Weird, I was pondering exactly this analogy earlier. Specifically astrology, but cold reading is a better fit for a conversation with an ‘AI’; astrology works well for one-off articles. Both dependent on the Forer Effect, of course.
Important piece, I think. Because this part is 100% true:
There are many examples of this easily found once you start doing the research. The mechanism is simple enough and already baked into people’s preconceptions of how readings work so many psychics accidentally develop the knack for it, meaning that they’re not just conning the person being read, they are also conning themselves.
This is Sam “I’m a stochastic parrot and so are you” Altman. He thinks his high tech magic 8-ball really does think just like human beings do. He’s not so much trying to persuade us that ‘AI’ has achieved our level so much as persuade us that we have always been on its level.
Maybe he is just 100% grifter and absolutely knows he is bullshitting. But I think he’s at least 50% conning himself.
Which is probably worse. True believers are so tiring.
Businesses are in it for the money, employees tend to be one of the larger expenses, so maintaining some bullshit positions that would cost them money doesn’t make fiscal sense, so what’s up?
Obviously, yes. Especially when you are a member of a dominant ethnic group, cosplaying at being “other” when you will never be involuntarily othered, and explaining your (entirely illegitimate) choice via racial stereotyping.
It is absolutely not the same as identifying as gay or trans or whatever other besieged minorities you are slyly pouring scorn on. People don’t choose to get fucked over for who they are regardless of what they do. They are who they are and they’re surrounded by desperately insecure fuckwits who can only make themselves feel better by making the lives of others worse.
@news whomever runs the News bot, could you please stop boosting every single reply to every last post? I only want to see the initial News posts in my feed, not all of the replies.
Following Lemmy on Mastodon is a truly terrible idea. If you subscribe to a community here on Mastodon, you will get every post in every thread. Your Masto feed will be an unreadable pile of out-of-context garbage. There’s no over-zealous bot. That is just how it works.
Kbin allows you to use both Lemmy and Mastodon but doesn’t crowbar them into the same feed. That might be your best bet.
Defence lawyers often get asked how they can bring themselves to defend someone they know is guilty. Prosecutors are rarely asked how they can bring themselves to prosecute someone they know is innocent.
They didn’t just knowingly keep an innocent man in prison (after a conviction which was dodgy as fuck even before this new evidence). They knowingly let the real offender stay free to continue offending (as serious sex-offenders nearly always do).
Its then head of complex casework in Manchester said: “If it is assumed that the saliva came from the offender, then it does not derive from Malkinson. This is surprising because the area of the clothing that the saliva was recovered from was crime specific.”
However, he said “he did not see that there was a need to do any further work on the file” unless the case was brought to appeal, and then his focus would be on “bolstering” the case against Malkinson.
No concept of what their job is even supposed to be (in theory, at least), let alone any intention of actually doing it. Just get a conviction. Doesn’t matter who you convict, just make sure it sticks and get your promotion.
Liberal democracy is a fucking sham. Full of nice ideas that only work (in theory) if you completely ignore power.
It is the best system that has been allowed to develop given the pre-existing imbalances of power, sure. But liberals have no theory of power, let alone any intention of redistributing it.
What is the point of a free press if the press is owned by billionaires?
How can you have free speech when power controls the platforms from which you can be heard?
What use is the rule of law if it is impossible to adequately prosecute the wealthy and too expensive to adequately represent the poor?
Liberalism is full of sensible ideas which cannot work in this reality. A reality that liberal leaderships are happy to maintain because they hold, and are beholden to, a big chunk of the power that needs to be redistributed. Umberto Eco offers a nice aside on this, in Ur-Fascism:
It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.
Punch left, pander right, act all shocked when fascism takes over.
This is a useful critique of liberalism from a Rawlsian liberal, who admits that even Rawls might not have an adequate answer: The Rawlsian Diagnosis of Donald Trump. Worth reading in full but here’s a click-free taster:
There are many other questions we could ask—about the growing influence of money on the political process, say, or about the rising cost of a college education and the obstacle it presents to achieving fair equality of opportunity. But perhaps it is sufficient to take note of the skyrocketing economic inequality that characterized U.S. society during the years in question. Rawls’s claim that his principles embody an ideal of reciprocity rests heavily, though not exclusively, on the fact that his “difference principle,” which governs the distribution of income and wealth, requires economic inequalities to be arranged in such a way as to maximize the position of the worst-off group in society. Robert Nozick once asked, in objecting to the difference principle, how we would feel about a principle that required inequalities to be arranged in such a way as to maximize the position of the best-off group. Nozick’s mischievous question was a fanciful hypothetical that was intended to cast doubt on the strength of Rawls’s argument for the difference principle. But if one looks at patterns of inequality in the United States in recent decades, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the basic structure of U.S. society has come closer to satisfying Nozick’s hypothetical principle than it has to satisfying Rawls’s difference principle. That is, the inequalities fostered by U.S. institutions have come closer to maximizing the position of the best-off group than to maximizing the position of the worst-off group.
In short, the United States in recent decades has egregiously failed to live up to any reasonable standard of reciprocity, because its institutions and policies have blatantly failed to affirm the good of all citizens. If, as Rawls maintains, the stability of otherwise just institutions depends on their embodying an idea of reciprocity, then what we should have expected to see as a consequence of those failures is just what we have in fact seen: growing resentment and discord, and the degrading and destabilizing of liberal institutions. In one respect, the situation is even worse than this might suggest. Rawls’s point was about the stability of otherwise just institutions. Or, more accurately, it was about whether a candidate theory of justice could generate its own support if it did not meet the standard of reciprocity. The pre-Trump United States failed to meet that standard, but not because it was attempting to realize a utilitarian theory of justice that relied more heavily on sympathy than on reciprocity, and not because it was attempting to satisfy any serious theory of justice at all. Instead it was simply allowing, or even encouraging, the wealthy and the privileged to prosper at the expense of everyone else. And if even utilitarianism, which seeks to advance the general welfare, contains the seeds of instability because it fails to satisfy the conditions of reciprocity, then what are we to say about institutions that fail to satisfy those conditions because they neglect the worst-off and allow the wealthiest to amass almost unimaginable riches? What we can say is that they provide fertile conditions for the emergence of a candidate, and a president, like Donald Trump.
There’s no grand conspiracy and there is no set of rules that will tame the beast.
It’s not about individual greed. It is structurally inevitable. Any system which relies on power being in the hands of saintly individuals is doomed to fail.
I don’t know what a genuine Marxist revolution would look like because there has never been one. And I’m not optimistic that there ever will be. The crises of capitalism which create the conditions for a (theoretical) Marxist revolution occur when (and because) labour is at its weakest.
It’s fascism that wins out when liberals fuck up. Not least because liberals prefer it that way.
I don’t have any answers. But I’m not going to stop looking for them.
My default has been Duck Duck Go for a few years now, originally on privacy and fuck-google grounds. I used to have to (reluctantly) stick !g in the search quite a lot when it couldn’t find what I wanted. Hardly ever need to now.
To be entirely fair to it, that is a transliteration problem. It does make sense if it could use Swahili to write the final “K” but it can’t, so it transliterates to “K”.
Then again, Kenya has both Swahili and English as its official languages, so it’s the kind of pedantry which is also (*sort of) incorrect.
sort of because if someone wants to have a rant about the evils of colonialism here, I’m gonna agree with them.
It’s toot. With screenshots. And everyone surely knows by now that your search results are dependent on your search history. And, of course, LLM output is stochastic, not deterministic. It lies at random.
No study exists comparing the capacity of currently available menstrual hygiene products using blood.
They don’t have to explain how they know. Literature searches are standard, and done before doing research like this. Funders want to know if they’re wasting their money on a question that has already been answered, and whether the proposed methods are appropriate given what has been done, and learnt, before.
That’s not to say that all literature searches are perfect. You can check on PubPeer for any howls of anguish from unacknowledged researchers. But the only legal requirement for testing is tampons due to toxic shock syndrome and its relationship to absorbency. It’s really unlikely that manufacturers are doing the tests without being forced to and, if they have done any, really unlikely they would fail to publish their results if they liked the results. If they are suppressing unwelcome results, the research might as well not exist.
So, I was spacing out while waiting for my next class in college and had this idea and wanted to know what a British person would think of it. I wanted to make a T-Shirt with the outline of the Falkland Islands filled with the Union Jack, and on the top, or top-left corner, a depiction of Queen Elizabeth II smiling from Heaven...
Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty (www.nature.com)
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con (softwarecrisis.dev)
A long read, but fascinating.
If bullshit jobs are *really* bullshit, how do businesses justify the expense?
Businesses are in it for the money, employees tend to be one of the larger expenses, so maintaining some bullshit positions that would cost them money doesn’t make fiscal sense, so what’s up?
Oh boy. (feddit.uk)
Police and CPS had key DNA evidence 16 years before Andrew Malkinson cleared of rape | Police (www.theguardian.com)
Google search is over (mastodon.social)
Via @rodhilton...
Woman Is Awarded $1.2 Billion in ‘Revenge Porn’ Lawsuit (www.nytimes.com)
First (I repeat, first) test of menstrual products using actual blood published last week (I repeat, last week) (mastodon.social)
Archive link to story here: archive.ph/HVNLH...
Want to make a T-Shirt and to know if it's offensive to Brits alike
So, I was spacing out while waiting for my next class in college and had this idea and wanted to know what a British person would think of it. I wanted to make a T-Shirt with the outline of the Falkland Islands filled with the Union Jack, and on the top, or top-left corner, a depiction of Queen Elizabeth II smiling from Heaven...