The fact that Daghlian and Slotin died in the same hospital bed has always been a sobering thought. "Well, that does it" are harrowing words.
There are famous engineering incidents that are good to study -- the Challenger disaster, the Minnesota Bridge collapse, the Therac 25... But compared with the LANL Criticality incident, there's something different. The former are all technical failure analysis.
This incident is almost existential in it's implications, like Shelly's Frankenstein. A discussion on the nature of humanity.
The asides with the dog are great. I've seen a few blogs use this technique -- I'm not big on Greek, but I think Plato used this technique too.
It instills the idea that you should be asking a question at this point. Some information has been provided that should generate more questions in your head, if you're keeping pace.
Psychiatry, having failed to measurably solve any "mental health" problem is so desperate to find a solution that it's sampling the recreational drug cabinet. This isn't science. This isn't medicine. This is rolling back the clock to witch doctors and medicine men.
Can't be depressed if your mind has been chemically lobotomized.
I have found that people treat depression and anxiety like a medical condition -- diabetes, or high cholesterol.
Yet I can measure those numbers, compare them with other people similar to me, determine what ranges are outside the norm, and observe changes as I try different strategies to manage them.
Depression, like physical pain, can neither be measured nor compared. And if this analogy holds, then there are those who would rather dull their pain with medication and claim victimhood, rather than find the source of it.
Everyone's got their fairly reasonable explanations as to why this is happening. Complexity in cars driving up cost and tanking reliability. Inflation. Tight finances. Public transit, work from home.
And then I look at the WEF guys, who want to make personal vehicle ownership not a thing and think... Boy it's happening. We're turning into Cuba with ancient cars on the road -- eventually none of them will be personally owned. And we're totally happy about that prospect for now.
That webpage> With blockchain-enabled mobility, all providers and consumers can equally participate in a transportation system, setting the terms, conditions and pricing they choose.
I'll wait and see before concluding that that's happening...
People don't communicate well. They use the word "spying", when "surveillance" would be more appropriate.
How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left?
I mean, it's all public information, right?
How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?
I get the concept. But there's a pretty obvious difference between just sitting in my home and going to work and posting on a global media platform that is literally intended to reach every other living human as its core reason for existing.
The argument seems bizarre to me. A much better pre-technology analogy would be if I wrote lots of letters to the editor of a newspaper and people read them.
Maybe it would even be a little creepy if the government had an FBI agent in every small town that read letters to the editor and sent them to be filed by topic in Washington or something.
It doesn't really matter what label you put on it. The fact that you say it'd be a "little creepy" should start setting off alarm bells. Do we really want people with guns and the force of the state behind them doing creepy things to the populace, routinely?
Who cares whether it's "spying" or "surveillance"?
Here's the real issue, which this semantics argument is derailing. Several times, a shooting spree has occurred, and all the government agencies say, "Oh, yeah... We knew about them! Anyways, the mass shooter's community is very much under attack..."
Pretty hard to swallow when the federal agencies are spending time and resources holding a magnifying glass over political opponents (with a long, LONG track record of nonviolence).
1) I would at least have a chance of knowing about it, and could lodge a complaint with the relevant agency, or take them to court, if necessary. This may not work, but there's at least some level of recourse and accountability.
2) The chilling issue is that of mass surveillance. The kind of surveillance you describe is time- and resource-intensive, and doesn't scale. If agencies can collect and analyze data on a vast number of people with a few clicks of a mouse, that's a danger to everyone's freedom.
Unfortunately we ended up in a world where corporate spying/survelliance is out of sight and out of mind. Never mind the fact corporate spying has achieved something dictatorships of the past could only dream about in their wet dreams.
You have correctly identified the underlying assumption of this discussion.
From someone who has the opposite view, that human consciousness did not arise from an evolutionary process, but was created by God -- I believe we will never fully create an artificial consciousness.
I think a further assumption is that the human mind is a deterministic machine. If we could freeze whatever entropy is involved with human behavior, just like the seed of a Minecraft world, we could get the same result, and perhaps even control human behavior.
I don't think consciousness is deterministic like that. I have some things I can point to for justification, but much more largely, there are some strange implications that arise from "we're all dancing to our DNA".
I completely disagree with you fundamentally as I don't believe in God, but I find your argument more coherent than most of the other arguments over why AI isn't (or even cannot be) conscious or sentient. If there is no supernatural, then consciousness must be created using natural laws and therefore something that ultimately it is possible, somehow, to recreate again using the natural laws.
I think determinism is another debate entirely, and I believe most scientists consider the universe not deterministic but instead probabilistic, but honestly the distinction doesn't seem that important to me for this discussion.
Further (and non-scientifically), if we can never quite crack an observably sentient AI, I'd probably start coming round more to the idea that maybe humans were created by a god. However, at this point, it seems like we're starting to climb up the sentience ladder without any obvious impassable rungs so far.
Certainly with generative AI, we've demonstrated that an evolutionary model can produce (as an example) a method for a bipedal robot to learn to balance and walk like a human.
But all this to me is a cheat. We've already built the robot, and the control systems, and feedback mechanisms, and placed a goal on the end result for it to work towards.
I think the external constraints we put on the system mean that the creation will never surpass the creator. Oh, the mechanical muscles will be stronger and faster to the point we can get robot ballet. But it will still be bounded by the limits of our imagination and capabilities.
When it comes to LLMs, I'm sure it will create fascinating stories that are loved more than Tolkien. But the stories will still be limited to the bounds of our own thought.
If you ever feel like discussing religion, my Twitter DMs are open!
This is like saying, "I've developed a new compass for a deep space probe to help it find North!"
Our society is actively declaring that falsehoods are truth, and should be celebrated. We're hallucinating ourselves. All this software does is make sure LLMs hallucinate with us.
Before long, we could end up with left-leaning and right-leaning AIs autonomously fighting the 'culture war' over social media, much more advanced than simple bots spamming copy+paste comments.
Combined with ever-improving ways to fake video and voices, things could get even uglier than they've been over the last few years.
Well I think that its hallucinations are a good demonstration that none of the post-truth subjectivist philosophies were ever things that many people took very seriously. ChatGPT is the real thing as it relates to extreme relativism: it really cannot tell the difference between true and false and doesn't really care, either. By contrast, the apostles of post-truth were really only trolling for a response... no one really lives by its principles because it's so impractical and disastrous. To really believe in post-truth, you must perceive no difference between raisin bran with cyanide and raisin bran.
It's impossible to answer this without getting political. Instead, let's just say every previous generation has been critically wrong about some things. Statistically, we're unlikely to be the outlier.
Some of the ugliest episodes in human history were caused by people who believed their political positions were not political positions, but unarguable statements of the True and Good.
Eeehhh? Im not sure truth* exists, but there are things that we accept as true and things that are so fundamental that it doesn't occur to us to question them - these things are inherently political. Just to be clear - not using that word to refer to the specific species of polarized discourse that we got in the states, talking about the nature of power and the human condition.
Curious what you consider to be true though? I'm coming at it from the perspective that even in physics where we can isolate so nicely we still aren't divining any truths, just making models with increasing explanatory powers.
Personally, I've been reaching more towards 'shared values' than 'truth', this is likely the pedant in me but truth doesn't feel tractable whereas shared values feels like it has less baggage?
Does shared values here just mean definitions? Such as the number of carbon atoms in a mole, 5+9 in base 10, the average number of protons in a carbon atom is a specific value, and leptons exist?
No, shared values is referring to the moral/emotional stuff, I find it more useful when trying to bridge the gap in a pretty politically charged environment to reconnect on simple things like wanting other people to be happy and healthy.
Are those true things? Good candidates, I like 'leptons exist'. Do you mind if we just gently ignore the math one? Feels like inviting the whole 'is math invented or discovered' thing.
1) carbon atoms in a mol - a mol is a counting number so it seems tautological to declare this one a truth
2) pass :)
3) this seems like a good candidate but it also seems to reduce truth to just the things we measure and only to the extent that we can be accurate (I'm also assuming you meant neutrons, protons are static by specie). Purely hypothetically there could be a whole heap of unusually heavy or light carbon out there that would disprove one or another of our theories. To put it another way; is the average number of apples that a trees grows in a year 'true'? It'll change year after year after all. I'm fine with a definition of truth that implies error bars and best efforts but I feel it falls short of the colloquial definition.
4) I think the pure observation that a thing somewhere exists is probably the closest to true, the rebuttals against that would all be self consuming anyway. The specific claim that leptons exist seems a little more fraught though - we could conceivably come to another conclusion if that better fit the facts.
So, can we call these things true if our concept is potentially incomplete or incorrect?
I’m a little confused on the statement “truth isn’t political”. This kind of goes against what I understand politics to be, which is the negotiation of a broader societal trend, which doesn’t itself have to do with whether or not the societal trend has a factual basis. The truth may be that cigarettes cause cancer, but the politics are obviously that acknowledging this would encourage society to implement top down policies to limit cigarette use. In this way, “cigarettes is a carcinogen” is a truth with significant political weight, which is what I understand a political truth to mean. Is my understanding different from yours?
If I'm understanding the parent comment correctly: a fact may have political implications but it doesn't depend on politics. In other words reality is independent of our interpretation of it (i.e. philosophical realism). The rub of course being that coming to know facts about most things is a highly social process filtered through interpretation and biases. Everything can be political if it needs to be decided upon by a group.
EDIT: I have avoided using "truth" here because it's a more general term than "fact" which has the connotation of being in reference to something concrete.
Generally when people talk like this nowadays they mean trans people, or the LGBT community in general. Sometimes Jews, though those types don't say that part out loud on HN too often.
There were lots of good examples during COVID. Remember that you don't need to wear masks, because washing your hands is enough (and we need to save the masks for doctors, but we're afraid to say that, because it will cause a run on masks). Remember that staying 6 feet apart is a magic distance over which COVID cannot cross (or maybe 1 meter, truth depends on the country you live in). Remember that you can't eat inside a restaurant, but you can eat outside, and it's okay for the restaurant to build partial walls around their outdoor spaces to make them more comfortable. Remember that COVID definitely could not have come from a lab leak, and it's racist to even suggest it might have happened. Never mind that the scientist who started the anti-lab-leak open letter was himself heavily funded for GoF research, and he refused to sign his own letter for political reasons.
I don't claim to know the answers to all of the questions (and I certainly don't know where COVID came from), but clearly there are plenty of cases where dubious statements were strongly enshrined as "True" in a way that required major online players to suppress alternative beliefs as "False".
A big difficulty is the conflation of fact with judgement. 'Vaccines work', 'masks don't work', 'a lab leak is impossible', etc. are judgements, not facts. They are not even hypotheses, in that there is no clear criteria by which they can be falsified. Hence fact-checking presents obvious problems, as in practice it will be judgement-checking.
There are famous engineering incidents that are good to study -- the Challenger disaster, the Minnesota Bridge collapse, the Therac 25... But compared with the LANL Criticality incident, there's something different. The former are all technical failure analysis.
This incident is almost existential in it's implications, like Shelly's Frankenstein. A discussion on the nature of humanity.