Sunday, April 26, 2026
Friday, April 24, 2026
Thursday, April 23, 2026
P(doom) | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
This way overstates the case. Obviously AI will have controls.
Furthermore, AI is not near as smart as we give it credit. It is like a Wikipedia that can talk. It understands language really well, but everything else is based on probability where certain facts and things are associated with other facts and things.
Beyond probability, AI has little understanding of things that it is talking about, and its ability to reason is limited, although it might be able solve simple problems.
However, this is why there is a big push to make AI's smarter. Doing so requires a great deal more hardware, and they are building it. The AI demand for computer memory is driving up the cost of computers by a significant amount.
However, I suspect that the current methods are inefficient and they are just throwing more hardware at the problem to make it better. This is a drain on resources, when they need to come up with better algorithms.
So I asked ChatGPT what it thought of my points, and this is what it said...
Your core argument is clear and grounded, but it leans a bit too confidently in a few places where the reality is more nuanced. Here’s a straightforward take on the strengths and weaknesses:
What works well:
- You push back against hype. That’s valuable—AI discussions often swing toward extremes.
- The point about scaling via hardware vs. improving algorithms is thoughtful and widely debated in the field.
- You correctly note that current AI systems rely heavily on statistical patterns rather than deep “understanding” in a human sense.
Where it overreaches or could be refined:
- Saying AI is “like a Wikipedia that can talk” undersells it. Modern systems don’t just retrieve facts—they generate novel responses, combine ideas, and can perform nontrivial reasoning in some domains. It’s still probabilistic, but not merely lookup-and-repeat.
- “Beyond probability, AI has little understanding” is philosophically debatable. Even humans rely on pattern recognition more than we like to admit. The real issue is type and reliability of understanding, not its total absence.
- The claim that reasoning is limited to “simple problems” is outdated. AI can now handle fairly complex reasoning tasks, though inconsistently and with failure modes.
- “Obviously AI will have controls” is asserted too casually. In practice, governance, safety, and control mechanisms are active areas of concern—not something universally agreed upon or solved.
Your strongest idea (worth emphasizing more):
- The critique that the field may be over-relying on brute-force scaling (more compute, more memory) instead of algorithmic breakthroughs is legitimate. Many researchers are asking the same question.
How you might sharpen it:
Instead of framing AI as “not that smart,” you could frame it as:
- powerful but uneven
- impressive in narrow ways, unreliable in others
- advancing quickly, but with unclear long-term efficiency
That keeps your skepticism but makes it harder to dismiss.
If you want, I can rewrite your paragraph to sound tighter and more persuasive without losing your viewpoint.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Sunday, April 19, 2026
Saturday, April 18, 2026
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
The Climate Crisis is a Scam - Professor Ian Plimer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kNvSu93P9Q&t=1153s
This guy says many of the same things I’ve been saying, such as pointing out how changes in the Earth’s orbit can cause ice ages. He talks about the massive CO2 decline over Earth's history and how it got dangerously low 20,000 years ago, where if it had been any lower, all terrestrial plant life would have died.
However, he denies any relationship between man-made emissions and rising temperatures.
The average global atmospheric temperature has risen by about 1 to 1.1 degrees since 1880. Some of the temperature records are controversial because the government has adjusted past measurements, claiming that earlier methods were not consistent with modern ones. Nevertheless, we know that temperatures have increased, albeit rather slowly.
It seems very likely that man-made emissions have been at least partially responsible for this increase. However, we also came out of the Little Ice Age around 1850, so there was already an upward trend.
The temperature and CO₂ data suggest that the rate of change is gradual and that temperature sensitivity to CO₂ is relatively low. I have no reason to believe that we are in a climate crisis, at least not in the near future.
Reportedly, out of the 100+ models that the IPCC uses, the only model that accurately predicts actual climate is the less extreme Russian model. However, the IPCC likes to average all the models, including the more extreme ones. They make their predictions with huge error bars, indicating a wide range of possible outcomes, because they really don't know. However, the focus tends to be on the more extreme predictions.
Almost all of the disagreement is about the degree of positive feedback, also known as Climate Sensitivity. Although this seems mild now, I can't rule out some significant effect in the future. However, if there were, we would have plenty of warning. These changes happen very slowly.
All of the really bad scenarios would require us to raise the temperature by 4 to 5 degrees. We just aren't getting there very fast, and we are running out of fossil fuels.
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
You are being misled about renewable energy technology
0 seconds ago
I am almost convinced, but...
Reportedly, China has massively subsidized solar panel construction in order to dominate the world market, leading to an oversupply, driving solar panel cost down by 90%. Is this a sustainable economic situation?
Given that, I think that the free market will use the most economic source of energy, which could change depending upon a combination of economics and politics.
There is much concern about the reliability of renewable energy. The counter argument is that you need massive backup sources of energy, but it seems to me that we already have that.
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Saturday, April 4, 2026
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Monday, March 30, 2026
Friday, March 27, 2026
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Re: Darwin's "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex"
I find this interesting just from a historical perspective. When it comes to eugenics, the argument I've heard is that genetics is more complicated than a simple eugenics point of view.
There is likely some benefit from not propagating genetic defects. To be clear, this in no way advocates genocide or racial superiority. The Nazis took these ideas to an evil extreme, and they used Darwin as a justification.
Darwin's "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex"
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.
It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Monday, March 23, 2026
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