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Notes -
Glenn and John have responded to Radley Balko, who has been attempting to discredit the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis. Balko has thus far written two articles, [1] and [2], and a third is planned. Balko has an obnoxious writing style, so I made a summary of the main arguments with the help of ChatGPT (free version):
In previous videos, Glenn and John reacted to TFOM and interviewed the filmmakers. I'm sure none of this is news to many people here. I'm hoping to elicit some discussion and also to check my understanding of what happened when Floyd died. My current thinking is:
Chauvin's actions that day, while not sanctioned in the training manual, were perhaps not unusual within the MPD. I strongly suspect that he kept Floyd in that position simply because it had worked for him in the past and he hadn't been corrected.
With high confidence, Chauvin meaningfully contributed to Floyd's death.
Floyd's drug use, including any drugs he may have taken immediately prior to his death, probably made him more fragile than he otherwise would have been, but I find it unlikely that the drugs alone alone killed him.
I find it implausible that any of the officers acted with malice.
Convicting Chauvin of manslaughter or second degree unintentional murder, but not third degree murder, would have made more sense.
There was a Metaculus question for the Chauvin trial. At the time, the community was divided on whether he would be convicted of anything. This gives us a sense of how surprising the reaction to Floyd's death was. Have we been able to make sense of it since then? Decades from now, will anybody care? Or will none of it matter in the grand scheme of things, especially compared to the pandemic?
We've dinged people before for posting stuff written by ChatGPT, but usually because either they tried to obfuscate it or because they were being snide.
I'm not sure what to make of "I had ChatGPT summarize this article for me." That's actually not a bad use case for ChatGPT, but my own inclination is to say that if you can't be bothered to actually read and summarize the thing you are referring to yourself, this isn't the place for using ChatGPT to do the work for you.
This isn't an official ruling (yet), nor a mod warning, but I'm taking it up with the other mods and I am inclined to say "Don't do this in the future."
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