The media “priming” has been going on for a while:
This is from 2019-11-07, and was warning of the havok to be unleashed by the release of GPT-2.
Researchers had feared that the model, known as “GPT-2”, was so powerful that it could be maliciously misused by everyone from politicians to scammers.
Living the post-apocalyptic landscape after its release, we should have been warned that:
The public at large will need to become more skeptical of text they find online, just as the “deep fakes” phenomenon calls for more skepticism about images.
Just imagine where scepticism about things one sees on-line could lead!
Thanks for the link to Dan Wang’s annual letter, Eggspurt. I had lost my link to him due to an unfortunate hard drive failure. And it is great to hear that he plans to write a book – should be fascinating.
We should remember that while Mr. Wang rightly focused on the many problems facing China, he also penned this thoughtful observation:
“I worry however that one of America’s superpowers is to spin up yarns to reduce the urgency for action. The United States can relax either because China will be pulled out to sea by the receding tide of demographic decline, or Silicon Valley will produce superintelligence — and it will be on America’s side. I’m trying to tell a story that preserves American agency. It is that China will not fade away, meaning that America must reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor. It also has to contend with China’s strengths because it’s a lazy exercise to look only at a country’s weaknesses. If we obsessed only over America’s problems, it would be a pretty ugly picture as well.”
In recent months, Mr. Moore has echoed Mr. Trump’s complaints about the Fed’s decisions last year to raise borrowing costs, saying they are holding back economic growth. “The Fed is a disaster,” Mr. Moore said in a Journal interview last December. “We should have a discussion in this country about whether we need a Fed.”
At some point in the distant past, I was told Herodotus had written that the pyramids were constructed from the top down – by which he apparently meant that the sandstone pyramid had initially been cased in white limestone (starting from the top, and working down).
Over the subsequent centuries, that limestone casing was apparently filched, leaving the erodable sandstone seen in modern times. Perhaps there is a historic case for an outer casing. And if rock-cutting technology had been better in pharonic times, the original builders might have used granite instead of limestone.
Of course, this all assumes that the pyramids were not in fact built by aliens.
It’s because most Americans aren’t under any pressure to succeed and we’re also constantly at war for no reason. The GI Bill advantages are not as valuable as before for many reasons (federal grants, easy availability of college loans, ubiquity of cheap/free with grants community colleges, widespread internet access, etc). Parents never want their children to risk their lives when there are other options - and almost everything pays better than the military. Military service is just not attractive at all in the modern world.
