141–150 of 189 posts
I read the Economist for over a decade growing up. It was a great way to learn about the world, who was in power where, and the challenges facing economies at the time. I found their exposition to be pretty good given the fact they were restricted to a few pages for important events. However, their proposed solutions were always the same. More market freedom, etc. I did feel with the change in editorial direction a w…
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Why ask a human being who might have the exact knowledge you are looking for when you can ask the "dumb machine of making things up and getting things wrong" instead. Now being serious, LLMs are nondeterministic loosy compression algorithm which return "what a plausible answer to that question would be". They have no world model, no truth verification and formally will be excellent while having no verifiable content.
Yeah, but despite that they work pretty good lately if what you're asking is verifiable, like searching for the name of a book.
"There is a book about a boy in a magical school, with friends, who fights a big bad and its called ..."
should have Harry Potter as the highest possible response. But that is not the answer based on a truth model, just a statistical average. You could have been looking for Earthsea series. Or it could have the heat turned up and decide to go for a hallucinated answer over the statistically most likely token.
If you want a verifiable answer your best options would be to have the heat turned to 0, but that means it cannot create new responses. Or if you have heat, to ask 4 times and sample the avg. But at that point what is the advantage over just googling it?
And one shooting your answer and hoping its the bell curve answer is going to have decent results but its also proveably going to fail in a non insignificant number of cases
I'd love to know if "the pink" has the same problem because I used to find the editorial very good. As a non-investor, left leaning voter, it interested me that I found much to agree with in "the financial times" while still finding much to disagree with in "the times" and "the daily telegraph" and "the spectator" -as if money was more neutrally stanced on left-vs-right.
Truth is reading any of these MSM sources on either left or right is bad imo. Before reading them you're merely uninformed, after you're misinformed which is far worse
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There is an amazing write up[0] of somebody who was present when Boris gave some apparently "impromptu" speeches who absolutely pins him to the ground on his technique for appearing haphazard, off-the-cuff when it's patently clear its a rehearsed schtick. The man is literate. The problem is he is also almost amoral, and should never have been allowed to occupy a position of authority. He has some charming qualities,…
> and should never have been allowed to occupy a position of authority. He has some charming qualities This is quite the contradiction in a democracy. Democracies, at least in modern indirect democracy form, are popularity contests. I personally prefer this form of government over other popular choices. But ignoring this aspect is exactly what leads to unqualified people being elected to office.
From monarchs to pure direct democracy, decisions have to be made. But how?
I see "government" as a kind of consensus algorithm. Policy work, adjudicating, record keeping, legislating, appropriations, etc. It's all just one big data processing machine, trying to discern signal from noise (information), hopefully learning stuff (knowledge), and occasionally acting.
For all our history, we've experimented with strategies for reducing transaction costs. Building trust, predictability, and stability.
How do you think we've done so far?
IMHO: Government, and especially bureaucracy, ain't great. But the alternative of no government isn't acceptable.
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Why is that amazing? For all his faults, Boris Johnson is an excellent writer.
There is an amazing write up[0] of somebody who was present when Boris gave some apparently "impromptu" speeches who absolutely pins him to the ground on his technique for appearing haphazard, off-the-cuff when it's patently clear its a rehearsed schtick. The man is literate. The problem is he is also almost amoral, and should never have been allowed to occupy a position of authority. He has some charming qualities,…
They're wrong and right in equal measure, but what they do is publish their opinions with conviction and back it up with sound arguments and facts. I remember reading articles they published in the late 80s about their belief that Japans economic boom was about to end, but they were also one of the biggest backers of Bush's invasion of Iraq which they were disastrously wrong about. I haven't read it for a while so I…
They did publish a correction. Some pithy blurb like "Blah blah blah, we regret the error."
To their credit, most warmongers didn't have the stones to do a mea culpa.
Regardless, I unsubscribed and never looked back. (Ditto The Atlantic, for the same reason. Impotently, I didn't have a NY Times sub to cancel in protest.)
During the run up to Bush's Folly, one of their wizened writers related how The Economist regarded the Vietnam War, noting the similarities, noting The Economist's moral failings, wondering if they'd repeat the same mistake.
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no, he also underatands the system, propaganda, manipulation pretty well... he was just on the wrong side of truth and justice.
He really understands how to manipulate the situation and has founds various and fun ways to deny genocide. He is a human piece of fucking shit, who denied genocide more then once. Anybody that still hold him up as some kind of 'truth teller' has not done the proper research or is also a genocide denier.
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Probably a reference to Helen Joyce, a prominent gender-critical author/activist. Formerly an editor at The Economist.
She’s the reason I quit the Economist. In almost every issue for a while they inserted an article about the dangers of trans people, without ever speaking with an actual trans person. Weird. So I looked it up and found out they had secretly put an anti-trans crusader in charge of trans issues, giving her the Economist’s no-byline “voice of God”. If they have become that sleazy and one-sided on issues where I know whe…