granted a lot of 80+ year olds are in care facilities.
And like, maybe we can relax this to 60+ years olds, in which case based on the raw data there, that's about 18% of the population.
I mean, just looking around Boulder, the homeowners are old people, that's pretty clear.
No, they can be. To state that they are, as an absolute, based on your sample size of one, especially with regard to other instances where ChatGPT has failed the user with serious physical results, is fallacious.
I am glad that you are OK, but as another user suggested, it's nowhere near as consistently accurate as it needs to be in order to be anywhere near an adequate substitute for a call to a GP or 911.
Exactly. Someone way back when decided to call them neural networks, and now a lot of people think that they are a good representation of the real thing. If we make them fast enough, powerful enough, we'll end up with a brain!
I wish McCulloch and Pitts could see how much intellectual damage that wildly bold analogy they made would do. (though seeing as they seemingly had no qualms with issuing such a wildly unjustified analogy with the absolute paucity of scientific information they had at the time, I guess they'd be happy about it overall).
Computational neurons were developed with the express intent of studying models of the brain based on the contemporary understanding of neuroscience. That understanding has evolved massively over the last 7 decades and meanwhile the concept of the perceptron has proven to be a useful mathematical construct in machine learning and statistical computing. I blame the modern business culture if software development more than I blame dead scientists for the misunderstanding being peddled to the public.
I also blame the modern business culture more, but we shouldn't act like McCulloch and Pitts were innocent. They well could have introduced neural nets without making the wild claims they did about actual neural equivalence. They are largely responsible for much of the brain = computer naivety and, in my view, they put forward this claim with shockingly little justification. The reasoned analogically without actually understanding the things they were trying to analogize. They basically took something that had the status of hypothesis at best and used it in the same manner one might if one had understanding.
To be clear, I'm not at all criticizing their technical contribution. Neural nets obviously are an important technical approach to computation—however we should criticize the attendant philosophical and neurological and biological claims they attached to their study, which lacked sufficient justification.
There was an actual simulation of a brain that could respond appropriately to stimuli. It ran many orders of magnitude slower than real-time but demonstrated the correlation. Probably not using the DNNs that we use now, but still a machine.
The hubris here isn't CS people making comparisons, it's assuming biological substrate matters. Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors. So what? The "chemicals not electricity" distinction is pure carbon chauvinism, like insisting hydraulic computers can't be compared to electronic ones because water isn't electricity. Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties; it just hill-climbed to a solution using whatever materials were available. Brains work despite being kludges of evolutionary baggage, not because biology unlocked some deeper truth about intelligence.
Meanwhile, these systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago. At some point, look at the goddamn scoreboard. If you think there's something brains can do that these architectures fundamentally can't, name it specifically instead of gesturing vaguely at "inscrutability." The list of "things only biological brains can do" keeps shrinking, and your objection keeps sounding like "but my substrate is special!!1111"
> Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors.
This is an incredible simplification of the process and also just a small part of it. There is increasing evidence that quantum effects might play a part in the inner workings of the brain.
> Brains work despite being kludges of evolutionary baggage, not because biology unlocked some deeper truth about intelligence.
This seems naively dismissive of arguments around substrates considering that playing "Go at superhuman levels" took 1MW of energy versus the 1-2 (or if you want to assume 100% of the brain was applied to the game, 20) watts consumed by the human brain.
> Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors
If it is, sure. But this isn't a given. We don't actually understand how the brain computes, as evidenced by our inability to simulate it.
> Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties
Sure. But the complexity remains beyond our comprehension. Against the (nearly) binary action potential of a transmitter we have a multidimensional electrochemical system in the brain which isn't trivially reduced to code resembling anything we can currently execute on a transistor substrate.
> hese systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago
Straw man. Who said this? If anything, the symbolic linguists have been overpromising on this front since the 1980s.
> Straw man. Who said this? If anything, the symbolic linguists have been overpromising on this front since the 1980s.
I'm sure I've seen people say this about language translation and playing go. Ditto chess, way back before Kasparov lost. I don't think I've seen anyone so specific as to say that about medical licensing exams, nor as vague as "write code", but on the latter point I do even now see people saying that software engineering is safe forever with various arguments given…
Fair enough. I’m not going to argue nobody said anything. What I’ll contest is that anyone of consequence said it with consequence. These beliefs didn’t slow down the field. They didn’t stop it from raising capital or attracting engineers.
Jonas & Kording showed that neuroscience methods couldn't reverse-engineer a simple 6502 processor [0]. If the tools can't crack a system we built and fully documented, our inability to simulate brains just means we're ignorant, not that substrate is magic. It also doesn't necessarily say great things for neuroscience!
And "who said this?"... come on. Searle, Dreyfus, thirty years of "syntax isn't semantics," all the hand-wringing about how machines can't really understand because they lack intentionality. Now systems pass those benchmarks and suddenly it's "well nobody serious ever thought that mattered." This is the third? fourth? tenth? round of goalpost-moving while pretending the previous positions never existed.
Pointing at "multidimensional electrochemical complexity" is just phlogiston with better vocabulary. Name something specific transformers can't do?
> If the tools can't crack a system we built and fully documented, our inability to simulate brains just means we're ignorant, not that substrate is magic
Nobody said the substrate is magic. Just that it isn't understood. Plenty of CS folks have also been trying to simulate a brain. We haven't figured it out. The same logic that tells you the neuroscientific model is broken at some level should inform that the brains-as-computers model is similarly deficient.
> Pointing at "multidimensional electrochemical complexity" is just phlogiston with better vocabulary
Sorry, have you figured out how to simulate a brain?
Multidimensional because you have more than one signalling chemical. Electrochemical because you can't just watch what the electrons are doing.
> Name something specific transformers can't do?
That what can't do. A neuron? A neurotransmitter-receptor system? We literally can't simulate these systems beyond toy models. We don't even know what the essential parts are--can you safely lump together N neutransmitter molecules? What's N? We're still discovering new ion channels?!
I personally do not think operational proficiency and understanding are equivalent.
I can do many things in life pretty well without understanding them. The phenomenon of understanding seems distinct from the phenomenon of doing something/acting proficiently.
So, a decent approximation that only turned out to be wrong when we looked closely and found the mass flow was in the opposite direction, but otherwise the model basically worked?
>I didn't claim that it didn't happen to you, or that it never happens.
The following is worded in such a way that it very much reads that you're saying it doesn't happen...
>When other people say that something happens to them, why should I simply take them at their word when it contradicts the evidence actually available to me?
You've very clearly said that if something hasn't happened to you, you're not likely to believe someone when they tell you it's happened to them. Further...
>You seemed to be implying that it will always happen, or commonly happen...
... there was no implication. The comment you initially responded to clearly stated specific instances that will trigger the phone number requirement, the same instances that are very clearly stated by Discord[1] itself.
> The comment you initially responded to clearly stated specific instances that will trigger the phone number requirement
And I'm saying that I've personally been (as far as I can tell) in some of the situations described without encountering such requirement, therefore "will" is hyperbolic.
It especially doesn't make sense to me that there would be a flag for "joining too many servers" because they put a hard cap on that anyway. And indeed, the support article says that this triggers for joining too many servers in a short period of time.
I'll allow being upset that something you love is changing because you're nostalgic for what it's always been, struggle with change and don't like how bland modern design is. I don't personally get it (though I've got solidarity regarding the blandness of design), but I understand those sentiments exist in others and am OK with that.
What I don't get, and what was truly excessive, is blaming it on "woke" and watching our politicians and president get involved. That was all beyond stupid.
Everything is weaponized, whether it makes sense or not. They’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and these things take a life of their own
The funny thing about calling it woke is it wasn’t a partisan issue, nobody was going to Cracker Barrel Republicans included, that’s why it was dying, and all my woke/liberal friends were just as nostalgic.
But it’s really representative of how little of a shared vision for America there is on the modern right, like this full throated attack in an attempt to protect something they don’t want.
While I don't entirely disagree here, it is very much the case that the kind of "Americana nostalgia" that Cracker Barrel's once and future look epitomizes is much more something that the American right cares about than the left, in and of itself.
That doesn't mean that the left doesn't care about the corporate blandicization of everything with any personality, nor that the right was actually going to Cracker Barrel in droves. But it does mean that it's very easy for those who wish to stir up more polarization to paint the original rebrand as an attack on the right.
I mean, it’s real in the sense that any culture war point is real, in that it’s probably more salient on the extremes than in the middle.
But if you were talking about about gay rights or trans rights or abortion you’d have a loud and vocal group on the left saying the right was absolutely morally wrong. In this case though. Where’s the attack? The attack is coming from capitalism, not from the left, so maybe I get what you’re trying to say, but this is the first culture war issue where I would say the reality, even if not the perception is that most people are either in the center(don’t care) or affected (don’t like it), I don’t think there are many serious people on the other side of it (the Cracker Barrel rebrand is good, and you’re wrong for being against it.). But ironically, you could even argue the “attack” came from the right! No longer protecting its own institutions(this is overstated for effect but I think the point still stands)
I don’t know that I’m saying I disagree with you- there’s the very real observation that about Americana that say the right brings American flags to protest and too many on the left don’t, but still, it’s funny.
Oh, the attack itself absolutely comes from the right! The bland rebrands are 100% a product of right-wing corporate America trying to maximize profits at the expense of everything else.
I think my point is just that while you're right that there isn't really anyone on the left saying "this is a good thing that we should keep", the vast, vast majority of the people who are being animated by the perception that it is an attack are on the right.
Those people reflexively blame the left, because they have been conditioned to see anything that attacks the things they care about as coming from the left, but it is 100% a clash between the corporate wing and the rural-culture wing of the American right.
My take is that some on the right, perhaps most, correctly identify that our culture is in the doldrums but don’t have an answer. Being conservatives and reactionaries their instinct is to reach for a point in the past they think was better and try to roll back to that. But they haven’t thought it through in any depth. They don’t know what they actually want.
Leftists, having different instincts, reach for things like class conflict and social injustice to explain the doldrums, but I’m not convinced they’ve thought it through either.
Yeah, the weird annoyance from me is I probably value things like cracker barrel more than your average Republican.
I think about how there was this era of Vegas in the 80’s and 90’s where they built all those crazy theme hotels, and now the “theme” for most hotels in Vegas is just like “glam”
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