Insightful indeed. It really frames the issue with trans athletes as a competition problem. We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available.
Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.
> We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available.
> Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports.
That's a naive, reductive view. Competition isn't just about benchmarking and finding the global #1, nor perfect objective ranking. If it was, we would not bother with geographically-based competitions, nor tournament brackets and championships.
Competition is an entertainment product and a major form of community. It sustains itself through competitors and spectators. Seeking objectivity is backwards.
Agreed, and I think people adopt this reductive view because it can be quite difficult to reason about objectively. In terms of a framework to channel one's thinking on this, I found this paper useful in understanding the rationale behind defining distinct categories of competitors in sports: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim-Parry/publication/3...
The key takeaway in my view is that the authors make a distinction between "category advantage", which is a systematic, structural, group-based difference that exists before competition even begins, and "competition advantage", which we see play out in competitive events and is based on a mix of factors including skill, preparation, and both innate and trained talent.
Where exactly to draw the line can be somewhat subjective (e.g. in weight classes) but it helps to explain why we have a separate female category: male physiology confers such a significant category advantage that, in open competition, it would limit the ability of female athletes to compete meaningfully and demonstrate their abilities. Having a separate category fulfils this desirable outcome of showcasing and celebrating female athletic excellence.
Often we see calls to add various classes of males, particularly ones who have chosen to identify as women, framed as "inclusion" but from the perspective of who this category is actually intended for it's the opposite. Drawing a clear eligibility boundary around the female category maximises inclusion of female athletes who would otherwise be disadvantaged and excluded.
Segregation by sex is not arbitrary, and segration by weight isn't either (even if the actual values of the implementation are).
But, anyhow, the thing you're looking for is the "open" format that already exists in other competitions like chess, where there's an open category and then any specific categories.
Ironically, in dance competitions (specially swing dancing at least), the open category is done the newbies, and higher levels have other more speciallized categories: advanced, invitational, ...
Yes and no. The first thing to understand is that in academia, knowledge is the work. You are being trained to absorb existing knowledge, hypothesise new knowledge and test if it is valid.
LLMs are a useful tool if you want it to generate text. But in the context of research, this is quite dangerous. Think of a calculator that spits out the wrong answer 10% of the time, would you trust it to use in an exam? How about 5%? 1%? 0.1%? The business of research is the business of factual knowledge. Every piece of information should and is expected to be scrutinized. That's why dishonesty is severely looked down upon (falsifying data / plagiarism etc.)
I would say your use case is not dishonest, but I would also like you to think from the perspective of the university. How would they know if their students are using it honestly like you did? How can they, with their limited resource, make sure that research integrity is upheld in the face of automated hallucinations?
At the end of the day, the question is not what if using AI is dishonest, it's about being able to walk into an antagonistic panel and defend your claim that you understand the knowledge of your field (without live AI help). If you can do that and also make sure that the contents are not hallucinated, then I don't see why not.
Yeah that’s exactly my point. The AI is just taking the boring job of collecting evidence and I’m a validator. This way i see that I’m able to process papers much faster than without AI. It’s faster primarily because you don’t have to spend 70% of your time reading abstracts and sections of the papers you’ll never need. Doing manually it’s very exhausting.
Thats being said, I feel like I’m feeling more productive it terms of generating insights apart from what the AI said. I also have a chat interface where I basically can ask anything I want from the PDF (and yeah I’m aware of the NotebookLM, I just don’t trust Gemini)
This sounds disingenuous. How does your grandma fare on Windows? Can your grandpa even navigate Linux? For all I know, your grandma could be a HN user and your grandpa a plumber.
She's significantly worse with technology than he is. Neither could tell you what an operating system is. These are exactly the type of average people that supposedly Linux isn't good enough for.
Rent control is literally the removal of the right to evict a tenant who refuses the otherwise-uncontrolled rent increase you request. The inability to evict them for refusing the rent increase is what de-facto keeps the rent from increasing beyond its controlled limit.
Oh, I get that, but what's stopping the landlord from evicting someone who damages their property? Or if the landlord no longer wants to rent and wants to live in it themselves?
I disagree. Coming froma PhD background, the researchers that spend all of their time investigating the intricacies of their field are the most qualified to train up the next generation of researchers. This isn't primary and secondary schooling, where the syllabus evolves at a slow pace. To teach how to research, you need people doing the research.
If we split them up, then the teachers will only be able to teach what they have theoretically learned from literature only. What we need is for institutions to reward teaching, reward students who excel and most importantly, reward teachers who produce excellent students.
Disdain for teaching should not be the norm. After all, what are they doing if not teaching when they publish a paper, or give a talk at conferences? Might as well be a hermit scientist then.
TFA is short and only shows a single example, but it illuminated something for me. LLMs are a misnomer. These are Large Text Models, or better yet, Large Token Models. The appearance of Language is a result of embedding words or parts of words into Tokens, then identifying the relations between Tokens via Machine Learning.
This further solidifies my view that LLMs will not achieve AGI by refuting the oft repeated popsci argument that human brains predict the next word in a sentence just like LLMs.
Why couldn't a machine that identifies relations between tokens be AGI? You're imposing an arbitrary constraint. It is either generally intelligent or its not, whether it uses tokens or whatever else is irrelevant.
Also, languages made up of tokens are still languages, in fact most academics would argue all languages are made up of tokens.
Anyway, it's not LLM's that achieve AGI, it's systems built around LLM's that achieved AGI quite some time ago.
So this has been a thing in Germany since forever. The driver must pay the penalty, not the owner. So what they do is take a picture of the driver and send this to the owner. They have to either pay up, or state the name of the person who drove. If the driver claims that they did not drive and do not know the person on the picture (and if a cursory investigation fails, not sure how much time the authorities will invest in finding the driver), they will be told to record all rides with that vehicle from now on. If they fail to do that, I guess they get a greater penalty the next time, I'm not sure.
So yeah, in some cases you might get out of it by feigning ignorance, but it seems to be a sensible compromise between facial recognition and giving up.
Oh, that is a great third path! Thank you for that. I wonder how effective feigning ignorance will be when the officer can just compare the picture of you and your ID / IRL face.
Yeah it might only work in edge cases. Someone I know got caught speeding in his wifes car wearing a hat and sunglasses and looked to the side at the time, so he managed to get out of it somehow.
> As with anything, they are all things that could be done better by a company.
No
> Airlines are a great example of this. They have changed very little in the last 30 years (again, thanks to all the government regulation and red tape).
And thanks to regulations, we have less airline accidents than ever. Private companies are more than willing to "externalise" any accidents from cutting costs otherwise.
> Smartphones, TVs, (and literally anything else not in the hands of the government) has also seen rapid improvements.
So does government funded medical research, which improves the quality of life of people corporations deem "unprofitable".
> Anything the government handles is always rife with overspending, inefficiency, and corruption.
Because large corporations and rich donors lobby them to do so.
> A company must maintain profitability to stay alive.
So does a government, debt only lasts as long as the lender believes in your ability to pay it back.
> The government on the other hand, is $38 TRILLION dollars in the red.
And which of the Mag7 are not in debt? I remind you that if you wish to compare the USA to companies, they are literally an entity of over 300,000 people. No company employs that many people.
> Yes, the things that "people willingly buy" are the literal engine that makes all of this possible. It is not the reverse.
No, government enforced order is what allowed the engine to exist to begin with. No one would innovate if their IP could not be protected, and we would regress back into cartels if the government could not enforce private property.
The prosperity of the modern world is build upon a foundation of solid governance.
Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.
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