• 2 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 19th, 2023

help-circle








  • That’s fascinating, and I agree with you. Why the US hates the idea of high-speed rail is beyond me, especially because they prided themselves so much on the rail system they put together earlier in their development. In any case, the US can’t do much of anything with its debt-to-GDP as high as it is right now. They can hardly keep from shutting the government down entirely because they won’t even agree to a government budget.









  • No, there is no coursework past a master’s thesis. For the last typically ~3-4 years of graduate training, everything that you’re doing is original research. If your research isn’t good enough or done correctly, you will never get a PhD. You also have to defend your dissertation. Getting a PhD from a reputable university does mean that what you say, specifically related to your research area, is correct.



  • Those are extremely few and far between, and they aren’t evolutionary biologists. Behe, the most famous of them, doesn’t have a PhD in biology, but a PhD in biochemistry. Those are vastly different fields, and understanding the evidence for evolution wouldn’t have been relevant to Behe’s PhD. MDs more commonly don’t believe in evolution because MDs are essentially average folks who can memorize stuff really well. MDs don’t receive training in research or how to conduct it, so they’re pretty poor at understanding primary research most of the time.

    Someone with a PhD from a reputable university (essentially, one that funds their PhD programs rather than making students pay, and one that doesn’t incentivize publications directly with bonuses) will be an expert in their subject area. Behe would be able to tell you about the biochemistry of sickle cell anemia. Someone with a PhD speaking on an area outside of their expertise is perhaps more likely than the average person to be correct because they could have read and understood most primary sources even outside of their area, but I wouldn’t say it’s all that much more likely. Basically, PhDs speaking on the topic of their expertise are experts, but they’re not experts in everything.

    Personally, my PhD made me like the trope of someone who could tell you everything you want to know about some esoteric subject but wouldn’t know how to make a meal.

    Getting a PhD produces highly specialized knowledge, not general knowledge.



  • Would you, after devoting full years of your adult life to the unpaid work of learning the requisite advanced math and computer science needed to develop such a model, like to spend years more of your life to develop a generative AI model without compensation? Within the US, it is legal to use public text for commercial purposes without any need to obtain a permit. Developers of such models deserve to be paid, just like any other workers, and that doesn’t happen unless either we make AI a utility (or something similar) and funnel tax dollars into it or the company charges for the product so it can pay its employees.

    I wholeheartedly agree that AI shouldn’t be trained on copyrighted, private, or any other works outside of the public domain. I think that OpenAI’s use of nonpublic material was illegal and unethical, and that they should be legally obligated to scrap their entire model and train another one from legal material. But developers deserve to be paid for their labor and time, and that requires the company that employs them to make money somehow.