25 Comments

How much more trouble will be in when expert worship has finally mutated into AI worship?

That’s the real risk of AI.

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The first version of "AI" (marketed and trumpeted as the be-all-and-end-all in the 60s and 70s) was actually called "Expert Systems."

The AI marketers will catch on and revert to that name again.

Trust the Experts!

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I do remember “expert systems” and how they would replace doctors and lawyers “within 5 years, 10 tops, but easily by 2000”. We were told that we would describe our symptoms to a computer and out of the little slot would be issued a prescription to cure our ills. Medicine would be fully automated.

What this turned into is a grotesque caricature: our doctor appointments now consist of talking to the back of a doctor’s head while he or she taps on the computer, looking up the “correct” diagnosis given the symptoms and prescribing the “correct” treatment (misleadingly, almost paradoxically, called the “standard of care”). The expertise of the system lies not in your health, but in your expected net cash flow.

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Good for you and Jaap!! Hip hip hooray. In the other hand, bloody Dutchmen (I married one)

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Had the opportunity to work with some of the Dutch (not all). Very structured, polite, organized, and some of the most arrogant attitudes. They do think they are the smartest people on the planet (and they could be, perhaps).

Anyway, suggest we start calling our ongoing and ever present weather phenomena "climate variance".

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Good idea. Sometimes the climate identifies as warm, sometimes it identifies as cool, and so on.

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Sometimes I wonder if people like these two ladies realize how stupid they sound. I guess the fact they wrote and published this paper answers my question.

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If you don’t include “conspiracy theory” research, you are more or less stuck with Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Sad but mostly true.

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The collectivists are relentless.

But they know the lawyers' drill, "when you have neither facts nor the law, pound the table!"

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The dutch are, in my experience, an oddly bifurcated race. They seem to have completely upended their bell curve when it comes to personality distribution. I've never met an average dutchman. They're either the most excellent of people or they're bloody-minded lunatics. I suppose there must be some "in-betweens" somewhere in Holland, but I'll be damned if I know where they're hiding.

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Be actuarial. To get an average, meet them two at a time.

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Alas I have not sufficient likes to give as your comment deserves.

[insert literal laugh out loud emoji here]

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Female prerogative and emotional intuition on steroids. Adam, the first 'guilty' defendant was shamed into compliance. Eve's fatal feminist gene remains our hereditary albatross. And so no surprise we are where we are....

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That's totally Sovietic what those witches propose.

Maybe... even Juche-ic, a la North Korea.

Even Caribbean communists try to disguise it a little.

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On a related note regarding the point you make about a "molecule of choice". Recently I sent a question to your friend JJ Couey, regarding the nature of viruses: whether viruses are organisms or just molecules. This seems to me to be a rather fundamental question. The answer could be interesting.

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Aren't they supposed to be molecular complexes that have no metabolism on their own, but reproduce when introduced into a cell by taking over the cell's machinery? If so, it would be sort of an edge case from either perspective.

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As an analogy, I can´t help thinking of .. the turd. Imagine you are stunned, every time you realize a turd has just come out your back end (I used to have a dog like that). The reason you are stunned is because you cannot relate the phenomenon with the eating and digesting of food. Now, imagine some other idiot of your species comes along and tries to eat and digest the turd you have just produced, and the outcome is simply awful. Might you regard the turd as evidence of some kind of INVASIVE thing? A BAD and AWFUL thing trying to take over your body?

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So are you suggesting that viruses are natural excretions of the body, and that people get sick from them because they take them in from somebody else? Thus, more in the nature of a toxic waste or pollutant than a predatory micro-organism?

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Actually you're suggesting it, and it sounds like a pretty good suggestion to me! I now officially gift you the turd analogy. Even though I graduated from college, my education stopped in the 8th grade.

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I don't get it...Our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen....These women aren't science deniers, they're total idiots....

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In my many years of research, I have been unable to ascertain exactly how stipulated "expertise" in any particular discipline seems to automatically bestow some kind of "expertise" in other, unrelated, fields of endeavor.

My sincere thanks to "Contrarian Scientist 1 and 2" for their work. I can add their startling conclusions to my model, (with attribution). Which will undoubtedly increase the probability of the model's eventual success.

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Ending this nonsense, like ending the nonsense of illegal immigration, defunding cops, decarcerating thugs, anti-merit policies, requires one thing, without which this BS will keep accelerating: disenfranchise women.

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Congratulations. Well done!

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I don’t know, being No. 2 probably makes you the worst denier.

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There is a bright side here Briggs. The ladies in question could have published their paper in something called Minority Report!

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