Feynman: Take the world from another point of view (1/4)

Some videos from Feynman which make a great impression on me were these.. "Take the world from another point of view" 1.) ▶ this video 2.) link 3.) link 4.) link

Really fun reads. Great to give to people who think anything 'sciency' is stuffy:) I love this old Horizon as well: ▶ this video

It actually goes a lot deeper than that. Companies like this helped organize cheap workers around the world to just put all that information once and for all, to train the AI and interpolate / remix the answers for people: link OpenAI this year hired a bunch of people to just manually do the work of basic coding once and for all: link This is a story of using cheap labor to train machines at scale. OpenAI's content moderators have just unionized: link Moreover, this is a story of taking labor of artists all over the world, remixing it at scale and selling it, destroying any sort of scarcity: link More artist issues: link There's GitHub, which had tons of people contribute code, and then the AI just ingested all that work for remixing by Microsoft Copilot: link And of course, finally there's Wikipedia, which had tons of people contribute actual changes, vet them for accuracy, etc. over 20 years, in many languages -- simply taken for use by AI companies: link But once again, in 2023, where we are now, there is a staggering amount of humans just producing this kind of content, and the AI is mainly used to model and remix it. Perhaps to do so can form some sort of internal understanding of this text, and that's what's interesting. But even Sam Altman has lately said "scale is not all you need". So a new approach is here needed. ▶ this video

I sometimes think when we're all bitching about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket (which it is, on many dimensions - maybe not in the aggregate as people like Steven Pinker argue, depending on how you "measure" that, but I think it's fair to say we could do much better), typically because of the foolish behavior of one "stupid" group or another, do we maybe underestimate the significance of how differently each of us perceive and conceptualize the world? >> Being 17 or acting as part of a group don’t make you less culpable. > Yes it does. Boys do strange things, boys in groups do stranger things, like not testifying against each other, especially if they feel society has abandoned them and the world is against them. Both of these seem arguably "true" to me. > Sorry, but a 17 year old knows what it means to rob and murder someone and knows the difference between right and wrong. That’s the basic criterion for culpability. This seems arguably "true" as well. But then, what does the word "knows" mean in this context, precisely ? For example, we all "know" we should be kind to others, and clean up our acts in general, but when your life falls apart as a consequence of not acting in the way you know you should have, does "know" have the same meaning as it did before? We use the same word for both situations, but is the meaning the same? > especially if they feel society has abandoned them and the world is against them There are all sorts of complications in life that

I think this is the video Gell-Mann is talking about where Feynman "advocated on national television that people not brush their teeth": ▶ this video . He doesn't actually advocate it, but uses it as an example of how to look at the world.