Everybody now knows M$ or Google are evil. The weird part is that Apple still seems to escape the same judgement. But they're no different. They're exactly like all the others.
They seem quite distinct to me. Microsoft is focussed on selling to corporations and OEM’s. Google is selling people’s attention to advertisers. Apple is selling premium hardware directly to consumers.
> "When policy is politically polarized, you need more facts," he said.
Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies.
> "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king."
My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work. His response was "I still think it'll work"!
That's funny :)
Though when presenting facts and studies, it's also worthwhile to think about how much of the world these studies are accurately able to explain.
For physics this number is high. "
For social sciences there's good reason to be skeptical.
Even if (big if) a study is directionally replicable, the total proportion of the world, that can be accurately and consistently be explained isn't great.
"Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q"
Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders.
The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.
I agree, if we limit the statement to the quoted piece.
But I think the full line is true as it stands.
> The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.
I.e. that the danger doesn't come from being selective based on methodological soundness as you say, but based on e.g. ideology.
There's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.
Interestingly, research shows LLMs are better than humans at persuading people, and one of the reported reasons is that their arguments are deemed to be more evidence-based. (Findings even show that people are more likely to be persuaded when they KNOW the other side is an AI... maybe the underlying dynamic is that they assume people have vested interests?)
So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies.
LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.
Thank you!
That's actually really interesting reading.
Some of the effect sizes are small though - would have been interesting to see a greater variety of benchmarks. Like what's the effect of different incentives given to the human controls (does 20 VS 100 USD change anything? etc.).
Anyways, thanks for the links!
I have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds.
Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.
There's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index.
So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it.
The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf.
I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more.
Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels.
I don't think this is particularly strange when one thinks about the effect of ideology. It has a way of filtering any common reality different people have. I'm not sure how to move towards a common understanding without a larger sense of shared experience, but even then the same experience can have different interpretations.
That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.
What facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.
In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. Then when told apple pie is not the answer and its actually kale you want them you immediately pivot to a different for ending up at apple pie.
Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
>In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins.
No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact.
>ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and
They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!").
>and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.
make everyone's voice matter. actually listening to peoples concerns and try to address them. but also, treat everyone as being on the same side. we all want a better life. we should cooperate to achieve that. globally. it takes education. not just STEM, but also moral education. teach people to care about each other and to listen. we need to eliminate prejudice and racism and make it possible to resolve conflicts.
it's a long road to get there. but it's the only way that is going to work.
evolution -- ppl who refuse to acknowledge reality tend not to leave many offsprings. and if they do, maybe they are adhering to a more powerful reality afterall.
That's realy inaccurate. If anything the more religious you are the more offsprings you have. Atheist societies are below replacement levels. What makes you think fact based thinking leads to more children making?
given the unknowability of reality - 'facts' in science are only hypotheses that have not yet been disproven by data - nobody knows why anything exists at all -
a lot of weight has to be given to 'what works' - what things grind up against the machinery of reality and survive over the long term? there is a 'truth' to such things
Sometimes they are lies. Governments including Western ones have lied before (e.g. Tuskegee Syphillis), and academics have published flawed, misleading, or straight-up fabricated studies (e.g. “landmark” Alzheimer’s study).
But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues, and the individual may give a stupid counterargument (“…lie pushed by my enemies…”) but they have a legitimate one. In this case, I guarantee there are specific people who’ve been indisputably replaced by H1Bs, maybe clustered in specific reasons, and maybe specific fields. Telling these people “overall H1Bs create jobs” won’t convince them.
Like telling poor people “the economy is improving, inflation is only 0.x%”. Both may be true in general at the population level, but to the person you’re speaking to, they don’t matter; economic improvements can go to others while they suffer more.
> But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues,
I feel like this has been a big failing of one (left) side of politics in recent years. Quick to state 'facts' as arguments but those haven't landed as well as they have in the past (15 - 20+ years ago), for whatever reasons...
One reason is in the article: less immigration does not lead to more native employment. I can also assume that it has no effect on salaries, too. There is an argument in there that more immigration => more jobs for the natives, but it doesn't say if those jobs are the same as the ones for immigrants, and I assume they're not, they're management jobs to oversee the immigrants.
As a conclusion, immigration does not affect low skilled jobs in any way. No matter what the politicians propose, increase immigration or decrease immigration, their situation is more or less the same.
> 158 Canadian soldiers died defending the United States at the US's request after 9/11. Canadian fighter jets helped to patrol the skies in the US at the US's request after 9/11.
Bad idea. Canada (as well as all other nations) should let the US fight and lose its wars by itself.
Very informative article, but I'd say all of this is in favor of OpenRouter, not against it. It gives you full flexibility, not just of models, but of providers. That's the offer!
As long as you are constantly diligent in staying on top of what each provider is doing that may impact you.
It reads to me an argument for self hosting, maybe a less capable model to deal with smaller compute resources, but when starting to use that model and inference software to build a benchmark you can easily rerun when you change things to observe the impact of the change.
Maybe that’s a similar level of diligence but they feel different to me.
Like everyone, it seems, in this thread, I have not one big box of cables but several. But my classification system is mostly around age: old USB cables (mini, micro) vs recent USB cables (USB C), old screen cables (VGA) vs recent ones (HDMI), etc.
This doesn't work for everything: audio cables do not evolve much, nor do remote cables for DSLRs; but in general it's reasonably effective.
Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.
All the big AI labs were built on stealing IP; who is surprised that's still how they operate? And who believes, or has ever believed, their promises that your data is private and not logged, etc.?
The big AI labs are not trying to advance humanity, they are in this for the money, and as most (all?) private companies they don't care about ethics at all.
That doesn't mean they can't be useful, or that their products are trash, etc. It just means that they shouldn't ever be trusted. Buyer beware.
They have throughout this period of AI products shown to reproduce works that they were trained on. They are getting sued all over the place for the theft of content right now and it seems courts and governments want to wave copyright protection (and ignore criminal acts because the "ai did it") to see where this leads.
Its why I stopped writing open source software, my code was stolen and put behind a paywall and the license under which it was published has not been adhered to. Doing work in the public domain at all now is just stupid, these companies are allowed to steal it and call it their own.
It's hilarious how people think they care about their reputation, and wouldn't circumvent ZDR policies. Like bro, they literally covertly hired Apple employees and had them steal IP and equipment form Apple. They aren't scared of Apple lawyers, so they definitely aren't scared of yours.
But I don't see how. AI is going to be a commodity in short order and best case the US will be a temporary leader in the supply of tokens. Meanwhile AI is going to destroy much of the Service and Software industry that make up most of the US economy. And the US is betting every last cent to bring about this future. It does make sense for Trump since this might be a sugar high that lasts till the end of his term.
In USA there is surprisingly little state involvement in the whole llm mania. Who needs the state with 800 lbs gorillas like Google, Amazon, Nvidia, etc
In China, it is the principal obsession of the entire communist party which eg funds the whole infrastructure without a single NIMBY peep.
The strange emphasis in China on humanoid robotic constructions is due to the CCP realization that with the cataclysmic fertility collapse they will increasingly have no one to rule.
what the point and usefulness of the comments above? we shouldn't be surprised? is normal to steal? hiring apple employees?
can you realize what this means?
focus on this part:
"If his account is correct, this is not a minor dispute over attribution. It would mean that unpublished human work was absorbed into a model and then presented to the world as a breakthrough by the model itself"
Don’t they openly state that their product may cause IP issues but that is fine because they will take care of your legal problems caused by their product?
In the end, it’s not them stealing, it’s the AI doing stealing. What kind of moral compass are we talking about?
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