Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, December 17, 2024
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57 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
Follow up on the school shooting a couple of days ago.
Apparently, the governor has ordered the flag be flown at half-mast for a week or so.
So it sounds like the politicians are on it and this won’t happen again.
I found an interesting Substack run by Gary Marcus who is watching the AI scene carefully and is not swept up by hype or wishful thinking. It’s worth going to his archive and looking at the contents but I read this one this morning and he makes good points: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/confirmed-llms-have-indeed-reached (November 9, 2024)
Disquieting quote: “The economics are likely to be grim. Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs [Large Language Modules] will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence. As I have always warned, that’s just a fantasy. There is no principled solution to hallucinations in systems that traffic only in the statistics of language without explicit representation of facts and explicit tools to reason over those facts.
“LLMs will not disappear, even if improvements diminish, but the economics will likely never make sense: additional training is expensive, the more scaling, the more costly. And, as I have been warning, everyone is landing in more or less the same place, which leaves nobody with a moat. LLMs such as they are, will become a commodity; price wars will keep revenue low. Given the cost of chips, profits will be elusive. When everyone realizes this, the financial bubble may burst quickly; even NVidia might take a hit, when people realize the extent to which its valuation was based on a false premise.”
Worth reading in total, and check your holdings. Might be a nasty shock coming.
@Not the IT Dept.: The whole LLM thing is fascinating to me. There are some very specific things they are good at (grammar and style suggestions, for one) but for the most part they are just terrible, and will get worse as more and more of what they are trained on is just more LLM generated crap. People are succumbing to the hype and unconsciously lowering their expectations. For example, in this largely positive review of Apple Intelligence (partially based on ChatGPT) in The Wirecutter, the author glosses over the fact that one suggested “improvement” to an article she was writing was to falsely claim that she had actually used the product rather than just review the specifications. Absolutely unethical for anyone, much less a review site. But, hey, the LLM has determined that actual product use makes someone more likely to click and share, so why not just say that?
I’m reminded of when I would go shopping in certain stores in China and discover “international” products with all kinds of certifications on them, including ones that simply could not apply to that type of products. The marketers noticed that a particular symbol increased sales, so why not put it on all their products?
Note that I’m specifically critiquing ChatGPT-like systems. Machine learning is a much broader category and has had many successes.
@Not the IT Dept.: somewhat related to the ai hype, Paul Krugman has a fun piece up- “Crypto is for Criming “.
Personally, I don’t want to be involved with currency that depends on a reliable power source, but I am old and more of a Luddite than our dear commenter here. As to ai, just more attempts to to stupefy us, as if humans needed any help with that.
@becca: Where is Paul Krugman publishing articles? I thought he had retired from the NYT?
Gary Marcus is not anti-AI, he’s anti-corporate-propaganda masquerading as science and geared to inflating the price of company stocks. AI is real, and the point he makes (this is very simplified, sorry GM) is that companies are spending increasing amounts of $$ in getting smaller and smaller technological improvements; that the next advances in AI are going to require big investments of cash and patience; and that a financial crash could come once the financial market realizes these two facts.
We’ve bought tickets for this movie before, folks, and a tech crash could be pretty devastating to the American economy. He doesn’t address it as far as I’ve read but if China is putting in the long-term cash, planning and patience, we could lose an important sector to them. Worth thinking about; you can bet no one around Trump will think about it. (GM’s position on Elon Musk interests me: he has nothing to say about politics but he hints that it would be helpful for EM to make up his mind what business he’s in.)
@Not the IT Dept.:
I suspect Elon is no longer really in any sort of business. He seems to give all the signs of someone who has descended into the “sprinting through the hallways of his mind, screaming and raging” stages of drug abuse and mental illness.
@MarkedMan:
I believe he has a substack.
First it was websites, then blogs, now substacks. Plus ca change…
@MarkedMan: Pretty sure he’s on Substack now. I saw it trending on Memeorandum earlier. MSN is reporting on it.
I’m mulling over a story set on Earth around the year 22,000. I’m having a hard time imagining sufficiently advanced technologies, not to mention history to cover the next 20k years. For one thing, the planet may have gone through catastrophic climate change, and later a glaciation period.
I thought maybe one spectacular feat of engineering might serve for the former, though. How about replacing the Moon with Europa? Also moving the Moon to Venus to finally terraform that hellscape into something a person might want to visit. Would groups oppose this and demand Venus primordial be kept pristine?
On other things, weird factoid of the day: a helium balloon wouldn’t float on the Moon.
@Kathy:
From what I’ve heard, we will skip the next glaciation, due to CO2 content.
@Kathy: “On other things, weird factoid of the day: a helium balloon wouldn’t float on the Moon.”
Did you mean some other place, with an atmosphere?
@Barry:
One of the Apollo astronauts did a demo where he let a feather and a hammer drop, and they fell at the same rate. Using a helium balloon instead of a feather would have been even more dramatic.
But a feather is the usual comparison subject, because in air it drifts in air and falls down slowly.
I guess I should be relieved that our legislators have bravely kicked the can down the road again.
However:
and:
I suppose I should know who these livid lawmakers are.
Can they ruin Christmas for Speaker Johnson?
@Mister Bluster:
Dems should vote no, let Johnson gather the votes to pass it.
@Mister Bluster: Always amusing to see how debt ceiling and funding issues disappear whenever there is a Republican in the White House.
You know what REALLY sucks?
Diverticulitis.
Thank goodness for antibiotics and Tylenol.
@Mikey:
My sister had that. Awful.
Judge Merchan refused to dismiss the felon’s conviction.
Come now. We knew this was the start of a series of well deserved convictions, which won’t happen now. And when the appeal inevitably reaches the Leo Court, it will be overturned in a way that would make a sophist blush.
But at least the felon is angry now.
And at least one judge in one jurisdiction holds fast to the principle that no one is above the law.
@Sleeping Dog: Absolutely! Nothing better for Democratic Party prospects for the midterm than being the proximate cause of the next major economic downturn. You go, guys! BRILLIANT!
@Not the IT Dept.:
There’s an idea (not original to me) about general intelligence, which I find interesting. It is that human intelligence is a result of an interior dialectic, the communication and conflict between different parts of our brains, not just the two hemispheres but conflict between instinct and reason. Most animals have an instinct for fight or flight, but they do not have an internal discussion about it. They do not consciously weigh the pros and cons.
Maybe the thing to do is connect more than one independent AI and have them ‘fight’ over the answers to questions. Humans can learn jut by memorizing information, but until some of that information is challenged, and contextualized from a different POV, humans won’t fully understand what they’ve memorized.
The wife has been obsessed with the recent shooting at the Christian school, sending me links to read. We agree on some issues on these shootings and disagree on some, but we have come to total agreement on one thing. The authors who insist on writing about how these shootings happen are idiots. How is easy. There are lots of guns around. It’s easy to acquire them legally or illegally. Lots of people (maybe most?) dont bother to keep them locked up and/or make it easy for their kids to obtain them, even when they know the kids are having emotional/mental health issues.
I just recently had my teeth cleaned. Wife and I see the same dental tech we have seen for 15 years. We like her. I ended up talking about guns with her for some reason. She keeps one under her pillow for self defense. I told her you can buy a small gun safe to keep by your bed with an electronic code you can open in about one second. It would be much safer for when her grandkids visit. She said that would take too long and she just tells her grandkids to stay out of her bedroom. All of her grandkids have easy, uncontrolled access to a gun.
Steve
@Mikey: @CSK:..Diverticulitis.
I was diagnosed with diverticulitis in 2008 after I experienced extreme pain that I would not wish on anyone. It was complicated with an abdominal abscess.
Surgery was recommended by two physicians. I was in the hospital for a week for observation after I was cut. The wing of the local hospital I was in was a new addition that had just opened with all private rooms. Food was good and I got to see a lot of Ren and Stimpy reruns on TV. When I was diagnosed I read about how diet might be a cause of the condition. When the surgeon came by to check me out the day before I was released he said that I could eat anything I wanted. OK by me. He also said that I could not return to work for seven weeks. At the time I was a waged employee of Verizon Communications (not Verizon Wireless) the local land line telephone company. Not only did Verizon Communications insurance cover 100% of my medical expenses, they paid me for 40 hours every week that I was off work.
@steve: Meanwhile, I keep my CO2-charged pellet gun in a locked, biometric gun safe because when my grandkids visit twice a year I don’t want them in danger.
After the election I briefly considered a Glock 17, but ultimately I’m unwilling to have anything more powerful in my home because I think gun ownership changes our brains in a way I don’t want mine changed. And I’m not willing to kill somebody – I would rather focus my energies on getting me and my wife out of our home if we have an intruder.
So, anecdotally, the kind of person that would be careful with a gun, doesn’t want one in his home.
@Tony W:
Maybe wanting a gun disqualifies you from owning one. Didn’t Adlai Stevenson say something similar about the presidency?
@Michael Reynolds:
Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s all about intuition making connections fast, without a filter (like AI). And reasoning which can analyze the results. AND, you get a long pitch on the author’s consulting practice on business decision making, which I recommend you skip if you read it.
The author didn’t say it, but I think it’s the basis of George Lakoff’s observation that conservatives are able to think through complex causation, but they don’t.
This one needs its own thread: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/17/lieutenant-general-igor-kirillov-russian-general-killed-moscow-explosion-chemical-weapons
“A source in Ukraine’s SBU security service said Kyiv was behind the attack.”
@Not the IT Dept.:
I’ll say this again: get Ukraine into NATO by any means and ASAP. You don’t want to have to fight against them.
@Kathy:
A small horde of tiny robots that scurry across a man’s face to shave his beard. (Or woman’s, but I expect there would be a more permanent solution, while men may want to retain the ability)
@steve: My first realization that non-criminals kept guns in their house was when I was 11 or 12 and one of the neighborhood kids got his parents gun out of their bedroom and started playing with it, horsing around with his little brother. As everyone sees coming, he shot his brother in the stomach. The brother did live though.
If you’ve got a gun in the house and you’ve got kids, you have a much more dangerous house than if you didn’t have a gun, full stop.
@Gustopher:
That’s a god idea. I often wonder how ordinary people lived in ancient times, and sometimes I feel like illustrating that in the future as well. There was a lot of that in Steel Beach, I forget by whom (I did not like the story).
The problem is that ordinary living is not very interesting. That’s why we know little about the daily lives of the ancients.
The other day I got in the car, placed one phone on the holder, one on the passenger seat, turned on the bluetooth speaker, hooked the phones to the dual car charger, ran Waze on one and Audible on the other, put on my seat belt, and only then I was able to start the car and go.
Not that long ago it was just the seatbelt.
@MarkedMan:
I suspect that the people who actually run Tesla and SpaceX were overjoyed when Musk bought Twitter. Give the manic bored billionaire a different toy to play with that isn’t those companies.
Somewhat related… USA Today ran a piece recently about the five most important space-related events for 2024. Four were successes and all of those directly involved SpaceX. The fifth was the Boeing Starliner mess, which only indirectly involves SpaceX, since NASA’s astronauts from the Starliner mission will be returning to Earth in February on a SpaceX Crew Dragon vessel. Last night, a US Space Force advanced GPS satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It was originally booked for a ULA Vulcan, but ULA could not guarantee when they would actually be certified to launch such a cargo, and the Space Force wanted a firm date.
@Kathy: Years ago I came across an article about a community of scribes who were employed during the Egyptian pyramids’ construction. Because they had abundant access to the clay they used to inscribe pyramid related stuff, they started using it for letters, shopping lists etc. Some they baked and sent off, and some just sat around in garbage dumps until they dried out on their own. Because it was cheap and easy it was used for all kinds of mundane things like shopping lists, notes to each other and casual correspondence. I remember one letter from a parent to a child away at school (apprenticeship?) who had requested more money. The sarcastic reply could have come from any parent at any time.
So the alledged Wisconsin school shooter, 15 year old Natalie Rupnow, enjoyed a hobby with her father: going to shooting ranges. We have become so warped as a country that a significant portion of the population thinks this is just a fine thing to do for family bonding. If I remember correctly, that is the “hobby” the Sandy Hook shooter enjoyed with his mom too.
@MarkedMan:
I’ve heard about such things.
In addition, broken bits of pottery, potsherds, were the scrap paper of the times. In Greek they’re called something like “ostraca,” which is where the word “ostracize” comes from. Voters wrote down the name of the person they wished to exile in such ostraca.
@MarkedMan: I never had any kids, so go ahead and call me an ignant cracker-a**ed f*** if you want to; it won’t be the first time. While I share your sadness at the fate of Natalie and her victims, I’m having difficulty seeing a difference between going to the shooting range with your father and having your father farm out the job to the Boy Scouts or the Church youth group–which is where I learned to shoot. I have no doubt, based on the outcome here, that her father was the least likely guy to have introduce her to guns and shooting. On the other hand, he may well be an outlier in the gun owners’ subgroup. And if he’s not, your concern is probably a day late (at least) but will not be something the nation can fix.
@Kathy:
Here’s a bad one, for balance: Sentient socks. Foot fetishists have their consciousness uploaded into socks.
Obviously this can’t be all socks that are sentient, since the number of socks exceeds the number of sock wearing humans, and not all humans are foot fetishists. Could the consciousness be cloned, so all socks would be sentient?
Would these socks be more expensive or less expensive than plain socks?
Do people even know their socks are sentient, or would this be something foot fetishists are surreptitiously adding to the sock production?
The people I knew in the UK who had guns and ammunition in the house all kept them very securely under lock and key.
Even today, while handguns are now virtually impossible to own privately (except under very special circumstances) there are a surprisingly large number of shotguns and (bolt action) rifles around. And even .22 semi-auto rifles.
Subject to police license, which may be revoked at will.
Including for any failure of security of their storage, which is subject to inspection, at will.
In short: “thou shalt not dick about.”
@Gustopher:
I’ve a rule that all sentients in my fiction have rights. no sentient socks.
And that downloading your mind anywhere is useless. You wouldn’t live on, a copy of you would. You’d be dead. Curiously enough, the Invincible animated show did get this (though it was with cloning).
@Not the IT Dept.:
@Kathy:
As I’ve said before: Russia is going to have a problem with an enemy prepared to deal in “wet work” on a level similar to the KGB, or Mossad in a bad mood.
Just look at the persons involved in the Russian arms import trade who turn up dead, or just vanish, the “sequence of unfortunate events” that Russian mercenaries in Africa have been subject to, the numerous killings of Russian air force and naval officers in Russia, and Russian administrators in Ukraine.
Russia is used to dealing with western countries that generally play by peace-time rules and legalities, whatever the provocation. Ukraine takes a rather different view.
@Kathy:
Doesn’t do any good with ancient times, but I saw someone write that if you want details on daily life in the recent past, read murder mysteries from the time. The writers want to be credible, so they’re motivated to treat day by day details accurately.
My wife and I have been watching old PBS Poirot episodes. I treat them as audible wallpaper and pay little attention to the plot. But the episodes are set in a span of 30 years and they seem to be tolerably conscientious about period details. That’s fun. They’ve had DC-3s in a few episodes, starting, I think a few years too early, but they had a beautiful, flying, De Havilland Dragon Rapide, a wood and wire biplane in an episode set earlier. Poirot’s side kick, Captain Hastings, is a car guy and it’s fun to see what Lagonda or Alfa he’s driving. The furniture and wardrobes and cars and telephones seem to change appropriately. They seem to have combed the UK for some impressive art deco buildings. They have a period airport terminal building they’ve used in a few episodes, pretending to be various airports. Still an active airport, in one episode for a couple seconds, you could just see a Cessna 172 taxi by.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: It seems US gun culture has moved far, far away from going hunting with the kids, which is what I presume you were talking about. When I was a kid, gun shows and magazines were about hunting. There might be a few of those around but nowadays it’s mostly about killing people. Assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stock kits and in your face bravado and swagger about gunning down anyone who looks at you wrong. Gun culture has turned rancid and vile and we are too inured to it to understand just how far it has fallen.
@Kathy: Clearly, sentient socks would have chosen that life, so I think their rights would be entirely preserved, at least in principle if not in letter. It wouldn’t be a crime to eventually dispose of socks, but the person would have accepted this when making the choice to become a sock.
As to the matter of downloading the mind being useless, I can think of two counterarguments — first, people are stupid and many who decide to do this won’t realize this; second, the real driver for this might be the people who want sentient socks, and the foot fetishists are performing a selfless act in allowing their minds to be replicated this way, to please both the sock wearer and that copy of themselves.
This does bring up the moral questions about whether a person can make decisions for their duplicate — the duplicate would be a separate being, but would have all the desires and proclivities and interests of the original. They would definitely need the ability to unravel themselves, should they decide life shouldn’t go on like this.
And who wouldn’t want socks that warm up ever so slightly, and gently cradle your toes, and let out a gentle, satisfied moan when you put them on?
Ok, most people.
(And I’m firmly of the belief that transporter duplicates demonstrate that the transporter kills people on one end and creates new ones on the other and that everyone in Star Fleet is just a copy)
@MarkedMan:
There’s gun culture and hunting culture, and a slight overlap between them.
@Kathy: Are you familiar with Mickey7? Not overly deep, but very definitely puts the mortality of exact copies front and center.
@gVOR10:
Great tip!
I’ve noticed something like that in movies set in the recent past, especially compared to movies made at the time. For instance, The Post, and All The President’s Men.
What I find even more interesting, but far less instructive, is when developments not predicted in science fiction later get incorporated into it. For example, smartphones. These are not rife in SF, until they came into general use. Then you get them transparent, holographic, etc.
@Kathy: There was a BBC sci-fi series called Star Cops. I saw it on public TV decades ago. The lead cop of the Star Cops had a device he called “Box” that was suspiciously like a smart phone, though it had a voice-activated AI. You know, like Siri.
That’s the only place I can think of something like a smart phone.
@Jay L Gischer:
Trek got many kudos for “predicting” the cell phone in the 60s (though those were radios like walkie talkies*). Later TNG got recognition for the tablet-like PADD. Too bad they never thought to mix the two.
Now and then you get things you can interpret as being other things. Clarke had his Comsole (not a typo), which served a function very much like a desktop with a web browser. Clarke’s was a dedicated machine, though.
*It was more about the flip phone form factor.
In the far distant future, you’ll not be stuck in a flesh and blood body determined by your DNA. You’ll be able to be aquatic and swim the depths of the oceans as an orca. Then you’ll be able to walk the boreal forests as a wolf with several good friends as other pack members. You’ll climb Olympus Mons on Mars as a human/machine hybrid.
@MarkedMan:
I think I saw a trailer or promo for a movie based on it. It looked too gruesome for my tastes.
@Slugger:
Kuato: What do you want, Mr. Quaid?
Douglas Quaid: The same as you; to remember.
Kuato: But why?
Douglas Quaid: To be myself again.
Kuato: You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.
@steve:
@MarkedMan:
I’m in a local trans peer group here. We usually get 30-40 people per meeting (once a week in person). The first meeting after the election we had 60 terrified women in that room. I want to say about a third were adamant that they were going to get training and a gun and that was going to keep them safe. I watched that idea spread around the room.
Right before I figured out what to say, a quiet woman spoke up about how she asked a friend of hers about buying a gun and getting training. He told her not to buy a gun unless she was absolutely 100% certain that she could shoot another human being. That brought home what a gun was, a tool for killing, nothing more nothing less and handguns are designed to kill other humans.
I spoke up next and said that you also have to accept that the most likely use of that gun would be to paint your walls with you face and brains. This redecorating would be accomplished either by your hand or by someone else’s the second you hesitated. I told everyone that the reason I won’t own a gun, other than being an anti-gun zealot, is that I know with absolute certainty that if I had a gun, I would eventually climb into one of the big black Chicago garbage bins and install my brains all over that can. I would then conveniently be taken away to the dump where I belong.
The only purpose of our contemporary gun culture is to sell death for profit. That’s it. Doesn’t matter how many people blow their fucking heads off or how many children get blown apart. It makes people feel invincible when they are quite vincible and makes a lot of very terrible people a lot of money.
The fact that I won’t have to worry about some fuckface with a gun ending my kids lives in a terror of bloody mist and children screaming is about the only good thing about my move to the UK.
@MarkedMan: Never been a hunter, and the church youth group never went hunting. Learning how to shoot straight was a cultural norm where I grew up, for whatever reason.* I was never coordinated enough to be good at target, but Luddite can attest that I’m okay at skeet.
*I grew up in a socioeconomic subgroup that tended to believe that violence is a tool that is useful for solving problems. That belief may be a factor in the gun lore. Dunno.
A feel good anecdote.
A guy I knew from the homeless shelter from this spring – ran into him randomly at the downtown grocery store. Really decent guy. He has an apartment now. We chatted. He’s doing well.
It’s difficult to express what it means to me when I run into a person that used to stay at the shelter, and then see them later, after, established in the world again – having an apartment. It makes me so extraordinarily happy. Proud kinda. And sad that it is relatively rare.
That dude made it out. Good for him!
@Beth:
I owned a gun for a while because a guy wanted to kill me. I would have no trouble pulling the trigger if I were sure it was necessary. Earlier I was ready to stab the guy with a chef’s knife. But a lot of people are unable to do that as evidenced by the percentage of soldiers, especially draftees, who won’t fire on an enemy. It speaks well of at least some humans that they aren’t prepared to take a life even in dire circumstances.
I’ve never seen the mystique of guns. I’ve fired quite a few different weapons and basically it’s just extremely loud and in the end kind of boring. I did a WW2 package in Vegas researching a book. M1 Garand, and the carbine, and a .45 which I used to own, a Thompson and a BAR. My wife tried it a few weeks later, ended up making me finish it. It’s surprisingly boring, at least to me.
Bang, bang, bang. And?
I’ve never gone hunting (though I have done a fair bit of fishing). Nevertheless, as a Boy Scout I earned both Archery and Rifle and Shotgun merit badges. It was a skill test, like playing darts, with a side order of macho.
I regularly have to give animals that I love dearly the coup de grace. (Yep, spelled wrong, my Dad always said “Dying with grace”). I’ve loved them so much that their place on my ranch is here, with me, all the way until they die, and I will give them an honorable death. I will never let somebody else kill them.
None of those guns are available for children to handle. How hard is that to understand?!