CompassRed

Doesn't matter where the track leads if the trolley can't get to it. It could lead to rainbows and sunshine, but that isn't where the trolley is headed because there is no possibility that someone other than Trump or Biden is elected president. A few cry babies voting third party won't get some third person elected. A vote for the third track is a vote for a track that will not be ridden.

Language parsing is a routine process that doesn't require AI and it's something we have been doing for decades. That phrase in no way plays into the hype of AI. Also, the weights may be random initially (though not uniformly random), but the way they are connected and relate to each other is not random. And after training, the weights are no longer random at all, so I don't see the point in bringing that up. Finally, machine learning models are not brute-force calculators. If they were, they would take billions of years to respond to even the simplest prompt because they would have to evaluate every possible response (even the nonsensical ones) before returning the best answer. They're better described as a greedy algorithm than a brute force algorithm.

I'm not going to get into an argument about whether these AIs understand anything, largely because I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but also because that would require a definition of understanding which is an unsolved problem in philosophy. You can wax poetic about how humans are the only ones with true understanding and that LLMs are encoded in binary (which is somehow related to the point you're making in some unspecified way); however, your comment reveals how little you know about LLMs, machine learning, computer science, and the relevant philosophy in general. Your understanding of these AIs is just as shallow as those who claim that LLMs are intelligent agents of free will complete with conscious experience - you just happen to land closer to the mark.

Imaginary numbers are no more imaginary than real numbers. The name trips a lot of people up. If you want to call imaginary numbers "dark unicorns" then you really should say the same thing of the numbers 1, 2, and all other numbers as well.

You're thinking of topological closure. We're talking about algebraic closure; however, complex numbers are often described as the algebraic closure of the reals, not the irrationals. Also, the imaginary numbers (complex numbers with a real part of zero) are in no meaningful way isomorphic to the real numbers. Perhaps you could say their addition groups are isomorphic or that they are isomorphic as topological spaces, but that's about it. There isn't an isomorphism that preserves the whole structure of the reals - the imaginary numbers aren't even closed under multiplication, for example.

Vote splitting is not a myth. It's just math. Let me explain with an example:

1000 people at a conference are deciding where to order catering and hold a vote:

• 490 people want Mexican and do not want Asian
• 510 people want Asian:
  • 480 people want Vietnamese, would be satisfied with Thai, and do not want Mexican
  • 30 people want Thai, would be satisfied with Vietnamese, and do not want Mexican

The restaurants on the ballot are:

1. A Mexican restaurant,
2. A Vietnamese restaurant, and
3. A Thai restaurant.

If the people who want Asian recognize the strength of their combined numbers, then they can tip the scales by all voting for the favorite between Vietnamese and Thai. In this situation, we get 490 votes Mexican, 510 votes Vietnamese, and 0 votes Thai. This time Vietnamese wins and the majority of people, the 510 who prefer Asian, are either happy or satisfied with the result while only 490 are disappointed.

If everyone votes for their favorite, then we get 490 votes Mexican, 480 votes Vietnamese, and 30 votes Thai. In this case, Mexican wins and the majority of people, the 510 who prefer Asian, are left disappointed while only 490 people are happy with the result. The vote has been split and the result is that the entire conference is worse off for it.

By the way, the ratio of 480 Vietnamese to 30 Thai is irrelevant as long as neither value is 0. That ratio can be fixed to any positive value and a situation can be described in which vote splitting occurs with that specific ratio of Vietnamese supporters to Thai supporters. That's why vote splitting isn't too uncommon - any number of people voting Thai has the potential to split the vote. The one caveat is if literally every Vietnamese supporter decides to vote Thai as well; in that scenario, no vote splitting can occur. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen in practice because it's easier to convert the Thai supporters who are smaller in number than it is to convert the Vietnamese supporters who have greater numbers.

If you want examples from history, there are plenty. Our electoral college amplifies the effect since it breaks one federal election down into a large number of state elections, any of which can exhibit vote splitting. Other people have linked to them in this discussion and you can find more elsewhere online.

You're mistaken unfortunately. The books don't start that way. They start by describing Arthur Dent's house.

Nobody is arguing that a grocery stocker requires less skill and training than brain surgery. Literally nobody. And yet you people repeat this idea over and over.

We know you aren't arguing that every job requires the exact same degree of skill. All that we want to do is say that there are jobs whose required skills are quick to acquire and are therefore easily replaceable. Meanwhile, there are other jobs whose skills take a long time to acquire and are not easily replaceable. We use the term "unskilled labor" to refer to the former group and "skilled labor" to refer to the latter group as a point of convention. When people claim that unskilled labor doesn't exist, they imply that every single job requires skills that are slow to obtain and therefore every worker is difficult to replace, which is clearly false.

I mean this not as an attack on you but a chance to expand your worldview. Cognitive dissonance hurts, and it’s important to recognize when it’s happening so you can ask further questions.

Where is the cognitive dissonance? Where is the contradiction in distinguishing between jobs that require trained applicants and jobs that don't require trained applicants?

There is no such thing as an “unskilled worker” because all jobs require skill. It’s called human skill, and it’s what enables us to build societies greater than the sum of its citizens.

If you decide to use "skilled worker" to mean a worker who has a skill, then you are correct that "unskilled workers" do not exist. Unfortunately, that's not what the phrase "skilled worker" means. If that's how you use the term, then you're talking about something different to everyone else.

The logical conclusion you are suggesting is that because some humans are less capable, they don’t deserve basic needs such as a home, reliable transportation, internet, food, utilities, etc.

The logical conclusion of "unskilled labor exists" is simply that unskilled labor exists. You cannot jump from the observation that "unskilled labor exists" to the claim that "some people don't deserve their basic needs." It's a non sequitur, and it's not a position anyone in this thread would support.

And if your basic premise starts with the notion that society should not be meeting the basic needs of its people, then there’s only one thing that would convince you anyway.

This is a straw man. No one here has expressed the position that society shouldn't meet the basic needs of its people. The position you are arguing against is the position that some jobs require training before hiring and others don't. Again, that's just what people mean when they refer to skilled labor and unskilled labor.

It's supposed to be E^2 = (mc^2 )^2 + AI^2 , which implies that AI = pc, because AI is the momentum that will carry us into the future. These rookies clearly just took the square root using freshman's dream.

Yeah, you're close. You seem to be suggesting that any measurement causes the interference pattern to disappear implying that we can't actually observe the interference pattern. I'm not sure if that's what you truly meant, but that isn't the case. Disclaimer: I'm not an expert - I could be mistaken.

The particle is actually being measured in both experiments, but it's measured twice in the second experiment. That's because both experiments measure the particle's position at the screen while the second one also measures if the particle passes through one of the slits. It's the measurement at the slit that disrupts the interference pattern; however, both patterns are physically observable. Placing a detector at the slit destroys the interference pattern, and removing the detector from the slit reintroduces the interference pattern.

Binary supremacy!!!!!!!

Of course! I'm always excited for an opportunity to discuss these sorts of things, so I should be thanking you instead.

I'll preface this with the fact that I am also not a physicist. I'm also simplifying a few concepts in modern physics, but the general themes should be mostly accurate.

String theory isn't best described as a genre of physics - it really is a standalone concept. Dark matter and black holes are subjects of cosmology, while string theory is an attempt to unify quantum physics with general relativity. Could string theory be used to study black holes and dark matter? Sure, but it isn't like physicists are studying black holes and dark matter using methods completely independent from one another and lumping both practices under the label string theory as a simple matter of categorization.

You are correct to say that string theory is an attempt at a theory of everything, but what is a theory of everything? It's more than a collection of ideas that explain a large swath of physical phenomena wrapped into a single package tied with a nice bow. Indeed, when people propose a theory of everything, they are constructing a single mathematical model for our physical reality. It can be difficult to understand exactly what that means, so allow me to clarify.

Modern theoretical physics is not described in the same manner as classical Newtonian physics. Back then, physical phenomena were essentially described by a collection of distinct models whose effects would be combined to come to a complete prediction. For example, you'd have an equation for gravity, an equation for air resistance, an equation for electrostatic forces, and so on, each of which makes contributions at each point in time to the motion of an object. This is how it still occurs today in applied physics and engineering, but modern theoretical physics - e.g., quantum mechanics, general relativity, and string theory - is handled differently. These theories tend to have a single single equation that is meant to describe the motion of all things, which often gets labeled the principle of stationary action.

The problem that string theory attempts to solve is that the principle of stationary action that arises in the quantum mechanics and the principle of stationary action that arises in general relativity are incompatible. Both theories are meant to describe the motion of everything, but they contradict each other - quantum mechanics works to describe the motion of subatomic particles under the influence of strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces while general relativity works to describe the motion of celestial objects under the influence of gravity. String theory is a way of modeling physics that attempts to do away with this contradiction - that is, string theory is a proposal for a principle of stationary action (which is a single equation) that is meant to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity thus accurately describing the motion of objects of all sizes under the influence of all known forces. It's in this sense that string theory is a standalone concept.

There is one caveat however. There are actually multiple versions of string theory that rely on different numbers of dimensions and slightly different formulations of the physics. You could say that this implies that string theory is a genre of physics after all, but it's a much more narrow genre than you seemed to be suggesting in your comment. In fact, Edward Witten showed that all of these different string theories are actually separate ways of looking at a single underlying theory known as M-theory. It could possibly be said that M-theory unifies all string theories into one thus restoring my claim that string theory really is a standalone concept.