Haven't read the whole thing yet, but I like this.

UFO/UAP people talk about the "five observables," which they tend to interpret as technology that lets solid objects do things solid objects usually can't, but I think the more straightforward interpretation is that UAPs aren't solid. I was thinking some kind of laser tech, and a proton beam isn't that far off.

I'd love to have a government that competent.

That sounds like this study, and ones similar to it, which has been interpreted that way, but could be interpreted differently as well.

There definitely is some kind of unconscious decision-making. Consider also the times you're driving and arrive at your destination and don't remember consciously choosing to take the turns you did. Also relevant I think is ideas like flow and muscle memory, these spaces where you become so good at doing a thing or so used to doing the thing that you can do it at some unconscious or subconscious level.

But I think these unconscious decision-making spaces are evidence against the theory at OP's link, because they show we can tell the difference between conscious decision-making and unconscious decision-making. We have an established concept of mindless vs mindful action, and conscious minds can tell the difference on reflection.

1. In the article, the author says, “We don’t perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them." I can't tell why they expect it to be about half a second though.
2. Separate from this theory, we already know our pre-conscious processing fills in false details. That's why you don't see the blind spots caused by your optic nerves, and why you do see optical illusions.

I think their answer would be that your conscious mind is not making the decision to act. Some other, unconscious part of your mind is making that decision instead, and since the conscious mind's job is to invent the narrative of a unified self, it pretends that it made the decision.

I think this just moves the problem back a level though. We know for sure there is pre-conscious processing of senses, and this seems like a debate about how much pre-conscious processing there is, rather than an explanation of consciousness. As an explanation, it fails for the same reason all consciousness-is-illusion explanations fail, which is that it requires something that experiences the illusion, which is itself a conscious experience.

The BioNTech covid vaccine was developed in less than a day. Moderna's mRNA vaccine was developed in two days. The rest of the delay in getting it into people was clinical trials, bureaucracy being slow and the time to ramp up production.

The article says BioNTech has several cancer vaccines in clinical trials now. How much of the eight year delay is necessary to make sure they work, and how much is unnecessary delay while they wade through the bureaucracy to get approval to start manufacturing these vaccines?

If it's fewer steps per calculation, why would it take more power per task?

Or is it... (insert dramatic music) ...just the end of the beginning?

Or give them a new kind of multiple personality disorder.

I've been here for a few years, and had interest in the singularity since sometime around 2010. I think I'm more optimistic regarding the timeline, in that I think we'll see extremely capable AI sooner rather than later, but I'm more pessimistic regarding our ability as a society to avoid disasters along the way.

Yeah, it's partly facetious. The thing I had in mind was the apoploe vesrreaitais guy who isn't a sociologist now that I look it up.

That's what I'm wondering. How much of this is actual useful research that advances the field and how much is sociologists plugging things into Dall-E and having opinions about the results?

But also, there's no possible way for any human to keep up with 4000 new papers per month. We almost need AI to read the AI papers and tell us what the good ones are.