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."

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.

Most of the people on Slashdot have been screaming that the emperor has no clothes for a while now. Building a machine that spits out semi-plausible dialogue is very different from making an intelligent machine. I just asked Google's AI to summarize information about myself (my own name from my own town) and it rather hilariously indicated that my wife was actually my (IRL) sister. It had apparently retrieved the names from an obituary for our grandparent but didn't actually understand the relationships. We're not seeing the meaningful improvements that you would hope to see given the ludicrous capital that's been invested into LLMs. This isn't like Moore's Law in the 90's where there is constant improvement along a single axis (transistors per square mm). There have been a couple really big breakthroughs (first deep learning, and then transformers). Throwing more and more compute power at it isn't going to create the payoff that all the investors think. It's not going to get significantly better without more big breakthroughs, and those might come tomorrow, or not until long after we're all dead and gone. LLMs are a very risky bet right now.

Absolutely, and of all the rote learning they stopped teaching (multiplication tables, keyboarding) I think cursive isn't a big deal. But I did have a co-op student a few years ago, and we were talking about something and I wanted to sketch it, so I went to grab a piece of paper and he goes, "wait, I'll pull up a notepad app on my phone" so I wait, and wait, and he's tapping and swiping and then the app doesn't work, and he has this stylus and it's not working, and I go, "look, let's just do this on paper" and I pull a piece of printer paper out of the printer and start sketching the idea. There are just too many times when you need to get an idea down on whatever surface you have around you, and you don't want to be dependent on having a tablet or a phone or whatever handy. And to do that you need practice making marks on paper with a pen or pencil. I assure you that my kids' printing ability is barely legible (even the 16 year old girl who gets A+ marks) and they didn't take cursive. The idea that a 16 year old girl would have illegible handwriting in the 80's or 90's was unheard of, unless they were mentally challenged.

You are just quoting pop-psychology. Go look at some actual research. My wife is a school psychologist. Kids' performance in fine motor skill tasks have fallen drastically, while video gaming has been going up. The lack of instruction in writing in schools is a significant contributor to this problem.

There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based. This included everything from phonics to flash cards and of course cursive. In fact I think keyboarding was also a victim. My kids didn't take any of these things in school (we're in Ontario, Canada). Their handwriting is awful.

We sat in the evenings teaching them how to read (sounding words out), doing adding, subtracting, and multiplying flashcards with them, and I bought a typing tutor program and repeatedly encouraged them to use it. The Ontario government brought back mandatory cursive teaching to classrooms just after my kids left elementary school. I would say, of all these things, learning your times tables is way more important than cursive. There was a lot of research in recent years showing that both "learning to understand" *and* rote learning are important for a child's education, but it seems like the school boards won't admit their mistakes until the people who made those mistakes retire.

Just as my kids entered high school, the provincial government, worried that certain minority groups weren't doing well on tests and were over-represented in basic classes (vs. academic level) decided to de-stream both grade 9 and grade 10, and remove all exams from grades 9 and 10 as well. You don't have to write an exam in Ontario until you reach grade 11. Let's be clear... the data showed that kids from minority groups weren't doing as well, and their solution was to stop collecting data. It's absurd.

I really do feel like the education system was unethically experimenting on my kids this whole time. The worst part is that they were basing their decision on pop-psychology teacher-memes instead of hard and fast evidence-based research. The cost of these mistakes will be paid by the generation of kids who are only now moving on to university and the workforce. The whole saga sickens me.