> Trump called for investigation and arrest on Comey, Cheney, Powell, ... despite the fact that they never crossed the line in expressing their criticism to Trump's decisions.
I'm not a fan of Trump's governance, but none of those people were investigated for "criticizing Trump's decisions".
> This has never happened in Europe.
Poland: The "Lex Tusk" Commission (2023)
Hungary: The Sovereignty Protection Office (2023)
Ukraine: Viktor Yanukovych vs. Yulia Tymoshenko (2011)
Turkey: Erdoğan vs. Ekrem İmamoğlu
Romania: Investigating the Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor (2018)
France: The "Clearstream Affair" (2004)
> How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.
1. Insults are subjective. If you don't see the problem with criminalizing subjective opinions, then I don't know what to tell you.
2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions while simultaneously claiming that speech is freer in Europe.
> Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".
You've lost the plot. The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians, your rebuttal was that the way they did it was idiotic, which directly implies that you're ok with criminalizing idiocy even when the criticism is legitimate. Your reply here is a complete red herring.
> Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based:
This does not follow. Literally.
> This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid.
It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests. I don't know where you got the idea that it has to be a conspiracy.
> Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.
This is also delusional, and frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this (not only researcher bias, publication bias, hiring bias, and more).
> When, at the same time, "normal" people have absolutely no problem criticizing politicians in a "normal" way.
So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.
As for examples, the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people (section 185), and insulting politicians has even harsher penalties (section 188). There are hundreds of articles covering cases, just ask any AI for a summary.
> So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.
In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense, even if it does not harm anyone, in the tort sense?
> Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.
And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
> politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"".
That isn't really happening. No one's career is being ruined by having to rewrite grant proposals to remove DEI language, because previous policy required DEI language. The restructuring of academic funding and incentives is frankly long overdue. Everyone, including scientists, has been complaining about grant funding and the skewed incentives in academia, like publish or perish. You often have to break a system before it can be fixed.
I'd say that one data point is not enough to object to, except if what's depicted is literally impossible, like the AI generated images of a female pope. Beyond those, the distribution of a set of generated images is what implies likely bias.
> In Europe, criticizing any politician is very very common.
Criticizing politicians has gotten people arrested in Europe. This doesn't happen in the US.
> As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.
This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?
> I didn't see them defining "for everybody" what low/high morality are.
Morality by definition is a set prescriptions that everyone ought to follow.
> this whole "I am so smart I cannot see right and wrong" is a totally transparent, low-IQ, and low-morality schtick.
The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.
> The child knows how to catch the ball, without understanding.
I disagree that decoupling "knowing" from "understanding" is well motivated or useful in any way.
> I don't think that it is useful to say that LLMs understand anything they say, or that we say to them.
This is starting to seem like a Chinese Room disagreement, so I'll just say that what that thought experiment demonstrated is that there is no robust or meaningful way to distinguish semantics from syntactic processing given everything we know about reality, and that LLMs were a fantastic demonstration of this illusion, eg. that "semantics" are reducible to a relational network of syntactic elements.
Not sure why this is weird when you really think about it. You're saying that a multiparameter constraint satisfaction problem is harder to solve, even when there's only a single solution (one point in the total space that satisfies all constraints), than just being given that solution/point. Well of course it is!
> Which simply dooms the terminally ill to fake treatment.
I wish people would stop saying this. First, controls aren't necessarily "fake treatment", they are often compared to other standard treatments.
Second, the treatment being tested can actually harm the patient more, therefore the people receiving your alleged "fake treatment" can actually come out better off. Which is the "fake treatment" now?
I don't disagree with your final point, but mainly with this increasingly pervasive and wrong framing of RCTs.
I think you need understanding to reason, but you don't need reasoning to understand. A child understands how to catch a ball without reasoning about forces, air resistance, gravity, etc.
I think LLMs understand without reasoning. They've built a large associative network of concepts (a kind of understanding), but we don't yet have a good handle on the process of reasoning using that network.
I think it's a mistake to disentangle their abilities from understanding. Just swallow the pill that they have some form of understanding, even if it slightly differs from ours. I really don't see the problem.
Because they don't just parrot, they interpolate, which is why they have such varied abilities. You can't explain the range of behaviours they have with just parroting, and once you accept that, why shouldn't this qualify as some form of intelligence?
> Spaced repetition is very effective, but it's really really clunky to use
Spaced repetition is just reviewing the same material periodically. It doesn't have to be a complicated system.
We already know how to learn and educate: spaced repetition (periodic review), and retrieval practice (frequent testing). This is how school used to be fore centuries; it's not sexy but it's effective.
Translations are a lot more likely to be error-free and robust, as the original data structures and algorithms have been battle tested.