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Bored of It

paulrobertlloyd.com

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Re: Bored of It

#141

Post by bsenftner »

latexr wrote: post #17

> The best minds of my generation I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”. I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.…

I've always considered references to "the best minds" to mean those glorified because they make others large sums of money. "The best minds" are never the ones profiting from their ideas.

Re: Bored of It

#142

Post by TimorousBestie »

diggan wrote: post #122
TimorousBestie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My software working group has spent much of the quarter discussing whether or not it’s made us more productive. They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it. I don’t use it because our products have the potential to harm other people and I’m not personally comfortable assuming that risk. Nobody else seems particularly moved by that argument, however.

> They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it. That sounds... Good? Lots of people run into using whatever is vogue without even thinking twice about it. See the massive move to using cloud for absolutely everything, money be damned, and you'll see what I mean. Cargo culting is a huge issue in the industry. At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less prod…

It would be great if they’d actually collect data instead of merely speculating, that’s what I’m getting at.

Re: Bored of It

#143

Post by raydiak »

While I agree with some of the points here, the aloof tone-deaf consumerist mentality reveals either ignorance of, or more likely indifference to, the transformative juncture we've reached and/or the possible perils. If all you feel about the current situation is "bored," that's a you problem. The world is not here for your amusement. Boredom is a lack of imagination. Go do something else. Your problem is not boredom, it is your own apathetic attitude and need to be regularly spoon-fed entertainment.

Maybe I don't get the level of burnout I'm seeing because I don't spend much time streaming or doomscrolling, but that's an example of my point. If you spend more time creating than consuming, then boredom isn't a problem regardless of what the rest of the world is up to. Occasional fear and horror at the news maybe, but certainly not boredom.

Re: Bored of It

#144

Post by v9v »

terhechte wrote: post #71

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the na…

This can be taken as an instance of the Shifting Baseline phenomenon [1]. The fact that we can only perceive certain changes over large timescales doesn't mean we can safely ignore them. It's harmful to ignore experienced perspectives.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

Re: Bored of It

#145

Post by bumby »

zwnow wrote: post #138
bumby wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we are inherently social creatures. It’s arguably what allowed us to move to the top of the animal hierarchy. Consider this: if you were to ask a parent “would you rather your child grow up to be wildly intelligent but have sociopathy to the point of being utterly alone, or frankly average (or even dull) intellectually but have a rich social life with meaningful relationships, which would you choose?” I think…

I never benefited from "meaningful" relationships so the choice is pretty easy actually.

Do you have children? That was a prerequisite for the question. If you do, it implies you don’t consider the relationship with your children either meaningful or beneficial, which says…a lot.

Re: Bored of It

#146

Post by sgarland »

zwnow wrote: post #78
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you go from "successful" to "useful"? There seems to be no logical connection from "shitty people are successful" to "empathy is not useful to society."

Because empathy isn't useful to society. One only lives once so you better make sure you'll be successful. Having empathy will actively hurt your own life

> …I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

– Captain G. M. Gilbert, Psychologist at Nuremberg Trials

Re: Bored of It

#147

Post by zwnow »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #125
zwnow wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because empathy isn't useful to society. One only lives once so you better make sure you'll be successful. Having empathy will actively hurt your own life

Studies show that the primary predictor for happiness is personal relationships. Make of that what you will.

What kind of people is the study based on? Does it include people with mental disorders? I dont value personal relationships.

Re: Bored of It

#149

Post by bufferoverflow »

lm28469 wrote: post #127
bufferoverflow wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem for me. When you're 60 or 70, you will wish to have a body of a 25 year old. Dying early from rotting teeth is normal in nature, yet you probably brush, floss, and go to dentist.

That puts you way deep in the wishful thinking territory, again there is 0 rational connection between LLMs and immortality, especially if you're already on the way out

That's why I said "chance".

And no, there's no zero rational connection. LLMs and other types of neural nets are already demonstrating they can solve complex tasks. Unless there's some intrinsic barrier to how intelligent they can become, we should surpass human level intelligence within years, maybe a decade.

Once you surpass human level intelligence, you can scale scientific research by orders of magnitude.

Heck, AI already assists scientific research. We basically solved protein folding problem with AI.

Re: Bored of It

#150

Post by InsideOutSanta »

zwnow wrote: post #101
lolinder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> empathy isn't useful to society ... Having empathy will actively hurt your own life Even if I accepted the second statement (which to be clear, I absolutely do not), it doesn't follow that empathy isn't useful to society. Society is not benefited by everyone running about chasing their own personal success to the exclusion of all others: that kind of world isn't even called a society. We have other names for that a…

I am aware people have trouble building this mental model of an unempathetic society. I am old enough to have witnessed that in 99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation. There is no reason to have empathy.

>I am old enough to have witnessed that in 99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation

Old people can be wrong, and in this case, they are.

>There is no reason to have empathy.

This is a category mistake. You reason that empathy is superfluous if people are the cause of their misfortune. However, whether people are the cause of their misfortunes is utterly irrelevant to whether there is a reason to have empathy.

So far, none of your arguments have had any discernible logic behind them. If you are so convinced that empathy is needless, why can you not articulate a coherent argument for your position?

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