Jesus yeah that’s a great point re:Musk/Twitter. I’m not sure that it’s true as you wrote it quite yet, but I would definitely agree that it’s, at the very least, an excellent prediction. It might very well be functionally true already as a matter of political economy, but it hasn’t been tested yet by a sufficiently big movement or financial crisis or whatever.

+1 to everything that you said about organizing. It seems that we’re coming to the same realization that many 19th century socialists already had. There are no shortcuts to building power, and that includes going viral on Twitter.

I’ve told this story on the fediverse before, but I have this memory from occupy of when a large news network interviewed my friend, an economist, but only used a few seconds of that interview, but did air the entirety of an interview with a guy who was obviously unwell and probably homeless. Like you, it took me a while after occupy to really unpack in my head what had happened in general, and I often think on that moment as an important microcosm. Not only was it grossly exploitative, but it is actually good that the occupy camps welcomed and fed people like him. That is how our society ought to work. To have it used as a cudgel to delegitimize the entire camp was cynical beyond my comprehension at the time. To this day, I think about that moment to sorta tune the cynicism of the reaction, even to such a frankly ineffectual and disorganized threat as occupy. A meaningful challenge to power had better be ready for one hell of a reaction.

Same, and thanks! We’re probably a similar age. My own political awakening was occupy, and I got interested in theory as I participated in more and more protest movements that just sorta fizzled.

I 100% agree re:Twitter. I am so tired of people pointing out that it has lost 80% of its value or whatever. Once you have a few billion, there’s nothing that more money can do to your material circumstances. Don’t get me wrong, Musk is a dumbass, but, in this specific case, I actually think that he came out on top. That says more about what you can do with infinite money than anything about his tactical genius, because it doesn’t exactly take the biggest brain to decide that you should buy something that seems important.

I actually also reviewed that one, except my review of it was extremely favorable. I’m so glad that you read it and I’d welcome your thoughts on my very friendly amendment to his analysis if you end up reading that post.

Glad to hear it!

Totally agreed. I didn’t mean to say that it’s a failure if it doesn’t properly encapsulate all complexity, but that the inability to do so has implications for design. In this specific case (as in many cases), the error they’re making is that they don’t realize the root of the problem that they’re trying to solve lies in that tension.

The platform and environment are something you can shape even without an established or physical community.

Again, couldn’t agree more! The platform is actually extremely powerful and can easily change behavior in undesirable ways for users, which is actually the core thesis of that longer write up that I linked. That’s a big part of where ghosting comes from in the first place. My concern is that thinking you can just bolt a new thing onto the existing model is to repeat the original error.

This app fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Your friend sets you up on a date. Are you going to treat that person horribly. Of course not. Why? First and foremost, because you’re not a dick. Your date is a human being who, like you, is worthy and deserving of basic respect and decency. Second, because your mutual friendship holds you accountable. Relationships in communities have an overlapping structure that mutually impact each other. Accountability is an emergent property of that structure, not something that can be implemented by an app. When you meet people via an app, you strip both the humanity and the community, and with it goes the individual and community accountability.

I’ve written about this tension before: As we use computers more and more to mediate human relationships, we’ll increasingly find that being human and doing human things is actually too complicated to be legible to computers, which need everything spelled out in mathematically precise detail. Human relationships, like dating, are particularly complicated, so to make them legible to computers, you necessarily lose some of the humanity.

Companies that try to whack-a-mole patch the problems with that will find that their patches are going to suffer from the same problem: Their accountability structure is a flat shallow version of genuine human accountability, and will itself result in pathological behavior. The problem is recursive.

Unfortunately, COP28 is taking it seriously, seen here with “both sides” reporting from the NYT.

Investment giant Goldman Sachs published a research paper

Goldman Sachs researchers also say that

It’s not a research paper; it’s a report. They’re not researchers; they’re analysts at a bank. This may seem like a nit-pick, but journalists need to (re-)learn to carefully distinguish between the thing that scientists do and corporate R&D, even though we sometimes use the word “research” for both. The AI hype in particular has been absolutely terrible for this. Companies have learned that putting out AI “research” that’s just them poking at their own product but dressed up in a science-lookin’ paper leads to an avalanche of free press from lazy credulous morons gorging themselves on the hype. I’ve written about this problem a lot. For example, in this post, which is about how Google wrote a so-called paper about how their LLM does compared to doctors, only for the press to uncritically repeat (and embellish on) the results all over the internet. Had anyone in the press actually fucking bothered to read the paper critically, they would’ve noticed that it’s actually junk science.

Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

All these always do the same thing.

Researchers reduced [the task] to producing a plausible corpus of text, and then published the not-so-shocking results that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did a good job generating plausible text.

From the OP , buried deep in the methodology :

Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.

Yet here’s their conclusion :

The advancement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 marks a critical milestone in which LLMs achieved physician-level performance. These findings underscore the potential maturity of LLM technology, urging the medical community to explore its widespread applications.

It’s literally always the same. They reduce a task such that chatgpt can do it then report that it can do to in the headline, with the caveats buried way later in the text.