I spent some very enjoyable time browsing courses and tutorials in the Santa Fe Institute’s complexity explorer![1]
I wish I had encountered complexity science earlier in life. It touches on so many of the questions that have sparked my imagination over the years, I’m so pleased to find such an accessible introduction.
The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been interested in learning the thought process of those researchers.
> Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally
If I'm understanding you right, you're suggesting the author thinks that researchers are intentionally doing poor constructions to undermine public perception of classical art as part of some sort of culture war? I don't see anything in the article to suggest this
> The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness. It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling.
It's towards the end of the article. He doesn't directly mention culture war stuff but he does talk about it being "iconoclastic." I think it's a reasonable interpretation of what he was saying.
I don't think it's reasonable. If there's context I'm missing and this guy has written about culture war stuff before, fair enough, but based on this article alone, I'm not seeing any indication of that.
That phrase suggests more that the author believes this is done for spectacle, knowing that it will attract attention to the researcher far more than a nice-looking painted statue would. Basically he seems to be accusing these researchers of doing flame-bait for clicks, like those kitchen-top meal TikTok videos designed to get engagement by making people angry.
Maybe my brain is oversaturated with culture war nonsense from too much doomscrolling but that’s where my train of thought went too, even if it wasn’t directly implied.
By claiming our ancient predecessors had terrible taste you can make them look like primitive fools, and make our own modernity appear superior in comparison.
When boiled down to culture war brainrot the poor coloring in the reconstructions becomes a woke statement that the brutish patriarchal empires of antiquity have nothing to teach our sophisticated modern selves and that new is good and old is bad. A progressive hit-piece on muh heritage.
Anything you don’t like is a purple haired marxist if you squint hard enough.
Idk why my brain went there. I’m guessing the years of daily exposure to engagement-farming ragebait had something to do with it.
Interesting. Like many people here, I've thought a great deal about what it means for LLMs to be trained on the whole available corpus of written text, but real world conversation is a kind of dark matter of language as far as LLMs are concerned, isn't it? I imagine there is plenty of transcription in training data, but the total amount of language use in real conversational surely far exceeds any available written output and is qualitatively different in character.
This also makes me curious to what degree this phenomenon manifests when interacting with LLMs in languages other than English? Which languages have less tendency toward sycophantic confidence? More? Or does it exist at a layer abstracted from the particular language?
I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.
On the flip side, the crypto hype machine pretty seamlessly flipped to the AI hype machine, so it makes sense the same anti crowd shifted pretty seamlessly. Given the practical applications of crypto were minimal and the externalities were mostly crime and pollution, I’m not at all surprised that many people expect the same for AI.
The anti-crypto people were correct, though. Why should we not push back when we’re seeing the same type of baseless hype that surrounded crypto being cultivated around the AI space?
They were and we should push back and yes, there is a mountain of baseless hype. But if you train your fire on the wrong thing, you risk not addressing the actual problem.
But if I say "I object to AI because <list of harms> and its water use", why would you assume that I don't also object to alfalfa farming in Arizona?
Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide?
This is nothing but whataboutism.
People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the other bad things happening in the world at the same time.
Because your argument is more persuasive to more people if you don't expand your criticism to encompass things that are already normalized. Focus on the unique harms IMO.
If you take a strong argument and through in an extra weak point, that just makes the whole argument less persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people think).
You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave factories produce is terrible for the environment."
Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.
Adding a weak argument is a red flag for BS detectors. It's what prosecutors do to hoodwink a jury into stacking charges over a singular underlying crime.
I think you'll have a difficult time comprehending the phenomenon if you look for reasoned arguments. A much more productive framework, IMO, is to see it in terms of a feedback loop between funding sources and the aggregate valence of speech on a particular topic.
The energy industry is one of the largest in the world, with trillions of revenue on the line. The FF component of that industry has every incentive to turn sentiment against upstart competitors, but you do that at scale less by reasoned arguments and more by gut level appeals: "the people who want renewable energy hate your culture and way of life", "renewal installations are ugly and a blight on the landscape of your home", etc.
One thing Jenny Chase (longtime solar analyst with Bloomberg) likes to point out is that in many places, solar panels are actually cheaper than fencing materials [1]
Unfortunately, she doesn't say what kind of fence she's talking about. The kind of fancy privacy fence people put up between yards, maybe; but I'd be impressed if they're cheaper than livestock fence, which is the context some people are talking about in this thread. A typical cattle fence (woven wire, steel posts, barbed wire on top) will cost about $2500 per quarter-mile right now for the materials.
I'm not sure what a quarter-mile of solar panels four feet high would cost, or whether they'd survive the occasional cow rubbing on them. Neat idea, though.
When I bought my solar panels, they showed me their test video of launching balls at them to simulate hail. They said you're toast if it gets to baseball size but below that you should be fine.
Yes, this reminded me of a similar experience camping with friends where we could only describe the foliage as “ultragreen”. An incredibly vivid blue-green tone that suffused the whole island where we were staying. Been looking for explanations since
I wish I had encountered complexity science earlier in life. It touches on so many of the questions that have sparked my imagination over the years, I’m so pleased to find such an accessible introduction.
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