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It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

theatlantic.com

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Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#3
This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles.

I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#5

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles. I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

>Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense.

Is it even possible ? Like, don't you know the political inclination of any website/journal you read ? I feel like this search of "The Objective Truth" is just a chimera. I'd rather articles combine pros and cons of everything they discuss tbh

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#7

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles. I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

A journalist's job is to journal something, exactly like how NTFS keeps a journal of what happens.

A journalist doing anything other than journaling is not a journalist.

So people getting quoted verbatim is perfectly fine. If the quoted turns out to be a liar, that's just part of the journal.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#8

Better headline : It's too late to stop taking Sam Altman at his word See same with Elon Musk. Money turns genius to smooth brained egomaniacal idiots. See same with Steve Jobs

Money removes social feedback. You end up surrounded with bobble heads telling you how genius you are… because they want your money. This is terrible for human psychology. It’s almost like a kind of solitary confinement — solitary in the sense that you are utterly deprived of meaningful rich human contact.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#9
post #7

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles. I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

A journalist's job is to journal something, exactly like how NTFS keeps a journal of what happens. A journalist doing anything other than journaling is not a journalist. So people getting quoted verbatim is perfectly fine. If the quoted turns out to be a liar, that's just part of the journal.

[deleted]

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#10

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles. I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

It’s possible to insert a few sentences factually accounting for a person’s character without inserting a subjective judgement of character.

For example you could say:

Joey JoeJoe, billionaire CEO, who notably said horrible things, was convicted of some crimes, and ate three babies, was quoted as saying “machine learning is just so awesome”.

There, you didn’t inject a judgement. You accurately quoted the subject. You gave the reader enough contextual information about the person so they know how much to trust or not-trust the quote.

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