421–430 of 448 posts
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A perfectly mundane explanation isn't proof. There isn't enough evidence in this case to prove it one way or another. That should be acceptable but for many people it isn't.
In that situation, though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot applies, as we can’t prove the negative.
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Just curious, how did you find Covid "exciting"? Making lots of money on the bear market?
He didn't say "since COVID" but "since before COVID." COVID isn't the exciting event, it's an arbitrary landmark.
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Science served us well enough that we're all still commenting here. It's the prevention paradox all over again, if science had not done its work you'd be in a much better position to appreciate the difference that it - and healthcare - made but then you might not have made it at all... science definitely did not let us down. Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot…
> Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science. What is the solution to this? The framing seems way too simplistic to ever be useful. It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along, and the Bad side who just needed to do what the Good side said. In reality, it all came down to "who do you trust to both have yo…
That, right there, is where so many people went wrong and what was blatantly exploited by grifters up and down the chain. The side of science didn't "have answers all along", but it was willing to learn and change.
And no, it wasn't "boo science". It was, to a large extent, political maneuvering using science as a convenient scape goat, because whenever science learned, it got turned into a "see, they don't know either". And, of course, with a large helping of grifters making money off the ensuing confusion.
In reality, it came down to seeing who was willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence, and it was a pretty clear signal. (It was not noise free, absolutely, but it was not extremely hard to read, either - if folks had a basic amount of scientific education. There's your solution, too)
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1) There's a range of speeds that are possible depending on what you assume the turning angle of the jet was. That range doesn't go anywhere close to the speed of sound. 2) The burden of proof is on those who make an extraordinary claim. There is a perfectly mundane explanation of the cause of apparently fast-moving object which is supported by available evidence. Even if that depends on some assumptions, you would h…
A perfectly mundane explanation isn't proof. There isn't enough evidence in this case to prove it one way or another. That should be acceptable but for many people it isn't.
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In that situation, though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot applies, as we can’t prove the negative.
You are making the assertions here. You claim to know the speed of the object, the distance to it, the size, etc etc.
To make the extraordinary claim more plausible, you have to rule out the more mundane possibilities. Prove it's doing something unusual. Until then, "we can't prove it either way" doesn't mean there's a 50/50 chance.
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Regarding ET specifically, it could be a species from Earth that became intelligent before humans did, it does not need to be extraterestrial. The assumption that we have good knowledge of Earth is incorrect, especially the deep ocean.
Agree, it could. It would make sense if they lived in the ocean or underground, as the surface has many instabilities (weather, tectonics, solar radiation, impacts ~~ not to mention crazy upright apes). Interdimensional aspect could be Earth from an alternate timeline, such as where the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event did not occur, and reptilians not mammals evolved into an upright "humanoid" species th…
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Speaks to a supreme confidence in the theory, surely? I'm a layman but imagine everyone is going to want to hear every wild idea these guys could think up if this works out. They might have been sitting on this for 20 years? Probably why I'm not, but If I were any vc person I'd be busting down their door trying to give them all my money
How would you find such researchers if they didn't have plausible real-world results yet? I have a theory for new high performance heat engine which I developed over 15 years already, but I don't think anyone would give me ANY money for making a prototype (which may not work in reality), so I have to somehow do it in the limited time after working two jobs (I had to earn enough to have a home with a proper garage). D…
Like I said, there's a reason I'm not in charge of any VC stuff and I largely don't invest myself lol.
I wish you the best of luck with your invention though, please never give up and never stop dreaming. People like you even if you never produce it push us ALL forward. Thanks for what you do
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> It's not anywhere near an AGI Conjecture. We literally have no idea how far away from AGI we are, that's one of the dangers.
Ehh ... we kinda do. However sure you are that calculators aren't close to AGI, I'm only slightly less sure that one-word-at-a-time auto-completion networks aren't close either. Both can do things the other can't. LLMs are not strictly more powerful than a calculator. They cannot add two numbers together reliably. We're going to increasingly find that AGI is a fuzzy boundary made up of a million smaller intelligences…
Humans can't add two numbers together reliably either, at least not without assistance (like pen and paper, or a calculator). We invented calculators exactly because humans are not innately good at such calculations, so I'm not sure what you think this proves.
> If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to connect these brains together.
All of these are being and have been connected to LLMs now, to great effect. See RT-2, for example.
Finally, I think you vastly overestimate human capabilities. LLMs are already superhuman in many tasks. Adding a "few more intelligences" where they currently fall down does not at all seem far off.
This has been my experience so far: people underestimate the capabilities and rate of progress in machine intelligence, and they often significantly overestimate human capabilities to derive their estimates. Overestimating human specialness has a long history.
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A perfectly mundane explanation isn't proof. There isn't enough evidence in this case to prove it one way or another. That should be acceptable but for many people it isn't.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns.
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> I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science. Speak for yourself, I'm happy to lend my positivity to people who think they might be close to breakthroughs even if they are unlikely moonshots, and you better believe I'll be maximally hyping up my own work if I ever feel like I am close to some kind of breakthrough too. That's part of the fun of being a living thing in this weird physical universe.
Exactly. I find myself a lot more engaged by people working on trying to get room temperature superconductivity checked off than by people figuring out how to do A/B testing on unsuspecting consumers to increase the number of ads that are clicked.