alt Hacker NewsEh I think the writer should visit poor countries and live among locals. Mistakes and poor judgements compound, and it leads to horrific living conditions (malnutrition, nonexistent hygiene, quack medicines, short-sighted violence, etc)
In fact developed countries are built on top of these "earrings": it's called math (and by extension science in general). If the math is right, it's always right, and it has spared their lucky citizens a LOT of needless misery and wheel-reinvention.
"Thinking for yourself" is overrated if you don't have good framework. See antivaxxers and their "research"
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No, this story takes it to the extreme, that you end up basically having no brain.
Take it this way. People seem to judge that LLMs are not conscious and thus have no real inner experience. And that humans do. So if you replaced a human brain with a very powerful LLM (with some simply residual neural matter), you've basically killed the human. He isn't feeling anything at all anymore, he's just an automaton, basically a flesh robot.
I think this story is a weirdly good discussion point because many people still don't seem to "get it" that success is completely fundamentally irrelevant, and what matters is having a good inner life. You are what happens in your mind -- overall good thoughts and inner life = good life; bad thoughts and inner life = bad life. You can theoretically be the richest man in the world and about the most miserable, and very poor and living the best life.
If we don't kill our definition of good life and success (i.e. reaffirming value as pertaining exclusively to the mind), it will sooner or later kill us, or kill what's good in us. The more we can orient our entire society toward good inner lives and not anything else, the better our lives will be.
Scott Alexander has actually practiced medicine in Haiti as part of a relief effort.