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CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

simonwillison.net

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Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#161

Post by myvoiceismypass »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #78
red-iron-pine wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Donald Trump is wickedly smart. wut. this is a joke, right? Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless, and willing to utilize any and all tools.

> wut. this is a joke, right? No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists. I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent . And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dop…

> recall the Republican debates

From literally a decade ago?

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#162

Post by necovek »

casey2 wrote: post #151
clintfred wrote: post #29

Facts are the enemy. I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.

Did we read the same book? Wasn't Winston fixing historical records? Sure he just directly rewrote them, but that's not a job. A job makes it look like you aren't fudging the numbers. But the result is the same. The CIA has a long history of lying with statistics to push political agendas. Who remembers the "war on drugs" or LA in the 90s? I don't recall seeing CIA working with contras in the duckbook. That's because…

It was certainly one perspective that was valuable to have: I imagine everybody understood that it was by CIA (it was in the name!) with everything that implies even with "fact" in the name.

There were still actual facts in there, and when there was controversial stuff, you knew that it was coming in with US-tinted glasses, so if that supported with any claim an "adversarial" point, you could trust it to be true (eg. if it confirmed rising GDP and per-capita increase for China and matched Chinese figures, you'd be fine trusting it).

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#163

Post by LM358 »

irishcoffee wrote: post #128
oliyoung wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BNW has proven to be far more prescient, and insidiously so, than 1984

Yeah, that and Atlas Shrugged, but mentioning that book is a magnet for dissention. Edit: I was correct, and I don't understand why. Was AS somehow twisted for political reasons? It's a great book.

Probably because the author was an insufferable person and that that very book was part of the basis for (not "twisted") her inhumane and pretentious pseudo-philosophical spin on libertarianism?

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#164

Post by usefulposter »

arjie wrote: post #64

Really don't like this engagement-bait style "suddenly stops" / "have quietly" and all this stuff. It's no wonder it works. The headline from the CIA is far more staid and off the front page in comparison https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 It's not even a bad submission saying that he mirrored it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/

Ha, yep. I recall a similar observation in December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251912

What other engagement bait adverbs appear in HN submission titles?

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#165

Post by joriJordan »

GS523523 wrote: post #154
Fairburn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion = blind loyalty (to those in power of said religion) It's one of the oldest tools we have to control society. And it gets abused. All. Of. The. Time.

That's better, but it's still wrong, because there are plenty of organized belief systems whose leaders don't demand blind loyalty. To say that these don't qualify as religions is absurd. You could say that one of the elements of religion is having faith in something that is not provable via the scientific method and I'd agree. But then you'd lose generals, managers, politicians, etc... from the list above in which c…

"Do what we say or lose your income" does require blind faith in the correctness of the hierarchy. The business model and whether or not useful work is being done or if the biological is just shuffling capital around as political rules allow.

It requires ignoring management is just another random person, wielding fiat authority. Physics has not imbued them with special properties. It's allegiance to made up semantics.

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#166

Post by Kim_Bruning »

andy_ppp wrote: post #108
casenmgreen wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was about propaganda at BBC - nothing. I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks. Can you describe the basis for the claim?

[flagged]

So asking an LLM to work from memory will get you the general vibe of the thing from sources. The vibe as a vibe is actually very useful! It's a new variant of counting google hits for a term. But it doesn't really tell you more than that; and you can't treat it as fact.

Same as with a smart person working from memory. They're smart, and their memory is good, but they could misremember after all. [1]

If you ask your LLM to execute a search for you, congrats, you're one step further, now it can summarize the search results for you. But now you're back at the point you were before LLMs existed and we all relied on google. Just because google says something, doesn't mean it's true.

Now both you and the LLM need to go work through the sources and figure out what's actually going on.

The "ChatGPT says it's clearly absurd..." is missing the word "...because..." , and roughly a paragraph of support

[1] (Before you complain: I'm not anthropomorphizing. You're anthropocentrizing! )

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#167

Post by MrSkelter »

casenmgreen wrote: post #102
nostrademons wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban…

I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was about propaganda at BBC - nothing. I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks. Can you describe the basis for the claim?

The idea 1984 is about Russia would have surprised people at the time. That’s an ironic twist of history Orwell could have written about himself.

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#168

Post by rldjbpin »

used it extensively in high school as a more approachable way to learn about countries without the daunting amounts that wikipedia pages tend to have.

come to realise down the line the "writer's biases" in the latter half of the articles. almost comical to see how nuanced situations are distilled down to "our perspective". recall how you could "learn" about the drug trade situation in almost any country, regardless of how you perceived the country's safeness before reading the page.

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#169

Post by direwolf20 »

normalaccess wrote: post #101
boshomi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present i…

Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.

Already happened, my friend

Re: CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

#170

Post by direwolf20 »

simonh wrote: post #35
exe34 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing, but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most powerful military in history.

What were getting is another Russia with the full military and economic might of the US.

A number that is soon to approach zero, everyone hopes.

It could happen. The world is dedollarizing as a direct consequence of the trade war.

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