> There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.
I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
> actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
I'm reminded of the quote
> “No one involved in an extralegal activity thinks of themselves as nefarious. I'm a businessman, okay?" - Quark, DS9 S6E25
I don't believe anyone nefariously sits there and says "lets make sure people aren't educated" but I genuinely believe there are people who say "I did this thing and people keep voting me in to keep doing that thing or keep paying me to do that thing, so I'm going to continue doing it that way"
You are 100% correct, people mostly follow incentives. The problem is that, for many politicians, "this thing" in "I did this thing and people keep voting me in, so I'm going to continue doing this thing" refers to the starving and/or defunding of education.
I can almost admire how you manage to think that but that is just ignoring reality. Politicians have created entire media giants that are designed to either lie to you and trigger an emotional response within you. Maybe not out of pure maliciousness but they benefit from doing it.
In the US, it's easy to imagine, or just see, politicians actively opposing expansion of the currently-poor education system. Some actively seek to further defund it (see school vouchers).
As for actively misinforming poor people, that is the day job (campaigning) for countless politicians, who usually spend less than half their time drafting or voting on legislation.
> I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
Populism is exactly this - misinforming poorly educated people with bad scary words, "others", "easy" fixes.
> Inflation is bad! Crime is bad! We'll just deport 20 million "others" and everything will be allright!
Or:
> Let's send all the money we're spending on the EU on the NHS, 350 million pounds per week more for the National Health Service!
In some countries, like the US, there are active efforts to sabotage education, or at least cripple it - by reducing funding to a point where educators have to spend their own money for supplies, get burned out, have poverty-level wages, etc. Those can't be accidental.
That's because you aren't viewing it in the proper context and think that the result of the action is isolated. I can't honestly imagine that you couldn't come up with a single incentive for misinforming people on topics in such a way that would result in your own benefit.
Just curious, how would you describe the motivations of a stereotypical sleazy car salesman offering predatory loan rates: A hard working person doing what they need to do to survive, or a con artist trying to find more victims? Only one of those choices represents reality, and you should really be wary of anyone who would suggest the other choice.
> In a direct message sent via X in July, Nullbulge said it accessed Disney’s data through a company manager of software development, whose computer it compromised. The material taken appeared to be limited to public and private channels within Disney’s Slack that one employee had access to.
Isn't that on Disney for preventing unauthorized access to the machine? I guess a case could be made like S3 that more default protections should be in place, but that's a tradeoff on how annoying do you want it to be for your users vs how secure does your data need to be in this system?
> The incident wasn’t expected to have a material impact on its operations or financial performance, the filing said.
This is such a good perspective and thank you for posting. I agree with your statements and of all the hype cycles that have happened, I think this does have a real shot of becoming something. Because of that I think they’re going to keep throwing money at this until someone figures it out. Because what else is there left to grift on in tech right now?
> I think this does have a real shot of becoming something.
I wouldn't be doing a PhD if I didn't. PhDs are terrible. I'm amazed people do them for "the money" and not the passion.
> Because of that I think they’re going to keep throwing money at this until someone figures it out.
My concern is who they throw money at, and even more specifically who they don't throw money at.
Some people known to do carpet pulls, no prior experience in ML, and throw together a shitty demo that any ML researcher should be skeptical of?
$_$
PhD researchers turning their theses into a product?
._.
Something's off.... But I guess when Eric Schmidt is saying you should steal and ask for forgiveness later, I don't think anyone should be surprised when unethical behavior becomes prevalent.
> Because what else is there left to grift on in tech right now?
l̶i̶f̶e̶Hype finds a way. There's always something to grift.
The key thing to always recognize: grifters are people who have solutions and are looking for problems (e.g. hamstring AI into everything) while honest people have problems and are looking for solutions (i.e. people understand the limits of what we can do, the nuances of these things, and are looking to fill in that gap). I can tell you right now, anyone saying anything should be end-to-end AI is a grifter (including Google search). We just aren't there yet. I hope we get there, but we are quite a ways. Pareto is a bitch when it comes to these things.
I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.