Actually ideal:
Reinforce that screw by the end of the day.
Fix the modeling error by the end of the week.
Develop a more robust modeling methodology over the next few months.
Brainstorm ideas to improve the institutional culture (without sacrificing flexibility, because you’re aware that these values require a tradeoff). Have a proposal ready for the next board meeting.
Now you’re getting it. The world can’t be fixed. It can’t even be survived. But it can be a nice place to live.
The worst people in the world, the Stalins and the Osama bin Ladens, try to be heroes but they’re as flawed as anyone else. If they start to succeed those flaws can manifest in horrifying ways. They often destroy imperfect but necessary things in attempts to build perfect things that can’t exist, like true Communism or functional political Islam. Humility and temperance are called heavenly virtues for a reason.
That even though I decided that my morality would never demand that I be a hero… there nonetheless just isn’t a coherent, enduring shape that fits my soul that doesn’t make that the thing I ultimately want for myself.
Reading that, I’m not sure whether you’re grieving because you’ve given up on that belief or because it’s true. I hope the former. The desire to be a hero is dangerous—a hero needs villains. As Nietzsche said, he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do what you can, but we all fall short of perfection. We all burn fossil fuels, for one thing. A bit of humility is in order.
It’s not your job to save the world. That’s God’s job, and if that job has driven God crazy it would explain quite a bit.
I think you’re onto something. I think, for this purpose, “child” means anyone who doesn’t know enough about the topic to have any realistic chance at successful innovation. A talented 16 year old might successfully innovate in a field like music or cooking, having had enough time to learn the basics. When I was that age kids occasionally came up with useful new ideas in computer programming, but modern coding seems much more sophisticated. In a very developed field, one might not be ready to innovate until several years into graduate school.
A 16-year-old Salafi will be strongly influenced by his Salafi upbringing. Even if he* rebels, he’ll be rebelling against that specific strain of Islam. It would take a very long and very specific journey to take him toward California-style liberalism; given the opportunity to explore he’d likely end up somewhere very different.
*My understanding of this particular Islamic school is hazy, but I doubt our student is female.
A child who’s educated in a Salafi school has two choices—become a Salafi or become a failed Salafi. One of those is clearly better than the other. Salafis, like almost every adult, know how to navigate their environment semi-successfully and the first job of education is to pass on that knowledge. It would better if the kid could be given a better education, but the kid won’t have much control over that (and wouldn’t have the understanding to choose well). Kids are ignorant and powerless; that’s not a function of any particular political or philosophical system.
I think in general it’s best for children to learn from adults mostly by rote. Children should certainly ask questions of the adults, but independent inquiry will be at best inefficient and usually a wrong turn. The lecture-and-test method works, and AFAIK we don’t have anything else that teaches nearly as well.
Later, when they have some understanding, they can look around for better examples.
Yeah, that’s the idea I was going for.
I propose a test—if apologizing for or clarifying a controversial position is obviously a bad move, you’re dealing with Level 4 actors. In such cases, your critics don’t care about what you believe. Their narrative calls for a villain, and they’ve chosen you.
I think there are more limits than that because plausibility matters. The set of positions Ibram X Kendi could plausibly take is very different from the positions available to Donald Trump. Too big a reach and you’ll look insincere, opportunistic, or weak. It’s easy to alienate your social coalition and much harder to gain acceptance in a new one.
You seem to be steering in the direction of postmodernism, which starts with the realization that there are many internally consistent yet mutually exclusive ways of modeling the world. Humility won’t solve that problem, but neither will a questioning mindset.
Every intellectual dead-end was once the product of a questioning mind. Questioning is much more likely to iterate toward a dead end than to generate useful results. This isn’t to say that it’s never useful (it obviously can be), but it rarely succeeds and is only the optimal path if you’re near the frontiers of current understanding (which schoolchildren obviously aren’t).
The best way to get out of a local maximum that I’ve found is to incorporate elements of a different, but clearly functional, intellectual tradition.
I don’t know about Moldova, but it seems obvious that the creation of modern Israel depended on the idea that the Palestinians could be managed and equally obvious that it hasn’t worked out that way. The only real endgames are genocide or leaving and personally I’d vote for leaving.
In 14 centuries of Islamic history from Spain to Indonesia, with limited travel and much regional variation for most of it, there will be many opportunities to find examples that match our own culture’s Current Thing. Some Muslims are hypocrites; some Westerners look for homosexual subtext where none was intended. Many Muslim empires have risen in vigor and fallen in decadence. Still, the orthodox position is clear—homosexuality is both sinful and illegal. I’ve seen a Jew eat pork and laugh it off; it would be a mistake to make pork a key component of an appeal to militant Jews.
More to the point, in this era gay rights are associated with the West at its most liberal, which is exactly what Islamists oppose. Activity that might have been tolerated a thousand years ago is now perceived as a Western obsession and its practitioners as enemy sympathizers.
Trying to replace enemy leadership with more congenial leadership never works. You reliably get a corrupt puppet government and an insurgency. The only exception is after a comprehensive defeat of the enemy (i.e. post-WWII Germany and Japan), which begs the question (in the sense that this tactic would allow us to win only in cases where we’ve already won).
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the food supply in the Middle East and North Africa used to come from Russia and Ukraine (link). Actions targeted at increasing food security in the region won’t solve the political issues, but probably would turn down the temperature of the region. It would also help with the immigration crisis in Europe. It’s not an easy or quick solution (growing food takes time, and the scale of the problem is staggering), but it’s hard to see how peace would come without food.
Sun Tzu says that the keys to victory lie in knowing yourself and your enemy. When I got to #4, it became obvious that you know very little about Islam. There are no LGBTQ+ safe spaces in Islam. A relevant wikipedia page says “Homosexual acts were forbidden (haram) in traditional Islamic jurisprudence and therefore were subject to punishment. The types of punishment prescribed for non-heterosexual activities include flogging, stoning, and the death penalty, depending on the particular situation and the school of thought.” The major Muslim countries are signatories to a UN counter-statement opposing gay rights. See here for a consensus statement of the Australian National Imam’s Council, whom I would expect to be much more liberal than the average Palestinian, saying, “From the time of the Prophet until now, all scholars of every time and era, have agreed that the practice of homosexuality is a forbidden act and a sin in Islam.” It’s just a complete non-starter.
Me—Ph.D. in solid state materials chemistry. Been out of the game for a while. Less understanding of physics than some other commenters but have a different perspective that might be useful.
My first thought is that they have a minority phase; the samples are likely ~99% LK99 and ~1% unknown phase with weird properties. You can see it in the video; part of the specimen is levitating but a corner of it isn’t.
The second thing I would do is try to make a bunch of variants with slightly different compositions to identify the minority phase.
The first thing I would do is try to make versions with different amounts of hydrogen. Hydrogen is ubiquitous, diffuses readily into and out of most materials, and is invisible to most materials analysis techniques, but it can have a profound effect on a material’s properties. If you get different properties by annealing the sample under high-pressure hydrogen*, you’re on the right track.
*For safety’s sake you would typically use forming gas, a non-flammable mixture of hydrogen with nitrogen (or sometimes argon). Ammonia is also sometimes used but is more dangerous.
Strongly upvoted. A few comments:
I think of a human being as a process, rather than a stable entity. We begin as embryos, grow up, get old, and die. Each step of the process follows inevitably from the steps before. The way I see it, there’s no way an unchanging upload could possibly be human. An upload that evolves even less so, given the environment it’s evolving in.
On a more practical level, the question of whether a software entity is identical to a person depends on your relationship to that person. Let’s take Elizer Yudkowski for example:
I personally have never met the guy but have read some of the stuff he wrote. If you told me that he’d been replaced with a LLM model six months ago, I wouldn’t be able to prove you wrong or have much reason to care.
His friends as family would feel very differently, because they have deeper relationships to him and many of the things they need from him cannot be delivered by an LLM.
To Elizer himself, the chatbot would obviously not be him. Elizer is himself, the chatbot is something else. Uniquely, Elizer doesn’t have a demand for Elizer’s services; he has a supply of those services that he attempts to find demand for (with considerable success so far). He might consider the chatbot a useful tool or an unbeatable competitor, but he definitely wouldn’t consider it himself.
To Elizer’s bank it’s a legal question. When the chatbot orders a new server, does Elizer have to pay the bill? If it signs a contract, is Elizer bound?
Does the answer change if there’s evidence that it was hacked? What sorts of evidence would be sufficient?
If asked, AI-lizer would claim to perceive itself as Elizer. Whether it actually has qualia, and what those qualia are like, we will not know.
A lot of the nonprofit boards that I’ve seen use a “consent agenda” to manage the meeting. The way it works is:
The staff create the consent agenda and provide it to the board members perhaps a week in advance.
Any single board member can take any item off the consent agenda and onto the regular agenda.
The consent agenda is passed in a single motion. It always passes unanimously, because anything that any member thinks merits attention has been moved onto the regular agenda (where it is separately discussed and voted on).
It doesn’t do much for governance directly, but fewer time-wasting consent votes can make room for more discussion of issues that matter.
In the US, parties still aren’t recognized by the Constitution. Every election is a choice between all of the people who qualify for the ballot for each office. Several groups of like-minded politicians quickly emerged, and over time these became our major parties.
It’s not uncommon for an American candidate to run as an independent (i.e. not affiliated with a party), although they hardly ever win.
I should have added—Determine whether this is a modeling problem or a manufacturing problem. If the model was sound but the physical screw was faulty, you’ll need an entirely different response.