I think a major casualty of the war on science funded primarily by fossil fuel interests has been that the kneejerk pro-science response has become a lazy appeal to authority.

People say “99% of scientists all agree listen to them you are not worthy of having an opinion on this!” and while it is arguably true lol, it also sends a message undermining to the interests of science.

Science is the practice of skepticism not of finding facts and crusading under their banner in a materialist campaign of conquest. Facts are rather the inevitable residue of science after science has subjected theories to extended and diverse torturuous inquisition.

I wish people defended science by saying it isn’t a set of Correct Facts but a system of Skepticism that has thoroughly examined a shared body of knowledge and that you should assume that if the more fantastic sounding theories contained within that arena of “skeptical melee” haven’t been dismantled that you can probably trust that they are real, as fantastic as they sound.

This when you shorten it sounds like an appeal to authority where the scientists are given undue authority but it is not the same thing. What matters is the environment of genuine skepticism that scientific theories and “facts” are subjected to in order to establish their validity that matters.

Basic foundational “observations” by Economics aren’t based on the Scientific Method.

I wish the Scientific Method didn’t have “Method” in the name because while it is a sensible name it also is misleading.

Science is “method agnostic”, a new promising method may uncover other methods and theories that totally pull the rug out from under old theories and methods that is a necessary and sometimes brutal aspect to scientific progress.

Economics, because it began and is sustained for the most part as a system of methods searching for justification for their continuation, is largely incapable of undergoing these necessary “method resets” that come periodically in any scientific discipline.

Chemistry can admit that atoms aren’t tiny planets with electons orbiting like moons because Chemistry didn’t start as the pursuit to find evidence for atoms being like solarsystems and flesh out the theory that atoms are like solarsystems.

Thus no matter if locally good science is being done in economics it is undermined by the uncomfortable need to preserve the survival of the foundatinal contextualizing methods and axioms they invoke implicitly from the truth uncovered, a vice that plagues any human endeavor consciously and subconsciously and not only keeps Economics from being a real science it also largely sucks the oxygen out of the room for actually scientifically rigorous study of these phenomena.

Alchemy is a great analog here to compare Economics too. Alchemists in the pursuit of trying to figure out how to turn things to gold did interact with and in some ways advance chemistry, but alchemy could never divest itself from its own pre-existing beliefs and methods as chemistry discovered more and more of the universe and began to accurately predict more and more of it.

If alchemy was capable discarding old methods to pursue understanding phenomena more lucidly and precisely chemistry would probably be called “alchemy” in english nowadays and alchemy would be called “pseudo-alchemy”.

Economics equates to alchemy they express a desire of a system of methods, axioms and explanations to produce a certain end goal and it forms fatal shackles to the follies of the past.

It honestly looks wild, if you have never watched a video of it you should it is hilarious.

Economics: Our findings are just as rigorous as these other sciences we swear!

I believe autonomous drones can now beat humans if FPV racing.

On a repeating, static track maybe, we however are talking about war where nothing repeats quite the same and the landscape is always changing and being changed.

Ok, I won’t buy a new phone then :)

You have done the pattern again of invoking an infinity with hand waving. 10,000 drones is an immense amount of money. If each of those drones cost $2000, a very reasonable price for a military attack drone, that is $20 million you just dropped on a single attack.

$20 million is a serious amount of money, you can buy a whole lot of counter UAS systems for that amount of money, and those systems aren’t a single use, disposable tool like the assault drones you dumped all of your money into.

A shahed costs closer to ~$30,000 than $2000 so this point holds even more true for longer range flying bombs.

Well yes and by the way all of that is a prerequisite to having an effective unmanned aerial force as well.

The thinking error you are making here is believing there is a way to bullshit around needing human talent and human curated datasets being constantly updated by human experts with AI.

There is not.

Why are you obsessed with the fact that counter UAV solutions aren’t 100% effective?

Nothing is 100% effective?

Why do I have to calm down because this is lemmy?

Are you not putting effort into your conversation or investing yourself in defending your points just because you don’t think this post will be popular?

Do you think I give a shit about that?

This is not how warfare works, there is always a practical limit to how much force is worth concentrating of a particular type, you don’t know what you are talking about. You keep telling me I should change my thinking based on projections you make where you assume infinite energy will be provided by datacenters or that it is easy to concentrate an infinite amount of drones together to attack the enemy without their being counters to that or inefficiencies inherent to that.

Just last week Ukraine shared a video of a single drone pilot destroying a russian Rubicon logistics hub for russian drones. One person destroying a concentration of many smaller drones is not an impossibility I don’t know why you think it is. “Scaling that up” this strategy up is also less useful when you don’t have the human intelligence work done to actually locate the target and bring together all the necessary operational elements to hit it.

AI is a useful pattern matching tool when the patterns don’t change much, that is about it.

It is the humans you need to worry about not the AI.

Again, stop trying to fear monger about a perceived existential threat while providing no evidence when there are ACTUALY existential threats like Climate Change we are facing.

Sure and there is always going to be a limit of how many drones are useful? Especially with the proliferation of airburst ~30mm guns mounted on helicopters and ground based vehicles? The Gepard ain’t a new idea…

Pattern matching is a useful tool for war right up until the enemy evolves.

You are the one acting foolish by assuming that because you can imagine something becoming existentially dangerous when it has shown zero evidence of doing so… that we should prioritize focusing on it when we have things like Climate Change that are actually existential threats.

Yes, anything could become an existential threat, I will however focus on the realistic most likely existential threats because otherwise I will spend my whole life worried that sky is falling while propping up the value of snake oil salesman tech companies.

I would suggest ingesting less scifi slop about AI and taking an interest in actual existential issues threatening us.

Where is my strawman argument?

Look, if this is a religious/spiritual belief system around AI for you as it is for many people I can’t convince you AI is bullshit, but there is simply no evidence AI is going to take over, that tech companies aren’t completely bullshitting, that AI is profitable or that people actually want it for work… MOST IMPORTANTLY only a SMALL FRACTION of the datacenters needed to build these supposedly unstoppable AIs are actually breaking ground and being built.

The thing that limits AI is that we physically cannot build enough datacenters to mitigate its stupidity and hallucination enough to compete with humans on things that actually matter.

Yes you could train an AI on videos of successful human piloted interceptions, but you still have to make that dataset, you still have to update it every time battlefield tactics change, and you still have to figure out how to filter out all the nonsense the AI introduces in the training.

In other words, AI is only unstoppable if it is inputted with an impossible amount of energy, this is used as a trick to handwave away the serious problematic issues at the heart of current AI/LLM based design.

A human by contrast is powered by a PB&J sandwhich…

Yeah and fpv drones flown by a human pilot can easily out perform “AI” so…

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Honestly I have no issue with being able to sell your data, what I take issue with is the consent part both in the fact that companies are ignoring that law and that the law is set up to hoeplessly violate people’s consent constantly whether on paper they technically agree by clicking “I agree” or whatever.

I would also say I believe people are entitled to a share of profits made through surveillance capitalism done onto their identity whether the person is aware of the profits being made using their data or not at the time. I do not believe there should be a time limit on how far back you can litigate on this and I think the only way companies should be allowed to escape this legal conundrum is by explicitly educating their customers/clients according to regulations about this kind of thing and proactively sharing the profits made upon the data shared.

I would posit that unfortunately Israel is the mirror and I am very worried thinly veiled lazy rightwing antisemitism will appeal more to people in the US than a reckoning with that truth.

“Homeland once depicted Hamra Street in Beirut as some back alley shithole and funny enough they did the filming for that in Tel Aviv. Unsurprising that the writers are making Israeli slop now,” said another.

Disgusting.