> So desperate to be valued and liked, that he desperately grabs at anything and everything to get the acclaim
Like all billionaires, he is an empty void that can never be filled. To borrow a phrase, he is a hungry ghost.
After his first million he needed more, then after a billion he saw that it was not enough, then after becoming president... he is, was, and always will be an empty hole of a person who can never feel satiated and who can consequently never feel genuine happiness.
Earlier I said "all billionaires", and that wasn't fair.
To be clear, there are some who turn Capitalism into a religion (objectivists, and the like), and to them it can be moral. They at least seek to serve a moral good, even if I disagree about the means I can appreciate that their goal is still to make the world a better place.
Trump is not one though. He is utterly devoid of morality and seeks only to fill an endless black need for external validation.
But science is about doing your own research! The idea is that science results are based on evidence that is published in serious [1] peer review [2] journals.
At some time you realize you can't repeat all the test at home, because it would be full of mice and transgenic plants and a huge particle collider and ... Also, there are a lot of very hard topics. So you must trust the system, but not too much.
* Big pharma wants to sell drugs and get money.
* The FDA wants to cover they ass and get money.
* Journalist want to publish bleeding stories and get money.
[There is also an optimistic version where all of them want the best for humanity.]
All of them together are making a quite good job, and you can go to the pharmacy at the corner and be quite confident that you will get the cure for a lot of illness with a low risk. In some threads people ask for most tests, in some threads people ask for faster approval. It's a hard trade off, and I'm happy I don't have to make the decision [3].
In 2020 there was a lot of misinformation in both directions. From politicians to youtubers, form individual crackpots to professors in the university. In many cases you realize they may not even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria, in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
Science is about doing your own research, but doing your own research is super hard. As a rule of thumb, if the FDA and the European equivalent agree, it's probably ok [4], but cross your fingers just in case.
[1] Whatever "serious" mean. It's a hard question.
[2] And real "peer review", not a comment section in a web page.
[4] Do you trust the contractor+regulations that installed the elevator at your building? It's another trade off of as cheap as possible and enough regulations to avoid appearing in the front page of all newspapers everyday.
Not for the average adult human on planet Earth, no.
Fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence. Of the 50% that remain only a fraction have access to the equipment necessary to replicate any given experiment, of that fraction only a small percentage will have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to accurately replicate any given experiment, of that tiny fraction only a much tinier fraction will have the KSA's to interpret those results in a meaningful way.
Science should replicate. That does not automatically imply that YOU should be the one replicating it.
For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they are and listening to them, or at least listening to the general consensus of those who are more qualified when such a consensus exists.
Yes, other peoples goals don't always align perfectly with yours, but the simple truth is that you aren't qualified or even capable of understanding everything in the world. When it comes to those subjects you must be adult enough to understand and work within your limitations.
Honestly, do you really believe that people who sacrificed large parts of their lives to become researchers are in it for the money, or out to get you? These are brilliant people who choose to take a career path that doesn't really pay well. When 99% of them tell you something is safe, Occam will tell that it's a pretty safe bet the weirdos on the fringe are just plain wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with doing your own experiments as long as you understand your limitations. But that’s not what people mean when they say they “did their own research”.
They mean that they went online and found blogs and YouTube videos that agree with whatever crackpot view they already held.
The issue with picking people and organizations to trust (which you absolutely should do) is that the average person isn’t even able to evaluate what qualified means. And RFK jr. is the guy appointing the “qualified people” who run things. On paper many of them are qualified, but in reality they’re crackpots.
You have to dig a level deeper and understand that this set of qualified people are actually just nuts who essentially performed the scientific equivalent of a coup because their ideas couldn’t win on merit.
> For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they
I agree. But how do you that without researching? Who makes the list of trustful institutions?
Let's pick homeopathy. The pharmacy in the corner of my home sells homeopathy too. There are even some curses in some universities [in Germany?] [I searched in MY university. Apparently there is no curse for human medicine, but there is a curse for veterinary https://www.fvet.uba.ar/?q=homeopatia .] Can we agree homeopathy is not real? How do you know?
This is all a very fun thought experiment and whatnot but the reality is the COVID vaccines went through gigantic randomized controlled trials, our absolute best known method (by a gigantic margin) to figure out what is true.
Those trials unequivocally showed extremely high effectiveness and extremely high safety.
The people who say otherwise are simply wrong in this case. No matter how much philosophizing you or they want to do on epistemology. If they want to demonstrate otherwise, they need to conduct their own trials, ideally large, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trials.
> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
This is not how trials work and you should go "do your own research" on the basics of the methodology before you opine on higher-order things like vaccines etc.
>> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
If you want to ruin your day, take a look at the hydroxychloroquine [retracted] paper by Raoult. Who is the control group? Why was it reported in the press as a 100% cure if the only death was in the trial group?
I agree that the trial to prove the effectiveness and safety of the covid-19 vaccines were much better designed. One of the reasons is that to get the approval of the FDA they must dot the i and j and cross the t and f.
To be fair, when the Covid vaccine was being rushed to be approved, I didn’t 100% trust that Trump wouldn’t pressure the FDA to approve without being confident it was safe.
So my standard at the time was that I’d take it if the FDA and at least one other developed country approved it.
Here in Argentina we approved the Sputnik vaccine. It was approved only here and in Russia. And here it was approved not by the standard office (ANMAT), but by a special resolution of the Health Ministry.
> Don't take anybodies word, look at the evidence for yourself.
Please nobody listen to his person. There is nothing scientific about ignoring the experts to instead behold the opinions of the uninformed.
The world is too large, too complex, and too nuanced for the layman's opinion to be worth much. When someone is unqualified treat their opinion as equal to every other unqualified persons opinion. Include your own in that assessment. Be honest, what qualifications do you have that make your assessment of the evidence more valid than any other random street person's in the given field? It's very likely the answer is "none". So lend your own opinion the level of respect it has earned. Be honest with yourself about what that level is.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov
I am right and I suspect you know it... you just don't like the way it makes you feel. Hence your focus on vibes and ad hominums rather than reason.
It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.
> It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.
I think you're grossly overestimating the complexity of most modern science outside of physics and mathematics (and computing, as an intersection of the two).
Good science is actually pretty easy to explain most of the time. It may take a long time to become a domain expert thst can perform novel research in a field but it it's well within the understanding of most people to have a single topic explained to them by an expert.
In fact, that very thing happens in courtrooms all the time.
Your condescending attitude is why people don't trust authorities and with good reason. If you can't help people understand science, it's you that doesn't understand it.
Furthermore, I hope you realize how close your "self-evident" logic is to a lot of extremely gross and genocidal ideologies of the past and present.
I originally wrote a long winded response to this, but I deleted it. The more I think about your perspective the more I realize that though I disagree, it is also very reasonable of you to believe the way you do and I can respect that.
The truth is that we're both likely right to some extent, and wrong to some extent.
I now think that maybe there is no hard and fast rule one can apply to every situation to decide when one should decide for themself or just trust the experts. The optimal solution likely varies greatly depending on the specifics of the given situation, and it's very reasonable that we would have two very different takes about it.
This is how its meant to be done. Usually with the reviewer being the stronger model.
That said, with both the test driven development this post describes and the reviewer model (its best to do both) you have to provide an escape hatch or out for the model. If you let the model get inescapably stuck with an impossible test or constraints it will just start deleting tests or rewriting the entire codebase in rust or something.
My escape hatch is "expert advice". I let the weak LLM phone a friend when its stuck and ask a smarter LLM for assistance. Its since stopped going crazy and replacing all my tests with gibberish... mostly.
Following Anthropics lead Google is banning oAuth with third party tools, even for their "Ultra" tier subscribers. They are also removing the pro models from the free tier.
If you need to use those things you can still do so, but only with a much more expensive Vertex or Studio API key.
> Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their computer.
I see this point being missed over and over again in this thread. To people like you and I the computer is often the entire point. To normal people it's a tool. It exists to get the job done so they can move onto something else.
The solution that requires the least effort is objectively the best solution. Most of the time that still means Windows, and it won't change until the required level of effort changes.
If all the crap that people suffer through, and make YouTube channels dedicated to about how much Windows is hell, is not enough to get them to look elsewhere then "fixing" other operating systems won't get them to look.
They aren't looking and they aren't interested in looking. At this point they have no one else to blame.
From the paper itself: "54 trials were identified for inclusion (2477 participants...) ....24 (44%) of these trials had a high risk of bias, and the certainty of evidence for most outcomes was low."
I have a bad back and bending over hurts. Statistically it will also start to hurt you someday.
Even if we ignore the pain, there is no way to organize food in a chest freezer effectively. To reach items on the bottom one must remove all the food that sits above it. This wastes time and effort that could better be spent on other things. Meaning the opportunity cost is too high, even if it saves me money on electricity.
Yeah, we have a french door fridge with a lower drawer freezer, and even with that being split into an upper drawer maybe 8" deep, and a lower one ~12" deep. Everything but the top layer and maybe one layer under that, is where food goes to die. And that setup is vastly better at this all than a 30" deep chest, except that when you pull the drawer out, all the benefits of a chest are lost. So (nearly) the worst of both worlds.
Like all billionaires, he is an empty void that can never be filled. To borrow a phrase, he is a hungry ghost.
After his first million he needed more, then after a billion he saw that it was not enough, then after becoming president... he is, was, and always will be an empty hole of a person who can never feel satiated and who can consequently never feel genuine happiness.
He is not just a bad person, his is a bad soul.
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