I just had the most mind-blowing conversation with a former colleague. Long story short, we're downsizing on our move and I'm trying not to send a whole bunch of perfectly good used furniture to the dump. I've contacted everywhere that I could theoretically donate it, and they're not taking any furniture. I've contacted every used furniture store, and they all say they're overstocked. One told us, "I'm going to sit here and take this exact phone call all day today." So I reached out to my contact list on my phone to see if anyone needed anything for free.
One person, whom I guess I haven't talked to much lately, ends up saying they could use something and I tell him we'll leave it in the driveway for him next week. The conversation ends up with me saying that we're avoiding as much indoor, face to face meetings as we can during this move.
He says, and I quote from the text, "You don't really believe in COVID, do you?"
I reply, "Yeah, the science is pretty straightforward."
He says, "Scientists are just conspiracy theorists."
I say, "You're a scientist. I know this because I hired you and you have a degree in biochemistry."
He says, "That was before I got my MBA and realized how the world really works. Science isn't real."
Perfect GIF for how you must have felt. We are so screwed. I'll bet the guy doesn't "believe" in climate change either. No wonder you want to get away from it all.
I'm sure you're right, but I was terrified to dig into it any further 😂
I certainly understand the instinct to back way slowly!
Although, as a person who is not going to be directly harmed by the cognitive dissonance of hearing it from a fellow scientist's mouth, I am almost unbearably curious to know what he means by "Scientists are just conspiracy theorists."
I tried a search on the phrase, with and without the 'just', but no luck
@NilaJones @BE FYI most search engines are broken and if you try to use old-style searches they just fail. Multiple words in quotes will typically fail. Easy to see; do any search, copy a six word string from the displayed search text, put it in quotes, re-search, and note no answers.
For me, this pattern holds on every search site (many of which share engines) that I have recently tried. Frustrating!
The tokenizing and vectorizing have been way de-dimensionalized to better fit LLM inputs that don't lead to direct copyright infringement, secret revealing, etc.
Yes.
I'm puzzling what in his #MBA training created this?
Here is one posited scenario:
The functioning of humans has made sense to him through the lens of his MBA - people and groups are working to make money/profit by doing business.
Scientists are saying that global business has produced #ClimateChange and that how businesses are run needs to change.
He feels this threatens global business.
And resolves this conflict by declaring science not to be real, etc.
@BE
I don't blame you one bit.