Wouldn't you know whether a teacher is reliable or not? If reliable, they probably have this reputation also because they can also say when they don't know something. And if you found out a given teacher isn't reliable, you'd be careful about what they say next - or you would just ask someone else.
The problem here is for a child to be thinking this system is reliable when it is not. For now, the lack of reliability is obvious as chatGPT hallucinates on a very regular basis. However, this will become much harder to notice if/when chatGPT will be almost reliable while saying wrong things with complete confidence. Should such models be able to say reliably when they don't know something, this would be a big step for this specific objection I had, but it still wouldn't solve the other problems I mentioned.
On the topic of "24. A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM...", I would strongly caution against this:
- short of AGI, what a child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child.
- even if you had a perfect answering LLM who never makes a mistake, what's the end result? No need to talk to others to find out about something, ie reduced opportunities to learn about cooperating with others
- as a parent, one wishes sometimes for a moment of rest, but imagine that your kid just finds out there's another entity to ask questions from that will have ready answers all the time, instead of you saying sometimes that you don't know, and looking for an answer together. How many bonding moments will be lost? How cut off would your kid become from you? What value system would permeate through the answers?
A key assumption here for any parent equipping their child with such a system is that it would be aligned with their own worldview and value system. For parents on HN, this probably means a fairly science-mediated understanding of the world. But you can bet that in other places, this assistant would very convincingly deliver whatever cultural, political, or religious propaganda their environment requires. This would make for frighteningly powerful brainwashing tools.
Fair point in your case, but my experience across companies and industries is that people just don't read. It's true in any customer facing experience where tutorials etc are routinely unread and ignored, it's true for execs who are always short on time and want the exec summary in order no to read a whole memo (however misguided this may be in certain instances), it's true for seasoned professionals who prioritize and decide to ignore certain requests until they are clear enough / repeated enough, the list goes on.
Even people getting @mentionned on slack or in emails seem to find it acceptable to say routinely they didn't see/read whatever it was they were specifically asked to look at.
Looking at the link shared in another comment with the actual study, it seems that only 55% of private sector workers are happy with the new arrangement, and that higher satisfaction rates are in the public sector. I am a bit skeptical about some of the conclusions of the report saying for example that the private sector needs to take more inspiration from the public sector, which seems blissfully unaware that the private sector can't rely on tax revenue to pay salaries, and has a very different set of operating constraints.
Can't help but notice that their reduced 4-days work week still is 36h long. 9h work days would be considered long in most European countries, where the norm is around 40h for a five-days work week. So they are not just cutting a day, they are also working 1 hour more than average on each other day. This probably explains a lot in terms of productivity.
On a different note, the increased ability of men to participate in family life and household chores sounds amazing. It might sound weird to younger professionals without kids, but as soon as you have a child, having one extra day to deal with everything household related makes a huge difference.
Ongoing demo of integrations with Claude by a bunch of A-list companies: Linear, Stripe, Paypal, Intercom, etc.. It's live now on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njBGqr-BU54
Qwant is infamous in France for having made big claims and failed repeatedly. It was for the longest time just a wrapper around Bing, while claiming otherwise.
All families can't afford meat daily, let alone any type of meat they want. So, some families might favor chicken and certain processed meats here and there, but most cuts of beef and lamb for example might be out of the question, and so will daily meat consumption. The same applies for dairy, they might afford big blocks of tasteless cheese, but won't touch often cheese with taste, French or otherwise. There is no enforced rationing, but choice is reduced if not removed for a good fraction of the population, purely for economic reasons.
I think many people have very positive experiences and data, at scale, speaking to the kind of success Edtech can have.
I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).
This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.
This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.
These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.
A scientist that causes, through willful fraud, the death of people seems to be guilty of something like manslaughter. Using fake data is a pretty clear-cut example of willful fraud, and a reasearcher fudging data over such a life and death question should 100% be held accountable.
Scientists making errors in good faith should on the other hand be insulated from any kind of liability.
Thank you very much for sharing this, and the accompanying documentation. I had no idea that Ireland had such a system in place. It seems really elegant and efficient, and better than say the Condorcet voting method. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method)
^ This, exactly. In France, digital rights isn't at the forefront of people's worries either (environment, inflation and buying power, societal questions, security, etc). That being said, at least in France, they also stand for a more direct form of democracy, and they seem to apply internally what they preach, which if true would be a unique feature.
Then again, I don't know for sure if this is really the way they operate or not. I was never part of this party, because although they know being called "pirate" party is a turnoff for voters, they don't seem able to take the logical step of changing it. They seem nice enough, with some interesting proposals, but what working adult has time for participating in self-defeating orgs?
yup, I can imagine some adversarial changes being made to the effect that the document generated by this online form can be refused by the administration in question.
OR if there are people interested in efficiency in this administration, despite what the current state of things would suggest, they could embrace this development, buy the rights to this and implement it on their website for everyone to enjoy. One can dream.
The end of coal has not happened on Germany, who went back to using massive amounts of coal as Russian gas stopped being available : 33.2% of all German electricity came from coal in 2022.
https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Stromerzeugung_2022...
(slide 17 braunkohle + steinkohle)
To paraphrase, western democracies have problems, but the other systems are worse. If one accepts that democracy remains our best bet, the question becomes how to make democracy function better. This isn't just a question of what system of government, vote, decision, etc, but also of how well informed the citizenry is, and to what extent they feel empowered to be politically active. Billionaires do have an outsized power to influence in general, and in the US in particular (super PACs, etc), but other powers can act effectively against them (justice, press, NGOs and other forms of organized civic actions..). Switzerland has very frequent votes on a wide array of issues, giving citizens constant opportunities to act on the way their country / district / city operates.
Information relevant to oneself, ie to the life and management of one's local and larger communities, are what will ultimately make the difference between a well-informed and enlightened citizenry able to make collective choices that result in positive outcomes, and people that base their choices on flimsy information and passing emotion.
News can be information, usually when it has a scientific and/or investigative component, and provides the person reading or watching it with a better/deeper understanding of an issue afterwards. Not all news are information however as running after readership and ratings often result in sensationalism and clickbaiting with zero or negative value. Information isn't just news either, and books, longform articles, documentaries, etc also provide very valuable inputs that help to understand how the world around us work and make better choices.
What I find disingenuous in the article shared here is that all news are treated as being basically of the empty / sensationalist / inflammatory kind. The author of the article seems also blissfully unaware that journalists provide an essential service in democracies, by scrutinizing public action as well as what is happening with the other parts of society (economic players, scientists, organizations of all kinds..). There can be no informed citizenry without ethical and well-functionning news sources. Trying to say one should seek such quality in news sources and leave aside the sensationalist partisan crap is sadly not the point the author makes, instead advocating for people to just ignore the news altogether.
In any case, probably not a romantic explorer figure as the clickbaity title suggests.