631–640 of 868 posts
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My employer of 750k people made it very clear, upload proof of vaccination or be fired. That’s a fact.
That was GP's point. Being fired != being prevented from working. You are still free to get a job at a different employer that has different policies.
These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels- they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I have seen more talks and papers that rested…
> raise so many... emotions in me... and I now believe [faking gels] is a common occurrence On the other hand, shysters always project, and this thread is full of cringe vindications about cheating or faking or whatever. As your "emotions" are probably telling you, that kind of generalization does not feel good, when it is pointed at you, so IMO, you can go and bash your colleagues all you want, but odds are the ones…
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I don’t understand the standard of modeling you seem to assume. Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid brain aren’t even mutually exclusive if your model is abstract enough. When I say „a neural network models a human brain“, I’m talking about the high level concept, not the specific structure of a human brain compared to other brains. You could also say that it models a dogs brain if you wanted to.…
I think a lot of people don't abstract their brain model when they say "models a human brain", or they'd say "models biological intelligence", etc. Specifically, I don't think there are any human traits in LLMs other than having mostly been trained on human outputs. They see tokens and predict tokens; very different sensorium from humans. There aren't any specific corvid or cephalopod traits either afaik. Biological…
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Hacker news is completely flooded with “AI learns just like humans do” and “AI models the human brain” despite neither of these things having any concrete evidence at all. Unfortunately it isn’t just bosses being fooled by this. Scores of people push this crap. I am not saying AI has no value. I am saying that these idiots are idiots.
What evidence for „AI models the human brain“ do you want? Isn’t a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?
Also, it's obvious that our brain is not built like AI models.
There are similarities between both human and current AI models, but there also huge differences, which doesn't allow easily map one to another.
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What evidence for „AI models the human brain“ do you want? Isn’t a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?
Neural networks are not a model of the working of the human brain. They are based on an extremely simplified approximation of how neurons connect and function (which while conceptually similar is a terrible predictive model for biological neurons) and are connected together in ways that have absolutely zero resemblance to how complex nervous systems look in real animals. The burden of proof here is absolutely on show…
Well then you already think it’s a model. Being a simplified approximation makes it a model.
Just as I said in another comment, a SIR model also models infection behavior of COVID in humans, even though it is extremely simplified and doesn’t even look at individuals. It’s basically just a set of differential equations that give a curve that looks like infection numbers. But that is exactly what makes it a model. It’s a simplified abstraction.
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What evidence for „AI models the human brain“ do you want? Isn’t a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?
IMHO, it's clear that no human can learn like AI. AI outperformed humans with huge margin in some areas already, while their performance is laughable in other areas. Also, it's obvious that our brain is not built like AI models. There are similarities between both human and current AI models, but there also huge differences, which doesn't allow easily map one to another.
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This is a bad take. Because even the craziest of crazies (the flat earthers) are actually doing the scientific method by running experiments to test their crazy conjectures. What makes them crazy is that they have a poor sense of discernment about when it's worth it to trust authorities and when it's not; they're not dumb, and education is not really failing them (in the sense that they "aren't being taught what scie…
> This is a bad take. This is a bad start to a post on HN. Less confrontational would be better. > Because even the craziest of crazies are actually doing the scientific method. I can name several conspiracy theories off the bat which I've heard repeated by people who have not tested the theories. The vast majority of them, at best, found a video of someone on the internet with "dr" in the username. The percent of "j…
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Good luck with that sentiment here. People just went through the last five years and will go to their graves defending what they saw first hand. To admit that maybe those moves and omissions weren’t helpful would be to admit their ideology was wrong. And that can not be.
You know you wrote this on the Internet? The thing the government created to do science?
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I think this comment comes across as slightly ignorant. Many examples exist where a misguided belief in scientific 'facts' (usually a ropey hypothesis, with seemingly 'damning' evidence), or a straight up abuse of the scientific method, causes direct harm. Suspicion is often based on facts or experience. People have been infected with diseases without their knowledge. People have been forced to undergo surgical proce…
> No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements This is just wrong and naive. You can be happy if a majority of people agree to this.
But if you're not a pedant, I essentially mean that most parents will vaccinate their children, many passengers will book flights, and a majority of the citizens in a population do respect their officials (etcetera).
And I think if you were to dig deeper than this, and test that hypothesis with... well... a scientific experiment of some kind, the result would probably support it.
But a good number of people will naturally question the outcome!
That is assume that person publishes results that: "factor X seems to lead to outcome Y". Many other scientists will then start trying to establish the low-hanging fruit result: "something that looks like factor X seems to lead something that looks like outcome Y". In other words they will be performing a sort of replication but in a novel way. If the result is fraudulent, then none of these results will materialise. In other words I don't get how a paper can be fraudulent AND highly-cited without escaping scrutiny, unless we are talking of a fraud mafia.
Here I am using the field of pure mathematics as a mental model. Assume a person publishes a mathematical result with a flawed proof that escapes scrutiny. If this result is used by sufficient number of mathematicians (especially the lemmas used to prove the theorem) then fairly quickly it will end up generating self contradictory results.