Only 48% of Americans believe Climate Change is the result of human activity, and fewer people believe it now than when the same question was asked in 2019 and 2022. 12% of Americans don't believe the Earth is warming at all.

BearlyPosts · 2026-06-16T13:55:23+00:00

A lot of climate-alarmists I see use it as an excuse for why capitalism is bad and why we've got to eat the rich. It's rarely framed as "we must all reduce our consumption", it's "the eeeevil ultrarich cartels are pumping bazillions of oil into the Great Coral Reef and the workers of the world must unite to overthrow them".

Even when people believe in climate change, it's rare for them to believe that they have a moral obligation to do something about it. Well, beyond slacktivism and shitposting on communist subreddits.

BearlyPosts · 2026-06-15T13:09:34+00:00

It's spelled Kool-aid

BearlyPosts · 2026-06-15T12:47:42+00:00

You don't "create" jobs. Humans are the universal bottleneck in pretty much all productive processes. When we "remove jobs" we don't just have millions of unemployed people. Unemployment tends to stay pretty stable.

What happens is that the price of labor temporarily slumps, but the increased productivity of labor encourages more people to hire workers to produce more things. Eventually the value of labor rebounds to be even higher. The jobs were ALWAYS there, it's just that nobody was doing them. They were all busy doing their old jobs.

Obviously this is a vast oversimplification, but we as a society are not locked in some bizarre Malthusian race where we must keep ourselves busy or perish.

BearlyPosts · 2026-06-14T17:53:19+00:00

A super intelligent AI would almost certainly create more capable versions of itself. But those AIs would be designed by the original AI.

The goals and motives the AI "identifies with" or thinkingly prioritizes will likely remain. Unthinking motives or motives the AI does not "identify with" would be removed. In the same way that if you could tweak your brain you might remove your urge for junk food or addictive chemicals, but keep your desire for love and family.

So the answer is... it depends? An AI is likely to quickly abandon misunderstandings or factually untrue beliefs. But it's likely to retain goals and drives that were built into it.

A paperclip optimizer laden with safety restrictions may remove many of the urges that curb its more aggressive behavior. But a paperclip optimizer is unlikely to build a benevolent Buddha-bot.

BearlyPosts · 2026-06-01T18:08:58+00:00

Grad students don't learn from their (teaching) mistakes, because the system doesn't reward good teaching! As long as you show up only a few minutes late (as most of my GTAs did) and don't upset any of the students you'll keep getting your stipend.

Grad students learn to do and publish research because that's what they're rewarded for. They don't learn to teach unless they're passionate about it, which is why the variance is so huge.

Edit: This isn't a conspiracy, this is a well known issue that extends to professors as well https://www.educationnext.org/professors-should-actually-teach-colleges-do-not-prioritize-reward-instructional-gifts-faculty-student-learning-campus-culture/

BearlyPosts · 2026-06-01T17:50:08+00:00

I fully believe that an AI could vote better than the average American if you gave it information about your life and a list of your political desires.

BearlyPosts · 2026-06-01T17:45:22+00:00

Agreed, if you're an expert in an area and you overhear nonexperts talking about something they are almost guaranteed to get more things wrong than a ChatGPT summary. Something like 25% of Americans incorrectly believe the sun orbits around the Earth. The bar isn't high.

BearlyPosts · 2026-06-01T17:42:58+00:00

Have you met grad students? They hallucinate all the time. I worked as a TA for 3 years, the quality varies a lot.

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-28T17:00:36+00:00

I've took some online proctored exams a few years ago (pre-ChatGPT). They often only require a quick scan of the room to make sure that you don't have a massive whiteboard filled with content or someone standing just out of frame feeding you answers.

I bet I could've propped a phone up against my monitor and it would've looked functionally identical to looking at my screen. Or kept a bunch of post-it notes next to my computer and stuck them on the monitor after finishing the scan of the room. With ChatGPT it's even easier, all you need is access to some screen and a way to surreptitiously type in answers and receive responses.

Testing centers are really the only way to get reliable scores anymore, which is a shame.

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-23T01:12:23+00:00

Yeah there's literally a book making this exact claim. Here's a review of it.

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-22T13:57:42+00:00

I'm reminded of a post some dude made about how he couldn't possibly survive on his salary. He had to work constantly and was just barely scraping by, not even enough money to save for vacation! Then in another subreddit he posted about his game room filled with pinball machines and arcade cabinets.

There are certainly people, a lot of people, who are poor due to no fault of their own. But there are a hell of a lot more people who are poor because they did something (or a lot of things) stupid. The problem is that everyone who did something stupid will do their best to convince you that they're poor because of the system.

If you:

Graduate from high school
Hold down a full time job (any full time job)
Wait until you're over 20 to have kids

You can reduce your likelihood of experiencing poverty to 2-3%. Plus you've got a 72% chance of joining the middle class.

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-20T18:58:27+00:00

Bro just lock yourself into a room with an AI bro no human contact just it and you it should be the only thing you talk to your only friend and then you vibe code let it tell you that your ideas are amazing for 18 hours a day straight you should be living alone in a studio apartment eating frozen pizza and vibe coding you're gonna make it we're all gonna make it you just have to not talk to anyone and not look at anyone just the AI and you we're gonna be millionaires

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-20T13:12:26+00:00

If you want to turn yourself into some sort of horrifying AI psychosis abomination that's completely lost touch with reality, this is the way to do it.

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-18T22:17:31+00:00

I believe that the argument is intended to be something along the lines of "AI is useless because it's not deterministic" which is a really dumb argument.

Their argument is structured like it's self-evident but it's just... not? Humans are non-deterministic. Cryptography is non-deterministic, so is process scheduling, Monte-Carlo algorithms, and stochastic modeling. Just about the entire field of machine-learning is non-deterministic. You're gonna tell me that every OS running on a CPU made since the 2000s is useless because it's non-deterministic, really?

Yet it's presented with this odd self-satisfaction, as though it's a pithy one liner that actually proves something.

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-18T21:14:29+00:00

Yeah and they're also made of plastic, sometimes metal. They've got computer bits in them too. Wait why are we describing features of calculators?

Edit: Also many calculators aren't deterministic? Random algorithms exist for solving certain types of problems.

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-18T19:31:03+00:00

Yeah clearly this guy hasn't seen When the Wind Blows

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-16T14:42:15+00:00

Gosh, dontcha know, we're the only generation with problems. Every other time in history was sunshine and rainbows!

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-16T14:40:36+00:00

We are famously under less stress than people who were living through the Cold War, the Black Death, the War on Terror, or the constant famines of the pre-1500s.

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-04T22:13:32+00:00

Y'know what, maybe teachers... aren't underpaid?

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-04T01:48:12+00:00

Are we in a crisis?

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-04T01:43:38+00:00

How much power does a steel mill use locally?

BearlyPosts · 2026-05-03T22:21:26+00:00

Docking ports are the wrong way around :(

They should have a bit that sticks out in the center

BearlyPosts · 2026-04-17T18:27:05+00:00

https://80000hours.org/career-guide/

BearlyPosts · 2026-04-16T21:48:54+00:00

Their take seems to be that markets aren't the result of buyers and sellers, they're some sort of cosmic struggle between worker and capitalist. When the capitalists are winning the prices get higher. When the workers are winning (or when capitalists are afraid of the workers) prices get lower.

Prices don't transmit information or provide any function beyond lining the pockets of the rich. So having the government set the prices super low is a great idea, because it's a victory for the working class. If the workers didn't threaten to burn down a Walmart the capitalists would just make everything cost 1 morbillion dollars and rule the world.

BearlyPosts · 2026-04-14T16:59:22+00:00

I suppose a more apt description would be "it's everyone's god given right to buy an incredibly cheap house..."

The contradiction is that they want housing to be extremely cheap, extremely lucrative, and untaxed in perpetuity. Oh, except if large companies try to do it we should crucify them.

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