It's interesting to think about how the culture around AI can also loosely be considered as coalescing between these two camps. But the camp who are the descendants of Leavis, if we can call them that, includes many scientists who (before AI) would have agreed with Snow.
There just might be an empirical fact that when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all scientist" or "all intelectuals", that person is just full of it.
At best they are bushitting. More likely, they are trying to achieve political goal by creating us vs them dynamic of two simple camps.
>when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all [ anyone ]", that person is just full of it.
It's just that our society, at least in the US, is pretty much built around projecting opinions, and a whole lot of other attributes, onto large groups of "others".
As a nation, we kind of started out that way from the outset, and it's hard to develop better ways of interacting at scale once tendency becomes culture.
I identified with this article despite being a new mom rather than dad. I was minted in the ambition track and have alighted on work I find meaningful.
I still wake up with a burning fire in my stomach for my work. This was dulled somewhat the first few months postpartum; it wasn't entirely gone, but it felt like a different person had taken over the reins, one who only cared about the baby and nothing else. Now the fire is back.
I do not know how to navigate this at all. As the author of the linked article searches for good father figures in vain, so do I. The search feels even more difficult. Everywhere I am met with young mothers who confess that whatever meaning they felt from their work feels like a distant shadow of what they feel with their child, and that they are only too happy to stay home. The other direction includes women who are militantly childfree, or who offload an unacceptable level of hours onto hired labor.
I wholly agree with the author's main thrust: for some people, the ambition is still there and unhelpfully competes with the ambition to be a perfect parent. When the expectation for mothers is as high as it is, the situation feels impossible; it feels as if you're doomed to either traumatize your children or renege whatever great potential you were told you had all your life.
Ivy League classes usually aren't as large as their state school counterparts. At most you might get around a hundred students in a large lecture course; this is rare by design.
You can crunch the numbers on this to verify for yourself – most of these have a population of 6000 undergrads or so. 1/6 of all of the undergraduates need to take a single course for your "up to a thousand" to be true.
I agree that a citation would be nice, but the number of students is indeed large for Ivy League courses (as per the article, in this econ course, he had 86 students for a class that usually only has 30).
What's interesting is that you don't realize how much of that stuff from Walmart had artistic processes embedded into it along the production line.
Did those shower curtains have a design? Did your sweater have a color and style? Probably so, but you never pay attention to how the world of "fine art" refracts into your daily life.
If the products were cheap, it's likely someone unpaid is responsible for the design. See, for example, the lawsuit against Zara over theft of ideas from small-time designers [1].
In any case, cheap Chinese brands do the same thing as Zara en masse (copying designs – note the "external suppliers" bit in its defense PR), and those products then end up in Walmart/on Amazon. The artists starve but you have your shower curtains and are happy with the price.
I do. My aunt is a pattern designer for ... Shower curtains at Walmart. Yup she works for a supply house in NY that designs shower curtains and her main customer is walmart
Ha! That's amazing! Well I take it back for shower curtains (congrats to your aunt!). I do think the point still stands for Amazon sellers and Zara, but maybe I'm not giving Walmart enough credit.
Even when people are paid, it’s not necessarily fair nor driving the price paid - like clothing/purse manufacturing in low income countries for high income markets.
The same experience happened to me, but it was even better – I was told I had a "little paronychia" and lanced without anesthetic. Her scalpel rubbing against two nerves in the nailbed of my thumb, the ER doctor lanced and scraped without so much as lidocaine (or even tylenol!)
The next day I almost lost my thumb, because this sadist that enjoyed cutting me open without any painkillers didn't bother to check whether the infection spread to my bone. I was also misdiagnosed by her, and would have lost it had my PC not found a hand surgeon in the nick of time.
Meanwhile, to curtains on either side of me at this hospital were people who were clearly homeless and had come in with some fentanyl withdrawal symptomps, but mostly so that they could sleep on a bed. When my partner tried to intervene and say that he's never seen me in this much pain, the doctor looked at me like I was a junkie, telling me that "it wouldn't hurt if I wasn't acting up."
I understand the "next, next" that happens from burnout, but this was next level sadism. No empathy; she actually seemed to enjoy my pain. No legal action was possible since this was an "emergency room environment" and she was only there "part time."
This was UCSF Saint Francis/ Dignity Health in Nob Hill. Please avoid this hospital if you're in San Francisco.
Sorry that happened to you. I personally will probably never go to an ER willingly ever again. If you land in an ER without someone that cares about you as an advocate to look over you....IDK I wouldn't want to be in that position.
This thread is filled with terrible people. Self righteous self aggrandizing zero real world experience "Justice warriors" I hope they all need an ER someday to see just how dire it really has become. Maybe that will shove some real world knowledge into their empty heads.
Neither of us is the villain here. The people massively abusing the system are.
I realize my comment is not "nice" but the people on here jumping on villainize my real life experience are terrible people. Both of us were wronged by a system. We did not do the wrong. We just noticed what was a large cause of it because we actually experienced it.
technically, it was the supervising technical director.
The only reason this happened (I don't think "working from home" was very common in 1999) was because she just had a baby! I love this story because it feels like good karma – management providing special accommodations for a new mom saves the show.
Articles like this [1] (re: Rochdale gang) are contributing to the impression of a link in the UK. There's also the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal [2] which affected an estimated 1,400 girls specifically in Rotherham. Population of Rotherham is 265,800, for reference. In both these cases, girls were charged and the offenders are Pakistani.
There is also a recent video of a girl wielding an ax and knife to protect her and her sister in Scotland [3]. She has been charged with brandishing weapons. Interestingly, the BBC has issued an article [4] claiming that it was a "Bulgarian couple" that the girls approached, and to not "spread misinformation." I am a researcher of Slavic languages, so I can tell you from watching the video in [3] that the accents featured in this video are not Bulgarian. I am not willing to stake a claim in what they actually are (someone else is welcome to comment).
Actually, I'm quite alarmed that the BBC is claiming this, as I generally consider the BBC reputable.
In my experience, ChatGPT, at least, seems to have had multiple languages used to train its corpus. I am guessing this based on its interaction with me in a different language, where it changed English idioms like "short and sweet" to analogous versions in that language that were not direct translations.
But my guess is that the data sets used from the other languages are smaller (and actually, even if it had perfect access to every single piece of data on the internet, that would still be true, due to the astonishing quantity of English-language data out there compared to the rest. Your comment validates that). With less data, one would expect a poorer performance in all metrics for any non-Anglophone place, including the "cultural world view" metric.
ChatGPT is worse in Russian. Example: after accurately noting that a name appeared in a particular Russian book, it asked if I wanted the direct quote in Russian. I said yes. At this point it switched to Russian output but could no longer find the name in that book, and then apologized for having used what seemed to have been "approximations" about the book before.
(I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in English was right, the name is there)
I was using Qwen3 locally in thinking mode, and noted that even if it is talking to me in Japanese, it is doing it's "thinking" steps in English. Not having a full understanding of how the layers in an LLM handle language connections I can't say for sure, but for a human this would result in subpar outcomes.
For example (not actual output):
Input: "こにちは"(konichwa)
Qwen Thinking: "Ah, the user has said "こにちは", I should respond in a kind and friendly manner.
Qwen Output: こにちは！
It quiiiickly gets confused in this, much quicker than in English.
I'm kind of wondering when will it become a universal understanding that LLMs can't be trained with equal amounts of Japanese and Chinese contents in training data due to Han Unification, making these two languages incoherent mix of two conflicting syntax in one. It's remarkable that Latin languages is not apparently facing issues without clear technical explanation as to why, which I'm guessing has to do with the fact of granularity of characters.
That said, in my tiny experience, LLMs all think in their dataset majority language. They don't adhere to prompt languages, one way or another. Chinese models usually think in either English or Chinese, rarely in cursed mix thereof, and never in Japanese or any of their non-native languages.
Would they not quickly bocome divergent vectors? In the same way that apple and Apple can exist in the same vector set with totally different meanings?
So all information gleaned reading a glyph in the context of japanese articles would be totally different vectors to the information gleaned from the same glyph in Chinese?
I don't know, but at least older Qwen models were a bit confused as to what words belong to which languages, and recent ones seem noticeably less sure about ja-JP in general. Maybe it vaguely relates Hanzi/Kanji character being more coarse grained than Latin alphabets so that there aren't enough character counts to tell apart or something.
I don’t think this can be solved until there is massive investment to train LLM in native Japanese. The current ChatGPT tokenizer still use BPE and you can’t even present a Japanese character with a single token
Ah nah, that was just me here, I'm no good with the phone IME. I tried a bunch of different sentences. It always thought in English.
It was pretty good at one shot translations with thinking turned off however, I imagine thinking distracts it from going down the Japanese only vector paths.
Quite a few reasoning LLMs do reasoning in English only. Because the RL setup specifically forces them to do so.
Why?
Because the creators want the reasoning trace to be human readable. And without a pressure forcing them to think in English, they tend to get weird with the reasoning trace. Wild language-mixing, devolved grammar, strange language-mixed nonsense words that the LLM itself seemingly understands just fine.
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