What’s a common “fact” that’s spread around that’s actually not true and pisses you off that too many people believe it?
AI/llm is just a statistical word predictor.
You could perhaps make the argument that it’s a statistical token predictor, but that is about as useful as boiling down various weather services as “just statistics” or the economy as “just statistics”.
Making a language model that speaks a language is not that hard, but the world of science underlying how this is done is anything but simple. Saying it’s just statistics is ridiculously reductive like saying your response to this comment is just chemistry. Context driven tokenization, byte level byte pair encoding, RoBERTa, fine tuning methods, direct preference optimization, dataset curation and management, and curriculum learning for targeted performance and memory are things that are being developed and refined very fast (like weekly or monthly breakthroughs sometimes) and with pretty staggering performance increases. It still is not for everyone because power tools injure, but instead of saying “just a statistics engine” say what you really mean “I don’t understand it, but I believe XXX is a bad use case for LLMs.”
To a lesser extent that any company is “programming AI”. Not in the way that you mean it; curriculum learning, guard rails, and fine running are all extremely indirect. Nobody had their hands specifically in a model’s parameter space directly.
Aight, ima bite. LLMs are just statistical word predictors.
I would agree that parts of weather services are weather pattern predictors (which likely do include some machine learning nowadays) and certain aspects of economics are statistic predictions (the rest is either monopoly or pseudoscience lol), so yeah both are statistics.
I’ll also agree that the statistics of “AI” is difficult and honestly beautiful. Transformers really are ingenious and the methods for optimizing them are as well.
However, I don’t think it is comparable to “your response to this is just chemistry”
There’s a significant difference between these systems.
One is a machine emerging from physics over billions of years to eventually comprehend various aspects of the universe and social interaction as a byproduct, experiencing the illusion of free will, and deciding to respond/not-resopond to a comment.
The other, is a machine built with the sole purpose of predicting the “right” next word. It’s a novel area of science, but it is a science and it is still just a word (or “token” if you want to be pedantic) predictor.
Saying your response to the comment is just chemistry is more like saying AI is just the laws of electromagnetism; both of which are stupid. But saying a specific statistical modeling method is in fact a statistical modeling method is just a fact.
And I’m not saying this as someone who is pure “anti-AI” since it does have its uses. The work going into LLMs is incredible and the breakthroughs for LLMs typically can be extended to other machine learning problems.
If you can train a model to notice unsafe code, who do you think will find bugs/exploits easier in a large code base? A model you can parallelize that never gets tired or a pen-tester/programmer who will eventually need to sleep? Obviously the model wins for vulnerabilities that are common and that is significant because if they are common vulnerabilities, you probably have them in your code base.
Machine translation is, of course, the standard perfect use case for LLMs. With newer models even idioms can get translated well, and there are many more uses outside the realm of text-based models too.
But again, all this is still 100% statistics. These models are statistical models. They are using previous data and specified parameters, “guardrails”, etc. to build a model which when given some new data will give an output with probabilistic accuracy. That is literally the core of statistics.
On the note of “no one has their hands in a model’s parameter space directly” that’s actually false and there’s been more active study into finding and “inhibiting” certain parameters that have correlated with “lies.”
But yes, the point of AI (like that of any statistical model) is to remove the need for manual tuning. So yeah the point is mostly to not mess with parameters directly, but to build a framework by which you can basically just pump training data in and get a model which makes high accuracy predictions. That’s the same point for polynomial regression, there are just more applications for neural nets than simple regression models.
Sure there are some who are trying to build true artificial intelligence by replicating the neuroanatomy of living things, which could be non algorithmic and possibly even eventually sentient. But LLMs? Yeah no, those are just a fancy new statistical modeling method. It’s new so there’s more to explore and lots of stuff that hasn’t been tried yet, but that’s just how new things are in science and math.
LLMs are just statistical word predictors.
I took some time to reflect on this post because I don’t prefer to be the moron, hopefully that didn’t slow you down because your response is a good response.
To start I think that hyping up the thinking people do as a counter argument is exactly the same thing I was doing by describing recent advancements in AI and I’m not sure it moves us foward, so I will count that as a wash.
The next thing I will add here is an article I read… idk awhile ago but it shows the explainability of AI decision making in a more advanced way than like Shapley parameters for example: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html
And you basically hit it for me: my biggest gripe is that we are not doing one word at a time predictors any more. So functionally yes it’s true, but practically we are doing next word prediction for LLMs in the same way you’re doing next word prediction when you talk: you know where you’re going and we build sentences one word at a time.
I also don’t think it’s fair to say that “oh fundamentally LLM stuff is just electromagnetism” because while that is literally true, I think it’s still a better analogy to say statistics vs chemistry. The comments are going to make you feel a certain way, you’ll make a response based on that feeling and what you know, and we will continue. I think that’s pretty functionally the same as “here’s an open prompt, we need to answer it, let’s take a statistical approach to the specific wording we will use”.
Now that we are including end goals, reflection, and rule sets, I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s just one word at a time prediction anymore because training and optimization are happening at the prompt and response scale, not the word scale anymore.
I have not read anything recently that is purporting to do something useful by editing NN weights directly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. I think that is actually just a side discussion in the end.
In the end, if there is evidence of planning and then adding words to meet this plan, even if it goes one word at a time, I think we are escaping “statistical word generator”. And if you say that we didn’t escape that threshold, I would suggest that when we talk we are doing the same thing: we understand grammar at a pretty fundamental level, but when it comes to vocab there are only a handful of words that make sense and we are making that decision in a way that is not altogether different from LLM sentence generation. I think the only sane way to disprove that is if you want to go looking for substantially offbeat phrasing or expression that would be outside the bounds of “statistical regularity” that LLMs are using.
Unless you want to show a history of totally whackadoodle phrasing for ideas in lemmy, LLMs are no more staticstical word predictors than you are.
Okay, yes, we aren’t doing single words at a time (technically some models do chunk long words anyway so even from near the beginning we weren’t doing “singular” words at any time)
However, you are both right and wrong in your assertion that LLMs our equivalent human responses.
The translation of thoughts to words and words to motor functions both can be approximated by ANNs. And yes, the work done to select words we use is a probabilistic process like you describe. We hear patterns in language and that makes us more likely to use that phrasing. The more you hear a phrase the more likely you are to use it over another and when two or more phrases would communicate what you want to say your brain basically just picks one.
So, If speech production (or sentence construction) was what you meant by saying “it’s the same for human responses,” then yes, we agree. Both are probabilistic word generators and likely work in similar ways. (In fact I think place cells were found in Wernicks area (?) or one of the other speech corteces which means some of our word selection is likely similar to the results from transformer architectures)
However, if you meant the entirety of human response—as in from hearing/reading a comment, thinking about it, responding—is the same as current LLMs generating text. I strongly disagree.
The actual process of “thinking” is not something an ANN (especially a non-recurrent one) can do. The ability to ruminate on thoughts and make changes/learn-new-things simply by trying to formulate ideas before even deciding to comment cannot be accomplished with a pre-trained static net, not even one with memory or the illusion of memory like current LLMs. (Not to mention that identity also plays a large role in our responses and it too cannot arise from current deterministic architectures)
As for me asserting human response is chemistry is more like asserting AI is electromagnetism, there are many reasons why, but the simplest illustration would be this:
- I think it is entirely possible to build an inorganic but still functional human brain on electrical hardware. (In other words, full blown transhumanism or at the very least, “AGI”) If human response is chemistry in organics, it would be electromagnetism in silicon.
So, If speech production (or sentence construction) was what you meant by saying “it’s the same for human responses,” then yes, we agree. Both are probabilistic word generators and likely work in similar ways.
This is what I meant.
However, if you meant the entirety of human response—as in from hearing/reading a comment, thinking about it, responding—is the same as current LLMs generating text. I strongly disagree.
That would be crazy, I’m glad you would disagree with that.
As for me asserting human response is chemistry is more like asserting AI is electromagnetism, there are many reasons why, but the simplest illustration would be this:
I think it is entirely possible to build an inorganic but still functional human brain on electrical hardware. (In other words, full blown transhumanism or at the very least, “AGI”) If human response is chemistry in organics, it would be electromagnetism in silicon.
This is moving into a funny gray area, but what you are talking about is, I think, only possible if you take a route like the one covered in Jeff Hawkins’ “A thousand brains”. It’s not the most fun read if you’re not into neuroscience, but the second half is pretty relevant regardless.
“Statistical word predictor” makes it sound like they’re doing something difficult. They’re a glorified predictive text built on theft.
You’re literally arguing with the thing they’re debunking by just saying the thing they’re debunking
"survival of fittest "was not coined by DARWIN, it was by herbert who co-opt his research.
Chronic lyme does not exist as a disease, and its coined by non-scientist which has snowballed into a large industry(providing questionable testing, LYME DOCTORA) by providing services that is equivalent to pseudoscience AND Belief its in more than 1 country, eventhough its mostly found deer ticks in americas, and not ANY TICK species. people actually went a little crazy with the Rx. basically people have what psyches called, delusional parasitosis, or psychosomatic disorders, i visited these forums and it seems alot of these people have mental illness+ they long term damage from using supplements and plant extracts that are likely somewhat toxic. seems pervasive in the midwest, and what a surprise chronic use of antibiotics from these “lyme doctors” also have cause long term damage. and this pairs with homeopathy/naturopathy/alternative medication.
Most MSMs prior to trumps 2nd or 1st term is not “liberal leftist” media, none existed for decades. the only 1 i see was a podcast/on a obscure channel and time Demcry now! is the closest thing to be talking even something remotely “left”. every other just fawns over “Fallen soldiers” even cnn did often, plus its significant amount of copaganda show.
also recently the artemis launch is , and the cold war launches are wildly still believed by asians as faked, and done in by studio. the most common excuse is why "is there wind in space, because the flag is “flapping”…etc. i was actually surprised older asians still widely believe it. during 2019, and currently to.
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I’m trying to understand what you’re saying. Would you say that someone who identifies as nonbinary is not transgender? If so, does that mean that transgender only exists within the gender binary?
Things being “illegal”.
No it’s not against the law. Just because someone can sue you doesn’t mean what you did was a crime. Just because a business can’t sell a particular product doesn’t mean it’s illegal to have. You can’t ‘get arrested’ for half the shit people think is ‘illegal’.
The only electricity generation we should have is solar.
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But in the end isn’t all energy solar?
Most energy sources trace back to the sun’s power through direct or indirect processes. Fossil fuels, wind, hydro, and biomass all originate from solar-driven cycles on Earth. About the only thing you could argue that isn’t solar is geothermal. But even that exists because some sun exploded created gas and dust that clumps together and forms a planet.
Sure, that is a statement a human could type or vocalize.
I assure you I am human. But isn’t that exactly what an AI would say?
Although I also believe we live in a simulation so in the end maybe we are all AI.
Why do you say that? Isn’t it better to diversify to guarantee supply when the sun is out? What’s the problem with wind, hydro or geothermal?
Plus, having other means to generate electricity would also somewhat bring down the cost of solar cells due to lower demand.
I’m saying a diversification of generation is needed. All eggs in any one particular basket is ignorance.
Nuclear is fine, it’s only unsafe when people are idiots. Oh wait, actually scratch that, in that case it’s not safe. /s
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Chernobyl is hardly the only meltdown we have seen. 3 reactors in Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Fermi 1, K-19 soviet submarine, the US SL-1 test reactor. And there are plenty of non-meltdown radiation releases. Newer designs do seem safer, but the track record of nuclear power is checkered, at best.
That and the fossil fuel industry creating Greenpeace to spread propaganda far and wide under the guise of environmentalism
I’ve heard the argument that nuclear is also bad because it still uses steam turbines which require grease/cooling oil derived from petroleum. Lot of anti turbine people for that reason. I wholeheartedly disagree and am what you could consider a highly knowledgeable person in the matter.
I think we have to settle with the fact that all oil deposits are going to be extracted and used by humanity. I’d prefer if we used it slowly to grease turbine bearings rather than just burning it all the time.
Also, until fairly recently, we were using whale oil for lubrication in a lot of things. As fucked up as it is, that shit is renewable. There are alternatives for lubrication that are slightly more expensive than petroleum products.
I absolutely agree with everything you’ve said so far.
And yet the petroleum industry is pushing so hard to brainwash the public to think another Chernobyl is inevitable, even though they can make the very products that can prevent it.
“Half of Americans voted for this”
No, half the voting population voted for the guy, but not necessarily all he is doing. It’s actually only about 20-22% of the population that actually voted this guy into office. Far from “half of Americans”, so just stop it.
it also doesnt count un-registered people, it just assume anyone of at age that can vote dint, some arnt even registered, and some are unable to vote for one reason or another that is not due to personal choice.
NPR: Trump would have won even if everyone eligible voted. I agree that substantial Trump voters disapprove of current events, but the truth is one in two US citizens preferred Trump over Harris on Election Day. Not to mention turnout was 64% not 42%, so it’s 30% not 20%
so it’s 30% not 20%
Fair. I was going by population numbers vs votes cast and didn’t have the voter turnout numbers handy when I originally wrote that out and was paraphrasing from that to save time.
But that’s still far from half, and I’m tired of people using the misconception/phrase to justify their xenophobic rhetoric.
oh i thought you were referring to people saying it to illustrate how bad the system is and how important trump winning the election was lol. i definitely agree that it doesn’t justify what he’s doing (even if it legally stands, even if it legally stands, it doesn’t stand socially)
but it is not inaccurate to say nearly half of the citizens preferred him on election day. per the link, pew research shows 48% of non-voters would’ve voted for trump as opposed to 45%, with a pretty high validity.
People who didn’t care enough to vote are just as bad as the ones who voted for Trump. They were warned what was coming and they allowed it
While voter apathy is widespread in the US, note that voter disenfranchisement has been honed over decades so many people either didn’t get to vote or could not vote because the impact to them short-term was too great to afford making decisions for the long term (e.g. people losing their jobs while living paycheck-to-paycheck).
Mathematically speaking, each of them is half as bad as one Trump voter
Approximately half as bad, in raw outcome terms. A vote for the opponent is significantly worse than not voting. But yeah, big losers for not even voting.
A lot of people who voted for him didn’t like either choice and thought he was least evil for whatever reason. We can never know how evil Harris would have been - even if she wins in the future that doesn’t show what she would have been if she was in now. The situation and people change over time
lol. we 100% could know harris would be less evil than trump. it would have been 4 more years of essentially the same administration but with a younger bend which likely would have been better. only reason people think of trump less evil than harris are ones you cheer on the ice things so they have a twisted version of right and wrong.
That is a matter of opinion. The ‘right’ has different beliefs from you and finds many of the things ‘the left’ supports wrong\evil.
Yeah and Nazis had different opinions about Hitler so we definitely should just be all philosophical and say there really is no difference. /s
What a, putting it lightly, not well thought out argument.
I didn’t say there was no difference in how they are ‘evil’. I said they were both evil and Harris has evils that to the right are just as unplatable if not more than Trump is to the left.
I think they believe that but I have watched thier philosophies dropped by their party to the point where whatever they represent changes whenever. The party is so different now than they were in the 70’s that their own politcians would see the current incarnation as evil. Add to this the blatant violations of the constitution. Americans at the least should be able to understand the bill of rights and how it fits into the declaration of independence’s grievences that lead to the revolutionary war. What happened in the residences in chicago reads exactly like colonial america you just have to replace ice with redcoats. The fact people call themselves americans and think that due process does not apply to all is just. well. frustrating.
It is very frustrating as someone with those ideas that are lost. Nobody is close to what I want. The left keeps moving to socialism and the right to authoritarianism
the left maybe but not democrats who until recently have been going right such that they have a lot in commone with 70’s republicans. Even then the movement left is with a minority caucus within the party but heck it just used to be bernie practically.
“We are not collectively responsible for the output of this system we collectively use to run our country”. Disagree.
No, half the people who actually showed up to vote voted for the guy
He only got 49.8% of the popular vote in 2024, so while it’s close enough that most people would accept rounding up, even this statement is not factual in the most literal interpretation.
Nope. Everyone who didn’t vote, voted for this…and every American who isn’t out on the streets right now, fighting to end this, is silently supporting it. The world gave Americans the benefit of the doubt in 2016, but not this time. Y’all fucked up big time, and it’s your mess to clean up.
Maybe check your facts. NPR: Trump would have won even if everyone eligible voted
Trump won in 2024 with just under 50% of the vote, 49.7%-48.2% over Democrat Kamala Harris.
Roughly 64% of the eligible-voting population turned out in 2024, the second highest since 1904. 2020 was the highest.
But even if everyone who could vote did, Trump would have won by an even wider margin, 48%-45%, according to Pew’s validated voters survey
Whether it’s your intent or not, the narrative you’re spreading is used to dissuade folks from demanding better than the choice between a shit taco and a turd sandwhich. It affirms a shitty status quo and demands political patience in the face of a fucked up world… to the benefit of fascists and their corporate cronies.
Man I like npr but its missing a lot. It says he would have won by a larger margin but he would get a lower total percentage. So its basically saying that many who did not vote would have voted for a third party as in the election it was apparent just over 2% but in the theoretical one the third party would have won 7%. Of course that is the popular voted and it does not go into where the differences were and for which side. Given the electoral college it really comes down to the swing states. In other words does the thing over the country remain the same just looking at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Because if they had moved by less than a percent then the election would have went the other way. The real question is if the third party voters really feel the country would be just as bad under kamala as trump. like how bad they view ice and war and tarrifs and dismantling of agencies and firing of experienced people and having a ever more right supreme court and such. From what I can tell they think it would be just the same using online coments anyway.
I don’t doubt that. All i was saying was that, if you didn’t vote, it was an automatic vote for what America got. I’ve always said that Trump isn’t the hero America needed, but he’s the one they deserve.
nah, the DNC refused to actually released the election autopsy, they know they won but they dint want to call out the rigging. 2024 was so obviously rigged by musk and other people. why should the Dem voters have to vote overwhelmingly to overcoming rigging by the republicans every time, the DINODNC are totally complicit in allowing trump a nd the gop to win the elections.
What I would give to make everyone in the world understand that a computer responding to a string of 0s and 1s in the order directed is not thinking.
How do you define “thinking”?
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Spontaneous signals sent in the human brain in response to stimuli. The thing about computers is that their only stimuli is 0s and 1s, and their only response is 0s and 1s. They’re a complex system of switches. Humans experience the entire world of stimuli, and we made this system of switches to convey representations of the meanings we create in our brains. A computer has no mechanism to understand that the purpose of these 0s and 1s we’re sending is to ask and answer questions, to solve a problem of how to build a bridge, to come up with a compelling story to make our friends laugh. We can program it to very accurately perform an action. That’s what it can do.
Spontaneous signals sent in the human brain in response to stimuli.
This sounds a bit circular to me. Almost like saying “thinking is what brains do.”
I’m also getting the sense that you’re partly talking about consciousness there, which I would personally treat as a separate subject. It’s not obvious to me that in order to be able to think, one would also need the capacity to experience.
Almost like saying “thinking is what brains do.”
That’s not wrong to say though, because it’s true. Thought is a function of a brain. There’s no mechanism for non-brains to think. I think you’re confusing computation for thought. Computation can result in a product that looks like it came from thought, but computation itself fundamentally has nothing in common with thought. It’s not a spontaneous, creative response to the stimuli we experience in the world. There is no process of meaning-making. There can’t be, because it has no mechanism to understand what it’s responding to.
Brains are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics. I don’t see why that same function couldn’t be performed in silicon. I wouldn’t say our current systems can think in the sense that people understand the term, but I see no reason to assume they couldn’t in the future - or that thinking is reserved only for wet meat computers.
I don’t really see how you could make a brain out of silicone, because thought a product of cells. The cells send signals to each other, and that’s how you get thought. You could maybe grow a brain in a lab, but I don’t see how a plastic replication would work. And even if you did grow one in a lab, who knows how not being connected to a body would impact its ability to develop thought.
That’s an unserious definition because if thinking is defined as happening in the human brain, then monkeys can’t think. Obviously monkeys can think.
In its most basic form: the continuous formation/recall of associations and disassociations between stimuli.
That is the atom of thinking. But even that rules out ANNs pretrained using gradient descent since they can’t learn in response to stimuli.
The next simple step up is the ability to overwrite those learned associations which probably is solved by completing the first task but it’s important to note.
The following step up is being able to process those associations/memories themselves as stimuli which can be associated forming new connections/memories that can be recalled and associated and so on ad infinitum.
That rules out finite non-recursive neural nets, and that still puts us no where near AGI. It’s basically just an ml taxonomic tree builder
The next necessary piece for actual high level thinking is curiosity and action. The system needs to be able to take a concept and a relation (abstract idea of a particular kind of association between two concepts) which currently don’t form a known relationship, and attempt to find the missing concept which would complete that relationship. (Most likely this involves either finding relationship chains between the two which in all other known cases are equivalent to a known relation OR following some procedure to experience the relationship directly as stimuli.)
Lastly, in order to experience the idea of thinking, we first need to have the ability to form temporal associations, but also have working memory of recent past thoughts, and finally the ability to compare those with previous recent memories or the most current stored thoughts. Finding patterns in our thinking helps us be better at thinking. (This is a prerequisite for the experience of free will and consciousness)
That’s what higher level thinking entails.
Of course tuning the system’s response to recognized associations, how memories are stored and recalled, how frequently the system experiences curiosity, etc. will all impact the overall intelligence of the model, but considering most current “AI” don’t even check off the first box, that’s all a bit out of scope.
It doesn’t piss me off at all, but too many people think time is consistent. Time fluctuates, moves faster or slower depending on your relative speed. There could be dead spots in the galaxy/universe where time simply does not pass.
I’m with you aside from the places where time may not pass. Time isn’t a “place” thing. Particles traveling through that space would have time pass for them so long as they were traveling sublight.
Time does not pass for entities traveling at c. Everything else is reference frame.
That’s crazy too. Light travels instintantly, but it takes time to reach us. Reality be cray, i love it.
That’s because light is in a different reference frame than we are.
Your mom so big she absorbs lights refrence frames
Yo momma so fat she got an event horizon.
That’s a good one
This is one thing that always got me. Isn’t this all based on movement? When we talk about time in warped spacetime being different from time “elsewhere” isn’t it usually based on how we track time? (physical clocks, atom vibration, etc…) An example I remember reading about was the light clock on a moving object. The faster you move the “longer” it takes the light to bounce from mirror to mirror, but that shouldn’t change what one bounce was initially defined as.
We defined time as a measurement between two points of “existence” to relate to changes within that period at what I’d call “standard spacetime.” I’ve always felt like one second is one second, it’s just your clock that was affected.
I guess it’s the relative part that gets me. If it’s all down to movement, down to the atom, everything that could happen in 1 earth second on earth happens in the ticking of 3 seconds in altered spacetime does it actually mean anything significant?
…idk now after writing it out I’m more confused about why I was confused. It makes sense, it just feels like it shouldn’t make sense lol
I hear you one hundred percent. If it wasn’t tricky our best minds wouldn’t still be scratching thier heads over it.
Venice is often touted as being the “birthplace of Opera.” When in fact the true birthplace of Opera is Florence. We can credit its development to a group of artists and intellectuals called the Florentine Camerata.
This is extremely important everyone! Please take note of this and the next time you and your fellow construction workers are debating the intricacies of music history, set them straight!
Also, editing to add the little fun fact that one of the Florentine Camerata’s members was Galileo’s dad, Vincenzo Galilei.
I am the very model of a modern Capitano.
I got another one. It bugs me when people say that it’s not possible for two dark haired people to produce a blonde child. These people think they’re so smart because they know genetics exist. But if they learned anything about genetics at all, very basic punnet square genetics you learn in highschool biology explains why it’s not only possible but pretty common. If both dark haired parents are carriers for the blonde gene, there is a 25% chance of a blonde child. And reality is probably more complex than what I learned in highschool.
It’s like the stubborn fuckers who refuse to accept the science of sex and gender being any more complex that “penis man vagina woman”. They think they’re so smart for knowing “basic” biology and refuse to fucking learn anything beyond that.
“Just doing my job” being a valid excuse for causing even minor harm.
Here’s one that makes me angry: the myth that suicide is a criminal offense, that you can be criminally charged for attempted suicide. This myth might make people reluctant to seek help. Police don’t only have power to intervene when there’s a crime. They intervene to protect you if you’re attempting suicide. It is NOT a chargeable offense.
Propaganda from the fossil fuel industry.
Solar panels are the cheapest source of electricity now. Batteries have dropped in price by more than 90% in the past decade, and are now viable for grid-scale storage, addressing the main issue with renewable energy. EVs are competitive with combustion cars, and in some ways superior. Heat pumps are now superior to furnaces in many locations. The solar punk future is now! But you wouldn’t know any of this by listening to the public discourse, mainstream media, and many politicians.
Relevant video from Technology Connections
I got the vibe of his video as soon as I read the first sentence lol.
The average person only lived to be 35 back in the day.
No, the average lifespan was like 35 back in the day. 40 year olds weren’t some rare wrinkled old person, the average was affected by the extremely high childhood mortality. If you could survive the first few years of your life your chances of surviving the next 60 were pretty good.
That being said, even among people who survived childhood, living to the ages we see nowadays was more rare than it is today due to a lot of environmental and societal factors like plagues and war. It wasn’t unheard of, but that is also something that brought the average down to an extent.
We essentially had a plague in 2020, and there are multiple wars going on as we speak. Those factors didn’t disappear.
True, but we don’t wholesale shit in our drinking water any more while riddled with syphilis
The deaths from both the wars going on in the modern day and infectious diseases like COVID are nowhere near on the scale that they were before, especially in terms of the percent of the world population killed by them. We haven’t had deaths on the scale of WWI or the Spanish Flu since those events.
We haven’t had deaths on the scale of WWI or the Spanish Flu since those events.
WWII had 3-5 times the number of deaths (depending on whose numbers you trust) as WWI though? Like, it’s not even close. Even using the highest estimate for WWI (22 million) and the lowest estimate for WWII (70 million) WWII was more than triple the deaths.
The global population at the time of WWI was ~1.8 billion, and at the time of WWII is was 2.3 billion.
So in terms of of percent of the world population, WWI loses.
I will concede that the Spanish flu was a lot worse than COVID.
Fun fact, the bubonic plague never went away. It’s still kicking around the world. Obviously not like it was with The Plague, but still.
There are a couple cases a year in the States. It’s treatable now, that’s the difference
I got relatives that lived to their 90’s in the 1600’s, we may have skewed it a bit
That you only need headlights to see in the dark. Headlights are just as much so other cars can see you, than they are so you can see. In the rain and in the fog, they’re crucial to have on.
I live in the PNW where is rarely sunny and often raining and the number of people who don’t u detest and this is too damn high!
