Popular Mechanics is like Popular Science right? Extremely bullish on new technologies to the degree of taking one study and turning it into a breathless article about how we're 1 year away from flying cars?
Sorry for the cynicism, but I grew up subscribing to Popular Science and I gained a very jaundiced view of this kind of science/technology popularizing
Yes, they loved the moller sky car, frankly these magazines would have been great if they just accurately caveated stage of development and leaned into a speculative "The World of Tomorrow" attitude for these types of things. As a result of NOT doing that they really poisoned people against the very idea of progress (of which we make a ton.)
Is this a trick question? Yes it was. A horse could go over any terrain while a car could only really go over very specific terrain designed for it. We had to terraform the world in order to make the automobile so beneficial. And it turned out that this terraforming had many unintended consequences. It's actually a pretty apt comparison to LLMs.
who would I be trying to trick if it was? you didn't answer the question anyways. I'm not wondering whether cars were seen as strictly better than horses in all situations. I'm wondering if people disagreed so vehemently about whether cars were faster road transportation than horses
But isn't that exactly the kind of learned helplessness being discussed? As a fellow distracted individual, I have seen instant gratification erode all of my most prized hobbies and skills. Why read a book when I can scroll on my phone? My distress tolerance is lower than ever. LLMs feel like a bridge too far, for me anyway.
Nothing has been eroded for me, in fact it had the opposite effect. It's easier to get into new hobbies, easier to develop skills, I value reading on my own more than I did before. At least for me, LLMs act as multipliers of what I can and want to do, it hasn't removed my passion for music production, 3D, animation or programming one bit, if anything it's fueled those passions and let me do stuff within them faster and better.
Nothing I could make would be very good. So the only reason I would, say, write, is in order to write, not to have produced an essay. Hobbies are ways to pass time productively. If it took less time, it wouldn't be a better use of time, but a worse one.
It's not about being able to do more faster, but be able to faster get help doing what you wanted to do. For example, before LLMs, if I wanted to figure out how to do something with a specific analog synth I basically spent time reading manuals and browsing internet forums, piecing together whatever I could find into something actionable, sometimes slightly wrong, but at least in the right direction.
Nowadays, I fire off the LLM to figure it out for me, then try out what I get back, and I can move on to actually having fun playing on the synth, rather than trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do.
The end goal for me with my hobbies is more or less the same, have fun. But for me the fun is not digging through manuals, it is to "do" or "use" or "perform" or whatever. I like music production because I like to make music, not because I like digging through manuals for some arcane knowledge.
The point is "things that used to take me hours, can now be done by a magic computer program in the background, while I do other things". It's applicable for small unix utilities I create to make my development UX better, it's applicable for when I'm doing music production and it's applicable in a wide-range of tasks both professionally and for my hobbies.
It saves me from stuff I find boring yet necessary, so I can focus more on the fun stuff. I guess this was the overall point I was trying to make in this comment-chain.
I'm not a scientist, and I don't even have a very good statistical background, so correct me if I'm wrong; would it be far to say that the lack of skepticism about fMRI studies in the broader public is due to scientism? Because of naive reductionism and a gut understanding of what is "scientific", people are far more skeptical of a study that says, "we surveyed 100,000 people" vs. "we scanned the brains of 10 people." I've noticed a similar phenomenon with psych vs. evolutionary psych. People have an image in their head of what is scientific that has nothing to do with statistical significance and everything to do with vibes.
It is tempting to speculate on what might cause the credulousness of the broader public re: fMRI, but I think there is enough / too much going on here for me to really be able to say anything with much confidence. Scientism especially is hard to define.
I think I broadly agree with you though that credulousness to (statistically and methodologically weak) scientific / technological claims mostly comes down to vibes and desires / needs, and not statistical significance, logical rigor, evidence, or etc.
Where needs / desires are high, vibes will (often) win over rationality, and vice-versa. It is easier for people to be objective about science that doesn't really clearly matter in any obvious direction, or at all. fMRI is "the mind", and thus consciousness, and so unfortunately reduces rational evaluation in much the same way speculation about AI and "consciousness" and etc does. *Shrug*
You learn a lot about post-War Japan and the New Left. Just because a writer dresses their story up in futuristic or fantastical trappings does not mean that they aren't writing about their own cultural milieu. Tomino is explicit about this in the interviews compiled for the supplementary material in the Gundam Origin manga. They are a fantastic read (and the manga is a masterpiece).
Interesting. It is a shame that you can't really experience art correctly unless you have the context of living in that time & place. I will never experience Anime, Russian literature, early English literature, etc. fully because my lens is always gonna be an American in the 2000s.
I am curious how people 100 years from now will perceive art from the last 20 years, much of it feels like a thinly veiled commentary on whatever hot button social issue was prevalent at the time.
But that's exactly why you should read literature. Obviously the goal isn't to shake your own worldview entirely, which is impossible. But you can open it up enough to experience art from another culture on its own terms.
Plus, many classic novels feature introduction to help ground the reader in the historical moment. Though those intros also often feature spoilers, which is annoying.
I can't find the specific interview online. It's included in one of the volumes of Gundam Origin, which I took out of the library. However, this interview touches on similar themes, and may in fact be the same one I read. I have a poor memory.
If you're looking to learn more about the political movement in general, read up on the Zenkyoto. I am far from an expert, so I don't have any specific books to recommend. But if you do a little digging, even just on Wikipedia, it will become clear how much Japanese culture owes to that political moment.
> Throughout Z, my attitude toward everyone involved was, “You’re fools for only wanting Gundam. You’ve recklessly asked me to do this; I’ll make the protagonist go insane.” Despite this warning, they pressed ahead anyway, those adults felt no responsibility toward the work. So, I decided to do exactly what I wanted.
> Yasuhiko: Including the bit where you lifted the hero’s name from Camille Claudel?
> Tomino: All of it was intentional. And even after I made Z that way, the same stupid adults came back saying, “Let’s do another one next year.” Honestly, I was aghast. All right then, let’s make ZZ. But I’ll show you: this is the kind of foolish thing you’ll get. Only then did they finally catch on, “Oh, Tomino’s calling us idiots.” It took them two full years to get that. Two years of time and money. There are a lot of adults like that.
Here's what's funny. You know what they used to call a book that foregrounded the soap opera elements you're talking about? A novel. That's why Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first novel. Now, if you go to Wikipedia, War and Peace is also categorized as a novel. What else could you call it? But it's funny to imagine a time when novel was a genre.
I think you mean romance? A romance used to be a Roman-style long narrative fictional work that described extraordinary deeds, soap opera plots. Novels were more concerned with realistic narratives describing the nitty gritty of everyday life.
It is kind of like how modern art doesn't mean modern today. It means that time period where people called art "modern". Novel meant new as in "novel science results". It was used differentiate prose (the new style at the time) from epic poetry back in the 16 hundreds and stuck. How that translates to Russian IDK.
There is no "novel" (as like "new" thing) as genre in Russian lit. in russian things called "novel" in english are called a russian word that is a translation of "romance". and tbh "romance" makes tons more sense than "novel".
But "novella" (different genre) is a thing in russian.
I don't speak Russian, but whatever the Russian word is for "book." Or maybe others called it a novel but Tolstoy rejected the label. I'm not sure.
Either way, the word "novel" wasn't necessarily equivalent to how it is used today: any book length work of narrative fiction.
Though watch out, this is a rabbit hole. Just look up novel on wikipedia. You'll see a big orange message at the top which is the first sign there is a problem. And then the article is excessively long. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to define what a "novel" is.
Sorry for the cynicism, but I grew up subscribing to Popular Science and I gained a very jaundiced view of this kind of science/technology popularizing
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