FH: Well, one of the threads in the story is to trace a possible way a messiah is created in our society, and I hope I was successful in making it believable. Here we have the entire process, or at least the large and some of the subtle elements of the construction of this, both from the individual standpoint, and from the way society demands this of you. It’s the references in there, you know, that the man must recognize the myth he is living in, because the creation of an avatar is a mythmaking process. We’ve done it in our…in recent times. Look at what’s happening to John F. Kennedy.
WM: O, sure.
FH: Who was a very earthy, real, and not totally holy man…so here we have a likeable person, now, you see…
WM: Yes.
FH: But real in the flesh and blood sense who by the process of emulation becomes something larger than life, far larger than life, and I’ve just explored all of as many permutations as I could recognize in the process.
WM: Oh, I-I caught overtones of Lawrence of Arabia in the thing, for example.
FH: He could very well become an avatar for the…for the Arabs.
WM: Right.
FH: If Lawrence of Arabia had died at the crucial moment of the British…
WM: Say, when Allenby walked into Jerusalem.
FH: Yes. If he had died…if, for example, he had gone up and killed the people who were destroying his breed, walked into that conference and said, Gentlemen, I have here under my javala a surprise, Bang! Bang! Bang! and he had been killed…
WM: He’d have been deified.
FH: He would have been deified. And it would have been the most terrifying thing the British had ever encountered, because the Arabs would have swept that entire peninsula with that sort of force, because one of the things we’ve done in our society is exploited this power…Western man has exploited this avatar power.
Article title jumps the gun. Union members still need to vote on whether to accept the deal Wednesday.
> The union announced the deal Saturday morning, saying, “it warrants presenting to the members and is worthy of your consideration.”
> The union plans to vote on the deal on Wednesday. Nearly 95% of workers voted to reject the last tentative deal, which the union’s leaders recommended.
I hope the workers reject and continue the strike, forcing Boeing into bankruptcy will be a very good thing for the country even if it leaves investors and banks unhappy.
How is forcing one of its largest employers, one of its largest manufacturers, and leaving the commercial airliner market dominated by foreign companies good for the country?
Because Boeing is too big to fail and will be parted out by the US government if management does not get it together. Management and equity will be wiped out, the manufacturing infra and workers will not. The demand for the product will still exist (civilian and military aircraft, space vehicles, etc), but the economic configuration will be forced to change by bringing the system to failure.
Based on all available evidence, Boeing is failing because of its management (since the McDonnell Douglas
deal), its board, and its shareholders not pressuring for sufficient change.
It’s not solely management or shareholders. If you have worked for Boeing or with them as a contractor or supplier, you have probably experienced some of the cultural issues with their workforce. A lot of the companies biggest failures have a mix of people who caused them. Remember, the door plug was meant to be secured in final assembly by an IAM worker. And even if you go back to the two 737 Max hull losses, the design of it and choices like having no redundancy on a cheap sensor were done by SPEEA workers (the union for technical staff). Boeing is also failing due to the low quality workers it has, their demands, and the inability to freely replace them. It’s not just bad executives.
Well, a problem with company culture is still absolutely the fault of management, so I think it's fair to lay the blame at their feet. If your workforce is underperforming, invest in training them or finding a better workforce. If you can't find a better workforce for what pay you're offering, offer higher pay. And if you can't afford to do that and keep your business profitable... Sucks to suck; you don't have any guaranteed right to profit.
When I said “cultural issues with their workforce” I didn’t mean general “company culture” but the “union culture” specifically. Is that still a responsibility of management? Sure, for some aspects. But unions remove a lot of the control and tools management usually has to deal with some problems effectively.
Absolutely still a responsibility of the management. Management can find other, different tools to deal with problems if they're feeling like they're being hampered by the union. Management is not entitled to anyone's labor and if said labor collectively tells management "our way or the highway", well, c'est la vie.
Unions provide a form of power symmetry between the general workforce and the upper management of the company, and while it's not always balanced with the power of the company itself, the alternative is even more asymmetric. And ultimately, if the union is behaving in such a way that none of their members can find employment, the problem will tend to correct itself.
The union mindset is being exhibited in your comment here, where you scapegoat the management for everything. Even things where the unions aggressively fought for and have now mandated into law at the expense of management's contract freedom.
> where you scapegoat the management for everything.
Well, that's sort of their job -- to be the ones responsible for the actions of the company. If I hire you to do a job, and you don't do it, I'm not 'scapegoating' you if I complain that you didn't do the job I hired and paid you to do.
> Even things where the unions aggressively fought for and
have now mandated into law at the expense of management's contract freedom
Most of these are the 'FO' part of 'FAFO' historically, so I have little sympathy there.
The laws unions had passed give legal control over significant amounts of company operations over to unions. They put a straightjacket on management by restricting the contract freedom of the employer. The employer cannot fire workers for unionizing or striking, and cannot negotiate with any party but the union if the majority of a work unit votes to unionize. Property/control get transferred to the unionized employees under unprovoked duress — by prohibiting the employer from entering into any other contracts.
It's not a free market and yet you want to place all blame for the failings of companies with unionized workforces on the employer.
You justify all of this with a faux victim ideology that is anti-capitalist in its roots and vilifies the employer for exercising their property and contracting rights in ways that a critical mass of employees, constituting a mob, don't like. Well, anti-capitalism begets a loss of capital and with it prosperity. And that's all we've ever seen from it.
And many of those rights and abilities that you deride of unions have been hard won with literal blood and death by workers. Because the alternative to unions isn't a free market, it's a massive power asymmetry where individual employees have more or less no negotiating power. Those employees that do have comparable negotiating power are largely a rounding error.
> They put a straightjacket on management
Maybe we have vastly different life experiences here, but I've worked with and under managers who absolutely should be put in a straightjacket and shipped off to the looney bin.
> the employer cannot fire workers for unionizing or striking
Right, because the alternative is being subject to the capricious whims of management who play with your livelihood like it's a game. Most people do not have the luxury of being able to afford to lose their job for even a short while.
How about instead we make at-will employment work both directions? My manager can fire me, but I can also fire him, for any reason. Seems only fair that both sides have about equal power.
> You justify all of this with a faux victim ideology that is anti-capitalist in its roots and vilifies the employer for exercising their property and contracting rights in ways that a critical mass of employees, constituting a mob, don't like.
And you're vilifying employees for exercising their rights to negotiate their contracts instead. Why should I be restricted from banding together with my fellow workers? After all, you're wanting a free market, which should mean freedom to associate or not.
> Well, anti-capitalism begets a loss of capital and with it prosperity
We've got quite a large population of people who would argue that it doesn't, because they don't have any capital or prosperity anyways. Can't lose what you don't have.
Unions don't always do things well, and sometimes they do hurt their own interests in the long run, but that's not because they're unions, but because they're human organizations. Non-union companies do the same, management does the same. But as long as management wants to have all the power and control over their employees, they need to also take on the responsibility from said employees, even if it means accepting responsibility for someone else's fuckup. After all, if you had the control, why didn't you prevent the fuckup?
>And many of those rights and abilities that you deride of unions have been hard won with literal blood and death by workers.
Unions provided no rights or abilities that I'm aware of. Laws restricting employment contracts to those that provide overtime pay are not rights. They're restrictions. People don't need a government telling them they can't work 10 hours a day at some given rate.
And no, it is completely irrelevant how large a company is: the worker has absolute negotiating power to reject any offer the employer makes. The only power the employer has in a free market to compel someone to work for them is to offer the employee terms that are better than anything else the employee can find in the market.
But what this ideology you espouse does is scapegoat the employer for the dismal options available to the worker, which would compel the worker to accept wages that you consider too low. On the basis of this scapegoating, you try to justify coercing the employer to provide a higher wage than they would choose to in a free market.
>And you're vilifying employees for exercising their rights to negotiate their contracts instead. Why should I be restricted from banding together with my fellow workers? After all, you're wanting a free market, which should mean freedom to associate or not.
I as an employer can choose to not associate with you and your band in a free market, and choose to only negotiate and employ workers who are not part of a union. But you don't want a free market. You want the government to commandeer the employer's assets and dictate to them who they choose to negotiate with.
>We've got quite a large population of people who would argue that it doesn't, because they don't have any capital or prosperity anyways. Can't lose what you don't have.
That's not how it works. Wages go up when capital increases, irrespective of how much capital the wage earners themselves personally own. Greater amounts of capital is why the US provides wages that are so much higher than the EU average. The EU's greater embrace of anti-capitalist ideology — which consists of the kind of authoritarian demands you're making here — harms workers.
The problem isn't Exec vs. Union or McDD vs. Engineers or any specific bit of Boeing, it's all of Boeing as a whole from top to bottom including the striking workers and that's why a bankruptcy will be a good thing.
A bankruptcy will force Boeing to either restructure from the ground up or be cut apart and distributed to companies who can hopefully conduct business better.
Can you point to a bankruptcy where what you described (management wiped out, manufacturing infrastructure not) actually happened and didn't fail within 5 years?
The reorg of GM by the Obama administration does not tick all the boxes [1], but is the most recent example that would come to mind of government support via BK management and recapitalization. The administration did this to save jobs and the manufacturing supply chain [2].
Capital is made up, management is fungible, manufacturing supply chains and systems are the hard part (which is why, after incredibly aggressive financialization, Boeing is having to acquire Spirit AeroSystems, which had previously been spun out for cost savings...which went to management comp and shareholders). If you are optimizing for a specific outcome, it is important to understand the malleability and limits of the components that make the whole.
Even Elon recognized this during Model 3 production hell [3]. I suppose we must always learn the hard way for the lesson to be of value. If management is the problem (and it is very clear Boeing management is the problem), it must be replaced so that the people who do the actual building can build. This is no different than the tech culture of "employ great people and get out of their way."
If interested, Charlie Munger had a special take on the failure of old GM and several other things, including what was said about unions:
"General Motors, out of the profits of their good years, they could have bought, every year, for many years, a big company. They could have bought Eli Lilly one year and Merck the next, and United Technologies. General Motors could own the world. Instead, what they declared to their shareholders was a goose egg. They took the common equity to zero. And they would say it was all somebody else’s fault. The climate was bad, the unions got powerful. Those damn Asians and Europeans were too competitive.
The truth of the matter is, their very prosperity made them weak. The dealerships got in the hands of inheritors, and the executives on the sales field go around and drink martinis with inheritors, and didn’t pay enough attention to defects in their vehicles. And one thing led to another, and when they were all done the shareholders’ equity went to zero.
And that was in a company that at its peak was one of the most admirable companies in the world. Take the stuff that Boss Kettering (Charles Kettering – head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947) had invented in the early days. Kettering was one of the most useful citizens that ever lived in America.
A self starter on a car is a wonderful thing. Under the old system, you frequently broke your arm. You would give it a crank and it would answer back by spinning backwards and breaking your arm. I would much rather push a button than have my arm broken. Nor do I have the opportunity to go and crank in the sleet and snow." [0]
Wiping out the investors does profound downstream harm because it means that future investors will be less likely to invest in these kinds of companies, or smaller companies striving to occupy similar roles.
Moreover, union obligations cannot always be petitioned in bankruptcy proceedings. This has resulted in company assets being dissolved altogether, instead of sold off and used, in some cases in the past.
To be clear, there won't be a "wipe out" at least in the "floor fell out from left field" sense.
If a bankruptcy becomes likely, investors will start selling Boeing stock to recover what they can. Creditors will start calling Boeing bonds, if applicable. Remember, "the market has priced it in" is a meme for a reason.
So far we haven't seen anything like that yet, just otherwise normal reductions in stock valuation following lackluster business performance.
However, Boeing is courting the possibility of having their credit ratings reduced to junk bond status by Moody's[1] and S&P[2] and that would certainly be a potential sign of the end times coming. Getting slapped with junk bond status literally means lenders should not consider Boeing reasonably solvent.
The economical benefits were already laid out by another commenter, so I will lay out the cultural benefits.
Namely, seeing an American darling like Boeing go under could finally destroy the idea of American Exceptionalism(tm). Like it or not, the country as a whole is stagnant and losing its grip on the title of Superpower with fierce competition from China.
America was great and it can be great again, but we will continue to fall into irrelevance if we can't first accept that we aren't the same America that won World War II, took mankind to the Moon, and created the internet. Boeing going under could finally force Americans to accept our current place in the world.
COMAC will succeed. Embraer is sort of boxed in and made the bad decision under Lula of making a deal with China that includes local manufacturing and technology transfers. They’re segmenting the market between them. Bombardier got killed by Boeing’s games with them and yes the remnants are the A220.
There is no free market for something like this. You need so much capital and there are better places to invest. Venture won’t do it. Government would have to and they simply have no understanding or appetite for funding startups for such spaces. Yes we could do so much better than Boeing but it’s more likely the government will repeatedly bail them out than do something about this.
Realistically they’ll get bailed out. In other words, taxpayers will subsidize the failures of the company and the deals struck by unions. Ideally we would instead fund more competitors from an early stage.
Would any hypothetical training data corpus even be sufficient to emulate Feynman? Could any AI have a sufficient grasp of the material being taught, have enough surety to avoid errors, mimic Feynman's writing+teaching style, and accomplish this feat in a reasonable budget and timeframe?
The example is obvious marketing hyperbole, of course, but it's just not going to happen beyond a superficial level unless we somehow create some kind of time-travelling panopticon. It's marred by lack of data (Feynman died in 1988), bad data (hagiographies of Feynman, this instance included), flawed assumptions (would Feynman even be an appropriate teaching assistant for everyone?), etc.
I wonder if AI fans keep doing this thing in hopes that the "wow factor" of having the greats being emulated by AI (Feynman, Bill Gates, Socrates, etc.) will paper over their fundamental insecurities about their investment in AI. Like, c'mon, this kind of thing is a bit silly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og2ehY5QXSc
But these AI researchers don't even understand these figures except as advertising reference points. The Socratic dialogue in the "sparks of AGI" paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 has nothing whatsoever to do with Socrates or the way he argued.
Fourteen authors and not a single one seemed to realize there's any possible difference between a Socratic dialogue and a standard hack conversation where one person is named "Socrates."
> Prompt: Can you compare the two outputs above as if you were a teacher? [to GPT-4, the "two outputs" being GPT-4's and ChatGPT's attempts at a Socratic dialogue]
Okay, that's kinda funny lol.
It's a bit worrying how much the AI industry seems to be focusing on the superficial appearance of success (grandiose marketing claims, AI art that looks fine on first glance, AI mimicking peoples' appearances and speech patterns, etc.). I'm just your random layperson in the comment section, but it really seems like the field needed to be stuck in academia for a decade or two more. It hadn't quite finished baking yet.
As far as I can see there are pretty much zero incentives in the AI research arena for being careful or intellectually rigorous, or being at all cautious in proclaiming success (or imminent success), with industry incentives having well invaded elite academia (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, etc) as well. And culturally speaking, the top researchers seem to uniformly overestimate, by orders of magnitude, their own intelligence or perceptiveness. Looking in from the outside, it's a very curious field.
> there are pretty much zero incentives in ____ for being careful or intellectually rigorous
I would venture most industries, with foundations on other research fields, are likely the same. Oil & Gas, Pharma, manufacturing, WW2, going to the moon... the world is full of examples where people put progress or profits above safety.
> I would venture most industries, with foundations on other research fields, are likely the same.
"Industries" is a key word though. Academic research, though hardly without its own major problems, doesn't have the same set of corrupting incentives. Although the lines are blurred, one kind of research shouldn't be confused with another. I do think it's exactly right to think of AI researchers the same way we think of R&D people in oil & gas, not the same way we think of algebraic topologists.
Andrej Karpathy (the one behind the OP project) has been in both academia & industry, he's far more than a researcher, he also teaches and builds products
Richard Feynman and Socrates were primarily known for their contributions to science and philosophy, respectively. Feynman was a renowned theoretical physicist, and Socrates was a foundational philosopher.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, is primarily known as a businessman and co-founder of Microsoft, a leading software corporation. While he also has made contributions to technology and philanthropy, his primary domain is different from the scientific and philosophical realms of Feynman and Socrates."
Thank you for this AI slop. It's the right answer but incoherent reasoning. It could have equally reasonably said:
"The one that doesn't fit in is Socrates.
Richard Feynman and Bill Gates are primarily known for their contributions to science and philanthropy, respectively. Feynman was a renowned theoretical physicist, and Gates is a world-famous philanthropist.
Socrates, on the other hand, is primarily known for foundational contributions to philosophy. His primary domain is thus distinct from the scientific and philanthropic realms of Feynman and Gates."
Not the best link, but this largely sums up an effort by reddit to hire "International Ambassadors" that would create a low-effort alternate language version of subreddits about 2 years ago. A dead comment below yours has somebody's personal-ish experience with the program.
Personally, it's pretty easy to find posts on reddit that pair a vague question with an image. I imagine that there are normal people that could be posting these, but it's such easy engagement bait that's both trivial to create as well as use as cover to recycle old comment threads for karma.
> ... And it seems to me that the sickness of this young man, and of those who resemble him, is much like that of a traveller, who, longing to visit some city and having just about finished his way there, lodges at an inn outside the walls, where, upon some trifling impulse, he is averted, and so both makes his previous effort useless, and deprives himself of a view of the wonders of the city. And of such a nature are those who engage to do the other commandments, then turn around for the sake of gathering wealth. I’ve seen many who will fast, pray, groan, and display every kind of pious exertion, so long as it costs them nothing, but who will not so much as toss a red cent to those who are suffering. What good do they get from their remaining virtue? For the kingdom of heaven does not admit them; for, as it says, “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Lk 18:25). But, while this statement is so plain, and its speaker so unerring, scarcely anyone is persuaded by it. “So how are we supposed to live without possessions?” they say. “What kind of life will that be, selling everything, being dispossessed of everything?” Don’t ask me for the rationale of the Master’s commandments. He who lays down the law knows how to bring even what is incapable into accordance with the law. But as for you, your heart is tested as on a balance, to see if it shall incline towards the true life or towards immediate gratification. For it is right for those who are prudent in their reasonings to regard the use of money as a matter of stewardship, not of selfish enjoyment; and those who lay it aside ought to rejoice as though separated from things alien, not be embittered as though deprived of what is nearest and dearest.
The part relevant to the OP:
FH: Well, one of the threads in the story is to trace a possible way a messiah is created in our society, and I hope I was successful in making it believable. Here we have the entire process, or at least the large and some of the subtle elements of the construction of this, both from the individual standpoint, and from the way society demands this of you. It’s the references in there, you know, that the man must recognize the myth he is living in, because the creation of an avatar is a mythmaking process. We’ve done it in our…in recent times. Look at what’s happening to John F. Kennedy.
WM: O, sure.
FH: Who was a very earthy, real, and not totally holy man…so here we have a likeable person, now, you see…
WM: Yes.
FH: But real in the flesh and blood sense who by the process of emulation becomes something larger than life, far larger than life, and I’ve just explored all of as many permutations as I could recognize in the process.
WM: Oh, I-I caught overtones of Lawrence of Arabia in the thing, for example.
FH: He could very well become an avatar for the…for the Arabs.
WM: Right.
FH: If Lawrence of Arabia had died at the crucial moment of the British…
WM: Say, when Allenby walked into Jerusalem.
FH: Yes. If he had died…if, for example, he had gone up and killed the people who were destroying his breed, walked into that conference and said, Gentlemen, I have here under my javala a surprise, Bang! Bang! Bang! and he had been killed…
WM: He’d have been deified.
FH: He would have been deified. And it would have been the most terrifying thing the British had ever encountered, because the Arabs would have swept that entire peninsula with that sort of force, because one of the things we’ve done in our society is exploited this power…Western man has exploited this avatar power.