That's the quote that stuck out to me, too. It's like they're insinuating that the person is lying (while elsewhere admitting they don't have evidence either way). I mean, I don't want to backseat-quarterback here, but would it have been so hard to say something like, "We have decided to take our website offline while we investigate a report that our website generated an inappropriate image of a user"?
> The real issue is that most of the net worth is equity. These unrealized gains are not taxed. In some cases, a lot of the value is driven by speculation and not actually tied to the current profits of the company. This is why wealth taxes are brought up, or at least changes to capital gains taxes.
Of course, equity is still useful. One can borrow money using the assets as collateral, and rather than paying taxes on the (borrowed) money, one instead pays a comparatively small interest to the bank. Moreover, those unrealized gains never need be taxed so long as they are never converted to cash. The capital gains on the assets are then reset when the owner dies (the so-called "buy, borrow, die" strategy [1]).
I would venture that this is a massive loophole in the tax system that ought to be patched-out.
Tegmark proposes no such thing; indeed, he may as well be proposing the exact opposite of what you claimed. He is essentially suggesting that all mathematical structures are "real", which would explain why the universe exists at all -- presumably because it is also a mathematical structure.
> I agree that there is a significant sliver of a philosophical problem which remains stubborn (how precisely does physical activity produce qualia)
But that "sliver" of a problem is known as the hard problem of consciousness for a reason [1], which is exactly the sort of problem neuroscience can only address in a limited capacity. Understanding how nerves propagate a signal to produce a sensory input (an "easy" problem of consciousness) doesn't inform us as to why certain physical mechanisms result in conscious experience (or more fundamentally what it even means to have a conscious experience).
To return to the topic at hand, a stochastic parrot generates grammatical, sensible language without understanding its underlying meaning. Of course, you can debate what it means to understand something; but for a person to vocalize an idea they understand, they must first somehow consciously process that idea. This is firmly a hard problem to which neuroscience offers limited guidance.
Of course, I'd agree that human beings aren't stochastic parrots -- if human beings were stochastic parrots, then what would it even mean to understand something? But I doubt you could use neuroscience to ascertain whether large language models are or aren't stochastic parrots. Indeed, depending on your definition of "understanding", consciousness might not even be a prerequisite, making the comparison to neuroscience moot.
Interpret entropy as "how unlikely is this state to occur by random chance?", with lower entropy corresponding to less likelihood.
If you throw a bunch of carbon, oxygen, and other organic compounds into a vat, you're vastly less likely to get a fully formed human being than, well, a disorganized pile of matter. Usually you wouldn't consider the random clump of molecules more complex -- there are practically an infinite number ways to rearrange a pile into a pile. In contrast, there are many orders of magnitude fewer ways for a human being to emerge.
That said, there is a sense in which the random pile of molecules is more complex. If I want to predict the motion of every (or at least, most) of the molecules in that vat, it's easier to predict the bulk motion of a human than each molecule moving per the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution.
Similarly, it's easier to compress a static black image than continuous random noise. Notice that a static black image is more organized, more easily compressed, and less likely to occur by random chance (assuming noise is the default). Therefore, a static black image has less entropy. Whether you want to call this state more or less complex is a matter of definition.
