Awful summary video, in my opinion. Takes 5 minutes to get to the new discovery, then spends 3 minutes repeatedly claiming that we don’t have any explanations for the wide range of genome sizes, then 2 mins of Patreon credits to get over the 10 minute mark. There might be 30 seconds of actual content in this video.
I’d give a highschooler a bad grad on this, why do so many people give this guy money to make low quality content like this?
He could have just picked any section of this Wikipedia page and read it verbatim and he would have transmitted more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_size
Bad channels which’ve accumulated views and subscribers getting recommended by the youtube algorithm. Hence why he has a filler segment to get the video to 10 minutes. That’s just how youtube works nowadays.
The power dynamic isn’t the inherent problem. Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.
The more central problem is the incentive structure of the academy. Genuine training outcomes cannot be measured by the bureaucracy and therefore don’t matter.
Without solving the incentive problem nothing can really be improved. In aggregate the most successful PIs will be the most ruthless blood sucking fraudsters. A few exceptional empathetic geniuses will sneak through on principle, but mostly we’ll continue hobbling along.
> Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.
This is such a bizarrely vague statement that it's meaningless. You and I both have zero clue what the environment was like for apprenticeships in these hundreds of years, or how issues like this were resolved. Further, if the system of apprenticeship was historically as abusive as PhDs seem to be today, then I'm not sure we should look to it for guidance.
Germany, for example, still uses apprenticeship for many careers. But there are a great many legal protections for Azubis (Auszubildende/apprentices) that protect them and provide avenues for changing companies and reporting issues. They have stronger legal protections than normal workers in some cases. It still isn't perfect and it can still be problematic to handle issues, but there's a system in place.
> Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.
Have you ever read historical books about what it was like? Because quite a lot of that system was pretty abusive and controlling. Power differecial did caused quite a lot of harm in the past.
> Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.
Is this meant as a proof that however it's done now is perfect? There are many tweaks one can make to the model to make it less lopsided and still keep the fundamental apprenticeship model. I am willing to bet that if you look at how it's done around the globe there are many ways of doing apprenticeship where the power balance is different, and historically it's probably also been practiced in many different ways.
Apprenticeship is simply 1:1 training over some extended period. Of course, it can go well or very badly.
Focusing on the structure of that relationship and hoping that more bureaucracy will protect the most vulnerable PhD students from misaligned advisors just doesn’t seem to work in my experience.
The fundamental issue is the incentive structure. Without changing it you’ll just drive personal abuse further behind closed doors.
It makes sense that UIKit is more solid, because not only does it have 17 years of its own history, but builds upon the legacy of AppKit which stretches back another 20 years. By comparison SwiftUI is still quite young.
Haven’t touched Flutter because Material Design feels weird on iOS, its Cupertino theme isn’t great, and I’m not the type to reinvent the wheel on UI design in the apps I work on. Also don’t really feel like picking up a language, toolchain, and ecosystem for a single UI framework.
Is there any animosity towards the later efforts to “professionalize” some of the early simpler Android APIs? I’m thinking specifically of some of the drama surrounding the banning of SharedPreferences.
Most of that is being driven by the same people who worked on the original APIs. Being on a successful platform means all your rushed, good-enough APIs from years ago tend to now be load bearing regret.
Jon has a lot of opinions about how this is stupid or he'd never hire anybody who does that and so on, and yet Jon does these things anyway, because he's human and humans are fallible.
This is less obnoxious than it might be because at least Jon is self-aware enough to identify that e.g., this code written by "an idiot" was in fact written by J. Blow himself which suggests maybe he's an idiot. But his resistance to adjusting Jai in light of these observations is a (modest but non-trivial) problem with the language.
The necessity of sharp tools doesn't excuse needlessly dangerous edges.
Another extension is that Gods are distributed software installed in the hardware of believers. Aquinas seemed to believe essentially this. Gods exist and act via humans in the same way that human minds exist and act via human.
That seems improbable. Aquinas was a Christian, specifically, a Catholic, so he believed in Jesus and the Trinity. On that view, there are no Gods, there is just the One God, embodied in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The idea that "Gods are distributed software installed in the hardware of believers" is not just wrong on that view, it's non-sensical.
Now, I can certainly believe that Aquinas believed that God (singular) acts in humans in a similar manner that human minds act in humans in that both God and human minds (souls) exist in some non-material realm and act on material human bodies in some mysterious way. But that is not the same thing at all. Software does not exist in some spiritual realm that is separate from material reality. There is nothing metaphysically mysterious about software. There is something essentially metaphysically mysterious about God, and almost certainly on Aquinas's view, about minds as well. I am far from being an expert on Aquinas, but I would be shocked to learn that he was not a dualist.
You're right that Aquinas would have rejected the notion that gods are software installed in the hardware of believers, but he was not a dualist - he advocated a kind of hylomorphism that doesn't map neatly onto contemporary philosophical categories:
Software in some sense does exist in a spiritual realm in the same way Aquinas talked about "incorporeal beings". You can't hold or point to software or souls or gods. You can hold and point to hardware and bodies.
Of course, I have no idea what Aquinas actually believed. I just find his conclusions around the existence of "incorporeal beings" and "souls" to be consistent with the emergent-agent idea we're talking about.
For instance, in a very un-catholic view, Aquinas argued that - to some extent - animals and even plants have souls in this way.
Software does not exist in any spiritual realm, it's just that the word "software" refers to a state rather than a system. There is nothing "spiritual" or "mystical" going on there. It's completely mundane physics. You can't point at software for the same reason you can't point at sleep or death or urgency. It's just a quirk of natural language that we overload nouns to refer to both systems and states.
I absolutely love your writing BTW! I wasn't aware of it before today. It's really derailed my whole workday. It's fun to discover a new author like this, thank you for responding to my comment :)
I don't mean to argue that anything spiritual/supernatural is going on when I'm talking about an emergent god agent here. I'm arguing that gods are in the same ontological category as individual human minds are. I'm sure most religious people, Aquinas included, would need quite a lot more mysticism to be injected into the idea before they would recognize it as their own.
I don't fully believe it, to be honest. Mostly because I have no way of testing it or experiencing it. But, it's a fun idea and it's fun to imagine how my own little caricaturized model of Aquinas' mind might find some things to agree with. As far as I can tell, he was a person that desperately wanted a cohesive model of the "full stack" of things. Unfortunately for him, the best understandings at his time were pretty rough by today's standards.
It is. I remember listening to some AI or neuroscience podcast in 2019, it was an interview where one guy made a digression about religion being an internal control system which may be common and shared by people and works on mind level - the opposite, external control systems we make because people don't belive (in the same), so the first one doesn't work for them but CCTV (over them) does.
This is immensely dumb. What secret cabal of researchers would they be hiring that would be capable of being ahead of Deepmind/OpenAI? Where exactly would they find these people? Shadow MIT? CalTech2?
Military and intelligence technology is almost always ahead of the private sector. Governments have practically infinite money and resources to throw at the problem, including for recruiting and industrial espionage.
The only people who think this are people who have never been associated with a top research org. You NEVER hear about anyone, let alone the top people, going to work for government. They all get scooped up with big tech salaries or stay in academia.
The military would need to be literally breeding geniuses and cultivating a secret scientific ecosystem to be ahead on AI right now.
The military does have a secret scientific ecosystem. Where do you think all of its advanced classified technology and cryptography comes from, the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog?
I’d give a highschooler a bad grad on this, why do so many people give this guy money to make low quality content like this?
He could have just picked any section of this Wikipedia page and read it verbatim and he would have transmitted more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_size