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.

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.

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.

Yeah honestly, if you’re only looking at the campaigns that led to overthrow of the government or territorial liberation then it should be somewhat self evident that nonviolent campaigns have better outcomes. They lead to less death and less destruction of infrastructure which is desirable for whatever comes next. Unfortunately, that’s not always an option for people seeking liberation.

Haha speak for yourself. Understanding the underlying mechanics makes it obvious what comes next and I kind of wish we could just skip that part. 😅

I’d say Taiwan serves US geopolitical interests beyond just chip manufacturing. It exists as a separate political entity thanks to the US who intervened in the Chinese civil war to protect Chiang Kai-shek’s military dictatorship. The PRC wants to remedy what they perceive as the consequences of foreign interference in China’s political affairs. That enables the US to use their support for Taiwanese independence as leverage in their attempts to suppress China’s economic rise.

Let’s be fair, the ROC under the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek was far from democratic despite their claim to Sun Yat-sen’s legacy.

While no party in Taiwan is openly in favor of reunification, there are major parties like the KMT and the TPP that are in favor of building a closer relationship with mainland China. Combined they are currently polling higher than the DPP which is considered to be the “pro independence” party.

So while I would agree that peaceful reunification is not possible in the near term, i think changes in the geopolitical dynamics between the US and China could make it more likely.

I suspect China believes it can outpace the economic growth of Taiwan in the long run. If Taiwan’s business elites start to think they’re missing out on that growth by opposing reunification, then you’ll see a political shift in Taiwan.

They were actually banned from reddit for posting “John Brown was right” memes implying that the radical abolitionist was correct to kill slaveowners. They can be excessive and annoying but they’re certainly not fascists.

I somewhat agree. I do take issue with the notion that the Nordic working class has been bought off though. That makes it sound like they’re conscious advocates of imperialism which I don’t think is generally true. Rather I’d argue that free from hyper exploitation, they can’t develop a meaningful class consciousness. As such, it’s difficult for them to see how their long term interests are put at risk by the capitalist system and how a socialist system could maintain their high standard of living without requiring imperialism.

I doubt the Nordic working class are receiving a meaningful share of the value stolen through imperialist means. Instead, I think the Nordic bourgeoisie are able to accumulate wealth without having to hyper exploit their local populations thanks to imperialism. This ameliorates the local class antagonisms and creates the superficial appearance that a capitalist system can maintain a stable high standard of living for the working class.

Of course, if imperialist exploitation can no longer ameliorate said antagonisms, class conflict will re-erupt in Nordic countries. The danger here is that parts of the working class may be convinced that their standard of living is predicated on imperialist conquest which is the basis for fascism. The good thing is I don’t actually think that’s true. A more reliable way for Nordic workers to maintain their standard of living would be for them to suppress the interests of their local bourgeoisie and transition to an actually socialist model.

Saying the Democrats control the republicans is silly but saying that they use the republicans as a threat to stay in power is indisputable. They literally funded pro trump candidates in republican primaries under the assumption they would be easier to beat in the general election.

Most places in the US developed in a similarly shitty way thanks to the logic of American capitalism. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t ethnic and cultural diversity.

I think part of the problem is that US media generally accepts the US state department’s interpretation of Chinese foreign policy. That makes it difficult to interpret China’s aims since it’s buried under pro US bias.

Personally, I think the Chinese government appears relatively predictable if you can parse various global sources including the actual statements China publishes. Granted that’s a bit more difficult since it means accounting for all the biases of each source.

The GSI is not a reliable index. The Walk Free initiative that publishes the GSI doesn’t use a consistent methodology for every country and will also uncritically accepts reports of human trafficking from unreliable sources.

For example, their report on China includes unverified claims of harvesting organs from members of the Falun Gong, a right wing cult operating out of the US. The Falun Gong also operates the Epoch Times which is a far right conspiratorial newspaper that has promoted Qanon, antivax propaganda, and claims of election fraud in the 2020 US presidential election. You can not trust their testimony on faith alone and yet that’s what Walk Free did.