>We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.
I feel like you haven't read Exodus because it describes in detail the early Israelites' predilection for idolatry.
>We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).
The Exodus narrative explicitly describes the early Israelites flocking to worship idols like that.
>Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology
Most critiques of AI are based on experience with the cheapest AI available a year ago, by midwits unable to recognize that AI's performance on the Putnam, IMO and bar exam makes it far smarter than they are by almost every metric that was traditionally used to measure intelligence.
People misinterpreted Google being behind as Anthropic and OpenAi being really ahead, when it was really just Google falling behind the same way it did with Tensorflow, Angular and GCP.
>Its remarkable how Anthropic is able to maintain their edge against all competition. Anyone have any idea what the secret sauce is that has Anthropic at the top of all leaderboards for the past few years?
It's self-reinforcing: they've got the best coding/research model, which helps them to improve their models better than the competition so they stay ahead.
Fortunately the US has not only freedom of speech in the constitution but also tens of millions of armed civilians that place a hard limit on how much control the government can have over people's speech. The only reason the Chinese government can achieve such control over speech is because it can disappear anyone who speaks against it.
It doesn't even need guns; Nepalese youth managed to stop social media censorship there just by going to the political capital and threatening to beat the MPs to death.
>This is an individual solution to a systemic problem. On a personal level, it is possible to solve such problems
I.e. it's only a problem if you're not willing to go and strike up conversations with people. Which is not AI or mobile phones' fault. Expecting society to come up with "systemic situations" to your personal problems is a fast path to a lifetime of disappointment.
There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius: "Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers". People who just believe whatever they read in books don't actually learn to think, just to regurgitate, and often become out of touch with how the world actually works (although this happens to heavy consumers of any kind of fiction).
Even in the 1800s the literacy rate in the US was over 50% (the highest in the world), because it was founded by "sola scriptura" Protestants for whom Bible reading was a religious duty.
>the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
>Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement.
Not really. South American countries don't go to war with each other and they don't have a union. Nor do central American countries.
>Somehow you seem to imply none of those things are happening right now in Europe, is this really your perspective? You think no one is thinking about domestic energy supplies? Do you not understand how EU works? Lots of things are happening in parallel, not the least a lot of work around energy dependency and other core infrastructure issues.
"The purpose of a system is what it does". So far there's no sign of any progress, it's just getting worse. The Draghi report was two years ago and nothing has been done to address the issues it raised.
>Communism, in its classical sense, seeks public or common ownership of the means of production and the abolition of private ownership of major productive assets
That's the eventual mathematical outcome of the new Dutch tax on unrealized capital gains, which combined with the fact that the tax system treats inflation as real gains means that over time the state will come to own all productive assets.
More likely it just slowly declines like Japan. Or if anti-migrant sentiment continues growing at the current rate, it breaks into a race war when the AfD and PFN win the majority of votes in Germany and France respectively.
>AI feels to me like having access to someone who got a D in literally every single course offered at a university. If you don't know anything about the subject they are smarter than you. If you do know the subject, its unsettling how bad they are. Basically the Gell-Mann effect:
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face when AI's capable of matching the best human students on the hardest exams we have, like the IMO, the Putnam and the bar exam. I can only assume you've only ever used the free tier of any AI service.
I feel like you haven't read Exodus because it describes in detail the early Israelites' predilection for idolatry.