Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3d ago
The main thing that is improving them is agentic AI - i.e., they can now actually do web searches and other external reference lookups, rather than just making up whatever isn't in their training data.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3d ago
This reminds me of Vox Day's Encyclopedia Galactica project, or the even more retarded Conservapedia.
Wikipedia and crowd-sourced intelligence in general has its obvious failure modes, yet Wikipedia remains an extremely valuable source for.... most things that aren't heavily politicized. Even the latter will usually have articles that are factually correct if also heavily factually curated.
The problem with AI-generated "slop" is not the "schizo" hallucinations that you see. It's the very reasonable and plausible hallucinations that you don't see. It's the "deceptive fluency" of an LLM that is usually right but, when it's wrong, will be confidently and convincingly wrong in a way that someone who doesn't know better can't obviously spot.
With Wikipedia, if I read an article on Abraham Lincoln, I am pretty confident the dates will be correct and the life and political events will be real and sourced. Sure, sometimes there are errors and there are occasional trolls and saboteurs (I once found an article on a species of water snake that said their chief diet was mermaids), and if you are a Confederate apologist you will probably be annoyed at the glazing, but you still won't find anything that would be contradicted by an actual biography.
Whereas with an AI-generated bio of Lincoln, I would expect that it's 90% real and accurate but randomly contaminated with mermaids.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
I'm fine with addressing both, but most people only want to address the thing that makes them angry in the moment.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Indeed, let us then abnegate all prior agreements we no longer consider binding on us because we don't like the costs. This will be very reformative and beneficial.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Indeed, people who say X doesn't matter would be making a poor argument.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
That's a fully generalizable statement. People can argue any benefit you receive is because of some form of upstream corruption. The point is not to whatabout the point about union corruption and whether or not any pension would meet your standards for legitimacy. The point is you can't just abdicate on legal obligations because you don't like how they were created.
Or rather, you can, but you will sometimes be the whom and not the who.
But I'm taking to the wind. We're now burning down anything and everything if it hurts people we don't like. This will end well.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
You shouldn't have joined a corrupt union. The payment is not somehow cleansed of its corruption by the fact that it goes to you and not the union.
You didn't answer my question about whether any union would meet your criteria for being non-corrupt. And do you expect everyone who joins the union to do an investigation of its corruption and come to the same conclusions as you? Should we just take it as given that you think no one with a union pension should be able to collect on that pension because they're guilty of complicity in "union corruption"?
Cut them off or reduce them very significantly.
Okay. I say that glibly: at one time I would have been willing to take a personal hit in the form of reduced or no Social Security for myself if it would "fix" SS. Now I am too jaded to believe that's being anything other than a chump. But sure, at some point transfer payments are definitely going to have to be cut/reduced, and I bitterly hope it's not until after I'm dead.
Or maybe we should look at transfer payments.
Or we could look at both and not just go for your low-hanging emotionally satisfying culture war targets.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
If that obligation was obtained corruptly, I think they are.
If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension? As as a follow-up question, is there any union or pension scheme that @The_Nybbler does not think is "corrupt"?
Transfer payments are huge. Trying to point to some bigger but much more nebulous problem looks like a distraction to prevent doing anything about transfer payments.
Did I say don't do anything about transfer payments? So what do you want to do about transfer payments?
Maybe we should also look at what the biggest problems are and consider how to allocate efforts accordingly.
"Bigger but more nebulous problems" are indeed harder to "do" something about than raging at welfare moms on TikTok. I don't fault people for taking the ragebait and going for the low-hanging fruit per se. You don't want to fix transfer payments because you have a rational economic plan to do so and you want to make things better for anyone else. You want to fix transfer payments so you can laugh as Laquisha is kicked onto the street. And I'm not even completely faulting you for that! I have not become as blackpilled as you, though my heart is increasingly bitter, but I have started to accept that schadenfreude is one of the few satisfactions left to us.
But don't lie to yourself about your motives. Tell me you want to fix some other stuff that doesn't warm your culture warring heart and maybe I'll believe there is some principle involved.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Is a "distraction" a thing @The_Nybbler does not care about, as opposed to things @The_Nybbler does care about?
I can be angry at single welfare moms while also noticing how much money we sunk into Afghanistan and the billions we're sending to Argentina. Our transfer payments, as you point out, are mostly to old people, and if you want to cut them to the point they are no longer our greatest federal expenditure, you won't just be booting single moms off the rolls.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Okay, fair, forgot about the guy who didn't have time to actually do anything.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
That you find their parasitism morally acceptable doesn't make it not-parasitism.
People collecting pensions they were promised as part of their work agreement is not parasitism. If you think workers should not receive pensions, you can advocate for ending pensions (and indeed, that is happening, and will probably happen even in the few places where pensions still exist, like government employment). You can complain about unions and their tactics, but the individuals who expect to collect on the benefits they were promised are not being parasites for expecting a legal obligation to be fulfilled.
As for old people demanding expensive medical care, we have discussed before the diminishing returns of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep Grandma alive for another month, and those are legitimate ethical debates, but an old person who wants health care and reasonably expects to receive it even if it is more expensive (because they are old) is not parasitism unless you're prepared to advocate for the ice floe health care plan.
But this includes the people in the videos you were complaining were just ragebait!
If you actually read my post, instead of just rushing to chew on my heel as usual, you'd have seen I admitted I also feel the rage and find these people infuriating. My point is not "A worse than B, therefore you should not be angry at B." My point is if you're concerned about the broad dysfunction of society and how to fix it, A is actually more impactful than B and you should consider that B might be an emotive distraction. By all means, let's squash the parasites as well, but let's be clear about motives.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
I'm not saying that Trump is committing the first serious norm violations in our country's history. He isn't. We have been steadily eroding those norms for a century.
A century?
People accused George Washington of abusing presidential power.
There has not been a president in history who was not at some point accused of exceeding his authority and violating the Constitution. Granted, some of these accusations were more bad faith and politically motivated than others, but still- I'm not even disagreeing with @FCfromSSC at this point that the Constitution is literal paper, but "norms" have always been a nebulous fuzzy thing manipulated by the politicians of every era. Just as the Supreme Court has always been in a sort of "dialog"/adversarial relationship with Congress and the Executive branch, making rulings as much to uphold their own legitimacy as to interpret the Constitution in some theoretically "objective" way.
There was never a period in American history when the political class was treating the Constitution as a rulebook that could not be deviated from to their own advantage. Some individuals treated it so- even some presidents! But they were not the norm.
To the degree I have been in more-or-less continuous disagreement with FC and other "America is dead" drumbeaters over the years, it's not with the facts before us today but rather whether these facts actually represent a meaningful difference from the past.
Where my own thinking has changed is that I think we may be the generation that sees the bill come due, the inherent instability in the system reach the breaking point, the ruin in the nation exhausted.
At this point, my optimistic hope is that the nation outlives me. Just need to eke out another few decades.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
From an emotional point of view, I understand. It's easier to get angry at Welfare Mom than Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex. It's a lot more personal when you meet the parasites and see how they live their worthless lives.
From an economic point of view, though, it really does seem like Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex would like to distract us with ragebait about welfare moms.
10% may be an overstatement, but I agree that even 1% is unacceptable. But my point was that "schizo mode" (like if you literally see references to mermaids) is pretty obvious. "Abraham Lincoln was married to Susan Elizabeth Fancher" is not an obvious hallucination if you don't actually know his wife's name.
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