Doesn't the same apply to art and literature, philosophy and political science? Don't we (in the study of music or art) have the same sequence of struggle for new solutions, a study of which things worked or failed and why, what they could impart to our science, and the necessity of passing on both process and derived conclusions to the next geveration, so that they can refine upon what's been learned? Art and literature are less often considered forms of "problem solving" than math or physica, but they are probably more crucial ways in which groups of humans solve large problems for their own survival... like math problems which are too complex for any one person to fully understand.

First they came for the artists and writers. Then they came for creative coders and engineers. Now they're coming for mathematicians and now you understand why it's a problem to deprive a generation of the right to conceive and sketch ideas which fail and to struggle and work out solutions for themselves?

Who will want to be a mathematician? Or an artist or a poet or a musician, in this world? What will consuming ideas and media even mean when they're totally remashed versions of things people don't understand the references to, and when the consumer themself has zero knowledge of prior art to give them the ability to discriminate between creative license, fact, and fiction?

Without evolving art or literature, stuck in a dead loop of culture, mathematics is a dead letter anyway. Because even if you do produce something miraculous and brilliant, it will be instantly absorbed and no one will ever understand it.

Gradient descent got us into this mess..which shows how lazy people have become. Gradient descent should not really be able to solve anything new. People want candy. Mathematicians should focus on finding a way out of the current problem. I'm not a mathematician, I'm an artist and coder and musician. I already have to deal with daily requests to "fix" terribly written AI code and so-called art. Now it's your turn. My guess is that there's likely some kind of quantum proof of work that evades LLM manufacture, that we profit from as creatures who survive in our Everett verse. Go find the way to reduce that so we can rid ourselves of this scourge.

My trick to solving those things, by the way, is to talk to myself out loud until I fall asleep, then have a metaphorical dream that I have to analyze, and then the answer is suddenly clear. I never doubt that I will get to the answer, but it can take days or weeks... you have to trust that your mind will get there.

I still believe in this, because it produces self-reliant, ultra-high-performing people, and if your goal is e.g. to have your lineage survive and thrive, then that's what you would want. So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers, and we talk to our children like they're adults and have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down somehow.

Really, the only thing I'd like from low-pressure and low-performing people with too much time on their hands is for them to leave people like us alone, and go back to maxing out their credit cards, taking drugs, watching reality shows and crashing their cars, without thinking they're capable of judging people they'll never understand. But hey, that's the world we live in, and it's all sour grapes from them, so the main thing is to make sure they never get an upper hand no matter how many ill-behaved children they have.

That's the perspective from this side of that.

I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)

You don't have to abuse children for them to grow up into functioning and healthy adults. That simply is ideology not rooted in any kind of data.

There is a parenting style called authoritative (not authoritarian! Authoritarian is what you had to suffer through) that is characterized by both clear and unwavering secure attachment (i.e. the kid always knows it is loved and protected, even if it got a bad grade in school or did something stupid) and clear, well-communicated and understandable rules and high, but achievable performance targets.

signed, an educational science phd who never was punished for a bad grade in his entire time in school even once, yet developed the discipline of doing a part time phd while already working and being a parent anyway.

I grew up the same way. There was a lot of arguing—it rarely turned physical, but they didn’t take much interest in me, either. I had to sort out many of my own issues on my own. Fortunately, I had grandparents on one side of the family who loved me dearly and made me feel like I belonged. They also always encouraged me and supported my talents.

Now I have children of my own and think about this a lot—especially since my wife’s experience was similar, yet different. We decided to do things better with our kids, and we try to put that into practice every day.

Here’s something that crossed my mind: I’ve certainly achieved a degree of success in life, partly because I had to be very independent from a young age. If I wanted something, I had to take care of it myself—at least in most cases. But I’ve come to the conclusion that while my sons might turn out to be more "normies" or conventional, the psychological toll of that kind of upbringing—the low self-esteem and the lack of pride from one’s own parents—far outweighs those benefits.

I never said that we weren't loved or that basic affection was withheld.

We were expected to do beyond what we thought was our best, or else we would be disappointments to our parents. Would they still love us? Sure. Kick us out...? Not unless our responses involved gross insubordination. But we were called to explain ourselves as one would in a court of law.

What was at stake, and this is what I think you may misapprehend, was not parental love. It was parental respect.

In order for that to function, you actually have to love them and know that they love you. Otherwise you wouldn't give a shit whether they respected you.

Which is why withdrawing respect at times is not abuse, it's teaching someone how to conduct themselves.

Don't bring your dog collars around then

> as one would in a court of law.

such as this loud symptom, if you don't want the shame of it to outlive you. It's what you're looking for in fact. Your highly disagreeable post, followed by the very reasonable replies you wrote to the reactions it caused, is a hint you're still looking for that kind of stimulation. It's a form of self-punishment.

Edit: clicked the profile, it's just a troll, lol. Joke's on me.

My childhood didn't suck at all. That's really a misinterpretation. Here's an example.

When I was 5 years old, my parents took me on the Concorde from New York to London. I remember the trip very well and learning what the Mach sign at the front of the cabin meant. The flight attendants gave me some neat models and stuff that I still have 40 years later.

A member of the British Parliament was sitting in the row behind us. Toward the end of the flight, he spoke to my father and said that he'd been worried about sitting in a row behind a child, but that he'd been listening to our conversation for two hours and had to comment on how much we'd talked about and how well I'd behaved.

Children do live up to your expectations of them, and you can talk to them as adults. None of this makes a childhood suck.

Guy grew up in Russia with no indoor plumbing, forced to drop out of school at 12, has 7 brothers and sisters killed in a genocide, flees conscription at 15, broke on a train to Holland then a boat to Argentina where he speaks no Spanish, ends up in America at 21 and becomes a Spanish translator, works as a cloth cutter and a bartender, buys a farm on a patch of arid desert, sends his kid to college, the first person in the family ever to go to college. Kid becomes a lawyer. Kid has kids and takes his children and his father on the Concorde, where they meet members of the British Parliament.

This man also locates and rescues his brother from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after WWII. Brother could barely speak. Brother marries woman he met in Auschwitz and has two children who are the next people in their family to go to college. They become doctors.

I grew up with this man. He believed in achievement and a human soul.

The news is this: Dismissiveness, anger and dejection do nothing.

With regard to my grandfather's style of expectations and parenting, it was less than my father's. A young man in my grandfather's village had hung himself after getting bad marks in school. My grandfather was afraid my father would hang himself if he pushed him too hard. He was gentler.

That seems very common and normal. Of you weren't influenced by your grandparents that is a reflection of something too.

The person I was replying to started the comment chain from an abhorrent position of Social Darwinism. Failing to see their privilege, and failing to distinguish their lives from their grandparents' is very common for people holding those opinions.

Attributing that success to strict parenting and hard work requires quite a lot of extra argument, which the thread starter does not have. Refusing humanity of people who were not on the flight, and did not achieve the same success, is something else entirely.

Being on the flight wasn't my achievement, it was my grandfather's and my father's. Having that type of achievement to emulate may in fact be a form of privilege, but what would you do, strip the world of it entirely?

I've just been sucked into the same online shitstorm as everyone else, I guess. I'm posting right now directly after reading tonight's clickbait about the woman who got sentenced for child abuse for letting her 5 year old kid walk a few blocks alone in a gated community. Transposing that to all this, it makes me think about what impacted me, my family and my cohort and allowed us to be self-sufficient, and further, the whole commentary demonstrates that such things are perceived by a good chunk of the population as "abuse" when they're really tools you need to give your children which other people would love to deprive you of giving to your children. I am an example of someone who would be nothing without the framework of expectations and responsibilities I was given at an early age (including at times radical freedom that I had to use judiciously or else face extreme disappointment) so I'm speaking in defense of that style of parenting.

But as to why I'm here writing in the middle of the night, it's pretty much on myself and my own addictions. I should be doing something more productive.

Blame the game, not the player! In today's kind spirit of early-internet you're also not a dog on the internet communities, there you go...

No warranty granted or implied: A bit of sarcosine in the morning, and a bit more glycine at night I say. :-)

But if your definition of success is remotely related to any form of leadership, then your suggestions are extremely flawed. To be a good leader, you need to manage people, have empathy, sympathy, tact, charisma, and so on.

Adding to that - many things in the real world end up being a mix of both, which means you need both to get to the top. Tom Brady or Michael Jordan don’t become the best in the world by being assholes to their teammates. Significant political / activist figures don’t start movements by belittling people. And so on.

Which means that the attitude you’re displaying here really kind of locks you into the upper middle class overachiever definition of success as a doctor, lawyer, etc. and not into the class of the truly successful.

It's okay that you didn't turn out to be that magnanimous, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you tried as hard as you could

You had more in your humanity tank than you knew you had

I've got lots in the humanity tank.

I just reserve the right to speak honestly, and I'm also willing to have my mind changed. Lots of hypocritical assholes are magnanimous as a gesture. I'll spend 2 hours telling a homeless guy he's not Jesus and he's ruining his life and try to find him a job. I did that a couple nights ago. But that isn't magnanimity, fuck no. It's some kind of sheer Dostoevskyan desire to see humanity in everyone I meet because the token value of mine is only as good as theirs. That's how I define morality. Magnanimity can go to hell.

I felt very seen when I read this story of Nathaniel Hawthorne's https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/ebrand.html

It's about a man who left home on a journey because something was bothering him and he didn't stop investigating until he figured out what it was.

It turned out (spoilers!) that he regarded his fellow men at an arm's length. He saw himself apart

I am of that kind and it causes me great pain. If I'm reading you right it seems you feel yourself in the thick of it with everyone. I hope you do not take that feeling for granted

Thus my girlfriend, who's a bleeding heart bless her, took serious offense at my conversation with the homeless guy who thought he was Jesus. In her mind, the righteous thing would have been to hand him a dollar and say nothing, because he's merely a victim of his circumstances. She accused me of trying to humiliate him or make myseld better than him by asking him why he was dragging this misery around like a cross. She berated me for it, because in her view of herself, being a good person in society means something different than it does to me.

I took it under consideration that maybe, the way I choose to immerse myself is too self-aggrandizing. I ran into the homeless guy a couple nights later and he asked for a cigarette. I apologized to him if I'd been intrusive or tried to judge him. He sat down and told me he didn't mind at all, he's trying to get off the street and off drugs and he doesn't have a lot of long conversations with people.

Neither one of us was right, me or my girlfriend... and to your point, a lot of times I really do just want to keep society at arm's length. But then I don't filter myself when I want to say something potentially offensive, and suddenly I'm in the whirlwind of the lives around me.

It really is two sides of the same coin, because the sicker you are of the world the more you either divorce from it or engage with it... and a lot of times you want to do both.

I saved the story to read. Thanks for the genuine response to what I wrote.

It's Poe's Law in action. We can't tell if you're unhinged enough to post that or you're imitating people who would post that to make fun of them.

No one hates so bitterly as the lazy and poor contemplating the energetic and prosperous. --Dale Worley

you sound like a cunt, seriously, and have no idea what this attempt at stepping back tells about you. That makes you transparent, really any shrink would be like "ah yes, of course, that was to be expected". It's the only reason I'm replying back (no downvotes though, those are for spam). We get it you absorbed sadism from your parents. Why don't you tell us about the other side as well, all these moments of astheny when you're not flamboyant but ashy?

I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.

Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.

When I was a teenager I really thought their demands were unfair.

When I was a dropout and a taxi driver in my 20s, I blamed my parents.

When I became a millionaire based on finding something I loved and doing it very well, even though they disapproved and didn't support me in it, I finally was able to thank them for giving me the intellectual tools to do that for myself.

And interestingly, unexpectedly, they finally respected my choices as well.

Life without a struggle is meaningless.

My brothers, worth noting, are far far more interesting and successful than I am... I'm still a dropout loser to them. Megacorps and politics are their games.

Our father had a thing about no television and only books. We had to read 50 pages a night of a book he chose, after school, and report to him what we had read. Every night. No video games either, and computers only if you were writing your own code.

My eldest brother was severely dyslexic. He had a very hard time reading 50 pages a night. He found all kinds of ways to fake it. He makes $20 million a year now, give or take, as a senior law partner, still faking it. Tell me that ain't a good story.

I guess I'm happy. I can't complain. I need more challenges.

I think that's a really awesome honest answer. I find it very cool you're still looking for challenges and setting the terms yourself. I wish you the best life ever possible.

I've had this feeling for a long time that the more things I own, the more time I waste dealing with things instead of creating and living life. Stuff is this ever-growing entity that drags you down. I don't buy stuff. I actually don't have a dresser in my closet. I have a carry-on suitcase on the closet floor that I keep all my clothes folded in, after owning the same house for 8 years. But I have a girlfriend, and therefore there's stuff everywhere. Stuff is just stress.

I know, that sounds mad.

That sounds like a recipe for long-term psychological complexes. I know plenty of high-achievers that don't constantly feel like they have to prove themselves. And I wish I didn't have to work so hard to challenge that feeling in myself.

The measure of whether it was done in the proper proportion, I think, is whether you find later in life that it was, on balance, a service to you.

Ime if you constantly need to prove yourself then you rarely feel this; when you do, the feeling is ephemeral.

> achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all

This feels circular. It assumes a value judgement about achievement which stems from your upbringing.

It is a value judgment. It's one that not everyone shares. It's surprising to me that a majority of people find it to be a controversial.

I think what's actually going on here in this thread is that people think any value judgment must be a bad thing. Right?

As far as I can make out, your argument goes like this:

Strict parenting is good because it produces high achievers. I think achievement is good because I was conditioned to think it was good. I was conditioned to think it was good as a result of strict parenting.

Effectively: strict parenting is good because I was strictly parented.

But to answer your question, yes, there are serious moral frameworks in which achievement (of the sort you mean) is neutral or even undesirable. From a Buddhist or Stoic standpoint, being attached to material achievement is as a source of suffering. For hedonists, achievement is only good insofar as it produces happiness. In care ethics, relationships matter much more than accomplishment. All of which is to say that it's not a self-evident truth that achievement is inherently good.

No need, they have videos.

It's my prerogative to determine, and it's fairly trivial to identify, the difference between someone who has trouble forming their thoughts into words, and someone who like this poster is clearly stating an antagonistic and divorced relationship with life itself.

I'm capable and free to judge. Your knee jerk reaction itself is highly suspicious and redolent of someone else who's going through a divorce with living.

You should always question your own interpretation. Yes. When you find some evidence that you may be misunderstanding someone, then yes, you should certainly default to giving them the benefit of the doubt and ask yourself whether you've misunderstood something. This is pretty basic ethics and rhetoric.

But the meaning of the poster was quite clear. It was absolutist, in fact, and it was nihilistic, derogatory and dismissive toward any notion of intrinsic human value. Wouldn't you agree?

My advice to you would be: When you find yourself intervening in a conversation to support something transparently antihumanistic and evil, by claiming without any basis or merit that the other party in the conversation is misunderstanding it, maybe you should assume that you're failing to understand something.

I don't need "soul" concept to describe the human experience, and if you use it to describe technology, it only makes things more confusing. It only ends up as an attempt to state that some things are not "good" because they don't match your own vague concept of what is good or bad, without explaining why nor what this is.

What's your point, other than that you are misunderstanding the word? It needs no mystical or religious basis. If you have ever played music with someone or shared a difficult experience with a random human/whale/dog/squirrel which transcended transactional or intellectual communication and which caused you to view their interior world as something more than a clockwork sum of parts and neurons, then this is what is meant by "soul". If you want to be purely technological and psychological about it, it's that which emerges from a layer of intelligence that exhibits what Freud would describe as superego. Something that AI does not yet have.

It's only a vague concept if you haven't experienced it.

I'm not saying a soul is given by God or that one needs to believe anything in order to find a soul in oneself. What I'm saying is that the poster's comment is darkness and hopelessness and a hatred for his own species rolled up into one, and that such a perspective is both painfully inexperienced and profoundly awful for the person and for whoever they are convincing or it, because life contains much more richness (religious or secular) than what is disdained by this person.

What you find condescending in my statement isn't that it's religious, it's that I'm willing to tell them that they're missing out on life. In that respect, I don't mind being condescending, because not all philosophies or ways of living lead to equally happy results.

A soul - and I mean this in the most atheistic, nonreligious sense you can imagine - is what you operationalize every single day when you're faced with hardship or any situation where you'd prefer not to be. It's also the dynamic that makes you feel joy in doing something beyond simple pleasure or happiness.

You know SQL? Think of "soul" as a view of the tables describing your intellectual and physical properties, left joined with your actions, which filters those actions that would otherwise not be simply mechanical or deterministic. Does that help?

What can you say besides "I don't feel a soul inside an LLM"? You don't feel it? OK, good for you, whatever.

I'm bothered by the exact quote you pulled from the article, although I didn't mention it, because it's reticent of a certain hypocritical hot take among founders and business/marketing types who can be "generous" toward their engineers because they believe that their own artistic contribution to the project is some messianic vision of it that far outweighs the quotidian questions about how it's actually built. I didn't really want to weigh in on what I felt was that tendency in the post, because I do work successfully with a lot of people like that and I often admire the sweat and work they put into their own side of running things... but those kinds of statements do come off as somewhat patronizing if they're not backed up by truly massive amounts of hard work.