The Universe Doesn’t Do Charity: Bad News for Cosmic Bargain Hunters
If I could go back in time and rename conservation of information with a single word, I’d go with “offload” (verb form) or “offloading” (noun form).
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William A. Dembski
Mr. Improbability
A silly story to honor March Madness AI Assistance Disclosure: The author used artificial intelligence in the development of this story. At six foot six, Liam O’Donoghue had spent much of his life disappointing strangers. They saw the height first and the rest later. In airports, grocery stores, church parking lots, and restaurants, people always asked, “You play basketball?” Liam always gave the same answer. “No.” The more accurate answer would have been: not successfully. He was twenty years old, broad-shouldered, long-armed, and naturally unathletic. He could dribble only as the ball directed him. He could not pivot without risk to bystanders or furniture. He had never developed a jump shot, a layup package, or any other part of the Read More ›
Requiem for an Artificial Superintelligence
He defended his dissertation, refused the academy, and founded The Battering Company.
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Anti-AI Absolutism
My take on the AI situation v Doug SmithDoug Smith has for some time now been calling attention to destructive effects of digital technologies on people, especially the young.
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What We Can Learn About Schooling From Baseball
In Part 3, drawing on my experience as a baseball coach, I offer a somewhat different approach to using AI in educationEdify kids, don’t enhance them. We are organic beings, not gadgets to be improved with newer and better modules (like the newest computer chips).
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How AI Could Create Vast Increases in Learning Efficiency
Part 2: Artificial intelligence is promising to fundamentally transform education, leading to vast increases in efficiency of learningAlpha School students are said to advance an average of 2.6× faster than peers on nationally normed MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) tests and frequently score in the 99th percentile.
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A Non-Transhumanist Vision for AI in Education
Bill Dembski describes this new approach as amounting to edification rather than enhancementAI should be used as a way of honing students’ skills and knowledge, helping them learn more effectively than before.
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What Are My Recommendations for Reining in/Reforming Google?
Part 10: Here’s one thing: If Google claims Section 230 and DMCA protections but actively moderates or curates content, it is a publisher, not a neutral platformThe alternative to the First Amendment is a narratocracy in which a society’s commanding institutions determine what stories are allowed and disallowed.
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Pulling the Strands Together to Chart Life After Google
In Part 9, we begin by looking at how the manipulation directly affects you when you search for informationAfter the 2016 election, Google leadership decided to prevent voters it saw as populist and low-information from deciding future presidential elections.
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What Public Policies Can Help Us Achieve a Less Biased Internet?
Part 8: Robert Epstein proposes a number of changes worth consideringRobert Epstein is the former editor of Psychology Today who, as I discussed yesterday, has studied the ways in which Google can manipulate public opinion.
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How Google Can Control and Manipulate Public Opinion
In Part 7, Robert Epstein, former editor of Psychology Today, offers some disturbing information on how search engines can be manipulated for political purposesEpstein, working through web projects, also provides a sobering assessment of how much Google monitors what average Internet users are doing online.
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How Google Search Rank Disrupted the Alternative Health Industry
Part 6: Google’s bias is as real as ever, but the firm has deflected it to an impersonal policy that gives an air of objectivityHaving a Wikipedia entry gets you instant credibility even though so much of Wikipedia is substandard and politically biased.
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Google’s Power Over Online Business: Monopolistic and Extravagant
Part 5: To help people understand Google’s power over online businesses, I ask. What if the road on which the local Walmart is located suddenly became a dirt trail?It’s as though Google is doing everything in its power to throttle organic traffic, driving that traffic to their sponsored ads, increasing its bottom line.
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Becoming a Slave to Google: How It Happens
Part 4: After an update, you always have to second guess what Google did. You become a reverse engineer who never sees under the hoodThis leads to a mentality that always tries to second guess whether Google will favor some piece of content or way of expressing it.
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A Potential Chink in Google’s Armor: Loss of Legal Immunity
Part 3: Currently, Google is legally protected from the consequences of frequent copyright violationOne outcome of the resulting ad clutter is that, unless you are top of the search, you’re likely wasting time trying to make money off organic search.
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The Utter Dependence of Online Businesses on Google
Part 2: An SEO business needs to please Google or else it is dead in the waterGoogle’s re-presentation of information created by others makes it less likely that users will visit them. Thus Google’s business expands at their expense.
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The Evilization of Google—And What to Do About It
Part 1: Understanding Google's dominance over the internetNothing is totally evil. Still, there’s enough evil in Google that it is, for now, more on the side of Darth Vader than Obi-Wan Kenobi.
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Orwell’s Cold Dystopia is Closer Than We Think
When we speak lies as truth, tyrants come marching inThe Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. [Winston’s] heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him… And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 Read More ›
What’s the Relation Between Intelligence and Information?
The fundamental intuition of information as narrowing down possibilities matches up neatly with the concept of intelligenceThe key intuition behind the concept of information is the narrowing of possibilities. The more that possibilities are narrowed down, the greater the information. If I tell you I’m on planet Earth, I haven’t conveyed any information because you already knew that (let’s leave aside space travel). If I tell you I’m in the United States, I’ve begun to narrow down where I am in the world. If I tell you I’m in Texas, I’ve narrowed down my location further. If I tell you I’m forty miles north of Dallas, I’ve narrowed my location down even further. As I keep narrowing down my location, I’m providing you with more and more information. Information is therefore, in its essence, exclusionary: the more Read More ›
Can We Trust Large Language Models? Depends on How Truthful They Are
Just because a piece of tech is highly sophisticated doesn't mean it's more trustworthyThe trust we put in Large Language Models (LLMs) ought to depend on their truthfulness. So how truthful are LLMs? For many routine queries, they seem accurate enough. What’s the capital of North Dakota? To this query, ChatGPT4 just now gave me the answer Bismarck. That’s right. But what about less routine queries? Recently I was exploring the use of design inferences to detect plagiarism and data falsification. Some big academic misconduct cases had in the last 12 months gotten widespread public attention, not least the plagiarism scandal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and the data falsification scandal of Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. These scandals were so damaging to these individuals and their institutions that neither is a university president any longer. When I queried Read More ›