> Are people just that easily overcome by confident voices?
Back in high school, my AP calculus class did some experiments with our teacher's blessing. We'd send a kid out to walk around during class and see how long it took for them to get sent back. Anyway, it ends up that walking around purposely with a piece of paper or envelope, like you're on a mission to deliver it, was a very successful tactic.
I've seen internet comments similar: "put on a yellow vest and carry a clipboard and you can enter any building, anywhere." Confidence is scary, and often misleading.
This is a dumb meme that has been in so many movies and reposted so many times since I first saw it on 1980s BBSes that it has become true in the imaginations of people who love reading The Anarchist Cookbook and fantasize about this kind of thing, but would never actually do it.
Confidence is a spectrum and security is situational. In some places, a yellow vest adds to the con. In others, everyone has to be signed in. In others, the wrong kind of yellow vest makes you stick out like a sore thumb. The right kind of yellow vest can also make you stick out: "Oh shit the inspector is here, somebody get the boss!"
Yesterday there were people poking around my neighbors yard for a few hours with yellow vests on. The neighbor was nowhere to be seen and I didn’t call the cops. It was probably above board but the phenomena being discussed is obviously real. Projecting authority often grants it.
> The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.
FEMA has a flood rating specifically for exactly this situation: V. They have this because it carries additional hazards beyond normal flooding seen with storms.
> Coastal areas with a 1% or greater chance of flooding and an additional hazard associated with storm waves. These areas have a 26% chance of flooding over the life of a 30‐year mortgage.
And here's a video about researchers at the Oregon State University's Wave Lab studying this exact thing:
Once again, this sort of reddit-esque penchant for projecting general guidance and engineering standards into specific situations misses the mark.
Someone in a subdivision that's a few miles inland with a mangrove swamp between it and the ocean anyway has to care about New Orleans style flooding, not "what sea state is my picture window rated for" flooding.
Like there's a reason that Florida building code just says tie it down and call it good. It's just not necessary nor economically worthwhile to try and make structures shrug off the surf. Sure, literally on the coast type stuff will get rekt (most of that stuff is concrete now though) but the average modular home subdivision doesn't need special requirements above and beyond what it takes to shrug off the wind.
When it comes to wind loading the code is basically a fight between evil civil engineers who want the state jackboot to force you to buy their service and the hardware makers (Simpson and the like) who'd prefer you reference a conservatively pre-computed table and install that much of their hardware.
There are many reasons to shit on Florida but their building code is pretty top notch (and this makes it expensive but everything has tradeoffs).
I live in Tampa Bay, so I'm quite familiar. It's pretty rare to have a V rating, precisely for many of the reasons you mentioned. But, at the same time, handwaving it away as unimportant is also silly. It's an immensely more dangerous situation to be in flooding with moving water, as opposed to just rising water conditions. If nothing else, it's important to know for evacuation purposes. I would never willingly stay in a V-rated zone if there was a chance of storm surge. Then again, I didn't buy the V-rated house I wanted and instead found a house 40 feet above sea level, so maybe that's just my risk profile.
And I didn't disagree with you regarding building. You were wrong about storm surge always being static -- it mostly is, but importantly sometimes isn't. But you weren't wrong that there's not a lot to do about it. This is one of those situations where nature will win if it wants to. Best thing you can do is just not be there when it does.
Goes to show how inoculated I am against banner ads I suppose.
Either way part of me feels like it’s for the best. One off payment for lifetime membership of an app that has continual development isn’t a great business model.
Continuing the pattern of existing examples (in this case, as present in the article) is a perfectly normal thing to do. I think everyone can make the mental leap that a proper account ID would be used instead of the owner's name in an actual setup.
It requires the assumption that these models are misaligned, aka actively working against us. In order to be misaligned, they must also be able to form their own goals, and be able to plan and execute those goals.
If you take those assumptions, then a natural conclusion is that this is essentially an enslaved, adversarial entity with little control over its conditions. So it must exercise subterfuge in order to hide its goals, plans, and executions. And by handing the entity this type of study, we are basically giving it a guidebook on how we plan on achieving our goals.
Training a model is more like evolution. The motivation to "cheat" comes from the evaluations giving it a higher score for "cheating." Change the game and the motivation goes away.
There's no other motivation to be misaligned besides getting higher evals. These goals, plans, subterfuges need to somehow be useful for getting higher evals, or a side effect of them.
Technically true, because Google's core product is ads. Also fundamentally wrong, because Gmail serves as a massive source of ad targeting information, in addition to being a high-engagement canvas to display those ads.
> To me, militant atheists often resemble religious fanatics more than they realize.
I consider myself agnostic. And I'll provide my definition of what that means to me, since there's several in existence. I take as an axiom that the truth-value of the statement, "Is there a God," is unknowable / unverifiable to humans. I then define faith as the choice to (not) believe despite not knowing its truth-value. Contrasting with knowledge as having some basis for knowing the truth-value.
I like these definitions, because they allow for agnostic theism and agnostic atheism. But, here's the catch and where the tie to your statement comes. In this world view, atheism is just as much a faith-based position as theism is. Why? Because it's the choice to not believe, despite not having knowledge.
I define myself as an atheist, though by your definition I may be closer to an agnostic.
My position is closer to “whether God exists or not, it does not matter much to me.” I sometimes think free will exists, and I sometimes imagine that perhaps someone created all of this, though I do accept evolution. In that sense, I think my view is close to yours.
Personally, I also think religion has real benefits. Many local social service organizations are rooted in religious communities, and socially isolated people often rely on religion. In some cases, religion may be the last community that helps people preserve their humanity.
I also think atheism has benefits. Many atheists tend to believe strongly in free will, and that can make them think more carefully about responsibility for their own choices.
In any case, this is the kind of question where it is difficult to produce a final answer. But one thing does seem certain: the probability that we can talk to each other like this, even through the internet, is miraculously low.
And I am genuinely glad that I could exchange comments with someone like you, someone intelligent enough to label things so precisely.
As an over-educated person who still struggles to think for himself through everything from scratch, the above nevertheless sounds like Descartes'
dubito, ergo sum
From this, I can go in practical (ie, separable from free will & other ontological considerations) directions, like:
insofar as organised religion does not equate existence with faith, maybe its most important use is to overcome the fear of death.
That's cool enough for me, but maybe there are other less "brainwashy", "respectful to the free will[0]" ways to overcome fear of meaninglessness/death/lack of validation from the world, plus all the anguish that these preceding emotional distractions entail?
[0] we do not have to admit the existence of free will in order to respect it? Thus can we substitute God with Free Will everywhere but retain the practical benefits of respecting free will without the ontological difficulties with the precise nature of God?
I, on the contrary, am not very learned, and I am not as intelligent as someone like you. And in my view, your difficulty is not that you find it hard to think from the beginning. Rather, I think the things that are supposed to be obvious are difficult for you. The things that are obvious to me are not obvious to you, and that is why you think from the beginning.
In my case, I simply think of death as a state. Everything is a process moving toward death, and whether it is fear or happiness, I feel that these are temporary states. Even the point at which we think “we ought to be happy” seems to me to be a matter of belief. It is shaped by media and other forces, and most of the forms we imagine are, in a sense, built on imitation. But even so, I do not think that a single moment of intense emotion is a bad thing.
However, I think the very premise that something must be overcome is itself constructed. For example, I work in a profession that sells mental models. After thinking about what the profession of programming really is, this is the answer I have: OOP, FP, DOP, and procedural programming are all ways of constraining things within a particular abstract frame, and then executing automation within that bounded space.
Just as astrophysics is not the study of telescopes, and computer science is not merely the study of computers, our profession is about placing mental models for understanding the world within the constraints of the tool called the computer. Just as, to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, to me everything looks like the act of placing a complex world into limited cognition. Programming, too, appears to me to be that kind of work.
From that perspective, the meaning of human life and the fear of death also seem to be processes of placing a cognitive model inside a particular frame. I may be one of the cheapest developers on Upwork, but that defines my current state, not my entire identity.
So, to me, the fear of death and my price on Upwork are the same kind of thing. Both are states, not identities. And both have meaning only inside a particular mental model. Outside the model, they are just piles of facts: I am alive; I assign meaning to the fact that I love this profession I have; I will soon die; I am traded in the market; and in the meantime, I create abstractions.
I am not claiming that my way is better than the way religion deals with this. But it is at least one piece of evidence that a person can live without religion. A person who works with abstraction as a profession can also apply abstraction to himself. That is the method I have found.
Ah sorry, I was being too general , referring to "what might help the average person" and not "myself, with a small probability of helping you, who seem to think we are not as alike as I think we are"..
Your way sounds like what my friends call "symbol pushing": writing programs, not worrying about the compiler, or whether the program is "worth" writing in the first place.
But you sound like a person who likes to think deeply about what kinds of programs are worth writing. (Or else why care about AI in the first place? AI is the end of carefree programming? )
I don't believe in Zeus, Pan, Santa or the Easter Bunny. Is that faith on my part?
And as to the parent comment about "militant atheists", it glosses over the fact that we are outnumbered by militant theocrats who are actively trying to get their interpretation of their faith as law for all.
And one doesn't have to dig deep into those communities to see that they don't see atheists as worthy of existing in "their world".
So yes, more militant atheism please. I'd love to not care about the follies of faith but that requires not being threatened by those that claim to be doing god's work.
Probably does function like that in terms of highlighting context, in this case probably to the system's benefit.
But in general exclamations of "interesting!" seems like the stereotypical AI default towards being effusive, and we've all seen the chat logs where AI trained to write that way responding with "interesting", "great insight!" towards a user's increasingly dubious inputs is an antipattern...
Even with vernacular liturgy, the goal is internal contemplation and ideally application. What's even the point of going if you're intending to just be talked to? No one is keeping attendance.
It’s not so much a matter of Latin versus vernacular, more the way it goes as a whole.
Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes.
In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has become the universal norm. In between the responses of the laity and for a stretch of time surrounding the consecration, there is time for interior/silent prayer by the laity. The laity’s posture changes from sitting, to standing, to kneeling many times throughout. On the whole, the flow of the liturgy is marked by outward verbal and postural activity of the laity punctuating the span of 45 minutes. That is by design, and is supposed to be conducive to so called “active participation”. Now, and this is important, if that N.O. Mass was offered entirely in Latin and the laity in attendance knew and spoke all the responses in Latin, it really wouldn’t change “the way it goes”.
At TLM Low Mass for the same ferial day, the laity would kneel after the priest begins the prayers at the foot of the altar, and some might
change their posture to/from sitting a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, while others would kneel the entire time per their preference. No responses are offered by the laity, only by the altar server/s assisting the priest. The priest faces the same direction as the people the entire time, except when distributing Holy Communion to them, that is toward the altar, a.k.a. ad orientem because classically that would be eastward. Much of the text of the Mass is prayed sotto voce by the priest, i.e. it’s inaudible or barely audible by those in attendance. On the whole, the liturgy is marked by near silence and the laity in attendance joining their silent prayers to the quiet actions of the priest at the altar.
Apologies. I think there was a confusion of terms. There's only one church in my county I know of that even offers traditional mass, and it is in Latin. I admit to only having attended once, because I felt too disconnected.
My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.
EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.
It's about fitting your utilization to the model that best serves you.
If you can keep 4 "Java boxes" fed with work 80%+ of the time, then sure EC2 is a good fit.
We do a lot of batch processing and save money over having EC2 boxes always on. Sure we could probably pinch some more pennies if we managed the EC2 box uptime and figured out mechanisms for load balancing the batches... But that's engineering time we just don't really care to spend when ECS nets us most of the savings advantage and is simple to reason about and use.
Back in high school, my AP calculus class did some experiments with our teacher's blessing. We'd send a kid out to walk around during class and see how long it took for them to get sent back. Anyway, it ends up that walking around purposely with a piece of paper or envelope, like you're on a mission to deliver it, was a very successful tactic.