It’s a geographic legibility, but you could also say that “C. Chavez ave” provides a historical legibility or an ability to see what the city values.
In Melbourne the North-South street go: King, William, Queen, Elizabeth, Swanston, Russell. It communicates the commonwealth history and founding history of the city. Cute, but decidedly less useful and memorable than number avenues.
Dwarkesh gets far more technical and in the weeds than TPBN. It’s very different. I can’t listen to TPBN though it seems fun but I’ll relisten to Dwarkesh episodes more than once.
I don’t know. I find him pretty hard to listen to. He has admitted that his show prep is AI produced, and I think the gaps in his understanding come across in conversation. I also find his child-like irreverence and familiar tone with his guests to be very distasteful. He also can’t drink a pint of Guinness and you just can’t trust people like that.
Did you listen to his interview with Amodei? The guy goes on about, “well don’t you know about such and such” or “yeah but an AI can’t learn like an intern…” like he’s trying to argue with him. Look, this is coming from a guy who hasn’t really done anything with his life other than be friends with people in San Francisco, talking to the head of a company that’s changing the way an entire industry operates. I think Dwarkesh just needs to shut up and listen. The total lack of respect puts me off.
There’s a potential irony here that a commenter lamenting the decline of education in the West is leaning on the “critical thinking over memorization” trope in contemporary Western education, when that trope has contributed to a decline in educational effectiveness.
The massive success of information retrieval allowed people to trick themselves that they no longer needed to remember things, and remember them easily. They should instead turn focus on critical thinking.
But critical thinking is knowledge based. At least, I buy E. D Hirch’s argument that it is.
Believe or not, if you look at Zhihu[0] you'll see a lot of people glazing Western education system. Grass is always greener on the other side of Pacific.
[0]: China's Quora equivalent, but much better than Quora
I think both viewpoints can be right. Chinese people come here, study engineering, chemistry, pharma, computer science, etc. and then graduate and then they invent and make insanely cool things.
Meanwhile at the same schools, so many Americans major in things like the various identity “____ studies,” fake sciences like psychology, etc. They graduate from college with potentially less useful skills or knowledge than could have been gained by watching a few (non-AI) YouTube videos a day.
We’ve turned half or more of our educational system into babysitting and self-esteem therapy for a generation we’ve raised to be incredibly anxious and fragile.
Memorizing is not understanding. You can see this clearly with LLMs trying to predict outside their training data.
Yes, memorization is important. What I argue it's pushing out truly understanding and critical thinking. Kids need trial and error from experimentation (play).
This argument is also explored by the “Quantum Computing for the Very Curious” series that uses spaced repetition to teach an advanced topic. The series has been posted to HN more than once.
The ‘brow’ standards have dropped significantly, in a process Fussell has described as the general proletarianization of culture.
For a long time films that would be considered niche and arthouse were middlebrow, because film itself was at best a middlebrow medium.
To people still concerned with the various brows, Marvel films are below low. They are sign of a debased and infantile film culture that caters to childish tastes and merchandising, not art.
Years ago I was surprised to read a critic that described Branagh's Hamlet as middlebrow. I mean, Henry V, sure - that only even qualifies as middlebrow because it's Shakespeare. I would assume it was lowbrow at the time it was written. I love the prologue, though.
Yeah I'd say the critic was most likely affirming the idea that film is a middlebrow medium. Seeing Hamlet at the Globe is high brow, but seeing Hamlet as the cinema is middlebrow.
The Globe is full of tourists, so it's multibrow at best.
Bourdieu's take was that the working classes like simple sentimental art, the middle classes like aspirational, middlebrow art because they feel they have something to prove, and the upper classes often prefer kitsch.
Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.
Most opera lovers have no idea who Luigi Nono was, and would care less if they did know.
> Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.
Are you sure it's more sentimental than technical? Like, with-your-ears sure?
Note that it took something like 140 years for someone to write a tempo fugue using a piano technique in Chopin's 4th Ballade. That is to say-- sentimental composers are as good at hiding their technique as audiences are at missing it.
Few things push AI bull spirits on me like seeing these kind of (pretty much correct) diagnoses of the challenges of AI in society.
The proposed solutions are utterly fanciful. They rely on the presence of social and political competencies which have almost completely disappeared.
The OP at least points to the plausible outcome of "protocol lockdown" instead of healthy adaption. Ezra Klein recently made a similar point that AI could end up being over-regulated like Nuclear because irresponsible private industry and weaknesses in our political systems cause a chronic allergic reaction in the demos.
This is an aside, but it always irks me when people throw out the "critical thinking" thought-terminating cliché.
> Critical thinking taught alongside AI literacy.
Critical thinking is not a skill unto itself. You cannot think critically about things you do not understand. All critical thinking is knowledge-based. Where one does not have knowledge, they must rely on trust, or in substitution a theory of incentives which leads to a positive outcome without understanding of details and dynamics. But that substitution theory is itself knowledge.
As to "AI literacy", we could have started on computing literacy 30 years ago when it became obvious that computing was going to dominate society. You can't understand AI without understanding computing.
I agree with the core premise that the big AI companies are fundamentally driven towards advertising revenue and other antagonistic but profit-generating functionality.
Also agree with paxys that the social implications here are deep and troubling. Having ambient AI in a home, even if it's caged to the home, has tricky privacy problems.
I really like the explorations of this space done in Black Mirror's The Entire History of You[1] and Ted Chiang's The Truth of Fact short story[2].
My bet is that the home and other private spaces almost completely yield to computer surveillance, despite the obvious problems. We've already seen this happen with social media and home surveillance cameras.
Just as in Chiang's story spaces were 'invaded' by writing, AI will fill the world and those opting out will occupy the same marginal positions as those occupied by dumb phone users and people without home cameras or televisions.
In Melbourne the North-South street go: King, William, Queen, Elizabeth, Swanston, Russell. It communicates the commonwealth history and founding history of the city. Cute, but decidedly less useful and memorable than number avenues.
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