Or the majority of the residents of New York City on their daily commute? I like to think I have sense, and I happily use public transport most days. I prefer it to sitting in traffic, isolated in a car. At least I can read a book. If you work too hard to insulate yourself from the world, the spaces you'll feel comfortable in will get more and more narrow. I think that's a bad thing.
We're not disagreeing that exercise is good. I also happen to be very pro-exercise. What I'm trying to do here is reckon with the fact that, as you say "exercise, athleticism, sports are celebrated everywhere and anywhere you turn", and yet the obesity epidemic only got worse. And providing the same kinds of answers for the loneliness epidemic will show similar results. It's possible that this disagreement is rooted in differing understandings of what "social infrastructure" means.
I’m not sure what you’re advocating for. Is “pro-exercise propaganda” hinting that you’re against exercise? I think it’s cheap and easy to dismiss large scale social problems as the individual’s responsibility. We badgered people to exercise and change their diets while the obesity problem got worse and worse. The first time we saw an improvement was with the introduction of GLP-1s.
If your goal is to feel self righteous, keep believing the problem can be solved if people just get stop being lazy and join a club already. That’ll work for some people, but what I’m saying is it’s not a solution to the problem.
This is good advice for your friends and family, but a bad answer to the question. "How can we solve the obesity epidemic? Stop eating so much and get some exercise." Well sure, but this misses the big picture. We built a social infrastructure that encourages a sedentary, solitary life. We shouldn't be confused by physical and emotional health implications. We can expect some people to be proactive about it, but we can't expect that of everyone.
I guarantee that once we do know people will start appending the word “just” to the explanation. Complex behaviors emerge from simple components. Knowing that doesn’t make the emergence any more incredible.
Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this. Let's say you have a box of gas in a low entropy state: all the particles are on one side of the box. A moment later, the particles will have spread to the other side of the box, so the entropy is lower. But to say "a moment later", we're assuming a quantity called time. I'm confused how you can see this in reverse: "because the particles spread to the other side of the box, a moment passes".
> What can you learn from something parroting data we already have?
You can learn that a neural network with a simple learning algorithm can become proficient at language. This is counter to what people believed for many years. Those who worked on neural networks during that time were ridiculed. Now we have a working language software object based on learning, while the formal rules required to generate language are nowhere to be seen. This isn’t just a question of what will lead to AGI, it’s a question of understanding how the human brain likely works, which has always been the goal of people pioneering these approaches.
> There are hours of podcasts with Chomsky talking about LLMs
I'm not an expert, but it seems like Chomsky's views have pretty much been falsified at this point. He's been saying for a long time that neural networks are a dead end. But there hasn't been anything close to a working implementation of his theory of language, and meanwhile the learning approach has proven itself to be effective beyond any reasonable doubt. I've been interested in Chomsky for a long time but when I hear him say "there's nothing interesting to learn from artificial neural networks" it just sounds like a man that doesn't want to admit he's been wrong all this time. There is _nothing_ for a linguist to learn from an actually working artificial language model? How can that possibly be? There were two approaches - rule-based vs learning - and who came out on top is pretty damn obvious at this point.
I vacillate between excitement for the future and fear that people like Kaczynski are right (not the violence, obviously). It often does feel as though the direction of technological progress is independent of what is best for the wellbeing of humanity.