This is definitely a why not both sort of situation. In fact, I think being dimwitted is often associated with being evil, since goodness is (often) just rational self-interest.
I think this is really the wrong framing. Science can't disprove religion. The question is whether it makes any sense to believe in the religion in the first place, given what observation and science say about the universe. Science can't prove that God didn't create the universe a nano-second ago in exactly the state to produce this temporal evolution, but no one believes that because its not explanatory and also fails a bunch of other, not-necessarily scientific, but rationally motivated epistemological tests.
The way I see this is that science cannot disprove any particular religion, but it can probably offer more compelling explanations for the state of the world than religion can offer. People haven't flocked away from religion because explanations for the state of the world aren't really what people want from religion. They want a sop for their anxieties. they want community, etc. I think believing in nonsense is a real shitty way to get these things, but I'm not most people.
This book is really fascinating because it contains a surprising amount of Soviet ideology. The authors repeatedly state that mathematics is posterior to the material world, not prior to it. That is, mathematics is just the observation of regularity in the world, particularly those discovered by people working to create things. Contrast this with the still heavily idealistic world of western mathematics, where mathematicians are more likely to sympathize with the notion that numbers are real things somewhere out there whose structures the real world supervenes upon in some way.
Interesting stuff!
Even though I favor the Soviet view of mathematics personally (I do not think numbers "exist" out there independent of the material world), I think this approach hampers the didactic goals of the text and probably hurt Soviet mathematics as well. The examples in the text are all highly concrete (literally things like rubber mats when discussing curvature). This very down to earth style makes the abstract notions of curvature in other contexts (for example, general relativity) more difficult to grasp, in my opinion.
On the other hand, some people prefer strong, material, examples of mathematical ideas. This book definitely provides that. The section on affine maps in terms of fixing the plane of a surveillance airplane photograph is beautifully concrete.
There are plenty of high intensity activities with low risk of injury. Rowing and swimming come to mind.
I think the bigger problem is that, as far as I can tell, very few people have the appropriate personality type for high intensity exercise. Most people seem to experience it just as pointless discomfort.
Delegation does not have to be because of a lack of knowledge. In fact, it seems like if one delegates for this reason its probably a sign of trouble to come. We delegate because of lack of time.
I guess its impossible for an executive to know ALL the details of the work they delegate, but I'd be willing to wager that executives who understand the details function better in the long run.
It certainly isn't tautological that executives be imbeciles about the businesses they run.
I think this is a rosy estimate. The vast majority of what people do with these models is just the same old shit, I would be surprised if 1% of it were genuinely novel stuff worth folding back into the training data.
Yes, it will show up on your bill as a cost drastically smaller than purchasing the equivalent amount of gas. If you put solar panels on your house you can get that cost even lower.
One under-appreciated value of having an EV is that you don't have to buy gas. You literally do not have to buy gas. I cannot emphasize this enough: you do not buy gasoline for these cars. Not only that, but many places let you charge them for free. That is like someone giving you free gas.
I think there is a difference here. Signal qua signal isn't dangerous. Its purely what one does with it that might constitute a criminal act. In particular, using signal is unlikely to cause problems accidentally.
Driving a giant truck for no good reason entails a certain risk because of both the inevitability of human error (on the part of the driver but also others) and basic physics.
Furthermore, one might argue that the right to private communication is more important than the marginal improvement in life that you get from driving a big car for no particular reason.
Like consider a person who wants to drive a car filled with TNT. By its very nature this is a danger to others regardless of the intent of the driver or other drivers. Society might be argued to have an interest in regulating such behavior. I think there is a good case to be made that unnecessarily large vehicles differ in degree only from the TNT case, but differ categorically from using signal.
I'm not making the case that the differences justify banning big cars, but there are differences between the two situations.
I've felt for a long time that laws should have an attached "intent" section and one function of the courts should be to invalidate laws which, after a period of being in place and some analysis, fail to achieve their stated intent.
I think it would be good for democracy if lawmakers had to put in writing what the law is supposed to accomplish AND if that were something legally binding.
"The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago, when the pandemic flung the city’s economy into chaos and plunged low-income New Yorkers into dire financial straits. But even as the city has rebounded, rent collection rates in affordable housing remain short of pre-pandemic levels. As costs balloon, landlords say insufficient rental income is threatening their ability to stay afloat."
Are the smartest researchers in the world out there saying there isn't a wall? I don't know of any people doing the actual R&D who frequently make outrageous claims.
Synthesizing a bunch of stuff I've read here lately, it seems like if OpenAI and Claude have actually found product market fit (generating code) then the question of hallucination is going to get less attention in the future. If the real money is in code generation (where there is a relatively clear acceptance criteria of at least "it runs and does what I wanted as far as I can tell") then there doesn't seem to be a lot of juice in pulling ones hair out on hallucination of facts.
It seems like for agentic coding, just making sure the AI can find the relevant documentation to establish a ground truth is probably sufficient.
Note that I'm distinguishing here between hallucination of what you might call "free facts" and hallucination of material which deviates from what is in the context itself. The latter seems both a tractable problem and one which will improve coding agent functionality. But the former seems like its no longer on the critical path, probably because its hard.
You could, for instance, require people who own habitations to actually live in that location. You could tax people who own property they do not actually live in very aggressively until they would be willing to sell for less to avoid the tax burden. You could have a system which taxes aggressively and builds lots of houses and gives it to people who own it as long as they live there.
There are quite a lot of ideas between "government owns everything" and "let vampire landlords do unlimited rent seeking."
As it happens, I think there is quite a lot to be said for the free market solution of just letting supply meet demand more or less freely, but I think your interpretation really is not the most generous one.