I don't understand this single dimensional view of the world where one country has to be the "winner" or "best". Historically that has almost never been the case except for military might, which wasn't necessarily correlated with technological advancement. Economic size does matter, but that's eventually going to track population size.
Why can't we have a multi polar world where different countries are good at different things, and no one has to dominate?
Because at the international stage there's no rule. It's pure anarchy. This is why the countries with big military might and and economy to back it can bully the other countries into submission, or bribe them into submission (post-WW2 US and USSR did both). With this they can boost their economy, and with that their military so there's a superpower born. This is super stupid of course. What you describe requires rationality and humility. So far not happening.
Its not about dominating its the constant competition. Growth and power makes it easier to grow more and become more powerful. If you stay in your lane you limit how you can grow and then the guy who didnt stay in their lane has grown bigger and can now influence and push you around.
You could have an equal balance of power but both sides would still be competing to match each other and it could be upset at any moment.
Agreed. And don't get me started on the whole Thucydides Trap, whose primary trap is that assuming war is inevitable based on conflicts from centuries ago will, in fact, become a stupidly self-fulfilling prophecy.
White British is an ethnic umbrella recognised by the British government. In the last recorded statistics, the White British population in Britain had been reduced to 54% by births, and dropping significantly each year. A generation ago Britain was 90-95% White British. It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.
> In the last recorded statistics, the White British population in Britain had been reduced to 54% by births
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British , "In the 2021 Census, the White British group numbered 44,355,044 or 74.4% of the population of England and Wales." In Scotland the percentage is 87.1%.
You might be referring to the percentage of recent births to non White British parents, which is a different thing. (And, if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British.)
> It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.
Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.
Demographics by births are much more meaningful than the total population because it's only births (and more immigration of course) that informs all future generations. Even if all immigration was halted today, the Britain of the future will be ~50% native (not taking into account the statistically lower native birth rates).
>if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British
Not exactly. "White British" as a compound noun means "ethnically British", not "white AND a British citizen".
>Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.
Large areas of England do not speak English as their first language, and there are rapidly evolving youth dialects with strong black and other minority ethnic influences. As a reminder, the mutation of Old English due to Norman French influences took centuries. It's not at all out of the question that even the current already-done migration may cause the largest transformation of the language since the Normans.
You point appears to be that people should be more outraged by the people who are having insufficient babies, rather than someone cutting down an iconic tree.
Which is an odd point.
"Large areas of England do not speak English as their first language". That's no way to speak about Norfolk
I don't mean to say this as a challenge to what you said, but as a genuine question: Do you hold any value in the continued existence of the red squirrel in Great Britain? Would you see its extinction as any kind of loss? I know many people that are hugely invested in securing the red squirrel, but would never be seen dead expressing any kind of hesitancy towards the idea of their own ethnic group disappearing. I've always found it a little odd, given that squirrels don't have culture, traditions, or a written history attached, and it's purely aesthetic.
Why does the technicality that red and grey squirrels are different species hold any weight to you? The effect is still the same: They are two discernibly different populations, of which one is on the decline in its native land alongside the increase of another. As humans, we are orders of magnitude more sensitive to population differences amongst humans than amongst squirrels. Squirrel populations do not have associated music, dress, religion, traditions, and so on. So the question remains: Why does the decline of a discernable population of squirrels carry immense sentimental weight to many people, but not the decline of an ethnic group? Especially when most people would give a very different answer if that ethnic group were, for example, Native American or Palestinian? The only answer to me is that people feel that they aren't allowed to hold these sentimental thoughts, and work to block them from their own mind.
I do not play favorites with nationalism. I have the same opinion of Arabic or Chinese or any other culture.
In any case, you are implying the ridiculous point that somehow culture is some telepathic magic that is inherent to the people who lived there from some completely arbitrary cut off point where you somehow think it drops out of thin air in the blood or something instead of something one is raised into. Do you think for example a british baby taken to afghanistan and raised by the Taliban would turn up to have English culture magically?
Extreme nationalism is a third world culture to me, I would consider a capitalist, liberal immigrant from say Egypt to be more European than a white nationalist. The far right causes problems for and has problems with far right from other places. White nationalists and Islamic extremists hating each other, and so on. I have never heard democratic capitalist people having issues with other democratic capitalist people. If you want to solve ethnic etc conflict I would say the surest shot approach to it is to suppress, deport, eliminate, deal with far right wingers of every stripe whether white or islamic or jewish or any other.
And lastly what exactly has nationalism given us? The bad far outweighs the good. For pithy stuff about language and food, you have genocides, warfare, bloodshed on the other end of the scale.
And Palestinians are being genocided...again driven by nationalism and religion. Genocide and property crimes are obviously bad.
Whites aren't being genocided in England. If someone thinks that, then being a delusional snowflake somehow equating not having enough babies to other races genociding you is their mental problem, not mine.
Why have you highlighted this expression as something latent in the middle and ruling classes? I 100% agree with what you're saying and most of my 'lower class' (like myself) council housed friends I discuss this sort of thing with do also.
I can see where you’re coming from, but not really. Unlike an RNN, the main transformer still processes sequences non-recurrently. The “sidecar” model just encodes internal activations into compressed latent states, allowing introspection and rollback without changing the underlying transformer architecture.
Such articles about Europe always seem to ignore skilled immigration and pretend it's not important. Europe sucks at attracting skilled immigrants compared to the US, or even Canada. And the contributions of immigrant founders is well documented.
I think attractiveness to skilled immigrants is also an indicator factor of social mobility and societal openness, which indirectly plays an important role for a successful entrepreneureal ecosystem. Europe is far behind in this regard.
Hmmm...having to listen to the fairly constant anti immigration rethoric in the US makes me question your point of "social mobility and societal openness" a little bit.
What value does it provide over linking to the original source?
Any website that constantly asks me to login is spammy in by book. It's a for profit website that adds little value other than duplicating information from primary sources and occasionally mangling pdfs with redundant information to advertise themselves.
They also provide a central place to search things, with a richer interface than Google scholar, and have centralized a significant amount of good sources.
There's a reason millions of researchers have joined. That you don't find value or know what they provide is no reason others should not learn the value they add.
That's fine. You also miss all papers not on arxiv. You miss published versions of even the papers on Arxiv (which are often improved versions), and you miss any benefit peer review has on those papers.
I use arxiv nearly every day, and also a few places that get things not on arxiv because the majority of papers are simply not there. Arxiv is paid for by universities paying subscriptions, locked in for five years at a time. It's also funded by Simons Foundation (which may not pay forever) and Cornell and many individual donors. Affiliate groups like professional societies and govts pay huge sums to keep it running. Many companies pay 10's of thousands annually to be members.
Piggybacking on their money while taking affront at a bigger, more comprehensive service, because they dare post an ad, seems somewhat short sighted, but to each his own.
Since a significant number of job postings for researchers as well and communication and networking opportunities are widely used on Research Gate, none of which is present on Arxiv, you are simply missing likely useful contacts and tools for your career. And I write this as a researcher for several decades, long before any of these were live.
As I said, enough people find value at research gate that millions do pay.
Well, the brain is a physical neural network, and evolution seems to have figured out how to generate a (somewhat) copiable model. I bet we could learn a trick or two from biology here.
The way the brain does it is by giving users a largely untrained model that they themselves have to train over the next 20 years for it to be of any use.
I suspect there may be trade off undergoing evolutionary selection here, where for some organisms a behaviour is more important from the offset, it's worth encoding more of the behaviour into genes, at what cost I wonder?
It's also possible there is some other mechanism going on at an embryonic stage, a kind of pre-training.
I suspect some of the division is also defined by how complex the task is, or how sensitive the model is to it's own neurons (kind of like PNN). I don't have a well rounded argument, but my instinct is that encoding or pre-training walking is far easier than seeing. Not to mention basic quadrupedal walking/standing is far easier than bipedal, they can learn the more complex coordinated movements after.
Some parts are copiable, but not the more abstract things like the human intellect, for lack of a better word.
We are not even born with what you might consider basic mental faculties, for example it might seem absurd, but we have to learn to see... We are born with the "hardware" for it, a visual cortex, an eye, all defined by our genes, but it's actually trained from birth, there is even a feedback loop that causes the retina to physically develop properly.
We should also consider the effects of trauma on those brains. If you’ve ever spent time around people with extreme trauma they are very much in their own heads and can’t focus outside themselves long enough to focus enough to learn anything. It definitely impacts intellectual capacity. Humans are social animals and anyone raised without proper socializing and intimacy and nurturing will inevitably end up traumatized.
There's indeed a nice trick to be learned from cognitive science focused in biological cognition: the mind is embodied and embedded. Which means, roughly, that it is not portable. It doesn't store things like "glass at position x,y" but only "glass is at a small movement of the hand towards the right". Consequently, whatever gets encoded only makes sense within a given body and only inasmuch as it relied on its environment (with humans, that includes social environments). The good news is that, despite being not portable, this reliance on physical properties might be a step in the right direction, after all.
I'm not clear on what advantage this architecture has over mamba/Griffin. They also have the linear scaling, better sequence parallelism and are competitive in performance with transformers.
It's a bit clickbaity and disingenuous to say "employees in Asia", when South Korea comes in at the bottom, and the difference between Singapore and France/UK and the rest is just a few percentage points on a small sample (What's the error on the sampling?)
