I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
I spent an enormous percentage of my life very frustrated with other people because they couldn't just see the answer to things.
For example, I can put an engine into a car, and still tell you where every part of that engine is located relative to every other part, without being able to see it, including the internals, and describe, for example, over the phone how to troubleshoot it without being able to see it at all in person - just a mental model. And, for reference, I have almost no fundamental knowledge or experience with engines besides taking one or two apart - and it would not extend to other engines. It's been at least 20 years and I could still do it verbatim.
I'm way out on the end of that bell curve, but I'm not unique. I've worked with people who found that ability completely baffling, and would have to break out diagrams and blueprints to do that.
The gap is a lot wider than you think it is, it's not subtle, and this is known as the typical mind fallacy.
Edit: And funnily enough, further down there's a comment about Feynman realizing that his friend counts visually and he counts verbally - and I'm on the verbal side on that one, unless it gets complicated, and then I end up tallying mentally - but I have to count them verbally at the end.
> If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
There was a couple who streamed on youtube who reacted to meme compilations, and years ago one of the things they reacted to referenced a similar topic. During that stream everyone learned the woman has no inner voice (including herself, she'd never even thought about it before and had no idea an inner voice was a thing).
While he was asking her what it was like, he brought up the voiceovers in tv and movies that were supposed to represent a character's thoughts. She had no idea that's what it was supposed to be, and always just thought it was some nebulous narrator describing what was going on.
I think any such signals would be a similar "wrong mental model" situation where you can usually only tell by poking at it with very specific questions or actions.
When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.
The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.
E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.
As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.
Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.
So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.
I imagine it's tougher to do. My friend who has become a well known tattoo artist has exceptional visual recall of minute details. I have to believe it contributed to his ability(tho he grinded hard, used to borrow anatomy textbooks to learn from)
Not to say someone with poor visual recall can't make great art, it just may be tougher to make something closely representative from memory.
But there are obvious giveaways. Among your friends and colleagues there are people who can’t sing and people with perfect pitch perception despite no training, ones that can barely coherently speak but can write beautiful prose and vice versa, some can stare at code for 12h straight while others find the sheer idea of it horrifying. There’s people who believe in ghosts or even believe they’ve seen ghosts while others are grounded and rational. People with photographic memory and people who cannot recall what they were doing 5 minutes ago (me). The list of distinctions could keep going forever. Everyone’s good at something and shit at something because everyone’s mind is different. It’s silly how most people completely underestimate the diversity of human internal experience - maybe this type of close-mindedness is part of it too.
I don't see how people being different from one another (uncontroversial, obvious basic fact) means that people have fundamentally different phenomenal experiences. You're conflating ability with experience when they are not the same thing.
Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation:
worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.
But abilities (and inabilities) are intrinsically tied to phenomenal experiences. And you can even shape your experience by learning. It feels different to look at code, speak a language, play an instrument or do a kickflip when you’re an expert (or exceptionally (un-)talented). Some people are biologically or developmentally predisposed to different abilities, and if you talk to them enough, you’ll learn that the way they experience these abilities is different from yours. I am conflating it because this is conflated in reality. This should be obvious in hindsight - your brain doesn’t have separate ability and qualia compartments, you know.
I'm not sure if people overestimate it either, some people just have strong memory and powerful mind's eye. My memory is probably from early trauma and represents the extreme other end. If anything it can be a detriment sometimes, I'm not sure a super powerful ability to picture stuff really impacts day to day living for the average human in history. There's no reason for it to disappear evolutionary if it's not a big disadvantage.
As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.
If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.
I feel you, in the same boat, though I can't actually isolate any trauma or anything like that, reliving unpleasant experiences verbatim is no fun. And the early 2000s was not a fun time with all the pop earworms running around.
It's funny, I've never met anyone but my family who can do this like I can, so cheers! I always say I don't have a perfect memory, but I don't know anyone I can test myself against except my mother, who can "relive a trail ride she took 45 years ago down to the plants and opening and closing the gates". Having to remind people about significant shared life events is a real downer.
5 years old is crazy, but by the time they are 15-16 it becomes difficult to restrict them from things their peers all do. There needs to be a wider push from all parents or more of a consensus from society that these platforms are dangerous.
You're not going to achieve coordinated, collective action by placing the burden of acting on the individual. It never works.
If collective action has to happen to solve some problem, it needs to either 1. be so strongly incentivized such that it's the only sensible thing for individuals to do, or 2. be mandated top-down and enforced.
You can't just shout "My solution relies on everyone independently doing X!" It never works.
I agree that probably won't happen that way. There also won't be much in the way of regulation until society slowly realizes the dangers.
I think we are currently in the process of finding out now that there have been people on social media from birth and are now adult members of society.
Yes, the platforms need to be regulated more for minors.
But also, prohibition has never been a very effective method with teens.
Just look at how college kids drink when they get to college. The sudden removal of parental restriction has a lot to do with that if you ask me.
I think this is better approached with broad education, and stronger regulations on the platforms themselves.
Part of the problem is that many parents aren’t educated themselves about what is good and bad for their kids. Examples include things like nutrition, screen time, even simple stuff like when to wean from bottles and keeping suffocation risks out of cribs.
> Part of the problem is that many parents aren’t educated themselves about what is good and bad for their kids. Examples include things like nutrition, screen time, even simple stuff like when to wean from bottles and keeping suffocation risks out of cribs.
I would argue that more is being asked now of parents than in previous decades at least. You’re asking every parent to fight multi-billion dollar international addiction platforms on top of working, parenting, etc.
I totally agree with you, and that’s where platform regulation and privacy regulation has been failing parents.
Most people really can’t fathom the amount of data that tech platforms are slurping up, and they can’t fathom the sophistication of the data science that goes on involving their content feeds and data and metadata collection/targeting.
Drinking is down for young adults and teens. My pet theory is that Covid broke the chain of party and drinking culture being passed down. (This is entirely speculative, and based on a single chart I saw.)
The relevance to your point being that removal of parental restrictions don't seem to be doing that anymore.
Education is definitely a good idea, but do note any plan that depends on education gives up the next 5-10 years before results are seen. Works great for societies and countries that think that far ahead.
America in particular has an extra challenge, since Big Tech is based here, and threats to revenue streams will be met with immense opposition.
It used to be close to 0 (wasn't a super festival goer though) for me, so anything will feel like way more ppl using n2o.
But you're comparing 30-60s dissosiative high that gets fully metabolized in seconds to fucking alcohol - 30 days of poisonous metabolites and 50% of all killed and killers being high on that. And there's MUCH more to mention.
Even weed is not as bad as alcohol, though due to symptoms being somewhat harder to spot, the risk of functioning addiction is way higher. And it often ends up as the substance ADHD spektrum folks use for self medication (self administered action/substance aimed at equivaling naturally out of homeostasis neurotransmitter balance in brain). OTOH, two generations ago ppl used alcohol for that instead.
Yeah, okay, I made the same mistake as Sony. I wrote "buy", but what I meant was "spending money" in a general sense (regardless if it's buying ownership or paying a license fee). Second hand customers simply can't afford (or willing to pay) the price of a new copy. Trying to force these people to the Sony shop is a really bad move and won't work.
Otherwise you're right, it's absurd that license fee is the same as the price of an owned copy.
I inherently disagree with the ad model of business. Intentionally worsening a product with ads to convince people to pay to remove them is just rewarding them for enshitification.
So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.
The fact that they sometimes can't means you can't have someone who is not a software engineer. Otherwise there is no way to verify whether the LLM wrote correct code or not.
I feel like this depends on the kind of project/work to some degree. Lots of software engineering time is spent on very simple websites, apps and other projects that LLMs have been well trained on. I suspect if you want a static site with a contact form or a CMS theme/plugin, you could probably get a usable result by having some non-technical person plug some prompts into an AI.
They wouldn't be able to verify if the code is correct, but based on my testing, if the work is simple enough, it probably wouldn't matter much.
There are a lot of companies whose modus operandi is basically "build the same basic site 300 times, except with a different colour scheme and logo".
Exactly. Expertise is frequently required to steer, correct, rework, know what is good and what isn't. This happens 500 times a day on both the micro level and the architecture level.
If you look at a graph of the world population it’s seems clear to me that freely available common resources are just going to continue to get overused and ruined as we continue to add people to the equation
It probably isn't as much about population growth as the increasing wealth gap. My hypothesis would be that a society where people don't feel fair distribution of wealth is more prone to this 'abuse' that you call 'overuse'.
Drug addicts don't become addicts all of the sudden. Lots of people with no place to go resort to awful things, people that feel like they have no place in society do not see a reason to take care of it. It doesn't make it right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to address the root cause.
In the sense that a website could just ask your OS if you are over a certain age and that age was self declared? That seems fine to me, but why can't the websites just ask me for my self declared age?
That's how things used to be and that makes more sense in my opinion because an OS isn't the thing displaying content. It just run whatever it is told to run.
>but why can't the websites just ask me for my self declared age?
Because children just click through the age gate when it suits them. With this legislation, a parent that purchases the device and creates an account for the child can set the age once and take the decision out of the kids hands. It's a huge improvement without any significant privacy issues. I can't fathom why the tech crowd is having a collective aneurism over this.
>OS isn't the thing displaying content
But the account on the OS is the right place for the single source of truth of properties of the current user.
Also children can "come upon" devices, so this is still completely pointless unless there's a way to ban devices that don't have this ability. and the only way to do that is to ban devices that cannot verify the user's age. since a device can't really verify an ID, some third party (ideally meta, but also the government works) needs to verify id and age, write something to the secure enclave of the device, and now that's stuck with the verified age set.
If "just let someone report the age" worked, pornhub wouldn't be blocked in TX.
How do you propose that a child's device will remember their age in a "legally distinct" way for the life of the device? You ought understand what i am asking here, as it directly follows what i said before. You have a child, somehow the device knows how old the child is. An adult sets it? great. What if the device wasn't set up by a responsible adult?
You don't foresee a black market of "no-age-audit" devices? How do you prevent that? Well, one way is to use the secure enclave and write the birthday in it so that it cannot be tampered with. How is that written? who writes it? Who verifies the ID?
TX passed a law stating that adult sites like pornhub must verify age. I hope you understand what "verify" means in this context. It isn't "i promise i am over 21 or 18 or whatever" - because if that worked, TX lawmakers wouldn't have made the law say "verify" https://journals.law.unc.edu/firstamendmentlawreview/screeni...
In the future, casual dismissals are viewed negatively.
I really don't know where you're coming from. You seem to be imagining that the law requires some kind of cryptographically validated age attestation. The law requires nothing of the sort. It's just an age field associated with the account. There are many ways to get around it, none of which the law demands protection against. It's simply a standardized way for parents to ensure a modicum of reasonably effective age-discrimination for online services.
There are no secure enclaves, no verification, and certainly no black markets. I really don't know where you are getting any of this from.
>TX passed a law stating that adult sites like pornhub must verify age.
Yes, when states are left to their own devices to come up with laws, some of them will be more onerous than others. But I don't know what you think you can infer from this. Casual dismissal was warranted.
that you know of. when you were 11 could you get root? I could. I got expelled from a highschool for getting "root" on a DOS machine by holding down the shift key (at 13).
All it takes is one moment of weakness from a parent or not blocking the kid's view of the keyboard, or the kid getting an app that figures out possible passwords from keyboard sounds (it'll be here someday), or any manner of other things, like you forgetting to close your session.
11 year olds aren't stupid.
also there's nearly weekly exploits that get your root on a linux machine, so unless you're blocking arbitrary code downloads, which means you're going to have to whitelist sites you allow your kid to visit, which means they're probably just going to get that stuff elsewhere, as is customary. Again, 11 year olds aren't stupid. any one of them could tell another "here's a script that gets root" and spread it around school. If it became a thing.
I just had a vision of linux being outlawed because it's too insecure
This is why I only purchase digital games at high discounts. It might be worth $60 to own a piece of physical media that can be played at any time without internet. However, to me the value of a DRM license that can possibly be taken away at any moment is very little. It is ridiculous that they attempt to sell digital games at the same price as a physical game.
At that point it will be a self correcting issue when huge swaths of the human population dies from starvation due to not being able to produce enough food. It is preferable to do something prior to then.
The tools can definitely go away. They could get exponentially more expensive to where it is no longer financially possible to keep it subsidized. The bubble could pop and most of the companies could go bankrupt. It's not exactly like a calculator because it requires such an astronomical amount of resources to keep running.
I agree with you but there is a calculator analogy where the resources are local and while taxing for most, viable for the individual. Local AI is less capable than an army frontier model agents but still quite useful.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
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