You went from "I find it inconvenient" to "they're masochistic cultists" pretty quickly there. Ad hominem attacks are against site policy.
You've spawned a huge thread of people being incredibly self-righteous about the mind-boggling difficulty of sending email. It makes me think that it's actually a great filter to keep out people who prefer drama to clicking a few buttons that are different than the buttons they're used to clicking.
I understand that familiarity is a powerful driving force in human psychology, but really, it's not like it's that hard to learn a different flow. I mean, I've had to use Perforce, and while it's fun to complain, it really wasn't that hard. I didn't even have to get out of my chair.
First, thanks for taking the time to respond. Like I said, I do hope I'm wrong.
I will admit, this does seem like a pretty good use for computers.
I just I hope it's not part of the slippery slope to letting machines do our thinking for us. (Then again, what if they do a better job than we do!?)
I'm curious about how you detect and correct problems with the machine material? E.g. the (presumably automatic) error of substituting "phantom" for "fathom"?
Does your machine take a overconfident stance, or does it understand its own limits and help the child to know that it is not infallible?
s/phantom/fathom/ I assume your computer did that?
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I'd say computer programming is different than reading comprehension. Compiling is perfectly appropriate for a machine to give you feedback: the process is mechanical and the machine has good information.
> Teaching is a frustrating job...
Right: that's the problem to solve. (I'm assuming you're not talking about, er, having hired people to be teachers who don't actually want or enjoy the job, eh?)
> ...you have to make students repeat things over and over...
I would say that that's a obsolete method of teaching: in 2023 we know enough about memory now to teach mnemonics. But that's kind of a tangent.
> ...students ashamed and the teachers bored...
More symptoms of a broken system, IMO.
We have much better systems and techniques for education than we generally use now. (In my experience school (public school at least) functions more as a warehouse to keep kids out of the way, and any educational effects are secondary. That's the problem we should be trying to solve, with AI or anything else...)
My point is that computers and robots should do the scut work to free up the adults to do the important human activities like teaching our young.
I don't want to rain on your parade. I really hope I'm wrong. But I see this as somehow profoundly, deeply dystopian.
On the one hand, AI should be used to alleviate the economic and social conditions that prevent children from having attention and coaching from caring adults.
On the other, raising children by robot seems sketchy to me (in ways that are difficult to articulate.)
Second, I feel for you. This can't be fun, and it's not your fault.
Third, although I think I'm pretty squarely in your "target audience", if you will (Rust & SEL4!? Yes please!), my first reaction was "Oh well, too bad it will be cancelled before it goes anywhere."
Google has done this to themselves. There is a massive undertow against adopting anything Google makes. (I still sting from Reader, still, years later.) Stadia? Etc. Why bother?
Which brings me to my fourth and final point: Y U Googler? What I mean is, on the one hand no one is forcing you to work at Google? On the other hand when (sorry) IF they cancel this project are you going to continue to support it yourself? What is your personal stake in this project?
I'm willing to give you jtgans a break, but not Google.
For me, part of it is a simple fondness for understanding things and a separate but closely related joy in making things that "go", things that act "on their own" as it were. I always kind of assumed it was an innate propensity, a kind of natural monkey curiosity. I was always taking things apart as a little kid. They say I disassembled the clothes dryer one time, but I don't remember it.
I like it when something goes from being mysterious magic to a familiar tool. (Like compilers.) And it's even more fun when you can use your tools and knowledge to create some new useful or beautiful (or both) thing with them.
FWIW, depending on your applications, other modalities might be easier: fluidics or even clockwork logic. You'll never be as efficient and fast as silicon, of course.
Well, FWIW, Bucky considered himself to be working on behalf of all humanity. As an engineer he saw that working at the larger scale gave him the greater efficiency. (I.e. instead of heating and cooling individual buildings he proposed putting domes over entire cities!) In his lifetime he traveled the globe (~80 times around!) and was one of the most famous Americans in the world, in part because he was working on everyone's behalf.
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Anyway, you're right that standards of living have been going up globally, often with environmental degradation, but not always. For example, the revival of the Loess Plateu:
> the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project was launched in 1994[7] to rehabilitate the land and improve the people's livelihoods. The project guided the people living on the plateau to change animal husbandry practices; encouraged natural regeneration of grasslands, tree and shrub cover on slope-lands previously used for farming; and land restoration through terracing and replanting. These efforts allowed the perennial vegetation cover to increase from 17 to 34 percent, and "[e]ven in the lifetime of the project, the ecological balance was restored in a vast area considered by many to be beyond help"; in addition, more than 2.5 million people were lifted out of poverty by doubled incomes.[6]
> Restoration has occurred over an area of about 35,000 square kilometers (about 5% of the plateau's total area).[8] Results have reduced the massive silt loads to the Yellow River by about one percent.
An ecologically harmonious lifestyle is economically cheaper, both for
the household (in reduced expenses) and the surrounding economy (via
reduced degradation of "ecosystem services"[1].)
This, along with advances in technology, should result in massive
reduction of work required to maintain a given quality of life. E.g. a
24-hour work week, and the option to retire after working only a few
years.
One's leisure time would, presumably, be directed towards things like
spending more time with one's children, or participating in local
politics via concensus building[2] (the most expensive yet most efficient
form of government I suspect.)
FWIW, Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have this level of technology
by sometime in the 1970's. We did (e.g. transistor, atomic power), but
we have yet to engage our technology coherently to make it (a secular
utopia) happen.
I don't know how to get from here to there. It's mostly a people problem
and I'm not a people person.
I think you have to get some land, build some ecologically "green" houses
and infrastructure, rent it to folks much below market rate on the
understanding that they meet certain conditions (like you can't just move
out and sublet it on Airbnb or something.)
The idea is that the folks renting these eco-flats and apartments at ~70%
off market rate use the difference to live well.
To close the loop, at least some of them would be working to get more
land, build more eco-neighborhoods[3], and rent them out to more people.
And a certain amount of the collected rent would go to a fund to support
wild land conservation and ecosystem restoration.
You could build something like Park Merced[4] in San Francisco but
integrated with regenerative farms and a wildlife corridor.
[2] "Consensus decision-making or consensus politics (often abbreviated
to consensus) is group decision-making processes in which participants
develop and decide on proposals with the aim, or requirement, of
acceptance by all."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
[3] Christopher Alexander of "Pattern Language" fame has a site called
"Building Living Neighborhoods":
"Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of
belonging, places of health and well-being, and places where people will
want to live and work. This has become possible through the use of
Generative Codes, Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to
make possible conception and construction of living, beautiful
communities" https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm
> Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments.
> At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua.
(Nothing against Wayland, I'm just mentioning it to say something potentially useful to someone.)
I threw in the towel (on predicting the future) when Twitter became a thing. I remember reading a "Penny Arcade" comic about Gabe (or is it Tycho?) "micro-blogging" about his defecations, and being deeply puzzled. Pretty much my rule of thumb is, if you didn't predict Twitter you have no idea what's going on. Even Alvin Toffler didn't predict Twitter.
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FWIW, I think the sane response to complexity of modern society is a kind of physical conservatism, similar to how the Amish live (but with slightly more technology.)
The idea is that you rely on old highly-stable systems (not to be obscure but I'm talking about mimicking ecosystems for our fundamental needs: food, clothing, housing, [most] medicine) and then introduce carefully those aspects of our "modern space-age-a-go-go" civilization that are really indispensable and low-risk.
You're too kind. :-) I appreciate your conversation and reasonableness too.
And I agree with you,
> We need to get everything down on paper and start sorting it out, and then form opinions. And this applies to everything, not just psychedelics. If only people could figure out this incredibly simple idea.
I like to think we're getting there, but only time will tell, eh?
> It didn't sound like that's what you were pointing out, at all.
Sorry. I'll try to do better.
> This makes it sound like the mushroom is little more than a placebo.
Yeah, kind of. It has an effect, that's undeniable, but whether that effect results in a therapeutic outcome or a bad trip or just a fun time is not due the chemical. It's not like e.g. aspirin for headaches (FWIW that's still pretty mysterious too, but at least it's consistent.) The result of taking psilocybin depends on the "set and setting" (and a lot of other factors no doubt.)
> Can go wrong? Sure, so should be used with caution, like anything else powerful.
Look this is weird for me to say but no, I object to the normalization of getting high as a way to treat depression. There are other methods that are effective and safe.
> Are the insights and healing similar?
> Is the amount of effort similar?
> Is the likelihood of receiving insights similar?
> Is there trustworthy evidence suggesting high risk (likelihood and magnitude) of risk with psilocybin, and trustworthy evidence that there is lesser risk with <x>?
> I feel fairly certain the answer to most of these questions is something like: "We don't know, for sure, because there is very little evidence outside of anecdotal stories."
One of the strange and frustrating things is that every kind of healing modality with which I have personal experience (including Reiki, Feldenkrais, NLP, EFT, hypnosis, and others), every one of them is somehow "unreproducible" by at least some mainstream scientists, to put it mildly:
> Reiki is a pseudoscience,[1] and is used as an illustrative example of pseudoscience in scholarly texts and academic journal articles.
> There is no good medical evidence that the Feldenkrais method confers any health benefits. It is not known if it is safe or cost-effective,[2] but researchers do not believe it poses serious risks.
> EFT has no benefit as a therapy beyond the placebo effect or any known-effective psychological techniques that may be provided in addition to the purported "energy" technique.[3] It is generally characterized as pseudoscience and it has not garnered significant support in clinical psychology.
> The use of hypnosis in other contexts, such as a form of therapy to retrieve and integrate early trauma, is controversial within the medical or psychological mainstream.
I know from personal experience that the five things I just mentioned are pretty profound healing modalities. I have some theories, but really I don't know why science can't verify this stuff (at least so far.)
The whole problem (I'm pointing out) is that the bang is too potent and can go wrong. The kinds of insights and healing you get from e.g. Core Transformation Process or Feldenkrais Method may take longer but they're much safer and unlikely to have negative side-effects.
First, thank you! That paper is awesome, actual Scottish science. Cheers!
Second, I would never begin to deny that "the drug has a pretty powerful impact on your brain", because that would be stupid.
Third which "effect"? Your linked study "sought to investigate the acute brain effects of LSD in healthy volunteers", we're discussing psilocybin for major depression. So... what's up doc?
What I'm saying is that getting high is not the best available therapy for depression.