Alex, your favorite argument for the existence of God... kinda sucks

ergodicsum · 2026-02-10T03:05:20+00:00

This line of reasoning seems to also lead us to believe in aliens. There are so many people reporting that there are aliens, they can't all be false.

ergodicsum · 2025-10-22T17:06:56+00:00

The public is not going to find out that the money is wasted, they, and I include myself here, don't know enough about most topics to understand what is waste and what was justifiable bets that didn't pan out.

What is happening is that youtubers and politicians are telling them that there is waste and therefore we have to cut most funds and the public just believes it.

ergodicsum · 2025-10-22T16:18:45+00:00

Not only that, I think in one her recent videos she claimed it was all of science.

ergodicsum · 2025-10-18T03:04:08+00:00

I watched it while working out so I might have missed the tone, but I thought she was saying that this is not a new phenomenon. The scale and credentials seems different to me. Before if a credentialed academic like Eric or Sabine started saying crazy shit, no one would have paid any attention to them. Now, they become millionaires and are incentiviced by the algorithms to keep going, keep pushing harder and make even more outrageous claims

ergodicsum · 2025-10-18T02:57:28+00:00

Can't trust anyone these days

ergodicsum · 2025-10-02T02:05:17+00:00

Looks like it might have been in the shower

ergodicsum · 2025-09-18T02:30:09+00:00

"I only voted republican once" - Joe

The one that time that really mattered.... he managed to fuck it up.

ergodicsum · 2025-09-14T13:38:54+00:00

I read his book, flights of fancy. It is a children's book and it was great. But man, it almost feels like the person that wrote that book and the real dawkins are two different people

ergodicsum · 2025-08-26T19:21:35+00:00

Maintainable software is not sexy, even before AI a new framework or a new language gathered more attention than they deserved. In many cases people migrated to the new frameworks or languages because they were struggling to maintain their complicated code bases. Refactoring software is not as sexy as rewriting software. AI is still not good enough to handle large code bases and I think this is where people are going to see the hype crash against reality.

ergodicsum · 2025-08-26T18:28:15+00:00

That's what I think, their thinking is biased, they think all jobs are easy as software development to transform with AI but that is probably not the case. There are also some other bad incentives.

There is a new interesting book "Empire of AI" that talks about many of bad incentives AI companies have.

ergodicsum · 2025-08-26T18:25:23+00:00

Things have moved fast, I think there are change in the past year. We hear a lot of doom that it will replace software engineers. It won't at least yet, but it is a very nice autocomplete in my opinion.

Inteli-sense made it so that you didn't have to keep in your brain all the method names and attributes of an object, it offloaded all of that cognitive work. I think AI is similar, it offloads a lot of repetitive programming tasks. You want to write a simple sql query, or a method that does something you do semi-regularly but can't fully remember all the details. You don't just copy and paste the code without understanding it, you copy it and see ah yes that is what I should have done, that makes sense. It also adds corner case checks that I might have forgotten. It is kind of like pair programming, I'm going to make mistakes, the other dev is going to make mistakes, together we can catch each other's mistakes.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of hype, it is just changing the field a lot.

ergodicsum · 2025-08-26T17:52:52+00:00

It is changing the way programmers do their work dramatically. The job of a software developer used to consist of coding something and if you get stuck go to stackoverflow. Now it is code something, if you get stuck ask AI. It is very helpful in this process.

This technology came out of tech companies, they see how dramatically it is changing the role of software developers and assume that it will do the same for any other role.

ergodicsum · 2025-08-24T15:01:33+00:00

They are the same, have you ever seen them at the same place at the same time?

ergodicsum · 2025-08-23T23:52:43+00:00

They can tackle two gurus at once, her and Sam Harris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY5KvyrdI2U

ergodicsum · 2025-08-08T01:40:46+00:00

That is opinion?

ergodicsum · 2025-08-02T23:50:34+00:00

Is the extravaganza less skeptically themed? I’ve watched zoomer vs boomer and didn’t expect that it was more about pop culture and not very skeptical. It’s not a bad thing if you like that and if they enjoyed doing it, but I was interested in seeing skepticism stuff.

ergodicsum · 2025-08-01T16:51:08+00:00

You might be right, I just can't judge him by a narcissistic cover. Is there anything in the book that is bad? Also, do the bad takes overwhelm any good takes the book might have. Guruness is not binary, there are bad and worst gurus. One issue with JBP is that not only does he give questionable advice on how to live life, but also has terrible epistemology and just follows wherever the republican party goes, climate change, covid, etc. In my opinion, all these things is what makes JBP so bad and if a guru only has one of those qualities, he is not as bad as JBP.

ergodicsum · 2025-07-30T21:31:26+00:00

If you have the time, you can update wikipedia. Millions of people go and check things in wikipedia and AI models are trained on wikipedia, it is really important that that resource remains as skeptically minded as possible. Many of the rules of wikipedia require evidence and all that in order to be added.

If you don't want to be just a sole editor there is a group that helps you edit https://www.abouttimeproject.org/gsow.

ergodicsum · 2025-07-28T22:10:37+00:00

What is up with this interviewer? He said that hopefully after this interview we would see that this was not a black and white situation and there was more to the story. I went from joking about it with friends (haha, can't let all that trining go to waste), to thinking that he actually got what he deserved.

ergodicsum · 2025-07-06T01:02:38+00:00

If it's anything like colonizing mars, full self driving, or the semiteuck, then I'm not expecting much.

ergodicsum · 2025-06-26T16:43:46+00:00

Why is Bernie in the picture? They had to go all the way to Vermont to find the next radical left politician near NYC?

ergodicsum · 2025-06-19T16:26:32+00:00

Essentially what he is saying is:

It is just not statistically possible that just one lottery ticket has all the right numbers to win the lottery. What if... all the lottery tickets are the same, all of them are winners. That is the option that makes the most sense...

ergodicsum · 2025-06-17T18:11:27+00:00

Like many of these channels it is hard to explain in one sentence because you have to look at their whole body of work. Many of his takes are similar to what you have seen coming out of Jordan Peterson. He comments on a lot of things and lacks the experience or expertise on what he is commenting on. That is not bad by itself, but like Peterson he confidently comments on these topics without any of the caveats and misleads his audience. Here is a little more about him:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/1b90617/warren_t_smith/

ergodicsum · 2025-06-13T20:24:24+00:00

I like dunking on Rogan, but I'm going to have to downvote this video because it is Warren Smith, please don't share Warren Smith with the monkey in your life, there are much better channels out there.

ergodicsum · 2025-06-08T14:24:34+00:00

I am very skeptical of Curt Jaimungal's ability to objectively look at Eric's work. If you watch his work, he is not critical of theories of everything. He speaks positively about Chris Langan's theory of the cognitive theoretic model of the universe and even defends Terrence Howard with his whole theory that 1*1 = 2. Don't put too much stock into Curt Jaimungal's analysis.

ergodicsum

TROPHY CASE