Quoting a high end philosopher with an incomprehensible unrelated quote makes your argument unassailable by small minds.

Sorry, a bit of a (bad) joke on my part given your signature, but also serious. Let me be less cryptic.

Folk Psychology is an idea of Paul Churchland. I took a philosophy of mind seminar, and it's the idea that resonated with me most. Basically it says that these mental states we ascribe to people don't necessarily reflect the actual processes and are just a way humans understand and interact with the world and other people. When you say thinking you are using a folk psychology notion that isn't consistent with other people and probably not internally consistent with your other beliefs. Folk psychology also implies that introspection is not as valuable as people imagine for answering these questions.

Of course, when thinking is scientifically defined, it will be related to the folk psychology notion otherwise they won't use the term thinking, but it should be rigorous enough to allow scientific progress.

But to your point, let's assume we could create a set of objects that can't think (even though we haven't defined what think really means.) I'm not sure that's much progress. There are a lot of things in the world, and it's the tricky ones that are really informative to the definition (just look at how ML works.) While I agree that some eventual scientific definition will exclude rocks and chocolate, people will have different opinions on things like snakes, ravens, and Claude Opus 4.5.

As for Popper, I've read some of his stuff a long time ago for a philosophy of science course. While interesting and influential, it's a bit dated. From my perspective, it's precomputer, so it misses important questions about how science is done. Current philosophy of science people seem to dismiss it for other reasons.

Yes, we do know how LLMs work. Maybe you don't, but the engineers at OpenAI and Microsoft and Google etc., absolutely do. The evidence of this is that over the past three years, they have been able to repeatedly and steadily improve the quality of the chatbots' responses, and to correct incorrect responses of the past. One notable example was an early Gemini image generator, which, when asked to render drawings of historic figures like Lincoln, would render an image with the wrong gender or race. The designers had built this into the LLM, but didn't fully anticipate the ultimate fallout. So they fixed the image generator to be more historically accurate, before they brought it back online. This kind of correction would not be possible, if the engineers didn't understand thoroughly how it works.

Lot's of things can be improved without understanding them at a fundamental level. Trial and error helps build some intuition but it's not real understanding. History is full of examples where humans built and improved things without a good theory to understand how they work. In fact, it's often these inventions that help motivate the development of the science. Look at how the steam engine helped thermodynamics.

Neural networks are a very basic simulation of the neural networks of brains. But they didn't really work that well until people used them in convolutional networks that modeled vision systems. Since then it's been a lot of experiments building intuitions but very little strong theory that leads to understanding. The researchers are still surprised at how well LLMs performed and can't really explain it, but they can run lots of experiments and try different ideas and tweaks. Going back to your example of Google, for their most recent LLM model, after they trained it, they were surprised at the strength of the model. If they really understood it, there would be no surprise just an implementation of their already worked out solution.

To be fair, the phrase was coined in 1955 to describe a field of research. When you read AI, you should interpret it as artificial intelligence research.

But you are correct; the term is now being abused. While many products have been result of AI, I would definitely not call any of those products an artificial intelligence. LLM algorithms are the first invention that could be built into a system that has a chance of succeeding. At a minimum, it's forced us to rethink our notions of intelligence.

What in hell GPT-generated word salad did I just plow through?

Careful. If you don't understand something and then proceed to critique and insult it, it might be you looks like the fool.

It is generally agreed that chocolate bars do not think. Rocks do not think. Pocket calculators do not think. We know what thinking is not, even if we can't define it fully.

I'm sorry this is just folk psychology and not very useful in this context. What we need is a scientific definition before we can address this question. Until then, it's just inconsistent thought, at least from a scientific perspective.

Pedophilia is not just about age or physical characteristics it's about exerting power over a helpless individual.

I'm not a fan of terms getting new definitions without good reason. Often it's for lazy reasons, but sometimes it's to attack someone. When I grew up, a pedophile was someone attracted to prepubescent children. We had statutory rape laws to cover older children who were not emotionally developed enough to properly consent. I understand the term now has an extra definition in our culture, and this is what's causing the confusion. I don't know the source of this new definition, but it allows people to escape back into their confirmation bubble and claim their side is being unjustly attacked.

Be careful. It has not been absolutely proven that vaccines never cause XXX. It probably can't be.

Technically only tautologies can be proven.

The same thing is happening with solar; from a Wall Street perspective it's a failure because prices keep falling and solar companies aren't making profits. From a Chinese perspective it's a success, because they are blanketing their mountains with cheap solar panels and they are going to achieve energy independence which will help the whole economy.

That's one of the ironies of capitalism, everyone publicly waxes about how great it is to have a free market, but the dominate players do everything they can to ruin any free market. A free market drives profits down close to zero. This is why Buffet loves his economic moats.

They care about it because it's exactly their plan - they tank the rest of the world's auto industry, then they take over. We've seen this pattern with industry after industry. This is why dealing with them is problematic - they are not operating in good faith.

I'm not sure what that has to do with good faith. Bad faith, in a domestic sense, would be dumping and destroying those markets then taking over and drastically increasing prices. Not sure that even applies when talking international with different economies and different goals/perspectives. However, assuming it does, have the Chinese followed this pattern. Have the prices of the markets they dominated suddenly jumped after they got a dominate position. Standard example would be solar panels and it's not true there. Maybe they just have a system that does a good job lowering prices for consumers.

Instead of his wife's?

Well that was predictable. It really doesn't matter what I say, as this is just distraction. You quibble over things that don't matter or misconceptions that got corrected and ignore everything that proves you wrong. What did any of your comment have to do with what the majority of the left believes? As I said, you can always find people on the fringe, so what.

So let's see how you list stacks up for the majority of the left.

- The inflation is "temporary" and "small".

The US did a great job controlling inflation compared to other countries. And it was temporary.

- The Steele Report is credible.

Very few on the left read the Steele Report. It was mostly a meme for pee pee jokes. As for the courts, it was one of many pieces of evidence they used to get warrants. Given the number of Trump people convicted of working with the Russians, the warrants were justified.

- The laptop is a Russian plant.

This was initial speculation by some in the intelligence community that got pushed by 24/7 news channels. People on the left quickly accepted that it was real once the details came out. Notice how this is different than the right who still think the laptop of Biden's son is a big deal. There was nothing incriminating against Joe Biden on that laptop.

- The lab leak theory is propaganda.

There was a lot of debate on this. Most on the left decided it's unknown. Of course there were lots of different lab leak theories that went from accidental to intentional attack. Most agree the attack theory is nonsense.

- Opposing long term lockdowns is unscientific.

People on the left are willing to treat it as scientific, but science requires logic and evidence. Unfortunately/fortunately, pandemics are rare...

- Biden is fully mentally competent.

The vast majority who saw the debate realized he had lost too many steps. The administration did a good job hiding it, but pivoted when the public found out. If anything, it is a positive for the majority of the left.

- Defunding police is a great idea.

The left promotes moving money to focused efforts to helping communities instead of having police do those jobs poorly. You're just parroting talking points that misrepresent positions.

- The GF riots were "mostly peaceful".

The majority of the left knows these protests had a lot of violence and many people died.

- Judging by identity instead of merit is democratic.

This is getting laughable.

- Extremely adult books in grades schools are appropriate.

Again, no, but I guess it depends on what you define as adult. Probably boils down to fear of anything gay.

- The majority of Black Americans support defunding, oppose school choice, oppose VoterID, and support illegal immigration.

I don't know what this means. I guess it means that the left thinks most Black Americans are on the left, which is true. And then the logic is they must therefore agree with the nonsense you posted above which is nonsense.

To smear moderate democrats with these folks would be ACTUAL strawmanning, but to show the far left and far right have similar totalitarian goals? Thatâ(TM)s sanity.

Sure anybody can find a small fraction of the left who support all kinds of crazy stuff. The problem is the majority of the right supports crazy, and they are in power.

China is a country that can be divided into two sections - a huge number of poor that make 1% of the C02 and the elite, that make far MORE coal than the average western person.

I'm sure this is true for many countries. Personally, I think it's reasonable to "judge" people on CO2 output and judge a country on the policies it uses to lower those emissions. This means per capita is a useful metric for how well those policies are doing.

You should not get a free pass for your elite because you mistreat your poor.

It's a separate issue on how they get their average such much lower than the US. The goal is to get it lower and they are currently much lower. In many ways, they are still a developing nation, and one can be concerned about the future, but I not willing to blame them for an unknown future particularly when they are making strong moves towards renewable energy.

China is the world's largest emitter in total. They produce 35% of the total carbon emissions. Merely because you also have a bunch of poor people doing nothing does not excuse you abusing the crap out of the atmosphere.

So here you go back to using an obviously bad metric. They have over four times the population of the US. This metric really amounts to saying they have too many people, but that's a ridiculous argument.

However, your other metric based on GDP is interesting. Particularly given their CO2 per dollar GDP is twice the US and that coal has roughly twice the CO2 per unit energy as gas. It also takes into account China's manufacturing for the rest of the world since that's part of their GDP.

However, many simple arguments are misleading. I'd like to see real research on this topic. It smells a little like a think tank pivot point for the energy industry. They want us to blame China, so we do less to impact their profits. Do you have an citations where they actually consider the details to support this metric?

If you have humans double-checking your AI, then you don't save money. Never gonna happen.

Depends on what the AI is doing. If it's predicting a rare event, then humans double checking for that event can be inexpensive. You calibrate the model so that it has a small positive rate on a hold out set and then have humans check the live positives. Since it's a rare event, there are only a "small" number of images to check. If the false positive rate is too high, then you are checking like crazy and you need to fix/recalibrate your model. Notice the humans ignore all the events that system predicts as negative.