"Manually" would be a charitable reading. Most of these prompts and answers appear AI generated. On your average HN front page submission, there is literally no effort too easy nor too important that won't be offsourced to the nearest LLM.
Their argument would be, "If meth is a negative externality, we should just tax it instead of banning it in stores for kids to buy." Kids may die, but I'm sure with all that extra state revenue we'll get a nice park or museum or kickback to Tesla or something.
Most disorders in the DSM-5 are defined by polythetic criteria, i.e. meeting X out of Y symptoms from a list for a given duration of time, or by conjunction of polythetic criteria. These definitions are socially constructed and statistically validated for pragmatic use, but very rarely have definite underlying biological markers. Especially as concerns personality disorders, these disorders can also simply be an inheritance of cultural or political baggage and prior psychoanalytic theory.
> In some circumstances the only way to tell the difference between the two is what drugs work: if antidepressants help, it's Major Depression; if mood stabilizers help, it's Bipolar Depression.
This is ridiculous. There is zero mention in the DSM-5 or ICD-11 of "if these drugs work, it's this, otherwise it's this." I would question a psychiatrist dispositively making a diagnosis on such grounds.
> Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own.
Unrelated, but once you get to a more mature level, say grad school and above, I can say this is not always the case! Just like it's easier sometimes to Roll Your Own Damn X in programming, so too are some expositions of proof so dense (necessarily or unnecessarily so) that it is a less taxing affair to simply figure it out yourself, or at least figure out 90% of it, consulting a suggestive sentence or two in the proof in order to get at that last 10%.
Maybe this observation of mine is not so unrelated after all. I don't regret many of the times that I've thrown up my hands at the rococo explanations or solutions given to me by LLMs and simply did my own work. The Socratic method with AI is sometimes more effort than it's worth.
Looking into his biography, it seems that he was indeed pitching the engine not as a means of efficiency, but as a means of avoiding mistakes in mathematical tables. It would have done Babbage well to insist he couldn't possibly solve all classes of mistakes, but would have solved a great many of them! "Why yes Senator, you are quite intelligent and handsome and make a fair point, allow me to give you the finer picture..."
Would have also been a fair point if Babbage had channeled his inner techbro and insisted it would directly replace human calculators; simple machines like Babbage's will chug along blindly on obviously erroneous data, but humans for all their sloppiness can often backtrack on errors.
> You (a smart human) should be able to converge on it by cross-examining your LLMs.
What makes you think this is fundamentally different from cross-examining ELIZA? There is no guarantee that the LLM will help you converge on anything. Indeed actually calling out an LLM on BS tends to eventually produce an "I don't know and can't help you further" answer (as it should).
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
> Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.
"Relevant" needs disambiguation. It does not make your thoughts less valid in any moral sense that you should feel ashamed of them or anything, but IMO, it does mean that they are less worthy in the attention marketplace. If these thoughts are not competing in the attention marketplace, and rather being shared amongst acquaintances, or offered up in the aim of constructive criticism, then it does not risk turning the attention marketplace into a competition of hustling mediocrity.
> Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.
> If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know.
Indeed the consequences are not thought about often. My motivations for commenting are for catharsis and parasocial connection, and (if you're like me) your reasons for reading are for entertainment and parasocial connection. I believe most of the dressing up as "being accurate and helpful" or "learning new things and growing" are just negotiations that make it palatable to our conscious sensibilities and self-image.
> The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
And that begins to touch on another aspect of my demotivation, which is, "Why bother creating value? It won't help the reception." Unless you're contributing some huge objective boon to humanity, the reception largely boils down to marketing and dumb luck. I've seen too many of my life's works languish in obscurity to put any more emotional attachment into the thing. One must labor only for one's own inner satisfaction, but what if that means one is left with no motivation to labor at all? Then, I suppose, that's just the death of a laborer and the birth of a slacker.
> You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
I'm not claiming it's a good or rational thing that I'm not motivated. (I'm also not claiming this happens to everyone with credentials.) I'm very nostalgic for that unembarrassed enthusiasm I once had, because, were I to possess it now, at least I would have a shot at producing something of value.
You may have gotten the wrong impression when I coupled this rueful sentiment with a criticism of the verbosity and redundancy of blogs and self-help books. These two things are in tension with each other but not strictly contradictory. "I am large, I contain multitudes."
> This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing.
Not self-aggrandizing. There are very few things that I consider myself "(among the) most capable" of explaining, and most of them are not interesting to people. There are many more things that I'm somewhat competent in explaining, but those suffer the intimidation of the eyes.
> Maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
Not sure how you mean "style," but it is some sort of inferiority complex or insecurity. I do not claim it is a good or rational feeling.
> How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell. tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual. Are those rituals a good thing on the whole? Even if they are, why dress it up with all these theological truth propositions and elaborately fraudulent mythologies? Why do we have to be so verbose and repetitious, and pretend there's really 10,000 books' worth of depth to the Serenity Prayer?
> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”
As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
I work as a federal contractor. It's very true (epistemic status: my managers and project leads tell me as much and I act accordingly, I don't deal with it directly nor understand the bureaucratic larger picture). You will not get funding from Department X again if you ask for more money on a project than you wind up spending. Now, is that the sin of overquoting, or the virtue of overdelivering? For some reason, every agency treats it as the former, and I haven't the foggiest idea why. My coworkers acknowledge how stupid and perverse of an incentive it is, yet treat it like a fundamental force of nature.
Most solutions to this problem are essentially what the OP recognized as nakedly illegal---that is, exaggerating productive hours---but most contractors are savvy enough to do it in less auditable and more positively regarded ways, such as stretching out timelines (four 20-hour work weeks raise fewer flags than one 80-hour week), adding more chefs than the kitchen calls for, or funding unnecessary little side projects. Straight-up tampering with timecards is an impatient and dangerous way of achieving (IMO) the same wasteful evil as happens everywhere else in the public and private sector.
It makes zero sense to me either, yet it is an omnipresent influence in who gets tasked to what in my work. At my level, I do not know anyone who endorses it, they merely react to it.
My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.
I'm of the opinion that for all the bad things AI has done for us and our psychology, there is a silver lining in that it has reduced our tolerance for "slop" and time-wasting tactics in general.
"Brevity is the sister of talent," said Chekov, and it applies to more than just creative writing.
It's not the same doctors saying they themselves are simultaneously smart and stupid. It's "smart" doctors saying that as a point of policy, it is not a good idea for biomedical companies to try to make a buck off of popularizing unnecessary diagnostics, because anxious patients will by chance or by intention find a "dumb" doctor who will agree to perform invasive procedures. (Have you ever heard a tech person say that the tech world has a lot of stupid ideas? It's the same thing.) Look up what happened with South Korea diagnosis vs. mortality rates when they instituted national thyroid screenings in the 90s.
> Every system that exists as a black box is more understandable with more sensing, not less.
With perfect humans in a perfect society, maybe. But such is ignoring the elephants in the room here, from the actual experts on the topic.