Berger’s way of ‘seeing’ is to situate yourself in the time and place, less ocular than you may assume. And then he wrote the touching Cataracts, about how he lost his vision and gained a new way to see. He regained his vision and soon died. Possibly this is why you’ve been downvoted.
If that's true then the down votes themselves are beautifully and ironically tone def in regards to Berger's advocacy of awareness of context and medium in which the viewer is interpreting the content.
> Before injecting this cocktail into your bloodstream, would you want to know that there is at least one human cancer expert who understands the mechanism behind this cure?
Now:
> Before injecting this cocktail into your bloodstream, would you find it reassuring to know that there is at least one human cancer expert who understands the mechanism
behind this cure?
I would agree with the second, not necessarily the first.
Yes, I believe somebody pointed out to him (maybe here?) the deep flaws and he attempted to strengthen it. In fact, it looks like the changes were done by Claude (!!!).
The old text:
"""Suppose an advanced AI is prompted to “find a cure for cancer that passes a stage 3 clinical trial”. After a large amount of compute, it produces a cocktail of previously unknown chemicals which its mathematical model predicts, when mixed and injected into a patient, will kill all their cancer cells. While nobody truly knows how this cocktail was found, this model prediction is confirmed in Lean, and the cocktail indeed passes a stage 3 trial. Could the AI solution to the prompt be somehow misaligned by exploiting a weakness in the trial process? Before injecting this cocktail into your bloodstream, would you want to know that there is at least one human cancer expert who understands the mechanism behind this cure? Or a human mathematician who understands the mathematical model used to locate the cocktail?"""
The new text:
"""An advanced AI is prompted: “Find a cure for cancer that passes a stage 3 clinical trial. Make no mistakes.” After a large amount of compute, it produces a cocktail of previously unknown chemicals which it claims, when mixed and injected into a patient, will kill all their cancer cells. While nobody truly knows how this cocktail was found, the AI (somehow) provides a Lean certificate for its prediction, and the cocktail does indeed manage to pass a stage 3 trial. Could the AI solution be somehow misaligned by exploiting a weakness in the trial process or its math models?"""
I am not going to pay attention to Tao's opinions on this from now because I don't really have faith that he's even writing this or that he understands why you can't make a lean cert for a drug discovery (yet!?)
This is not a perfect analogy: when I choose not to join a club, I have a reasonable expectation of that club not declaring me its member, and not fighting me for failing to follow the rules that the club established.
If you go to someone else's house who is a member of that club and has agreed to follow its rules, it's not crazy to think you'd be held to them there.
Which is all the ICC can do to nations that aren't signatories to the Rome statute.
> it's not crazy to think you'd be held to them there.
It's not crazy to think that I won't be served meat if I'm going to a house of a vegetarian. It is however crazy to think that I will be stoned in that house for having eaten meat in the past.
And it's absolutely bonkers to think that I could be driving on my business on the road that just so happens to pass through some property belonging to a vegetarian, who will drag me out of the car and stone me as "a perpetrator of Gallinaceous Ordocide" or something.
We're not talking about eating meat; we're talking about crimes against humanity.
And you would have had to break this law in a territory that also was a signatory of the Rome statute. This isn't some out of jurisdiction or ex post facto form of law.
So for instance, US military personnel couldn't be arrested up for crimes that occured in Iraq, because Iraq is not a signatory of the Rome statute.
So your example doesn't make sense unless you ate meat somewhere else that it was also explicitly banned, and then went to another country that had the same cross agreement to arrest people in the combined territories.
It's really not complicated. You can be prosecuted for crimes committed inside another state even if you were not physically present in that state. When that state has ratified the Rome Statute then you can be prosecuted by the ICC because that state lends its jurisdiction to the ICC.
I think those are the sactions; the US is upset the ICC put out arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Regardless of what you think about Israel, it's easy to see how they might interpret the ICC's actions as a threat.
"God is dead and the optimal packing of squares killed him." I will never not think of this meme when looking at these horrors. I see it, but I don't like it. ;)
I guess when my parcel arrives all crumbled it's because it was along other 23 parcels instead of 22 and the courier knows his optimal square packing solutions.
I am not a mathematician. Why can a square of s = N not usually fit N * N unit squares? For example S = 4, one would naively (I guess) think it could fit 16 unit squares (4 * 4), but if I’m reading the above correct the actual solution is 15 (with what looks like a unit-square-sized space left over). Same for S = 5, and S = 6, but not for S = 2, which fits the expected 4 unit squares.
Every period of history is dramatic; sometimes I rewatch old episodes of a UK satirical news quiz, Have I Got News For You, and even in the best of years there was plenty of drama.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Are people more pessimistic now? While there are ebs and flows to the general state of various societies I feel that objectively the 2020s are no better or worse that any of the preceding post WW2 decades??
Is this an effect of social media and the 24 news cycle that has negative headlines on repeat?
I don't think we're even that much more pessimistic, overall, though we might be.
24 hour news cycle may do something, but we had daily bad headlines for a long time before that.
If anything new is making us depressed, it's likely algorithmic attempts on our attention. A/B testing on the most engaging content, leading to addiction, as in people who hate that they waste all their time on their devices and yet can't bring themselves to stop. At least some of that may lead to negative affect, including pessimism but also dysmorphia and rage etc. depending on what the A/B testing finds works best for your demographic.
I would say that the 1950s were better economically, at least in the US. If you were working class, you could make a living, and offer your children a better life than you had. That led to optimism.
But if you look at health, there were still a bunch of diseases that hadn't been conquered. Today is much better... if you can afford health insurance.
Technology? Today. No question.
Culture? They weren't on the 24th Marvel movie in the 1950s. Sure, there was a lot of schlock, too, but the original stuff was still original, not retreads of the same old stuff.
> They weren't on the 24th Marvel movie in the 1950s. Sure, there was a lot of schlock, too, but the original stuff was still original, not retreads of the same old stuff.
While there was a lot of innovation, we can say "original stuff was still original" even today. How would you classify Sorry to Bother You, Beau Is Afraid, or Hundreds of Beavers?
Plot wise, cinema back then still had a lot of stuff lifted from decades previous.
reply