2nd law of thermodynamics is what makes destructiveness so costly. It is much easier and cheaper to destroy than to build or rebuild. The Trump administration is devaluing the United States at an alarming rate.
As I understand it, this is to wreck the government oversight on the conduct of the rich and the powerful. They really want to establish a full blown oligarchy. And they managed to convince the poor people that the government is bad for them too.
It's not. Everytime there's a new form of media or communication there's an uptick in "bad actors". Think yellow journalism or any of the moral panics around TV programming. Even back when the printing press was invented there was an uptick in troll behavior. One of the Green brothers posited that martin Luther was really just a pamphlet troll.
With social media and the Internet, stupid just got louder. I don't think people got stupid.
IQ tests are administration-sensitive and have changed dramatically since the beginning of such a Flynn effect study. The population makeup of many countries has changed in recent years to include many immigrants for whom the study would make exceedingly little sense to include. IQ tests do not cover and do not claim to cover a comprehensive view of human intelligence, famously lacking verbal and social components entirely. It is possible past IQ tests were simply overtuned and we’re now seeing the natural correction.
Amplifying stupid can be very deadly, though. In some sense, the printing press caused the 30-year war, and radio brought us World War II. Eventually, society will adapt. I just wish we could find a way to adapt faster than the bad actors do.
Just to be clear, that "speed-up" is not a good thing: Those 100 years were a lot less deadly in total. The World Wars were even shorter and much deadlier still. A possible next full-blown conflict between major powers will only last hours -- and end civilization.
I feel like declining human intelligence is a result of advancing machine intelligence. Computers are a force multiplier and societal pressure towards building intelligence is reduced.
So the AGI/ASI problem might solve itself: we slowly become incapable of iterating on the problem while existing AI is not nearly advanced enough to pick up the slack.
It’s quite beautiful. Once a civilization tries to build machine intelligence it slowly degrades its own capacity during the process thus eventually losing all hope of ever achieving their goal - assuming they still understand their goal at that point. Maybe it’s an algorithm in the Universe to keep us from being naughty.
The human brain optimizes for efficiency, if that extra intelligence doesn't confer survival benefits it'll be lost. I can't imagine that intelligence doesn't confer survival and reproductive benefits though, it's more likely that the gradient of survival and reproduction between the most intelligent and least has shrunk. In a sense civilization is coddling the weak, and humanity is getting weaker for it.
Yes, the strongest man who ever lived is alive today. The best player of every sport is alive today . It absolutely supports the theory support the theory that the smartest person ever is alive today, etc. etc..
Maybe on average, but I think it’s probably correlated to inequality. The kid of two Oxford professors will probably be smarter than a kid that grew up in poverty. The school system is aimed at mitigating these differences, but if on average everyone gets less intelligent maybe the school system is working poorly.
What frustrates me about MatterPort is that no one who works there has ever played a first-person video game. If they had, navigating their sites would be so much nicer.
Tipping risk of the Atlantic Ocean's overturning circulation, AMOC. Keynote by Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf, Co-Head of Research Department on Earth System Analysis of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the University of Potsdam.
Thanks for linking it. Pomodoro is something that I come across every couple of years but I can never remember what's interesting about it and quickly forget what it is again.
Just because an economist puts a name on an economic trend like "secondary post war depression" doesn't mean they understand it. The economy goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down, economists usually don't know why or how.
I like reading stock news twice a day. Once, during trading when they have no idea what is happening in the trenches. And then again in the evening, to see what creative narrative msnbc came up with to justify a total about-face from what they wrote a few hours earlier.
I regularly see some article on the iPhone stock app saying something like "Dow (rise|plunge) on <reason>, markets wrapped", five minutes after open. Look guys, "markets wrapped" means "it's after close" and that doesn't happen for another 6:55 hours...
Not to mention -1% is not a "plunge", it is well within the normal variance.
Wat? Macroeconomic observations don't individually track every single microeconomic occurrence and assign a root cause that "Bob did it". There are many possible factors leading to recession but no singular root cause because it's macroeconomic, some include:
- OXPC: Over-expansion of productive capacity
- Contraction of credit
- Contraction of demand
- Knock-on effects of layoffs harming other sectors
I hope FBI is backtracking the serial numbers on these components and finding the diversions to Russia. Serialization similar to what the FDA mandates for drugs should be implemented by treaty for all NATO nations, and sanctions imposed on suppliers to Russia.
