That would be a really fun project! It almost reads like the setup for a homework problem for a class on chaos and nonlinear dynamics. I bet that as the model increasingly takes into account other people's (supposed?) preferences, you get qualitative breaks in behavior.

Stuff like this is why I come back to postmodernists like Baudrillard and Debord time and time again. These kinds of second- (or Nth-) order "news" are an artifact of the media's constant and ever-accelerating commodification of reality. They just pile on more and more and more until we struggle to find reality through the sheer weight of its representations.

Really liked this articulation that someone shared with me recently:

here's something you need to know about polls and the media: we pay for polls so we can can write stories about polls. We're paying for a drumbeat to dance to. This isn't to say polls are unscientific, or false, or misleading: they're generally accurate, even if the content written around marginal noise tends to misrepresent them. It's to remind you that when you're reading about polls, you're watching us hula hoop the ourobouros. Keep an eye out for poll guys boasting about their influence as much as their accuracy. That's when you'll know the rot has reached the root, not that there's anything you can do about it.

Journalists actually have very weird and, I would argue, self-serving standards about linking. Let me copy paste from an email that I got from a journalist when I emailed them about relying on my work but not actually citing it:

I didn't link directly to your article because I wasn't able to back up some of the claims made independently, which is pretty standard journalistic practice

In my opinion, this is a clever way to legitimize passing off research as your own, which is definitely what they did, up to and including repeating some very minor errors that I made.

I feel similarly about journalistic ethics for not paying sources. That's a great way to make sure that all your sources are think tank funded people who are paid to have opinions that align with their funding, which is exactly what happens. I understand that paying people would introduce challenges, but that's a normal challenge that the rest of us have to deal with every fucking time we hire someone. Journalists love to act like people coming forth claiming that they can do X or tell them about Y is some unique problem that they face, when in reality it's just what every single hiring process exists to sort out.

I have now read so many "ChatGPT can do X job better than workers" papers, and I don't think that I've ever found one that wasn't at least flawed if not complete bunk once I went through the actual paper. I wrote about this a year ago, and I've since done the occasional follow-up on specific articles, including an official response to one of the most dishonest published papers that I've ever read that just itself passed peer review and is awaiting publication.

That academics are still "bench-marking" ChatGPT like this, a full year after I wrote that, is genuinely astounding to me on so many levels. I don't even have anything left to say about it at this point. At least fewer of them are now purposefully designing their experiments to conclude that AI is awesome, and are coming to the obvious conclusion that ChatGPT cannot actually replace doctors, because of course it can't.

This is my favorite one of these ChatGPT-as-doctor studies to date. It concluded that "GPT-4 ranked higher than the majority of physicians" on their exams. In reality, it actually can't do the exam, so the researchers made a special, ChatGPT-friendly version of the exam for the sole purpose of concluding that ChatGPT is better than humans.

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.

Just a bunch of serious doctors at serious hospitals showing their whole ass.

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

Not directly to your question, but I dislike this NPR article very much.

Mwandjalulu dreamed of becoming a carpenter or electrician as a child. And now he's fulfilling that dream. But that also makes him an exception to the rule. While Gen Z — often described as people born between 1997 and 2012 — is on track to become the most educated generation, fewer young folks are opting for traditionally hands-on jobs in the skilled trade and technical industries.

The entire article contains a buried classist assumption. Carpenters have just as much a reason to study theater, literature, or philosophy as, say, project managers at tech companies (those three examples are from PMs that I've worked with). Being educated and a carpenter are only in tension because of decisions that we've made, because having read Plato has as much in common with being a carpenter as it does with being a PM. Conversely, it would be fucking lit if our society had the most educated plumbers and carpenters in the world.

NPR here is treating school as job training, which is, in my opinion, the root problem. Job training is definitely a part of school, but school and society writ large have a much deeper relationship: An educated public is necessary for a functioning democracy. 1 in 5 Americans is illiterate. If we want a functioning democracy, then we need to invest in everyone's education for its own sake, rather than treat it as a distinguishing feature between lower classes and upper ones, and we need to treat blue collar workers as people who also might wish to be intellectually fulfilled, rather than as a monolithic class of people who have some innate desire to work with their hands and avoid book learning (though those kinds of people need also be welcomed).

Occupations such as auto technician with aging workforces have the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning of a "massive" shortage of skilled workers in 2023.

This is your regular reminder that the Chamber of Commerce is a private entity that represents capital. Everything that they say should be taken with a grain of salt. There's a massive shortage of skilled workers for the rates that businesses are willing to pay, which has been stagnant for decades as corporate profits have gone up. If you open literally any business and offer candidates enough money, you'll have a line out the door to apply.

This is a frustrating piece. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history knows that you can't just report on what fascist movements say then fact check it (which is what WaPo is doing here). JD Vance doesn't give a single shit about workers, and the facts don't matter. It's about aesthetics. The American fascist movement, like all such movements, is interested in appropriating the very real grievances of workers into a spectacle that serves power rather than challenges it. Walter Benjamin calls this the aestheticization of politics.

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

This article is a mess. Brief summary of the argument:

• AI relies on our collective data, therefore it should be collectively owned.
• AI is going to transform our lives
• AI has meant a lot of things over the years. Today it mostly means LLMs.
• The problems with AI are actually problems with capitalism
• Socialist AI could be democratically accountable, compensate people from whom they use data, etc.
• Socialists have always held that technology should be liberatory, and we should view AI the same way
• Some ideas for how to govern AI

I think that this argument is sloppily made, but I'm going to read it generously for the purposes of this comment and focus on my single biggest disagreement: It misunderstands why LLMs are such a big deal under capitalism, because it misunderstands the interplay between technology and power. There is no such thing as a technological revolution. Revolutions happen within human institutions, and technologies change what is possible in the ongoing and continuous renegotiation of power within them. LLMs appear useful because we live under capitalism, and we think about technology within a capitalist framework. Their primary use case is to allow capitalists to exert more power over labor.

The author compares LLMs to machines in a factory, but machines produce things, and LLMs produce language. Most jobs involve producing language as a necessary byproduct of human collaboration. As a result, LLMs allow capitalists to discipline labor because they can "do" some enormous percentage of most jobs, if you think about human collaboration in the same way that you think about factories. The problem is that human language is not a modular widget that you can make with a machine. You can't automate away the communication within human collaboration.

So, I think that author makes a dangerous category error when they compare LLMs to factory machines. That is how capitalists want us to think of LLMs because it allows them to wield them as a threat to push wages down. That is their primary use case. Once you remove the capitalist/labor power dynamic, then LLMs lose much of their appeal and become just another example of for profit companies mining public goods for private profit. They're not a particularly special case, so I don't think that it requires the special treatment in the way that the author lays out, but I agree that companies shouldn't be allowed to do that.

I have a lot of other problems with this article, which can be found in my previous writing, if that interests you:

• The Anti-Labor Propaganda Masquerading as Science
• Why Is There an AI Hype?

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.

Happy to be of service!

I don’t know enough about their past to comment on that.

I highly recommend Herman and Chomsky's book, Manufacturing Consent. It's about exactly this.

But at least the way I read it, Bennet is saying that the NYT has a duty to help both sides understand each other, and the way to do that would be by giving a voice to the right and centrists without necessarily endorsing any faction

I think that this is a superficially pleasing argument but actually quite dangerous. It ignores that the NYT is itself quite powerful. Anything printed in the NYT is instantly given credibility, so it's actually impossible for them to stay objective and not take sides. Taking an army out to quash protestors gets normalized when it appears in the NYT, which is a point for that side of the argument, but the NYT can't publish every side of every issue. There's not enough space on the whole internet for that. This is why we have that saying that I mentioned in the other comment, that journalists should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, or that journalists ought to speak truth to power. Since it's simply impractical to be truly neural, in the sense of publishing every side of every issue, a responsible journalist considers the power dynamics to decide which sides need airing.

The author of the OP argues that, because Cotton is already a very influential person, he ought to be published in the NYT, but I think that the exact opposite is true. Because Cotton is already an influential person, he has plenty of places that he can speak, and when the NYT platforms his view that powerful people like him should oppress those beneath them, they do a disservice to their society by implicitly endorsing that as something more worthy of publishing than the infinite other things that they could publish. For literally all of history, it's been easy to hear the opinions of those who wield violence to suppress dissent. Journalism is special only when it goes against power.

No, we only agree that the NYT sucks, but disagree on basically everything else. We are coming from exact opposite directions. Yes, we both are attacking the NYT, but, like I already explained, the article attacks them for the opposite reason. For example:

Until that miserable Saturday morning I thought I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in a struggle to revive them. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

That is absurd bullshit. Like I said, the NYT's principles and history are that of collaborating with American elite interests since its founding.

The article talks about "objectivity" over and over, and how the NYT used to strive for it, but that's simply not true. The author's concept of objectivity is what Gramsci calls cultural hegemony, in which the worldview of the ruling class becomes accepted as consensus reality. Like I said, the NYT and its ilk once had cultural hegemony, but it's now been pierced. Another example:

There have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions. The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

Fuck that noise. This author is praising them for being "brave" on questioning trans people, but many activists groups have documented what this actually is: The NYT has an anti-trans editorial stance.

Again, like I said in my first comment, the author doesn't understand the role of power in journalism: He thinks that the job of the journalist is to present all sides objectively, without any understanding that some people are in power and others are oppressed. Like the famous saying goes, the job of the journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. The NYT's entire history, with some very notable exceptions, I grant you, is the opposite of that. Its apparent fall from grace now isn't because it has lots it objectivity, but its hegemony over American information.

I very strongly disagree with almost every word in this article. The work of journalism is to hold power to account, not to publish the dangerous ideas of the already-powerful. Any so-called journalist who thinks that is their job ought to be fired. The NYT didn't lose its way when it hesitated to publish a call to crush BLM protestors with the army, but when it decided to be the mouthpiece of the American elite, as it has been for most of its history. Remember when it collaborated with the Bush administration to invade Iraq? Manufacturing Consent came out even before that, and it documented decades of NYT editorializing in favor of specific American interests.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered.

Give me a break. The very people who did the Iraq WMD coverage are still famous and respected journalists, for crying out loud. Some of them are still at the fucking Times.

I agree with the author that the failure of journalism is a major cause of Trump, but in the exact opposite sense: It's not that the NYT is no longer trying to be objective, but that its veneer of objectivity has become transparently bullshit. The only thing that has changed is that traditional media outlets no longer have a monopoly on what information Americans get. The many other sources that have risen to challenge them are extremely problematic, to say the least, but traditional media outlets created that opening themselves. Like so much MAGA bullshit, the attacks on the media as elite and biased and out of touch land because they are in fact grounded in some truth, though the "solutions" are always a nightmare.

I say this every chance that I get: There is no such thing as a technological revolution. Revolutions happen within human institutions, and technologies change what's possible within them. It's great to see a similar argument in such a mainstream magazine.

Dan McQuillan has been warning about this since forever, to the point where I would've assumed that he'd be referenced if not interviewed int his article, though he wasn't. Here's a pretty short one from him. His basic argument is that AI is best understood as algorithmic Thatcherism, in which they'll silicon-wash the same austerity politics that neoliberalism has been feeding us forever.

Sounds very doable! My friend has an old claw foot tub that he lights a fire under. If you want something a little less country, you can buy on demand electric or propane water heaters and hook your hose up, though I'd expect the electric one wouldn't be able to keep up at 120v. Hardest part of this project is probably moving the tub. I say go for it!

I would love to read an actually serious treatment of this issue and not 4 paragraphs that just say the headline but with more words.

I have been predicting for well over a year now that they will both die before the election, but after the primaries, such that we can't change the ballots, and when Americans go to vote, we will vote between two dead guys. Everyone always asks "I wonder what happens then," and while I'm sure that there's a technical legal answer to that question, the real answer is that no one knows,

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.

I know that this kind of actually critical perspective isn't point of this article, but software always reflects the ideology of the power structure in which it was built. I actually covered something very similar in my most recent post, where I applied Philip Agre's analysis of the so-called Internet Revolution to the AI hype, but you can find many similar analyses all over STS literature, or throughout just Agre's work, which really ought to be required reading for anyone in software.

edit to add some recommendations: If you think of yourself as a tech person, and don't necessarily get or enjoy the humanities (for lack of a better word), I recommend starting here, where Agre discusses his own "critical awakening."

As an AI practitioner already well immersed in the literature, I had incorporated the field's taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial -- except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own -- that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). T

Oh damn good to know. I do a lot of work with one of the UCs. We were happy to stop work during the grad student strike a few years ago and we'll be happy to do it again. Thanks for posting!

I've now read several of these from wheresyoured.at, and I find them to be well-researched, well-written, very dramatic (if a little ranty), but ultimately stopping short of any structural or theoretical insight. It's right and good to document the shady people inside these shady companies ruining things, but they are symptoms. They are people exploiting structural problems, not the root cause of our problems. The site's perspective feels like that of someone who had a good career in tech that started before, say, 2014, and is angry at the people who are taking it too far, killing the party for everyone. I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with that perspective, but it's certainly a very specific one, and one that I don't particularly care for.

Even "the rot economy," which seems to be their big theoretical underpinning, has this problem. It puts at its center the agency of bad actors in venture capital becoming overly-obsessed with growth. I agree with the discussion about the fallout from that, but it's just lacking in a theory beyond "there are some shitty people being shitty."

I wish we had less selection, in general. My family lives in Spain, and I've also lived in France. This is just my observation, but American grocery stores clearly emphasize always having a consistent variety, whereas my Spanish family expects to eat higher quality produce seasonally. I suspect that this is a symptom of a wider problem, not the cause, but American groceries are just fucking awful by comparison, and so much more expensive too.

Excellent thank you very much for this.

So true! I hereby retract that antizombo slander

https://puginarug.com/

https://zombo.com/

https://www.yyyyyyy.info/

I like single purpose concept websites that don't do anything. They're the opposite of the modern internet that values engagement above all. They communicate exactly one thing once and though you never have to go back, you're always glad that they're there.

I've already posted this here, but it's just perennially relevant: The Anti-Labor Propaganda Masquerading as Science.

I do really like the bait and switch intro strategy. I actually do that all the time in my own writing. I think that you could do that even harder using Hickel's work as a source. Something like "Global poverty is down. Famines are going away. Things are going amazing. Except they aren't," then on to your stance about antinatalism. That might even open up an interesting epistemological argument to pivot: We ought to focus on what we know, not on these fragile measurements and stories, and what we do know is that people are born and will feel pain and pleasure.

As for the evolutionary disposition points, yeah those absolutely need more evidence before being used as strongly as I did, but my word limit for this was 1000-1250 and it’s sitting at like 1800 as is lol

Haha oh boy do I feel this one. I try so hard to keep my own essays under 2000 words, which is where I notice that people tend to read them a whole lot less. It's really hard! I have no advice, since I'm terrible at this.

I do have a question, though. The problem I originally had writing this, was that it felt like a mixed-bag of poorly explained ideas from actual philosophers, with nothing original or convincing to say. I still feel like that’s largely the case, what do you think?

I actually think that's totally fine, especially for an undergrad, but also in general. I also think about this in my own writing. I love a big new idea and feel pressure to come up with more, but sometimes that's not what a topic needs. Sometimes things bear repeating with a new perspective, or a tweak, or a mix of other ideas. Sometimes, you just need to bring old ideas to a new audience, or repackage two relevant ideas from two places together, etc. All these things are worthy and necessary endeavors in human knowledge (re)production.

Some minor feedback on your rhetorical strategy: I think that you should reconsider your introduction. Accepting that kind of Stever Pinkeresque mainstream optimism doesn't set up your argument very well, which is more thoughtful and much more willing to engage with subversive and controversial ideas than I thought it'd be from the intro. I especially didn't like the law of diminishing returns bit: It's not obvious at all why one should be able to apply a concept from classical economics about productivity to the human emotional experience. Those are pretty different things, and if you want to make that case by analogy, you're going to have to set it up.

If it were me, I'd reframe the intro to be about how unquestioning optimism and a belief in a poorly defined "progress" is our society's common narrative. Instead of appealing to diminishing returns to transition to your point about antinatalism, you could instead cite modern scholars like Jason Hickel who are (I think) very convincingly rebutting that narrative. That tees you up a little better to take that big step.

That's really the main thing that jumped out to me. The only other thing that I'd say from my first pass is that you talk a lot about depression and the human tendency towards it. If I were reading this very closely, I would examine your sourcing on those points, and I would be extremely skeptical if your sources don't include anthropologists, many of whom I suspect (though I don't know) would take issue with that. It is true that it seems that we're becoming more depressed, but going from there to arguing that it's innate to humanity is, in my opinion, a big leap, even if you do cite some evolutionary reasons as to why it might be. It could that this line of thinking reifies hegemonic social conditions more than it says anything profound about humans.

Hope that helps!

Glad you enjoyed!

I'm feeling better and better about my "pornetariat" theory.

Alexandra Elbakyan (Scihub) has probably done more for scientific progress than anyone alive.

I think that's a very weird interpretation of that, but fair enough :)

To be clear, I wasn't advocating for organized violence as a good tactic. I was just picking a simple example.

I still think that Bevins's history and analysis has merit, even if you disagree with his conclusions. I've read at least two books by anarchists that put forth similar concepts of legibility: Graeber's "Utopia of Rules" and James Scott's "Seeing like a State" (which I actually read to write this post and have a bajillion opinions about, but that's a post for another day). Regardless of your stance on whether your movement should or shouldn't be legible, you have to understand legibility, both to the state, and to other capitalist powers like, say, social media (to pick one at random 😉 ).

I once again disagree with your characterization of the book.

You realize how funny it is that you post this in an Anarchist community?

That's stupid. Anarchist revolutionary theory and historical practice are full of ideas that are perfectly compatible with this analysis, even if Bevins himself is clearly not an anarchist. There is no more legible act to the state than organized violence, for example.

I'm not sure why you've taken this unpleasant posture towards me. I'm genuinely here for a discussion, but this is my last response if you keep acting like I'm some sort of uncultured idiot that needs you "to start from the basics 😒"

Yeah, again, I take pretty strong issue with your characterization of Bevins's stance. Have you actually read the book? I think that this is an interesting and worthwhile discussion, but I also don't want to go in circles if you haven't...

When he says that they're illegible to state power, he doesn't mean that they want to appeal to the people currently in power (and maybe this is a conflation that I accidentally invite in my own write-up). He means that they cannot participate in state power as an institutional apparatus, be it as reformists or revolutionaries.

I get what you're saying, and I agree with a lot of it (but not all of it), but you're just not responding to an argument that Bevins makes, at least in how I read him. You are responding to one that many in western media did in fact make, and I agree with you in that context, but that was just not my reading of Bevins at all.

I don’t think its wired to critique someone for having a widely different interpretation of what happened than multiple others that were directly involved and then taking this very peculiar subjective interpretation to make wide sweeping (and IMHO wrong) conclusions about what we should learn from it.

It is because that's literally what the book is about. The book is addressing that very phenomenon as its core thesis. That's exactly what he is talking about when he says that the protests are illegible. If someone says "people disagree a lot about what happened and that's a problem" responding to that by saying "i disagree about what happened" isn't really engaging with the argument.

My impression is that Bevin started out with a preconsived notion and then kinda made up a retrospective narrative of these protests to fit to that.

I'm sorry but I don't think that anyone who has actually read the book in good faith can come to that conclusion.

edit: added more explanation

Just because a postcapitalist world should have a battery for every house does not make batteries in and of themselves solarpunk. The story surrounding the battery, in this case, the branding, is actually precisely what matters, because solarpunk is explicitly about speculative futures. It's a genre of science fiction that creates an optimistic and green aesthetic to aid in imagining a postcapitalist world. Posting a link to a currently existing consumer grade technology with consumerist branding is, by definition, not solarpunk.

"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." You're posting the automobile. Science fiction is about the social context of the technology as much if not more than about the technology itself.

Again, I'm not saying that personal batteries are bad, or have no part in a postcapitalist future.

That's kind of a weird critique, because it's actually consistent with the book. He spends a lot of time talking about how wildly different every person's interpretation of the event is, and that's kind of the problem. It's part of why these movements are illegible to power. He's very clear that this is his interpretation, based on his own contacts, experience, and extensive research, but that it's not going to be the same as everyone else's.

Same is true with the moniker. Whether or not the people on the ground felt that way about it or not, that story, fabricated without input from those on the ground, is what ended up creating meaning out of the movement, at least insomuch as power is concerned. That's like the core thesis of the book: The problem with that wave of protests was not being able to assert their own meaning over their actions. The meaning was created for them by people like western media, and they weren't able to organize their own narrative, choose their own representatives, etc.

edit to add: IIRC, he even specifically discusses how the different people in the core group of Brazilian organizers disagree on what happened.