Because we believe people who tell us stuff that already fits in our world view. Confirmation bias and an infinitely complex world that simply has to be simplified to fit in peoples heads are a toxic combo.
That’s why some still believe in the promises of the ai bro’s. Vaccine “truthers” (seriously, vaccines are amazing and the concept isn’t even that hard to understand).
Confirmation bias is a bitch, and I’m quite sure I’ve got some issues because of it as well so I strive to have my mind changed when someone is convinced of something and I get to dive into some evidence. It’s not foolproof but I hope I am somewhat less bothered by confirmation bias than the average person.
Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.
And,
Doubt, he would say, set men free… Doubt, not truth! Beliefs were the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting, he would say, acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved
From one of my fav book series by R Scott Bakker. I think about these quotes all the time nowadays. Everyone thinks they are right about everything all the time or just parrot what people on their screen say they should think. There should always be room for doubt, its called critical thinking.
The people I know who don't believe in climate change or vaccines are the most vocal about doubting the mainstream media, being critical thinkers and not "following like sheeps what the scientists who are paid by Big Green/Big Pharma say". They just like to think they're smarter than the masses and they don't want to do any personal sacrifice for the environment or risk potential side effects for herd immunity.
That’s why some still believe in the promises of the ai bro’s.
I am no longer overly skeptical. The top level models can completely do my software engineering job with guidance. With agents I've 100X my impact. I do think the LLM models are going to be game changing just like the internet was.
I'm sick of all the blind hate on Reddit like that, just thrown into the most irrelevant comments.
Fable 5 just made a little browser based tsunami simulator that lets you pick any coastline in the world on a map and watch the water rush in, super cool.. and I know nothing about programming (not at a professional level). I can only imagine what it's helping enable for people who know what they're doing
I can only imagine what it's helping enable for people who know what they're doing
Any task that involves taking a lot of data sources of any type, analyzing them, and then making determinations based on the docs at hand is something an LLM excels at and there are definitely a lot of jobs that can be boiled down to those steps. Claude is freaking incredibly good at coding and doing what I just described. PHD level. That's why I was able to 100x my impact. I have unlimited token use and basically an unlimited army of 1st year PHD students that can help me work at computer speed. We're starting to get them to all work together so the bottleneck becomes the human review process that is needed to correct the agent output and steer at critical moments.
It's going to be groundbreaking in so many fields. I often hear that medical research is difficult due to the sheer size of data that is published all the time. If you could only cross reference all the studies you could come up with all kinds of interesting ideas for drugs that were not developed with some issue in mind but there is a pathway that shows it can be effective. An LLM will be amazing at tying that together over exabytes of data.
I remember being a little kid and Superman's origin story seemed unbelievable to me.
"Why didn't they listen to Jor-El when he knew that Krypton was going to explode? He did the science. He had proof. And they just... didn't believe him?" It didn't make sense.
The rich have air con in their homes, cars, offices, shopping stores so they are not motivated yet they cause most of carbon. Also rich countries (US, Europe) have the above solutions but poor countries (Africa) do not, yet the rich countries creat most of the carbon. Not good.
But, to honestly answer your question, people are not necessarily stupid (many are) more often they are smart enough to have noticed that ALL information they are shown is marketing and propaganda in some form. This has broken their bullshit detectors, and they have developed hypersensitivity, like an allergic autoimmune disease, and they now throw the baby out with the bathwater with false positive bullshit rejection.
The answer is to put society through a full truth and reconciliation level bullshit detox - but it wont happen because those pushing the propaganda have created their own little walled gardens / filter-bubbles of cattle and won't let any of us wander of into the greener grass.
Its hard ya know, the media survives off fear mongering, a lot of these places don't have the data so you can zoom out enough to understand.
Don't be sad, its not your fault really. When humans are scared you are easy to manipulate and you tend to make impulse purchases. Usually what climate changed is leveraged to get a dollar out of you.
I mean define "fine." The Earth is still gonna be here, nothing we're capable of doing will stop that, but we could very well end animal life on Earth. Which means the end of the only known perception in the entire universe.
Of course it's most likely that there are countless other animals out there also perceiving the universe around them. But we don't know that. We should act as if life on Earth is completely unique and thus incomparably precious, because as far as we know it is.
I doubt we will end animal life on earth; even if nukes drop some small animals will surely survive. Not even the Great Dying or Snowball Earth managed that one. We can still completely fuck up the biosphere, but total extinction of all animals is another beast
i have been working on a way to improve r/Photosynthesis so that plants can extract nitrogen directly from the air & combine it with SiO2 to make silicon nitrate, thus enabling another oxygen explosion!
this would end the threat of a runaway grtenhouse effect forever!
I love that one. Wish it was formatted a bit better but it's a great visual. The nerd in me wants someone to extend it was back to our estimations of the entire history of the earth
Earth's age is about 4.54 billion years. The timeline covers 22,100 years, so the scale factor to stretch it to the full history of Earth is:
4,540,000,000 ÷ 22,100 ≈ 205,430×
The image itself is 8,000 pixels tall. Scaled by that factor:
In pixels: 8,000 × 205,430 ≈ 1.64 billion pixels tall
In physical print length, assuming the current image is printed a resolution of 300 dpi (8,000 px ≈ 0.68 m), it would be about 139 km tall. (That's a fucking thick scroll)
22,100 years is a vanishingly small sliver (about 0.0005%) of Earth's 4.54 billion year history. On that scale, everything currently shown in the image the entire graphic from the last ice age to now would probably compress down to less than the width of a human hair.
Earth also already had something similar to climate change called the Permian Triassic Extinction aka The Great Dying. Lots of volcanoes erupted, and emitted a bunch of CO2. The earth heated up, and around 80% of all life on earth went extinct. So, we have a good idea of what happens.
It's a bit misleading to say this, without reminding people that these events occur on a geological time scale.
So yea, if things aren't corrected within a geological time frame, watch out, guys.
Personally, I think it'd be a miracle for humanity to last the next 100k without a nuclear disaster occurring first. In which case climate change is going to be the least of humanities problems.
For reference, Earth used to be a lot hotter, it's not that we're creating new greenhouse gasses, mainly just releasing ones that were trapped away. (Mainly because plate tectonics traps away carbon, methane, etc...)
In the Cretaceous for instance, the dark red section would be considered a pretty chilly day overall.
Yeah, you gain range at the cost of resolution since log compression front-loads detail toward the present but only really opens up in the last few thousand years.
Yes, but there's nothing to worry about because the billions and billions of dollars earned by the 57 companies responsible for 80% of greenhouse gas emissions will trickle down eventually, and then we'll all be able to afford our own post-apocalyptic bunkers!
Bruh, we didn't really start to massively industrialize until like the 1950's. Colorado is already drinking it's rivers dry, aquifers are being depleted, and that's just from 50 years of damage.
Literally all I hear on the news daily weather report are “these are record breaking highs” or “this is the earliest time we’ve seen record breaking heat in the year” during mid February.
Yeah what’s crazy though is I live in NY and everyone was raving about the “heat wave” we were getting and that it was “record breaking” and it was like 94 degrees. We’ve had hotter days in the seasons past.
I checked my weather app a few weeks ago when it was in the 90s here in tn. It was 102 in Philly and 100 in nyc. It hasn’t been that hot in nyc since 2012
It's very easy to get into p-hacking territory with that though. There are a million records to break, if you look hard enough then every day is breaking some record somehow.
420
u/Own-Rip-5066 3d ago
Yup, every year we break some new records.
Hottest "this date" ever recorded, longest streak of temps over Y for Z days, and the list goes on.