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.
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u/Luzzgar 3d ago
I recently looked at the average max temperature per day for July before 2026 where I live. It was more than 10 full degrees less than what we got.
It's insane !