I would be more excited if it wasn't $200 a month to try.
I don't feel like OpenAI does a good job of getting me excited either.
Find the perfect snowboard? How can that idea get pitched and make the final cut for a $200 a month service? The NFL kicker example is also completely ridiculous.
The business and UX example seems interesting. Would love to see more.
I think sports betting is obnoxious and stupid but I do worry about this moral policing some seem to want to do.
The people I know losing money to online sports betting are the same people who thought they were going to become pro online poker grinders 15 years ago.
If you got rid of online sports betting they would go play slots at the casino more and waste their money on the lottery.
If you get rid of all games of chance for money, there is a good % of people who will find a way to squander their savings somehow.
If anything, people I know waste far more money going out to eat than sports betting.
For me personally, It's not a moral thing. It's more of the militant nature of the current state of gambling advertising in the UK. It's predatory and aimed at the very people seemingly unable to have fun gambling. Those spending a little on a flutter now and then aren't really a concern of mine, it the ones struggling with gambling addictions having all this garbage shoved in their faces 24/7.
It's a case of the relative amounts and proportions of harm. Gambling is something where a small but not insignificant percentage of the population have an addiction problem - they're prone to get hooked and basically lose all their money. Now, this isn't something that's absolute: someone may be susceptible to this but not actively seek it out, especially to the extent of going to a black market bookie or similar. So the fact that it's so heavily advertised is going to increase the harm to these people.
Secondly, the bookies have a strong incentive to perpetuate this harm: much like with gatcha video games, which have the exact same moral hazard (and are exactly modeled on gambling), the 'whales' who get completely addicted bring in so much more revenue than those who occasionally gamble a little for a bit of fun, that even if they're a minority of customers they can make up the majority of revenue, and so they're going to make more money if they optimize for hooking them (there are some guardrails, to be fair: in contrast to said video games, there is a system where you can ban yourself from all the major bookies if you realize you have a problem. Probably doesn't make the ads any easier to sit through, though).
I'm not in favor of banning gambling altogether: I realise it's something a lot of people can engage with healthily, even if I have no interest in it at all. But I would be in favor of reigning in the advertising of it: it's kind of obnoxious how large a percentage of it is present in sports media anyway, even without the harms done. (I feel the same about alcohol ads, even if that is something I do like, and alcohol has a much lower moral hazard from the manufacturers in terms of hooking in alcoholics, because the ratios are not so extreme)
I never said I want it to go away. I merely said that maybe we shouldn't advertise things that commonly lead to addiction. I've gambled a little here or there and don't see any harm if it's limited and done for fun.
It might reduce the number of people who get into in the first place. But more likely and more importantly I would hope that it makes it easier for people who want to recover to not be tempted. I can't image what it would be like for an alcoholic to watch a cold refreshing beer cracked open in the types of party settings they used to enjoy during an ad, or for a gambler to see someone in an ad winning and hear that if you put $1k into an account they'll give you another $1k and other benefits.
I grew up playing American football and I am pretty well versed on the literature.
I live for now and don't put a lot of stock in having a great life after 65.
In American football, much depends on the position you played. I am not sure how that is for Aussie rules but lineman and linebackers who would be involved in more hits have it worse than wide receivers and cornerbacks. That never seems to be reported with CTE.
The concussion count is mostly non-sense from my understanding. I think this is how the NFL has shaped the narrative to not be so bad and their bogus "concussion protocol". The subconcussive hits are the major problem and that is just part of football. I took at least a thousand of them smashing heads together.
It is also degenerative over time. You aren't going to just wake up one day with problems. If it is really bad you are going to have crazy behavior problems. Like Aaron Hernandez. I am sure OJ Simpson had bad CTE.
I just doubt cold sores are that big of a variable compared to being hit in the head thousands of times.
My memory completely sucks but that has just made me an incredibly good note taker for job related functions.
I don't understand how that aren't weight classes in football. I was a 185lb center going up against 300lb nose guards in high school and everyone thought that was ok.
Sapolsky's book Determined is really the counter to your post.
I don't want to believe what that book says but it is quite a strong argument. It is really too sweeping and complicated to discuss in this format though. It really would need an entire counter book to it that dissects each point.
The point of my comment was not whether free will exists or not – it was whether choices exist or not.
I haven't read Salopsky's book myself, but I don't believe it argues that choices don't exist, only that they aren't free. And the comment to which you are replying wasn't expressing any stance on the question of whether our choices are "free" or not, only distinguishing it from the separate question of whether they exist at all.
That said, the impression I've gathered of his book – e.g. the review in The Atlantic by Kieran Setiya (a professor of philosophy at MIT) – doesn't impress me – Sapolsky largely ignores the philosophical literature on the topic, despite its essentially philosophical nature. "Free will" is more fundamentally a question of philosophy than neuroscience, because a big part of the debate is how the phrase "free will" should even be defined – and that kind of definitional question is one in which neuroscientists have no special competence, but for philosophers it is their bread and butter.
Thank you for referring to that review [0]. I think it is a pretty standard compatibilist argument, which accepts that everything about a person, including the degree of "willpower" one has, is determined by prior causes, and yet still attempts to salvage a notion of free will out of it.
This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief, and also intricately tied to moral responsibility. So compatibilists might be better served by tabooing the phrase—which some do, replacing it with "free choice" or similar.
There's also this bit:
> Still, when you act with indifference to the rights and needs of others, we can blame you for what you do—unless you have a good excuse. What counts as an excuse is a question of morality, not metaphysics.
When developers write code with security bugs, there are sometimes "good" excuses for it and sometimes not. We tried apportioning blame for many years, and it never worked. What worked is large-scale tooling and environment changes. I believe this generalizes quote broadly.
Regarding your point about moral responsibility: while I agree it is a major motivator for human belief in free will, it isn’t the only one. Added to that, while belief in free will and belief in moral responsibility are strongly correlated, neither is a necessary logical consequence of the other - believing in either but not the other is a facially logically coherent, even if somewhat rare, position
> This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief,
I disagree. I don’t think the average person’s belief in “free will” is “fundamentally supernatural”. Most people say they believe in “free will”, but (unless they’ve had some exposure to philosophy) they are pretty vague about what it actually is.
If by “supernatural” you mean “religious”, I think you might be overestimating how much influence religion has on the average person’s views on the topic. While it is true the majority of Christian denominations will endorse some version of metaphysical libertarianism in theory, it is a rather secondary doctrine - the Bible never explicitly discusses the topic, and opinions differ on whether or not it presumes it implicitly. [0] The Nicene Creed, which most Christians accept as a statement of the most important points of Christian teaching, never explicitly mentions it either. In many denominations, services will rarely or never address it. Hence, for many Christians, Christianity doesn’t contribute a lot to their understanding of “free will”, because it just isn’t the focus of a great deal of Christian teaching
Now, of course, there are exceptions: for example, there are the Free Will Baptists, for whom the concept of “free will” is so important, they even put it in their name-but they are minuscule in comparison to Christianity as a whole
In fact, some Christians are compatibilist determinists. There are actually two main forms of determinism - physical determinism (all our choices are predetermined by physical processes) and theological determinism (all our choices are predetermined by God’s will)-and the compatibilist versus incompatibilist distinction exists for both. Most Calvinists reject metaphysical libertarianism in favour of compatibilist theological determinism, although a minority (primarily the so-called “hyper-Calvinists”) are incompatibilist theological determinists instead.
[0] I’ll limit the discussion to Christianity, in part for reasons of space, but I think if you look at Judaism or Islam you will find it is a similar situation - most Jews and Muslims will affirm belief in “free will”, but both religions tend to spend relatively little time on this topic in comparison to others, especially if one is talking about the experiences of the average follower, as opposed to the arcane theological debates covered in advanced study
I feel like at this point we have to separate LLMs and reasoning models too.
I can see the argument against chatGPT4 reasoning.
The reasoning models though I think get into some confusing language but I don't know what else you would call it.
If you say a car is not "running" the way a human runs, you are not incorrect even though a car can "outrun" any human obviously in terms of moving speed on the ground.
To say since a car can't run , it can't move though is obviously completely absurd.
This was precisely what motivated Turing to come up with the test named after him, to avoid such semantic debates. Yet here we are still in the same loop.
"The terminator isn't really hunting you down, it's just imitating doing so..."
USD to CAD has front ran a lot of this already. 1.45 is crazy.
The idea Canada can so easily re-route trade is absurd. Especially when the trade is going to be settled in USD.
I have been trying to understand the point of all this and come up empty this morning. I would have to assume it is for enormous leverage in the trade deal that ultimately ends all this. The leverage this gives the US in a trade deal, especially with Canada is pretty incredible.
25% is just so insane that it probably does cause Mexico and Canada to concede to whatever Trump wants in a trade deal and in short order. I think this is why Trump won't even take a call from Trudeau right now. It is a leverage tactic and then when they do talk what leverage does Trudeau have? Basically zero.
Yes, the USA has massive leverage over Canada on basically every front. We are a small child standing next to a massive person with a gun. But what is the point of destroying us?
Our economy is already down. All of our tech elite move to Silicon Valley. Our energy infrastructure cant get off the ground. The USA dictates so much of what Canada is able to do.
What is the point of squeezing us more? We have so little we can offer you.
We've already given you the lives of our soldiers as we follow you into pointless wars. What more do you want? The pennies in our pockets?
We are hoping the electorate in the US doesn't want to find out. US leadership has threatened Canada and other countries with using economic or military force for annexation. Canadians are hoping that saner heads will prevail, but it's not looking very good. We are very much aware that our military has been underserved in every way by Canadians, and that was part of the reason I chose not to continue my military career.
In the meantime, we are carefully and cautiously reminding the United States that we fought many of the same wars and learned the same lessons as the US military about how insurgencies are fought, and while many of our friends, family, and neighbours are American, we are not, and do not want to, and will not be American. Do with that what you will.
Retaliatory tariff why? US tariff are self inflicted harm. If you see your neighbor slashing their wrists, slashing your own doesn't improve the situation. Canadian taxpayers will be the ones eating that cost.
> Their strategy is to make sure Americans feel the pain too. But they are likely to focus on what experts call precision strikes against U.S. exports from Republican strongholds and industry groups with political leverage in Washington.
> Late Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would impose 25% tariffs on more than $105 billion of U.S. goods. “We didn’t ask for this, but we will not back down,” he said, warning that American jobs in their auto and manufacturing industries were at risk.
> A first wave, set to take effect Tuesday, will hit $20 billion of imports from the U.S., including alcohol, coffee, clothing and shoes, furniture and household appliances. On Sunday, Canada released a list of tariff targets, including products from Republican-leaning states, such as whiskeys from Kentucky, oranges from Florida and appliances from South Carolina. Government officials on Sunday also said they were targeting motorcycles in Pennsylvania, which has a Harley-Davidson plant in York, Pa.
> A second wave on an additional $85 billion of goods would include tariffs on cars and trucks, agricultural products, steel and aluminum and aerospace products. The second phase will begin in three weeks, to give businesses enough time to stockpile and find alternatives.
The only reason America will feel significant pain from our own tariffs on Canada is because without it, the tariffs on Mexico are voided as Canada has free trade agreement with mex that would make black market proxying through Canada trivial. I suspect that's what this is really about, Canada has to be in lockstep or themselves tariffed for the Mexico tariffs to be persuasive upon Mexico. Otherwise cartels just route white market goods to Canada under shell companies and then to us at no tariff.
The Canadians should find some other way to punish us than cutting off their nose to spite their face imo. A tariff is totally unpersuasive especially in light of the comparative trade dynamics.
I think it’s prudent to see what damage the actions of Canada, Mexico, and China can do with regards to economic retaliation and if they need to iterate accordingly.
I think Canadians are more likely to find themselves in a situation in which all of their land is owned by Chinese and other foreign interests than an occupation by the U.S. that requires "insurgents", and it seems like they are happy to do it.
I fear that in hoping cooler heads will prevail, you've only set yourself up for failure. Trump and Musk will take advantage of your willingness to see them as better than what they are. That's how they win. Just remember they are doing Nazis salutes and setting up a concentration camp in Cuba. There are no more cooler heads.
Well, that's nonsense. No one is doing "Nazi salutes" nor setting up concentration camps. I mean if the ADL say it was not such a salute, methinks thou doth protest too much. As far as concentration camps, this is just leftist hyperbole. Visit Germany and Poland go see what real such things were like, this is more offensive to those victims of atrocities then the made up things you are referencing.
Musk literally did a Nazi salute behind the presidential seal. And Trump announced concentration camps at Guantanamo Bay, so you're wrong there as well. I'm not getting my news from leftists, I'm getting it from the two co-presidents. You just have to watch what they do and say in public to come to these conclusions.
Again, the ADL literally said it was not such a salute. Also, those are not concentration camps of the kind of Nazi Germany. This is highly offensive to those that suffered in the holocaust to conflate these things.
"Also, those are not concentration camps of the kind of Nazi Germany. This is highly offensive to those that suffered in the holocaust to conflate these things."
Yeah, they are like 1933 Nazi camps, not 1945 Nazi camps...
The road to Nazi Germany was paved by people, like you, who looked at the obvious and dismissed it as hyperbole until the truth became unbearable. You're literally that guy in the "are we the baddies?" meme.
They are doing Nazi salutes and setting up out-of-country concentration camps to which they will send individuals they deem "illegal" who have been labeled by the head of state to be "poisoning the blood" of our nation.
This sentence is true in America today, and in 1933 Nazi Germany.
As for anyone who is offended, send them my way and they can give me an earful, and we can talk it out. But when I see a Nazi salute, I'm calling it out; I don't care who it offends.
The world is transitioning from a "rule of law" order to a "rule of jungle" order, where might makes right.
People who understand this will have an easier time in the new world order. The goal now is to make it through the inevitable war, and try to set up a better rule of law next time.
Canada is the first test. The way to handle America is to use the only language bullies know: force and strength. Never back down. Never give an inch. If Canada tries to negotiate, it's done. Whatever agreement is reached, America will renege, and Canada will lose.
The problem is that the USA is capable of far more force and strength than Canada is. It's like an abusive relationship, but one where due to geography, Canada cannot simply leave.
I blame Canadian leadership. There should have understood the risk long ago. There are other problems as well due to weak management.
The claim about drugs is a legal justification for the use of emergency power. Canada isn’t causing problems for US. These tariffs are harmful and unfair to Canada.
Canada’s leadership could have done better in the past decades (not that they are directly responsible for these tariffs).
* Canada funds and invents new technologies in early stages, but fails to commercialize them: AI, smartphones, pharmaceuticals, …
* Canada hasn’t introduce measures to retain its talent. It’s too easy to be trained in Canada and work in USA.
* Canada hasn’t diversified its trade. It exports around 80% of exports to a super power, putting itself in a vulnerable position.
* Canada’s economy focuses on natural resources, oil, finance and services. It should do a better job in more productive sectors (tech, manufacturing, etc).
* Canada’s immigration is insane.
* The housing crisis, inflation, reduced GDP per capita and productivity are the result of poor management.
* Canada should stay neutral with respect to internal politics of major powers. The power swings, and liberals should not speak ill of republicans.
* Canada should meet its NATO commitments. It contributes less than most members. It should think of defense.
* Canada’s universal healthcare system seems to me costly and hard to sustain, and needs to be reformed to lower public costs.
Thankfully, tariffs are delayed, and hopefully will not be slapped back.
I don't feel like OpenAI does a good job of getting me excited either.
Find the perfect snowboard? How can that idea get pitched and make the final cut for a $200 a month service? The NFL kicker example is also completely ridiculous.
The business and UX example seems interesting. Would love to see more.
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