@HooverInst@sebastianjunger@EconTalker@Liberty_Fund@Econlib The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics & Dawkins’ Middle World hypothesis are central to the guest’s self-contradictory attempt at grounding mystical ideas into science. Unfortunately the 1st is a minority interpretation and the 2nd has also been heavily criticized
@thegenesisbl0ck Could babies and kids’ needs be met by any secure attachment figure? Can’t there be multiple primaries? Dads, nannies, grandparents, can’t they all take this shape? As such, multigenerational households could be part of the answer
Idk if we’re eroding ourselves but, if we are, and it’s hurting us, i expect this to be self-correcting as we’re simultaneously giving an edge to folks that somehow don’t let that happen. I just don’t believe in product traps
Something happens to my brain after agentic coding that I can’t describe. It’s like cognitive offloading which folks have already written about, but even more. It feels like I can’t think through problems anymore. Like a fog. Using agentic but losing my hard-won agency.
@jchalupa_@bnielson01 Key point is not so much to say that the generalization to criticism or the introduction of the HTV criterion are bad ideas but that they can more easily be gamed. It’s a problem that needs acknowledgment
Bruce gives the example of “hunger causes people to eat” as an example of a theory that is dismissed for being explanationless. He argues that it is used to immunize the preferred theory “a person always freely chooses whether to eat”. The preferred theory incidentally rests upon the deus ex machina of people’s “creativity”: people freely choose behaviors because they’re creative beings. The appeal to creativity can be seen as easy-to-vary in the sense that it can be used to explain away many things, like a wildcard
@MorePerfectUS Makes one wonder whether occupational licensing is actually more about guild protectionism than about raising quality standards for customers
@valkenburgh Isn’t this perversely good for crypto tho? Crypto is for exit when gov overreaches. “They” escalate, we respond by leaning into crypto more
@astupple@DavidDeutschOxf I see, makes sense. My initial generous interpretation was that he was anti-coercion and mostly agnostic as to how kids individuate, but I agree he overemphasizes genetic determinism, and while he doesn’t cast parents as completely irrelevant he exaggerates their powerlessness
@patrickc@DanielleFong I have a similar experience every time i catch it being incoherent as my tutor on complex topics. When i point it out, it acknowledges but somehow isn’t being apologetic enough to my taste
The pretentious invocation of "product traps" shouldn't distract from the fact that this is yet another instance of the widespread belief in human helplessness and instrumental self-erosion, whereby our tools somehow become our prosthetic governors
You can't formalize the notion of an explanation. You can always invent new modes of explanation. And they are conjectures, like any theory. So you might conjecture that so-and-so is a good mode of explanation. And the openness of science is connected with the non-formalizability of explanation. And by the way, that's exactly the same as the non-formalizability of mathematics. So you can't formalize what is a valid proof. Because however you formalize it, you can prove that there will be mathematical truths that can't be reached by that formalism.
@DavidDeutschOxf
I can’t decide if this weirdly adversarial dynamic with my AI tutor is didactically good or bad. I sure don’t like when it is confidently teaching me incoherent things in a domain i know little about (since i’m trying to learn it) and so hard for me to detect. At the same time, i feel good when i do detect it, as if “spot the hallucinations” was a twisted didactic tool. But how many such tests did i fail?
o3 still makes mistakes (of course?) but they’re increasingly hard to spot. It takes grit to persist in questioning the confident o3, especially if it’s a highly technical topic you’re trying to learn, and you hesitate between your own confidence that something is not adding up and your own self-doubt from this being a new topic for you. If your hunch turns out to be correct, and something was indeed wrong, you end up sort of resenting o3’s confidence, which made you self-doubt. I feel like this confidence-resentment dynamic is underdiscussed somehow, and could even backfire where people distrust their own hunches and give up thinking they’re too dumb. A human tutor would empathize more with the visible struggle of the student, and start wondering about a mistake via the nonverbal feedback from the student. This dynamic would in turn be less likely to lead the student to give up from self-doubt
@CliffordAsness@ATabarrok Surely the gov must also be regularly fixing the stupid, lest actual degrowth would set in if all the gov did was this 3-step process. Or is the argument that the market continuously finds ways to stay ahead of forever-accumulating gov stupidity?
@dwarkesh_sp@pawtrammell With “full automation”, there’s no longer a difference b/w robots & people; their welfare, indistinguishable from ours. Otherwise any non substitutability will become a source of full employment, as there is no lump of labor, but rather an infinity of problems for people to solve