You hit the nail on the head for the conservative agenda, though that is not as impressive as it once was since they all have started saying the quiet parts out loud. Anyone with enough brain cells in close contact to notice that Jesus was about as anticapitalist as you could possibly get is appalled and concerned for their safety. At least all of the ones I know are.

To your point on the authority of a postdoctoral level person who assumes they are right in hubris, I feel like they have kinda earned it. It is also likely that their “wrong” is going to be far closer to right than that of a lay. I am personally a polymath, so I don’t find lay topics for myself very often, but when I do, I do listen to topical experts and respect what they say, while checking the voracity of things that feel off to me using reputable journals and prepublication articles on the likes of arXiv.

If someone is lay and they are either unable of unwilling to do the diligence to verify the person claiming topical authority, then they really need to just take what is said at face value and not enter the more global conversation aside from trying to learn more (eg asking questions). I am so tired of my numbskull uncle claiming that Anthony Faucci doesn’t know how viruses work of some distant relation bitching about how student loan forgiveness is theft from taxpayers. My uncle knows nothing about virology and my distant relation couldn’t parse economic principles to save his life, but there they sit, acting as counter-authorities to people with doctorates and 40+ years of professional experience. That is the part I want to see stop. If you have a Masters degree, fine, argue with the expert, but if you have never stepped foot inside a classroom where that topic was being taught, just don’t. Your opinion is woefully uninformed and thus not worth the CO2 you expended to voice it.

I do like your take on the societal and philosophical underpinnings for the Death of Expertise. It gels well with some things and gives me some avenues to investigate should I finally get fed up with this world enough to write it. Until that time, I will just keep Farnsworthing it.

Damn it… I literally just found draw.io like 2 weeks ago.

Fair enough argument. I do wonder who, in your opinion, is someone who can justifiably have authority on a topic if not a topic expert? Who is reasonable to be educated by?

As for the book, at this point I have not put pen to paper as it were, but the premise is the observation that there is a concerted effort on the part of some political parties to sew so much doubt in subject experts as to render their knowledge meaningless to the general populace and how dangerous that becomes when the situation is something that has potentially dire consequences. I have seen it happening for a long time, but it really came to a head for me in 2020 when I saw entirely lay politicians and pundits undermining warnings from virologists, epidemiologists, and statististians and sewing distrust in public health organizations essentially to trade people’s lives for political points. Since then I have been seeing an ever escalating trend for people in category 1 of authority to push the populace away from category 3 on topics which really only category 3 should be talking at all. The rest of us should be shutting up and taking notes, asking questions for clarification, and learning.

Abortion, gender identity, climate change, economics geopolitics, etc. Essentially every topic that has been politicized into a hot button issue is really somerhing that is so beyond complex that we should not be arguing with the people who have dedicated their entire adult lives, sometimes 40+ years, to studying.

My father has the perfect microcosm anecdote from his working days. He worked for a garage door manufacturer who hired some fresh faced MBAs into middle management. They were all sitting in a meeting one day and thought they came up with an amazing idea, so they took it to the veteran engineers who had been designing garage door openers for decades, some of them essentially since the damn things were invented, and told them to make their hairbrained idea. The enginners looked over what they were given and told them that they had had the idea decades earlier and that it did not work and that materials science and engineering had not progressed to the point that it would be feasible. Did the MBAs who were trying to make waves and make a name for themselves listen? Nope, they fired all of the veteran engineers and hired in a bunch of fresh faced engineers who had never actually designed a garage door opener and told them to build their hairbrained idea. The engineers, only knowing what they had learned in school and a couple of years in other jobs got excited by this revolutionary idea and dove into it. Fast forward about 2 years, and millions in R&D, and we find the fresh faced engineers, now not so fresh, somberly telling the MBA dickheads exactly what the veteran engineers had told them initially. This, along with a few other boneheaded schemes to make earnings sheets look better for the MBAs actually ended up tanking the company and it was sold like 10 years later.

Subject expertise matters. Respecting subject expertise matters. Being able to recognize when you are sitting atop Mount DK is one of the finest skills we could ever teach our children.

Even with the somewhat incorrect examples, I want to print this out and hang it as a poster on my wall.

I have to respectfully disagreed with your example. Ostensibly the researcher should be an authority. I think the example given in the chart is not quite right either. I think the confusion comes from the three definitions of “Authority”.

1. the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. “he had absolute authority over his subordinates”

2. a person or organization having power or control in a particular, typically political or administrative, sphere. “the health authorities”

3. the power to influence others, especially because of one’s commanding manner or one’s recognized knowledge about something.

In your example the “Authority” is definition 3, someone with specialized knowledge of a topic that should be listened to by those who are lay on the topic.

In the chart I think they were trying to go for 1, which is the correct source of Authority Bias, but they didn’t want to step on toes or get political. The actual example is someone who has decision authority like a police officer or politician or a boss at a workplace who says things and a listener automatically believes them regardless of the speakers actual specialized knowledge of the topic they are speaking on. A better example would be “Believing a vaccine is dangerous because a politician says it is.”

This all feeds into a topic I have been kicking around in my head for a while that I have been contemplating attempting to write up as a book. “The Death of Expertise”. So many people have been so brainwashed that authorities in definition 3 are met with a frankly asinine amount of incredulity, but authorities in the first are trusted regardless of education or demonstrable specialized knowledge.

I forget the exact quote or who said it, but the gist is that a species cannot be considered sapient (intelligent) on an interplanetary/interstellar stage until they have discovered Calculus. I prefer to use that as my bar for the sapience of those around me as well.

Honestly, auto generating text descriptions for visually impaired people is probably one of the few potential good uses for LLM + CLIP. Being able to have a brief but accurate description without relying on some jackass to have written it is a bonefied good thing. It isn’t even eliminating anyone’s job since the jackass doesn’t always do it in the first place.

This is why I use a script blocker to block the scripts from marketing domains. From what I have been able to see the cookies aren’t written because the code that writes it is not allowed to execute. It also stops script injections and other malware payloads that require extra-domain linkages to scripts.

Incompetence might even be a little harsh. Inexperience or incompetence maybe. I prefer inexperience.

My landleech padlocked the basement and attic of the house I rent. I keep a large screwdriver for exactly this eventuality. Something goes wrong in the basement and that lock point is done for. Just slip it in the gap around the padlock and pull. Will only take about 200N to rip the thing off the door and I can get way more than that with a little bit of leverage.

I prefer the answer of giving the giy the reins and letting him get it so riddled with viruses then when he calls for support replying “sorry, your property your problem. You have absolute dominion over it and thus we give no warranty as we have no responsibility.”

Not that I know of. In the end you are editing the browser rendering parameters. Anyone can inspect the page and see that the opacity on the page is being turned down. Finding where it is happening is the only thing you can really make hard. Have a couple of the pass through scripts be machine generated and you can have it use nonsensical variable names and a bunch of dummies that lead on wild goose chases. It could all be fixable, but you can make it a pain in the ass. Add a redundancy or two and it will make debugging a nightmare because even if one is fixed, the others will make it look as though it has not.

The real answer is to have NEVER do freelance web development inside the client’s firewall. Never. If they try to require it, walk away. If it is inside their firewall then they can just take the source code and stiff you. If they try to spout some BS about security, say that is precisely what you are concerned about and point blank ask them what safeguards they are willing to allow you to put in place for developing in their system. If the answer is none, walk. If they are willing to let you VPN in, run the code from a local copy over the VPN and node lock it so if someone attempts to serve it from another machine it fails.

Apologies. I’m tired and hate businesses taking advantage of “Independent Contractors”.

Bury it six JavaScript and 2 php scripts deep so it is a pain in the ass to find.

I would genuinely cry. He is older than both of them and could literally run circles around them, both mentally and physically. I would 100% vote for Bernie and be fine with it. The vote for Biden is because the armpit of hell that I live in doesn’t do ranked voting and Trump will wreck the planet. A rotting potato powering a computer core running ChatGPT left ignored on the resolute desk for 4 years would be a better alternative to these two fuckwits.

Seriously, why did they have to run Joe? If they had run someone in their 50’s or 60’s they would win on “well, he isn’t as old as Trump” alone. If they had run someone under the age of 40 I imagine every leftist voter under the age of 50 would have been voting for them. The only reason “he’s fucking old” doesn’t stick to Trump is because he behaves like a horny 15 year old jacked up on cocaine and Twitter.

Just… FML.

As an Applied Mathematician I feel both seen and attacked by this. At least I get to play with novel analysis because the company I work for is pretty niche.

Lol, I have still written python scripts to deal with them all.

I have been seeing reporting from and have had friends in Australia and New Zealand who have been sharing that it is actually much worse down there than it is in the US. Apparently in NZ most of the legislature is made up of landlords, so the laws are particularly egregious and abusive.

Is a functional government based on logic and compassion too much to ask/too cliché?

Renters rights legislation with enough teeth to make present and perspective landlords, both corporate and individual, think twice before not taking care of a property as though they lived there? (Yes, there are stories behind this one)

I guess a company that actually pays me what I’m worth (which I’m not even really looking for that much).

A mug that says “Worst Sperm Donor” with an unactivated or emptied gift card to his favorite store.

Yeah, that’s why I used the heavy caveats. The wall produces an inelastic collision which will do WAY more damage as all of the energy is arrested rather than an elastic collision of the two vehicles in which a good portion of energy is spread between the two bodies as they separate.