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Few of us are certain of being the exception in a good way. We’ll buy a lottery ticket, fantasize about it for a moment, and then put it in our pocket and forget about it. No one heads to a car dealership or a realtor with tomorrow’s Powerball number. We are gripped by irrational fear rather than irrational optimism because confirmation bias is, in a way, a kind of survival mechanism. Good things come and go, but dying is forever. Your brain doesn’t much care about all those other people who survived a plane ride or a one-night stand: they’re not you. Your intellect, operating on limited or erroneous information, is doing its job, trying to minimize any risk to your life, no matter how small. When we fight confirmation bias, we’re trying to correct for a basic function—a feature, not a bug—of the human mind.
The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols
AI learning across a long time span is challenging, because when a person’s happiness goes up, the AI does not know whether it was a result of today’s activities, or last week’s, or last year’s, or some combination thereof. This problem is akin to a challenge facing social media algorithms: How can Facebook train its newsfeed to help a user grow over the longer term, rather than simply entice immediate advertising clicks? When the person shows growth, how does the Facebook AI know which day’s content or algorithms caused that growth?
Ai 2041
Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge. This is new in American culture, and it represents the aggressive replacement of expert views or established knowledge with the insistence that every opinion on any matter is as good as every other. This is a remarkable change in our public discourse.
The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols
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