I’m not saying polls are worthless. Biden should absolutely be paying attention to them, especially the more precise ones about which areas are safe, lost, and flippable.
But, for us, there is no upside to pollwatching. It’s really just another kind of doomscrolling.
@TruthSandwich@barney@ElectionGraphs@abulsme Fair enough. It goes without saying that generally polls are meant to promote an implicit narrative. Eg, if a poll says 80% would vote for Trump again, it's intended to a) encourage Trumptards, and b) depress Dems so they don't bother turning up to vote. Even accurate polls can flip on a dime and change, and temperamentally I favor a more 'intuitive' approach to gauging the warp and woof of the shifting sands of the political landscape. But as you say, polls aren't for me, they're for insiders, wonks, and people who like to feel depressed.
@TruthSandwich@barney@ElectionGraphs@abulsme He could die, flee to Russia, or KSA, be neutralized by legal quagmires; public opinion is fickle, and the election is months away. My sense of it is that support for Trump is melting like a blob of butter in the Arizona desert at noonday, and him running a campaign from prison is logistically impossible.
@TruthSandwich@barney Finally, someone who can identify the real problem: Americans voted for Trump because he's a racist, xenophobic Nazi tyrant, not despite it. The sickness in America's soul created Trump.
IMO, it started with the rotten-to-the-core apples #Nixon and #Agnew + the most successful, #Reagan.
#TFG just took egocentricity + pettiness nxt level.
Too much credit for #DonaldDumb.
The disease, however, started in the 1930s and then wasn't eradicated: the #US Nazi movement, #AmericaFirst and the fact that the sedition trial against 25 members of congress ended in bedlam b/c the judge died. Hardly anyone was ever held legally accountable. No denazification
Without particularly disagreeing, I’d take it back a bit further.
The US Nazi movement is itself an extension of the Confederacy. Even the German Nazi movement was influenced by American white supremacy, including Jim Crow laws.
I mean, why do you think Hitler railed on about Black people when Germany had approximately none? He got it from us.
You know, @TruthSandwich, that is, actually, a far stretch.
However, I seem to remember something of that kind, too. Something about how this was organized in the South...Can't recall at present.
I will not argue that the #US were built as a #SlaverNation * and that most of its institutions still suffer from the foul compromises needed to achieve a "state of the union," i.e., the #US' #Reconstruction failed, too.
/s: "We shall overcome" never lived up to its potential. /s ... @Bugaboo@barney
Yes, the #JimCrowLaws * were abolished in 1968, but in many regions "on paper," but not in the minds and hearts of a huge part of its citizens.
Nowadays, there is more finesse.
One of the best examples is #Gerrymandering.
And, of course, the not-on-paper #CultureWars waged by the #MAGATs. The are scared sh*tless of becoming a minority, which is demographically inevitable.
The #AIWar, as of today, seems lost to me. The most powerful men, corporations, and institutions are engaged in an arms race, which has even more momentum than the #ICBM race + the ensuing #OverkillCapacity. #Embodiment, the (IMHO not arguably) final step towards a self-aware artificial general intelligence has already begun. The train's left the station.**
* https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/109894787077782438 @Bugaboo@barney
@TruthSandwich@HistoPol@barney I particularly worry about eventually being unable to distinguish between real humans and AI chat-bot trolls on social-media.
Oh, I don’t know. I’d say I have all the attributes of an AI like ChatGPT. I can spout grammatically-correct nonsense in great quantity, nominally in response to prompts.
Here’s one example: a blog post that was supposed to be about economics but turned out to be about AIs.
Uhm, you missed my joke, so I’m going to explain it now in hopes of making it funny.
I was referring to an article which gave the example of ChatGTP being asked a question in one of the languages it’s not supposed to know (maybe it was Norwegian?).
It replied, in that language, that it can’t speak that language.
It now even masters rare minority languages, and quite some indigenous communities are worried about that (posted about this some months back, but possible not retrievable anymore.)
So, you see, the joke here is that he just told a joke and nobody laughed, so he had to prompt the audience by explaining that he had just told the joke.
This is funny because it shows how unfunny the character is, how bad he is at making jokes.
@TruthSandwich@HistoPol@barney Perhaps you are, who knows? I may be one too, because my grammar, and intelligence are obviously superior to a mere human's. But.. I see I've said too much. Just pretend I'm human for now.. Hey, have you heard about how awesome RFK jr is, and crypto?! 😉
@TruthSandwich@HistoPol@barney A question which I'm sure interests a lot of people is whether a machine can achieve true consciousness, or merely mimic it, like a waxwork mimics a life human. Or perhaps the distinction between processing-power, and consciousness is merely one of semantics.
I am 99% convinced it will happen. In this decade.
Self-awareness is the key.
BTW, who is the biggest threat to #AGI's existence, apart from #EnergyShortage and what countermeasures would you take to guarantee your energy supply if you were the AGI? Applying human ethics, rationale, based on the data you were trained on?
😉
@TruthSandwich@HistoPol@barney Of course, no discussion can be complete without injecting the dark horse in all this, that consciousness is rooted in something intangible, ineffable, which forever eludes AI, i.e the existence of the spirit, or soul, which is consciousness itself.
**
I am aware that most AI luminaries don't see it this way. Yet.
They see it too exclusively from a computer-science perpective, not from a #SystemsTheory and learning perpective.
This time, mass unemployment will quantitatively not be offset by the creation of new jobs. Even the programmers are being replaced.
Idle people, even if fed, do stupid things (panem et circensis.)
UBI, a prerequisite, is a long way off, if it comes at all.
There will be food riots within the next 7 years maybe not quite widespread in the #US.
And mass #ClimateRefugees.
Instead of years months weeks...AI automation, once implemented, takes but seconds and has hardly any variable costs (energy and water-cooling are relatively low).
Learning somewhere on the globe, known instantly everywhere.
A lot of things are not and thus do not need to be 100% correct (e.g., accounting.)
The capex that goes into LLM projects in bigger firms is staggering.
I don’t think, for instance, that all that many...
@TruthSandwich@HistoPol@barney It is not in man's nature to be idle. Ask me, who hasn't worked a real job in decades, but nevertheless am always about some business, whether it be gardening, riding my bike, watching porn, or staring pensively out the window wondering where my sex-life went, while a single tear rolls silently down my cold, pallid cheek.
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