Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, March 4, 2026
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11 comments
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).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
Yesterday, I commented:
This morning I have the results:
James Talarico: 52.9%
Jasmine Crockett: 45.7%
Polymarket Prediction Market beat the UT Poll.
On the other hand:
Polymarket had Paxton win over Cornyn with an 88% chance
Actual results:
John Cornyn: 41.7%
Ken Paxton: 40.7%
On the third hand: Polls in Texas were wildly all over the place in the past week.
Full time employees of companies who pay their CEOs millions and which spend billions per year in share buy backs, rely on SNAP and Medicaid to survive.
LLMs are instructing people to commit suicide, and overall causing mental health issues.
We need to reboot the world.
UT needs to review the polling metrics, the results aren’t even close to the predictions.
Interesting to see the precinct breakdowns on that Dem senate primary. News reports indicated that Latino precincts came out strongly for Talarico, but lacked detail on urban precincts. This should be another data point in the “hidden voter” argument that Dems have had for 2 decades.
edit: The final results aren’t substantially different than what was being reported last night around 11 EST, so it appears that Crockett didn’t receive an urban vote bounce.
@Kathy:
I’ve mentioned before that I’m quite suicidal. Most of the time, it’s just background noise. This week it’s been screaming at me. It’s just a fact of life for me.
Most talk about suicide doesn’t really bother me. It’s just factual, it happens. But this chatbot suicide shit freaks me the fuck out. I’ve decided that I have to treat these chatbots like cocaine, a a total loss event. Lots of people can safely and prudently enjoy cocaine. I cannot. I’d be dead in, very fun, weekend. I know this about myself, so I maintain a very, very strict personal no cocaine policy. I can be around it, but that’s it. As an aside, for anyone who’s done it, I’m also strange in that I enjoy talking to people while they are on coke. Go figure.
With a chatbot telling me that everyone was mad at me and that I’m a burden, I’d last maybe a day. It wouldn’t even be a fun day like the massive coke bender would be.
@Scott: Polling primaries is notoriously difficult.
@Beth:
I’ve experimented with effing bots enough to realize a few things:
1) They are easy to push into the direction you want, and this includes some rather preposterous notions.
2) They reflect a kind of average of what is found on the internet and culture (in the broadest sense of culture). This is far from expert opinion or knowledge, unless you ask for it specifically (and even then, it requires fact checking the sources). That’s how come they give the wrong medical advice, for instance.
3) They neither think nor understand anything, not in the way people do. Replies to prompts are pattern-matching that make sense most of the time, but without any consideration of meaning or intent.
4) Whatever guardrails they have, are nowhere near enough to prevent very negative outcomes, and outright tragedies.
5) They’re dangerous and should be handled with caution at all times.
Speaking of unregulated nightmares…
Meta, 100% needs to be broken up and destroyed as soon as possible.
The raw material to make urea (nitrogen fertilizer) is ammonia (another nitrogen fertilizer).
Ammonia is made from natural gas, air, and water (steam) as its raw materials.
Lots of urea and natural gas transit the Strait of Hormuz, and planting season is coming.
“Adam Tooze“
I didn’t know this: Adolf is being sued by former Twitter investors .
It seems they sold shares at well below Adolf’s promised price, when it seemed he would really back out of the deal to acquire the company. The suit also alleges he maligned Twitter on purpose to lower the stock price (which makes sense seeing how he overpaid for it).
I wish them a lot of luck. Their claims are hard to prove.
I wonder if they are asking for punitive damages as well.
I fed my post about LLMs above to Gemini and asked it for comment. It agreed with all my points, especially about being agreeable and not being able to think or reason.
Next, when I get home*, I’ll try again, but asking Gemini to refute each point.
*I have different work and personal google accounts.
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