The point is creating failed businesses is legal and tax deductible.

Let's gather authors of 15 different world languages together in a room and see if they can collaboratively write a short story. Surely their inability to do so will prove their inadequacy in their native language. /s

Simplicity brings us closer to truth — Occam's razor has underpinned the development of our species for centuries. It's enterprise, empire, and capital that feed off of complexity.

We're entering a period of human history where engineers and businesspeople drive academic discourse, rather than scientists or philosophers. The result is intellectual chicken scratch like this article.

>Simplicity brings us closer to truth — Occam's razor has underpinned the development of our species for centuries.

I keep thinking of emergent complexity. Even starting with very simple rules and components, the amount of complexity that arises as a consequence of ever rising interactions can boggle the mind and seems to validate our current predilection for elegant and succinct laws of physics to be enough to model the universe.

Coincidentally, LLMs being so good at coding that it became the #1 source of income for Anthropic is one such example of emerging complexity from deceptively simple ingredients:

A giant pile of matrix multiplies, next-token prediction, and enough data somehow climbs the ladder from autocomplete to writing code well enough that people will pay $20-200/month per seat for it. It is completely bonkers.

Doesn't sound like you're in the gutter champ

Not surprised. This summer I had a conversation with a senior staffer at OpenAI who had smoke coming from his ears due to Sam's incompetence. Contrary to his public image, he doesn't have the skillset of a CEO. He was a failed founder who was hired to head YC because he's smart and likeable. He was in a similar role at AI - a brainy media mouthpiece. Real work being done by senior staff. OpenAI's massive scale-up requires a new leadership style.

Maybe I'm taking this too seriously, but the authors seem preoccupied with airing their own frustration with the views of Deepak Chopra. Using such an author as a data source is distracting because he writes about a sort of spiritual thinking that - based on the tone of the article - the authors presumably do not practice themselves.

I would be interested to expand the author's definition of bullshit to account for instances where the 'bullshitee' has insufficient knowledge about a topic. In the same way a true statement about theoretical physics would be indistinguishable from bullshit to anyone not trained in the subject.

I found this paper close to touching on a method for understanding truthiness in generated text, but falling short into comedy.

This is a fair take - ie, the authors are saying what their readers want to hear using some pseudo-statistics.

In this sense, the authors are bullshitting their readers - by telling them what they want to hear (as any politician might)

The human experience is an embodied one, it is not just information processing

Do we know for a fact that a sufficiently stateful and complex ML model won't experience subjective consciousness?

Appreciated this. Hey everyone, it's just some art, relax :]

The interactive piece on Dürer found hyperlinked in the article was an awesome read.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/25/arts/durer-se...

In my opinion, the implied framework of morality is bit too simplistic to arrive at a meaningful answer. Good and Bad are not objective outcomes that can be 'caused' by OKRs. Why not try to recognize the inherent balance of good / bad in all things and then focus on being a better person?

Advertising: Bad to advertise lies, good to advertise truth E-commerce: Bad to sell consumption, good to sell solution Crypto: Bad for the environment, good for personal empowerment Finance: Bad for irresponsible spenders, good for people with low assets relative to cashflow Drugs, gambling, etc: Bad for the long run, good for the short run.

Even God, a construction meant to represent pure goodness, is bad to half of yall