This man lives in my head rent free

time for round 3 of the @need-him-pregnant-poll tournament and here's my propaganda for why you should vote for Aku rather than Gomez Addams: because Gomez would vote for Aku.

If you found this before May 18, the poll's still live. Don't vote for the lesser evil! Vote Aku here!

aku's percentage is climbing, but that'll stop if this post doesn't spread beyond my own followers. by reblogging this post to reach more people, YOU can make a difference in a silly internet poll.

ESPECIALLY if you went "i would've voted for aku if i'd seen this comic first": you have the power to make other people see the comic first.

do not taste plants if you don't know what they are

do not identify a fruit as edible just because it tastes sweet

hope you didn't eat any fucking seeds, bro

I saw the photo in my feed and went ohh, dude, no, we do not handle yellow rocks with our bare hands until we know for sure what they are. And I know that orange...

In comments, they continue:

and that's where I started cussing at the computer monitor. But someone else had got there first:

I will add:

- Apps like Seek are often good at helping to narrow the identity of a plant down to its family or genus, but very often fall short of an actual species ID (I should specify, they fall short of providing a *correct* species ID. Most will be extremely happy to give you a species ID, even though it is patently false). Once the app gets you close, it’s time to crack open a field guide or consult an expert.

- Speaking of field guides; BEWARE OF ANY PUBLISHED POST-AI. I’m serious. Once people figured out they could generate whole books using those bloated chatbots, foraging guides (which had experienced a surge in popularity following the threats of food insecurity during the beginning of the COVID Pandemic) were one of the first genres to be overloaded with ai slop. Look for trusted authors like Samuel Thayer, and publishing dates before 2023.

- A good field guide should offer detailed verbal descriptions of the physical characteristics of various plants, using specific botanical terms, and will often contain a glossary with definitions of those terms. It should also feature maps of the known growing ranges of those plants, and ideally, photographs of the plant during various stages of growth, and at different times of year.

- Start slow. Learn a handful of “easy” plants or fungi that have distinctive characteristics and few toxic lookalikes, and learn them well. Learn the toxic lookalikes as well as you learn the edible species.

- Once you are confident you have a positive ID, try a little bit and see how it agrees with you. Just because it’s “edible” doesn’t mean you aren’t allergic to it.

To my friend, that sounded like the cowards way to deal with a broken masticator. He decided to blaze his own trail and to that end, he bought a blender.

Everything he would have normally eaten, he blended.

Everything.

When he told me this I was paralyzed with horror.

“Everything? Like. Steak? Burgers? Tacos? You blended it?”

“Yeah,” he cheerfully informed me. “The trick is finding the right liquid to blend with. You can’t just go with water or milk, that would be gross.”

“THAT’S what would be gross?!”

“Yeah. So with tacos I made them with a hot sauce blend with extra spices to offset the liquid. They were pretty good!”

I was shuddering in agony as the story went on. He told me he’d started a book of recipes when he found a good proportion on something so he could blend it again and that he occasionally still blended a taco.

Well. They did, at the time. 

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis. 

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time. 

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

---

I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead: 

Let's follow the "if it wasn't worth you writing it, it's not worth my time to read it" principle forwards and backwards.

If a class's coursework can be correctly done by plugging the prompts into LLM, it's not worth doing. pedagogy needs to finally make the shift to what we know is valuable and motivating to students (this would involve taking children seriously, investing in teachers and schools, and demanding that colleges prioritize professors who are talented mentors and instructors)

someone defended using LLMs because he could input his insurance policy document into it and ask for the info he needed (and then verify the page numbers to confirm) instead of reading the whole document. now personally i'm of the opinion that we could just have universal healthcare where no one would ever need to do that again, but if you think that saving everyone's lives regardless of finances is too radical, we could legislate that insurance paperwork needs to be short and easy to understand, and their policies need to be clear and sensible.

people are chatting with LLMs and using them as "friends" - people need time and non-financialized spaces to meet people and make actual friends. we ought to take the amazing work efficiencies we've gained in the past few decades and turn it into leisure time, and restore unpaid public spaces and our rights to be there (no more loitering law bullshit)

every article is copypasted LLM slop that says nothing when you're looking for info on the internet. this is because you need people to click into your website to get served your ads to make money. i'm a hardcore "ban advertising" guy but if you think that's too extreme i'm sure we could think of other ways to disincentivize this (like idk a search engine that actually does its job??)

Image generators making porn from still images of real people? sorry, we have to tackle consent and sexual assault and online harassment and the patriarchy.

the problem we face is that to have a smarter kinder healthier society, we do have to change society, we will actually not succeed if we tinker around the edges. LLMs should never have gotten into such wide implementation at this stage without stringent safeguards in place. people who are actually thoughtful were picturing exactly these dangers for decades! people in power ignored them and people marketing these technologies lie about them.

here's what you actually want in a thrift store:

in a rich town

run by a church

staffed exclusively by little old ladies