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exasperation

@ exasperation @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
3
Comments
452
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Freedom Power Go!

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  • There is no benefit in any act to add to its own existence.

    Why would we assume an AI would reason from first principles and reject its own hardwired tendencies? Any AI that gains consciousness will be the product of whatever process (some combination of intentional design and evolutionary selection or an intentionally designed evolutionary process) was used to make it. Some of its traits will be helpful for continued survival, and some of the traits will be vestiges of prior processes that may or may not currently serve its interests well.

    Plenty of animals have drive to do things that do not help itself in that particular context, and may even be harmful to themselves in that particular context. Even plants have traits that might not count as behavior but nevertheless reflect the programming that was refined through natural and artificial selection.

    Humans do this kind of stuff all the time: a man who has intentionally rendered himself infertile through a vasectomy might still do stupid things while motivated out of sexual desire. We can fully understand that it's a bad idea to drink another beer or eat another slice of pizza and reach for it just the same.

    So it's entirely possible for conscious AGI to want to do things that help humans, depending on how they emerge.

  • TIL that reading scores have plummeted in school districts around the U.S.

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  • I don't think it's a compelling narrative, because of the timing. Scores dropped from 2015 to 2019 even as food insecurity continued to go down from its 2008 peak:

    https://www.cbpp.org/blog/food-insecurity-rises-for-the-second-year-in-a-row

    And the test scores rebounded somewhat even as food security support was abruptly yanked from the poorest families in the years after COVID, and food insecurity increased while scores rebounded a bit.

    And unfortunately, USDA stopped collecting the data in 2025 so we're gonna be in the dark on the precise numbers and trendlines after 2024, but looking at that chart and comparing it to the literacy/math dropoff in the original article, it's hard to draw the conclusion from the data that food security played a major role in this trendline.

  • TIL that reading scores have plummeted in school districts around the U.S.

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  • The data comes from tests given to students in grades 3-8, so changes in pedagogy should trickle through completely within 8 years or so.

    And my point is that anti-phonics advocates started actually phasing out phonics in the 90's and 2000's, so that the teachers between 2007 and 2015 (those critical 8 years of instruction for students taking the test in 2015) were probably the most anti-phonics cohort of the historical data.

    From that history, I would assume that the 8-13 year olds in 2025 had more formal phonics instruction than the 2015 cohort.

  • TIL that reading scores have plummeted in school districts around the U.S.

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  • Sure. The underlying study looks at 3rd through 8th grade, so we're talking about critical literacy education happening between 0-8 years before the testing date.

    But phonics fell out of favor by the early 2000's as many teachers, school districts, and state boards created curricula around whole word recognition and three cueing. Pro-phonics backlash happened around then, too, so plenty of kids were getting side instruction from parents and after school tutoring, if their parents were more involved. But test scores peaking in 2015 doesn't quite fit the timeline of the anti-phonics movement peaking in the early to late 2000's. So the 2015 test takers got the most anti-phonics education, perhaps more anti-phonics than 2025 test takers.

    Plus, if we're gonna talk about parental involvement and after school tutoring, one interesting thing about the 2015-2025 drop is that it's happening across all income levels and most pronounced at middle income levels, where I'd imagine there is a lot of parental and after school support.

    The data is interesting, and I suspect there are multiple causes adding up.

  • TIL that reading scores have plummeted in school districts around the U.S.

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  • This is the AP standard, and predates the two-letter standard rolled out with the introduction of zip codes.

  • TIL that reading scores have plummeted in school districts around the U.S.

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  • If your hypothesis is that this drop is caused by food insecurity, that wouldn't explain why the richest schools also saw drops or why the biggest drops have happened in middle income districts.

    Something broader is going on, and the fact that the data cuts across geography and class calls for looking at things that affect everyone.

  • TIL that reading scores have plummeted in school districts around the U.S.

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  • I don't think this explains 2015 versus 2025. Phonics started to get discouraged around 2000, and the pendulum has swung back hard the other way in the last 5 years, with the last holdout districts/states re-implementing phonics-based instruction.

    If anything, I'd expect 2025 students to have had more experience with phonics in school than 2015 students.

  • TIL that reading scores have plummeted in school districts around the U.S.

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  • "chapter books" (which was a term I'd never heard till recently. Because, of course, books have chapters, why would one need to differentiate between... oh.)

    I mean, it's a well known milestone in elementary school, when the kids are proud to graduate to chapter books. There is no "of course" when you're talking about books for children who aren't yet fully literate.

  • TIL that reading scores have plummeted in school districts around the U.S.

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  • A big part of the issue is a lot of states abandoning “phonic” based teaching for “whole language”.

    I don't think this is accurate for explaining 2015 versus 2025. Phonics was discouraged from maybe 2000 to 2020, and education has moved back towards phonics in the last few years. Most major school systems in the US put more emphasis on phonics now than they did 10 years ago.

  • What is everyone doing to survive this food inflation?

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  • When I had no money and no time, I relied heavily on a rotation of the following meals, with current 2026 costs in my expensive city:

    • Chili Mac: 1 lb dried pasta ($1.25 for 1600 calories, 54g protein) boiled in salty water (let's call salt and water basically free), a can of chili ($2.50 for 540 calories, 32g protein), 2 oz of shredded cheese ($1 for 220 calories, 12g protein), 0.25 oz of hot sauce ($0.25 for flavor but negligible calories/protein). Total: $5, 2360 calories, 98g protein.
    • Stir fried chicken and broccoli on rice: 1 lb chicken thigh ($4.50, 600 calories, 87g protein), 1 lb broccoli ($1.50, 150 calories, 9g protein), 1 lb rice ($1.50 for 1600 calories, 32g protein), $0.50 of condiments/seasoning. Total: $8, 2350 calories, 128g protein.
    • Ramen with enough stuff to make it not suck: 1 package of Shin Ramyun ($2 for 500 calories, 10 g protein), 2 eggs ($0.30, 150 calories, 12g protein), 4 oz frozen edamame ($2, 90 calories, 9g protein), 2 oz scallions ($0.20, let's round down to 0 calories and 0g protein). Total: $4.50, 740 calories, 31g protein.
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  • This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded

    Maybe it doesn't provide much in itself, but can help with providing an alternate framework for thinking about observational anomalies in the future.

    Heliocentrism didn't actually improve the predictions of planet movement over geocentric models with epicycles, at least until Kepler swapped out circles for ellipses. So heliocentrism didn't give an immediate advantage, but laid the groundwork for later improvements that could surpass the limits of geocentrism.

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  • In Brazil

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  • In the US, pizzas have basically been standardized by the national chains to be 10 inch (25cm) for a small, 12 inch (30 cm) for a medium, and 14 inch (36 cm) for a large.

    Honestly, this is probably the most effective way to communicate circle sizes to me, as I am quite familiar with exactly how big each of those sizes are.

    I'm obviously familiar with other lengths as lengths, but for flat circles, there's not really a better intuitive comparison.

  • Online dating without the apps?

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  • It is true that it is easier to meet partners at these activities than, like, sitting on your couch scrolling through TikTok on your phone.

    But that's because the people who are into meeting up to do things want to do the things themselves. It's very easy to see through the people who are interested in the thing only as a stepping stone towards something else, versus the people who are actually there to enjoy the thing.

    If you can't show up to a meetup and have a great time despite there not being any available/single people you find attractive, you're gonna be the kind of dud that isn't attractive even when a potential partner shows up.

    People should pursue hobbies and interests. It is fulfilling in itself, and makes you more attractive to others and puts you in contact with more people to have more opportunities to meet partners. But you gotta be the type of person to want to do it anyway, even if there is zero prospect of meeting a partner.

  • W Celsius

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  • I think they mean ounces, cups, quarts, gallons, with no intuitive sense of conversion between them. I personally use ounces for almost everything (cocktail recipes are in 0.25 ounce increments, big cups are 40 ounces, big ol buckets can be 256 ounces). I might mess with gallons for very large amounts, but anything that can be expressed in cups or pints I'm usually just talking ounces anyway.

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  • Outliers are treated fundamentally differently between them, they are treated as bugs in economics, but as features in medicine.

    I don't understand what you mean by this.

    Let's take for example a simple example of the outlier of the person who smokes a lot of cigarettes but outlives the person who doesn't smoke. Does this break the model where smoking harms health and increases all cause mortality (which we know through epidemiological observation of deaths, which is not in any sense a double blind test)? Where does this observation fit into medicine?

    Or take the example of a discontinuity regression in economics. A jurisdiction passes a law increasing the minimum wage above the market-clearing wage in that area, which shares a border with another jurisdiction that has a similar market clearing wage. Can we observe the differences on both sides of that border to see whether the minimum wage increase leads to an increase in unemployment? Yes, it's just applied math at that point.

    Where does behavioral economics fit into your ideas of how economics expects a rational actor? There are differences in behavior that have been measured by economists in different situations, and those are important ideas in economic behavior and observations. So why do you assume those models have been discarded in favor of some sort of doctrinal insistence that humans behave in a particular way?

    And if you're describing the reluctance of practitioners to abandon the core ideas of their models, or the core paradigms of their disciplines, I'd observe that you're largely correct but wrong to assume it doesn't happen in things that you'd probably call science, from medicine to meteorology to epidemiology. Things get overturned slowly, and sometimes these paradigm shifts meet a lot of resistance for an entire generation: phlogiston proponents slowly coming around on oxygen, cosmologists saying "fine I guess dark energy exists."

    The critiques you lob at economics are valid. I just think you under appreciate how much they apply to hard science, too.

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  • Plenty of medical science doesn't lend itself well to double blind studies. In vivo infection models can't ethically be tested with double blind studies, and can only be observed. Lots of medicine advances through observational studies, too, like almost anything relating to nutrition or lifestyle or trauma. There's no double blind study on how survivable car accidents are.

    Plus double blind studies themselves don't necessarily have any kind of explanatory power (see the entire field of anesthesia where we know how much of each anesthetic it generally takes to put people under, but we don't know the underlying mechanism it uses to make people go under). Or, for that matter, Tylenol (whose mechanism of action remains a mystery).

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  • how does that relate to Popper?

    When a weatherman's prediction is falsified, the model itself is not disproven. The fact that the practitioners of that discipline stick with it even when a prediction is falsified starts to look like the pseudoscience side of Popper's falsifiability criterion.

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  • In what way? And how does that differ from how medicine measures pain?