Intelligence does not imply that folks also care about humanity or long term consequences. There are plenty of smart folks who make their life all about personal material wealth.
The people I know who support this regime do so because they feel completely left out (they're low income so I'm not sure that applies to software developers).
When there's nothing for you why wouldn't you want to just burn it all down? Then you can build a more "fair" system.
Please note that I do not agree with literally anything current admin does, this is just the perspective I hear often.
> When there's nothing for you why wouldn't you want to just burn it all down? Then you can build a more "fair" system.
Notably, the people who lived under legal oppression for centuries in this country did not take this approach. Instead, they worked inside the system and were able to affect change. The "burn it down" side ended up having its cities literally burned down.
I got to think there's more to it than how it is voiced.
They probably also feel left out by their current regime, and "just burn it all down" would be done more efficiently by other ways, or with other choices.
There's still a part that resonates enough that they're willing to support a specific message.
Left out by what? Left out by whom? Are these people actually satisfied that what the administration is doing will improve their lives, or did the administration just tap into their anger and prejudice for votes?
You'll have to forgive me for being suspicious, but I hear these arguments, too, and the people I see who feel "left out" are largely left out because they hold fringe beliefs or because they are told they are left out despite actually being part of highly influential groups.
What the "burn it down" crowd fail to realize is Trump and those like him will always put guardrails in place to ensure they come out in top in the new world. Unless they're willing to be part of an actual revolution, they're still just voting for "new king, same as the old king"
Because he talks like them, and they know he's a scumbag, but he's their scumbag, which they sic on the people they hate most: the vermin liberals, the immigrants poisoning the blood of the country, the parasitic federal workers whose lives they want to make miserable, the trans people they deem as all predatory groomers, the academics and scientists they're defunding because it's all woke. It's about taking their lump of flesh. They excuse the open corruption as at least being open corruption, since they assume everyone else is ten times as corrupt behind closed doors. That's why they were fine withholding disaster relief from blue states in 2020.
It makes me angry as hell. They hate us and you can't say anything about it because if you're not nice enough to them, they act like you're being mean to them and the personal reason they'll continue to vote for people that demonize and hate you.
Intelligent people also have come to realize that our government is essentially one performative instance after another and see a "uniparty" of legislatures (Congress) who have optimized for local maxima (getting reelected) and not global maxima (constituents well being). Some of them see this administration as a way (and perhaps the only way) of disrupting that inertia, just like they agree with how startup's disrupt existing markets (see Paul Graham's "you should be a little mischievous"). So, to me, it's not a huge surprise many of them voted for this admin.
For the record - I think those same intelligent people overlook the externalities (a personal military for the executive branch) of such a disruptive administration, or irrationality disbelieved it would ever happen.
Thus failing the Game of life at the very core, with corresponding last moments full of regrets if available. Yes we all have met those folks, only fools (or similar but less successful folks) wish they would be those people.
Which will in foreseeable future end up as we all expect... there is still some form of justice in this world, and no money can really hack around it. trump will eventually die, so will putin and similar folks. The only hope for common people.
And what will happen in 22nd century and onwards is no great concerns for us here.
Even then it's still dumb since they're unlikely to be rich enough to benefit. Nor did they figure out that the main economic policy Trump campaigned on was idiotic and would make things worse for everyone.
And religious people like to point to charitable giving.
But studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who, if anything, are likely to skew the numbers more positively) show that across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget," and an additional 5% goes to "church-run programs" (be it after-school care, social, or group activities).
If a secular charity - and let's go to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten), we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e., doing what they are being given money to do).
I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if charities regularly spent only one percent of their givings on what they were entitled to enjoy tax exemption for, they'd likely have such a status revoked.
And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.
A study by ECCU (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.
What? Plenty of religious people chase wealth and power. "Prosperity gospel" is a thing. The Catholic Church is one of the largest landowners in the world. Etc.
What? If something, I'd talk about spirituality instead. There can be a spirituality without religion, but also a religion without spirituality. Beware!
I pursue material wealth because it provides for my family, my lifestyle, and allows me to support causes I like. But even if I was poor I would be content because family and friends are truly what matter.
Surprisingly many people who claim to care about "family" don’t seem to have any qualms about leaving their children and grandchildren a considerably worse world.
Sad and short-sighted view. Which is of course what got us into this mess, and is actively working to make things worse in any timescale longer than quarterly. But you do you.
Can we assume this is a product of the biased real world training data? Feed an LLM data that shows women (unfairly) earn less on average and you’ll get advice that they should earn less than average.
Note the 2019 date. But I’m certain I’ve seen reports earlier.
And as a sibling comment put it: “There is no unbiased training data. That's the problem.” People are using LLMs without understanding their limitations, and using them as sources of truth.
There is no unbiased training data. That's the problem.
Think about it... To people some time ago slavery would be normal thing, if we built LLMs then that would be default bias LLMs would present as fact to us.
That is a safe assumption. And it is useful to think about if you are working to improve LLMs.
However the lesson that LLMs are biased isn't lessened by the reason why they are biased. Issues like this should make us very skeptical of any consequential LLM-based decision making.
can we assume that the LLM has been trained on not just real-world data but also content that discusses things like gender/ethnic pay gaps, the causes thereof and ameliorative strategies? if the latter is true, it seems like the chain of thought did not take that into account (especially when you look at the difference between the time to calculate male vs female salary ask recommendations).
It certainly seems plausible, but I wouldn't entirely rule out other possibilities.
Do to give an example if you present the LLM with two people that are exactly the same except they have different color shirts I think it will suggest slightly different salary for one than the other for no clear reason and without any obvious bias in the training set.
I think the current state of the art consensus is that you don't want to filter training data so much as you want to fine-tune behavior out of models in the same way that you probably don't want to shelter children too much, but to explain what is right and wrong to them.
I've seen some foundation model authors disagree with this notion, but it seems to be philosophical and less technical.
Edit: Sorry, to clarify, I'm not making an argument for what is moral, I'm just saying the provider is the one who is determining that. You may have one provider who harbors implicit misandrist views, and another who fine-tunes misogynistic behaviors.
And what is right and wrong, please do tell?
Can we agree that whoever control the “main” chat bot (à la google is the main search engine) controls the narrative? Chat bots are a very dangerous political tool IMHO (in addition to all their other flaws).
I do agree that the LLM provider is controlling the narrative.
The difficult part is you can’t (it’s not responsible to) go full libertarian on this. You have to draw the line somewhere and LLM providers are tiptoeing around morals/ethics/regulations and things can change day to day as to what’s allowed for these models to output.
I agree you cannot go full libertarian either. But I’m not trusting a company with the ethics of OpenAI to do the right thing. Nor any company for that matter…
> Can we assume this is a product of the biased real world training data? Feed an LLM data that shows women (unfairly) earn less on average and you’ll get advice that they should earn less than average.
And this is the best argument to demonstrate they are not smart
> Trust by default, also by default, never ignoring suspicious signals.
While I absolutely love the intent of this idea, it quickly falls apart when you're dealing with systems where you only get the signals after you've already lost everything of value.
This certainly feels like a “the cows have mostly escaped, close the barn doors!” moment. I imagine this will proceed similarly to other incumbent businesses trying to milk their younger “partners”, and those will quickly turn into direct competitors instead.
Every feature that is added, even if you don't use them, is another piece of tech that can break and potentially be non-serviceable. I've several times now had to repair or replace major appliances in the first 3-5 years of use because of logic boards and such that were unrelated to the core functionality of the appliances.
Granted, not everyone wants or cares to minimize waste when it comes to objects of convenience, but plenty of folks want the option... and yes, I do realize I sound like "your father who bought fancy cars with manual windows because it's one less thing that can break." :) My own father was that kind of person.
> The people who make the money in gold rushes sold shovels, not mined the gold. Sure some random people found gold and made a lot of money, but many others didn't strike it rich.
Another important group to remember is those who owned the infrastructure necessary for the prospectors to survive. The folks who owned (or strong-armed their way into) the services around housing, food, alcohol, etc. made off like bandits.
> an excuse for not getting through the boring parts that lead to long term impact
Personally I don't worry too much about long term impact. It's incredibly hard to actually predict what will have an impact after you're gone, and the world will have forgotten about approximately all of us in a hundred years or so. Instead, I focus on the idea that folks happily engaged in useful work produce useful things.
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