You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.
> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers
…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence
What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.
So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.
> it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.
There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.
Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the last century. Up until the last five years student test scores were improving, and if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough. Why? Because the concern - after a baseline is established - is seeking exceptional performance, which definitionally cannot be made routine.
> Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036.
Yes? I don't understand what you're trying to argue here. Rising standards does shift expectations. But this all sounds good. So I really don't understand what you're trying to get at.
> if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough
There are several confounding factors. It might be that teachers getting better led to better students, it might be that universal access to information led to better students. I think you're overreaching with the claim that if students get better, it means instructors got better. But, sure, let's imagine I agree. So? I am of the belief that there is a ton of room for improvement.
I think that your post stems from the belief of 2 things. That education is zero sum. And that education has a filtering function not a quality improvement function. Both of which, I deeply deeply disagree with.
I do agree in the abstract that the "human social ranking" will be just as stratified as today. But that does not preclude many many classes of improvements.
Again, sorry if I am reading too much into your position, but I feel as if you run on a set of assumption here that you expect I share with you and that to me, feel alien.
"Car" is a good example of a label that's pretty strictly agreed to. If someone tells me they've developed a new car and then shows me a motorcycle, it's easy to prove that it's not a car, even though many of its engineering principles and functional components are identical to those in cars.
With consciousness, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any motorcycle-equivalent. Essentially everyone I've discussed the issue with (myself included) expects that any mind which runs on similar principles to ours or has similar thoughts to our thoughts is conscious.
You really don't have much experience in philosophy of language do you? It's notoriously hard to pin down the edges of such terms, even something like car or table.
Is a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?
It's hard to pin down the edges of any term, but there exist things which are car-like and yet universally agreed not to be cars. That's what I claim doesn't exist for consciousness.
Describing something as "car-like" is begging the question. You are presupposing an objective definition for "car" in order to draw a distinction between things that are cars, and things that are almost cars. The reason such a thing doesn't exist for consciousness is that people believe that the offered definitions for consciousness are illegitimate. It would seem logically weird for me to accept that a term is "real" if it crosses some percentage of public acceptance of the definition, and not real otherwise. I would argue that using that heuristic would make it very obvious that computers are not conscious because it's a stance that practically everybody takes outside of hackernews.
If we take the classical position that words point to real things in the world, "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience" is kind of just regurgitating the meaning of "word". The first half indicating the function, and the second half accounting for the fact we live in a world with a continuum of linguistic disparity.
Now, this position isn't the only position. But a relational model of language for example takes his assertion to an even more extreme place, and suggests they don't function as labels at all.
I don't have an ability to exhaustively test all words against this assertion. Nor do I have the kind of access memory to draw one if it exists. Sorry.
I guess my question or confusion is that if there exists no readily accessible, easily identifiable example of a noun which does actually serve as something more than "a useful label, agreed to out of convenience", then the critique appears to be stating a vacuous truth, because there are no entities for whom the critique would not apply.
My point was more that we have words for things that don't exist, whose map gets mistaken for territory.
Many of them appear very much like fundamental parts of reality, making appearance an untrustworthy instrument. Reversing cause and effect between reference and referent is something almost everyone does, no one notices, and is the source of endless confusion. We should strive to not confuse our model of the world with the world itself. Consciousness exists in our model of the world as much as red does.
This is rhetorically slippery, and feels like it is restating the thing that I asked to be demonstrated when I asked for example of the opposite. It feels like begging the question.
In either case, the central thing that I was saying is that critiquing an article because it makes a claim about a specific word which also applies to an entire class of words makes that critique feel less informative. What I mean is that if there were an article that said "The Sun is not red" and the response was that redness is a concept of human minds, then I don't know if I would feel informed. If the comment is just limited to point that out, I guess I wanted to point out the limitation.
A standardized unit of measure is almost definitionally a label of convenience, what? Why was there no concept of a meter until the 1790s? It was determined by a council of people, does that sound like a truth of the universe?
A label is distinct from a definition. Contrast that with "tall" or "short", which are entirely context dependent and used entirely for convenience.
Words like "just", "free", "fast", "fuzzy" fall into the second category. Perhaps "conscious" too.
The difference is the presence of a strict definition that depends upon a physical absolute. I can point to a metre. Suggesting that it's nothing more than a label is idiotic.
This is being intentionally obtuse and you know it.
A meter is the same anywhere in the universe. If it's not, it's not a meter.
The defintion of "fat" changes based on any 3 people in the room. A handful of people would struggle to form a consensus on if all people, dogs, mice, worms, and/or bacteria are conscious.
If you take the strategy that you will create a definition, create a label for that definition, and then say that any deviations from the defintion that was chosen makes usage of the label incorrect, then yes, it's the same everywhere in the universe -- according to fiat, and I don't believe that that negates that it is a label, just that validity of usage of the label derives from the perceived authority of the labeller. God didn't come down from on high and say that a meter is the length light travels in 1/299792458th of the time for 9192631770 cycles of radiation of Cesium 133. People in rooms chose that it would be based on the circumference of the Earth with a line passing through Paris, France (how convenient), and if there were an academy in the 1790s that invented the concept of "fat", and "fat" means a BMI exceeding 30, then fat would be true everywhere in the universe too (BMI after all is defined as a ratio of height, measured in meters to weight, measured in kilograms, which are both fundamental SI units), and there would be no ambiguity.
People are still coming up with definitions of consciousness and then those definitions end up being attacked by others who disagree with the foundation of the definition, which is - if you will recall - also what happened with the meter, over the course of centuries, until it was very recently redefined to be "unambiguous", but arbitrary. This was possible because few people had any particular emotional investment in the definition of a meter, and it is probable that consciousness will be eventually defined to mean that only humans can be conscious, which may be dissatisfying but would be true throughout the universe, like a meter. If the question then becomes "what defines a human" and "why a human", then I ask, why 1/299792458 of a second?
A meter is a meter. Over 30 BMI is over 30 BMI. Call those whatever you want, they are objective and measurable.
Concepts like the parent's "fat" example are cultural relatives. Someone can be called "fat" despite actively being proportionally skinnier or having a lower BMI.
But even that has at least a basis in the physical world. A skeleton can't be colloquially fat.
The root problem is that "consciousness" does not even have that. It's metaphysical and has no ability to be measured or observed or confirmed by an outside observer. Because even if it did not exist, the object claiming it would still be claiming it. And objects that do not claim it may in fact have it.
While the top comment may have used poor examples, it feels remarkably uncharitable to actually suggest "what is consciousness" is an equivalent discussion to "how long should a meter be?"
If you define consciousness as "being human", you would just have someone asking a new question - what is "fooblefobble?" Where "fooblefobble" is what we mean when we talk about consciousness today. The question doesn't get answered by being arbitrary in this context, you just necessitate a new word.
They can't rebuild it. Facebook Marketplace is allowing people to buy and sell locally for free with systems for managing fraud that are more robust than Craigslist. How do you rebuild when a way larger company - with a side project of theirs - offers one of your core businesses for free?
eBay has always competed with print and online classifieds. And started the successful Kijiji (in Canada). If what you’re selling is niche enough, local doesn’t work, and has a lot of friction unless it’s something too big to ship.
I like to pay the cheapest price humanly possible but there’s often value in just paying the shipping and online premium. As a seller, it’s easier to put up a posting whenever I feel and stuff it in a box and label it only when I have cash in hand.
+ there’s some geo-arbitrage for sellers: chances are the person willing to pay the most isn’t local to you.
EBay is still more friction than Amazon and eBay commissions are like 16% these days so eBay’s completely lost the giant pie that is mass-manufactured goods.
> Yes you can. The same way Wikipedia (or, way back when, a paper encyclopedia) can be used for research but you have to verify everything with other sources because it is known there are errors and deficiencies in such sources.
I think that if Wikipedia had no recommendations on good sources for their own articles and did not ever ban sources, companies would not be so sanguine about letting people use Wikipedia. There's an entire internal process associated with evaluating sources, and the expectation when using Wikipedia is that nothing written in an article is going to be sourced from the Daily Mail or Conservapedia, as an example. Also, I do think that there are companies that do have policies against talking to known liars. Given the Wikipedia bans sources and news agencies ban human sources once they've been shown to be unreliable, I don't think it's insane to then have such companies or agencies say that AI shouldn't be used because it's been shown to be unreliable. Obviously there's a balancing act of utility versus accuracy, and Ars has (probably incorrectly) decided that the utility of AI outweighs its inaccuracies.
What is frustrating is that AI cannot have a higher accuracy than the median reporter, given a little more time. AI is trained on all digitizable text, including falsehoods and inaccuracies by laypeople. Humans can look up digitizable text using search engines, too. An AI can't follow up on leads or ask anyone questions. There's no world in which synthesizing available data from digitized sources alone ends up with more accurate data than a human with a search engine and the ability to make a phone call. So allowing LLM use at all is a direct admission that seeking out the "truth" is not an important goal because it could never actually improve accuracy and could only worsen it through hallucinated, probable reporting. It's one thing when companies say that they're committed to truth and then secretly their most important overriding concern is their bottom line - it's quite another thing when a company directly says that the bottom line is their most important concern. Imagine the emperor walking through the parade, nude, saying "So what if I am nude? What are you going to do about it?"
> companies would not be so sanguine about letting people use Wikipedia
Are companies sanguine about using Wikipedia without verification. Maybe some, but they darn well shouldn't be. And I say this as someone who uses Wikipedia for many minor things (though for anything important, I verify elsewhere).
> Also, I do think that there are companies that do have policies against talking to known liars.
No doubt most/all. But such policies will always be caviated with exceptions if the information is properly validated afterwards.
> So allowing LLM use at all is a direct admission that seeking out the "truth" is not an important goal because it could never actually improve accuracy and could only worsen it through hallucinated, probable reporting.
I'm generaly anti-LLM, but this is… ad absurdum.
There is a huge difference between lazily accepting what an LLM spews out, and using that along with other sources for further research. No good reporter will trust a single source away from exceptional circumstances, wether that source is a person or an LLM, and what would be considered “exceptional circumstances” for trusting specific meat-sourced information won't apply for an LLM-sourced summary.
If you can trust Wikipedia as a starting point, you can trust a good LLM as a starting point. Both are offering a summary of what a bunch of people on the internet have written, neither should be trusted as a reliable source.
> I don't think it's insane to then have such companies or agencies say that AI shouldn't be used because it's been shown to be unreliable
If taking an absolutist approach. I would be a little more quakified and say that LLM output should never be used without verification of all details, rather than should not be used at all. It may be the case that this verification makes using LLMs no more efficient than doing research from other sources in the first place, and I suspect that this is the case often, if when using LLMs proper time is given to verifying the output.
The problem is people musunderstanding what an LLM is: a summariser, offering access to a compressed version of its sources. If you are using them as sources rather tham summarisers then you are using them wrongly. Unfortunately, that means a great many people are using them wrongly…
It sounds like you are unfamiliar with the idea that software engineering efforts can be underestimated at the outset. The humorous observation here is that the total is 180 percent, which mean that it took longer than expected, which is very common.
> If your peers are using AI and getting better grades, opting out is not a principled stand. It is a competitive disadvantage.
> The students are not confused. They are trapped.
> In this environment, choosing not to use AI is not intellectual integrity. It is self-sabotage.
> Here is where the conversation gets genuinely uncomfortable.
> The culprit was not artificial intelligence. It was standardised testing.
> For them, cognitive offloading is not a convenience. It is a developmental short-circuit.
> This is not merely a problem of laziness or moral failure. It is a predictable consequence (...)
> These investments are not philanthropic gestures. They are strategic plays for long-term market dominance (...)
> These are not neutral actors offering disinterested tools. They are companies with revenue models (...)
> This is not a new insight. It is a well-established finding that anglophone education (...)
> (...) AI is not a threat; it is an upgrade.
> If, however, the purpose of education is to cultivate human beings (...) then the arrival of AI is not the crisis. It is the revelation that the crisis was already here.
> Not more bans. Not more surveillance software. Not more hand-wringing opinion pieces from adults who themselves rely on AI for their professional work.
> But the overreliance they fear is not a new phenomenon introduced by ChatGPT. It is the logical extension of an educational philosophy (...)
The irony here is that the AI generated article gives a full throated endorsement of using LLMs to generate slop; why should we believe that the guy who prompted the LLM to generate slop that says slop generation is good did not himself use the slop generator?
But I’m responding to the rescue mission comment, which, since Vietnam, have overwhelmingly employed helicopters (Huey’s then, Black Hawks today). But machinery aside, the larger point is that air operations will likely go worse here than they did in Vietnam, unfortunately for both sides.
Yes, why are we still talking about the robot whose behavior can be programmed and whose behavior is set by a company and rolled out to all of their vehicles deterministically, when another commenter correctly engaged in whataboutism?
The flood-risk zones requiring flood insurance are insufficient to rely solely upon being forced to get insurance. Some floods extend past those zones or hit areas not covered by them.
Echoing a sibling comment, lots of landlords require it now, and the basic packages that insurers offer you as a bundle with auto or other forms of insurance are pretty decent, depending on state.
Typically seems like $100-200 per year for coverage that would handle the loss of most of one's possessions, provided you don't get screwed by "well, you don't have the receipt" or "we only cover water ingress, not floods or leaks".
Probably a lot? I've moved around a bunch over the past 20 years, so have had several landlords. I think all of them for the past decade have required proof of insurance when signing the lease. I don't think anyone I rented from required it before 2018ish
What do you consider useful? While I do not know how easy it is to make a claim, but my policy is a bit over $100 annual and covers some $20-30k loss. Which feels more than sufficient.
Hopefully, I never have to use it, and it is just a tax I pay.
I'm talking about people buying houses near a river that floods regularly and not purchasing flood insurance. Someone else brought up renter's insurance in response to my comment about flood insurance. Renter's insurance is cheap, btw. I have something like $300k coverage for less than $10/month bundled with my car insurance.
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