Favorite Rejects 2023-02-25

Ryan Moulton (@moultano@sigmoid.social) @moultano

I think this part of the argument isn't true. If natural selection is a blunt tool, gradient descent is a science fictional molecular scalpel by comparison. There's extremely high bandwidth between the objective and the changes to the model, which natural selection does not have.

Liron Shapira @liron

Gradient descent, the way we train AI models today, is a blunt tool. Natural selection used a similarly blunt tool, genetic hill climbing search, to build humans. Notice the frightening disconnect between what criterion humans were selected on, vs. what humans feel like doing. https://t.co/PPVbtIecvJ

Dare Obasanjo @Carnage4Life

The inflation adjusted version of the employees per $1M chart implies that worker productivity plateaued right around when smartphones were invented.

CatGirl Kulak 😻😿 (Anarchonomicon) @FromKulak

🧵 People in the Past were Desperately Poor 🧵 1/ Whenever I discuss history its shocking how much ignorance I encounter from even trained historians about the level of poverty in the past Contrary to idiots and revisionists No. People in the past were horrifyingly impoverished

pwner of a lonely heart @revhowardarson

for the longest time the top google search completion for "why won't" was "why won't my parakeet eat my diarrhea," because any human being who saw that phrase would immediately click, and not for the reason we wanted them to

elena 🌸 @cheer_wine

if you look up “is british still” one of the top suggestions is “still ruling india” enough americans type the sentence “is british still ruling india” that it is a top search suggestion fascinating

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Fascinatingly, AIs bullshit (speak without regard to truth) under the same conditions as humans. Folks bullshit when they are expected to have an opinion on a topic they don't know & they won’t be corrected. AIs hallucinate most when forced to answer on topics they don't "know"

Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

First time in my life i've ever heard of Oakland police catching a hit-and-run driver. usually bad drivers in Oakland are arrested when they leave the city and get caught by like Alameda or Berkeley PD.

sfchronicle.comOakland police arrest suspect in hit-and-run that killed 100-year-old pedestrianThe driver allegedly struck Tzu-Ta Ko with a Mini Cooper and sped away, leaving the...

Guillaume Blanc @gguillaumeblanc

“In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French” If you want to understand why, and the long-run consequences of this, read my piece in online magazine @WorksInProgMag

worksinprogress.coFrance’s baby bust - Works in ProgressFrance was once Europe’s superpower, thanks above all to its enormous population. Its decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

It's been very encouraging to see @NSF's willingness to experiment with novel funding mechanisms. Letting reviewers occasionally take "non-consensus bets" on projects they are especially excited about could accelerate scientific breakthroughs.

Brian Hanlon @hanlonbt

CEQA serves to uphold the status quo, protect incumbents, and enrich consultants and attorneys. Champion and strengthen California's environmental laws that have massively improved environmental outcomes and human health - not CEQA!

Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff

This pseudo-Malthusian reasoning — that a particular demographic is statistically predisposed to be loud, and are therefore *inherently* an environmental harm — is a fair housing nightmare. latimes.com/california/sto…