Otto Kretschmer

Yes and there is a scale measuring this - the modesty facet of agreableness in the big five personality model. If we assume a scale from 0 to 100 with Gaussian distribution and average score in the population being 50, teleevangelists as a group would likely score significantly below the population norm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Teleevangelists and cult members are either clinical narcissists or at least people with an above average concentration of narcissistic traits. You just won't have the motivation for so much self promotion if you don't have an unusually high opinion of yourself. Narcissists also love money since it validates their need to feel superior to others.

Uh... knowledge perhaps?

Such positions are also typically simpler and more emotionally satisfying Whan i learned about modern flat earthers, I thought for quite some time that it's satire. I couldn't grasp that someone can seriously believe that lol.

Bump.

Or you're a Schrodinger's cat...

That? I meant that ideological fanaticism is more about group identity than factual accuracy and that such a way of thinking might have evolved in humans as a strategy to maintain group cohesion in hunter gatherer groups living in dangerous environment.

Huh? Catholics (whom I am not) don't need to reject any branches of science ? I used creationism as a shortcut of young eartth creationism which is what's typically understood by that term. The Catholic Church doesnt believe in that.

They do but in a different, less dogmatic way. The Catholic Church officially accepts evolution as a valid scientific theory (see the encyclical Humani Generis from 1950) and does not believe the world to be 6000 years old, the Genesis story is treated more like a metaphore than a literal account. The Genesis account was never taken fully literally by the Catholic Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo already warned against taking it too seriously. Today the Catholic Church accepts all findings of science, including the big bang, it just posits that God is the First Cause.

For 99% of human history being factually accurate was far less important than being socially accepted, a tribal group full of freethinkers without ingroup-outgroup thinking would have fractured and died out. It all mighjt just be evolutionary legacy.

Here in Europe creationism is a fringe thing and the only churches that profess to it are imports from the US, not native European ones. The problem with ideological fanaticism of any kind (religious, political, even economic aka the Austrian school) isn't that it's wrong or unfalsifable but that it's actively harmful. In the US kids have died due to their parents using faith "healing" instead of taking their child to a doctor and let's not even start figuring out how many people died due to political ideologies.

I have experience with debating creationists from over a decade ago as well as recent one with debating Stalinist apologists (who actually consider their belief system to be "science") and honestly, debating such people genuinely feels like trying to punch through a castle wall with a fist - all evidence to the contrary is either rejected outright or reinterpreted to fit the dogma. No change in the core dogmas is possible. One Muslim creationist actually told me she will accept evolution but only if I show her the fossil record of every single generation over millions of years which would require possession of millions or even dozens of millions of fossils. The problem is that for such people their belief system is not just a set of opinions (like prefering bolognese over carbonara) but it seems to be a core part of identity, attacking their beliefs is equal to a personal attack on them and their tribe. But maybe it makes sense to take part in such discussions for the sake of onlookers?

Ok, thank you. I thought it's some shady organization based in Norway that I don't know about.

@TheVat What Norwegian squid?

It's happening again.

So back to the topic. Any ideas?

Lol I quoted a wrong person. I was supposed to quote @swansont's post, not yours. @swansont Chatbots are far from the most important thing in AI. There is this stuff for example: https://deepmind.google/science/alphafold/

What makes you think that AI produces exclusively slop? If AI produces exclusively slop, what makes you think it'll remain like that forever? It's a lot like expecting computers to remain frozen at ENIAC level forever, quite irrational isn't it?

No, DeepSeek uses regular transformer architecture with a few innovative things, mixture of experts (MoE) and multi head latent attention (MLA) but it's a normal LLM. I mostly use Gemini 2.5 Pro in Google AI Studio and Alibaba's Qwen series. Latest Qwen3 VL is at 2.5 Pro level.

Just... what? And when? I read an article some time ago about a Chinese AI based on spiking neural networks that requires ~90% less computational resources but it's an early stage model and I don't remember where the article was published. I also cannot comment on the merits of spiking neural networks themselves as my knowledge of comp sci is modest in general.

Why should anyone dislike this place enough to pull off a DDoS on it?

I am not a student, university education is long beyond me - I graduated with a master's degree in law in 2019. I used to be a big science fan at age 13-14 but that interest waned in favor of military stuff, history/alt history and geopoltiics/current events in addition to a multitude of other lesser interests.

Have you guys read The God Delusion? From what I've read about that book, it seems to have been written mostly for the Anglosphere - young Earth creationism (or creationism in general) is a big thing in the US but here in Poland as well as in other majority Catholic, mainline Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries it barely even exists, the official stance of said churches is theistic evolution which isn't at odds with the theory of evolution.

Hi. I read The Selfish Gene in 2014, now I'm planning to re-read it together with The Blind Watchmaker and The Extended Phenotype. What would be the best order to read those two books in and what other books of Richard Dawkins would be a good addition to these three, not counting The God Delusion obviously?

By extraversion I mean the Big Five extraversion which is broader than the popular understanding of the world, since it also includes stuff like assertiveness, activity level and excitement seeking and not just sociability. I mean an actual change in the trait itself and not just behavior. Someone who behaves in a less extroverted way due to having more family- or work-related responsibilities and doesn't have time for socializing but still feels the same urge to be social doesn't count here.