Historians like to use “state capacity” as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.

I didn’t think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”

I hadn’t read HPRick and Morty, so thanks for that!

Lots of gems about wizard fascism. I liked this part:

“It means, oh golly oh gee, that uh, one day science will discover space travel and cryogenics and then we’ll all be, uh, immortal space gods with our own private stars, Professor!”

Harry hated how inarticulate he sometimes sounded outside of his own internal monologues, which were much more elaborate. One of these days he would have to sit down and write down his internal monologues in a coherent sequence.

For those that (like me) is out of the loop and don’t get it, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:

In one of the advertisements that was particularly controversial, Sweeney says that “genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans [or genes] are blue”. Another voice then declares “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”.

FWIW, I think he’s wrong in the causation here. During the heyday of the British Empire history was one of the high status subjects to study, and they wrote it in very plain language. Physics on the other hand was seen as mostly pointless philosophy, and in the early 19th century astronomy was a field so low in status that it was dominated by women.

I would say the causation is money giving the field status, and lack of money hollowing out status. Low status makes the untrained think they can do it as well as the trained. You had to study history and master it’s language to make a career as a colonial administrator, therefore the field was high status. As soon as money starts really flowing into physics, the status goes up, even surpassing chemistry which had been the highest status (and thus also manliest) science.

If one wants to look at the decline of status of academia, I recommend as a starting point Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, that goes a fair bit into the post war status of academia versus business men.

I think the humanities were merely the weak point in lowering the status of academia in favour of the business men.

One of the products was removal of unwanted hair. You radiated and the hair just fell off! How practical!

To be fair to the radium people, I don’t think the correlation between radiation and cancer was established until the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still one could see hair falling of as a warning sign of sorts.

Depending on how AI-pilled your boss is, maybe you could just “ask the AI” if it is being used. If the magic eight ball says “yes”, then it’s being used, and everybody should be happy.

Can it really be that stupid? Was he just prompting it wrong?

Going through work email I saw a link o an article about Quantum-AI. It was behind paywall, and I am not paying for reading about how woo+woo=woo^2. What do you do when your bubble isn’t inflating anymore? Couple it with another stale bubble!

Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.

Not surprised. Making Hype and Criti-hype the two poles of the public debate has been effective in corralling people who get that there is something wrong with the “AI” into Criti-hype. And politicians needs to be generalists so the trap is easy to spring.

Still, always a pity when people who should know better fall into it.

Does moral cowardice matter in someone teaching about ethics? Yes, just as much as physical cowardice matters for a life guard. (The other way is fine.)

Does he express his ideas and teachings as something that it would be good if people did, but he totally wouldn’t if it causes himself a smidgen of inconvenience? If he didn’t, we now know that he was lying. Which matters if your moral framework cares about truth.

If you have to read his works for some reason, do it with open eyes and try to figure out who and what he is lying in service of.

My argument is that if he hasn’t spoken out on Gaza, if he hasn’t urged people to do what he thinks would be the best way to stop the genocide, then he is either a fool who can’t see what is in front of him or a moral coward who can’t act on his convictions.

Either way it makes him a poor ethics philosopher. We can be pretty sure that unless he himself is an experienced life guard, he would in fact not dive in to the river to save the child.

There is a genocide going on right now in Gaza. Has Singer, the great utilitarian, said anything about how the common man should act to stop it?

Is it more effective to protest or block ports or destroy weaponry? Do we have a moral obligation to overthrow governments supporting genocide, in particular if that government is in our country? If we come across one of the perpetrators of the genocide do we have a moral obligation to do something?

Or are these all to uncomfortable questions, while the donation habits of the middle class is comfortable questions?

That was entertaining!

Get well soon! Drink lots of fluid and watch some good movies (the non AI kind).

Get 2 and the plane will be 120% as good!

In fact if children with AI are a mere 1% as good, a school with 150 children can build 150% as good!

I am sure this is how project management works, and if it is not maybe Elon can get Grok to claim that it is. (When not busy praising Hitler.)

Leave it as it is then, I think it works.

Doing another round of thinking, the insistence of “AI is here to stay” is itself a sign of how this is a bubble that needs continuos hype. Clocks are also here to stay, but nobody needs to argue that they are. How was it Tywin Lannister put it - if you have to tell people you are the king, you are not a real king?

Some of the worst people you know are going to pivot to “See, AI is useful for cancer doctors, that was what I’ve been saying the whole time. Sentient chatbots? I haven’t written those specific words, you must be very bad at reading. Now, lets move on to Quantum!”

Prices ranging from 18 to 168 USD (why not 19 to 199? Number magic?) But then you get integrated approach of both Western and Chinese physiognomy. Two for one!

Thanks, I hate it!

The ideas are in general good.

I think the long term cost argument could be strengthen by saying something about DeepSeeks claims to run much cheaper. If there is anything to say about that, I have not kept track.

The ML/LLM split argument might benefit from being beefed up. I saw a funny post on Tumblr (so good luck finding that again) about pigeons being taught to identify cancer cells (a thing, according to the post, I haven’t verified) and how while that is a thing you wouldn’t leap to putting a pigeon in charge of checking CVs and recommending hires. The post was funnier, but it got to the critical point of what statistical relationships reasonably can be used for and what it can’t, which becomes obvious when it is a pigeon instead of a machine. Ah well, you can beef it up in a later post or maybe you intended to link an already existing one. There is a value in being consise instead of rambling like I am doing here.

Here’s the WSJ article on Archive: https://archive.ph/kS9Dx

Useful as a mainstream source for people in general hating AI.