confidentcrescent
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User ID: 423
confidentcrescent
20hr ago
I think our opinions are reasonably close. My opinion is that the program should be tightened up to curb misuse, but limiting starvation and malnutrition in your country is usually good and a more limited program which does so is worth having.
I'd approach fixing the problems differently, but I'm a lot less concerned about how exactly the problems in SNAP get fixed than about agreement that they are problems.
confidentcrescent
2d ago
The three examples I listed above:
- A drug user is spending significant amounts on expensive and non-essential drugs rather than food
- A obese SNAP recipient is spending and eating significantly more than they need
- A SNAP recipient spending $50 on goods which provide little to no nutrition is clearly not on a tight food budget
As originally brought up in an earlier comment by @tomottoe and then mentioned by the OP.
confidentcrescent
2d ago
First, if you increased your food budget to double your needed caloric intake I would still say you're overspending, even if your expenses are relatively low compared to others. It'd just usually not be any business of mine if I'm not paying for it.
As your current food budget is showing, you don't need that much food. Ideally SNAP would be giving exactly as much as is needed to top up the person's budget to the point where they can eat healthily, but targeting a program this accurately is unreasonable.
Second, is this actually how a significant amount of obese people are eating? Getting fat on rice flavored with butter and salt sounds difficult. Nor do I think people would be complaining about an obese person purchasing a cart full of vegetables and rice with SNAP - I think the complaints implicitly include that they saw carts full of typical junk food that is easy to overeat and get fat on.
confidentcrescent
2d ago
But we agree these cases are indeed waste and not proper uses of SNAP, right?
The OP seems to hold the idea that these kinds of spending are perfectly fine and that objections to them are just the conservatives hating specific kinds of poor people. That idea is what I'm disputing - I think it's both out of line with the stated goal of SNAP and also the conservative conception of the purpose of charity.
Before we discuss whether or not this waste is worth it and whether it can be practically reduced we need to be on the same page about whether it is actually waste or desired results of this program.
confidentcrescent
3d ago
The idea underlying all of these objections is one of deserving. Certain poor people don't deserve access to government food assistance. Those who do don't deserve to derive any pleasure from eating beyond not starving.
No, the underlying objection is to the lack of need. Conservatives view charity as primarily to cover a lack of ability to provide for yourself.
All three examples given in the prior post show a lack of need:
- A drug user is spending significant amounts on expensive and non-essential drugs rather than food
- A obese SNAP recipient is spending and eating significantly more than they need
- A SNAP recipient spending $50 on goods which provide little to no nutrition is clearly not on a tight food budget
Looking at how the US government describes the SNAP program I think the conservative view has the right of it here:
SNAP provides food benefits to low-income families to supplement their grocery budget so they can afford the nutritious food essential to health and well-being.
The three people described above can afford nutritious groceries with fewer SNAP benefits than they're getting. They further appear to be putting the saved money towards other luxury items. The purpose of SNAP is not helping people purchase luxury goods. If you think it should be I welcome you to donate your own money and ask you don't try to take mine.
confidentcrescent
6d ago
What would it take for you to believe that the managers have actually done some reasoning here?
The easiest way to show reasoning is to summarize and share their thoughts. If they have ideas about where and how this tool will lead to improvements then they can just tell people why.
From their perspective they see a potential phase shift in how their organization operates and they want to make sure that if it's real they capture it and if it's not real then maybe they've wasted a little bit of budget on tokens. That's really not a hard risk reward tradeoff to take.
As described, this hypothetical manager seems to have no better reason than FOMO to get this tool. If the tool would improve a specific task he would have no need to justify it as a "potential phase shift" - he could just say it will be useful for the specific thing. He wants it because it's trendy and he's afraid of being left behind.
Pushing a new technology because other people are excited about it is not reasoning; it is succumbing to hype.
confidentcrescent
15d ago
I think Arjin responded to the first part more eloquently than I can. I'll just add that to the degree that this was pushed by scientists as a group then scientists should share blame for it as a group.
People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.
I've seen this argument before and the aim is usually to imply that because some of the lower-level scientists were correct you should not lose trust in science from failures of science-driven policy. Sorry if that's not what you're getting at here.
That idea is bullshit because nothing has changed in the pipeline of science to policy. When the public next gets some more fancy science-based policy it won't be from the random scientist who has sane opinions but from the same kind of people who got things wrong last time. If scientists want credit for being correct they need to actually speak up when the public is being told incorrect science. Otherwise what the scientists are saying among themselves is irrelevant to whether or not the public should trust the science that gets to them.
confidentcrescent
16d ago
When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?
The same two things every technical expert wanting to preserve their credibility should do:
- Say only things you are confident about
- Stay out of the political side of debates
They violated the first by making a lot of confident claims that later turned out to be incorrect. They violated the second by advocating for the implementation of a bunch of specific solutions which had non-medical trade-offs.
If they'd done neither and kept to relatively generic advice and a little bit of carefully-phrased speculation they might get criticism for being useless but would have avoided much of the trust loss from saying wrong things. I think you would have also seen much less aggressive fights over lockdowns and masking without The Science pushing specific solutions.
Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.
A lot of the credibility current institutions are burning came from past institutions getting things right. When they said that vaccinating everyone against measles would get rid of measles it actually did do so. The same was not so for the coronavirus.
Past institutions could just have been lucky, but I think a more sensible default assumption is that they got better results because they were better.
confidentcrescent
18d ago
I will clarify my previous comment. I would like you to explain why expressing the same opinion as multiple large AI companies indicates a bias against AI.
confidentcrescent
19d ago
LLMs aren't beings, people, or minds
When I see sentiment like this, which literally chastises a matrix of numbers, I have to assume a non-neutral bias
Most, if not all, of the prominent companies in this space call their products "artificial intelligence" and advertise users treating them like people. They refer to them thinking, having skills, and doing things.
It is extremely frustrating to see an accusation that the above poster has an anti-AI bias for treating LLMs as advertised by many of the companies selling them.
A quick browse through the marketing materials of these companies will turn up many examples, like:
I'll take your word for it. It's definitely plausible on a calories/dollar metric, I was more surprised to hear you can eat that much rice without running into problems with stomach size. I find it quite filling and it's not a snack food you can nibble on throughout the day.
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