I think many people have very positive experiences and data, at scale, speaking to the kind of success Edtech can have.
I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).
This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.
This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.
These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.
A scientist that causes, through willful fraud, the death of people seems to be guilty of something like manslaughter. Using fake data is a pretty clear-cut example of willful fraud, and a reasearcher fudging data over such a life and death question should 100% be held accountable.
Scientists making errors in good faith should on the other hand be insulated from any kind of liability.
You cannot insulate scientists making errors in good faith from any kind of liability, if you make the wilful frauds liable. Because there is no 100% way of distinguishing the two.
You don't need to be 100%. We assume innocent until proven guilty in other contexts. At least some criminals are known to go free because we cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt they really did it. However we get a lot of them. It isn't perfect, but it is a standard.
Despite innocent until proven guilty, there are innocent people in prison or on death row. I doubt that is a standard that any scientist would agree to.
Scientists who publish research in a journal, and then it turns out that this research is wrong, for whatever reason, should not be held liable for the consequences of this.
Not that I'm in favor of the proposed measure, but saying because we can't identify wilful frauds 100% of the time then we can't protect the non-fraudsters, is just a bit silly, no? You have this kind of problem detecting any kind of fraud.
One test is, is there written communication between people about committing the fraud? If so, there you go.
I don't believe you're engaging in good faith here, so I'm not going to reply any more, but if you're interested in having a productive conversation, try to think about what I might be meaning a little more and then reply instead of taking the least sensical interpretation and responding to that. Or, if you like, you might reply to multiple interpretations of what I said if you're not sure which one I mean, and that way we can advance the dialogue.
Let me sum up the discussion for you. I am arguing that scientists should not be held liable for the consequences of published research that turns out to be wrong (for whatever reasons). That is the status quo.
Now you are saying, introducing liability is fine, as we can deal with that in this or that way. I am pointing out that all of these ways are inherently flawed, to which you respond that yes, this is true, but in other walks of life we are dealing with these things too. To which I am replying, that's fine, but if we don't introduce liability, we will have none of these problems in the first place.
So you see, it is not me who is not engaging properly with the other's argument. So I am happy to finish this discussion as well.
Thank you very much for sharing this, and the accompanying documentation. I had no idea that Ireland had such a system in place. It seems really elegant and efficient, and better than say the Condorcet voting method. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method)
^ This, exactly. In France, digital rights isn't at the forefront of people's worries either (environment, inflation and buying power, societal questions, security, etc). That being said, at least in France, they also stand for a more direct form of democracy, and they seem to apply internally what they preach, which if true would be a unique feature.
Then again, I don't know for sure if this is really the way they operate or not. I was never part of this party, because although they know being called "pirate" party is a turnoff for voters, they don't seem able to take the logical step of changing it. They seem nice enough, with some interesting proposals, but what working adult has time for participating in self-defeating orgs?
yup, I can imagine some adversarial changes being made to the effect that the document generated by this online form can be refused by the administration in question.
OR if there are people interested in efficiency in this administration, despite what the current state of things would suggest, they could embrace this development, buy the rights to this and implement it on their website for everyone to enjoy. One can dream.
Such people exist. I have a few acquaintances in city government. They're interested in helping, although some are either busy, tangled in red tape, or unimaginative. They are definitely not hostile through.
The end of coal has not happened on Germany, who went back to using massive amounts of coal as Russian gas stopped being available : 33.2% of all German electricity came from coal in 2022.
https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Stromerzeugung_2022...
(slide 17 braunkohle + steinkohle)
I'd say it's slowly happening. There was a large drop in 2019[0] by around 25% (~50TWh) from 2018, ignoring the 2020 drop (around 25% ~33TWh compared to 2019) due to the pandemic, 2021 was almost back to 2019 levels (-3.5%) and 2022 was an increase by ~6.5% compared to 2019. Looking at quaterly data[1] it looks like 2023 will be well below 2019 again. And no, it hasn't been replaced by gas[2], although there's no clear trend in gas for electricity, if anything gas consumption is down due to the war.
You're not missing anything, if anything that's a great example of why you shouldn't use an LLM to handle your whole sales pitch without supervision, the person being pitched to is clearly not interested in the product but asks if they want to make a video with them (probably as a form of paid content) and at one point the LLM starts to reply like it is the one selling the video...
Awful example to use, in the end the LLM here would have ended up buying a video for $80
Actually we've been using automated GPT-4 powered responders in production to get demos on auto-pilot for months, and we have the data to prove it. It's significantly better than Apollo.io because we actually used it in conjunction with Apollo before we switch to completely personalized outbound.
We have lists of demos and sales closed with this already I can happily show anyone who wants to see over a call.
Look, I don't mind at all when I get a cold email that is thoughtful and well targeted. But LLM written emails are very obvious, and irritate me to no end because I feel like this is the future of marketing – endless waves of automatically written spam, generative voice phone calls, and who knows what else
I think LLMs have a huge potential for changing the way we work, and creating hybrid human/AI interfaces where the AI does the boring parts and the human becomes more productive as a result – but with these agent systems it feels you're aiming to completely replace the human and instead go for quantity over quality
At Salesforce and Experian I worked with some exceptional sales people, who would be very likeable and turn a cold email into a $1m/yr contract. These people would be very smart and leverage their network, background and expertise. Maybe AI can completely replace them one day, but in the meantime I think the real money in this area is building tools that one of these professionals can use to 2x, 3x, 10x their workflow.
We had a sales team who did exactly this before these agents, and they got demos on auto-pilot without touching apollo.io or salesforce, because we used GPT-4 to respond like they would using their history of responses. You can set this up yourself using the webinar I linked above. We setup a calendly link with a round-robin scheduler to the whole sales team, and they constantly get demos on auto-pilot.
Parker Harris was actually one of my early mentors, because my first co-founder was the first investor in Salesforce(Halsey Minor). A lot of his advice went into building this.
We're not selling to the CEO, we're selling to the VP of sales who can now a/b test this, or the startup founder who can't afford a sales team yet, and I'm very sure a large percent of reps will fall below the line vs the auto-responders. We increased the number of demos our sales team saw with just GPT-4 auto-responding, then we doubled the total reply rate with personalized outbound. It makes sense that it wouldn't have the exact same reply rate. I'd be happy to give you access to get your insight on the direction we should go if you're interested.
Hi yes this is correct, the lead list 1500 youtube partners to form partnerships and sponsorships, and it actually formed over a dozen deals. You can see the setup here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj-gH4f6RUM
This agent was built for influencer partnerships to help us growth hack
We're also using it to sell Cheat Layer, and getting 10% reply rates vs the cold static outbound in Apollo.io
Information relevant to oneself, ie to the life and management of one's local and larger communities, are what will ultimately make the difference between a well-informed and enlightened citizenry able to make collective choices that result in positive outcomes, and people that base their choices on flimsy information and passing emotion.
News can be information, usually when it has a scientific and/or investigative component, and provides the person reading or watching it with a better/deeper understanding of an issue afterwards. Not all news are information however as running after readership and ratings often result in sensationalism and clickbaiting with zero or negative value. Information isn't just news either, and books, longform articles, documentaries, etc also provide very valuable inputs that help to understand how the world around us work and make better choices.
What I find disingenuous in the article shared here is that all news are treated as being basically of the empty / sensationalist / inflammatory kind. The author of the article seems also blissfully unaware that journalists provide an essential service in democracies, by scrutinizing public action as well as what is happening with the other parts of society (economic players, scientists, organizations of all kinds..). There can be no informed citizenry without ethical and well-functionning news sources. Trying to say one should seek such quality in news sources and leave aside the sensationalist partisan crap is sadly not the point the author makes, instead advocating for people to just ignore the news altogether.
Don't be naive. The citizenry doesn't make any significant choices. Western democracy is a sham. There are elections, yes, but voters are subject to large-scale manipulation, mainly through mass education and mass media. Not so much to determine who they cast their vote for, as to ensure compliance with the system itself, and its very limited set of choices. The range of acceptable opinions, and the matching political choices, are determined by the real rulers - presumably the billionaire class. Significant dissent on real issues is quickly crushed.
This is an overly cynical take. Ultimately all of the power in the US resides with the voters. Yes they are susceptible to manipulation, however they have the tools to resist the manipulation if they so choose.
It's a fallacy to think that because one person can't single-handedly change the world that change is impossible or that people in aggregate have no power. It is this fallacy that is at the center of trained helplessness.
It is the idea that if people want cleaner streets, they are incapable of sweeping them. If they want more supportive communities, they can't walk out their door and help someone.
To paraphrase, western democracies have problems, but the other systems are worse. If one accepts that democracy remains our best bet, the question becomes how to make democracy function better. This isn't just a question of what system of government, vote, decision, etc, but also of how well informed the citizenry is, and to what extent they feel empowered to be politically active. Billionaires do have an outsized power to influence in general, and in the US in particular (super PACs, etc), but other powers can act effectively against them (justice, press, NGOs and other forms of organized civic actions..). Switzerland has very frequent votes on a wide array of issues, giving citizens constant opportunities to act on the way their country / district / city operates.
At the local level a single voter can have a huge impact because there is very little participation at the smaller scale. A citizen that engages with their local rep or councilmember can effectively advocate for tangible improvements to their own life and their neighbors, and those actions (improving a public park, helping families get their children to pre-K, coaching a youth sports team, starting up an activities program for seniors etc) can provide far more genuine impact than any amount of "global" politics.
If you want the cynical angle, you can put time and money into a local politician and do way more manipulation to enrich yourself than anything large-scale.
Yes, and recent examples show it:
- News coverage allowed whole populations to understand a pandemic was happening and what actions were being taken by governments to tackle this issue. News also allowed public debates over policies to be known to citizens.
- News coverage allowed people to follow closely the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war that followed, including its atrocities, which did lead to specific actions in the form of extra support for Ukraine.
- another example given in this discussion was that news allow one to form an understanding of current issues in their country and community and therefore to vote as an enlightened citizen. This is vital in a democracy.
I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).
This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.
This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.
These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.
Here's a 5 minutes vid the center for Game Science published at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdrraeJyhoQ Some numbers here: https://dragonbox.com/about/algebra-challenge