Chathamization

8 ms·

31.
by Chathamization 3y ago
That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement
32.
by Chathamization 3y ago
Whenever I see people jump to alignment they invariably have jumped over the _much_more questionable assumption that AGI’s will be godlike. This doesn’t even match what we observe in reality - drop a human into the middle of a jungle, and i
33.
by Chathamization 3y ago
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that while, conspiracy theorist tend to both greatly exaggerate what actually happened, and use things that we have evidence of to push wild conspiracies we have no evidence of. Let me give an example
34.
by Chathamization 3y ago
Roughly the area of the Bronze Age Collapse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#/medi... Roughly the area of the Dark Ages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period#&
35.
by Chathamization 3y ago
You seem to be confused. The Bronze Age Collapse refers to events mostly centered in the Eastern Mediterranean, even though there were impacts elsewhere. The Dark Ages refers to events mostly centered in the Western Mediterranean as well as
36.
by Chathamization 3y ago
> It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless. It a
37.
by Chathamization 3y ago
Exactly. Having general skepticism is admirable. Having selective skepticism isn't.
38.
Why are we so gullible?(ontap.substack.com)
1 points by Chathamization 3y ago|0 comments
39.
by Chathamization 3y ago
> In cities where space is at a premium, a bunch of people standing, or on a bicycle, will always beat out people sitting down with room for an engine and a trunk. It depends. For example, you can theoretically fit more people into crowd
40.
by Chathamization 3y ago
Yeah, if a huge chunk of DARPA's budget was spent sending people to climb mountains "Because it's there," people wouldn't be happy. The NASA budget for aeronautics is 1/8th the budget devoted to sending people
41.
by Chathamization 6y ago
r/AskHistorians has some very good posts, but it also has a good deal of misinformation, even coming from flaired users. The big problem with it is that the user base and the mods tend to believe that it's accuracy is better than
42.
by Chathamization 6y ago
In my experience, professors will generally exaggerate the usefulness of the classes they teach. I'm curious as to what things from IR you found useful and what actions it lead you to? I've seen many IR grads who went into it hopi
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by Chathamization 6y ago
> International relations is an actual subject area. It's true that we don't need that many diplomats In my experience "International Relations" classes teach very little that's actually valuable. I think there&#
44.
by Chathamization 6y ago
This always seemed like an odd conspiracy theory to me. It supposes that the U.S. is one the one hand so cavalier about dropping atom bombs that they're willing to destroy Japanese cities merely as a show of force to a potential rival,
45.
by Chathamization 6y ago
I'd say yes. Do you think the ideas that came from the Manhattan Project didn't exceed that of the best individual involved? Or for a more extreme example - consider the totality of human civilization as an example of groups of hu
46.
by Chathamization 6y ago
> In the sense that a corporation's maximum intelligence is likely to be in the same ballpark as the smartest humans, it can't be seen as a true superintelligence. In what sense? Certainly the ability of large groups of people
47.
by Chathamization 6y ago
> Does anyone look at the present moment and conclude that we have an over-abundance of humble, empathetic, well-trained and effectively communicating leaders? Yet do we have a dearth of leaders with experience in the humanities? Just do
48.
by Chathamization 6y ago
One thing that people need to keep in mind as well is that people who are obsessively online are going to have a much greater presence than those who have a more balanced life, and people who are more judicious about there output are going
49.
by Chathamization 6y ago
This a good example of misleading data. For instance, the school district budget doesn't appear because it's part of the budget for LA County not LA City. But If you look at it[1] and adjust per capita, you actually get almost twi
50.
by Chathamization 6y ago
Well, that's a bit of a strawman. There are very few people who think we shouldn't spend any money on blue sky research. It's more of a question of how much we should spend, which blue sky research we should fund, and how tho
51.
by Chathamization 6y ago
I've wondered that as well. I've always liked the smell of durian (as well as its taste), and have met others that do as well. Others seem to really hate it. I've always assumed that the vast majority of people hate the smell
52.
by Chathamization 6y ago
> University is a place where teachers and students who are interested in a field meet to learn and research together. It would be nice to have places like this open to the general public and not gated off like universities are. There ar
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by Chathamization 6y ago
> Of course colleges do all these things already That's an important thing to keep in mind. Particularly with the more elite schools, the goal isn't to educate as many people as possible, but to keep their inflated prestige thr
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by Chathamization 6y ago
Indeed, productivity growth is actually lower than in the past, so we're actually in a phase of slower automation. I think one thing that doesn't get considered enough is the viewpoint that we're currently in a post-automatio
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by Chathamization 6y ago
We get a bit sidetracked by terminology here - if we suddenly called a college a technical school, would it suddenly be fine to remove the humanities from the curriculum? One of the big problems when we discuss these things is that there&#x
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by Chathamization 6y ago
> Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person. Sure, but we shouldn't assume that college is the appropriate place to do so or that the way c
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by Chathamization 6y ago
Sure, as a society we do some things purely for emotional reasons. But we should be honest about that - we shouldn't pretend that the reason we're building the Washington monument is because of it's potential use as a grain s
58.
by Chathamization 6y ago
> A human astronaut could probably accomplish as much in a week as a Mars rover can in a year. The estimates I've seen for a human mission to Mars are about 100-500 times the budget for Curiosity. So even if astronauts could accomp
59.
by Chathamization 6y ago
I agree. I think many people are thinking the main obstacle here is the mathematical mistake, when the main obstacle here seems to be explaining the mathematical mistake to 4th graders who are learning fractions for the first time. I'm
60.
by Chathamization 6y ago
I agree. Forums and old school personal web sites were much better for quality content than blogs or social media. Things went in the direction of mental junk food, focusing on getting a lot of new content as quick as possible.

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