domain:natesilver.net
ControlsFreak
11m ago
If the government can fund an army and a navy, then when the Air Force is invented, we decide whether it's more like an army or navy for the purposes of being able to fund it. Fortunately, the government is permitted to fund both, so this is easy: the government can fund one.
It is not a question of "being able to fund it". It's a question of whether it's authorized in the first place. So, is it an Army or a Navy?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21m ago
It isn't foolproof, though: Warren Buffet somewhat famously drives (drove? He's pretty old) a hail-damaged 2014 Cadillac.
EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?
Consider this a general reply to the quoted comment as well as to https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352758?context=8#context .
Look, I'm trying to convince you to not "pick the woke", or that I or anyone on my side as it were should "have power". I don't meant to tell you what to support or oppose. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, really. I don't think you made a mistake in your thinking, or that you should support a different side. I think you need to acknowledge that there's a good deal of conflict theory playing out. And I think arguing that the goings-on are good or bad in the framework of mistake theory misses the more tangible points of why and how this happened and why and how it will happen again.
Co-opting institutions in the name of ideology taints them.
If I turn the military into a bastion of reactionary thought, then I shouldn't be surprised that a century of leftist agitation works to erode the military even if that means that modern European nations have to piss their pants when Putin knocks over some border towns in Ukraine (though, granted, much of that panic be performative), or that we flail helplessly as pauper pirates in the Red Sea take our shipping hostage. We're materially worse off for it, and now untold billions of Euros will be wasted on incompetent rearmament programs to pretend to remedy the problem, but what good is any complaining? Socialists and communists and their green and woke successor ideologists have dismantled the military not because it wouldn't have been useful to them, but because the military was inseparably linked to reactionary ideologies.
The church - really any Christian church, all of them, doesn't matter which - has undergone the same process, though over a longer period of time. I'll skip the blow-by-blow, let's just say that in between the middle ages where the church wasn't just a major power-broker but also an absolutely essential insitution in almost matters social and cultural, at all levels of society, in all stages of life, it now mostly isn't. And it's left a giant God-and-Church-and-Community-shaped hole in western people's lives. Why did we do that to ourselves? Why didn't we take it slow and wait for a superior alternative to be developed? Why didn't we just root out the pedophiles and the nazi sympathizers and the intolerable profiteers like the prelate of Limburg and then go back to our congregations? Because again, it wasn't about troubleshooting or optimizing a socially useful institution, but about destroying an ideological enemy. Whether you were an enlightenment firebrand, a libertine who didn't want his hedonism criticized, a revolutionary who wanted to design his own institutions, a socialist who saw it as a tool of the burgeosie, or a late 20th century progressive who really needed to show off how much better he was than the primitives of yesteryear - they all had their various tactical reasons for destryoing the standing of religion in society, even without providing a better alternative. And they were right to, because the church wasn't just there to provide spiritual care and moral support, it absolutely was in their way and unwilling to give up what authority it had over peole's lives.
Or think about the immense economic damage caused by various green ideological warfare. For every sensible ban on a poisonous but replaceable substance, and for every much-appreciated restriction on the pollution of the commons, there's at least one other ideologically motivated but completely superfluous and highly harmful obstruction to economic activities. Pouring massive public funding into electric cars, for example. But it will save the climate, you might say. Then how about scrapping Germany's safe and productive nuclear power plants on what was little more than a whim?
And let's not even get started with "The Pandemic" or "The Refugees".
And by all means, maybe I'm just not aware of the full scope of the goings-on in America right now, but I doubt that what President Trump is doing to public university funding is anywhere near on that level.
In any event, my point is just this: I encourage you to consider these events in terms of conflict theory, because conflict is what is happening. Neither side is trying to do what's best for society; both are vying for influence, standing, authority and power, and whatever socially useful institution gets ground up on the way is just collateral damage. And neither side can, at present, afford to play nice. I leave it open to you whether you want to see the two sides as a left-vs-right, woke-vs-antiwoke or trump-vs-antitrump.
Thoroughlygruntled
27m ago
The biggest potential pitfall of AI therapy I can see is the lack of accountability. For me, the primary benefit of seeing a therapist is the fact that there is someone holding me accountable to the goals I set for myself every two weeks. Same as a personal trainer. It's hijacking my sense of shame and desire to please others for self improvement.
The thing that makes a therapist better than simply talking to a friend or loved one is that they'll tell you what you need to hear rather than affirming whatever feelings you might have without challenge. An AI that always tells you what it thinks you want to hear and cannot call you out on your bullshit doesn't seem very effective to me.
Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. [...] The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone's time.
It depends on Freddie's goals. If he wants to persuade the undecided middle and silence his opponents, bulverism is the most powerful tool in his box, as it amounts to social shaming. This comment by @Iconochasm puts it well.
As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of the position they didn't reason themselves into. You definitely can, however, shame them for being low-status losers until they rationalize themselves out of their stupid beliefs and get their kid fucking vaccinated.
Likewise, you can get many techno-optimists (or techno-pessimists) to clam up if you threaten to cross-examine their personal failings. "You want Fully Automated Luxury Communism because your life sucks and you're coping", "You want industrial civilization to be in decline because you're a cubicle drone who think's he'd be Immortan Joe after collapse", etc etc
These accusations work very well if even slightly plausible. Of course, it's a symmetrical weapon. Social shaming via bulverism about racists is the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike keeping HBD from being publicly acknowledged, and it's almost certainly true. If you actually want to control public opinion, bulverism versus fact-checking is a gun to a knife fight.
As for Freddie and AI though, I could levy a bit of bulverism at him — and I am an LLM skeptic myself. Why is he so desperate to prove the AI optimists wrong, if he is so convinced the passage of time will do that anyway?
DirtyWaterHotDog
32m ago
James Cameron gets spoken of in the same breath as Spielberg, but his movies lack introspection. He is an amazing filmmaker, amazing character writer but not a great philosopher.
His 2 most lasting works : Terminator and Titanic are character stories experiencing a larger than life event. The thing about character stories, is they're carried by great actors who bring those characters to life. Kate Winslet, Leo, Arnold and Linda Hamilton are the heart and soul of those movies. In contrast, not only are the actors of Avatar forgettable, but they're slathered in literally dehumanizing CG. It's not wonder that the colonel remains the most memorable character from the series.
I don't think there is a complex allegory hiding behind the Avatar movies. It was made in an era of peak environmentalism. "Humans are warlike creatures that will destroy the world for oil." I don't think there is much else to it. And I haven't seen anything from Cameron that'd make me change my mind on it.
FtttG
35m ago
Correct. Right now, there's no way for us to confirm whether breathless AI predictions will come true in the near future, because they're just that - predictions. But we have Bayesian evidence pointing one way or the other.
phailyoor
37m ago
so poorly written and barely comprehensible that it would take much longer to parse the meaning than if they had just sent the email in whatever native language and let me Google translate it.
they’re just too proud to hire a translator (but not to use an LLM).
ChatGPT hacked their brains and convinced them that using machine translation is OK. Because before, their ego was too big to copy paste the output out of google translate, but somehow when it's ChatGPT it's totally ok.
Of course by giving up on writing English in the first place, they will also never learn.
Jiro
37m ago
You can only confirm someone's checking account balance for sure by looking at the balance. But you can find evidence for the size of someone's checking account by doing things other than looking at it. If someone claims to have a hundred million dollars in his checking account and I notice he doesn't live like a rich person, and doesn't have a job that could earn a lot of money, etc., I haven't proven for sure that his balance isn't that. But I have found Bayseian evidence for it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
38m ago
If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine.
Is it? The Constitution puts almost all powers of international relations at the federal level. States aren't allowed to engage in treaties or establish their own taxes on goods entering or leaving the country.
Arguably some states do this in practice: a few have somewhat banned certain Chinese companies (TikTok, Huawei), but most of those laws/rules at least claim to be following federal guidance.
Jiro
42m ago
Then at least try.
If I try, you'll argue whatever example I give, even though whether I am right or wrong about the examples is irrelevant.
But sure.
If the government can fund an army and a navy, then when the Air Force is invented, we decide whether it's more like an army or navy for the purposes of being able to fund it. Fortunately, the government is permitted to fund both, so this is easy: the government can fund one.
The army is funded in 2 year intervals and the navy isn't. We say "well, the navy has ships that require maintenance and shouldn't be destroyed after a 2 year period just because we're at peace. The air force has planes that are also expensive and require maintenance, so it is more like a navy than an army in this regard and does not need to be funded in 2 year intervals".
On the other hand, the President is described as the commander in chief of the army and the navy. When you try to decide whether the air force is more like an army or navy there, you notice that the army and navy are treated the same way--he's commander in chief of both of them--so regardless of which one an air force is more like, the president is commander in chief of it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
43m ago
Yesterday, it was surreptitiously edited to remove all reference to Israel.
Botond173
43m ago
What else does it exactly mean then to you, to be "predisposed to noticing a particular type of bad thing in his life"? Assuming that one needs to be predisposed in such a way in order to notice being beaten up by moustachioed Mexicans in middle school or encountering drunk Mexicans in the middle of the road at night?
SSCReader
46m ago
Why should teachers be deprioritized for whiteness when they're going to be in high-risk environments, and spreading it to black kids who will then spread it to their higher-risk families?
This is a reasonable point! And indeed if you read Schmidt's paper his final recommendation is healthcare workers and essential workers who are likely to be exposed to and spread the disease to multiple people. While he discusses race as an impact his final recommendation doesn't actually suggest making the distribution race based directly at all.
Now part of that is because retail, grocery store workers and the like skew minority in the US in any case, but his final position in his paper does indeed seem to be there is no need to discriminate on race. I don't know whether the article only asked him about the race part or only used his answer for that part, but his papers recommendation does not suggest discriminating on race for vaccine distribution in the end.
Now having said that his recommendation turns out to be wrong anyway. There are 2 main vaccine pandemic responses 1) Vaccinate the most vulnerable (this directly reduces deaths) 2) Vaccinate the most likely people to spread the disease, workers who come into contact with many people. The 2nd saves lives indirectly by restricting spread even though you are primarily vaccinating people who individually are not at much risk of the disease.
However it has to be with a vaccine that is effective enough and taken up enough to get to herd immunity levels. Without that option 1) is generally your best shot. But Schmidt was making that recommendation before the vaccines were created so presumably we can't hold him responsible for the fact the vaccines were not as effective as option 2) requires, he didn't know that at the time.
phailyoor
52m ago
I'm not fluent yet but the point where I could watch degenelate videos like this and just understand them fine kind of ruined my life.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
53m ago
That's good when the numbers are directionally correct, not when they're completely wrong
Yes, surprisingly ChatGPT is better at translating wholesale than trying to revise a work or something. Asking it to translate directly actually gives a quite accurate result.
Unfortunately, as this situation shows, the user asked ChatGPT for revisions on the English work rather than translating the work from native language. I think this is a more typical use case because most people beyond beginners writing in English do not write in native language and then translate to English, but instead write directly in English. We are just fortunate enough to have the Japanese version as well, so we can see clearly where ChatGPT failed to capture the intention.
So we are in a world where "write English -> ask ChatGPT for revisions" is far far inferior to "write in native language (Japanese) -> use AI to translate to English" where translating directly gives a superior result. In this case the workflow that gives the best result involves the absolute least practice of English by the writer.
phailyoor
59m ago
It should be illegal to ask ChatGPT to write something that would take you less than 2 minutes to write yourself. Especially if it's well within your abilities.
phailyoor
1hr ago
IDK if you specifically disagree, but I strongly prefer the original English, errors and all, over the ChatGPT output.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
Not sure this is proper grammar.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1hr ago
The FEMA logic is that BDS is intrinsically racist. They stated this directly in their tweet explaining their policy in reaction to the backlash.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1hr ago
You do not know any of that. The question is, whoever wrote it, were they influenced by pressure from Jewish interest groups? Of course they are.
Jewish organizations have been asking for this for a long long time and not getting their way.
Per wikipedia:
As of 2024, 38 states have passed bills and executive orders designed to discourage boycotts of Israel.[6] Many of them have been passed with broad bipartisan support.[7] Most anti-BDS laws have taken one of two forms: contract-focused laws requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel; and investment-focused laws, mandating public investment funds to avoid entities boycotting Israel.[8] Separately, the U.S. Congress has considered anti-boycott legislation in reaction to the BDS movement. The U.S. Senate passed S.1, which contained anti-boycott provisions, on 28 January 2019, by a vote of 74–19. The U.S. House passed a resolution condemning the boycott of Israel on 24 July 2019, by a vote of 398–17. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Mike Braun (R-IN), Rick Scott (R-FL), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Steve Daines (R-MT) reintroduced the Combating BDS Act of 2023.
This is about a cudgel for hitting democrats with.
No it is it not. It is about Israeli/Jewish influence in American politics and culture. Here's the ADL's stance on BDS which is now the official stance of FEMA- that BDS is intrinsically anti-semitic and therefore racist.
What does the commissioner... do, then? This feels like the scene from Office Space with the Bobs.
The commissioner is a people person. He takes the figures from the statisticians to the politicians.
Does he physically hand them over?
No, he faxes it. Sometimes the secretary sends the fax.
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