Just gonna leave this here!

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

A lack of communities. Communal child care works great when you live in a village and you know everyone and most people around you are related to you.

We don’t have that anymore. People live in suburbs where they don’t even want to talk to their neighbours. Their relatives live far away, potentially in other provinces/states or even other countries.

Heck, a lot of people don’t even like their own relatives!

I think you mean simple, not easy. Getting a large group of people to do anything is not easy.

The love for the Nazi flag comes from white identity politics and white nationalism. The confederate types and the Nazi types have begun to rally together. White nationalism is spreading like a wildfire not just in North America but all over Europe.

You don’t think that’s one of the root causes of all these issues? Pride and resentment and a deep inferiority complex met with sneering on the other side?

It’s also Minnesota Nice for yes!

Also known as kicking the can down the road.

If you don’t fail a kid in elementary school they’re gonna fail in high school. If you don’t fail them in high school they’re gonna fail in university or in life in general.

Life has consequences for making mistakes and not learning from them. If we try to shelter children from their mistakes and bad habits then we raise adults who are poorly equipped for handling the challenges of life.

When I was in first year of university I met so many nice, seemingly-well-adjusted people who hit a brick wall with their coursework. I believe around a third of my peers failed to graduate at all in their programs. Many dropped out or transferred to other departments or other universities.

But here’s the thing: my peers had already been subject to a rigorous selection process to get in (only about 10% of applicants were admitted). If you had put all applicants through the rigours of the coursework far more would have failed.

The really tragic part of this whole story is when you factor in the degrees of the consequences for failure. In elementary school the consequences for failure would be very low. Children who are older than their peers tend to outperform them anyway. In university, however, the consequences for failure are very high (thousands of dollars wasted on failed courses that need to be repeated).

The consequences for failure outside of school (real life as they call it) are even higher: unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, and even violence and death.

When the right goes too far, they’re ascendant in politics. They’ve won the election and they’re enacting some seriously bad policies.

When the left goes too far they fragment into a million pieces. No coalition can be built because everyone is too caught up in fighting over the details.

Okay that looks really delicious! Well done!

And then finally 1 kid caring for 2 parents and 4 grandparents. 1 worker and 6 dependents.

You’ve made a very vague statement without any substance, sorry. “People in power” are not the reason a person who does not speak the language spoken in an office finds it difficult to get a job in that office. Language barriers make communication (and therefore collaboration) difficult or even impossible. It is no one’s fault that language barriers exist but immigrants without the necessary language skills are at a disadvantage.

If there’s anyone to blame, it’s the people in power in the home country of the immigrants who created the conditions where immigration into such a disadvantaged situation is preferable to remaining at home.

Learning the local language is a survival skill. It doesn’t require forgetting your first language nor does it mean the end of your culture.

The issue is that groups of immigrants can form enclaves where they speak their own language but not the local language. This has the effect of making them “second class” and limiting both their economic opportunities and their overall contribution to society.

Yeah but no more of an “in” than knowing English. Immigration policy is controlled by the federal government which only cares if you know one of the two official languages of the country (or not).

Where are your statistics? Do any cursory searching and you’ll find that South Korea is desperate for care workers. There’s a huge shortage.

Maybe in the west. Not in places like South Korea or Japan. Even if you got the populations to buy in to immigration 100%, you’ve got an impossible task convincing immigrants to learn the language.

English’s hegemony over the world makes immigration to non-English-speaking areas a huge problem. Quebec, for example, tries mightily to force immigrants to learn French and the results are quite ugly in Quebec politics.

The problem with declining population is the huge bubble pop you get when the population is mostly elderly people and few workers.

Yeah. I remember people talking about how in the 1950s you’d go for a drive in the country during the summer and your car’s windshield would be completely covered in bugs. It was like a rainstorm there were so many. Now you can drive through those same areas and not even get a single bug hitting your windshield.

I didn’t own a laptop at the time. I wasn’t going to take my big desktop to school regardless.