Yeah, this one took me a while to wrap my head around and intuitively “get it”. I first learned it was true from that mythbusters episode where they correct their past mistakes… and even they had thought that two cars hitting head on would receive the same energy as hitting a stationary wall at the speed of the sum of their speeds. They were corrected in letters written to them, and then they experimentally verified it.

And even seeing the experimental verification, it still took me a while to really get it. The opposite speeds cancel out, making you go from your speed to zero. Same as if you hit a brick wall at that speed.

Let’s say the two cars are going 50 mph (kph, whatever unit you want). 50-50=0. You experience the same as hitting the brick wall. It’s the difference between initial speed and final speed that matters, not the sum of their speeds.

I do teach English as a Foreign language, I used to teach computer programming (at a beginner level), and sometimes I daydream about teaching math according to principles from the essay A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart, but I am unlikely to be given the leeway to try.

I feel like “passing it through a statistical model”, while absolutely true on a technical implementation level, doesn’t get to the heart of what it is doing so that people understand. It’s using the math terms, potentially deliberately to obfuscate and make it seem either simpler than it is. It’s like reducing it to “it just predicts the next word”. Technically true, but I could implement a black box next word predictor by sticking a real person in the black box and ask them to predict the next word, and it’d still meet that description.

The statistical model seems to be building some sort of conceptual grid of word relationships that approximates something very much like actually understanding what the words mean, and how the words are used semantically, with some random noise thrown into the mix at just the right amounts to generate some surprises that look very much like creativity.

Decades before LLMs were a thing, the Zompist wrote a nice essay on the Chinese room thought experiment that I think provides some useful conceptual models: http://zompist.com/searle.html

Searle’s own proposed rule (“Take a squiggle-squiggle sign from basket number one…”) depends for its effectiveness on xenophobia. Apparently computers are as baffled at Chinese characters as most Westerners are; the implication is that all they can do is shuffle them around as wholes, or put them in boxes, or replace one with another, or at best chop them up into smaller squiggles. But pointers change everything. Shouldn’t Searle’s confidence be shaken if he encountered this rule?

If you see 马, write down horse.

If the man in the CR encountered enough such rules, could it really be maintained that he didn’t understand any Chinese?

Now, this particular rule still is, in a sense, “symbol manipulation”; it’s exchanging a Chinese symbol for an English one. But it suggests the power of pointers, which allow the computer to switch levels. It can move from analyzing Chinese brushstrokes to analyzing English words… or to anything else the programmer specifies: a manual on horse training, perhaps.

Searle is arguing from a false picture of what computers do. Computers aren’t restricted to turning 马 into “horse”; they can also relate “horse” to pictures of horses, or a database of facts about horses, or code to allow a robot to ride a horse. We may or may not be willing to describe this as semantics, but it sure as hell isn’t “syntax”.

Mine was just all repeated digits of whatever hour. 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11 all “counted” in my mind when I was entering university, and it happened so freaking often it was really weirding me out. It seemed like anytime I glanced at a clock without other intention, it would be one of those times. There were probably times I looked at a clock normally, but of course confirmation bias reinforces things. But it really did seem far more often than you’d expect. My bet is that my inner clock was prompting me to look at those times because I got an adreneline or dopamine or something spike, so my subconscious got trained into finding it.

Dusting and cleaning does not defeat the purpose. You’re making the mistake of thinking that cleanliness is boolean… true or false. It’s not that it’ll just get dusty again, it’s that it will get more dusty, and then even more dusty, and then dustier still, and there is actually no real practical limit to how filthy a place can get. Cleaning resets the progress to a point where you can live again.

Now, there is a related cleaning story that could be called defeating the purpose that stuck in my mind. It’s a bit Luddite in nature, but does have a point. It’s a micro-story from inside the book “Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh”:

The story was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop.

But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town—so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.

The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in the town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running.

In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever.

Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones every bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

That’s an example of defeating the purpose, where the thing you do actually makes it worse. A similar “defeating the purpose” is when a bunch of companies lowers wages to save money, making it so that people can no longer afford their products, meaning that they earn less money after all.

I will say that the blow dry option doesn’t really help sufficiently after using the bidet to avoid me wanting to use TP to dry off, but it might be sufficient for lady parts after peeing. Don’t have a vagina personally, so can’t say for sure.

A paramour is an “other lover”. Para = beside, amour = love. It’s not a casual fuck buddy, it’s your cheating partner. I’m surprised to hear you say it’s unknown as a word these days? Seems like just a normal word to me, albeit one I’m happy to go without using as cheaters suck.

Many channels I watch have already been mentioned, but one comes to mind that hasn’t been: if you like Stuff Made Here and NileRed, you’ll love The Thought Emporium. Dude is a mad scientist, for real. His current long term project is trying to make a neural net that can play DOOM… except he means real neurons. Biological neurons grown in his self built lab, sourced from rats.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a rare modern fairytale, in the old sense of the word, not the Disney sense.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if they didn’t burn everything at the end. I mean, I get that sanitation in that situation was pretty darn important, but it was the author’s choice to choose something that required that outcome. That ending made me sad for a long time. Definitely didn’t know how to handle it. Not sure I can even now.

I would bet on it being a little bit (well, a lot) of ablism mixed with people wanting only answers that they personally can use. Which circles back on the ableism… people don’t want to believe that they could suddenly join this minority group at any time.

I had to be in a wheelchair for a year. The internalized shame from pervasive background ableism is horrible.

Oh yeah, I fully understand why the stupidity happens/happened. I don’t know how to fix it or if it can be fixed… that’s why I posted it here, in the unsolved problems in your field thread!

How to get supervisors, superintendents, school boards, and even politicians to let teachers teach. It’s understood that overtesting reduces learning. It’s understood that rigid curriculums don’t work, and you really should be tailoring lessons to the capabilities of the class. All kinds of educational philosophy is understood well and in depth… but being permitted to apply any of it?

A 1-800 number is immune to long distance charges, free to call by anyone in the US— the owner of the 800 number pays any fees associated with the call. Traditionally, 800 numbers are owned by companies in order to sell stuff. (The 1- portion of a 1-800 number means that it’s a long distance call… which was a thing when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, but basically isn’t a thing anymore in the age of cellphones)

The opposite of an 800 number is a 900 number. The person calling a 900 number has to pay, usually by minute, and most of that money goes to the owner of the 900 number. Famously used for phone sex lines.

Don’t you mean Wyoming?

My two year old son is just learning a few words right now. I’m looking forward to the day I can have an honest conversation with him, explain things using words, and get to know what’s going on in his tiny little adorable head.

It’s a failure of properly understanding intersectionality. Intersectionality says that the combination of societal status does not equal the sum of each individual status, but may in fact be its own unique thing. A black woman has unique challenges and experiences even compared with “women” in general, or “black people” in general, even though black women are black, and are women. This is a weird idea and hard for most people to wrap their heads around, so it’s not surprising that this comes up.

Jews (of which I am one) have a particularly troublesome social status intersection that creates a unique combination that leads to some troubling conclusions for modern left leaning Americans.

Consider the following two premises: oppressors, that is, the strong, should be fought against to prevent the weak from harm. And white people have historically been the oppressors.

Hopefully, these two statements are non-controversial and make sense.

Then come Jews, who, apart from their Jewishness, are basically considered white in the modern day. So jews are oppressors and must be fought against to protect the weak, right?

Ah… but there’s a nasty historical coincidence— the oppression against the jews has always been that they are secretly powerful and oppressing others. The elder protocols of Zion and other nonsense permeates the culture. Hundreds of years of jews being the evil bankers (because we were forbidden from having any other job). Constantly given garbage and unfavorable positions, and any success we reap from that is then used as ammo against us.

So the intersection of whiteness and Jewishness creates a self-reinforcing messy cycle of increasing hatred that is really hard to untangle.

I continue working in Japan and have it covered by national insurance.

I was shocked to discover the hatred the old live action Mario movie gets. I enjoyed it when it came out when I was a kid. I rewatched it as an adult to see if my memory was faulty… still enjoyed it. It’s a little campy, but it’s a fun romp! I unironically enjoy it, as a good movie and not as a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie. And yet it gets so much hate…

Likewise, the crime wave of the 70s in the US has been directly linked to leaded gasoline putting lead in the air, and leaded paint. You can map the crime wave literally block-by-block to correspond with areas that have not done lead mitigation efforts or those that have.

Also makes you think about the pathologically evil governmental policies the older generation have enacted, and how those people have also been influenced by lead in the air.

I’m of the understanding that lead poisoning effects the ability to engage in theory of mind (thinking about what someone else is thinking— also, empathy) and future planning, consideration of consequences, first before influencing other mental faculties. Which is why it can be linked to crime so easily.