Why not do that? Because of inflation, you lose money doing that. It’s the last resort of someone who has no other options for saving their money, such as low level drug dealers.

You mean by investing the stock market? Or literal cash under the mattress?

There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.

Too broad. Wealth hoarder describes everyone with a mortgage as well as grandma Sally and her pension plan. Anyone who saves for retirement is a wealth hoarder.

All dinosaurs are reptiles, including birds. The major clade of dinosaurs to which birds belong is called theropods. The other well-known dinosaurs, sauropods (including all the huge quadrupedal herbivores), are totally extinct and have only very distant ancestry with birds and other reptiles.

By the way, crocodilians have been around for 250 million years, so they shared the earth with the huge dinosaurs of old! But they are not dinosaurs themselves.

“The other guys are even worse” is never a good excuse. That sort of thinking leads to a downward spiral; a race to the bottom.

There’s a ton of functionality in Photoshop that even pros never use. Every user of Photoshop needs something different from it. Sure, there’s a core of features that everyone uses (and which the Gimp also has) but there’s also countless other niche features that are a crucial part of the workflow for tons of users and they won’t give them up. This is one of the reasons Photoshop is so hard to replace.

It’s also the reason Latex is tough to replace as well. It’s a phenomenon which is not limited to commercial software, that’s for sure.

Seems pretty clear to me: they’re going after the Lego and Minecraft crowd. That is, little kids.

Either way it’s going to organized crime. At least the crypto scammers are unlikely to influence the election!

His theories aren’t discredited. Many people have misconstrued them however. I wrote about this in a reply to someone else.

He probably made a lot more than that on the video. Plus he basically told the world it’s not worth it. Kind of a bad deal overall for the sellers. No wonder they didn’t want him filming inside the cafe!

There’s no demand for that. All evidence shows that people will sacrifice pretty much everything to get a cheaper flight. I think we as a society have simply accepted that flying is a miserable experience that we put up with to get where we’re going. A few hours of suffering for an amazing week in paradise (every vacationer’s dream).

I think you’re still going to alienate teachers with that kind of shuffling. People form relationships with their colleagues. This is especially the case at universities where your coworker may be one of a handful of people on the planet who actually understands your research.

But also I think you may overrate the impact of teaching skill on student outcomes. Universities barely teach their students at all. Apart from lectures, they assign course work and conduct examinations. By far the majority of learning in university takes place alone, when the student engages with the course work. It’s often the case that students will pass a course with a decent grade having never attended a single lecture.

The truth of the matter is that most of the value of a highly selective university is the selectivity. There’s nothing that makes a teacher look brilliant more than having brilliant students. The top schools like Harvard could honestly eliminate lectures entirely, just keeping coursework and examinations, and their students would still be the most sought after.

Yesterday was my convocation day. So yes!

You could hire a hundred times as many grad students into the tenure track but that still wouldn’t stop people from competing to study with the best ones.

The brutal, national, standardized exam is what you get when you eliminate all the other barriers to going to university. It means every single student is in competition with one another to get accepted.

Shuffling staff around between schools just sounds like a great way to drive all the best researchers to the private sector while driving all the best teachers out of the profession entirely. Forcing people to move around to different cities for their job means you are selecting heavily for a particular “nomadic” type of person without any attachments to the local community. Sounds absolutely awful to foist that on educational institutions who really ought to be in the business of fostering community.

Everything these AIs output is a hallucination. Imagine if you were locked in a sensory deprivation tank, completely cut off from the outside world, and only had your brain fed the text of all books and internet sites. You would hallucinate everything about them too. You would have no idea what was real and what wasn’t because you’d lack any epistemic tools for confirming your knowledge.

That’s the biggest reason why AIs will always be bullshitters as long as their disembodied software programs running on a server. At best they can be a brain in a vat which is a pure hallucination machine.

They might do a bunch of damage at first but then we’d spray vast quantities of pesticides on everything.

Wait. So they don’t have separate gender events for artistic swimming?

This was covered in a great talk by Soren Johnson (lead designer of Civ IV): Playing to Lose: AI and Civilization.

His main thesis is that players constantly demand stronger AI (that doesn’t cheat) but when they try it they hate it. The issue is that strong AI doesn’t role-play like an actual historical leader, it plays like a “gamer” who will stop at nothing to win.

That is, strong AI opponents treat Civ like a game of poker and they’ll use every possible means of defeating you. They’re not reliable allies or trading partners, they’re bluffing, duplicitous liars.

Human players who play against such AIs report a very negative experience. Many of the diplomacy functions in the game become rather useless against such an untrustworthy AI, and the whole situation devolves into something more akin to “turn-based Warcraft” rather than Civilization.