Ahhhh, tell me you're a midwit without telling me you're a midwit.

I got a STEM scholarship to one of the world's top five universities. It's now down to about twentieth because of DIE but at the time it was a pretty hot deal.

It was a waste of a few years of my life and if I'd had to pay for it myself I wouldn't have bothered. About all it does is help get my resume past HR drones.

> I do NOT want someone who has skipped college engineering my cars, my nuclear power plants, my wind farms....
> I do NOT want someone who skipped college treating my wounds, performing surgery, or teaching me advanced mathematics.

Good for you. Doctors and engineers would typically fit into the "subjects which require a lot of hands-on work with expensive equipment" category.

> The number of people who can learn fluid dynamics, system mechanics, aeronautical engineering, nursing, doctoring, or any other real technical subject by just going 'online' is vanishingly small. Like - near zero.

Tell me you don't know any smart people without telling me you don't know any smart people. Smart people learn things so quickly that it's astonishing that midwits think it should take years.

It's a midwit thing. They always want to pretend they're better than other people so they'll pick some group and claim that group are stoopid, stoopid, stoopid because the midwit has a piece of paper which says they're smart and the stoopid people don't.

Really it's just basic class warfare. A hundred years ago they would have been saying the same about blacks.

In reality, I know a lot of very smart people and none of them are liberals. None of them are conservatives either, but that's because it's obvious to smart people that conservatives are just liberals in drag and have never conserved anything of value.

Britain also switched from "if you're good enough for a degree, we'll pay for it" to "anyone can go to university but they'll have to pay for it" shortly after I finished mine. It was a disaster for the kids, but it made the government look good because those kids were no longer counted in the youth unemployment figures.

Ah, sorry. I now see you were complaining about companies demanding degrees rather than saying kids should need degrees.

In the US it's partly because of the Civil Rights Act. Companies who didn't want to hire black people weren't allowed to do that but they could achieve the same by demanding applicants had degrees, which few black people had at the time. It's now largely because the managers doing the hiring are midwits with degrees and therefore think they should only hire midwits with degrees because they want to hire people like them because they're so great.

Because I'm conscious.

It's quite possible that you and the other commenters on this threads are not conscious, but I know I am. So any attempt to make a machine conscious is obviously futile.

A random number generator is a program.

You could connect a physical random number generator using quantum effects, but then you're basically just claiming that consciousness is a random number generator. To anyone who is conscious that's clearly nonsense.

> It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.

Everything the "AI" does is the result of a program it's running. You can literally look inside it and say "oh, yeah, it did that because it ran these instructions with this data." It will never do anything except run instructions on data, even if you can change that data to make it do different things.

There's no "Ghost in the Machine" which can make it do anything else.

> If you have a bachelor's degree you are substantially more productive than someone who doesn't have one.

[citation needed]

By far the most productive programmer I ever hired had no degree. I don't even know why anyone would hire a nobody with a degree over someone who'd contributed a lot to interesting open-source projects in High School.

And schooling has very little to do with education.

> This is another generic attack on higher education implying the people that they can be just fine and get advanced jobs that pay well without getting a college degree.

Why should kids need a college degree to get an advanced job that pays well? Aside from subjects which require a lot of hands-on work with expensive equipment, pretty much everything they need to learn can easily be found online and doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that way.

Modern "higher education" is welfare for communist midwits. This is why they shriek so much when anyone says "uh, why should kids need you to give them a piece of paper to get a job?"

A college education used to mean that you were one of the smartest young men in the country. Only a tiny fraction of the population had degrees and they needed to be smart to be accepted in the first place.

As entrance was expanded the degree stopped being a Certificate of Smartness because most of the people who were getting degrees were midwits at best. You could still rely on a degree from places like Harvard and Oxford, but thanks to nepotism and DIE even those are no longer Certificates of Smartness.

Today a degree is basically a sign of someone who borrowed six figures to be lectured by communists and thinks they're smart because they have a certificate that says so. This may be great for government employment but is not appealing to companies who want to get things done.

A few years ago some big British financial company said they'd stopped looking at applicants' degrees because they'd found no connection between a degree and success in the business. I know a number of companies who have blacklists of universities they won't hire from any more, and a few who just won't hire anyone with a recent degree because it's a sign that the applicant is not very smart.

How does a machine following a program, no matter how complex that program might be, become conscious?

The quest for AI is just Satanists trying to become God by creating life. There's no science or understanding behind it.

He didn't say that all biological beings are conscious, but that only biological beings can be conscious.

Which seems pretty clear since machines are just following a program. An LLM can't suddenly decide to do something else which isn't programmed into it.

NASA was literally created to give Nazis a job.

The Moon has very little in common with Mars, so there's no great reason to going there first. There's no atmosphere so landing is different, the surface dust is extremely abrasive, it's an entirely different environment for propellant production, the gravity is about half as great, etc.

About the only real benefit is that you're only a few days away if something goes wrong, rather than a few months away on Mars.

1. I would argue that Quantum Mechanics is a pretty good argument for a simulation, because you don't have to simulate the low-level stuff unless someone's actually looking at it.
2. Any detailed simulation of this universe would have to be run in a universe that's massively more capable than this one, or run at a very slow speed in a universe which is somewhat more capable than this one. So our limits wouldn't apply.
3. As far as we can tell, 99.9999999999999% of the simulation is just barren rocks. That means it doesn't really have to simulate a lot.
4. We have no idea whether anything really existed before this instant or whether it will continue to exist. You could likely eliminate much of the work by only calculating the past when you have to.
5. There's no reliable evidence that this is an MMO rather than a single-player game. That also reduces the amount you need to imulate.