> The left opened the doors of academic and internet censorship
This was almost entirely an astroturfed campaign, which very effectively worked to whip people up into believing that they were being censored.
Whenever it came up in the last few years in online conversations, I would ask "OK, so what are you being censored from saying?" Dozens, maybe a hundred times, of me asking that question, and it was nearly always crickets in response.
What is the evidence of "the left" censoring academia? Whenever I dig into that, it's sloppy science, fringe theories, or straight up crackpots who couldn't get published in a journal, who then found popularity on youtube and podcasts doing the "I am being censored by Big Science" grift.
If anyone would care to educate me on this, with evidence, I am here for it.
There are also more vivid and recent examples, like barring universities from divestment from Israel (ie, 0]), which has happened in quite a few 'blue' states. Not to mention sending in armed police (ie, [1]) to break up peaceful anti-genocide protests.
To prevent premature downvotes, preface: this comment is not about the merits or demerits of the censorship, just that it took place. Whether it's good or bad was a different question, but it very much happened. One might say that it wasn't "the left" behind it, but if you'd take approval ratings of this censorship at the time across left/right, the latter would've been strongly opposed with the former mixed at best, if not broadly in favor.
> If anyone would care to educate me on this, with evidence, I am here for it.
Sure, happy to. I'll focus on the "internet" part. There was mass censorship on the major US social media platforms during COVID in the name of "preventing racist attacks against East-Asians". This is widely documented and admitted.
Yishan Wong, ex-Reddit CEO:
> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic
That Meta and Twitter banned accounts for discussion of it is easily verifiable, Wikipedia also banned discussion of it.
In Twitter's case, they even had a CCP figure on their board of directors during this time [1][2].
You’re right, but a large part of the reason many come here is to participate in a strongly left wing idea reinforcement operation. HN skews left and votes in brigades to enforce that.
So many times I’ve opted to not refute things because I know it’ll be downvoted to oblivion, and because the community at large doesn’t care to change their views in the slightest.
(I'm the person you're replying to, in case you might get confused)
It's very unfortunate that all I received was downvotes, without a single substantial reply as to what would be particularly incorrect about the observations I made. This does indeed seem to stem from infallibility tribalism: "I identify with group A, so literally anything that can be taken as pointing out a flaw of group A is an attack on me as a person".
At the same time, this isn't a particular hallmark of the left; it's even worse on the right. In any right-dominated space, my comment, if the roles were swapped, would simply have been instantly removed rather than just being downvoted. r/conservative is a very prime example. Twitter is another one, having become much more eager to instantly abide by requests from foreign autocratic regimes to remove/ban accounts that oppose them after the Musk takeover.
I do wonder if you're going to downvote me for this comment, reaching a new "irony level" world record :)
It's definitely worse on the left, the group that's constantly inventing new ways to censor and exclude talk, not just action, the right leans far more libertarian in that regard. Most conservatives hate Reddit though so I doubt that's a sample of anything. I don't think X is a good example either, it's far less censor prone under right-leaning leadership than before.
And I'd never downvote something that's not entirely dumb as long as it's written in good faith.
> the right leans far more libertarian in that regard
That is the advertising. Meanwhile, the reality is the the US right is banning books in school libraries, telling people what they can do with their bodies to the point of needless deaths, requiring lie detector tests for hiring in the FBI where the question is "do you harbor any bad feelings about the boss?" The Speaker of the House just stated that "separation of church as state is a myth." I could go on and on.
As a lifelong independent, to me the above disconnection from the advertising and reality is the biggest reason that I can plainly see that pledging allegiance or alignment to any political party leads to the death of one's critical thinking abilities in that space.
I don’t think happening to not fall mostly within left or right makes any of your ideas necessarily more valid, there’s a smart and dumb versions of left, right and center to an extent.
All the things you listed imo are either extremely marginal or not an issue at all, especially compared to the lefts recent antics. Then again, I was pretty left leaning until I lived in SF, which quickly dissuaded me of it, along with the American left moving pretty far leftward. 15 years ago I guess id be considered somewhat left leaning even still.
"If only students didn't complain when Milo Yiannopoulos got invited to campus, the Trump administration wouldn't be kicking out (or imprisoning) international students based on their political beliefs, rejecting papers about gay people from conferences at military academies, and imposing quotas for hiring reactionaries." Is that the claim?
The underlying forces have been at play since the 1970s, with a party policy to eschew bipartisanship and further charged by creating a dedicated party media.
This setup has been constantly improved, to the point that Intelligent Design could successfully be held up along side the theory of evolution in American media - BEFORE the internet made itself felt.
There is an asymmetric media failure at play, and the idea that “both sides” have the same faults, allows this failure to persist, because it drastically downplays the propaganda machine that operates on the right of the content economy.
This is not an opinion, this is an open secret, as the people within the right wing ecosystem may as well be entirely captured. “Network Propaganda” does a better job of making the case, and should be required reading for most tech people interested in the market place of ideas.
> None of that is true! The bot invented entirely fake biographical details of half a dozen people who never existed, all to try and win an argument.
Welcome to reddit Simon! Nothing ever happens and a large percentage of posts are faked.
You can find discord groups for every major subreddit that are dedicated to making up stories to see what the most outlandish thing people will believe is.
> I would actually argue the opposite. r/worldnews is one of the few major subreddits that actively blocks the hordes of pro Palestinian bots.
> The pro Palestinian propaganda campaign being run by US adversaries might be the most effective I’ve ever seen.
> I could write a very lengthy post on this topic but it’s exceptionally rare to find anyone willing to have a discussion and not a yelling match.
I think this is what they claim to be doing, but really they are just blocking people who aren't pro-Israel while claiming they are bots.
I think you just explained what is going on. It is being done by the moderators.
The majority of opinion in Canada and US is negative on Israel's military campaign. Blocking this viewpoint from r/worldnews is censoring a majority viewpoint because I guess the moderators disagree with it. At least I am understanding now what is going on.
And even if you don't think that Israel is committing genocide, it doesn't mean you don't care about Palestinians dying in Gaza.
The moderators and the non-blocked inhabitants of r/worldnews are creating an alternate reality and self-justifying it by claiming everyone who doesn't agree with them are bots.
Could you explain why you believe that the war in Gaza is a genocide?
I’m not discounting the fact that many people believe it’s a genocide, I’m saying that they think so because our adversaries propaganda has been incredibly effective. I frequently see posts from communities of people who would be executed in the ME for their beliefs supporting the regimes who would drop the guillotine.
Civilian deaths are a tragic but expected outcome of war. The real deaths counts are completely within the expected civilian death margin for a typical war. The only claims I have seen with numbers that would actually indicate a genocide come from propaganda rags.
I think Israel is showing a lot of restraint and is mitigating civilian deaths as best it can but Iran and their proxies have embedded their fighters within the civilian population and aid organizations to an extent that makes minimizing civilian casualties extremely challenging.
On a separate note, the bot problem on Reddit is arguably worse than anywhere else on the internet.
I’d encourage you to seek out some of the astroturfing services to get a sense of how bad it is as good botnets are basically undetectable nowadays. They use real looking accounts with post schedulers to simulate real activity and then mix in their clients messages.
I do agree that the actions taken to mitigate the bots can cause a siloing of opinions that can elicit an echo chamber effect but what else could they do? Reddit is completely uninterested in dealing with the problem because it boosts their metrics and bots can overwhelm any sub that doesn’t attempt to contain them.
Per the UN Genocide Convention, which defines genocide not just in the totalistic sense (as practiced by Nazi Germany for example) but as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".
It isn't simply a matter of body counts (though I disagree with your spin on them). Israel's obvious intent to render Gaza to be basically uninhabitable, and to encourage what it coldly refers to as a "voluntary transfer" of its population; combined with its accelerated strangulation of the West Bank since the start of these activities, are what place its actions squarely within the scope of this definition.
Many genocides are actually happen once an attempt at ethnic cleansing is frustrated. Or done in concert with ethnic cleansing.
I would say that it is >90% likely that the ICJ rules that this is a genocide at this point.
> their proxies have embedded their fighters within the civilian population and aid organizations to an extent that makes minimizing civilian casualties extremely challenging.
This is no longer a war against Hamas nor it is about getting back the hostages. The first is achieved and the second Netanyahu doesn't care about because it would mean ending the war.
Instead because many in the Israeli government dream of Israeli settlements (https://www.timesofisrael.com/government-ministers-call-for-...), they do not want any rebuilding and do not want a day after plan that involves Palestinians staying in Gaza. This is what the war is about now: Israeli settlements in an ethnically cleansed Northern Gaza.
So what will happen now? Israel continues ethnically cleansing/genocide and in return becomes more and more of a pariah state. If Harris wins, she may get tough with Israel, whereas with Trump, he probably lets Israel do what it wants.
One commonly overlooked facet of Cannabis is the big difference between indica and sativa. The cannabinoids, and ratios of them, can be vastly different which leads indica to be a ‘downer’ and sativa to be an ‘upper.’
An indica can put me into a lethargic state while a good sativa gives me as much energy as a cup of coffee but provides 2-4x the head rush.
I will frequently hit a sativa vape before going on a run or doing chores because it makes it a more pleasant experience with no downsides. If I were to swap to an indica it would not be enjoyable whatsoever.
The most surprising thing to me is that Opus is only slightly in the lead.
I was feeding multiple python and c# coding challenges / questions to both and Opus blew GPT4 out of the water on every single task. Didn’t matter if I was giving them 50 lines or 5,000 Opus would consistently give working/correct solutions while GPT4 preferred to answer with pseudo code, half complete code with ‘do the thing here’ comments, or would just tell me that it’s too complicated.
Another data point, I definitely find Opus better for coding, but not by much. The problems I give them are generally short (<= 100 lines) and well-defined so any advantage Opus has in larger contexts won't be apparent to me. They're also generally novel problems but NOT particularly challenging (anyone with a BS CS should be able to solve them in < 1hr).
I have them working with mostly C++ and Clojure, a bit of Python, and Vimscript every once in a while. Both models are much better at Python and fairly bad at Vimscript. Clojure failure cases are mostly from invented functions and being bad at modifying existing code. I can't pick out a strong pattern in how they fail with C++, but there have been a few times where GPT4 ends up looping between the same couple unworkable solutions (maybe this indicates a poor understanding of prior context?).
Spot on. People need to say what they are actually using the models for and not just "coding".
I mostly use it to make react/javascript front ends to a python/fastapi backend and chatGPT4 is great at that.
I tried to write a piece of music though in the old Csound programming language and it barely even works.
It will be interesting to see how the context plays out because I have noticed that I can often give it extra context that I think will be helpful but end up causing it to go down a wrong path. I might even say my best results have been from the most precise instructions inside the smallest possible context.
It's because LMSYS is an aggregate elo across a range of different tasks. Individually in some very important areas, Claude Opus may be better than GPT-4 by 50-100 elo points which is quite a lot. However there are specific domains where GPT-4 has the advantage because it's been fine tuned based off a lot of existing usage. So weak points around logic puzzles or specific instructions don't bring down its elo whereas Claude Opus doesn't have this advantage yet. I believe Opus's eventual elo, after all these little areas of weakness are fine tuned, will be something like 1300.
I’m far more afraid of what Big Tech will do if they get a state sponsored monopoly on the technology over some sci-fi level scenario where AI will kill us all.
If only one group gets access to advanced AI it’s a turnkey solution for totalitarianism. Preventing this should be our primary concern.
I'm more concerned about the economic fallout from AI than even that. I'm having trouble seeing a future (assuming that AI pans out as proponents expect) that doesn't include an awful lot of people falling hard into poverty.
We went from an agrarian society into this white collar service oriented society in the western world in a generation. The ability for bullshit jobs to squander productivity gains for steady 40 hours of butt in seat time can’t be underestimated.
Correspondent contends that we’ve failed to spend society’s surplus productivity on an increase of leisure. We’ve rather created makework for vast segments of society who are no longer needed in a productive capacity but can hardly be left to starve.
This is arguably a result of the perverse incentives of growth capitalism. No profit may be made from leisure. Though indeed human psychology - the need to work - seems likely to play a role as well.
I don't even think these jobs are fullfilling. Do you really feel fulfilled by needing to work? Not really. Monkey brain doesn't work like that. You feel the need to survive, yes, but once shelter and food is acquired there is no biological drive to get you to be motivated to stock the shelves at Target. The only thing keeping people in those jobs today is the threat of abject poverty, and perhaps a lack of knowledge or opportunity to do something better to pay for food and shelter. Tellingly, no one who is independently wealthy is finding fulfillment stocking shelves at Target. You have to do that in this society as its more or less illegal to hunt and gather and homestead freely, thanks to property rights being distributed to every square inch of land on earth, and most current world governments have vilified the concept of an altruistic government and society, since that means the elites would have to cede material wealth and power.
The left opened the doors of academic and internet censorship and the right went ‘two can play that game!’ And kicked it wide open.