fasterik

22 ms·

331.
by fasterik 3y ago
It's interesting data on what AI researchers think, but why should we think that AI researchers are going to have the most accurate predictions about the future of AI? The skills that make someone a good AI researcher aren't neces
332.
by fasterik 3y ago
I'm not really sure if I buy the argument that AI will equalize society. A more realistic goal would be reducing poverty and keeping the Gini coefficient within reasonable bounds. I don't think this is necessarily incompatible wit
333.
by fasterik 3y ago
Just because there are two hypotheses doesn't mean that we should assign them equal probability. Why should we believe that we will need to modify the laws of physics to explain consciousness when they already do a remarkably good job
334.
by fasterik 3y ago
This seems like a needlessly pedantic parsing of the phrase "no evidence". I agree with Scott that we should take a Bayesian approach to scientific claims. So what does "no evidence" mean to a Bayesian? It means that I d
335.
by fasterik 3y ago
>You don't get to chose which feature has been used by the people who wrote the code you're told to fix. True, but that's more of a sociological problem than a technical problem. It's a question of how projects and
336.
by fasterik 3y ago
I don't understand this particular criticism of C++, and I generally think there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of C++. Yes, the language spec has become complicated. But you don't have to use every single feature in the langu
337.
by fasterik 3y ago
I always remember it in terms of set operations. && corresponds to set intersection, while || corresponds to set union. The union operation is similar to "adding" two sets together. You also have the distributive property:
338.
by fasterik 3y ago
The manipulated graph is shown in Guzey's section 19, originally from a paper called "Chronic Lack of Sleep is Associated With Increased Sports Injuries in Adolescent Athletes". Walker left out the column which showed fewer i
339.
by fasterik 3y ago
Ironically, you're cherry picking from the cherry picking. It's not just weak studies. Guzey provides multiple examples of demonstrably false statements in the book. There is also evidence of flagrant data manipulation. For exampl
340.
by fasterik 3y ago
A reasonable amount of skepticism is fundamental to science. But skepticism can be taken too far. The goal should be to maximize the number of true beliefs that we hold. If I choose not to believe in the mass of the proton or the structur
341.
by fasterik 3y ago
The article does briefly mention bed time, though I'm not sure how scientifically supported the claim is: >Early school starts are not the only cause of teenage drowsiness, but they are a crucial factor—especially because natural s
342.
by fasterik 3y ago
A lot of tragedies happen in the world, but you're not going to see a black bar on HN for every one of them. It's not so much about the magnitude of the loss, but the contribution that person made to the history of computing.
343.
by fasterik 3y ago
I'm not sure why you would infer from my post that I'm not in favor of solving world hunger or that I'm encouraging people to have unhealthy diets. My point is that figuring out how to solve food scarcity is a scientific prob
344.
by fasterik 3y ago
Drinking mercury is quite a bit different than having dozens of biomarkers showing that you're 95+ percentile in health and fitness.
345.
by fasterik 3y ago
There are dozens of essential nutrients. You only need about 15% of your calories to come from protein. Protein = health is laughably simplistic and incomplete. Also, the only reason we know what protein is is because we did the scientifi
346.
by fasterik 3y ago
I think the point still stands. In the Paleolithic era, life expectancy for the 60% reaching age 15 averaged 39 remaining years [1], so you could have expected to live into your mid 50s, compared to mid 80s today in developed countries [2].
347.
by fasterik 3y ago
There is no sharp line between "slowing down aging" and common-sense things like diet, sleep, exercise, etc. It all exists on the same spectrum. >simply getting them on to a nutritious diet would do far more for their quality
348.
by fasterik 3y ago
We all agree it would be bad to die at 40 if you could have lived to 60. By that logic, isn't it bad to die at 80 when you could have lived to 100? If you could do something to increase that probability, wouldn't that be a good th
349.
by fasterik 3y ago
I see little difference between the conspiracy thinking coming out of the hacker community and that coming out of MAGA and QAnon communities. Vague sinister claims that those in power are pulling all the strings and executing some master pl
350.
by fasterik 3y ago
I've been arguing since ChatGPT came out that LLMs should fall under fair use as a "transformative work". I'm not a lawyer and this is just my non-expert opinion, but it will be interesting to see what the legal system h
351.
by fasterik 3y ago
If it involves private ownership, profit, and pricing through competitive markets, then it's capitalist. Everything I mentioned is already done under the current capitalist system. A few examples of non-capitalist solutions would be na
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by fasterik 3y ago
I don't think it's that surprising if you consider culture as just another process of evolution. It took billions of years of single cells swimming around before the transition to multicellular organisms. It took millions of years
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by fasterik 3y ago
It's a straw man to define capitalism in such a way that anything involving a government doesn't count as capitalism. Unless they're radical anarcho-capitalists, most people would agree that you need some sort of stable soc
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by fasterik 3y ago
I think capitalism has plenty of solutions for this. We can allocate government funding for research, pass new laws that create tax incentives, create prize funds to incentivize development of specific drugs, or make advanced market commitm
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by fasterik 3y ago
I prefer compiled and statically typed languages myself, but it seems a bit absurd to not consider Python a general purpose programming language. It's Turing complete, has one of the most fully-featured standard libraries in existence,
356.
by fasterik 3y ago
How does Encyclopedia Britannica compare to Wikipedia? I would have assumed they stopped publishing it, but it looks like they are still updating the digital version. I find Wikipedia to be a pretty good resource on most subjects, even if o
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by fasterik 3y ago
>This idea of humans being primitive but also nearly genetically identical to modern man is absurd Why is that absurd? It seems reasonable to me that after a certain point in evolutionary history, technological sophistication has littl
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by fasterik 3y ago
Sunk cost fallacy. It doesn't matter how much time or money you've put into something, the question is always what is the best use of my time and money today ? The value of something is what someone else is willing to pay for it.
359.
by fasterik 3y ago
Poverty isn't a man made problem. It's the default state of nature, which was true for most humans in the history of our species. We can't solve it overnight. It takes decades of gradually increasing a society's wealth f
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by fasterik 3y ago
>We should have it down to basically zero by now. How can you claim to know a priori how many resources need to be thrown at a problem to solve it? Cancer is one of the most complex diseases in existence. Eliminating it requires sci-fi

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