| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago |
| The record scratch for me here was the idea that people can choose to be unsure instead of angry. People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature. (There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.) |
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| ▲ | jjulius 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for others and is therefore a bit of a struggle to shift into, but I love being unsure. It's great. It's a thing that's totally okay to be. The reality of life is that we're all unsure about a great deal, and it's quite a nice feeling to acknowledge uncertainty, sit within it and feel okay. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The observation here is basically a corollary to the idea that people experience loss outcomes differently than gain outcomes. It's not complicated or fuzzy. | |
| ▲ | tolerance 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People typically do not approach existential uncertainties with such intrepidness. I think this is the case for most people who hate AI. This article glosses over that. | | |
| ▲ | jjulius 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I suppose I am one of the people who could technically be lumped into the "hate AI" category, and yet I find myself incredibly comfortable with the uncertainty around where things are going. Perhaps it's because, as I previously mentioned, I have always enjoyed the feeling of uncertainty (and I recognize that's not the norm for most), but it's also because the entire thing feels so hyperbolic from all angles that I can't help but assume that whatever happens will be somewhere "in the middle" of all the rhetoric everyone's spouting from everywhere. I also have a very, "The world's gonna do what the world's gonna do, the best I can do is find my path through and flow with it," attitude about, well... most things. Maybe that helps? Maybe I'm talking out of my ass rn? I'm unsure! :) | | |
| ▲ | tolerance 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, I think that you're on to something and I wish you kept the original version of this part of your comment (yes I caught your edit and have it on my clipboard still!) because it touched on what I think about the whole "existential" bit of my own comment a bit more direct (but I think your edit expresses your attitude more sophisticatedly). Few people have anything that comes anywhere near any sort of philosophical foundation that they can rely on to weather their anxieties. If anything they only strengthen their sensibility to express—and compound—their worries. |
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| ▲ | grebc 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There’s absolutely nothing existential about a program that guesses the next word based on the last. | | |
| ▲ | ricketycricket 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There’s absolutely nothing existential about a tiny powder that just combusts very quickly. | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is if you're a software developer! | | | |
| ▲ | arjie 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Truly such a first-order Markov chain would not be a threat but it turns out that they have built a program that guesses the next word based on the last few hundred thousand and it turns out that it works pretty well for writing software. | | |
| ▲ | grebc 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Keep diving down the chain brother, I’m sure you’ll find the singularity down there somewhere. |
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| ▲ | lazyasciiart 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is flat out not a nice feeling to experience uncertainty about things like "can I pay for someone to look after my child so I can go to work?" and "will I have food to eat this weekend?". For some people, "will AI mean my job goes away next year?" leads directly to those concrete uncertainties, and they understand that, and that is why they don't enjoy the uncertainty they are currently feeling. I'm guessing that for you, those first two concerns have not come up? | | |
| ▲ | jjulius an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Sure! Uncertainty is a spectrum, and there are certainly moments where it's not a nice feeling. I'm a father, and I'd be lying if I said I haven't had those feelings over the years. My (making it very clear here that one's mileage will obviously vary) approach? I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe I'll need to figure out childcare, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll have food to eat this weekend, maybe I won't. Maybe my job will go away next year, maybe it won't. Today, there's work, and I'll do that work as best I can. Today, there's evidence things are changing, and I can be aware of that. Today, I can do something prudent to make myself more resilient towards whatever may or may not happen. Tomorrow, if something happens, I can react accordingly. The mind wants certainty, but that's not always available, so I observe the "wanting". The best I can do is act based on what's in front of me, and sitting in the negative emotions around existential thoughts doesn't help me, nor my family (it's natural to have them, but I acknowledge them and let them pass by). The best I can do is to do. If things change, I change. Everything in nature/life is ephemeral, and I have done my best throughout my life to set myself up to be as adaptable as possible. Edit: To reduce this and get a bit Tao-ish, you don't need to know the exact shape of the river downstream as long as you're capable of steering when you get there. | |
| ▲ | stronglikedan an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Okay, but why get angry about it? Getting angry at things you can't do anything about is just silly, and if you can do something about it, get motivated instead of angry. |
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| ▲ | asdfman123 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's just not true that "neurochemistry prefers" one state over the other. Neurochemistry rewards you based on how you've trained yourself. We used to gain status by being good hunters and warriors, and now we're trying to get it through clever hacker news comments. Believe me, "human nature" is very flexible. People are just uncomfortable with uncertainty when they're not used to it. I think most of us have trained ourselves out of a lot of intense emotions in favor of seeing the big picture. I could give a hundred examples of this. |
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| ▲ | janpeuker an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Big +1. Uncertainty is where we learn, and where non-zero-sum games are, but most western AI labs right now operate firmly in zero-sum game territory. |
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| ▲ | __MatrixMan__ 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | In a zero sum game, resources are neither created or destroyed, just fought over by competing parties or converted losslessly from one type into another. So far, this industry is negative sum by a long shot. Maybe one day AI will make a contribution that's so awesome that we'll look back at all of the harm it's causing and say that it was worth it, but that day... zero sum day... seems distant indeed. |
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| ▲ | dimbletimbers an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think I’m angry b/c I’m unsure but so many people are claiming to be sure without sufficient evidence. |
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| ▲ | Barrin92 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >People hate being unsure. I disagree with this and the same patronizing attitude of the article. We live in an age where being anxious, unsure and neurotic isn't just tolerated but encouraged. The reason is pretty obvious, anxious people are paralyzed, self-critical and as a consequence harmless. Hence Alfred Adlers profound insight, we don't suffer from anxiety, we produce it because it's a safeguarding mechanism against conflict, it's an excuse for not acting. That's why it's everywhere today. The author is right that anger is directed at someone, and in this AI shitshow where developers have technology shoved unto them some righteous old testament anger at the people responsible would be a very productive thing indeed. In the words of Utah Phillips The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses. Anxious people in the workplace tend to have no agency, they go to the pill doctor or ask themselves if they're at fault, angry people organize make their interests heard. It's pretty obvious why the tech 'luminaries' in charge prefer one over the other. |
