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NewsReaction Confirmation Bias

Back to episode — Episode 2494 CWSA 06/03/24

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r tiny smooth brains, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tanker, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day. The thing that makes everything better is called the simultaneous sip. It happens about now. I hope everybody's here.…

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All right. Well, there's a study that says the number of college students diagnosed with PTSD has more than doubled. Do you believe that? I believe that the number diagnosed is more than doubled. Do you think that the number with PTSD has doubled, or do you think maybe it's just because it has a name?

Here's a thought experiment. If I said to you tomorrow there's a new condition, it's a mental condition in which you worry too much about what other people will think about you and it stops you from doing some things, and you'd say, well, that sounds like something that has some other name. And I'd say no, no, it has a new name. It has a new name. There's a new condition. How many people would be diagnosed with that condition tomorrow? Millions. Because as soon as you have a new name for something, suddenly you think, well, I got a name for it. So see which side is this? This side's a little light. Yeah, I think it has something to do with the fact that it became a popular thing that everybody had a name for, and once they had a name for it, everybody had it. We got diagnosed.

But on top of that, I do think that the lesser physical activity and, you know, maybe the ultra-processed foods and just the terror of living in the modern world, it might make it worse. But I would think that 60% of it is just because they gave something a name that was a common experience before it had a name, meaning that people felt bad and traumatized for a variety of reasons, just didn't have a name.

Well, the Wall Street Journal says that AI might be slowing down. And could it be possible it was overrated? Now this falls squarely into the category of things I told you before other people told you, which is it seemed to me logically that once you trained it on everything you c

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ould find, you know, all the good stuff, you would run out of things to make it smarter, which is what's happening. They're running out of new material to train it. So it's as smart as it's going to get from the things it's already trained on. So instead they create what they call synthetic training material, which is they have one AI hallucinate, and then the hallucinations became what trains the…

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