You’re betraying your ignorance of how biology works and illustrating that you have absolutely no business debating this subject.

Have some humility and willingness to learn.

Efficiency is not the primary fitness function for evolution, it’s survivability.

I didn’t say it was the primary function. I guess all that talk about straw men was just projection. You don’t trust me, fine. Then what about Darwin who literally said, “Natural selection is continually trying to economize every part of the organization.” Now please go and read some introductory texts on biology before trying to explain to me why Darwin is wrong. There’s so much going on when it comes to the thermodynamics of living systems and you’re clearly not ready to have a conversation about it.

Here’s a concrete example for you of just how much of the brain isn’t actually essential for normal day to day function.

You’re baseless assuming that hydrocephalus causes the brain to lose a substantial amount of its complexity. Where is the evidence for that? In most of these cases it seems much of the outer layers of the cerebral cortex are in tact. It’s also really telling that your citation’s first source is an article titled “Is Your Brain Really Necessary” which is followed in the Journal by another article entitled “Math and Sex: Are Girls Born with Less Ability?”. But hey neuroscience hasn’t really advanced at all since 1980 right? The brain is totally redundant right? There’s no possible way a critical and discerning person such as yourself could have been taken in by junk science, right?!!

That’s literally the whole context for this thread, it just doesn’t fit with the straw man you want to argue about.

I took issue with specific statements you made that stand apart from the rest of your comment. That’s not a straw man. Although honestly this is on me. What can I expect from someone who thinks LLMs and the Human Brain are operating on similar principles? You’re so wound up in a pseudoscientific fiction there’s nothing I can do. You might as well start believing in the astrology, crystals, and energy healing. At least those interests will make you seem fun and quirky instead of just an over confident tech bro.

The straw man is you continuing to argue against equating LLMs with the functioning of the brain, something I never said here.

I’m not claiming you ever said they functioned exactly the same way. Im simply stating that you’re way off base when you claim that they appear to operate using the same principles or that all evidence suggests the human mind is nothing more than a probability machine. That’s not a straw man. You literally said those things.

There is zero evidence that all the complexity of the brain is inherent to the way our reasoning functions.

You’re betraying your own ignorance about neuroscience. The complexity of the brain is absolutely linked with its ability to reason and we have plenty of evidence to show that. The evolutionary process does not just create needless complexity if there is a more efficient path.

Again, we don’t have a full understanding of how the brain accomplishes tasks like reasoning. It may be a lot more complex than what LLMs do, or it may not be. We do not know.

This is such a silly statement especially when you’ve been claiming that both the brain and AI appear to work using the same principles. If you truly believe the mind is such a mystery then stop making that claim.

You decided to ignore that to focus on braying about tech companies and LLMs instead.

I don’t really care about your arguments concerning embodiment because they’re so beside the point when you just blowing right by the most basic principles of neuroscience.

I bring up tech companies because they’ve had a massively distorting effect on how many computer scientists think the world works. You’re not immune to it either simply because you’re a critic of capitalism. A ruthless criticism of that exists includes the very researchers whose work you’re taking at face value.

our brains appear to work on similar principles.

Sure in the same way that a horse and a motorcycle operate on similar principles and serve the same function.

Maybe try engaging with that instead of writing a wall of text arguing with a straw man.

Where the straw man? You’ve missed my point entirely. LLMs and the human mind operate on categorically different principles. All the verbiage used to describe neural network models has little to do with how the brain actually works. That’s honestly wasn’t a problem until Tech companies started purposely misusing those terms and now far too many people seem to think “AI” is something it’s not.

All the evidence suggests that our own minds are also nothing more than probability engines.

This completely understates the gulf between what we call AI and how the human brain actually works. The difference is so severe that acting as if they’re quantitatively comparable is basically pseudoscience. You might as well start claiming that we’re not far off from building a Dyson sphere just because we invented solar panels.

Most “AI” these days are built using linear feed forward networks. The brain is constructed using nonlinear recurrent networks which are can do far more with less. Now you could theoretically create the same output from a linear feed forward network but it’s way less efficient and would require many more neurons to achieve such a result. Which is wild when you consider that there are orders of magnitude more synapses in just the regions of the brain associated with language than there are parameters used in even today’s most advanced “AI” models. Now consider that human synapses rely on over a hundred qualitatively different neurotransmitters and not just a single 16-bit number. It’s also not just the scale of the signal that transmits information in a human synapse but the pattern too. Would you be surprised to know that there are a whole variety of signaling patterns neurons use? Because that’s true too. I haven’t even gotten into the differences in complexity in terms of how neurons process the information they receive. As of now there is no “AI” system that comes anywhere close to replicating that kind of complexity. It’s absurd to suggest where dealing with qualitatively similar machines here.

Kind of telling to be complaining about this on a day which celebrates the end of slavery.

It could be the business was borderline insolvent and cash from the checks acted as a short term loan from Walmart.

That or he was trying to create the create the illusion of cash flow in order to get the business to qualify for certain kinds of loans. The money from the loans he could subsequently embezzled. Then if the company went bankrupt the creditors would be at a loss.

If you end up integrating LLMs in a way where it could impact patient care that’s actually pretty dangerous considering their training data includes plenty of fictional and pseudo scientific sources. That said it might be okay for medical research applications where accuracy isn’t as critical.

I think you might be underestimating the number of democrats that are also war hawks who want to bomb Iran.

Vincent Bevins the author of The Jakarta Method actually wrote a book about why the protest movements of the last few decades rarely achieved their stated goals. It’s worth checking out.

Not really. The overwhelming majority of those protests were peaceful. However the media latched on to the few cases where riots broke out which is pretty much what they always do.

It really depends on how far both sides are willing to escalate.

Israel appears to be emboldened for a variety of reasons. Nobody is stopping their genocide. Hezbollah is on its back foot. Netanyahu sees political gain in a war with Iran. Trump is reckless enough to not reign Israel in.

However, Israel cannot wage all out war without the backing of the US. Iran knows this which is why I think their responses to past Israeli attacks have been fairly measured. These attacks are a serious escalation though and it’s hard to say how Iran may decide to respond.

If they seriously think the US is ready to back Israel in an all out war then we’re going to face consequences globally. Iran has the capacity to obliterate much of the middle east’s oil infrastructure, which the US is heavily invested in. That could cause energy prices to spike and create all kinds of downstream havoc for the global economy.

I kind of suspect things were always too big and complex for one person to address but the rampant individualism of our society obscures that history.

“I trust the United States government and so should you!” -Alphane Moon

How’s that relevant? Do you have counter evidence for any of the points I made or are you just desperately trying to prove you’re not a dupe?

I do check out RFE/RL and its sister outlets from time to time. It’s pretty obvious that their agenda aligns 1 for 1 with American foreign policy objectives. To be fair though, the US wouldn’t fund RFE/RL if it didn’t effectively dupe people into believing it was an unbiased source.

I think you mean it’s designed to prevent partisan interference. RFE/RL’s purpose is to support US foreign policy which makes it inherently political. It is undeniably a propaganda outlet and therefore comparable in function to RT. You may trust American propaganda over Russian propaganda but that doesn’t mean the former is not propaganda.

What an absurd response. This is akin to saying RT isn’t Russian state propaganda.

I doubt the person you’re replying to would disagree that the advent of capitalism is in fact what brought liberal democracy into existence. The point though is that such progress is unsustainable under a capitalist system and that it will result in various crises, war, and fascism. Therefore we do need to find a way to move past capitalism if we want even the possibility of creating a better world.

Growth isn’t a problem when it’s sustainable. However, there are natural limits to how far and how fast technological development and resource extraction will allow us to grow the economy.

Additionally, competition within capitalism forces the wealthy to seek out any and all means of growth. If they do not they actually risk all of their wealth becoming devalued. This drives innovation but it also is the driver of imperialism, exploitation, environmental degradation, all of which grow the economy.

When growth because less attainable due to various natural constrains, the wealthy start to cannibalize the systems that keep society stable. Again, they can’t help themselves. If they don’t their class position is threatened as some other capital owner beats them to the limited profits that come from privatization and austerity.

This usually results in mass unrest across all the various classes in society. That includes some of the middle classes who also rely on exploitation to maintain their standard of living. In response to threat of social unrest, the wealthy usually align themselves with right wing authoritarians that claim to be able to bring order to the chaos and renew growth through imperial expansion. This kind of politics is often supported by some of the downwardly mobile middle classes. That’s how we get fascism.

It stands for Democratic Socialists of America. They’re a member run left wing political group which grew rapidly after Bernie’s 2016 run. AOC is a member and up until recently she had maintained the endorsement of the national organization. After her surprise win in the 2018 primary, she has not been actively involved with DSA. As such, this outcome isn’t all that surprising.