I love how Musk will just put “giga” in front of things to make it sound cool. It’s sooooo silly and ridiculous, like something a 7 year old would do, or a comic book supervillain.

“Sir we’ve finished the road to -”

“The gigaroad.”

“Er, yes, we finished the gigaroad to the facto-”

“Gigafactory”

“…”

“😎”

Righteous-indignation-bait, equally as common. “Breaking news: person you don’t like experiences bad thing as result of what you dislike about them; more confirmation bias at 12”

Yeah, that was a critical quote. Undeniably he is saying that black people should be sterilized.

University course lectures are still the best and you can find tons of them in YouTube in their entirety.

The problem is the location of the steepness makes the difference between whether this means it’s easy first and slow progress later, or slow progress first and easy later. Is it like, x^1.5, or is it like ln(x)? Both are very steep at some point.

Yeah, I don’t think the phrase “learning curve” has any built-in suggestion, even culturally, to imply that the reasonable default assumption is one way or the other. I only ever heard learning curve to refer to something getting easier after awhile, which is indeed a valid curve

Yeah this is a common misunderstanding I’ve had to clarify to people as well, even people who work in tech. I support only using “Law” for things that are scientifically actually laws. I don’t even like to use it as a joke (Murphy’s Law) because, unbelievably, some people really do take that to be a law of the universe too.

Yeah, a lot of these things actually do make sense, just in a more precise way than even the people using them intend. Gravitational pull is also like this. Earth’s gravitational pull is not weak, it literally keeps everything on Earth tethered to it. More importantly, it happens as an intrinsic property of the Earth, the Earth doesn’t need to “try” to exert gravitational pull on things. Furthermore, gravitational pull attracts more mass which begets even more gravitational pull, like a snowball effect.

So gravitational pull is not about the strength of the force, but the fact that it is natural, effortless, and often forms a positive feedback loop (borrowing from another comment here lol).

So if I say someone at work has a lot of gravitational pull, I’m conveying that they do a good job of bringing other people into their area or work, that they naturally do it almost without even trying to, and that as their social influence grows, they just end up with even more social influence. It’s a really deep metaphor which is also physically accurate.

Hm, this is interesting. I only have a passing understanding of control theory, but couldn’t a positive feedback loop indeed be good when the output is always desirable in increased quantities? A positive feedback loop doesn’t necessarily lead to instability, like you said. So maybe this is just me actually-ing your actually, lol.

As for “more optimal”, oof, I say that a lot so maybe I’m biased. When I say that I’m thinking like a percentage. If optimal is X, then 80% of X is indeed more of the optimal amount than 20% of X. Yes, optimality is a point, but “more optimal” just seems like shorthand for “closer to optimal”. Or maybe I should just start saying that?

This reminds me of a professor I had who hates when people say something is “growing exponentially”, since he argued the exponent could be 1, or fractional, or negative. It’s a technically correct distinction, but the thing is that people who use that term to describe something growing like x^2, are not even wrong that it’s exponential. I feel like when it comes to this type of phrasing, it’s fine not to deal with edge cases, because being specific actually makes what is said more confusing.

“I’m in a negative feedback loop with respect to my laziness which will soon stabilize with me continually going to the gym daily, which is closer to optimal than before. As a result, my energy levels are going to increase exponentially, where the value of the exponent is greater than 1!”

Hmm. Now that I say it that doesn’t seem that crazy. Although I do still think some common “default settings” don’t do any harm.

Yeah this isn’t newsworthy because she’s rich, tbh there’s probably richer immigrant students at Harvard we don’t know about. But diplomatically this is a pretty big deal. This lady is gonna grow up to wield substantial political influence in her country, and she likely won’t have warm feelings towards America as a result of this.

But how can I deplatform the demagogues? It seems impossible. What you proposed sounds nearly as unattainable as the snarky “Suddenly make every parent in the US loving, compassionate, and effective at raising their children”.

I’m not in charge of the demagogues platforms. The platforms have no need to respond to social protests since the demagogues make them money. The majority of moderate people will not ever care enough to stop using a platform that supports evil. Tons of people still use facebook even when they KNOW about all those scandals, because they feel like it’s just not a big problem, and ultimately because they just like using facebook.

Your proposed solution just feels a lot like the how to draw an owl meme.

So then can anything that produces dopamine be addictive? Can I get addicted to hugging my girlfriend, or addicted to reading books, or jogging? Or is there some threshold? Does the intensity per time matter, or just the intensity, or just the time? What about the frequency of exposure? Does any amount of dopamine release make me slightly more addicted to whatever it is, or is there some threshold that needs to be exceeded? Do dopamine-based addictions produce physical withdrawal symptoms, always, never, sometimes? Depending on what? And are physical withdrawal symptoms necessary to constitute addiction or are there different tiers of addiction?

You see what I’m getting at. There’s sooo many questions that need to be answered before just saying “this produces lots of dopamine therefore it’s addictive and bad and should be limited”. While I appreciate and empathize with your sentiment about people cherry-picking the studies they like (sounding like an LLM here lol), it’s not as if science doesn’t know how to deal with that problem, and it certainly isn’t a reason to stop caring about or citing studies at all, or say “well you’ve got your studies and I’ve got mine”. Just because both sides have studies that give evidence in their favor doesn’t mean both sides are equally valid or that it’s impossible to reach an informed conclusion one way or the other.

My next biggest question (and what I’m trying to drive at with the semi-rhetorical slew of questions I opened with) would be what makes something an addiction or not? Am I addicted to staying alive, because I’ll do anything to stay alive as long as possible? That seems silly to call an addiction, since it doesn’t do any harm. And how do we delineate between, say, someone who is addicted to playing with Rubik’s Cubes vs. someone who just really likes Rubik’s Cubes and has poor self-control? Or what about someone with some other mental quirk, like someone who plays with Rubik’s Cubes a lot due to OCD, or maybe an autistic person who plays a lot with Rubik’s Cubes out of a special interest? Does the existence of such people mean that “Rubik’s Cube Addiction” is a real concern that can happen to anyone who plays with Rubik’s Cubes too much? Or perhaps Rubik’s cubes are not addictive at all, and it is separate traits driving people to engage with them in a way that appears addictive to others.

I know I’ve written a long post and asked lots of questions. It’s not my intention to “gish gallop” you, just to convey my variety of questions. The Rubik’s example is the one thing I’m most curious to hear your thoughts on. (There I go sounding like an LLM again)

I enjoy how every misplaced accusation of something being le AI le SLOP ends up just backfiring against the claim that AI only makes objectively trash things that can always be distinguished from beautiful pure human-made art. If it’s plausible that AI could have made this, then it must be plausible for AI to make art as good as humans have. What’s even better is it doesn’t matter if you can correctly distinguish it 95% of the time. Even just one misclassification is enough to undermine the claim that AI only produces #slop. The sentiment of the claim could even be saved if people were willing to say that just X% of AI art is #slop, but this is unacceptable for the dogmatist’s needs, which will only settle for 100%.

If every person who disagrees with you counts as further evidence that you’re right, then you’re thinking in an unfalsifiable manner, which is the basis for many a flawed conclusion. It doesn’t necessarily make you wrong, but you should really make sure to find justifications for your beliefs that are based on falsifiable reasoning instead. That’s the best way to know if what you’re believing is right or wrong, because you can try to falsify your beliefs in the way that you know them to be falsifiable, and if they still couldn’t be falsified, then you can say “Well, I tried to disprove this, and it still passed that test!”

So, let me ask you this, what would, hypothetically, suffice to prove or at least suggest evidence that porn addiction does not exist? If your answer is “nothing”, then you’re in unfalsifiable territory.

I’ve always interpreted smorty’s spelling as an intentional choice to poison data mining and most likely a sort of adversarial stylometry. There are ML systems out there that can do a good job of judging whether two different usernames are actually the same person based on their post contents. I also like how she’s preserving an old element of Internet culture with that over-the-top cutesy/derpy “I herd u liek mudkipz” style.

It is kind of hard to read, but interestingly, it also forces the reader to think harder about what’s being said. It is a bit exhausting but I feel like it’s worth it for some of those benefits. I am glad it’s not everyone talking like that all the time though, lol

Oh, yeah, I know. My issue is more about the word being reused so much. Whenever I see a word take off memetically like that I feel like it’s usually accompanied by a lack of deep thought. Almost like a thought-terminating cliche.

Yeeees although I feel like I’m walking into a trap rn

I’m more sick of hearing “slop slop slop slop slop” than I am of hearing about AI at this point. People sling slop around like it’s some sort of brave, heroic, destructive insult, leaving AI users in tears and shambles in its wake. Ironic considering a complaint against AI is that it regurgitates the same characteristic bit of content over and over again mindlessly. But even ChatGPT would have the writing skill to cycle in some other adjectives, my goodness.

I’ve never understood why there’s a special term for whale eye. Like. Isn’t it just…their eyes being turned to one side? Side eye? It just seems like it means the dog is looking somewhere other than where their head is pointed. To me it usually seems like a lack of interest. “I want to see this but not enough to turn my head”. Not sure why it would be read any different from equivalent human behavior.

Thanks for this counterpoint, that’s exactly the sort of thing I think people need to see when thinking about moving (whether emigrating from America or anywhere else) - what’s the big problems for people there, what’s their equivalent of these problems. Would you mind telling me which party this is so I can do some more research on it?