jmp242
I am pretty convinced crypto as it currently is is 99% a scam or a way to waste a lot of money compared to a traditional financial transfer. It’s made worse by the environmental impacts of mining. Crypto would have to be something completely different before it’ll take off for any kind of traditional payment system. And I actually think we just need the government to mandate a better bank to bank payment system with no fees like they have in Europe. Anything else is too fragmented which means friction in use and higher fees converting between the competing systems.
I know about that stuff, but I just don’t see how you fix the fundamental problems of crypto without turning it into basically another ACH anyway. I.e. to regulate out the scammers, enable people to reverse transfers, tamp down on the straight out pump and dump schemes, wallet hacking / securing, the central exchanges going bust or being a scam themselves…
I just think that by the time you make it equivalent to Visa or PayPal for end users, you’ve now made it basically one of those.
I’m still sad we went with bullshitter instead of the much more cultured sounding to me sophist. And, you know, having existed for thousands of years. But I’m strange.
I think from what I’ve managed to read of the article (it’s kind of long) - I agree we need to be careful anthropomorphizing things. However, there also seems to be quite a lot of confidence that we really understand what our brains are doing. I do not have that confidence, so I also do not have the confidence to say it’s going to be obvious for the mid-long term (50-100 years) that we know if a AI is a person or not.
That said, I also intuitively disagree with the other person in that article who claims that language meaning can be deduced or worse just is a matter of relative positions to context. This seems very circular to me. I think we can certainly reference language to itself, and literally “play language games”, but important levels of meaning have to “break out” and apply to external reality. Otherwise I strongly question the utility of language, and it’s prima facie useful. And we all spend a lot of time talking about physical reality…
However - I also question the idea that we can’t intelligibly talk about something we don’t have personal referents for. This also seems obviously false - from writing convincing period fiction to quantum mechanics equations - at least some of us can opine and figure useful things out about levels of reality we have no personal interaction with. I don’t see why we should assume an octopus / AI couldn’t potentially do the same.
Yet another take on the lack of a self.
Is it ever possible to distinguish mental actions, which we can direct and select, from the more general category of mental events, which simply happen to us? In what sense are we ever genuinely mental agents, capable of acting freely, as opposed to being buffeted by forces beyond our control?
I actually think I might differ with the author slightly here because i think the answer is we never are “genuine mental agents”.
I suppose once we’re defining terms, like everyone had to do with “bullshitter” in this case, we could as well define existing terms rather than reinvent the wheel. I think people like bullshitter not because it is intuitive what it means (note how every place that uses it also rushes to say it’s not synonymous with liar - which is what I thought it meant pre this recent book) but because it sounds “edgy” with the “bad word” and precisely like all slang is novel. It’s the reinventing that makes it cool.
Of course you can get real depressed about how little of this is actually new if you investigate the ancient sophists and what the platonic dialogs and others thought.
Honestly, my two comments are
Doesn’t sound like anything I want, but I’m sure someone does.
7
Honestly, I’ve been saying I’ll still be on reddit for the sysadmin sub for work, at least as long as old.reddit.com exists cause I’m at a PC when I’m working. But I looked at the sub today and realized - like with /r/news … there’s way less posts and content than there used to be.
And what is posted there is low interest. Also, IDK if I’ve “leveled up” (like 7 years ago TBH), but my problems I’d be pushed to post about usually fly completely over the heads of most other posters on that sub. So it’s not even valuable to me in solving problems unless I happen to hit on like 3 other posters who are actually as or more experienced as I am. Otherwise I get silence or “generic responses” I already know that isn’t actually helpful.
So… I’m starting to think I won’t miss much from that sub either. And I already had other time wasters.
I hope we get some more users on here, and people who are higher skilled (is the fediverse a "you must be this techie to ask questions filter?).