Thursday, July 4, 2024
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Friday, May 31, 2024
Friday, May 24, 2024
Daily Wire Backstage: Introducing The 2nd Greatest Commercial Ever
These discussions are always interesting. Their commercials are annoying.
They get tangled up over the definition of freedom to the point where it makes it look like they don't know what they are talking about. Freedom is very simple; you should be able to do what you want just so long as you don't interfere with the same right of others. The exact boundaries can be unclear which is one reason why you need a legal system to define rights. For example, free speech and property rights need legal definitions. I just can't claim that something of yours belongs to me. There needs to be a system for determining what is property. Likewise, people shouldn't violate other people's rights in the name of free speech, although there is a lot of that going around.
However, their discussion claims to be for freedom while apparently wanting to constrain freedom by religious values. It makes them look hypocritical.
As a side note, some claim that we have "natural rights". The problem with this is that you may think that you have the right to live but a bear thinks that it has the right to eat. People have preferences and tendencies, where they prosper when they are free, but without a legal system, they have no rights at all. It just becomes the rule of the most powerful.
The political discussion that followed was good.
Friday, March 8, 2024
Saturday, February 24, 2024
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Why Democracies Always Fail
Two centuries ago, a somewhat obscure Scotsman named Tytler made this profound observation: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Saturday, February 3, 2024
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Sunday, January 21, 2024
Saturday, January 20, 2024
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
Sunday, January 14, 2024
Saturday, January 13, 2024
Thursday, January 11, 2024
WARNING: ChatGPT Could Be The Start Of The End! Sam Harris
Sam Harris spends 30 minutes talking about the dangers of AI.
He makes assumptions about the future. I think that he underestimates the difficulty of building a general AI.
I think that ChatGPT is overhyped. It is like a Wikipedia that can talk. It has no understanding except to predict what words should follow other words based on statistical information. This is why it gets so much wrong. I asked it to write some computer code and the answer wasn't even remotely correct.
We will inevitably develop general AI, but AI is a tool to solve specific problems. We don't have to make an AI that matches human intelligence when it is more efficient to have problem-specific AI. Calculators can do math far better than I can, and even the best 8-bit chess computers can outplay me at chess. It would be like saying that when we developed mechanical locomotion, we needed to make a machine that functioned exactly like a horse. We found better ways to do locomotion.
This means that AI will be solving problems long before we have a general AI, but more importantly, we will be treating it as a tool, just like any other tool. For example, twenty years ago I was annoyed when Microsoft Word automatically corrected my spelling without asking me. It felt like the machines were already becoming smarter than us. Although that was a novel experience twenty years ago, we wouldn't think twice about it today.
Friday, January 5, 2024
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
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