~ Borders of Infinity, Lois McMaster Bujold
(And what a beautiful little page - click the white spots on the map in the header, more trees and houses spring up)
I suspect the ability to post/apply for jobs with AI "to study ___" has played a part in getting us into our present predicament. If only one researcher did it, the results would be negligible, but if a significant number try it, all those negligibles add up.
"A new paper finds a different story in the archives of the lead author, Leon Festinger. Up to half of the attendees at cult meetings may have been undercover researchers. One of them became a leader in the cult and encouraged other members to make statements that would look good in the book."
To me 'boredom' is the sneakier driver :) A lot of “I want it to be aliens” reads less like evidence-following and more like novelty-hunger: reality feels stale, so we reach for a plot twist big enough to make everything mean something again. That impulse is exciting, but it’s also how you end up treating catastrophe (or salvation) as entertainment instead of responsibility.
The world is boring, and you are responsible. Live with it.
This should not be used in court today, but I do believe there is also a big component of cultural antibodies developing over time - and thus the study can't be replicated by definition.
In 1975 a sober high-quality source suddenly writing bait "BREAKING: politician SLAMMED diplomat on issue" would register as interesting. Now, people are constantly drowning in information presented that way.
"The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (Eric Hoffer, 1951)
https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-Movemen...
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/get-inspired-by-carl-sagan-s-am...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pc3IuVNuO0
The articles posted UFO cult study reference is part of the reading list. =3
"On Liberty" (John Stuart Mill, 1859)
https://gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm
"Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
"The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod, )
https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...
This goes for a lot of things that are utter bullshit. Lie detectors, handwriting, many others and the big bad bogeyman of the court: statistics.
Eyewitnesses being unreliable is one thing, but expert witnesses believing their own bs should be a liability if they are found to be wrong after the fact.
A problem may be real but you can't know what the resolution will be or when it will come, if ever. The problem (or feeling of doom or whatever) could disappear on its own without even being acknowledged. Also, you could have identified a valid symptom but not the root cause. You could die before the problem is acknowledged by others. The problem could just affect you and people like you and not be universal.
A related concept in economics is "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
If you think a UFO is coming to destroy you, you might be vaguely right in a metaphorical sense that a complex system (or some mysterious adversary) is coming to crush you and your tribe in the next few years due to mysterious reasons though it's not going to be a literal UFO, it may feel like a UFO because you can't fully explain the approaching force but you can feel it intensifying. Without sufficient info and intelligence, the mind will try to transform complex problems that it cannot fully grasp into simple concepts that it can understand and that you can react to and communicate with your tribe (that they can also understand).
A UFO may be a metaphor for a powerful, mysterious, hidden adversary whose capabilities you do not understand. In any case, the correct response is to prepare, hide and flee.
Yet there are savants with nearly perfect recall which has been tested multiple times. I strongly doubt there is a single model for memory or even a single mechanism for forming memories and as a result personal understandings of it poorly generalize across any random section of the population.
Yes "we" do. It's false. It's false not because it's a lie but because it's very poorly worded and under specified. Inside of a work attempting to communicate a highly specific idea it's a genuine mistake. It invites ambiguity and misunderstanding.
> 99.9% of people
Good for them. What's the point here? Are you attempting to bully me by suggesting I'm not part of your crowd?
> in the spirit in which it was written.
Uh huh. And what spirit are you writing in?
It's interesting that the proliferation of cell phone cameras has not improved the quality of UFO reports much.
Nor has the availability of automatic UFO-spotting cameras.[1] They pick up drones, flocks of birds, and the International Space Station. But no good UFO shots.
LINEAR and GEODSS, which find near-earth objects and satellites using a pair of large telescopes at each site, have been running for decades, somehow don't seem to be picking up UFOs.
[1] https://www.space.com/spotting-ufos-sky-hub-surveillance
Super interesting to see the original research challenged.
I think but do not know that we'll have higher level work that sits atop it.
I don't know if/when we won't be needed to orchestrate that work.
I'm worried that if we don't have open source models that are up to par with the work-automating models that we'll have a rosy future. One of my biggest fears right now is big capital owning all the big models and infra. And that one day, they'll own all the labor.
Now, however, I don't think that we have that option. Pretty much everyone in tech was coerced to board a single boat of commercial AI.
My concern is what happens if it hits an iceberg. It's not like we can go back to pre-LLMs now.
