The people in charge are intentionally ignorant of things that _already exist in government_, like the OIG, 18F/USDS, etc. And since their actual goal is to slash and burn the government so that it's literally unable to function, thus justifying its total collapse since it no longer has capacity, they have to take out the people who actually look for corruption, look into social security fraud, improve government technology systems, etc who would see through and call this shit out.
It's never been about making government more effect or efficient-- it's the managerial equivalent of the "starve the beast" mentality.
>This is how people surround themselves with "yes men"
>But this always results in the death of a business
I think you are conflating a "business yes man" with a "newspaper angle yes man". It is fine for a major newspaper to endorse certain values, and distance themselves from others! It's fine because it's a big country with a lot of newspapers!
I think you're conflating a different issue and making mole hills out of mountains.
A paper, or journalism, is much more sensitive to these issues than a typical business btw. Because as you can imagine, once readers distrust a news source it is very hard to repair that reputation.
Op-eds aren't supposed to be that way, though yes many have become that. They are supposed to be experts opining about things related to their expertise. Such as a well known computer scientist opining about the field of computer science. This is useful communication to the general public and plays a valuable role in news.
There's a million shades of grey. The bad actors only want you to see black and white
I don't see how this is remotely incompatible with the parent. What percentage of the 8am-2am grind, do you think said Elon-tweets take? 1%? Less? What the team is doing during the unpublicized 99% is of more interest to me.
The parent is presenting this as a thoughtful exercise by serious, experienced people. It is absolutely not that.
The sudden closure of USAID is probably the best example. You have an organization of thousands of people that operates worldwide. It does a lot of things that save lives - deliver food to starving people, provide HIV medications, etc. If all of a sudden you tell all the grantees that you're shutting everything down, they won't get any more money or support, they need to stop the work they're doing, maybe they can get an exception but nobody is going to be answering the phone when they call to ask how because the staff are all on administrative leave - that has huge consequences. For instance, it meant stopping clinical trials in the middle. So there were women with devices implanted in their bodies with no ability to get support.
There are all sorts of other effects. We provide aid to allies all over the world. All of a sudden, we pull out the rug from under them with no notice. What are the short term and long term consequences of doing that? What would be the consequences to the stability of Jordan of pulling aid - the King has been our ally but it's a tenuous situation. What about Lebanon? Now that Israel has beaten up Hezbollah, we want to use the opportunity to strengthen the Lebanese state. What happens when we suddenly pull funding? There are dozens of different countries that are affected and each of them is a very complicated situation. It's not something that people with no domain expertise are going to figure out in a few days.
The way these guys are acting - it's complete madness.
Uh... no. It's an abandonment of any kind of strategy at all. You can be completely opposed to realpolitik and still believe in what USAID is doing (or the other things the Trump administration is getting rid of, like funding the WHO or other international efforts). For instance, an idealist would support USAID work to promote democratic institutions and conflict resolution.
It's not like they're saying "in the past we've played chess using only king's pawn openings and now we're going to switch to using queen's pawns openings", it's "we don't like this game so we're going to kick over the table and stomp off".
a "no-brainer"? for a one-time reduction? that severely damages America's ability to generate wealth? am I taking crazy pills today? I advise you to compare America's GDP per capita and especially disposable income per capita to any other country. wealth generation matters so much more than distribution.
> that severely damages America's ability to generate wealth?
Why would it damage that ability? The assets those billionaires own aren't going away. The skills of the people working at those businesses aren't going away.
Because dealing with someone who has proven willing to steal is bad for business. We've seen this happen again and again with communists who think they are oh so clever for 'nationalizing' their business to collect all the profits. They inevitably then find their actions effectively self-embargoed as other businesses avoid them like plague-ridden cannibals because that is what they are. Why show up to trade if there is a good chance they'll just seize all of your goods?
Yeah with a "default yes" approach it'll be easily bypassed. With a "default no" it would work, ie you simply don't get an account at all until you prove your age.
I disagree. Defaults matter. “It’s illegal” is a firm line parents can hold. And, you don’t need to deter 100% - just taking a chunk out will reverse network effects and cause population collapse.
Plus, expect more services to verify IDs in an effort to combat AI spam.
This idea that students are "more generally intelligent" requires specific arguments to support. ChatGPT alone has a vast breadth of knowledge that is impossible for a human to keep up with as well as superior skills to a student in any number of fields. I can find evidence that it has an IQ of around 124 [0] which is going to stretch most students (although in fairness the same article also speculates an IQ of 0).
Students can keep ahead of it with training in specific fields and it has a few weaknesses in specific skills but I think someone could make a reasonable claim that ChatGPT has superior general intelligence.
> superior skills to a student in any number of fields
It's abhorrent any time we measure pure distilled intelligence.
When asked to come up with any non-basic novel algorithm and data structure, it creates nonsense.
Especially when you ask it to create vector instruction friendly memory layouts and it can't code in its preferred way. I had some fun trying to make it spit out a brute-force-ish solver for a problem involving basic orbital mechanics and some forces. Wouldn't even want try something more complicated. It can do generalized solvers somewhat, since it can copy that homework, but none that can express the kinds of terms you'd be working with (despite those also having code available in some research papers).
Speaking of which, it cannot even figure out some basic truths in orbital mechanics that can be somewhat easily derived from the formulas commonly given, nine times out of ten (you can get there if you're very patient and are able to filter its wrong answers).
But at the end of the day it was still a valuable tool to me as I was learning these things myself, since despite being often wrong, it nevertheless spat out useful things I could plug into Google to find more trustworthy sources that would teach me. Really neat if you're going in blind into a new subject.
Claiming that Chatgpt is more intelligent than a student is the same as saying an encyclopedia or a library is more intelligent than a student. Sure they retain more information. But Chatgpt is not AGI and it has no idea what it is even talking about.
> I can find evidence that it has an IQ of around 124
Despite me being someone who is generally impressed by the best LLMs, I think this says more about IQ tests than it does any AI.
Which isn't to shame those tests — we made those tests for humans, we were the only intelligence we knew of that used complex abstract language and tools until about InstructGPT — but it does mean we should reconsider what we mean by "intelligence".
My gut feeling is that a better measure is how fast we learn stuff. Computers have a speed advantage because transistors outpace synapses by the degree to which a pack of wolves outpaces continental drift (yes I did do the calculation), so what I mean here is how many examples rather than how many seconds.
But as I say, gut feeling — this isn't a detailed proposal for a new measure, it likely needs a lot of work to even turn this into something that can be a good measure.
To be clear I was just bunching high profile AI founders and CEOs that can’t seem to stop talking about how dangerous the thing they’re trying to build is together. I don’t know (nor care) about Ilyas and Altmans current relationship.
