Well here we are again. Possibly on the verge of something quite meaningful happening, but probably at the point of you being skeptical about “everything” I may say here.
It isn’t really reverse psychology and I don’t really blame you. I realize I have no reasonable grounds to do so, and I understand how prone I am to make such cursory glances at things others would like for me to give a serious look and a couple moments of my time. I get that we are all obliged to do that very same thing, and that we’re obliged to do it much more constantly than we have been in the past.
The distractions and attention-grabbers are far too numerous now, and something has to give. Something IS giving.
We are becoming a society which is much more polarized. We are a society of “strangers and people we know” more than we have ever been. Yet still we say we “know” people like Taylor Swift. We “know” the people on our social media feeds and the people we admire throughout other media. But the rest of the people? We don’t know them.
We don’t know them and we have little or no intention of listening to them — which is to say hearing them out versus regarding them like the shiny fliers which still keep right on coming through the mail. They keep coming and coming despite that it’s easy to know 99% are given nothing more than the slightest glance and then dumped straight into the trash.
Is this all true? Sure it is, but since you know it is, the next available “out” is that you of all people don’t need to be told it. Which is still exactly the same response we all have, with our hair triggers about whether someone is having the gall to waste our time telling us something we already know.
We surely can’t have that anymore. Certainly not now, things are far too busy.
I don’t know how or why people tend to think they’re so good at doing that: evaluating where they think you’re going before you have even the slightest chance to go there. Especially considering that as someone who does not know you, I am in some way obliged to identify for you the things I believe we find as common ground before I ever even get to the thing which I suspect you may not know and also suspect will matter to you.
But how could I possibly know the common ground that you and I may walk on? At this point, you could, technically, be anyone on the planet who can either read English or has some means of translating this.
Well, I know it’s common ground because I don’t offer things that aren’t the truth. It’s common ground because if we can’t find true things to be common ground, this is not the time for me to be talking to you or perhaps even you to be listening to me. And while I might put something in a way you don’t think is precisely fair or disagree is perfectly accurate at times, if you find yourself amidst my writings — at least the serious ones — and you think either one of even those things, please do point it out. I don’t like not being fair. It’s not a good thing to be known as.
So now that all that is out of the way — my sorrowful lament on what is becoming of us — I will again come to the point at hand. As I did much more rapidly in version 1, and slightly more rapidly in version 2:
I am asking for help with something — obviously — and it is something that cannot possibly take more than five minutes for another person to do. In fact it’s precisely that:
I need five minutes of focused attention from an expert about a single point of a vast array of points I need to prove the authenticity of.
You may now easily see why this is such an incredibly difficult task for me to do, at least by myself. I’d say it’s impossible but strictly speaking, it really isn’t. It would just take me a thousand or more hours to do it if I did it on my own, and the solution would never be as good. So I think, “well, I’ve got a few thousand bucks I could spend on this project, nothing wrong with allocating five hundred or so to this part.”
And yes, this does mean I’ll pay you to do it. I’ll pay you by PayPal of VenMo or whatever, and since it’s only five minutes, I’ll be happy to pay you double your estimated hourly wage rate for a serious answer, triple for a particularly good answer, and even quadruple if you hit a home run with it. It will make it more fun.
So I would like an essentially random selection of experts to get back to me in the following fashion:
“I’m Doug, I’m a solar installer.”
or
“I’m Chris, I’m a software engineer.”
or
“I’m Diane, I program neural networks.”
or even
“I’m Harry, I own half a dozen concrete trucks.”
I will then assume that to each of these replies I can freely add “and I am possibly willing to help.”
After that, I will take 24 hours, more or less, and look through my list for an appropriate assertion or question, and I will ask you to give me five minutes of your best shot at telling me whether you can determine it’s veracity. Might ask you to give a ballpark estimate of something, or if you have a means to calculate it, even better.
Hopefully you will also either tell me why the assertion I’ve given is true or not true or give me the chance to ask a follow up question. I may take another 24 hours to figure out how to ask the follow up, but it will probably happen right away.
The goal, if it is not already obvious, is to solicit expert analysis as to the veracity of a variety of assertions on which a system I am designing depends. I need to know whether they are true or not, and if they aren’t, how far off — in the case of my estimates — are they?
By the way, I would really love to get the replies of some good neural net people. I have been working with ChatGPT for a while now and I had no idea things had progressed so fast. I feel like Rip Van Winkle or something.
Thank you, and cheers!
