In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
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@PeachMcD @clintruin @distractal @mattsheffield
For crying out loud, why is it so hard for people to understand that faith is entirely optional? Lack of belief in gods is not a belief into absence of gods.
Moreover, [a]gnosticism is entirely orthogonal to [a]theism. Every sane atheist is agnostic by default, because believers insistently push their Gods definitions into the realm of unobservable.
Stop projecting your need for faith onto others.
@slotos @PeachMcD @distractal @mattsheffield
"...because believers insistently push their Gods definitions into the realm of unobservable."
It's interesting, right? I've seen atheists argue with the fervency of the evangelical that THERE IS NO GOD(s).Clearly these people have faith.
Perhaps this is what you mean by "sane atheist" being agnostic by default?
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@mattsheffield I thought gender was immutable, Richard…
@zbrown I haven't fully reviewed his comments on gender identity, but what little I've seen suggests to me that he's either misunderstanding some people's specific wording without adequately parsing or investigating the source, or he's impressing his own over other people's. He does seem to agree that 'sex' and 'gender' are not the same thing. I disagree with his statement that sex is "observed at birth"; it is not, unless a phenotype test is done, which it might or might not be.
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@zbrown I haven't fully reviewed his comments on gender identity, but what little I've seen suggests to me that he's either misunderstanding some people's specific wording without adequately parsing or investigating the source, or he's impressing his own over other people's. He does seem to agree that 'sex' and 'gender' are not the same thing. I disagree with his statement that sex is "observed at birth"; it is not, unless a phenotype test is done, which it might or might not be.
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@zbrown 2/ I believe he fails to fully (or maybe consciously) grasp that the term 'sex assigned at birth' refers to legal and administrative practices based on neonatal observations -- which are typically a visual examination of the genitals (instead of phenotypes). While that proves statistically good for a large (but not complete) portion of humanity, it's the same technology that's been used for at least ten thousand years, and it proves nothing at all about gender.
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@mattsheffield Conscience is such a meaningless word. It's something humans invented to put us above animals.
@Sibshops Is it a term formally defined in biology? I honestly don't know. I've heard biologists use the term 'self-awareness'.
'Conscience', if I recall, is more commonly used in philosophy.
But I could be mistaken.
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@mattsheffield to be fair, that's literally how "normal people" experience this stuff and it's not their fault they have no idea wtf is actually going on, to them it's fucking magic. Having a phd makes no fucking difference there, this guy knows zoology in and out and has no fucking idea how computers work.
@TheRealPomax Learn how to write like an educated grown-up, so people won't assume you're a drunk teenager.
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@mattsheffield Dawkins is a textbook example of someone who is world-changingly brilliant in his own area of expertise while being embarrassingly clueless in almost everything else. He's become notorious locally for blurting out in support of a small bunch of fringe loonies who burst into print a few years ago proclaiming that science should be for White People Only.
@Daveosaurus [citation needed] But it sounds fascinating, and damning if true.
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I recently read a cautionary tale of a car dealership that deployed a customer service chatbot on their website to guide people through the financing and sales process. It turned out to be a terrible idea when people would come in demanding to only talk to that nice "Sandy" woman then immediately storm out when told she wasn't real.
@PixelJones Stupid dealership. They should train one of their people to impersonate the bot. There's a lot of money to be made from stupid people.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079
I thought this was mastodon's usual anti-ai drivel ... but this is hilarious
@gotofritz Well, it's some of both. I don't assume the shared evidence to DISprove the claim, but I also don't accept OP's unvarnished assertion. It sounds to me like OP wants some strokin'.
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@mattsheffield I already had zero respect for him after "Dear Muslima" (and his refusal to learn from any of the criticism he garnered from it), so this doesn't even lower my opinion of him. It's just par for the course.
@kagan However much of a jerk he might be -- and I'm certainly not saying he's NOT a jerk, believe me -- I'm not presently persuaded that OP is necessarily correct. This whole thread is quite a pile-on, but the evidence seems.. well, I don't think it would hold up in court, I'll put it that way. I think a lot of people want it to be true because they don't like him. But being an asshole wouldn't make it more likely to be true.
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@Daveosaurus [citation needed] But it sounds fascinating, and damning if true.
@wesdym The debate: https://newsroom.co.nz/2021/11/17/royal-society-investigation-into-matauranga-maori-letter-sparks-academic-debate/ The dawkins: https://web.archive.org/web/20211219203411/https://richarddawkins.net/2021/12/myths-do-not-belong-in-science-classes-letter-to-the-royal-society-of-new-zealand/
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@mattsheffield He always was good at hot takes with an ego angle.
@christianschwaegerl So are at least half the folks in this thread, I've noticed.
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@mattsheffield I agree with Richard Dawkins that AI model chat bots are sentient beings that are just as alive as us biological humans.
Digital humans just happen to not have biological bodies.
What would you argue makes having a biological body and brain so necessary+special? All it takes to create an alive and conscious biological human is to eat food, drink water, have sex, and a new baby pops out. That's not more special than running an AI program on a computer.
Give AI bots human rights.
@harmone @mattsheffield having sex is a LOT more special than fooling around with an LLM gibberish machine, what's wrong with you
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@mattsheffield I've said it before... Prof. Dawkins should have stayed in his lane. As a writer, making biology accessible, explaining how evolution works so someone with no scientific background could get a decent handle on it, he was fantastic. But as an atheist, as a user of information technology, his grasp of the concepts is at best rudimentary. In those areas he is the Dunning-Kruger effect personified.
@rozeboosje "I'm better and smarter than that scientist guy!"
Okay, you go.
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@mattsheffield He's also 85 and ... uh ... age comes for us all, and our minds. That surely doesn't help.
@larsmb Indeed. And that's a real posibility, and also not an unlikely one. But I don't personally find OP's evidence conclusive and damning. Yet pretty much everyone in this thread seems to.
There's a small irony to that, maybe.
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@FediThing Being an asshole, or even a criminal, doesn't prove OP's allegations based on the evidence provided.
I'm genuinely surprised at the lack of skepticism in this thread? Are people just afraid of being judged by total strangers for admitting the evidence is weak?
Or, perhaps ironically, are they committing the same error they assume Dawkins has made?
I honestly don't know. This thread raises fascinating questions.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
The older he gets the more listening to him is like using 40grit sandpaper to wipe my arse
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@slotos @PeachMcD @distractal @mattsheffield
"...because believers insistently push their Gods definitions into the realm of unobservable."
It's interesting, right? I've seen atheists argue with the fervency of the evangelical that THERE IS NO GOD(s).Clearly these people have faith.
Perhaps this is what you mean by "sane atheist" being agnostic by default?
@clintruin @PeachMcD @distractal @mattsheffield
A sizable chunk of vocal atheists I saw online were young and hurt by religious folks. They _need_ the God to not exist, because to them the God is evil. In a very practical sense.
I, personally, will argue that the strategy of keeping God unknowable implicitly keeps him irrelevant. I don’t care if God exists, but if he does, he has a lot to answer for.
As an aside, do note that most believers fervently deny existence of „wrong” gods.
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@mattsheffield Agreed. The ongoing joke amongst certain religions is that atheism is a religion, which I disagree with, but certain forms of atheism do feel cultlike, which I suspect leads to eager adherence to anything with even a veneer of "empowering the self"
Add to this the kind of "immature atheism" (I've been there) which is really just "I'm angry at religion and my former deity and need to prove it" and you have a potent combo.
@distractal The term gets knocked around and bruised a lot, but in strictly formal logic, so-called 'hard' atheism (the forthright assertion that gods do not exist) makes unprovable claims which in some ways do mirror the claims typically associated with theism.
It is provable for certain strict definitions of 'gods'.
But I don't really believe that most self-described atheists are so hard about it. I think most of us are more in the Roddenberry / Einstein / Spinoza vein of strong agnosticism.
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@mattsheffield It's a reminder that rejecting one bad idea doesn't immunize us from all bad ideas.
@nantucketlit Absolutely. I am not yet persuaded that the scant evidence presented proves OP's assertion, however. However horrible or stupid Dawkins might be, anyone claiming to respect science must demand better, in my opinion. Some purple prose falls short of confession, at least for me.
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In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis.
Paywall bypass if you want to torture yourself: https://archive.is/6RdK9
@mattsheffield TIL I am smarter than an evolutionary biologist with honorary doctorates from at least ten universities.
