Because she thoroughly de-articulates the fabricated mystique around Feynman, and openly discusses the toxic effect his legacy has had on science.
(Including the fact that a lot of his legacy was fabricated by people that either admired him, or wished to capitalize on that legacy.)
Her video on Feynman is long and detailed, and very sobering.
I highly recommend it. It absolutely/expertly challenged everything I thought I knew about him.
I Keffals broke the law, then that is a matter for law enforcement. It's not the purview of an internet hate mob acting as judge, jury, and executioner.
Every defense I've seen of kiwifarms is exactly like yours. Some insinuations about how "distasteful" an individual is, and then an implied "Can you really blame them for going after him/her?"
If Kiwifarms broke the law, then that is a matter for law enforcement. It's not the purview of an internet cartel and hate mob acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Every defense I've seen of censorship is exactly like yours. Some insinuations about how "distasteful" a group is, and then an implied "Can you really blame them for going after it?"
The comparison here is clever, certainly. But the scope matters: KF relentlessly attacks individuals, to the point of suicide. The anti-KF campaign only seeks to take KF offline by making it too expensive for hosting providers.
Nobody is trying to SWAT the guy behind KF. It is a huge, consequential difference.
This is just untrue for the most part. Some users of KF have harassed some people, sure. But the point of the forum has never been that. I will however concede that the nature of the forum tends to attract such people.
Now this I find doubtful considering everything else in this post. If anything the point has been exactly that with the exception of provably illegal things
He has already been swatted multiple times. In the past trans activists have shown up at his house with weapons, looking for him. Keffals doxed his mom on Twitter a few days ago, posting her full face photo and calling for her firing while lying about her links (there are none) to her son's website:
Do you know of any projects using automated transcription and machine learning to analyze hominid speech?
I ask because I remember reading about google translate effectively learning how to translate languages purely through machine learning and a large corpus of transcribed speech.
What we need is a large corpus of vocal recordings along with contextual video recording. Then train a model to associate vocalizations with states of the video by predicting subsequent video frames. By throwing enough compute at the problem we could probably come to understand any animal language with such a technique.
Looking at correlations between vocalizations and behavior is one thing primate researchers have been doing for decades. It seems implausible for there to be a large skill set that has so far escaped their notice.
Whenever one group of humans has met another, it has rapidly become apparent to both parties that the other has a language, no matter how long the ancestors of the two groups have been isolated from one another. Given how long humans and chimpanzees have been coexisting, if they had comparably effective language skills, it is implausible that either party has not recognized it in the other.
I think its been conclusively demonstrated that deep learning can discover correlations that go unnoticed by humans. An example that immediately comes to mind is AI detecting race from X-rays. There are many others. There's also many other factors that influence our ability to ascribe language skills to other groups of humans, from complexity of vocalizations to similar ways to interact with the environment and with other group members. We recognize ourselves in fellow humans, which makes it easy to ascribe similar capacities. The question is how easily can we recognize language in a species where we do not immediately recognize ourselves? The more foreign the behavior and the patterns of communication, the harder it gets. AI has the ability to elide over those difficulties.
I do not doubt that deep learning can discover correlations that go unnoticed by humans, and if our failure to detect the level of language skills we possess in chimpanzees (and the failure of chimpanzees to detect those skills in humans!) is due to the sort of difficulties you raise, then I agree that machine learning could find the evidence that we have not. What I do doubt, however, is that these difficulties actually exist to the level required for us to miss what is going on.
I believe that the theory of evolution is correct, and therefore that the evolution of language confers a differential fitness, yet chimpanzees are clearly not behaving in a way that exploits anything like the full capabilities of a human-like language, either in interactions between the members of their own species, or with their adversaries such as leopards or humans. At any time in the past, a small cabal of language-wielding chimpanzees, who grasped something more of the capabilities of their language skills than did their neighbors, could have dominated the remainder, increasing both their fitness and that of their species. In practice, we do not even observe them chatting.
It was David Brin, I believe, who made the same point with respect to dolphins: if they have these language skills, how come the knowledge of the dangers presented by purse seine nets, and the means to avoid them, has not spread within those dolphin communities where these nets are a significant cause of mortality?
There are many cases in evolution where a feature evolved for one purpose but then served another (which is how, it is supposed, birds got their flight feathers) - but even if that was the case for chimpanzee language, what was that primary purpose and why have the abilities not been adopted for their secondary purpose - especially as, once you have that level of language skills, change occurs at the rate of meme spread, rather than that of genes.
In other words, the combination of human-like language skills and the chimpanzee lifestyle seems very far from equilibrium. Language, by its very nature, does not deliver its evolutionary benefits cryptically.
The view I set out here is neither predicated on nor entails the position that human language is unique. In fact, I happen to believe that there have been several species on Earth with human-like language, it's just that the others are now extinct. I also think it far more likely than not that there is language-using life elsewhere in the universe.
I expect there's a hierarchy in language acquisition, where describing interactions with the world come before more abstract talk such as gossip. But once this first-order descriptive talk is understood, this can be leveraged to capture the more abstract talk.
I disagree. That text doesn't sound psychotic to me.. bitter, yes.. but I think HN users are all too familiar with being passionate about an issue at the expense of personal time and other pursuits, and I respect that.
People are already effectively playing as NPCs in popular videogames. They're called gold farmers.
If you gave me the option as I got closer to 70, that I could be uploaded, and take up zero physical space, and live forever, I would jump at the chance. I don't think it's narcissistic at all. Imagine being able to communicate with your ancestors.. the opportunities for preserving knowledge and ending physical suffering, including the impact of humans living on the planet.
Maybe we all just live forever until we run out of disk space. Maybe eventually we can have a lottery/queue where people take turns getting decanted for some IRL living.
One incentive for them doing this is that they have to provide support and if they let everyone use random search engines that deliver malware etc. They end up having to pay their "geniuses" more to un-crud peoples infested machines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc