Soap does destroy some bacteria, and a not insignificant portion. By destroying those fatty bonds the cellular membranes of many bacteria are destroyed, and many viruses denatured and rendered inert.

The removal is the primary action though, you are correct. Not all bacteria are destroyed by soap, which is why the leather, scrub, and scrub while rinsing steps are important to hand washing, since that mechanical action is what removes everything.

https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/why-soap-works/

Certainly. I’m not saying soap is bad by any means. It’s a tool for bathing just like any other. Not using soap to wash your body doesn’t imply unhygienic anymore than not using a scrub brush makes you unhygienic.

What matters is that you wash regularly, get rid of grime, dirt, excess oils and dead skin buildup.
There’s many paths to hygiene. For most people, the one with soap is the easiest and the only downside is “now moisturize”.

Persistent advertising from cleaning product companies since the 50s have heavily pushed a level of cleaning and perfuming well beyond what’s actually necessary for hygiene.
My body wash company would like me to use a silver dollar sized portion. I get better results from a dime sized portion and a moderate firmness silicone brush.

You’re taking “it’s possible to be clean after bathing without soap” as a way stronger statement than it is.
Do you think I’m saying soap is bad?
No one is talking about hygienic hand washing practices for medicine, food prep, after defecation, or after being coated in tough substances.
We’re in a giant pile of people talking about routing bathing to prevent body odor and the skin issues caused by poor bodily hygiene.
Washing with running water and a scrubbing action is sufficient for that purpose for many people. Bathing without soap is not a guarantee that you will have BO, a rash, skin lesions, or acne.

The Africa point isn’t really the gotcha you think it is. Soap working better faster doesn’t mean that a lack of soap doesn’t work. As you said, when they didn’t have soap they still washed. People are generally interested in being clean, and pragmatic. They’ll clean themselves, and if something helps them get cleaner faster, they’ll use it.

And yup, that passage does document that the Roman empire eschewed soap for personal hygiene until roughly year zero.

The primary action that soap has for fighting bacteria is breaking down oils and making it easier for debris and bacteria to be removed. Less food for the bacteria, and faster removal.
Bacteria will be destroyed by this process, but that’s coincidental to why soap works and provides benefit.
It’s why we don’t tell people to wash their hands by squirting soap on them, spreading it around and then rinsing it off. The critical step is the mechanical action that facilitates removal of debris with running water.

Yes, soap is necessary for hand washing because we need to maximize bacteria removal after defecation or before preparing foods or medical activities.

In the context of bathing however, you don’t need to sterilize your torso. You will also be rinsing your body far longer than you’re typically going to be washing your hands, which when combined with scrubbing results in a clean torso.

I’m not one of those people who’s opposed to using soap or anything, but that’s not the same as recognizing that it’s possible to wash and be clean without it.

Did I say pure luxury, or did I say it makes it easier?

I did forget that something is obviously 100% vital and indispensable or entirely worthless and void of functionality.

Early soaps were used for the preparation of textiles rather than personal hygiene.
As early as we invented soap, we actually had the notion that festering in your own rancid body oils is bad far, far earlier. As such, we had ways of dealing with that well before we had soap and people didn’t just immediately switch.

So go ahead and use soap. I certainly do. But if you’re looking to have your mind blown, take a shower and just scrub your skin with a brush, loofah or the palm of your hand and be amazed when you still get clean. If you’re really grimey, you can do what the Romans did and rub yourself with olive oil and scrape it off with a scraper before doing that.

Phrasing it like that is weird, but you don’t actually need soap. It just makes the oils and grime come off easier, so without it you just need to scrub more diligently.

If you’re cleaning yourself properly your skin is gonna be the same cleanliness afterwards either way. Cheap soap will dry your skin though, so use decent soap.

Cleaning regularly and effectively is the key, not the specifics. Soap just lowers the bar for effectiveness, and maybe adds “and also moisturize”.

Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn’t seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don’t work, how humans learn, and what “learning” and “knowledge” actually are.

I’m a human as far as I know, and it’s trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I’ve heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
Would you argue that I’m just a statistical collage of the things I’ve experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said ‘to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart’ or something”. Direct copies of someone else’s work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
I’m also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.

Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn’t just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?

You don’t need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don’t want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.

I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn’t labeled or cited.
If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.