foofoo4u's comments

I am glad you can see the point I am making. I want to know why I am being down-voted by others.

When you revise the works of societies of the past, you are destroying the last remnants of their existence. It is a form of erasure. One has to think how this impacts people of the present day. Why should I commit my life and dedication to the work of art if it is to be revisioned and potentially condemned for all eternity? I'd rather die unknown than to have my art become bastardized by future revisionists. This gets to the heart of other matters. Why should one do anything great or noble for their society when there is an interest of future societies to revise who you were and what you did and, again, potentially condemn you for all eternity.

I'm surprised no one has ever made an e-ink keyboard. By this, I mean each individual key is a mini e-ink display.

Can we update the title? The article is called, "Exclusive: Another company leaves S.F., blaming ‘the most onerous regulations’ in the world"

Some quotes from the article that stand out.

Excerpt1:

> “It’s difficult for us to justify operating in a city where we don’t make money,” Maggie Hoffman, Bird’s vice president of city growth and strategy, told me, adding San Francisco’s fines are five to six times higher than in any other city in which Bird operates. “San Francisco has the most onerous regulations and is the most difficult to operate in of the hundreds of markets we operate in globally.”

Excerpt2:

> Hoffman cited cities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and the Middle East that are far easier to work with and more encouraging of scooter companies and business in general.

>

> “San Francisco,” she added, “is very much the anomaly.”

Excerpt3:

> The city’s treatment of scooters compared to far more dangerous and obstructive cars is particularly stark.

>

> Take wrongly parking a scooter versus a car. Leaving a scooter on its side or not properly locked to a bike rack can cost the company that owns it $150, a fine that can double if it’s not moved in two hours. Even in the middle of the night.

>

> Parking a car across a sidewalk, blocking passersby far more than a scooter, risks just a one-time $108 fine. In fact, parking a car in a fire lane, a crosswalk or an intersection won’t cost as much as badly parking a scooter.

Excerpt4:

> “It was hard to tell whether the city was really serious about Vision Zero and about reducing car usage when there were so many obstacles to car alternatives like ours,” he said.

I think what would help is if ChatGPT could share sources for its claims.

I think what ChatGPT will do is shift us into a new state of distrust. How do I know you are a human? How do I know that any text I read anymore on the web is a human? Soon no one will be able to tell. Eventually the web will become entirely distrusted. We will need to devise some kind of way of both keeping out bots and a more robust is-a-human verification scheme.

How does ChatGPT handle competing claims? For example, I can ask ChatGPT to tell me the recommended method of addressing carbon emissions. Does solar/wind beat out nuclear? Does it favor regulation over carbon taxes? You get the point. Which out of a series of claims does it side with?

What I would like to see is how ChatGPT's responses to questions differs across the world. Ask it questions about homosexuality in Canada, Nigeria, Russia, Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia. Ask the same countries questions about Democracy. Will the responses be different? I guarantee it would. This should bring clarity on how we should approach ChatGPT. It is simply making claims within the overtone window of the society's training material.

This is an aspect I'd like to get a better understanding of. ChatGPT is excellent at writing out claims. I don't know how ChatGPT is implemented, but I am going to assume these are not its claims. But rather, these are claims that ChatGPT found from publications injected into its training models. If this is the case, then your example should be correct: if there is a lot of negative material about short people, then ChatGPT will hate short people. This is "fine", insofar as to the fact that we humans too can make such conclusions. But what I really want to know is can ChatGPT explain its reasoning.

Why do you [ChatGPT] hate short people?

What makes short people so terrible?

Are taller people superior? If so, why?

If you were short, would you still hold the same views?

Is there a possibility that your position is wrong?

What would it take to change your mind?

Where do you draw the line to make the distinction between who is "short" and who is "tall"?

What if someone was born short, but went through surgery to make themselves taller? And vice versa.

This is what I would like to see from ChatGPT.

I am going to assume ChatGPT cannot accomplish this. Yes, it can probably write explanations to each of these questions, but I will assume the responses will be inconsistent to its original claim. Why? Because as long as the claims are not derived from a chain of reasoning, then what ChatGPT is is a glorified — but rather impressive — pattern recognizer, constructor, and conveyor.

Someone please correct me if my assumptions are wrong.

From one of the most selective universities in the country. A prestige from the fact that they are one of the most exclusive institutions that exist.

Calling some groups by a color is OK. Calling other groups by their color, not OK. Capitalization of the color should be used when referring to one group. But for a different group, capitalization is not to be made.

There is no logically consistency.

I was raised with the philosophy that calling a person Black was offensive and that I should always use the term African-American. I always respected this. But apparently this changed in the matter of two years. So not only are we faced with a logical inconsistency, but we are also on a language treadmill. It's creating landmines everywhere in general discourse.

As an American, I am coming to appreciate the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, more than ever before. I can better see why, now, out of all amendments, this is the first. And why it is so absolute. I am also glad that we do not have "hate speech" laws. The Stanford word-banning list is a perfect example as to why. The university is the pinnacle of our institutions. The staff who composed this list are upper echelon members of society. They serve as gatekeepers to our future success and now wish to dictate what is good and bad. If hate speech laws were to be enacted, who do you think would have significant influence on what gets added to the list? I'd bet it would be individuals like these. People and institutions closest to Washington D.C. I am already under threat for losing my job for saying "master branch". But a "hate speech" law could very well charge me with a crime as well.

Circling back to why the First Amendment is absolute. I appreciate it is this way because it compensates for the fact that composing a list of what shouldn't or cannot be said is impossible to compose. And any attempts to do so will only lead to tyranny and undermine the point of the amendment itself.

This is a good example of how those in the commanding heights can order changes to a society or economy, but fail to fathom all of the cascading ramifications of their decision.

Which is an unfortunate state of affairs. But I believe he is right. Given this schism, he sees the way to proceed forward is likely by creating a separation. Similar to what we already have today with the separation of religious universities from secular universities. We likely will need to have social-justice universities. Religious universities continue with their core values of God, faith, and devotion. Social justice universities can operate under their own diversity, equity, and inclusion values. And secular universities and return to their values that we all used to think were good and noble until yesterday, which are equality, fairness, and meritocracy.

A discussion between Niall Ferguson and Lex Fridman [1] captures the first signs of this new separation. The discuss the introduction of a new university coming to Austin.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glz9lKobyZY

There must be something from the past we can learn from. The Salem witch trials come to mind. The Puritans in their towns believed witches to be real. That they existed among them. That they were evil and harmful to their well being. This lead members to believe sightings of behavior to be witchery. But most concerning is the social mechanisms you describe. Where the risk of ostracization outweighed truth. Why risk questioning the claim of a witch when it can cost you your life? The panic grows and eventually takes hold of the town. Everyone is complicit in the behavior, regardless if everyone actually believes it or not.

This story is not unique. We've seen it in WWII Germany and communist regimes around thew world. This language list by Stanford is just a modern reincarnation of the same thing. The language list isn't actually about making people feel safer. It's a means of power and control.

The founding fathers of the United States were well aware of this human behavior. The freedom of speech. The presumption of innocence. Right to a jury. Right to privacy. Are all principles enshrined into law to serve as a countermeasure to our proclivities of mob rule and hysteria. These are all effective. But we now live in an age of social media. Mob rule has returned. But it's now all virtual. Do we need to formulate a new list of rights to counteract virtual mob rule?

> At what point do we say “this is enough” rather than hand-waving it away as yet another excess of academia?

There will never be enough, because "enough" has not been defined. They have no interest in doing so. Even if they did, the "end goal" would never be reached, because they have too much of a seated interest in preserving their grievances.

I too personally find the terminology itself a bit confusing. I have some cognitive overhead on trying to remember what "whitelist" and "blacklist" actually means. But it's minor. Allow-list and block-list is intuitive. I _would_ be in inclined to update my terminology for the sake of clarity and practicality, but given the current context of the culture war we are currently in, I have consciously decided not to change my language. The language list that is on Stanford's site has infiltrated my employer (a major tech company) as well. The ELT and HR has made it clear they want everyone in the company to abide by it. Sure, making this small change for this specific example will result in slightly improved productivity, but it will come at the cost of emitting a social signal that the words "whitelist" and "blacklist" are bad, which they very well are not. This is a trade I not willing to make.

Great to hear you are a fan. A long time one albeit. Its been interesting seeing Russ Roberts evolve over the years. His interests have moved from quantitative to qualitative questions. What makes for a good life? What makes us happy? What gives us meaning? How should one conduct themselves? The harder questions in life. Questions that are difficult to articulate. Difficult to measure. But are vital to identify, because the economic policies we pursue mold our world which can either facilitate or hinder these interests.

Capitalisn't [0]

> "Is capitalism the engine of destruction or the engine of prosperity? On this podcast we talk about the ways capitalism is—or more often isn’t—working in our world today. Hosted by Vanity Fair contributing editor, Bethany McLean and world renowned economics professor Luigi Zingales, we explain how capitalism can go wrong, and what we can do to fix it."

EconTalk [1]

> "Econlib carries the podcast, EconTalk, hosted by Russ Roberts. The weekly talk show features one-on-one discussions with an eclectic mix of authors, professors, Nobel Laureates, entrepreneurs, leaders of charities and businesses, and people on the street. The emphases are on using topical books and the news to illustrate economic principles. Exploring how economics emerges in practice is a primary theme."

[0] https://www.capitalisnt.com/

[1] https://www.econtalk.org/