It's a silly concept IMO because it assumes that civilizations with the ability to do interstellar travel or communication make the decision to not do so because they have knowledge of an interstellar force that destroys any civilization that does so. It would seem like any civilization that becomes aware of such a force would be destroyed, so how would all of these surviving ones know of the danger? Actual dark forests are quiet because a mix of the animals' instinct and visible signs of danger.
While it's possible that some civilizations would hypothetically be able to observe what happened to others and keep quiet, they would all have to do so to solve the contradictions of Fermi's paradox.
Feels like just yesterday that everyone agreed that critical code is read orders of magnitude more than written, so optimizing for quick writing is wrong.
Genuinely I think that perspective is still shared by many/most engineers.
I think we’ve seen a wave of bad actors - either employees of LLM companies, or bots - pushing the idea hard of code quality not mattering and “the models will improve so fast that your code quality degrading doesn’t matter”.
I think the humans pushing that idea may even believe it, but I don’t think they’re usually employed as software engineers at regular non-AI companies, rather they have some incentive to believe it and convince others as well
>other techniques include Kant's Transcendental Deduction or Descartes's pure doubt
This is not quite accurate. Kant says very explicitly in the (rarely studied) Transcendental Doctrine of Method (Ch 1 Section 4, A789/B817) that this kind of proof method (he calls it "apagogic") is unsuitable to transcendental proofs.
You might be thinking of the much more well studied Antinomies of Pure Reason, in which he uses this kind of proof negatively (which is to say, the circumscribe the limits of reason) as part of his proof against the way the metaphysical arguments from philosophers of his time (which he called "dogmatic" use of reason) about the nature of the cosmos were posed.
The method he used in his Deduction is a transcendental argument, which is typically expressed using two things, X and Y. X is problematic (can be true but not necessarily so), and Y is dependent on X. So then if Y is true, then X must necessarily be true as well.
Sorry I meant "proof method" as more like "this was this guy's angle of attack", not that they would've thought each others angles were valid at all or that they're commensurable with say, 20th century formal proof logic (or Aristotelian logic for example). Descartes and Leibniz were squarely the rationalists that Kant wanted to abolish, and Hegel rejected Kants distinction between noumena and phenomena entirely, so they're already starting from very different places.
I guess it would be more accurate to state Kants actual premises here as making the distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself rather than the deduction, but the deduction technique itself was fascinating when I first learned it so that's what I associate most with Kant lol.
I guess I have not thought critically why we couldn't use a Transcendental argument to support Descartes. I just treated it as a vague category error (to be fair I don't actually know Descartes philosophy that well, even less than I know Kants lol). Could be a fun exercise when I have time.
>I guess I have not thought critically why we couldn't use a Transcendental argument to support Descartes.
The previous section within the Transcendental Dialectic that focuses on the nature of the soul goes into a refutation of Descartes' statement. Kant basically finds "I think therefore I am" to be a tautology that only works by equivocating the "I" in each clause. "I think" pretends that the "I" there is an object in the world which it then compares to the "I am" which is an object in the world. Kant argues that "I think" does not actually demonstrate an "I" that is an object but rather a redundant qualification of thinking.
I am being a bit imprecise, so here is SEP's summary:
>For in each case, Kant thinks that a feature of self-consciousness (the essentially subjectival, unitary and identical nature of the “I” of apperception) gets transmuted into a metaphysics of a self (as an object) that is ostensibly “known” through reason alone to be substantial, simple, identical, etc. This slide from the “I” of apperception to the constitution of an object (the soul) has received considerable attention in the secondary literature, and has fueled a great deal of attention to the Kantian theory of mind and mental activity.
>The claim that the ‘I’ of apperception yields no object of knowledge (for it is not itself an object, but only the “vehicle” for any representation of objectivity as such) is fundamental to Kant’s critique of rational psychology.
>You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive
This is a naive view of the average (or even above average) person's approach to learning, as well as an overly cynical read on the intellectually motivating atmosphere that comes from earnestly engaging in an academic environment.
Unless you were unfortunate enough to go during peak covid years, then that was just a skill issue. If it was truly beneath you, you could have been writing and publishing papers.
This is interesting but I am not surprised. People got used to spammers putting in zero effort because it's a game of scale for them. Well now zero effort still gets them all the way there when it comes to looking convincing.
It's more than a game of scale: people who almost but not quite fall for the scam that follows the spam incur real cost to them. They don't want to trick as many people as possible with their mail, they want to trick only the most vulnerable. The obvious (to most people) mistakes are in there deliberately.
This changes, of course, with phishing. Will phishing by email even survive when voice imitation calls become more and more available? I guess it will, the bar for monetization is too low bar with resellable accounts and the like.
Exactly. When you're spending money, you want to be in the loop. It's why the Alexa Echo devices as media for Amazon purchases never really worked out. Amazon had two conflicting aims. They wanted to race to the bottom with their increasingly shady vendors which eroded trust, while also positioning themselves and their devices to be trusted agents of purchases. Of course no one wants to buy anything sight unseen through them.
This was my general reaction when it was determined that the "log review" portion of the PCI checklist (can't remember what level) could be satisfied by computer "review", and that newer PCI versions were moving towards preferring automated "review"
>Human-driven research is also brute-force but with a more efficient search strategy
No it's not. Is there anything to back that up? There's a creative aspect to human research that I've yet to see with gen AI. All it does is regurgitate stuff and get some "new" ideas via the latent space of the distribution it models. But a generative model cannot by definition create anything new. Just estimate its data well enough that it can sample it well enough to fake novelty.
While it's possible that some civilizations would hypothetically be able to observe what happened to others and keep quiet, they would all have to do so to solve the contradictions of Fermi's paradox.
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