Academics do have a reputation that way, but only the 100% safe, tenured ones. The majority of academics are required to have a strong level of communication just to get their grants accepted. Imagine if, on top of working your normal job at maximum efficiency, you then had to make a presentation to the government every year about why you and everyone that depends upon you deserves to eat, while the government you make the presentation to becomes increasingly antagonistic and detached.
There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).
It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.
They might co-occur, but they aren't the same thing. It's easy to communicate something in a way that (a) the recipient understands clearly; and (b) the recipient refuses to acknowledge despite understanding it. And in the other direction, you can persuade people to do things without them ever understanding what you want or why the things should be done.
okay... here's another way of thinking about it: claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating. but, would you marry claude? would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker? a lot of people are choosing claude to be their intern, which is something.
what i am saying is, having people skills are the answers "yes" to all those questions. you can cynically call getting a job nepotism, or you can call it, well people like to work with their friends at the cost of measures of competency. and maybe, the core competency is being pleasant to work with or work for.
another place people struggle with this is executive compensation. if i told every DoD employee they could get a 10x better boss for only $20/y, every single one would, which is $58m in executive compensation. but the DoD CAN'T do that, and its leadership is TERRIBLE, so... do you see?
Regardless of the implementation, claude causes concepts to enter my brain, so it is at least one-way communication. Human brains have mundane implementations as well: chemical signals firing across neural synapses. No magic special sauce, at least not that we can detect
I would say you communicate to the model and you interpret the model's outputs. I would not say the model communicates back though.
I'm not sure that models are complex enough to have a consistent internal representation of a concept the same way that organic brains can to communicate. I'm not sure of any quantitative science backing this up though. Models don't know anything across iterations yet.
Most models do not have any persistent state or output that is separate from their input. They consume a stream of tokens and then output a probability distribution. The probability distribution will always be the exact same for that particular stream of tokens. There is no internal state, thoughts, mood etc., only prediction based on the input. "Memory" is usually just something injected into context by the harness and updated by usually a tool call from the model.
I'm sure there are research prototypes that work differently from this but I haven't seen any enter the mainstream yet.
Also, diffusion language models have a different evaluation order but I think they also do not really have internal thoughts or feelings because they also do not seem to have any sort of hidden state that encodes anything like that.
I believe the person was saying that in academia, literally everyone has a PhD, by definition since it's a requirement for the job, so the simple act of having it means nothing in the context of all of the other people that have it. It of course means a great deal since it's what let's you in to the room in the first place. Imagine interviewing 50 people, every single one of whom have an internship on their resume. What they did during their internship matters of course, but the simple act of having had one doesn't differentiate (matter).
I find it rich how fast you are to jump to destroying the entirety of academia in one stroke. It's quite easy to say things we don't understand should not exist, of course I'm guilty of this myself from time to time. Have you done education beyond the bachelor's degree? It's a very different world.
I'd honestly much rather give my ID to a Chinese model than an American one. If the American ones start requesting ID I'm out. I'm on a gemini organizational account right now that gives me pro but is directly tied to my organizational SSO. So that's something already. I just refuse to upload my face and drivers license anywhere ever.
Mirror Bacteria is quite the terrifying prospect [1]. I'd never heard about it but the theory is that if we made a mirror bacteria, our and all other immune systems would be unable to defend against it, potentially leading to catastrophic infection of vast swathes of all life across the planet and the unavoidable death of some large percentage of all life. The benefit would be that they could be used in treatment as a chassis to carry other molecules into the body or that they could manufacture mirror-drugs that would have novel effects. Quite the addition to the torment nexus huh.
Mirror bacteria is overblown. We can generate antibodies for them, so it will be fine. Also, they can feed only of fat, not sugar or normal proteins, so they will mostly starve.
And one interesting aspect is the number of children getting these types of neutered machines as their first learning tool. I read another thread comment saying people that started with react actually feel that using straight html is more complicated. My professors say that the best textbook is the one you've read. The next generation is being indoctrinated into this way of thinking
I'm confused. What exactly is it about these immigrants that make them incapable of appreciating fresh food? I agree that you can enjoy your privilege or money just fine, but do you believe that the poor are incapable or unworthy of appreciating wealth or privilege? They're surely more likely to appreciate the cost-to-calorie ratio.
You probably know but firefox on mobile let's you use extensions, for which i have ublock origin installed and regularly use it to block modals and things that my filter lists (every single one activated) don't cover already.
I've actually been meaning to move back to Firefox, so this is encouraging. I didn't realize you could do that sort of thing with uBlock, though? I thought it was just for blocking ads, etc.
Under the hood, uBlock works by filtering DOM elements. The "ad blocking" part of it is the set of curated filter lists built on top of that. But it also allows you to right-click on any element and create a custom filter, or write your own using DOM queries.
It's only getting easier and friendlier comparatively. Recently i bought a new computer and installing an external drive and putting kde linux on it was easier than fighting my way through the windows telemetry gauntlet, the setting, and all the bloat. Modern windows disgusts me continuously in new ways
There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).
It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.
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