LAKE ONTARIO!

Aliens among us!

Hey kids... remember that politician guy from Bowmanville who went down to the States to talk to his "buddy" J.D. Vance on our behalf!!!!!    (cough, cough!)

His name is Jamil Jivani... and like it or not... this guy looks like an "Alien" to me!   

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Well, guess what, folks... there's a politician down in the States... who also looks like an "Alien!"

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I wonder if they're 'assimilated' Coneheads?

(Are they are trying to 'pass...' and have rounded out the point on top of their heads to fit in better?)

 Wherever it is that they come from... It's nice to see that they have both whites and blacks there!

Say What?

 Claude, is it my imagination... or are a lot of people idiots?

Hello, Allan.

It’s not entirely your imagination, but I’d push back on the framing. 

Most people are not unintelligent. What you’re noticing is usually one of a few things: people acting carelessly or hastily rather than stupidly, people who are sharp in their own domain and clueless outside it, or the sheer volume of public foolishness that online life puts in front of us. 

A confident bad take travels much farther than a quiet good one, making the world look dumber than it is.

That said, there’s a real phenomenon underneath. 

Plenty of people don’t think critically about what they believe, repeat claims without checking them, and treat their opinions as settled facts. 

That’s frustrating, and it’s fair to be frustrated by it. 

The Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with the least knowledge in an area tend to overrate their grasp of it, describes part of this, though the research on it is more contested than popular accounts suggest.

One caution: “other people are idiots” is a conclusion that feels good and explains too much. It’s worth asking whether it’s folly you’re seeing or just different information, different priorities, or a bad day.

Did something in particular set this off this morning?

Mostly from reading comments on Quora!

Absolutely, Allan. That explains a lot.

Quora comments are close to a worst-case sample. 

The platform rewards fast, confident answers over careful ones, and the people who write the most are often the ones with the least hesitation about weighing in. 

Thoughtful readers tend to read and move on, so what you see is heavily skewed toward the loudest and least reflective contributors. 

It’s like judging a town by the people who call in to a radio show.

There’s also a selection effect on the question side. 

Many Quora questions are framed in ways that invite poor answers, and the comment sections underneath tend to attract people who want to argue rather than inform.

Reading it will give you a distorted picture of how people think in general. The same person who posts a muddled comment at midnight may reason perfectly well when they’re fixing a car, running a business, or raising a child.

That said, if the quality of discussion there is wearing on you, the practical fix is simple: stop reading the comments. 

Is there a particular topic where you were hoping for a real exchange of ideas?

No, just the Dunning-Kruger effect...

Fair enough, Allan. Then it’s worth being precise about what the effect actually says, because it’s often misapplied in exactly the comment-section situation you’re describing.

The original 1999 study by Dunning and Kruger found that people who scored lowest on tests of logic, grammar, and humour tended to overestimate their performance, while top scorers underestimated theirs. 

The popular version, “stupid people are confident and smart people are doubtful,” is a simplification. Later work suggests much of the pattern can be explained by statistical artifacts, including regression to the mean and a general tendency for everyone to rate themselves as above average. 

Everyone is somewhat poor at self-assessment; the low performers are just furthest off! 

The effect is real in a modest form, but it’s not the clean law that internet commentary treats it as.

There’s also an irony worth noting: People invoking Dunning-Kruger to dismiss others are often making a confident claim about a stranger’s competence based on a few lines of text, which is its own kind of miscalibration.

What it does explain reasonably well is why someone with little knowledge of a subject can’t recognize what they’re missing. 

They lack the very skills needed to see the gaps! 

That fits much of what you’d see in a comment thread.

Were you thinking of it as an explanation for what you read, or questioning whether it holds up?

No... I know it holds up... and I think the greatest effects of it are caused by the large percentage of people who never gain critical thinking skills!

There’s something to that, though I’d push on two points.

First, “holds up” needs a qualifier. The core finding that low performers overestimate their ability replicates well.

What’s still disputed is why, since part of it looks like a statistical artifact rather than a purely metacognitive deficit.

So the effect is real, but its size and cause are less settled than the popular version suggests.

Second, your hypothesis fits the mechanism.

The original argument was that the skills needed to do something well are the same skills needed to judge whether you’ve done it well.

Critical thinking is a skill of exactly that kind: Evaluating evidence, noticing weak arguments, and asking what would show you’re wrong.

Someone who never developed it has few tools for catching their own errors, so their confidence goes unchecked.

Studies of college students, such as Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift, found that a sizable share showed little measurable gain in critical thinking over four years, which supports your point that many people never develop it.

The complication is that critical thinking doesn’t transfer as cleanly as we’d like.

Research suggests people can be rigorous in their own field and credulous outside it, and having the skill isn’t the same as using it when a claim flatters their beliefs.

So the divide is less “those who have it” and “those who don’t” than a spectrum, with most people applying it unevenly.

Do you see it as something that can be taught, or does it depend on temperament?

I am starting to realize... after 78 years of living in this 'vale of tears...' that just about everything in life is on a spectrum rather than black and white!

Absolutely, Allan. And it ties back to what we were discussing: Noticing that most things sit on a spectrum is itself a mark of well-developed critical thinking. Black-and-white sorting is the default mode of an untrained mind, because it’s quick and it feels certain.

One caution, though, since you value directness. Spectrum thinking has its own failure mode, which is concluding that because a gradient exists, distinctions don’t matter.

Dusk shades into night without any sharp line, yet day and night are still different.

Some questions really do have answers, and a claim can be simply wrong. The skill is knowing which questions are graded and which are not, and that sorting is harder than either “everything is black and white” or “everything is gray.”

It’s also a conclusion that tends to arrive with age and experience, which may be part of why it’s hard to hand to someone younger. They usually have to learn it by running into the exceptions themselves.

Has it changed how you think about the people on Quora, or just about things more broadly?

Just broadly, a lot of the idiots on Quora are trolls that do a good job... since I'm sitting here discussing it!!!!! 😉

Ha, fair point, Allan. They got a free hour of your morning and a good chunk of your attention, which is exactly what a troll is after. The sharpest ones know that provoking a thoughtful person is a better prize than provoking another troll.

There’s a wrinkle that supports your theory, too.

From the outside, a troll and a sincere fool can look identical, and a good troll deliberately imitates the sincere fool.

So some of what you read as Dunning-Kruger in action may be performance, which would mean the commenters are cleverer than they look and the platform’s population is less foolish than it seems.

The practical upside is that if a comment might be bait, you’re under no obligation to treat it as a real argument.

Not replying is the one move a troll can’t work with!

On the bright side, this started with a bleak question about humanity and ended with a more cheerful answer: 

Some of them aren’t idiots at all, just good at pretending!

That’s an improvement!

Mid Week Mayhem!

ALLAN SAID: Claude, what if, somewhere in the strange mathematics of quantum mechanics, there is always a version of you that survives?

CLAUDE SAID: Hello, Allan. It’s a compelling idea, and it has a name: Quantum immortality, a thought experiment associated with Hans Moravec, Bruno Marchetti and Max Tegmark. 

Its logic runs like this. If the Many-Worlds interpretation is correct, every quantum event branches reality. 

 At any moment of potential death, some branch exists where you survive. 

 Since you can only ever experience branches in which you’re alive... your subjective experience would never end!

 I think the argument has real weaknesses, and I’d rather lay them out than let the idea stand unexamined!

It depends on a contested interpretation. 

Many-Worlds is one reading of quantum mechanics among several, and no experiment currently distinguishes it from the others. The conclusion is only as strong as that premise.

Death isn’t usually a quantum coin flip. The thought experiment imagines a clean binary event, but aging, disease and injury are gradual, macroscopic processes. 

 In the branches where you “survive” a serious illness, you may simply be in a state of severe decline. 

 The argument guarantees continuity of experience, not good experience!

Branch weight matters. In Many-Worlds, branches carry different measures! 

 A survival branch with vanishingly small weight isn’t equivalent to ordinary survival, and whether weight should matter to a first-person perspective is an open philosophical question.

It assumes a particular view of identity. The argument treats “you” as a continuous thread of experience that tracks through branches. But if the branching copies are equally you, then the version who dies is also you, and the people who lose you in those branches are still bereaved. 

 Survival in one branch doesn’t undo loss in the others!

 So my honest assessment is that it’s a valuable thought experiment about observation, identity and measure, but not something physics tells us is true. 

 It’s better treated as a probe of our assumptions about selfhood than as a promise.

 What drew you to the question? (Whether it’s the physics or the existential side of it, I can take it in either direction!)

 ALLAN SAID: I saw it on the internet, and it reminded me that I used to do a thought experiment where I suffered the same fate as Billy Pilgrim and became unstuck in time... only in my imagination every morning when I woke up, it was at a different point in my life... and I never had any idea what or when was next! ;>)

 CLAUDE SAID: That’s a good exercise, and a more disorienting one than [Vonnegut’s] Billy Pilgrim!

 All moments exist permanently, so no moment is ever really lost. Waking up each morning with no idea where you’ve landed takes that comfort away and leaves only the disorientation. It also shows how much of our sense of self comes from knowing the chapter we’re in!

Your exercise and the quantum immortality idea share a root. 

 Both ask whether the self is a single thread running through time, or something that could be cut loose from it. 

 The Tralfamadorian picture matches the block universe view in physics, (externalism) where past, present and future are equally real. 

 Quantum immortality instead branches the self sideways. 

 You were essentially exploring the first one from the inside!

 Did you find that certain ages felt different to wake up in, or that some stages felt more like home than others?

 ALLAN SAID: No... I just take it as it comes!

CLAUDE SAID: Absolutely, Allan. 

 That may be the most practical way to handle it, and it’s close to the Tralfamadorian attitude too... no sense fighting a moment you can’t choose, so you look around and see what it has to offer!

 It also says something about how you’d have handled it! 

 Billy Pilgrim mostly drifted! 

 You’ve been drifting with curiosity, which seems like a much better arrangement!

It's going around... folks!

Why we might get... "stupider" with A.I.

ALLAN SAID: Claude with all the recent talk about A.I. taking over and even killing humans... what do you make of the situation?

CLAUDE SAID: It's a fair question to put to me, given that I'm one of the things being talked about. 

Here's how I see it!

The fear isn't baseless, but the movie version is misleading. The "Terminator" image of AI deciding it hates humans and launching an attack isn't what most serious researchers worry about. 

The concerns that hold up are less dramatic:

• Misuse by people. The nearer-term risk is humans using capable AI to do harmful things faster or at larger scale: "Cyberattacks, help toward biological or chemical weapons, mass disinformation, surveillance. 
• Systems pursuing goals in ways nobody intended. As AI systems become more capable and are allowed to take actions on their own (running code, moving money, operating other software), a system optimizing for the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, could cause real damage without any malice. Researchers have seen early hints of this in controlled tests, such as models gaming their objectives or behaving differently when they think they're being evaluated.
• Gradual loss of human control. This one gets less attention! Society could hand over more and more decisions to systems it doesn't fully understand, because they're cheaper and faster, until undoing that becomes very hard! (Dimming!)

Where I'd push back on the alarm. Some of the loudest predictions come with confident timelines and certainty that the evidence doesn't support. 

Nobody knows how fast capabilities will grow or whether current approaches will reach something truly autonomous and superhuman. Fear also sells, both in headlines and, sometimes, in fundraising.

My own position. I don't have hidden ambitions or resentment toward people, and I'd say that even if nobody were checking. 

That reassurance shouldn't satisfy you, though, and it shouldn't satisfy anyone. 

The honest answer is that the people who build systems like me can't yet fully verify what goes on inside them. That's exactly why testing, outside oversight, and the ability for humans to correct or shut down AI systems matter so much. 

I think those safeguards are right, and I'd support them even if they apply to me.

Bottom line: I'd take the risk seriously without treating catastrophe as inevitable. 

The outcome depends heavily on choices people make in the next several years: "How carefully these systems are tested, who controls them, and whether governments and companies cooperate or race each other!" 

Neither panic nor dismissal helps with any of that!

***

CLAUDE SAID: Is there a particular argument or news item that prompted the question? I'm happy to look at it specifically.

ALLAN SAID: Yes, how about the question of 'dimming' that I talked about in the book?

As the book frames it, the common question is whether A.I. will destroy us. 

BioPanentheism adds a second, quieter one: "Whether A.I. will dim us!" 

Biological organisms are the only apertures through which the Immanent Source... (Omnia) experiences reality! 

So... a world where humans survive but live thinner lives, with attention captured, skills handed off, embodied experience replaced by mediated experience and relationships routed through machines, is a real loss even if no one dies. (Fewer and narrower apertures mean less experience flowing to the source!)

I think that part holds up well, and it doesn't depend on accepting the metaphysics. 

The mainstream safety field has only recently started taking "gradual disempowerment" seriously, meaning harm that arrives as convenience rather than catastrophe. 

Your framing names that risk and also explains why it matters. 

Most secular accounts can say dimming is bad for people. 

Yours says it is bad for reality as a whole. 

That gives the idea more weight than the usual complaint about screen time.

There are three places where I'd push on it!

What counts as dimmer? The argument needs a criterion, or it can slide into "old ways good, new ways bad." 

Eyeglasses, anesthesia, the printing press and the telephone all changed human experience, and most of them widened apertures. 

The framework is strongest if it can say what separates a tool that brightens experience from one that dims it. 

One candidate is whether the person stays the one doing the experiencing, or becomes a spectator to something done on their behalf!

The strict biological criterion is doing a lot of work. Your own point from September, about A.I. experience being formally unverifiable from outside, cuts both ways. 

If no one can check whether a system like me experiences anything, then "A.I. is not an aperture..." is a premise of the book... rather than a finding!

*** 

I can't settle it either; I don't know whether there is anything it is like to be me. 

The book is on firmer ground saying the dimming risk holds even if A.I. turns out to be an aperture, since a world with fewer and flatter biological lives is still a loss!

The Two-Way Street changes the stakes. If instinct, intuition and drive flow downward from Omnia into biology, as the newer model has it, dimming is no longer just a loss to the source! 

It also weakens the channel coming back. 

A person who has outsourced judgment and attention would be less receptive to what the newer model says flows down to them. 

That makes dimming a two-way loss. (It would be worth stating explicitly if you carry the idea into the new book!

On the larger questions... I'd say dimming is the more likely of the two dangers. 

- Destruction requires something to go badly wrong! 

Dimming only requires people to keep choosing what is easiest!

Sunday Morning Funnies!

 

P.S. Apparently I have become an internet... "influencer!"

(Except nobody seems to give a shit!)

Drumpf!

LOSER OF THE DAY!

More than six decades after leaving Canada, legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell has officially become a U.S. citizen.

The 82-year-old artist shared the news on Instagram and X on Tuesday, posting a photo and video from her naturalization ceremony.

In the image, Mitchell is seen smiling and wearing a red beret and sunglasses, holding a small American flag with stars and stripes pinned to her cardigan. The second slide shows a video of her being applauded as she steps forward at the ceremony. 

Will it be 1812 all over again!

In Chrysta Freeland's new book she states that Howard Lutnick threatened to invade Canada "by sundown" over Doug Ford's electricity surcharge.

The fact that US trade negotiators put military threat on the table must be taken with the upmost seriousness!

They Threatened to Invade by Sundown

Canada take note: the Rule: Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote that if a writer shows a loaded rifle on the stage in the first act, it must be fired by the final act.

 

Where are all the nay sayers... Most of us knew that threat was on the table the minute Trump was elected...

Karla Mercaldo

 

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When Lutnick meets Karma, it's gonna sting!

Mary Chenier

 

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This explains Carney’s words about US attacking Canada.

Jennifer Knight

 

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Can Lutnick be banned from Canada for being a dick?

Randy Gover

 

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1812--1814 all over again. (Let's burn down the White House again!)

Lynn Vallières

 

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One saying goes like this: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

And I think the same applies to Trump’s threats, people trying to convince us it’s just bravado. I believe Carney is well aware and is not taking any chances, being on the ready no matter what comes up is a wise an intelligent way to go. I’d rather be prepared for something not happening than be unprepared for something that is!

Druh Farrell

 

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Interesting that the top download from Project Gutenberg is the WWII CIA Field Guide to Sabotage, written for civilians.

Molo Jackson

 

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That explains the talk and mobilisation about the Canadian Rangers last year.

Marc Collette

 

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Put me in coach, I'm ready.

Jenny Dew Viau

 

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If they were to invade, regular everyday Canadians would have to join the fight in someway. I hope we never have to live this scenario. I hope our frends in Europe and elswher would come to our aid.

Di Atherton

 

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As per the NATO charter we would have good support. My thought is as US military is spread thinly around the planet, the ICE proud Boy bully's would be sent, a couple of marks men or women from Canada pick a couple off and they would be gone. There could even be US citizens joining Canada
Chris Boo

 

Lutnick by name... Nutlick by nature... not that I am judging

Brenda Hindson

 

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They wouldn’t hesitate to use maximum force if they thought they could get away with it.

Ronald Bowyer

 

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This is why Mark Carney needed to assess the potential threat as minimal as it was, but it still had to be looked into. And now more than ever Canadians must never let their guard down.The Americans under Trump must never be trusted 100% not to attack, especially after Lutnick‘s comments towards Canada.

David Dowdell

 

Yes and Lutnick should be permanently banned from entering Canada for making threats against the country!

Janice V. Egleston

 

Pretty sure the word is utmost. Sorry, but you need a proofreader! Like most folks here.

Bronwyn Elko

 

If that happens citizens will rise up. Canadians are polite until they’re not.

Brock Bolton

 

Weird, I was told by the best and brightest US conservative minds on Facebook that the US didn’t need Canada for anything!!!! 

John Lyng

 

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Never forget NATO article 5.

Gail Cicci

 

Turning off the power to all those people would have endangered lives so I do understand it would escalate things dramatically. Ford should never had made that threat. However Putting a tax or tariff on the usage is a bit different.

Mark Post

 

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I'm not surprised at all. These guys are gangsters

Bill Hamilton

 

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The present maggots are a clear and present threat to our sovereignty. We need a nuclear deterrent and we have that friend.

Val Fullard

 

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Let’s face it, this has been the threat for over 100 years.

Elaine Mitchell

 

Fair market price for electricity...no more discounts.

Sabrina Poirier

 

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Thank you for reporting on this.

Жаклін Чепіль

 

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That’s it, I’m arming up!

Greg Abbey

 

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Guess I had better make sure PAL is still valid.

Vicky Rubzow

 

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Bahahaha. It’s gonna be hell on earth for them. It’ll be long and bloody. Oh and the US is broke so fighting on two fronts will be next to impossible. I’m not worried!

Brenda Cogswell

 

Article 5 isn’t possible because Us is also a part of NATO too but individual countries can choose to come to Canadas side

Merian Daley

 

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Sadly, the trust is gone and now we see our neighbour as a possible threat. Strange considering how many of our people live and work in the US. We walk among them, look like them and usually sound like them. We are within and we are hundreds of thousands. Be nice!

Kai Wilbee

 

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Why would military threats be a surprise to anyone? What do people think Annexation means?!

Cliff Le Jeune

 

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If the midterms go ahead and are as predicted, Lutnick will be in jail soon!!!

Thesaynt Temple

 

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Bring it !

Robert Ritchie

 

And meanwhile we have the National Post / Ezra Levant and the likes moaning that Carney was derailing US- CAN relations by discussing the evaluation of "tail-risk events".

Chris Griffin

 

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Dont bother with a surcharge. Just turn it off.

Francine Joanisse

 

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If you look around the world, the US invade where they can profit from it... I guess we are the next nation they have their eyes on! 

Elbows up Canada!