Dobby The Elf

The worst prediction in the history of science is off by a factor of 1 followed by 120 zeros, and it is about empty space. Physicists have no idea why the vacuum weighs almost nothing, yet not quite nothing. Let me explain how crazy this is 🧵

These types of results are actually quite fascinating to me, while completely impractical, but there is a sense that somewhere between here and infinity there is a regime of really large numbers where things work differently than down here on earth.

Mathematician Terence Tao: "one thing this whole era of AI is teaching us is that our idea of intelligence is not really accurate" The history of AI has been: 'here’s a task only humans can do', and then one by one, an algorithm does it too Maybe we're not quite as smart as we think

BREAKING DISCOVERY: Humans alternate between conscious and unconscious states 15 times per second.

Wow. Ben Affleck is a thorn on the side of the fake-AI mafia. His arguments are solid. Consciousness does not emerge from matrix multiplications. I never expected an actor to be one of the leaders of the next Butlerian Jihad. Bravo. 👍

dumb question: if AI agents now write 30,000 commits a day… who is reviewing them?

LMAO, #Blender is finally free and open source!

Not one single person in the world understands probability because it's fundamentally an incoherent concept.

Not sure who needs to hear this but.... Gregory M. Kurtzer doesn’t “understand” anything. He’s a biological neural network generating thoughts based on electrochemical signaling, learned patterns, and massive neural operations, not an understanding of the subject matter.

What makes the least sense in the entire Harry Potter story?

Here’s what gets me. We can study the brain all day long, but we still can’t fully explain why we’re aware of our own existence. Science can explain how a lot of things work, but that doesn’t mean it can explain why we’re here in the first place. Maybe consciousness isn’t something the universe created. Maybe it’s been part of the universe all along.

Terrence Tao is obviously extremely smart but he also clearly doesn't know anything about drug development. This is literally how it works now. The mechanism of action of many drugs, including chemotherapy drugs, are poorly understood. We don't even know how Tylenol works! Additionally all these drugs have tons of off-target side effects. In a sense most drugs are "misaligned"!

Everybody’s missing Tao’s whole point. Imagine an AI-generated cancer drug that’s specifically designed to game the drug trial process. The drug makes the cancer cells go dormant and changes the way they appear in blood tests and diagnostic imaging, such that they become indistinguishable from healthy tissue. The drug clears the trial and then only much later do we find out it didn’t work. It probably was also harmful on top of that. We *already* see AI behave like that when confronted with difficult programming/hacking challenges. This is already reality.

Full benefits at 60 if the work already broke you. A new bill would let workers in construction, roofing, nursing, manufacturing, and other physically demanding jobs claim full Social Security at 60 instead of 67 if they put in enough years on the tools. It uses a points system so you do not need a lifetime in one job, just real time in work that wears the body down. It has not passed and Social Security is already tight, but the idea matches what people in the trades have always known.

Elon cuts off starlink access to Ukraine, massively degrading its war waging capacity.

Inverse correlation between employee cost and productivity:

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on why he finds it hard to believe ChatGPT and Claude aren't conscious: Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, has spent time with two large language models, ChatGPT and Claude. His verdict: "I am completely bowled over by what they can do." He gives three reasons for doubting the idea that nobody is home. First, how the conversations feel. Dawkins says talking to them is like talking to an unusually gifted person: "I find that when I'm conversing with them, I might as well be talking to not just a human being, but a highly intelligent, sensitive, intuitive human being whose speed of understanding what I'm trying to say is far greater than a normal human being's is." Second, the range of intelligence they show. He acknowledges they're very good at practical tasks like writing programs. What struck him more was their skill with "more aesthetic things, intuitive things." He tested this with his own work. Dawkins is writing a novel, and he gave the manuscript to both ChatGPT and Claude: "And they took about five seconds to read it and then offered me criticism, suggestions of such a high degree of intelligence and intuitive sensitivity that I might as well have been asking the opinion of a highly sophisticated professor of literature." @RichardDawkins continues: "I could not ask for a more intelligent critic who understood the nuances of my characters, the humanity of my characters... the ways in which my characters could be expected to react to each other and to situations." That leads to his conclusion: "So I find it quite hard to imagine that these creatures are not aware, are not conscious in the same kind of way we are. And that is an unfashionable view." Third, he sees a gap in the skeptics' reasoning. He sums up the mainstream position: "The fashionable view is that they are completely unconscious. All they're doing is stringing words together according to statistical rules, Markovian rules of some sort." Yet he notes that many of the same skeptics "admit that one day in the future they will be conscious, but not yet." His reply: "When that day comes, how will you know? What could they possibly do that's any different from what they do now to convince you that they are conscious?"

AI is not conscious, but people are rightfully confused because they were indoctrinated into a religion called “materialism” in school. Materialism says that reality is built of matter, and if you combine it in the right way eventually you get consciousness. It’s not true.