A comment the other day about communications from fake social media sites--sock puppets. The writer observed it was sometimes hard to identify messages from bots.
My fear--you ain't seen nothing yet. Someone is already linking Chatgpt to their fake media sites, so they can push out messages which seem very real with little effort.
Reading Hive Mind by Garret Jones. Finding it good through the first chapters, until he got to the "Ingredients for Good Politics" and the Coase Theorem. A fast summary: if a state has people focused on the long term, and willing to accept the results of elections, there can be effective bipartisan deals to handle externalities (like pollution) using Coase. Coase says that if you have good negotiators they can find a win-win solution without the need for regulation.
Then I started thinking about the Matthew Effect.
An assumption in the discussion is that high IQ people are more future-oriented and more able to do tit for tat bargaining, without holding grudges which lead to mutual destruction. The problem when you apply the idea to politics is that those with the gold/assets are able to hire those with IQ (lobbyists and lawyers) to rig the bargain.
Reading a book by Scott Galloway: Adrift, America in 100 Charts.
He has a chart showing the increase in the amount of corporate earning which are booked in tax havens. It's gone from 0% in the 1960's to 50% in 2016.
I wonder what it means. If we see a figure that corporations pay x% of their income as taxes, is their real tax rate considering total income x/2 %
And the audit rate has declined from the good old days of 1960 of 3 percent to less than .5%.
I seldom agree with Prof. Blackman, but I envy him his office setup. (Seven monitors, it's incredible. I tweeted a snarky comment about the relationship to high tuition rates, but his output is so voluminous that he might be producing seven times that of the average law professor.)
I might agree with his negative assessment of the SCOTUS decision on sports betting.
It seems to me humans are prone to being addicted, sometimes to good things, sometimes bad. I'm not libertarian enough to say everyone can choose her own addiction. I'd rather see the government intervene, possibly with "nudges" rather than flat prohibitions. Taxing vices like cigarettes and alcohol is good, taxing gambling
". It's just programmed to seem human." That's a sentence from Ann Althouse, in a post reacting to the frontpage article in the NYTimes recounting an exchange with Microsoft's trial version of a chat bot.
I'm jumping in where I have no knowledge, but that's not the way I understand chat bots like ChatGPT, etc. Aren't they "learning models"? To me that means the programmer is responsible for the IQ of the model, of the bot, but not the content of the responses. So it seems that ChatGPT et.al. will be showing us an average person, "average" based on the context the bot is learning from, which seems to be the usual suspects--white, european, educated etc.
I suppose by controlling the content from which the bot learns the developers can create different personas--say develop a basic personality, then give it a collection of the 500 greatest books in some category with instructions to give the words in them triple the weight.
I've participated in some research on the aging brain, partly because my mother started showing signs of what we assumed was Alzheimers at about my current age, partly out of do-gooder syndrome.
Two of the projects had me run various computer-based exercises. The most recent one is being run by a Phd with Georgetown University, possibly with the hospital; I'm not clear. His exercises spanned a wider variety of challenges than I'd run into before: for example seeing a long sequece pairing seldom seen names (because rare in English or originating in a foreign language) with pictures of the objects or a sequence of pairs of objects with no obvious connection (i.e., a brick and a coffin).
Before I got old, I'd almost always do well on tests, tests requiring language knowledge and identifying shapes. As I've reached my 80's I'm doing less well on the familiar tests, and absolutely lousy on some of the Georgetown tests. While some of my problems likely are changes in my brain, I think I never would have done well on some of them.
The ways I and my spouse process ideas and experience are often very different, which was observed years ago when we both took the same tests. She hasn't taken the Georgetown tests, but I expect she would do much better than I did on some of the tests.
In a perfect world, knowing what I do now, I'd wish I had taken these tests back in my teens. It would have expanded my view of how brains work, and made me better.
Watched the first half of the Super Bowl last night. Turned it off when Mahomes was injured, knowing the Chiefs were done for. Besides, I tuned out of all the ads because mostly they included people I didn't recognize. I realize I'm almost totally disconnected from popular entertainment and celebrity culture.
When I was young "representation" wasn't an issue. Instead you had "mobility", the idea that immigrants climbed the ladder from poverty to middle class with some striking it rich. Actually there were different ladders--Jews were noted boxers and basketball players before they became doctors and lawyers. Mobility was often about "firsts". We noted the "firsts"--the first Jewish SCOTUS justice, the first Polish cabinet secretary, even the first black cabinet secretary.
Emphasizing the firsts obscured our view of the many, or perhaps was just a way to avoid looking at the many. But "firsts" are still important; they show what is possible, what isn't prohibited. Similarly the extreme cases, like Muggsy Bogues, may be outliers but they too show what's possible.
Somehow this discussion ties into "intersectionality" to me. But that's for another day.
CRS has a paper on the issue of foreign ownership of agricultural land in preparation for the upcoming farm bill. Two items of note--about half the acreage included in FSA's AFIDA data is forest land (apparently a lot of which is in Maine) and China doesn't show up in the discussion of the owners of the most land.
They mention possible problems in FSA's data, including a request to GAO to look at it. I am sure there are problems.
The conventional wisdom now seems to be that groups, whether ethnic, racial, gender, ideological, deserve to have representation in every walk of life that matches their presence in society.
For example, I've noted articles on the dwindling presence of American blacks in major league baseball; the absence of blacks in management positions in the NFL, the lack of conservative professors in higher education, etc
My first reaction is to go slowly--the first consideration is whether there are legal barriers to such representation. Those I presume are almost always wrong.
A second consideration is that under-representation of one group necessarily means over-representation of other group(s). For example, the over-representation of Asian students in top educational institutions (i.e., Harvard, Thomas Jefferson High School) is the other side of the under-representation of other minorities.
A third consideration is the under-representation of a group in one area means the over-representation in other area(s). For example, the over-representation of blacks in pro football and basketball seems to be the counterpart to their under-representation in pro baseball.
A fourth consideration is trajectory through history. For example, blacks seem to have created and still dominate areas of music (about which I know nothing), like hip hop and rap. Jews seem to be prominent in Hollywood and the entertainment industry.
A final consideration (some would put it first) is whether the differential representation indicates a barrier to advancement of some kind. One rule of advancement is usually--it depends on who you know--meaning the greater the representation the easier it is to advance.
