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thebestaquaman

@ thebestaquaman @lemmy.world

Posts
3
Comments
361
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human

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  • Sometimes they literally don’t have the ability to press 1.

    Which is why I'm saying it should go through automatically after a short delay.

    It's easy to say "just over staff" until you're faced with the reality that maybe once every five years, for a grand total of one hour, you're faced with call pressure 1000 times higher than the second highest spike. It's not viable to staff a response center to deal with thousands of people calling in the same bomb attack or shooting within minutes, when you normally see on the order of hundreds of calls per week.

    What you need is the capacity to deal with 99.99... % of situations, and a safety mechanism to prevent the remaining situations from overloading your system more than necessary.

    In a mass casualty event, you need to be able to filter out the people making redundant reports in order to effectively handle the important reports. You need to do that without blocking out the important reports, that's the hard part.

  • New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human

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  • You really don't need an AI for this though. With the number of mass shootings the US sees, it's honestly shocking that they don't have a button the operator can press to activate an auto-reply along the lines of "We are already responding to

    <event>

    , if you still want to talk to us, press 1 or wait for a reply.", which waits something like 10s before going through.

    This would filter out a bunch of duplicate reporting with far less effort, and with less odds of something going wrong.

  • An AI-supervised remote exam went so badly that 58,000 students must retake it

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  • One thing is the 58 000 that have to re-take the exam. I'm just as interested in the 2% of exam-takers that were terminated due to "unspecified conduct issues", and how many of those were unfairly thrown out for cheating without having done anything wrong...

  • RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak

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  • Thanks for being understanding and engaging in good faith :)

    I think making vaccines legally mandated is an interesting discussion. On one hand, I think they should be mandated for reason that they are, statistically, proven to reduce overall harm to people. On the other hand, it think it's a bit scary to go that way, since we are then putting a lot of trust in whatever political body will decide which vaccines have a risk/benefit profile that should make them mandatory. It's a lot easier with seat belts or construction practices, since there are literally no downsides to either.

    I've had a thought experiment with others about a hypothetical autonomous car that is guaranteed to never end up in (or cause) any accident, but has an astronomically small probability of spontaneously combusting at any given moment. Let's make that probability small enough that the number of deaths and injuries caused by cars every year is reduced to 1 % of what it currently is, with the remaining incidents being caused by the spontaneously combusting cars. Now, for any individual, it's statistically safer to drive this car. As a society, everyone is safer if these cars are mandated (no pedestrians are killed, we don't need to spend healthcare resources on car-related injuries, etc.).

    From a utilitarian perspective, these cars should be mandated. From a purely logical risk-minimisation perspective, everyone should be jumping at the opportunity to use this much safer car. However, when you ask people, it turns out that most don't want the car. Despite knowing that this car would (statistically) drastically reduce their probability of being hurt or killed in traffic, the idea of getting into a vehicle that can spontaneously combust at any given moment seems absurd to them.

    That brings us to the "Twinge of doubt for something that has been so successful". We humans are generally terrible at risk assessment. We tend to heavily over emphasise extreme outcomes (the car combusting) while also under emphasising "mundane" outcomes (people crash and die every day, but it surely won't happen to me), and overestimating our own skills (by far most drivers think they're above average, and can therefore avoid collisions). The analogous vaccine-related line of thought would be that people hear that 1 /

    <large number>

    get severe complications from vaccines, which is over emphasised, while "hundreds of people in the US are killed by tuberculosis every year, but it surely won't happen to me", and overestimating our own immune system.

    Basically, a lot of fear is simply irrational, and that's linked to the human nature of being crap at intuitive risk assessment. I think fear of vaccines also falls into this category of irrational fear, and I don't really think it can be rationalised away. That's why I think programs to counter vaccine scepticism need to be based in how to make the rational fear of disease win out, rather than trying to completely dispel the irrational fear far too many people have related to vaccines.

  • RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak

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  • I honestly think you're misunderstanding me a bit here. I'm not advocating for privileging anti-vaxxer rhetoric or jumping through hoops to "let them have some wins". I'm trying to underscore that the first step to developing education, informational campaigns, deprogramming regimes, etc. is to understand the thought process behind becoming an anti-vaxxer. There are plenty of comments in this thread alone along the lines of "When presented a choice between a small risk of a mild fever versus getting tuberculosis, obviously the correct choice is to get the vaccine". I think that line of argumentation is counter-productive, since it

    1. Underplays the documented risk of many vaccines
    2. Doesn't address the core issue I think causes vaccine scepticism in the first place.

    Firstly, nobody who's afraid of getting a vaccine due to the associated risks will be convinced by "The only risk is a small risk of a light fever", since that's just provably false. Secondly, the line of argumentation anchors on the risk associated with vaccines, rather than anchoring on the risk associated with not getting them. Since I think the root cause of vaccine scepticism is irrational fear of getting them, I think it's more productive to anchor counter arguments, education, information campaigns, etc. on the very real danger associated with not having vaccines. Since fear is the underlying driving force here, we should aim to make fear of the disease outweigh fear of vaccines, not by down-playing the risk of vaccines, but rather by emphasising the risk of the diseases (which many or most vaccine sceptics downplay into absurdity).

    Basically, many vaccines do have a very low but non-zero probability of causing severe side effects. We humans are known to place irrationally large weight on these kind of unlikely but severe outcomes. Trying to downplay these outcomes is not likely affect peoples perception of the risk, because we're notoriously bad at this kind of risk assessment.

  • RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak

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  • It will never be about the science, because we already know they’re completely wrong about everything and therefore they need to make science irrelevant.

    I think there's an interesting discussion to be had here regarding cause and effect. You seem to be arguing that these people do not believe in science, therefore they end up as conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, etc. I'm not entirely convinced that's the case. I think it's common that people first establish a gut feeling regarding what is true, then begin disbelieving science when science disagrees with them. Basically, I think the casual chain is inverted relative to you. Of course, once people have started disbelieving science, the rabbit hole is open.

    the supposed strat of… agreeing them out of their position(?)

    That's not really what I'm arguing for. My point is that it never strengthens your position to disagree with things you know are correct, just to try to make a point. If someone says "water is denser than oil, therefore 1 L of water is heavier than 2 L of oil.", it doesn't help you to start by disagreeing with the initial statement. Likewise, when someone says "vaccines cause dangerous side effects, therefore ...", it doesn't help your position to disagree with the initial statement, which is well documented to be true. An immediate example that comes to mind is that the Astra Zeneca (I think) COVID vaccine caused several deaths due to triggering a very rare heart complication (if I remember the details correctly). If your initial counter argument is "vaccines don't cause deadly side effects", you can immediately be brushed off as having no idea what you're talking about, since it's well documented that they do. Any successful counter argument needs to start by acknowledging what is correct in the initial statement, before dialling in on why the conclusion is wrong.

    The point of the trolley problem is not to use it to convince the vaccine sceptics, but to use research on it to understand how they think, and thereby understand how they can be convinced. Surveys have consistently shown that not all people agree on what to do in the trolley problem situation (around 10 % choose to do nothing). It's only a false dilemma if you view it from a utilitarian standpoint, but the whole point of the thought experiment is exactly to compare a utilitarian standpoint to other views. There's quite a bit of research regarding the psychology of how we experience the consequences of action vs. inaction, and it appears that humans instinctively prefer inaction over actions with negative consequences, even when inaction carries more negative consequences. The book "Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman goes into some detail on this. I think a lot of vaccine scepticism is grounded in this instinctive response, which in turn causes people to disbelieve science due to confirmation bias.

  • RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak

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  • Trolley problem is just a pros and cons list made visceral.

    I fundamentally disagree with this, and it seems to me that many others do as well. The trolley problem is fundamentally about the morality of allowing something bad to happen through inaction, versus actively choosing a lesser evil.

    While it's true that the numbers can influence what people answer here, the numbers are not the core point of the thought experiment. The core point of the thought experiment relates to whether you are personally responsible for the consequences of inaction, versus your responsibility for the consequences of direct action.

    Crucially, as discussed in depth in Daniel Kahnemans' "Thinking Fast and Slow", humans appear to be instinctively averse to taking actions with known negative consequences, even when they know that the consequences of inaction are worse. This is supported by the experiment referenced in the wikipedia page linked above.

    The point here is that we can try to understand vaccine sceptics line of thought by understanding why humans appear to have this aversion. As mentioned in my first comment, I'm well vaccinated, and know fully well that statistically, both for myself and others, getting relevant vaccines is the right choice. Regardless, I felt a twinge of doubt when getting my initial covid shots. Not due to any logical reasoning, but an instinctive gut feeling: It felt more risky to actively expose myself to a vaccine rather than do nothing, even though I know the opposite is true. I very quickly overcame that twinge of doubt because I try to make decisions based on facts rather than feelings. While anecdotal, this is a concrete example of how human intuition does not always match actual statistics and logically sound decision making.

    I think that if we want to prevent vaccine scepticism from spreading, one place to start is trying to understand why people think along these lines: That direct action infers a heavier responsibility than inaction. The first place to start in that regard is recognising that the trolley problem is a very real dilemma for many people, and that surveys have consistently shown that not all people make the same choice in trolley problem situations, even though the correct choice seems obvious to many of us.

    By using much smaller numbers, you are giving a false impression of vaccines.

    Sure, I could have used more realistic numbers here, I won't argue that. However, I hope I've been able to convince you that my point is not related to the numbers, but to the underlying psychology of making these choices, regardless of the numbers. Therefore, I just pulled some numbers out of the air to construct the example in the OC.

  • RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak

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  • The "trolley problem" is a philosophical dilemma regarding the morality of allowing harm caused by inaction versus causing harm by direct action. In a common form of the dilemma, you are faced with a situation where a train trolley is headed to hit a number of people. You have the option to pull a lever that will direct the trolley to hit a smaller number of people, thus actively condemning that smaller number.

    The argument can be made (though I disagree with it), that you are "more responsible" for deaths caused by pulling the lever than those caused by inaction. Whether or not you agree with this argument, plenty of research has shown that humans are typically very averse to causing known harm by direct action, even though they know that inaction will cause greater harm. That is: "Human instinct" in the trolley problem seems to be to not pull the lever, even though a majority of people agree that it is the morally correct decision.

    Finally, the above discussion is more or less completely independent of the number of people on the two tracks. Whether it's 1:2, or 1:1 000 000 doesn't really change the moral argument of action vs. inaction. If you get into the kind of numbers where the number of deaths would have global secondary consequences, you have a new kind of dilemma though. However that's not the case here, hence my choice of pulling two arbitrary numbers out of a hat, rather than using actual numbers for vaccine side effects and infection lethality.

    What I'm doing here is noting that the question of vaccinating or not is philosophically equivalent to the trolley problem. Therefore, we can use research of the trolley problem to understand how vaccine sceptics think, and to learn something about how people can be convinced that pulling the lever is the morally correct choice.

  • RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak

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  • I'm among the most thoroughly vaccinated people around, after living in both SE Asia and South America. I'm also relatively well versed in statistics and am well aware that if your goal is to optimise for a good and healthy life, getting vaccinated is a no-brainier.

    Finally, I think that if we want to convince people that are sceptical of vaccines to get them, or give them to their children, we should start by

    1. Acknowledging that plenty of common vaccines have extremely rare, but nonetheless potentially severe side effects.
    2. There is an actual ethical/philosophical dilemma that has been discussed for thousands of years regarding the morality of harm caused be action vs. inaction.

    The dilemma that has shown up in countless philosophical debates throughout history is basically the trolley problem: "If you press this button, there's a 1/1000 chance that someone (e.g. your child) dies. If you don't, there's a 1/100 chance that they die." To me personally, the choice is easy (I press the button), but I recognise that people see this as a dilemma. There's plenty of research on how we humans tend to prefer inaction over actions that could cause damage, even when that choice is statistically unreasonable.

    Based on this, I think the most productive way to engage with people that are sceptical of vaccines due to this very human mode of decision failure, is to engage with the philosophical question above, and trying to convince them that inaction (not taking the vaccine) is, in fact, also a choice that they are responsible for. I think brushing the dilemma off as trivial is a bit reductionist, considering that the trolley problem is one that has been so widely discussed through the ages (even though I personally think it's an easy choice).

    Of course, if people are just blatantly ignoring or refuting established scientific results, there's not much you can do...

  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - EV

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  • It's all about your current situation. For a lot of people 50k could be what they need to get out of an immediate bad spot that could start to spiral (credit card debt etc.), and give them the needed breathing room to stabilise their situation.

    For my own part, I would probably just dump the 50k directly into my mortgage in order to reduce my recurring expenses a bit. It would make me live a bit more comfortably, but wouldn't be life changing in any way. In other words, I would probably flip the coin. However, I can definitely understand why someone else would choose differently.

  • Former Microsoft AI Leaders Are Spending $1M To Replace CEOs With AI

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  • So much the last bit! I can't count the number of times our CEO has either sent a mail or created an issue (very small company) with something along the lines of "X is broken", when what they mean is "I don't like the design choice behind X." Like, whatever they're complaining about is completely functional, it just doesn't work exactly the way they envisioned it. When explaining why it can't (or shouldn't) work exactly the way they envisioned, there's maybe a 50 % chance that "X is broken" turns into "oh, I hadn't thought about that".

  • Can't control

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  • It honestly shocks me how stupid people are. There was just a case in the news about some guys that were busted while planning an attack on the White House UFC thing recently. They had initiated contact about this on tiktok (before moving to signal). One of the guys had posted photos on instagram of training with one of the others. The first guy that was busted had been reported by his parents, who he lived with, because they had overheard phone conversations that made them worried. They had anlso noticed he had begun stockpiling weapons, ammo, and other gear. All of them had quit their job to make time for the planning + attack.

    Like, I'm glad these people were caught so that a bunch of innocents weren't killed. What baffles me is how intensely stupid it's possible to get. What would make anyone even consider communicating about this kind of stuff on a digital platform? How does anyone think it's a good idea to suddenly start stockpiling weapons in broad daylight? In what world do you document this training online? Why in gods name would you quit your job out of the blue while doing all the above?

    We're just lucky these people are so stupid....

  • Reflex

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  • While acting up is a problem in professional football, anyone who actually believes these players fall like flies at the smallest hint of contact have so obviously never seen a match up close, much less played football at even the junior level. Football can be a pretty brutal contact sport.

    There are very well defined rules for how you can tackle someone, but those rules allow that 90 kg player can basically mow you down at 25 km/h as long as they do it right. If you've ever looked closely at how these players fight for the ball (or played at a decent junior level or higher), you'll notice that most adults would quite simply be knocked to the pitch and more or less kept there if they ever tried beating a high level player to the ball.

  • Software update

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  • This makes me tremble. I cannot imagine starting every day with breaking some obscure tool, pipeline, or tool chain just for the hell of it

  • Time travel

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  • Psssht. That just follows simple mechanics. Two orbiting bodies can be accurately modelled by a high schooler, how hard can a couple more be?

  • I visited Meta's metaverse on the day it was supposed to shut down. I ended up in a horribly designed car park with no cars, for a restaurant that can sell no food

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  • That's definitely true, but the question is do the execs really care? I think that for a lot of these people, the only thing that matters is whether they can keep pulling those sweet sweet cash-outs. Just look at the absurd bonuses musk was promised from tesla recently. If he really cared about the success of the company, he wouldn't take those, he would take a fair paycheque and allow the company to reinvest the rest of the money. Instead, he requires massive bonuses to keep working. We're talking about the kind of money that could fund the entire educational sector in a small country for many years. He's taking that out as a personal bonus, to the detriment of the company.

    That kind of thing makes me believe that he doesn't really care about the long-term success of the company. What he really cares about is squeezing out cash from the company for as long as possible. If the company fails, he has enough money to buy up something else that he can squeeze cash out of. The modus operandi is basically

    1. Be rich
    2. Buy some company
    3. Wave your arms and wag your tung to get investor money into the company
    4. Cash out bonuses
    5. Go to step 3 until your cash-out has surpassed the investment cost
    6. Either sell out of company (if it's been run to the ground), or go to step 3 until it has been.

  • I visited Meta's metaverse on the day it was supposed to shut down. I ended up in a horribly designed car park with no cars, for a restaurant that can sell no food

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  • I honestly think a lot of the people pushing this stuff know very well that they don't need it to succeed. They don't really care if the general public hates it, and it flops. As long as they can convince investors, they're pulling yearly paycheques and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. If it flops, some thousand employees (thralls) will be layed off. If it fails catastrophically, they might need to step down themselves, and move to a different company that "appreciates their ability to be a visionary".

    These people are only capable of failing upwards, and they know it. The name of the game for them is waving their arms and blabbering about something to draw in investor money.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I think it makes sense to be flexible: In a table, or other bureaucratic contexts, it makes sense to put the family name first. In daily speech, it's rather common that I'm in contact with family members (even more so historically), and it makes most sense to use the distinguishing name (first name) first.

    If I'm with a group that includes siblings or parents/children, I can usually distinguish everyone by first name, while many people share last names.

  • 75% More Pedestrians Have Been Killed Since 2009. Giant Trucks and SUVs Are Why

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  • You may be right, but as with the trucks, I would expect a much less sharp minima: Smartphone and instant messaging adoption didn't happen all at once, but from this graph we see that we're going from a substantial year-on-year decrease directly to a large year-on-year increase. A change that is gradually adopted over the course of several years can't really cause that kind of effect.

  • Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    thebestaquaman @lemmy.world

    Why does YouTube feel completely devoid of content? (clarification in body)

  • Ask Experienced Devs @programming.dev
    thebestaquaman @lemmy.world

    Setting up self-hosted cloud storage

  • Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    thebestaquaman @lemmy.world

    Opinions: What is a movie you genuinely like, that is rated below 60% on rotten tomatoes?

    xkcd.com /2184/