Comment by ElProlactin
14 hours ago
This is how most people already live.
The average person doesn't know how the medication they take works, the mechanics of climate and climate change, how the energy they consume is generated, etc.
14 hours ago
This is how most people already live.
The average person doesn't know how the medication they take works, the mechanics of climate and climate change, how the energy they consume is generated, etc.
In the case of medicine it goes deeper than that, sometimes nobody really understands why a medication works.
> nobody really understands why a medication works.
But they work hard to try to understand it because the more they do the better the results for peoplea health. Also it goes without saying that if someone didn't understand many of the things that we do understand then things would be worse for us all.
Sure but in this reality, humans won't need to work hard to try to understand it for there to be better results for peoples health.
I feel like we just don't understand a lot about the human body still. Only a century and a half ago we had a US president die because a doctor rummaged around and damaged internal organs (with unwashed hands, because germ theory was still not uniformly accepted) to try to find a bullet on the wrong side of his body. We've come a long way since then, but it's not like we've been doing the field of medicine rigorously for all that long. The best strategy we have seems like pretty much the same as any other scientific field; come up with ideas based on what we know, try them out, and see if they work. That doesn't necessarily give us any actual insight into why it works though.
Yet it takes rigorous years long tests to understand effects of a medication.
Yes, and understanding the effects of a medication is different to understanding how the medication has that effect.
The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.
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The tests are there to confirm with statistics that (1) it works and (2) side effects are not too bad or too frequent.
That doesn't mean we understand why the medication works.
Yes and no: understanding means to know the relationships to the underlying system.
When you already know that system well, those effects are often just a matter of simple inference.
Just like here: most people are actually perfectly capable to foresee the detrimental effects of abandoning understanding.
Living in a fantasy world of "magic" makes you dependent upon your caretakers, who provide the ingredients.
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unless its the mrna covid vaccine. which needed how many months?
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That cant be true, theres a paper trail of sign offs of the most likely people to understand the probabilities.
Please define proof of "really understands why a medication works"
It reminds me of fynemans why do magnets work. Yeah sure does anyone really understand anything? Its metaphors all the way down
We don’t really understand how NSAIDs reduce pain, as a concrete example. In contrast we have a pretty good understanding of the pharmacology of caffeine.
It’s not like magnets, some things really are gaps.
Some medications are designed for one purpose, then other effects are discovered in practice. Gabapentin, for example, was designed as an anti-seizure medication structurally similar to the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA.
Now it is primarily used to treat neuropathic pain, and the mechanism for that is not well understood. The GABA receptor is not involved. This effect is just a happy accident, and nobody really understands why it works.
its a good thing that our lack of understanding of medicines has never killed anybody or have had any intended consequences
oh wait
This is also how most CEO live.
They ask their employees to build stuff, and have no understanding whatsoever of how any of it works.
A major school of German sociology places this at the core of its theory. According to this theory, modern societies are characterised in particular by the fact that individual subsystems of society reduce the complexity of their own (sub)system to the other systems to enable them to act at all; they fulfil what is called an "Entlastungsfunktion" (relief function). Prominent representatives of this school of thought are Max Weber, Arnold Gehlen and Niklas Luhmann.
In their view, it is modern institutions (public and private) which, as supra-individual entities, have long since become autonomous systems. The fact that the individual office-holders are human beings, meanwhile, is of little significance.
Hannah Arendt, in her theory of totalitarianism, attributed the effectiveness of both Nazi and Stalinist policies of extermination to the largly moral indifference of bureaucracy as a system.
In this sense, the task of controlling AI is a variation on the problem of harnessing a complex society consisting mainly of autonomous subsystems. This is a problem which has increasingly challenged humanity already for quite a long time. And it has been very difficult so far, even without AI ...
That's what makes libertarian AI doomers so strange. "Letting unconstrained machines with human components loose on the world will be okay, but letting unconstrained machines with nonhuman components loose on the world will produce terminators." How can it be both one and the other?
I'm going to say it's how everybody already lives, because while somebody may know some of those things there is nobody who knows them all.
But we can generally assume that the people who built and understand some technology will have the same desires and worries as us, and are bound by the same laws. For instance, if it was a team of strangers who designed the terawatt fusion plant, we can still assume with some confidence that they care about safe plant shutdown, failure recovery, ensuring there are no toxic side effects of operation, etc. Can we say the same when it is machines doing everything?
Very interesting point. I think the counter-argument to that is that the complex modern society is based on somewhat “deterministic” systems, in that, even if a single decision or event isn’t rationally explainable in the moment, at least in the aftermath, it typically becomes understandable, maybe even reproducible. There is someone, somewhere, capable of explaining, maybe even multiple someones.
We don’t generally have that insurance with LLMs/AI, yet?
Imo the counter-argument is that in principle you can research and understand the mechanics of climate change or medicine. You just don't have the free time and/or the motivation. With AI that changes - you could spend your entire life trying in vain to understand its reasoning.
It reminds me of how some religious people say that science is effectively no different to religion because we all take expert opinions on faith. But the difference is that there is a well-defined pathway to understanding, if you wish to do so.
This seems to me like asserting everything in the universe is explicable by physics. It may be technically true, but still not relevant to understanding earthquakes.
(Don’t bother to argue this not true unless you disagree with the essence of the argument.)
Anyway, post-hoc explicability isn’t a counter-argument to the assertion that almost everyone takes almost all technology as magic, from medicine to computers.
I’m still trying to understand your argument. Are you saying that after the fact we understand AlphaGo move 37? But somehow we are never going to understand an LLM’s decision afterwards? Seems like a disconnected take to me.
There are huge systems supporting that ignorance though. And where those systems are breaking down people do care.
This is a very Western take though.
The problem with "ignorance" in Western countries (particularly the US right now) is that it's very common for people who don't know to believe they know and form ignorant opinions that they often want to be applied society-wide in some way. You can see this with everything from climate change to vaccines.
In much of the world, even in middle income countries, people are comparatively poor and, in my experience living abroad in such countries for many years, much less concerned with "understanding" and forming opinions about everything under the sun. It doesn't mean they don't value education and are opposed to development/progress, but it does mean that they don't question whether the vaccine they're taking is the product of a conspiracy, think too deeply about why the river is flooding more often, etc.
They just deal with life the best they can and are more focused on supporting their families, enjoying what they can, etc.
Culture and religion play into this. The way secular and Judeo-Christian people look at the world is very different than, say, Buddhists, Muslims, Fulani tribespeople, and so on.
the average person doesn’t have an internal monologue
can’t use a computer (they’ve had like 30 years now in first world developed countries)
many can’t even use their smart phone beyond calling, texting (many can’t type well), and doom scrolling (they get addicted to drugs, gambling, and other LCD activities)
many read at a 6th grade level. most can’t even calculate tip in their head.
meanwhile, the same smartphone can give them access to literally any information and knowledge the world in seconds. and now gemini can explain stuff since most ppl can barely read or think.
it’s sad out there.
but more importantly. it’s not my problem.
> but more importantly. it’s not my problem.
But it absolutely is! Those people can and do vote.