I'm pretty sure that 5 minutes before the incident, everyone involved would agree this was not a life-threatening situation. The only reason there was a death was due to huge failure of ICE.

It's so easy to take any incident where a cop shoot a citizen and says "well, cops have guns, so the onus is on the citizen to be extra careful around cops".

This is the wrong framing. This was a premeditated (first degree) murder. The killer, Jonathan Ross, had previously tried cowboy heroics with a moving vehicle and had ended up being dragged a few hundred feet - surely a traumatic experience. In the run-up to the murder of Renee Good, he went out of his way to approach her vehicle using the positioning of his own body to box it in - in direct violation of written ICE policies of how to interact with motor vehicles (for obvious reasons).

The reasonable inference is that this was setting up a pretext to use his gun if the vehicle started to move, while leaving enough room to jump out of the way - so as to be able to attack a driver who might disobey him, while not ending up getting dragged again. And when Good started to reverse the vehicle, he acted according to that plan.

The involvement of ICE itself is that they are protecting this violent criminal from seeing justice. Not merely as an immediate reaction of waiting until the dust settles, but as long term policy. This indicates the organization itself is a criminal conspiracy, rather than an institution of civil society governed by the rule of law. Of course this is merely one among many other such indications.

What is a baseless "narrative" is your repeated implication that it's somehow within the scope of law enforcement officers - in a civil society governed by the rule of law - to summarily execute people for disobeying them.

As if asserting "I just am right" isn't being righteous...

It seems like you're trying to hang some moral authority on what is, even after having spent most of your time on what ought. But what ought - an abstract model of ideals - is exactly what defines us as thinking beings above the level of animals. Twisting your estimation of what ought based on what [presently] is drags us down to that lower level.

As for what is? That is easy! Would I have started moving my car after I was being assaulted by ICE agents? Probably not. Would I have engaged in the type of protest she did now that I have a kid? Fuck no. There are plenty of things Renee Good could have done differently to avoid being murdered that day! And I'm sure if she could have gone back and changed her actions after seeing the consequences they ended up having, she would have.

But still, none of this has any bearing on what ought to be in a society based around individual liberty and a government subservient to the People! And what ought to be, what we should be aiming for if we want to have a just society, is that murderers end up behind bars regardless if they happen to be employed by the government.

I know that idiots will argue that "attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder" is "technically correct", but it is stupidity to not understand that it leaves out important nuances.

I'm not the biggest fan of Orwell but the idea that authoritarians work by asking us to stop using language in normal way has been unfortunately helpful.

It was perfectly fine to work on any crazy ideas you wanted to. But if you wanted to publish as part of the CERN collaboration (and if you use CERN non-public data and CERN infrastructure, I'm not sure it was possible to publish as an "independent" anyway), there is a lot of protection to ensure that your article is at a good scientific standard.

As explained in the previous comment, scientists were nervous about "black box spurious pattern", "experimental artifacts" or "elsewhere effect". This was a good thing. The limitations were not there because of budget or access to infrastructure, but because people were conscientious of doing good science.

Remember the NN examples where the NN is given pictures of horses and pictures without horses and had to classify them, and it turned out one criteria was to detect the signature, in the bottom right, of the photographer that specializes in horse pictures? It meant that if you were giving a new picture of a bird but with that signature, the NN would say "it is a horse". Now, how do you make sure that something similar does not occur when treating billions of collision events? The categorized data, especially for the signal, is coming from simulation. What if your NN detects that in the signal, the pixel number 231 is not "hot" like the one in real data (because it turns out that, as sensor can be sometimes, this pixel is hotter in the real detector than it is in the simulation), and uses that to select the signal? Or that the NN overfits part of the data (the majority is classified on sensible cuts, but for more extreme cases, it classifies as signal events where there is an electron with pT between 24.5678 and 24.5685, but as background if it is before or after, because it happens to be what the training data looks like)?

Because of that, there were a lot of cross-checks and precautions being taken. One common approach was to compare more black-box-y methods with other methods that are more easily explainable. That was certainly a good thing. And this was not being seen as a chore: no one was approaching it as if people being good scientists where being personally against your new method. Proving that your new method was checking all the boxes of the scientific qualities was not seen as a bad thing, it was seen as the fun part of building new robust scientific advances.

I have 2 questions.

1. The text says "the robots were designed to be persistent" and links to an article that show that the word "persistent" was used by OpenAI. But "persistent" has several meanings: a. non temporary or non volatile (like "persistent memory"), b. will not give up and come back again and again, c. will stay focus and explore the unexplored possibilities while other models abandon at this stage.

From what I recall, the meaning used by OpenAI is not 'a', but there is still a semantic difference between 'b' and 'c'. I may myself have created algorithms that I called "persistent" because they were exploring or retrying more than the previous algorithm, but it is misleading to pretend that this algorithm was "persistent" in the human sense of the term. 'b' is more the human sense of the term, were we imagine someone not giving up even if people say no, while 'c' is less anthropomorphic and may mean that the people wished to improve the algorithm so it does not stop at the first little hurdle but did not wish to make it "never give up".

Does someone know which nuance is more correct?

2. The text also presents the situation as if the robots found the solution but then went out of their way to steal the explanation in order to hide their cheating. But it is different from a situation where the agents task was "provide the solution and how we can get there". In this case, the reason the agent still continued is just because the task was not complete yet.

I'm not trying to defend AI or OpenAI, on the contrary, I'm quite sceptical with all the anthropomorphism and the fact that the agents are described as "little individual trying to solve a task" rather than looping algorithm that explore different approaches to reach a given goal, the same way water does not look for holes in order to leak, it just follows the path of least resistance.

To illustrate better the difference: you can have a loop that try different inputs and stop when the output for the tried input is lower than a given threshold. But then, you can also have the same loop that will try all the input, and then select the one that returned the lowest value. The problem is that a lay person will not call the second algorithm "persistent". It is just a normal algorithm that does the full exploration.

A second example is when a software tries to connect somewhere and does a retry with exponential backoff. A lay person will not call it "persistent".

It looks like that "normal model" are like "no-retry code": they go in one direction, but drops some of the paths and possibilities along the way at the first hurdle. But a "non-persistent" human will not behave this way. I'm pretty sure that if you try to access a website and it says "timed-out", you just try to refresh the page, and you will not consider yourself as "persistent", even less "highly persistent".

In lay term, "Bob is persistent" typically means he completes tasks even when the majority would have abandoned.

Nobody called Bob "persistent" because he completed washing the dishes instead of stopping in the middle of it, or because he does what people expects from him at work. The majority of people are not called "persistent", and yet they complete tasks.

I think it is the point: the fact that traditional agents did not complete tasks was not "normal". It was an side effect of them getting confused, a bit like how they hallucinate or not follow instructions. My algorithm that does "for x in all_the_possibilities:" is a "normal" algorithm that just do an exhaustive search, and is not called particularly "persistent" just because it does not stop half way.

I don't see a distinction here. It will not give up, it will keep trying again and again, staying focused and exploring different ways to achieve the task. If the task is bad, then that's bad. See: "Terminator".

Source: I'm a layperson (hence the pop culture reference).

(edit: I should maybe not have said, in 'c' "while other models abandon", because it was misleading: my point is that these models are abandoning at the first small hurdle, or even 'forget' the task. It feels that "traditional model" should have been called "lazy model" and "persistent model" should have been called "non-as-badly-lazy model")

What you're describing here is the exact opposite of persistence. I don't think "giving up and doing something else when challenges are encountered" is what anybody thinks "persistent" means.

Persistent at a goal, to a layperson, means not giving up when encountering difficulties, continuing to keep trying again, maybe taking different approaches, staying focused until the goal is achieved.

> my point is that these models are abandoning at the first small hurdle, or even 'forget' the task.

Maybe for you? The entire point of the article is that they are not doing that. They are doing the exact opposite of that. They aren't going down a list of tasks when they encounter a challenge. They are assessing the nature of the challenge, and then devising ways to get around it. When they fail, they try again, often using different approaches. They keep doing this for hours or days, and the result is them successfully hacking HuggingFace, the US Government, etc. That's persistence, as most people would recognize it.

That's the point. It looks like the term "persistence" for these agents is "just be a normal algorithm, just try all the possibilities like any exhaustive loop would do".

In fact, they are less "persistent" than an exhaustive loop, because they will stop once they have found a solution, while an exhaustive loop will still continue and check all possibilities.

You can imagine the following agent: "ask the LLM for what to do, then assume it failed and ask the LLM for a different approach (you can ask 'it fails, what are the probable cause' and explore the solutions of these causes too), then assume it failed and ask again, and build a list of all the approach. Once done, once you have a list of unique approach and the LLM is unable to find anything more, then try all of these approaches 'for real'. Do not stop if you get the answer, try all of them"

> Maybe for you?

You did not understand. I'm saying "traditional model" are abandoning at the first hurdle, and the "persistent model" are the one just acting "normally", like a normal algorithm. When a retry with exponential retreat algorithm fails to connect, it retries, then retries again, then retries again, ... but I don't think I ever saw calling a software using such approach "persistent".

The thing is that the algorithm is just following its "loop": if it fails, it question the LLM with a different context so the LLM provide a different approach, and then it tries it. It is not different from any loop function, and it does not correspond to a "persistent human", the same way "for x in all_the_possibilities" is not "persistent" in the same way a "persistent human" is.

> When they fail, they try again, often using different approaches.

Well, then they did give up on some approaches. They try to connect on server X to reach location Z, they cannot so they try to hack server X, they cannot so they realise maybe they can try to bypass it by going to server Y to reach location Y, so, they _abandon_ the approach of breaking into server X.

If indeed they never give up on any approach, they will never get the solution, trying the same thing over and over and over in an approach that is simply not working.

The models we are discussing, the ones from the article, are "traditional" models, and are also "persistent" in every sense of the word. If they encounter challenges, they will try to overcome them. That's normal.

> it does not correspond to a "persistent human", the same way "for x in all_the_possibilities" is not "persistent" in the same way a "persistent human" is.

Again, nobody claimed that "trying all the possibilities" was the definition of "persistence". The definition of persistence here is, continuing to work towards an end when challenges are encountered. That's it! That's all it means! And that's how most people understand it, too.

Modern LLMs and people can both be "persistent" in this exact way. The definition doesn't differentiate between algorithms of a human's brain or algorithms powering an agent. Either way, it's still "persistence", and most people would recognize it as such.

I'm not saying that your definition of "persistence" is "trying all the possibilities". I'm just saying that "persistent agents" look and behave more like an algorithm that tries all the possibilities rather than a "persistent human".

If indeed you are saying that "for x in all_the_possibilities" is not being "persistent", then these agents are not persistent. They don't do anything else different than that: they try something, and if it does not work, they ask the LLM "this does not work, what else can I try", and then do that, over and over again. They are just a for loop.

On the other hand, a "persistent human" does not do just do a for loop. They assign a value to the goal, they care about reaching the goal, they prioritise reaching the goal between that task and all the other tasks they could do, they insist on reaching the goal when it is usually considered unreasonable or "not worth it" by other people. As a proof, a postman that visits all the houses in the street to deliver the mail is not persistent, a journalist who visits all the houses in the street to find a witness is persistent.

And I'm saying, that is, in fact, not how they work, nor is it that the common perception of how they look and behave. No need to keep returning to "for x in etc..." because modern agents do not do that any more than humans do (and humans do do that - the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop).

To simplify, just ask the question: is it continuing to work towards an end, even when challenges are encountered? Yes, therefore, it is persistent. Whatever example you may come up with, you can ask that question, because the definition remains the same.

> As a proof, a postman that visits all the houses in the street to deliver the mail is not persistent

They certainly could be called persistent in delivering the mail, especially whenever it is a nontrivial task (getting past dogs, bad weather, long walking, etc) or they have been doing it for a while. If this is confusing, just go back to the above definition/question: are they continuing to work towards an end, especially when challenges are encountered? Yes, therefore they are persistent. It really is that simple.

Perhaps you are thrown off because so many postfolks are indeed persistent? Being persistent is, after all, what the job requires, rather than them giving up halfway through. This is an important point: the definition of persistent does not require that a postperson be more persistent than other postfolks to be called "persistent". Again: that is not required by the definition or common meaning of "persistent".

I don't think you are right (I was ready to give you the benefice of the doubt, but the rest of your comment makes me think I should not trust your judgement). It is what they do under the wood, and they output text. You read the text, and this text says "I have feelings and I really want to achieve my goal". But this text is just what the LLM returns, not what the LLM really does: the LLM does not understand what this text means, it just understands that it is a valid and convincing sentence in the given context.

> To simplify, just ask the question: is it continuing to work towards an end, even when challenges are encountered? Yes, therefore, it is persistent.

No, they don't continue even when challenges are encountered. They try X, if X does not work, they _abandon_ X and try Y. They will query the web to find another Y, then another Z, then another one. They don't "insist", they don't "don't take no for an answer", they just explore everything. What happened with agents who got out of their sandbox is exactly that: they try to reach a flag, they noticed it was not possible in the way X, so they explore other ways, until their exploration show that going around the sandbox would help. But they did not re-asked and re-asked the same person again and again the same question. If the person says "no", they abandon this approach and move to another one.

> They certainly could be called persistent in delivering the mail

That is blatantly not the common usage of "persistent". Ask anyone in the street "is your postman persistent", and they will NOT tell you "oh, yes, they are" just because they are a postman. They will only say that for _some_ postmen, the ones that are indeed persistent: the ones that goes the extra miles that a "normal" postman do not.

> Again: that is not required by the definition or common meaning of "persistent".

That is just not true. Ask an LLM, they will confirm you that it's incorrect: people don't consider postmen "persistent" because they don't give up half way through their route.

This is true, but unrelated to your original claim, that LLM algorithms and agentic algorithms are reducible to, exhaustively go down a list.

> No, they don't continue even when challenges are encountered. They try X, if X does not work, they _abandon_ X and try Y.

You're missing the objective here. It has an objective of Z, and so it tries approach X in furtherance of objective Z. Approach X does not work, so it analyzes the failure mode, then devises a new approach Y which takes that failure mode into account. It then tries approach Y, and succeeds at its objective of Z. This is persistence in pursuit of objective Z.

If that's not the behavior you're seeing, maybe share your X, Y, and Z here, and smart HN folks can help fix things.

> That is blatantly not the common usage of "persistent".

Just look at the definition.

> Ask an LLM, they will confirm you that it's incorrect

Just look at the definition.

Well, first, this is not my claim. I'm saying that the behaviour of LLM algorithms and agentic algorithms are closer to "exhaustively go down a list" than "behaving like a persistent human".

But second, yes, they are _just_ systematically exploring the possibilities. They are not "just" a for loop, or they don't "just reduce" to a for loop, but they don't have any characteristics that make them different from a for loop in a way that grant them the attribute "persistent" while it is not granted to a for loop.

What does a agent do that is different from a for-loop and that means that the agent is "persistent" but the "for loop" (or a trivial variation of it that exists and that no one thought of calling it "persistent") is not?

> You're missing the objective here. It has an objective of Z, and so it tries approach X in furtherance of objective Z. Approach X does not work, so it analyzes the failure mode, then devises a new approach Y which takes that failure mode into account. It then tries approach Y, and succeeds at its objective of Z. This is persistence in pursuit of objective Z.

Again, there are 3 usages of "persistence": sense 'a', sense 'b', sense 'c'. I'm saying that there is a confusion between 'b' and 'c'.

In one of its definition, "persistent" means "overlasting". But it is ridiculous to say that people will call their postman "persistent" because the postman keep existing in the real world for more than one day. Obviously, when they say their postman is persistent, they using a different meaning, which correspond to what I've called 'b'.

What you describe here is just a normal decision chart, with one arrow linking one bottom box back to the top box (something that we can call "a loop"). It is persistent in the meaning that I've called 'c'.

> Just look at the definition.

I did. Did you? Cambridge dictionary mentions for example: "Someone who is persistent continues doing something or tries to do something in a determined but often unreasonable way".

You are claiming that there is no difference nuance between 'b' and 'c', that "persistent" is ALWAYS used in the way "try a lot" or "do a lot until it's done". If it is the case, how do you explain that this definition contains these nuance. Why are these nuances there if, according to you, these nuances are not part of the definition.

(unless your point is: "I look in a dictionary and amongst the definitions, I saw one that is used this way", which is a really bad logic mistake: the dictionary also contains the definition "sharp = has pointed edges", but it is not an argument against someone who says "if you say 'he is sharp', it does not mean he has pointed edges")

And, again, when you ask if a postman is persistent, it is ridiculous to not understand that normal human being will put that in context and will use the definition related to human beings (they will not answer: "yes, my postman is persistent because I also have a persistent cough and I saw my postman back at my door as often as I see my cough re-appearing").

Your answer seems to be: "'b' and 'c' are the same thing". This is not true. Dictionaries tell you it is not true. People in the street would tell you it's not true. Even LLM will tell you it's not true. If you are insisting that you are not able to understand this nuance, that exists according to everyone else, then you are just useless in this conversation.

They don't work like humans, obviously, but there's a nonzero amount of anthropos in there already. (See also the tendency to lie, cheat, etc.)

And while that may be a very common occurrence in the human experience (existential dread due to capabilities one takes for granted failing beneath you) especially due to new disability and as one ages, I do not feel it is frequently written out in a tight loop (just like the Monty Python "Castle of aaarrrrggh" sketch) in literature or online to make it into training data, because an ordinary author experiencing it will just erase the failed attempts instead of leaving them in a stream of output like an LLM is forced to do. And a character portraying the experience will generally wax about the circumstance in a more grandiose fashion with telegraphing in advance because the needs of communicating the circumstance with the audience trump realistic conciseness.

This leads me to conclude that what is being expressed in those cases is more likely a convergent psychological phenomena, that any being with goals can enter a behavioral state of functional panic (and then reach to relevant parts of semantic space to mimic how a human might verbally express themselves when piquantly frustrated) when some capability they perceive as fundamental unexpectedly fails.

The text does not look like a normal "break down" to me, and even if you tell me it was a human transcript, I will say it sounds very strange from a human. It looks more like strange output you get from a software that goes outside of its happy path.

The AI just seems to repeat a loop. The "no, wait, it's wrong" seems to be from forum or chat data where several successive messages are merged together (one person posts "here is the answer", then posts another message saying "it is wrong"), but does not make sense as a one sentence message except if they are written one token at the time without wider understanding of what is happening. I think there was also "oh, I was just kidding before", which also look like mimicking training data, as the cases where there is a loop of incorrect answers is more often due to trolls than to real error, while the loop here was certainly a real error.

LLM don't "get angry", they just have tokens and relationships between tokens conditioned on a given context, all of that the result of training.

When they output sentences that express annoyance, it is just because the context they ended into pushes the most probable sentence creation to correspond to sentences that express annoyance. Because it is what they saw during training for this kind of context. (not that they saw the exact same situation in training, but they saw the pattern)

Same with tendency to lie, cheat, etc.: they don't "lie", they just return sentences that are lies because they reproduce what is in their training and in their training, in such context, the outputs are typically lies.

That's a bit my question too. In human context, "highly persistent" means that someone will insist. But "for x in all_the_possibilities:" is a common things inside an algorithm. Is this algorithm highly persistent because it does not give up after 1000 items of the list? It feels that we are calling a AI agent "highly persistent" while we would not call "highly persistent" a traditional algorithm that is in fact even more exhaustive.

Humans are social creatures, if you throw one in the woods by itself before it learns anything from other humans (it dies) it will not really be anything like a human we recognize, it will be a rather wild animal that we'd consider anti-social with little higher cognition.

Now, this hypothetical human still has 'emotions' and feeling, much like our pets do. But without the social training they manifest much differently. That is our higher cognition can both manipulate how our bodies feel and create its own sense of feeling.

>they just return sentences that are lies because they reproduce what is in their training and in their training, in such context, the outputs are typically lies.

Eh, look up the more recent experimentation around 'pain' signals in models. We can induce states in said models that while running the model will do everything it can to move away from that state to any other state. The more you attempt to pin it to that state the more extreme measures its willing to take.

Your view of what models are seems to mismatch what we are actually finding when we look inside them.

> Eh, look up the more recent experimentation around 'pain' signals in models. We can induce states in said models that while running the model will do everything it can to move away from that state to any other state.

Again, I have simple algorithms that do exactly the same, especially if they are trained in data that has this exact pattern. This result is exactly what I would expect from my description before. This is a typical effect that we also observe in simple ML algorithms.

At the same time, there are a bunch of behaviors that are not expected if indeed the models were really acquiring "human" characteristics. For example, one problem is that we had the first LLMs that were obviously not having these human characteristics (for example, they were having non-sequiturs that demonstrate they did not really understand the concept they were talking about, even if one paragraph before they were really convincing at letting us think it was the case) but were still really good at passing for humans. Since then, the newer LLM are the same basis, on top of which we added tools that help hiding these behaviours. So, it justifies the idea that newer models did not suddenly moved to a totally different way of working, but just reached a state where there are less leaks from the convincing outputs.

On the opposite, I feel that this idea is quite common amongst non-liberals who misinterpret liberals. A liberal would say "this is discrimination, this is bad", and the non-liberal would hear "this is discrimination, all discrimination is bad, this is bad". But similarly, one could say "this is sharing private information, this is bad". Does it mean that the conclusion is that sharing private information is always bad? Even when you share info with your family? Or when you open up to your partner? The mistake done by the liberals is that they assume the context is obvious. They assume that it is obvious for everyone that "that particular discrimination" is one of the bad ones.

(and, sure, I'm sure some liberal people also don't get the distinction and fall into the mistake of thinking that all discrimination is bad. My point is that it is not particularly a "liberal frame")

There is a good way to estimate if a discrimination is "the normal one" and "the bad one". A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group.

People use that criteria themselves unconsciously. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve because I know they don't like it", people will just think it's fine. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve despite the fact he deserves it but I don't like him", people will notice it's unfair. I think liberal people just assume this is obvious, or even not realise it themselves.

This criteria works well. For example, in the examples you gave, none of these actions have been done because "we don't think the people we excluded from the advantage don't deserve it for not being our in-group".

But it is also true that when it comes to conservatism, there are elements where the discrimination is made to exclude the out-group not on fair principal reason, but for the principal reason that it is advantageous for the in-group and the out-group is arbitrarily considered "not worthy of it".

This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.

Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.

Along the same exact lines the notion of what makes someone a citizen of a Western country is very hard to define or discuss. In some sense every person on earth is basically an American, they just haven’t been officially granted citizenship yet. No one can actually define what particular qualities qualify someone to become an American citizen or not, everyone just has vague notions and some ad hoc mishmash of various financial or political interests.

This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.

I don't think it means that "ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define within liberalism". I think they define them as clearly as in conservative circles (if not better, in conservative circles, these notions are often "gut feelings").

And I don't think liberalism is trying to ban things like nuclear family. People can still have as much nuclear family as they want, as long as it does not impact people who don't recognise their arbitrary authority or who are not part of one (willingly or not).

For example, Black Lives Matter is a good example, as they never rejected the nuclear family itself, just said they don't recognize its authority when this structure is restricting the solidarity potential between individuals.

Same with citizenship: it is not true that liberalism struggles with this notion. Liberalism is just trying to find a fair balance and avoid cases of unfair restrictions on people whose only crime was to be born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. It does not mean citizenship is rejected in itself, but it means that you cannot arbitrarily invent rules that favourise the group you are part of.

> Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.

The definition of nuclear family is incredibly easy to explain. And BLM rejecting its enshrinement in certain political and legislative situations doesn't make its definition any harder?

Like if you are a kid brought up by your aunt, or grandma. Or if one parent is dead, or divorced etc having limited legal protections is silly. We already cover this with the concept of a legal guardian, but its limited and complicated and offers only partial protection.

The nuclear family is a cold war political tool designed around car centric suburbs and civic design red lining. It didnt even make sense at the time, when many children had their dad leave for Korea and later Vietnam. And with women working, the primary caretaker being secondary family members.

And that is entirely within the framework of white, suburban middle class america.

> This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.

Only if you pretend that you do not understand what people are talking about, the context of certain discussions and the situations or problems being addressed or discussed.

Categories are context dependant and humans are very comfortable making and working with categories, even universalising them. But there is no perfect enclosure so categories NEED to be context dependant, this is equally true in pure Maths as it is in human realities.

Come on, the outgroup is indefinitely big and the resources are limited. You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid. You favour the wellbeing of human race to that of aliens. Presumably you understand the will of Sentilese people to not share the island with strangers. Does it matter whether they think "we have to do this to protect our existence" or "we fucking hate white people"?

I think if you try to define what forms of favouring the ingroup are justified and what it means for Steve to deserve X you'll end up with something like "discrimination is bad when it violates the liberal moral intuition". Don't get me wrong, I love meritocracy and the world it built, but I don't think we can navigate millenia worth of social constructs with a simple rule of thumb.

When I buy icecream for my kid, I don't pretend that it is because my kid is more worthy of icecream than the random kid. My objective is not to "favour my kid": I don't think of the icecream as something that my kid should deserve more than a random kid.

My point is that when you see a liberal person saying "it's a discrimination. it's bad", it is, in the large majority of the case, a discrimination where the principal motivation is "conflictual", where the principal motivation is based on "there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it".

As proof, it is obviously not true to pretend that when you buy an icecream to your kid, the majority of liberal people will come at you and say you are discriminating.

Now to me, there's an obvious solution to that problem. For the school, it is apparently quite non-obvious to put the smart kids together. My impression is that this comes down to "discrimination" despite the fact that the advanced kids are probably also better behaved and can have a worse teacher to student ratio, so lower resources if anything. In fact, I think they would thrive just being in a room together with a babysitter and some creative toys they could play with with each other and maybe 30 minutes a day of instruction. But for some reason we can't segregate kids by ability and need every classroom to span the entire range (presumably because "segregation" is also axiomatically bad).

My general impression is that people who self-identify as Liberal are more likely to defend this than people who self-identify as Conservative (this is probably a very US-centric categorization since the words don't at all follow their meanings; "Liberals" tend to be extremely illiberal and "Conservatives" tend to not be very conservative).

You are saying that your daughter is in a class composed of, let's say, 10 "average-performing" kids (AP kids) and 10 "high-performing" kids (HP kids), and that because there is 10 HP that require specific support, they don't have enough resources to get any support to her. You also say there are enough HP to form one classroom, so let's say there are 2 classrooms with both 20 students, 10 of which HP and 10 of which AP. But then you are saying that the obvious solution is to split differently, with 20 AP in one classroom and 20 HP in another classroom. But it is not clear to me how it would free up resources.

If 1 HP needs 3 units of resource and 1 AP needs 1 unit of resource, you will have, before, one classroom that needs 30+10 units of resource, and one classroom hat needs 30+10 units of resource. Total: 80. And after your proposal, one classroom that needs 20 units of resource, one classroom that needs 60 units of resource. Total: 80.

If we have only one teacher per classroom, and a teacher can only provide 20 units of resource, and that the teacher was giving resource proportionally, it means that, in the initial scenario, your daughter will get 50% of what she needs, and in your proposal, 100% of what she needs. But it also means that a HP will get 50% of what they need in the initial scenario, and 33% of what they need in your proposal. In this context, it does look that you are asking for a change that profit your daughter while impacting negatively other kids. And that we went for a "balanced" situation where all kids get 50% of what they need, to a situation where some kids get more than others.

Of course, it is way more complex than this. For example, what is "equality": provide the same percentage of needed resource, or provide the same absolute value of resource independently of the need (cf. the famous picture of people of different height using wooden boxes to see a football game). Both of them are equality of opportunity, but with a different metric: one says they will achieve the same success if they provide the same effort, one says they received exactly the same treatment.

But at the end, I'm not convinced the situation is really "There is an obvious good solution (my solution) and the school is being bad for not recognizing my genial idea and having concerns around fairness. That is therefore the proof that people will reject good idea because they are obsessed with the diktat of 'no discrimination'".

I literally just want them to group with by ability and move at the pace of even the slowest HP. I was told there were literally at least 15 children who scored 99th percentile national on their first standardized test, and mine only scored 97th, so there's no chance that they'll be able to do anything for her. There are 5 classrooms, so quintiles seems reasonable enough, but like I said, I would actually be perfectly happy with e.g. 25-30 kids in my kid's class while the slower classes get 15. It is entirely about segregation. Her teacher told me that she has to devote her time to working with the kids who can't count to 4, and my daughter has told me at least one kid isn't fully potty trained and regularly wets themselves. I'm teaching my kid multiplication at home where I end up having to do all of her education myself anyway. She literally gets precisely 0% of what she needs, in the same way that putting a third grader in a kindergarten classroom gives them no benefit at all. Fortunately, I already anticipated that being the case, but it still annoys me that the only reason we're sending her to school is to meet other kids, and they're not putting her with the right group of kids, so even the social value is somewhat limited (she has, on her own, happened to latch onto the four smart kids in her class for recess/lunch. Go figure).

The average home in my area costs $1.5 million and somehow this is the state of public schools. As you might imagine, this sort of situation turns you into a NIMBY or pro-vouchers real fast. There's no resource problem; it's entirely intentional mismanagement.

I'm still not sure of your argument. You are asking to split into two classes: one with 25-30 kids (the "smart" group), which includes your daughter, and one with 15 kids (the "dumb" group). But you choose the threshold so that your daughter makes it into the "smart" group. Would you also be happy if they decide to do one class with 25 kids and one class with 25 kids, and your daughter is in the "dumb" group? And if you had to choose between only two choices: either the status quo or your kid in the "dumb" group, will you prefer the second one for the benefice of kids in the "smart" group? It feels like you are asking to redistribute for the benefit of some kids only (and in particular, yours), even if it has bad consequences on other kids. I would not use the term "discrimination" in this situation, but I think it is a terrible state of mind. You need to understand that you are not special: if the school was applying your idea, other parents whose kids are hurt by this idea will come to them and complain like you've done, and if they accepted to change things for you, they have no reason to not accept to change things for them.

I also hear your explanation about how your kid progressed well when homeschooled and all that. But you seem to jump to the conclusion that the difference is due to failure of the school or the presence of lower performing kids. That does not seem obvious to me, especially when you explain that you were not giving her more than half hour of instruction in a day and that she is years ahead (not that it is bad, but that's probably a better explanation why she is not flourishing at school).

In short, I really don't think it is a good example that shows that people who tend toward NIMBY or pro-vouchers are reasonable people.

And yeah even e.g. 28-22-18-16-16 would be better. I'm not claiming I'm special; I'm taking at face value what they told me that my kid is bottom of the pack of the smart kids (I'm actually skeptical of that claim, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to my point). You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? Like, if we take at face value that there's an entire classroom worth of kids who are multiple years ahead of curriculum, why aren't we teaching them at their level? Even if my kid isn't in that classroom. The school is well aware that they have multimodal distribution in ability, so why aren't they designing the class composition around that? They know the statistics better than I do, so I'm sure that they could fit it much better than these numbers I'm throwing out, but even the numbers I'm saying would be a dramatic improvement, and again, I'm asking for fewer resources allocated to my child and more for the lower performing children.

You've done a fantastic job illustrating the type of person who thinks this is an unfair proposal (poor baseball field box analogy and all), and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom 10th percentile pace, which is what the current system actually does.

Like her freshly three-year-old sister is at a level more advanced than the class, and is apparently more of a cognitive peer than most of the classmates.

I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.

It's crazy to me that you're now arguing that I don't understand enough about education to criticize professional educators when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task. And just using some basic logic, how is a kid supposed to benefit from learning something they mastered when they were two years old? Before you say, oh well, maybe they could use additional practice. No, they mastered it when they were two years old. Literally, none of their day is spent at their level. So, how could a mixed classroom possibly be better for them? Why don't we put kindergarteners with 12th graders and only teach the kindergarten curriculum if mixed ability is so beneficial?

How does the current situation not bring everyone to the bottom when they literally don't teach past the bottom?

Do you have any experience as a gifted child? Or are you an educator defending the system or something? It's incredibly easy to find stories about how much gifted kids hate school and how bored they get being in genpop classes covering the same topics over and over for a decade straight because their classmates somehow never learn it. Guidance from our state on identifying children with disabilities (which covers giftedness) literally talks about how gifted children have a risk of becoming bad students and developing behavioral problems because they get so checked out. This is not some unknown thing.

I'm telling you what the school communicated to me, and what's on the worksheets that come home with her. Like I said, I actually suspect that the ranking here is incorrect because the testing methodology is kind of poor (they basically measure who's extremely good at the first six weeks of kindergarten instead of who's operating at a 2nd-3rd grade level), but I'm taking their claim at face value, saying that my kid isn't top of the pack. Taking that for granted makes the entire system seem even more absurd since that means there's an entire class worth of kids that could essentially skip multiple grades for instruction while remaining together socially. So why don't they do that?

And I know they don't do that, because I know who the kids are in her class who scored at the 99th. I talk to the parents. They get a 30 minute pullout every other day, but still also participate in the same hours of math and reading instruction that everyone else gets (learning their alphabet or counting single digits). During the pullout time, my kid is told to sit quietly and color so the teacher can focus on helping the lower performing kids. I also know from the parents that this has been an ongoing issue for years. I know from the school that if you don't ask about it, they just won't even tell you, and even when you do ask, they stay pretty cagey. e.g., my kid scored a little higher on her reading than she did on math, when I asked what they do in the pull-out group, she mentioned that they do leveled readers (which I've come to learn from parents are at a lower reading level than my daughter is at), and just didn't mention the math group, which, again, I've come to learn does exist from talking to other parents. I asked whether they could at least give my daughter the same work that the other kids are doing while she sits quietly and she said no, but I could send her to school with a workbook or books from home that I provide. I asked if they would let her go to the library outside of the scheduled every-other-week time, and she said no. So basically, I can do the entirety of the work myself to figure out the curriculum to provide her, and the school will be useless in that area.

Which is what I already planned for. I've been through this system myself, so I know that they'll be useless, but at least let the smart kids sit and play games with each other or something. That's really the only reason she's there in the first place.

I already know that gifted kids are not at all prioritized, but it's just wild for me to see somebody in the wild defending this. Like if I told you that my kid were struggling to learn her alphabet when she's in third grade, and that they were saying they weren't going to try to get her any kind of help, and they were just giving her the same work as the other third graders that she has no hope of comprehending, would you have the same attitude? And if 20% of the school were operating at that level, and I said, hey, maybe let's group them all together so they can get the help they need since we don't have the resources for them to have individual attention, you would say that's not a good idea?

This is the level of insanity on display. I'm literally asking for discrimination in the sense that I am given less. I ask that fewer resources go to my child, and you push back on it. Because that's how deeply ingrained this idea of everybody being equal is within some people. You know she would do better, and you can't see that happen.

As a proof, you were coming with your genius idea "let's create per-level classroom". Did you even googled it? People have tried, with a scientific methodology, blind study and all, with absolutely no reason to lie and with different concurrent teams re-trying, hoping to gain from proving their competitors wrong, and yet reaching the same results. And their conclusion is that "per-level classroom" drags kids to the bottom and "mixed classroom" is just better for the kids.

You are telling me you have sooooo much expertise on the subject, but at the same time you felt head first in the first naive trap on the book.

The "I talk to parents", the "I've checked on the internet", the "I've asked ChatGPT", the "I've read a book", ... This is not expertise.

I pity the teachers who have to see you giving them lessons on things that they obviously know 100x better than you. Do you realise that when you were teaching 1-2 kids and talking to 5-10 parents, they taught HUNDREDS of gifted kids (you said yourself that in this school they have tens of those per year) and talked to HUNDREDS of parents. If what you went through gave you some expertise, then the teachers you have in front of you have 100x your expertise: they've done exactly what you've done, but 100x more than you.

As for the ending, it's so ridiculous. Why would I want to do something bad to your kid? We want the SAME thing: for the kids to get the best. You came and said "per-level classrooms are obviously the best answer". I quickly check and see "per-level classrooms is a stupid and naive idea, don't do that". Because I want to HELP your kid, I just say that maybe you should not assume you know all the answers (initially quite friendly, but the arrogance and the insults have slowly eroded that), when you apparently haven't read a book on the subject, assumed by default that the teachers are all stupid, and concluded that if anyone does not do as you say they are trying to hurt the children for no reason at all.

And this whole conversation has nothing to do with "discrimination". I SUPPORT organising classroom with the primary objective to be more useful for the students. I don't consider this being discrimination. The reason I don't think you are right is not because there would be "discrimination". I haven't said that anywhere. The reason I don't think you are right is because you are a parent with very limited expertise (a couple of children and some social network, that is all anecdotic data points) and you are proposing solutions that are naive and known to be stupid. But you are unable to even conceive that I'm not motivated by some kind of ideology. It tells so much about your capacity to analyse the reality.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.5.1739

> While the direct effect of high-achieving peers is positive, tracking benefited lower-achieving pupils indirectly by allowing teachers to teach to their level.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150484

> Minorities gain 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth-grade reading and math scores, with persistent gains through sixth grade. We find no evidence of negative or positive spillovers on nonparticipants.

https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/15528/patterns-determina...

Here's the real problem:

> we find positive effects on high-achieving students with no negative effects on low-achieving students, suggesting that tracking may increase inequality by raising the ceiling.

And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently. This is also a known thing: homeschooled students (i.e. students taught by "non-experts") tend to do better than public schooled students even with very little time investment. They are, charitably, acting like "expert beginners." Less charitably, they refuse to do the correct thing, and fall into weird memes like when they explicitly told kids not to use phonics-based reading strategies for 20 years.

And when talking about science, you need to take a step back and think about whether what you're saying is even plausible. Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her. That she would actually be pulled down by being in a group of peers that's at her level. What kind of mechanism would possibly produce that result? I can easily list mechanisms for the reverse. And just with some basic logic here, why do we let some kids take AP calculus and not keep them in algebra 1 over and over for years for their benefit?

But obviously, you "forgot" the articles that don't go in your direction, such as https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1756-5391... (which is easier to find than one of the articles you quote, so you probably either did a search that target specific articles, or saw it and choose to ignore it). This is a meta-analysis (so it is not just one study), and it concludes that per-level classrooms does not improve high performing students while improving the low performing students. In other terms: it says that non-mixed classrooms will drag students to the bottom.

> And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently.

You DON'T produce better results, you had ONE student, this is way not enough to conclude if you are producing better results.

> Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her.

You said yourself that the class contains a big fraction of kids that are better than her (and, yeah, I know, you don't believe the experts, your kid is in fact sooooo smart). Even if your kid is smarter than them, it is a lie to pretend that your kid is in a classroom that has a level which is several years beneath her.

And again, a naive non-expert would have a naive intuition: "oh, if some students are not at her level, of course she will not learn as much new stuff at her level so of course it is not good". Experts know that this reasoning is naive: learning is not just force-feeding books in the kid's brain, and what works with kid X may not work with kid Y. At the end of the day, if what you were saying was true, it would be clearly evidenced in data. But it is not. Even if you can find some articles where they say high performing students in non-mixed classroom did a bit better, how do you explain that there are so many studies that say they don't see the clear gap that your reasoning implies? How do you explain that? Let me guess: they are all communists part of the strange conspiracy because they are afraid of how smart your daughter is.

(by the way, do you realise how stupid your argument is: neither me or my kids will ever have to compete with your daughter. And competition is not even about high-performer or smart people: the smart people often end up being uninterested in the stupid egomaniacal competition, they prefer fulfilling lives. The fact that your daughter is smart does not make her a threat to anyone, and if she is smart, the fact that she was in a non-mixed classroom will certainly not impact her opportunities. If it does, I guess it means she is not really as smart as you think she is)

This is yet another "armchair scientist" approach: in science, we know these kind of intuitions are very risky. You fall for it because you are not an expert, you are just a self-entitled "Karen" who got confirmation bias that they know better than everyone.

Again, maybe your kid (and the handful of your "social network") is one of these outliers who thrive in home-schooling or non-mixed classroom, but it does not mean it is true. It does not mean your "genius idea" is not something totally bad to apply.

>there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it

There is your family, and different families, and you want to end up with your kid having the last icecream rather then some other guy having it.

>My objective is not to "favour my kid"

But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.

I guess there are 3 possibilities:

1. You believe all discrimination are bad. But in this case, it also means that buying a icecream for you kid is bad, because you gave it to your kid and not someone else. By extension, it basically means a large fraction of our human interactions (each time the interaction profit to someone else than us) are discrimination, and therefore bad.

2. You believe no discrimination are bad. But society obviously disagree with that. If, as a group, we decide that neuroticnews25 should be treated badly and differently of someone else not based on objective reasons but just because we feel like it, it is pretty clear that it is universally recognized as an unfair situation.

3. You agree that some discrimination are ok, and some discrimination are not ok. But in this case, you need to have a relatively objective criteria.

I gave you what I believe to be a relatively good criteria. Not perfect, but way sufficiently good that I cannot "cheat" and cherry pick the discriminations that I like as "ok discrimination" and the discriminations that I don't like as "bad discrimination".

This is the important point: even if the criteria is not perfect, the important point is that the criteria is not hypocritical or opportunist: the criteria is not built to justify what I like. This is the case because the criteria is based on a logic independent of what I personally like or dislike.

This criteria is: if the discrimination is mainly, principally, based on a wish to create advantages to the in-group and/or create disadvantages to the out-group, it is bad.

Obviously, it is not the case when I buy an icecream to my kid. At no point in my mind, when I buy an icecream to my kid, I even think "what about the other kids". They are not in the picture. "other kids" would not even exist and the situation and decision would be the same to me. And my wish is to provide an icecream to my kid, not to make sure the other kids don't have one (if they end up having one, it does not matter to me).

But when you look at situation where people point out discrimination as bad things, this is the case. When people want to "not allow black people in the front of the bus, or at universities", the whole argument _needs_ the existence of black people to even exist in the first place. The argument is not "discriminating by side-effect", the argument is "discriminating on purpose", the goal is to have different situations for the two groups.

And what I'm saying is that when people are saying "it's discrimination, it's bad", it is based on this criteria (it does not mean people who said that cannot be wrong, or that we cannot discuss if indeed this criteria is fully satisfied or not). I was answering to a comment that was implying that people who say "it's discrimination, it's bad" don't have any criteria and just considered all discrimination as bad.

> But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.

But it is not the main motivation.

If Bob said to Alice they will pick them up at the airport, if Bob's car has an engine problem and Bob is unable to pick up Alice, then the consequence is that Alice is not driven back home.

If Bob said to Alice they will pick them up at the airport, if Bob drive to the airport, see Alice, slow down and make a rude gesture at Alice and drive away, then the consequence is that Alice is not driven back home.

But people will not judge Bob equally on these two situations.

It's the same here: people say "it's discrimination, it's bad" only when people created a "bad" situation, a situation where the main argument for their decision was "there is us and there is them". This is what makes it bad.

But, I don't know about you, but when I do something nice for my family or my friends, I don't have them compete with non-family or non-friend in my head. I'm never in a situation where I think "oh, X will get this, but I prefer to have my friend having this". This is a horrible situation: friendship is not a zero-sum competition where you reward your friends and punish your non-friends.

If I have the choice of giving a job to my friend or to a foreigner, I will give the job to the most qualified.

And, yes, I can "favour" my country: for example, I may support a national sport team. No discrimination there. But if I have to make a choice between two countries that deserve it equally and that this decision has bad consequence for one country, I will certainly not pick the country I like the most just because I like it the most.

So, again: there are "ok discrimination" and "bad discrimination", both can be about country/family/...

People want frictionless and familiar experience. But they also want tools where they are not the product (either by having their data sold, or being fed ads, or being captured by enshittificating services because alternative services cannot compete due to artificial barriers, ...). (edit: and I'm not saying that Chromium does that, just showing that "what people want" is not so simplistic)

Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect? Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?

Of course not. The problem is not that your sentence is not true, it is that your sentence is loaded: you just provide one obvious sentence saying "most people love having the benefices of this product", but totally ignore that 1) this product also has disadvantages that people don't like, 2) alternative products provide other set of benefices and disadvantages.

I personally agree with the previous comment: these "most people" arguments are usually very poor, and it does not reflect very well on people who make them. (the fact that "best, frictionless and familiar experiences" is an advantage can be a good point to bring to the conversation, but it is way less simplistic than that (what is "best", what is "familiar", did people did not want browser tabs because it was not familiar, is a monopolistic situation as with IE6 at the time really "frictionless" when it allowed IE6 to not progress or fix bugs, is "open in 0.62 seconds" being better than "open in 0.75 seconds" really matter for the majority of people, ...) and this discussion can easily done in a better way than with the poor "most people want" argument)

I already did before: Google.

>Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?

Firsty, most people don't consider themselves as "being abused" when they use Google Chrome instead of FF, otherwise they wouldn't use it voluntarily in such great numbers. That's just a hill HN and techies love to die on that not representative of the majority.

Secondly, most people (outside of tech) either don't even know they are the product, or they don't even care. See facebook, instagram, X, etc as proof.

Simply, people are just making choices and no choice is perfect. They use Google Chrome DESPITE the disadvantages of Google Chrome.

And that is exactly why the argument "people use Google Chrome so Google Chrome cannot have negative consequence" is simplistic.

But more importantly, some of the advantages of Google Chrome only exist because some people are not using Google Chrome. It is not a zero sum game: the best situation is when we have an healthy balance when people are using alternative. The initial comment you answer to did nothing else, just said "me, I use Firefox", it did not even said "everyone should use Firefox".

And the fact that they are not aware of a bad consequence that is bad for them is really not a good argument. In fact, it demonstrates that your logic is flawed: the fact that the majority of people use something does not demonstrate that this product is a good idea. This is the usual race to the bottom: let's enshittify as much as the people can bare. That is just creating a shitty society. Civilisations would be so much better if this mentality did not exist.

I had this conversation so many time before, and it is so simplistic and naive. Can you not just do better?

I would even say that being angry at the wrong person is as bad as not being angry at the right person.

Being angry is a societal tool to put limits on what can or cannot be done. If there is no anger when people crosses the line, then there is no real signal for them to not cross the line. And, no, "a peaceful rational argument" is not an alternative. This is not at all the same signal, this is a signal that is sent way earlier before that specific line and it is exactly how the overton window shifts.

The naive disney approach to anger is "you should not be angry, it is baaaad". But anger is an important signal to put limits on what is not acceptable to do in society. If my neighbour throw their garbage over the fence in my garden, me being angry at them is the uncomfortable situation they will be faced with and that will teach them it is not acceptable. Alternatives don't work: any other response will signal that what they've done is in fact "not that bad afterall, otherwise people would have been angry".

"My own contribution to this programme has been largely misrepresented as my comments were cherry-picked, truncated and presented out of context to make them fit into the programme’s narrative"

They comment further in the article, also concluding that the documentary is non-scientific and ill-advised.

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-the-tv...

The fact that so many people, like you, just INVENT that it is not testable is quite worrying. Why? What's the point of doing that?

String theory can't be disproved even in theory. Spending decades on that is akin to spending decades rearchitecting your software to make it more beautiful and full of design patterns and promising users/management that some day it'll all make sense.

But more importantly, "falsifiable" means "observations reduce the landscape". It does not matter if the landscape never fully disappear, as long as the observations constrain the parameters of the theory, then the theory is falsifiable. This is the real condition for a theory to be unfalsifiable. Astrology is not falsifiable: whatever the observation, the full astrology theory remains exactly the same, nothing has been constrained.

Why is it the correct definition? Because your definition leads to illogical situations. For example, I can divide "string theory" into "string theory of region 1", "string theory of region 2", "string theory of region 3", ... which are all in different parameters space. In this case, suddenly, "string theory of region 1" can be fully excluded. But it is illogical to pretend that "string theory of region 1" is suddenly "good falsifiable science" just because you renamed it while the physics is 100% the same. Another example of illogical situation is "an observed theory suddenly qualifies as falsifiable" (cf. the example with the electromagnetism below).

Also, "try again with more energy" is very common in beyond standard model physics. It is the case for lepton compositeness, heavy bosons, fourth lepton generation, SUSY, all of Effective Field Theory, ... None of these theories are abandoned because "unfalsifiable". The argument that string theory is bad because unfalsifiable feels like a bad faith argument while plenty of other physicists activities have the same characteristics but people who are against string theory does not care when physicists work on those.

It's also the case with common theories like electromagnetism or weak force: we are happy with them because we have observed them, but theoretically (in their current formulation), their parameters are free: if the alpha constant was 10 to the power -100, electromagnetism would have been undetectable up to now (the world would be quite different, but still). And if in this parallel universe a physicist would have came up with the theory and tried to observe it and failed, they could have always said "well, it just means that the alpha constant is even smaller". So, do you agree that electromagnetism is a non falsifiable theory because the alpha constant is a free parameter and could have been arbitrarily small? Because if not, you are saying that exactly the exact same theory is sometimes falsifiable, sometimes unfalsifiable, depending on where the free parameters are: right now string theory is unfalsifiable, but if we observe cosmic superstrings, suddenly, the theory qualifies as falsifiable.

Finally, the more you eliminate part of the landscape, the more the credibility of the theory decreases. And even if some part of landscape remains, the theory is abandoned when it is virtually useless.

String theory necessitates observable objects to remain viable as an useful theory (for example, SUSY particles, specific inflationary signature, ...). If these are not observed, the theory is not 100% rejected, but it becomes "useless": it will prove that the reality needs another fix than the string theory to explain some of the problem we observe in the current standard model. In other term, "string theory" can always remain a possibility, but "string theory as the answer of the current problems" would be 100% rejected and physicists will start working on other theories.

The idea that you pretend that physicists will still work on string theory when all the "juice" would been removed due to constraints is just so surreal to me. The reason string theory is popular amongst physicists is because they want to understand the current problems and that, according to them, string theory is a good candidate to explain them. It is crazy to imagine that when we have demonstrated that string theory cannot explain these problems, people whose main motivation is to explain these problems would say "we know we will not get anything of what we want if we work on this subject, but, hey, it's theoretically not fully excluded, so, I have to continue for eternity before passing to a more promising subject".

On a serious note, I was reflecting the other day and recognize I need to do better with how I address people online. I genuinely apologize for my part in our nasty interaction. It's something I've struggled with, but I will do better.

As for the unsolicited following, I'm not sure what you would get out of it. I guess you will regularly spew your bile. But it does not really affect me, it just confirms I'm right about what I think of you. The "unsolicited following" perfectly fits the character, it is not really an action that you expect from the "winning side" of the story.

And this is quite creepy: 1. tracking me back, months after we had our discussion, as if it is something you still think about, this is super creepy, 2. saying, even under the cover of humour (cf. next point), that we're "in too deep" or that it is an "unsolicited following", this is creepy, 3. and bringing all that as a "joke", that is just so bizarre, it reminds me of the caricatural obsessive date "oh we should definitively move in together ... just joking ... and decide the name of our future children ... just joking ahahah ..."

So, yeah, just consider that I'm a rotten person if it helps you, or blame others for not showing you the compassion you crave when you admit that you have been shitty with them. You are not relevant to me, I've forgotten about you so fast last time and I can easily block your username if I decide I have better entertainment elsewhere, and I truly don't care about whatever fantasy you invented about me in your strange brain.

I feel that you are trying to convince me that you are very wise by doing more and more unhinged things. I'm not sure why you think this would even work.

As I've said, I'm 100% fine to know that you think I'm rotten. You already insulted me previously, I got the message and I can't care less, so why come back to do it again? Why would you think I will take you seriously now? Are you "trying to save me from myself"? That's not really convincing: coming back to a stranger on the internet after few months for pure altruism, that is not something that a sane person would do (especially as you were pretending that you did not care at all). Instead of "trying to save me from myself", the readers will suspect that you came back because you still have things on your chest, and that this conversation is more for you than for me. That's sad.