PJ @pj@qoto.org

@freemo @rrb

That's all I'm asking: effective collective "mechanisms that ensure safety" enforced by the community, elected government, or whatever, that work for the vast majority of their constituents.

Giving everyone guns and saying that this is for their protection just doesn't work for most people, despite what Jefferson was thinking when he said that having a gun will more likely prevent someone from attacking them.

@freemo @rrb

Yes. Let the bad drivers expunge themselves naturally, either by dying after hitting a tree or being killed when they hit someone having a gun.😀

If you take this stance then requiring proof of competence or professional credentials from let's say, engineers, medical personnel, and similar jobs where one can do lots of harm if they don't know what they are doing is also an attack on their freedom.

Everyone should be allowed to build and sell highrises and airplanes using whatever or no standards, as they like. That's their freedom. If people die when one of those fails, who cares, they should have known better and protected themselves.

Alternatively, their families (with guns) can get such bad actors permanently out of business so only the "good ones" will remain.

Actually, this may work😀

@rrb @freemo

Many, especially younger, people get a sense of self from things such as guns, cars, and boats, but that's not the point.

A "well-regulated militia" doesn't mean everyone can simply buy an assault rifle at the nearby grocery store. You can't do this in Switzerland or Israel where I believe everyone that is supposed to, have a gun, but, afaik, there are no mass shootings like in the US.

Something is wrong with a society where you can't drive a car without a permit or even a medical exam if you are of a certain age, but you can own a gun without any restrictions.

@freemo

Interesting theory about why guns are so loved in the US:

>White Southerners started cultivating the tradition of the home arsenal immediately after the Civil War because of insecurities and racial fears. During the rest of the 19th century, those anxieties metamorphosized into a fetishization of the firearm to the point that, in the present day, gun owners view their weapons as adding meaning and a sense of purpose to their lives.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-gun-became-integral-to-the-self-identity-of-millions-of-americans/

@freemo
I do not agree with this statement:

>"We should probably put more effort into addressing the "lightening problem" than we should be about addressing school shootings."

The question is: "What can we do about it as a society?"

You can see the storm coming and you can choose not to go outside or you may try to find shelter and protect yourself in some other way, but a child who ***has*** to be in school supposedly safe under adult supervision doesn't have such a privilege.

How can we consider ourselves a civilized society if we don't have the means to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of individuals that should not have them?

You need a license to drive a car and you can't buy cigarettes and alcohol under a certain age but you can carry a gun or even an army-style assault rifle no questions asked.

@freemo

I'm a little bit confused here.
Are you saying that school (or other mass) shootings are as "natural" as lightning?

@nielspflaeging

I see it more as a #process of self-#production and maintenance rather than a #state or #characteristics of a system:

>#Poiesis /pɔɪˈiːsɪs/ (from Ancient Greek: ποίησις) is "the ***#activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before***."
... etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιεῖν, which means "to make". It is related to the word poetry, which shares the same root.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis

@BetaCodex

Yes, it's always the same story.

Organizations, much like organisms are (autopoieticaly) 😉 built (and maintained) *from the inside out*.

No amount of ***outside*** help, ready-made solutions, or tools will change anything if the clients are not willing to do the hard work to change themselves.

@BetaCodex @nielspflaeging

And don't worry. Everything will be perfect because we'll also do all your #work for you while we are here. Who cares if things fall apart after we are gone because you didn't #learn anything from us.😀

You can tell Im in the middle of reading ***The Big Con*** by *Mariana Mazzucato* & *Rosie Collington*
on
*How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies*

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710959/the-big-con-by-mariana-mazzucato-and-rosie-collington/

@nielspflaeging

Of course you can't do anything with it. It is #autopoiesis. It is doing things onto itself like #growing and #learning. 😉

@unklar

I was hoping we may have learned our lesson with the calculators.

What is the difference between a student trying to pass as their own the work done by an #AI tool or the work of another student? They are cheaters in both cases, and they are also very easily identified as such.

Studens using search engines and new sophisticated language tools to support their thinking and making a point should be applauded.

But if your educational goal is to train a bunch of "parrots" good at spewing "facts" on demand without any critical thinking, of course you will be banning the use of ChatGPT because it is much better in doing that.

@EricLawton

Maybe they forgot (or didn't bother) to put their dentures on.😀

@boris_steipe

I glanced over the sources you listed but won't pretend I understand everything that's in there 😉
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, for example, a bird and an airplane both show the emergent property of *flying* while being two totally different "machines".
I believe where we differ in our views is that for you their flying is identical, or the flying of the airplane might be even superior to that of the bird, while for me they are quite different processes that cannot be compared so easily.
Also, #evolution and #learning are two completely different processes. Evolution depends on large pools of (imperfect) #copies of the same "thing", while learning is more like the #growth of a single individual having the ability to "learn" (modify their internal #state).

@boris_steipe
Reading this from *The Bitter Lesson* by *Rich Sutton*:

> researchers seek to leverage their human knowledge of the domain, but the only thing that matters in the long run is the leveraging of computation. These two need not run counter to each other, but in practice they tend to. ***Time spent on one is time not spent on the other***.

http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

For me, the last sentence means that the ***real value*** of #tools like #AI for humans is that they can free us from tedious, repetitive, unimaginative work such as #computation in favor of more elaborate creative thinking.

People have always used previously developed more primitive tools to develop better ones. This was true for all tools and machines we invented so far, and is also true for #AI's ability of "upgrading itself".

@boris_steipe

I don't know. #Language is a fairly new "improvement" in biological evolution, and I'm not sure you can reverse engineer (artificial) #intelligence from it.
You could argue that intelligence evolved ***before*** language. After all, you have quite a few intelligent animals with no language or with a very simple vocabulary.

@boris_steipe

I'm not sure if you can have a #state #phase #transition with just #computation. You can definitely "scale up" some existing capability by ading more computational power, but can you get (evolve to) something radically new?