jmp242

Common industry trope - same with climate change EVs vs industrial processes. We keep asking 7.9 billion people to attack the 5% or less left of an issue that maybe they with full collective action could dent, while just pretending that nothing can be done by the IDK 100,000 people running the industrial processes responsible for like 70% of the problem.

I swear, it's the latte / avocado toast financial advice. Yes, if I drop $100-$200 a month habit it'll make up for the $4,000 a month unsustainable living expenses.

If I thought he'd do it, John Stewart would be amazing. I think he might be the only potential chance, but he also (for some reason) isn't interested in actually running. I'd be really surprised if people hadn't approached him before and after 2016. And heck, Regan was a movie personality!

And I'd think he'd turn the Trump playbook back on Trump. Could you imagine John Stewart debating Trump? That's appointment TV right there, and Stewart would mop the floor with Trump in 2024. He destroyed Tucker back in 04 on Crossfire, and Tucker's a way better orator and presents way smarter than Trump ever has.

Stewart is a lock for any liberal millennial, we grew up with him during Bush. He'd get the 30-40 year olds excited again like Obama did in 08.

Too bad he wouldn't run - but also there's just no way to insert him cause primaries have started.

I guess at the basic level Biden must think the pro Israel vote is bigger than the gaza vote?

Oh god, finally gave a name. Who the hell is Shawn Fein? If I haven't already heard of them, it's a lost cause too - because they have no brand recognition. This is the dilemma and one I've been banging on about since before Obama. It's kind of insane the Democratic party seems to hope for a repeat of that once in a lifetime basically out of nowhere candidate / win. For reasons I don't get, Democrats are not building up people in advance to be candidates. So people have at least heard of them.

The problem is as far as I know there aren't any well known middle aged democrats who could run that have any national stance. Schumer is also too old, Bernie is also too old, and then there's the sexism that makes me question if Warren could run, and then there's the racism that makes Kamala and Cortez pretty unlikely to get far either.

I thought the entire four years that Democrats needed to have someone in the news and convince Biden to back them a year ago. That didn't happen. We already lost this years ago if Biden can't win it. I'm just still amazed that there's any support for Trump (well, ever, but certainly after the facts of his first term).

Sadly, at this point, it would seem you'd need a lot more blue no matter who to take some almost unknown candidate and get them up to speed to win. I haven't seen anyone suggest a better candidate - I'm trying to even think of the last time the same party won the election when the incumbent wasn't running. Was it Bush Senior?

unless the government has followed the legal process required for compelled disclosure.

I don't see why we can't just say that for everything. If the government wants the data, they can get a warrant. It's not that hard - don't we regularly complain warrants are too rubber stamped?

Training people is expensive in both cash for the business and the time of those around them. Hiring correctly once would make my life a lot easier.

I agree that training people is expensive - I'm just not convinced that any other system than the probationary one works. That is to say, there's sufficient cases of people getting past whatever screening plan the companies have and yet cannot do the job. Depending on the company, once you're permanent, it can be very hard and every expensive to fire you - especially in some countries.

I'm not suggesting that you should take anyone off the street and give them a probationary period. I'm saying if your position needs a skills assessment, I don't think there's a functional one other than a few months of actually doing the job. Too many other systems are easily gamed, or are easily set up to fail people inappropriately too.

Yes definitely. Many of my fellow NLP researchers would disagree with those researchers and philosophers (not sure why we should care about the latter’s opinions on LLMs).

I'm not sure what you're saying here - do you mean you do or don't think LLMs are “stochastic parrot”s?

In any case, the reason I would care about philosophers opinions on LLMs is mostly because LLMs are already making "the masses" think they're potentially sentient, and or would deserve personhood. What's more concerning is that the academics that sort of define what thinking even is seem confused by LLMs if you take the “stochastic parrot” POV. This eventually has real world affects - it might take a decade or two, but these things spread.

I think this is a crazy idea right now, but I also think that going into the future eventually we'll need to have something like a TNG "Measure of a Man" trial about some AI, and I'd want to get that sort of thing right.

Yea, that was a bad way to phrase it - I just meant that from what I've heard tokens are very much not word by word. And sometimes it's a couple words, but maybe that was misinformation. And I was trying (and failing) to make an analogy for a human - a concept is a compression of what otherwise would be a bunch of words, though I kind of meant more like a reference I guess.

I think it's very clear that this "stochastic parrot" idea is less and less accepted by researchers and philosophers, maybe only in the podcasts I listen to...

It’s not capable of knowledge in the sense that humans are. All it does is probabilistically predict which sequence of words might best respond to a prompt

I think we need to be careful thinking we understand what human knowledge is and our understanding of the connotations if the word "sense" there. If you mean GPT4 doesn't have knowledge like humans have like a car doesn't have motion like a human does then I think we agree. But if you mean that GPT4 cannot reason and access and present information - that's just false on the face of just using the tool IMO.

It's also untrue that it's predicting words, it's using tokens, which are more like concepts than words, so I'd argue already closer to humans. To the extent it is just predicting stuff, it really calls into question the value of most of the school essays it writes so well now...

Well, LLMs can and do provide feedback about confidence intervals in colloquial terms. I would think one thing we could do is have some idea of how good the training data is in a given situation - LLMs already seem to know they aren't up to date and only know stuff to a certain date. I don't see why this could not be expanded so they'd say something much like many humans would - i.e. I think bla bla but I only know very little about this topic. Or I haven't actually heard about this topic, my hunch would be bla bla.

Presumably like it was said, other models with different data might have a stronger sense of certainty if their data covers the topic better, and the multi cycle would be useful there.

To believe otherwise, you must believe that business leaders and hiring managers don’t know what they’re doing – that they are blindly following tradition or just lazy. [...]you’d need to believe that businesses have simply overlooked a better way to hire. That seems naïve.

IDK, Has the author ever worked anywhere? Talked to anyone who worked somewhere? READ SOME POSTS ON REDDIT ABOUT WORKING SOMEWHERE? The amount of times no one could understand why a business does what it does, seemingly to its own detriment, is staggering.

They are right that it's wrong to believe that people with college degrees don't have skills - some do. The issue is that it appears to practically be non correlated to each other. I've seen people with college degrees who clearly learned very little during that experience. I've seen people with no degree be very knowledgeable and skilled.

The other obvious question in regard to hiring is - if going to college was necessary to do a job, then surely the degree would matter. However, outside of limited situations, the thing they're looking for is a degree, not one related to the job they're hiring for. Also, degrees are stupidly expensive which at least has to drive up wages a little anytime there's some competition in the labor market.

I'd argue the biggest obvious mark against a degree really doing much is that it's relevant at most for the first job. After that, no one asks to see the degree, or cares what your GPA was, or whatever - because the much better skill assessment is actually doing a job in the field. At that point, while it's tradition to require a degree, it's literally a check box. If these companies thought about it better, they'd realize the hiring mostly ignores degrees for any position outside of literally the first one out of college. An obvious solution to this problem IMHO would be the probationary period. Set it for 6 months renewing for some period. You need some time having someone do the actual task to really know if they're going to be a good fit anyway.