A contrarian isn’t one who always objects - that’s a confirmist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform.

  • Naval Ravikant
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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 30th, 2025

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  • “Your claim is only valid if you first run this elaborate, long-term experiment that I came up with.”

    The world isn’t binary. When someone says less moderation, they don’t mean no moderation. Framing it as all-or-nothing just misrepresents their view to make it easier for you to argue against. CSAM is illegal, so it’s always going to be against the rules - that’s not up to Google and is therefore a moot point.

    As for other content you ideologically oppose, that’s your issue. As long as it’s not advocating violence or breaking the law, I don’t see why they’d be obligated to remove it. You’re free to think they should - but it’s their platform, not yours. If they want to allow that kind of content, they’re allowed to. If you don’t like it, don’t go there.








  • That’s because it is.

    The term artificial intelligence is broader than many people realize. It doesn’t mean human-level consciousness or sci-fi-style general intelligence - that’s a specific subset called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). In reality, AI refers to any system designed to perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence. That includes everything from playing chess to recognizing patterns, translating languages, or generating text.

    Large language models fall well within this definition. They’re narrow AIs - highly specialized, not general - but still part of the broader AI category. When people say “this isn’t real AI,” they’re often working from a fictional or futuristic idea of what AI should be, rather than how the term has actually been used in computer science for decades.


  • Different definitions for intelligence:

    • The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge.
    • the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations.
    • the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)
    • the act of understanding
    • the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason
    • It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

    We have plenty of intelligent AI systems already. LLM’s probably fit the definition. Something like Tesla FSD definitely does.





  • Thanks.

    Well, I don’t think OpenAI knows how to build AGI, so that’s false. Otherwise, Sam’s statement there is technically correct, but kind of misleading - he talks about AGI and then, in the next sentence, switches back to AI.

    Sergey’s claim that they will achieve AGI before 2030 could turn out to be true, but again, he couldn’t possibly know that. I’m sure it’s their intention, but that’s different from reality.

    Elon’s statement doesn’t even make sense. I’ve never heard anyone define AGI like that. A thirteen-year-old with an IQ of 85 is generally intelligent. Being smarter than the smartest human definitely qualifies as AGI, but that’s just a weird bar. General intelligence isn’t about how smart something is - it’s about whether it can apply its intelligence across multiple unrelated fields.




  • No, I haven’t seen that, but I’m sure you can provide an example.

    The point of agent provocateurs - at least as I understand it - is to make a peaceful protest no longer peaceful, giving the authorities an excuse to shut it down. But even if the people committing vandalism really are provocateurs, they still can’t accomplish their goal alone. They need real protesters to go along with it. Plenty of people are willing to riot, but they don’t want to be the first. However, once someone else takes that step, they’ll happily join in.

    If the general sentiment among the protesters was that this kind of behavior won’t be tolerated, these tactics wouldn’t work. A regular police officer can’t tell a protester from an agent provocateur - so if someone starts throwing bricks and immediately gets shunned and handed over to the cops, they’ll be taken away, and the protest stays peaceful.



  • A large group of people trying to have a peaceful protest could easily stop a few individuals who start smashing things. But from the looks of it, the reaction often seems to be the opposite - people applaud it or even join in. Even here in the replies, there’s someone excusing it with “who cares about Google,” and another one justifying the looting of ampm so apparently, in their mind, it’s not a problem. The fact that this exact same tactic is used by the aforementioned agent provocateurs should only further encourage self-policing within these protests.



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    5 days ago

    I don’t understand why these protests so often end up with people destroying cars and shop windows - and then, in many cases, looting as well. Whatever legitimate cause you may have had loses credibility pretty quickly after that, and it becomes hard to sympathize with the protesters, let alone criticize the riot police for stepping in. A cynic might say that some are just looking for an excuse to cause havoc.