bnralt

96 ms·

211.
by bnralt 4y ago
> Are you just choosing to ignore the actual contents of my responses? Both nuclear and biotech are highly, highly regulated spaces. Apologies, I have limited time and tried to focus on what I felt were your stronger arguments. But if yo
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by bnralt 4y ago
We don’t know where either of these technologies will be in 20 years time. You seem convinced that unknown biotech advancements won’t be that dangerous but unknown AI advancements could be, but there’s no reason to believe that someone who
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by bnralt 4y ago
Genetic engineering is a very powerful technology. Halting bioengineering because people are worried about the possibility of creating triffids/xenomorphs/some other SciFi monster, however, seems silly. Is it possible, especially
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by bnralt 4y ago
Sometime I listen to 90’s AM conspiracy theory radio for fun (Coast to Coast AM). One thing that’s struck me is how much fear there was about the Human Genome Project and designer babies being right around the corner (Gattaca was 1997, for
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by bnralt 4y ago
We should study it seriously, but it's worth noting even the article you linked to (which seems to be pretty biased, it should be noted) suggests the Portuguese model is far from a simple silver bullet: > Despite encouraging results
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by bnralt 4y ago
Did you read the report? Policing is still a major part of the Swiss approach to drug prevention (one of the four pillars) and though they try to use fines as a penalty instead of imprisonment, imprisonment for drug use still happens as wel
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by bnralt 4y ago
Indeed. No matter the likelihood of these things happen accidentally, we at least have the ability to create a situation with nuclear power or GMOs that would kill large amounts of people in the present if that was our goal. We couldn’t cre
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by bnralt 4y ago
The danger the AI alignment folk are afraid of is completely impossible with current tech, but they want to put up barriers because we have no idea what future tech might look like and there’s the possibility some future advance could be ve
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by bnralt 4y ago
Do you play Wordle? I actually thought this was interesting, since it’s something I’ve often wondered while playing it. “The first letter is U and the fourth is E, how big the set of possible answers is now?”
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by bnralt 4y ago
Seems that this depends on the definition of “lie.” It might be true that humans aren’t trying to deceive others 95% of the time, just like it’s true that ChatGPT isn’t _trying_ to deceive people 100% of the time. But both of them have a ha
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by bnralt 4y ago
Apple's podcast app used to be good a decade ago. It's strange how it's turned into a horrible app as time has gone by.
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by bnralt 4y ago
> 1968 - USS Scorpion attack sub sank somewhere near the Azores Islands. Phil Ochs wrote a song about this, "The Scorpion Departs, But Never Returns"[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbiJR-bqSfw
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by bnralt 4y ago
It also seems a bit misleading, since in that scenario a ball is intentionally thrown so that it comes down the same way. Let's consider something else - imagine an accretion disk of space dust slowly pulling itself together to form a
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by bnralt 4y ago
It's interesting comparing the relatively calm discussion here to Reddit being down for hours (and still down as I type this) to the hyperbolic comments people were making about the death of Twitter when Twitter briefly had some issues
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by bnralt 4y ago
I’ve noticed a similar writing style in a lot of others from the same group (AI Doomsdayers/“Rationalists”). Most of the time I stumble across something from that corner of the web it feels like the author was thinking “Why convey an i
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by bnralt 4y ago
> It seems increasingly that the concerns from the ethics branch have not come to pass at all. Neither have the concerns from AI alignment folk. I’d say both groups are pretty far off (and both fairly useless), but the ethics folks are a
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by bnralt 4y ago
Yeah, child actors are often treated horrendously but we as a society still permit it for some reason. Many people have heard about how two children died because of unsafe conditions during the filming of The Twilight Zone movie. What often
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by bnralt 4y ago
People are fine with kids selling someone some arts and crafts they made, but most people don’t think children should be making things in factories. Likewise, a school play is completely different from the life that most children actors liv
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by bnralt 4y ago
You might well be right, but it's odd when you really think about it. We're allowing behavior we deem immoral or harmful to happen in cases where we think it makes our entertainment a bit better.
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by bnralt 4y ago
I always found it strange that child labor laws have an exception for acting. From what I've seen, acting is probably a worse job for kids than many of the jobs that are outlawed.
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by bnralt 4y ago
> Having your bank account randomly disappear isn't one of the risks that anyone should have to take. Not only is it a risk many take, but many end up losing a significant amount. The FDIC actually has a list of the numerous failed
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by bnralt 4y ago
To further this, a lot of people (see Sam Altman, for example[1]) are saying the federal government should give depositors all of their money bank, and don't seem to care at all about what this would mean in the long run. Is the FDIC n
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by bnralt 4y ago
I assumed it was common because I've run into different Germans who brought up the myth to me, and were surprised I didn't know about it (treating it as common knowledge). But it's certainly possible the people I've know
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by bnralt 4y ago
I mean, I don’t think anyone here doubts that linguistics exists. The point was rather that fake etymologies also exist, and can be extremely common. As other replies have noted, it doesn't look like there's evidence that the word
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by bnralt 4y ago
There's a scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the father says that the etymology of all English words can be traced back to Greek[1]. When someone challenges him with the word "Kimono," he pauses for a second, and then co
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by bnralt 4y ago
I don't think anyone disputes that there were religious centers of learning that occurred earlier. But in cases where these institutions are Christian, people seem fine saying that they were monasteries and not universities. Monastic i
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by bnralt 4y ago
What you say is true, but I've seen this happening even with good teachers. I think there's a few reasons for this - first, if you have a large class and a student is already meeting all the standards, you're going to spend t
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by bnralt 4y ago
> This is a simple and effective way of achieving the goals they claim to be championing. And what are the real goals of these institutions? The whole approach of having artificially limited education where people are sifted into higher
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by bnralt 4y ago
I've seen this recently with the elementary school near me. Grading is extremely opaque, and seems to be largely based on teacher intuition. Some very advanced students have gotten grades below where they are (I've heard many teac
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by bnralt 4y ago
I came to realize that this is the case with advocacy groups. These groups will never want to say, "Hey, things aren't that bad anymore. We're working on some small problems, but honestly, we solved most of the stuff we were

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