A few things. My policy for all people is that if they ask me for something specific, then I will not give it to them on the spot. Doesn’t matter whether it’s panhandling or selling something or asking for signatures. I don’t like being put on the spot, so I’m going to either research it on my own or follow some policy.

My policy about panhandling is to give money to food charities instead. Not because I think it’s wrong to give them things, but because it makes more sense for me logically and emotionally.

Emotionally first. I don’t get that emotional rush that other people seem to get for giving out money to a needy person, but I do feel a lot of remorse if I think it was a mistake. Sometimes, their response to a donation makes you feel really bad, and you don’t ever get that if you just ignore them.

Logically next. A person without a home cannot buy food as efficiently as even a badly run charity. They don’t have a refrigerator or even a safe place to store food, so they’re forced to buy ready to eat food at several times the cost. Even if I did hand out money to individuals, I wouldn’t do it without a budget. It just makes a lot more sense to give the same money to a charity, instead.

Whoever made up that saying, “A watched pot never boils,” must have a very different brain from me.

I have no illusions that I’m capable of multitasking with my conscious attention, and if I’m watching a pot of water being heated to a boil, then that’s all I’m watching, so it inevitably boils while I’m watching it.

This reminds me of people freaking out over particle accelerators. Will it create a black hole???

Only they don’t know that the Earth is regularly bombarded with high energy particles from space. The reason we need particle accelerators is so that we can accelerate the desired types of particles to the desired speed, and aim them at the desired place.

Even I wouldn’t call myself a technical expert in AI. I studied it in both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees and worked professionally with types of AI, such as decision trees, for years. And I did a little professionally to help data scientists develop NN models, but we’re talking in the range of weeks or maybe months.

It’s really neural networks where I’ve not had enough experience. I never really developed NN models myself, other than small ones in my personal time, so I’m no expert, but I’ve studied it enough and been around it enough that I can talk intelligently about the topic with experts… or at least I could the last time I worked with it, which was around 5 years ago.

And that’s why it’s so depressing to look at these comments you’re talking about. People who vastly oversell their expertise and spread misinformation because it fits their agenda. I also think we need to protect people from generative AI, but I’m not willing to ignore facts or lie to do so.

I see the no true Scotsman fallacy as something that doesn’t affect technical experts, for the most part. Like, an anthropologist would probably go with the simplest definition of birthplace, or perhaps go as far to use heritage. But they wouldn’t get stuck on the complicated reasoning in the fallacy.

Similarly, for AI experts, AI is not hard to find. We’ve had AI of one sort or another since the 1950s, I think. You might have it in some of your home appliances.

When talking about human level intelligence from an inanimate object, the history is much longer. Thousands of years. To me, it’s more a question for philosophers than for engineers. The same questions we’re asking about AI, philosophers have asked about humans. And just about every time people say modern AI is lacking in some trait compared to humans, you can find a history of philosophers asking whether humans really exhibit that trait in the first place.

I guess neuroscience is also looking into this question. But the point is, once they can explain exactly why human minds are special, we engineers won’t get stuck on the Scotsman fallacy, because we’ll be too busy copying that behavior into a computer. And then the non-experts will get to have fun inventing another reason that human intelligence is special.

Because that’s the real truth behind Scotsman, isn’t it? The person has already decided on the answer, and will never admit defeat.

Neural networks work very similarly to human brains, so when somebody points out a problem with a NN, I immediately think about whether a human would do the same thing. A human could also easily fake expertise by looking at pen marks, for example.

And human brains themselves are also usually inscrutable. People generally come to conclusions without much conscious effort first. We call it “intuition”, but it’s really the brain subconsciously looking at the evidence and coming to a conclusion. Because it’s subconscious, even the person who made the conclusion often can’t truly explain themselves, and if they’re forced to explain, they’ll suddenly use their conscious mind with different criteria, but they’ll basically always come to the same conclusion as their intuition due to confirmation bias.

But the point is that all of your listed complaints about neural networks are not exclusively problems of neural networks. They are also problems of human brains. And not just rare problems, but common problems.

Only a human who is very deliberate and conscious about their work doesn’t fall into that category, but that limits the parts of your brain that you can use. And it also takes a lot longer and a lot of very deliberate training to be able to do that. Intuition is a very important part of our minds, and can be especially useful for very high level performance.

Modern neural networks have their training data manipulated and scrubbed to avoid issues like you brought up. It can be done by hand, for additional assurance, but it is also automatically done by the training software. If your training data is an image, the same image will be used repeatedly. For example, it will be used in its original format. It can be rotated and used. Cropped and used. Manipulated using standard algorithms and used. Or combinations of those things.

Pen marks wouldn’t even be an issue today, because images generally start off digital, and those raw digital images can be used. Just like any other medical tool, it wouldn’t be used unless it could be trusted. It will be trained and validated like any NN, and then random radiologists aren’t just relying on it right after that. It is first used by expert radiologists simulating actual diagnosis who understand the system enough to report problems. There is no technological or practical reason to think that humans will always have better outcomes than even today’s AI technology.

I think that’s the same point the comic is making, which is why it’s called “The four eyes principle,” meaning two different people look at it.

I understand the sentiment, but I will maintain that I would choose anything that has the better health outcome.

I once got my very pro-Trump very Christian aunt to agree that Trump wasn’t Christian and that many of the things he’s done go against Christian teachings.

By the next day, she was already posting tons of pro-Trump garbage on social media again. Because that’s what compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance mean.

And she had built so much of her identity around this billionaire grifter that she was unable to change.

I don’t know what the best way is to deal with these types of people, but in my case, I just completely cut her out of my life. There doesn’t seem to be any purpose to communicating with a person who is incapable of learning.

When I was in college, expert systems were considered AI. Expert systems can be 100% programmed by a human. As long as they’re making decisions that appear intelligent, they’re AI.

One example of an expert system “AI” is called “game AI.” If a bot in a game appears to be acting similar to a real human, that’s considered AI. Or at least it was when I went to college.

My knowledge on this is several years old, but back then, there were some types of medical imaging where AI consistently outperformed all humans at diagnosis. They used existing data to give both humans and AI the same images and asked them to make a diagnosis, already knowing the correct answer. Sometimes, even when humans reviewed the image after knowing the answer, they couldn’t figure out why the AI was right. It would be hard to imagine that AI has gotten worse in the following years.

When it comes to my health, I simply want the best outcomes possible, so whatever method gets the best outcomes, I want to use that method. If humans are better than AI, then I want humans. If AI is better, then I want AI. I think this sentiment will not be uncommon, but I’m not going to sacrifice my health so that somebody else can keep their job. There’s a lot of other things that I would sacrifice, but not my health.

Going by that last panel, Disability Visibility by Alice Wong must be so enthralling that nearby people who are reading Pain: A Political History by Keith Wailoo will stop reading their book to read Disability Visibility over your shoulder.

Thanks for the explanation. I didn’t get it until you explained it. Ironically, the people who read titles will have a harder time understanding the comic, because we’ve read it out-of-order.

I remember they used to have door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. Thinking back on it, we had book stores back then, so people could have gotten encyclopedias from there, so how did encyclopedia salesmen make any sales??

At any rate, at some point, my parents had purchased a short set of encyclopedias. They weren’t as good as the ones at the school or library, but it was something like 4-5 large books.

And despite what people think today, I don’t think those encyclopedias were as good or as accurate as Wikipedia is today. Wikipedia is so nice. If you want to know more about a part that’s not covered well in the article, you can just go look at the source.

OP is talking about booking flights where you can choose between nonstop or layovers. If it’s not possible to get a nonstop, then it’s just as bad for comparison as if it’s not possible to get a layover.

There are plenty of body weight exercises like squats and lunges that can strengthen the back. I think more than weights, people simply don’t like to do targeted exercises.

Just in case anybody has doubts, I gave an unserious answer to an unserious question. It was mostly just a turn of phrase.

I believe that violence should basically only be used to stop violence.

Those that voted for those that voted for it.

Men would be bragging about how short they are.

If you looked at my Duolingo, you’d think I was pretty fluent in Japanese. But if you look at me talking to a Japanese person, you’d think I knew very little Japanese.

I think this is a call duck.