Jim

**INTERNATIONAL BAR, DUBLIN — NIGHT**

A crowded bar. REG is standing beside two women, CLAIRE and AOIFE. The conversation has reached the dangerous point where someone has asked what he is interested in.

**CLAIRE**

So what do you do when you’re not working?

**REG**

I think about why England survived Napoleon economically while Holland did…[Read more]

Jake:

Well, if there were a barfly who brought up Adam Smith’s Capitalist condemnation of slavery and contrasts it with George Fitzhugh’s defense of slavery in semi-Feudalistic, semi-Communistic terms, that person would earn the bottomless bar tab and an orgy with the whole bar.

And if AI could do this unprompted, it would earn Overlord status,…[Read more]

Reg made me think of this scene.

Reg and Jake:

Ackshuyally, Jenny McCarthy is a Large Language Model. It’s just that her Language, especially on vaccines, is Largely beyond her bird bath depth. 😁

Yes, but you can install a local LLM on you home pc and ‘train it’ to be something like a “Feynman  Teacher”. The teaching system needs a policy that treats the student’s demonstrated understanding rather than the completion of the immediate problem, as the objective.

EG “Discuss the impact of the rapid economic development of the country af…[Read more]

Bet ya there’d be a market for socratic & sarcastic LLM’s.

Yes, I think so. It think that is a very good question. An AI trained only on pre-1905 knowledge might be less capable than one trained today, because modern AI can challenge classical assumptions partly because its training already contains Einstein’s challenge. When present-day AI suggests questioning absolute simultaneity, it is not i…[Read more]

Reg:

Wouldn’t AI in Einstein’s time have also held to all the assumptions of all the previous giants in Physics and Cosmology? Would AI independently question those assumptions?

Reg:

Inside RFK Jr.’s push to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy.

The latest news about Erica Schwartz and her hearing in Washington, DC is just flat-out disturbing!

This woman Erica Schwartz has spent her entire life in Medicine and in service to the nation in the U.S. Armed Forces literally breathing, e…[Read more]

I guess we could call on Feynman again with his cure for ‘metacognitive laziness’ and get students to learn the Feynman Technique first?

Explain the idea in plain language.
Notice where the explanation becomes vague.
Return to the source and repair the gap.
Explain it again without hiding behind jargon.

AI could be built into that process rather…[Read more]

Einstein’s originality did not emerge from knowing nothing that had gone before. He ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’ like Maxwell and Lorentz and others. Much of his work was reorganizing existing ideas around problems they had not fully resolved. For years Einstein clung to the prevailing cliché that the universe must be static. He later called…[Read more]

Reg:

World of Woo: When and why some people trust fame more than evidence.

It’s been with us for a while, at least 1985:

At least back then, people attached humor to this ad slogan. With wellness influencer culture, the ad slogan is now a serious qualification.

There is this interesting paper on the subject of how AI can make people lazy:

https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13544

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Of course, Einstein would have used AI. Using it does not mean outsourcing critical thought.

I think there is no way Einstein could have come up with his theories if he used AI to do his thinking.  AI summarises things well; but that means it only comes up with clichés.  It doesn’t do any original thinking, beyond su…[Read more]

Thanks, Reg 🙂

Have a great week everyone!

A somewhat curtailed post today.

Says Enco:

“And people resisting Islam in the Islamic world have yet another work to add to their arsenal.”

Ponder how improbable the outcome in which the most “liberal”, the ones who are most emphatic about anti-racism, anti-discrimination against LGBT and marginilized groups and oppressed groups are the most aligned with Islam. Islam, if there…[Read more]

Fellow Unbelievers:

Well, here’s the source of the cyclosporiasis:

Perhaps automated harvesting robots that don’t produce and spread feces and it’s pathogens, along with sterile sources of water, would be a big help here. Give AI something really useful to do, combined with sensors and robotics.

Meanwhile hold the…[Read more]

Jake:

Well, at least now you know you read a book that’s even better than you thought.

And people resisting Islam in the Islamic world have yet another work to add to their arsenal.