Toddlers do not actually start with a highly advanced "superchimpanzee" mind. Instead, adults project their own mature logic and thinking onto a child’s simple, playful actions.
> "The basic topic of my address today concerns how much of cognition is in the head of the infant and how much in the mind of the theoretician. My general stance is that we are being treated to an interpretive flavor of infant behavior that is much too rich."
Armchair philosophy without empirical data is just stuck in a loop of endless thought experiments. LLMs basically nuked the Chinese Room argument out of existence.
John Searle treated understanding like some magical binary property you either have or you dont. LLMs proved that understanding isnt a static noun, it is an emergent phenomenon.
Human spoken conversation doesn’t really work like file buffering.
People can tolerate missing words surprisingly well. If a phrase is slightly clipped, masked by noise, or dropped, the listener can often infer it from context. That happens constantly in real speech.
But pauses and stalls are much more damaging. A sudden freeze in the middle of speech breaks turn-taking, timing, and attention. It feels like the speaker stopped thinking, the connection died, or the system got stuck.
For voice UX, a tiny omission is often less harmful than a perfectly complete sentence that freezes halfway.
I think this conflates atheism with a much stronger form of causal rationalism.
Dawkins-style atheism is not “reject anything without a complete causal model.” It is a rejection of hypotheses with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and unlimited ad hoc flexibility — like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Consciousness is different. It is first a phenomenon, not an already-settled causal model. We do not believe humans, infants, or animals are conscious because we possess a complete mechanism for subjective experience. We infer consciousness from a cluster of phenomena that need explanation.
So the lack of a full causal account warrants caution, not denial. It is reasonable to say current AI gives weak evidence for consciousness. But that is not the same as saying AI consciousness is equivalent to believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The anxiety surrounding AI-generated "slop" mirrors the frantic warnings of late 15th-century clerics who viewed the printing press as an engine of spiritual decay. Johannes Trithemius, a prominent Benedictine abbot, famously argued that monk-scribes should not abandon their pens, fearing that printed books were ephemeral, error-ridden toys that would undermine the sanctity of scripture and the discipline of the mind. He believed that the sheer volume of cheap, mechanical texts would drown out genuine wisdom and lead to a permanent decline in the quality of human thought.
History shows he fundamentally misunderstood the human capacity for adaptation. Rather than succumbing to a sea of printed garbage, society developed sophisticated new filters. We invented the modern bibliography, the peer-review process, the concept of a "trusted publisher," and the critical literacy skills required to navigate a world where information was no longer a rare luxury. Humans have an innate drive to seek out signal over noise. Just as the chaos of the early printing era eventually gave way to the Enlightenment, our current struggle with synthetic content will likely trigger a new evolution in how we verify truth and value human insight.
The concept of a valuable service falls apart if players can influence the actual event. Without equal footing and basic honesty, you aren't measuring reality so much as you are subsidizing those with the power to manipulate it.
The logistical nightmare of hydrogen makes its production price almost irrelevant. Using surplus wind energy for carbon capture to create synthetic fuels is much smarter because these liquids are compatible with our current global infrastructure. You bypass the need for expensive new pipelines and specialized tanks entirely. By binding green hydrogen into a stable synthetic hydrocarbon, you get a fuel that is easy to move, has high energy density, and won't leak through solid steel.
Solid state batteries are overhyped because their production complexity makes them a pricing nightmare for the average consumer. Sodium ion batteries are the practical choice for short distance transport because they are affordable and charge incredibly fast.
When it comes to long distance shipping or aviation, the energy density of liquid fuel is simply too hard to beat. Fossil fuels will stay dominant for decades, likely evolving into carbon captured or bio derived alternatives rather than being replaced by batteries.
Dismissing massive capital expenditure as "hypeland" ignores the historical reality that speculative bubbles often build the physical foundation for the next century. The Panic of 1873 saw a catastrophic evaporation of debt-driven capital, yet the "worthless" railroads built during that frenzy remained in the ground. That redundant, overbuilt infrastructure became the literal backbone of American industrialization, providing the logistics required for a global economic shift that far outlasted the initial financial ruin.
Divorcing research from "learning by doing" is a recipe for a bureaucratic ivory tower. If you only funnel money into pure research without the messy, expensive, and often "wasteful" reality of large-scale deployment, you end up with an economy of academic metrics rather than industrial power.
The most damning evidence against the "research-only" model is the birth of the Transformer architecture. It did not emerge from an ivory tower funded by bureaucratic grants or academic peer-review cycles; it was forged in the fires of industrial practice.
History shows that a fixation on immediate social utility or "rational" cost analysis can be a strategic trap. During the same era, Qing Dynasty bureaucrats employed your exact logic, arguing that the astronomical costs of industrialization and rail were a waste of resources better spent elsewhere. By prioritizing short-term stability over "expensive" technological leaps, they missed the industrial window entirely. Two decades later, they faced an industrialized Japan in 1894 and suffered a total collapse. The "waste" of one generation is frequently the essential infrastructure of the next.
Focusing exclusively on the physical decay and replacement cycle of hardware is a classic case of tunnel vision. It ignores the fact that the semiconductor industry’s true value lies in the evolution of manufacturing processes and architectural design rather than the lifespan of a specific unit. While individual chips eventually become obsolete, the compounding breakthroughs in logic and efficiency are what actually drive the technological revolution you are discounting.
Dismissing "objective probability" is a convenient philosophical retreat that strips Polymarket of its only legitimate function. If the market isn’t an attempt to aggregate information toward a binary, external "ground truth," then it isn't a forecasting tool—it’s a "Keynesian Beauty Contest" where people bet on what they think others believe rather than what will actually happen.
Without an objective anchor to measure against, concepts like "mispricing" or "alpha" become logically impossible; you cannot have a "wrong" price if you don't believe a "right" probability exists. If we accept that the market signal is just a reflection of whale liquidity and "Persian bribes" rather than a calculated proximity to reality, then the platform is merely a math-washed gambling hall. Ultimately, a prediction market that abandons the pursuit of objective truth loses its epistemic utility and its entire reason to exist.
Reality might stop a transaction, but it cannot kill a drive. Sublimation reroutes our infinite hunger into the scientist’s obsession or the artist’s lifelong pursuit of beauty. These are not finite market choices. They are the redirection of a psychic energy that no physical object can ever satisfy.
This redirection is precisely what fuels the expansion of the global economy into realms far beyond basic survival. When a primal drive is blocked by the cost of a physical object, it sublimates into the high-end art market, the pursuit of scientific breakthroughs, or the infinite scroll of digital entertainment. Entire industries exist solely to harvest this redirected energy.
The "PS5" analogy fails to account for how "useless" hardware often triggers the next paradigm shift. For decades, traditionalists dismissed high-end GPUs as expensive toys for gamers, yet that specific architecture became the accidental engine of the AI revolution.
> "The basic topic of my address today concerns how much of cognition is in the head of the infant and how much in the mind of the theoretician. My general stance is that we are being treated to an interpretive flavor of infant behavior that is much too rich."
—— Who put the cog in infant cognition? Is rich interpretation too costly? https://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Haith_Critique%20of%20Cogn...