Laser Cooling is very cool.

Modding me down doesn't make me wrong, mods.

My opinion as a pragmatist is that most western institutions do a passably good job most of the time, but are imperfect and need to be constantly scrutinized to make sure they're serving the interests of the taxpayers. But what I'm talking about here is trust. There are many things that institutions could do to communicate in a way that doesn't do so much harm to their trustworthiness. I think that's an area where people are still learning how to do it "the right way." We're not there yet.

Wait, I thought Tylenol caused autism. Is there Tylenol in the vaccines? What's going on? LOL

First of all, trust in institutions is falling everywhere across the western world, not just in the US, and that drop in trust is bipartisan in the US. Secondly, there are real reasons for a general decline in institutional trust. In medicine, but also in economics, with the 2008 financial crisis that was caused by a failure of the institutions that are supposed to regulate such things. The rush to label anyone who questioned the origin of the COVID-19 virus as racist, only to have most authorities eventually admit that a Wuhan lab leak was not only possible, but likely, was another example. Again, the falling trust isn't a left or right issue. Does it help when RFK Jr. is running the CDC? Obviously not. But do you really think the state governments are immune to this falling trust? Definitely not.

What's funny is that the CDC still publishes measles data but I wonder how long that will continue.

While I count myself among the tribe of people who think we should govern ourselves based on evidence-based logic and reason, I have to admit, my tribe is a rather small minority. If the majority of the people in a democracy will not buy into an idea simply because you've provided a sound and well-reasoned argument, then we're going to have to fall back on practical lessons. You'd think measles coming back would be a pretty good object lesson, but apparently not.

Another article where we see that things started getting worse in the 2012 to 2014 timeframe. Which just happens to be when a lot of teenagers started to get smartphones. It's not a coincidence.

You don't understand the problem. The LLM won't "rip off" content from a website like GoodFood. That's now how it works. It doesn't copy stuff wholesale. It's a text generator that tends to generate text that looks like its training data, in a similar way that a person retelling a story or a joke will retell it from memory, but the memory isn't a facsimile, just like our memory isn't verbatim. When outputting the text, it'll be similar, but it won't be identical. I mean, it might be, but it might output something completely different just due to a neural net weight that was affected by some other training data that was kinda similar.

Exactly. As technologists, we need the output of computers to be precise and accurate. LLMs might be precise, but they're very often inaccurate, and that's not acceptable to us.

The average person doesn't live in a world where accuracy matters to them. A colleague said she used AI all the time, and I asked her how. She said she often tells it the contents in her fridge and asks it for a recipe that would use those ingredients. She said, "yeah, and it's really accurate too." I don't know how you measure accuracy on a test like that, but it doesn't really matter. If you're just mixing some ingredients together in a frying pan, you probably can't go too far wrong. As long as you don't ask it for a baking recipe, it'll work out.

And I think that's what's going on. The people who love AI don't know enough to realize when it's wrong, or are just asking it open ended questions, like you would ask a fortune teller, and it spits out something generic enough that you can't disprove it anyway.

I agree. Where I can find data to backup his claims, I generally accept what he says. Otherwise, I'm like, "hmm, ok, maybe."

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

I watch a lot of PZ, but you need to take that guy with a grain of salt. Yes, he's generally correct about the overall trends, and he got famous by predicting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but he's also prone to wild exaggerations, and often spouts incorrect details about countries or industries he talks about.

In the case of China, PZ's biggest argument that they're past peak and falling is demographic data. Unfortunately, just like their financial numbers, their demographic numbers are unreliable too. Most of this was systemic... instead of having a central institution do the census, China relies on data from provinces and adds them up. Unfortunately it also uses that data to determine transfer payments to provinces for things like school funding. So if you were governing a province and wanted more money for schools, you had an incentive to inflate the numbers, and this is what was happening for a long time. As China has been slowly releasing corrections to the data, massive numbers of people are just disappearing from the official counts. Like maybe one or two hundred million people.

What this means is that China's much further along the path to demographic decline than most other countries, and worse, they were actively trying to suppress birth rates with the one-child policy for a good portion of this timeframe. By the time they figured out what was going on, it was too late. You can't suddenly manufacture a bunch of 18 year-olds to fill your factories. And as a nation, they're very unfriendly to immigration, so that option is off the table too.

Now, China also has a leader who likes to shoot the messenger. Anyone under him who publishes data that Xi doesn't like finds himself on the outside, and unemployed. (Which is why we were all so aghast when Trump did the same thing with the jobs numbers.)

So yes, the reliable data we do have seems to indicate that China is in a lot of trouble. But don't take everything PZ says as gospel. He's often wrong.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.