Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social), page 7

More evidence -- this time with audio tapes from the original experiment -- showing that the Stanford Prison Experiment was rigged to encourage terrible behavior by the guards

In Medium: https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/K7gMN

Talking about this with my son, I was struck by how many pieces of major science/theory/culture in the mid-20th-century insisted that they "proved" humanity was inherently, natively selfish -- but turned out to be much less true

1/x

Check out the work of the anti-Trump PAC that is placing ads on Pornhub warning that "Trump and Vance's Project 2025 will ban porn," adding "enjoy it while you can"

Turns out doing political advertising on Pornhub is not only pretty cheap, but you can target swing states easily and be assured of reaching a lot of young men who are, statistically, likely Trump voters

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/01/nx-s1-5168877/2024-election-pac-trump-porn-sites

Project 2025 mentions banning porn on page 5 of the intro: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-porn-ban-lgbtq-transgender-rcna161562

I just discovered the music of @ekis here on Mastodon, y'all should go listen to it *now* it is lovely: https://shehackedyou.bandcamp.com/

It turns out that the major AI search engines, when asked about IQ scores around the world …

… have been citing the racist, deeply flawed data-set of white supremacist Richard Lynn — which offers preposterously low scores for countries like Kenya and Sierra Leone

These numbers are often excitedly cited on white supremacist sites — they have unusual influence. The guy who killed ten Black Americans in Buffalo in 2022? He talked about them

Wired story here: https://www.wired.com/story/google-microsoft-perplexity-scientific-racism-search-results-ai/

@mcc @jeisom

I dig that goal

@mcc @jeisom

aha, very cool -- did not know about these!

Super interested to see your Servo experiments -- I was poking around the servo repo a month ago wondering what it would be like to spin something out of it

"Prairie strips" ...

... are narrow little parts of big farms that the farmers allow to return to nature ...

... with wild native plants growing there, and no fertilizer or pesticides

Turns out these little strips of rewilding have a powerful and postive impact on the health of the surrounding soil

Item #13 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-25-the-third-thumb-prairie-strips-and/

Mastodon hive-mind!

I require your assistance

I'm wondering -- what was the first American song written about the problems of becoming famous as a singer/performer? Of the hassles of fame, of life on the road, etc?

When did this become a subject matter of songwriters and performers?

Please boost, the more brains on this one the better

How members of AP3, a far-right militia, cozied up to local police and border officials in the last few years

A *superb* investigation by Joshua Kaplan of @ProPublica, who appears to have gotten access to extensive chat logs from inside AP3

It's pretty mesmerizing

Check it out: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-secret-ap3-militia-american-patriots-three-percent

"Within the next several months, Nevada plans to launch a generative AI system powered by Google that will analyze transcripts of unemployment appeals hearings and issue recommendations to human referees about whether or not claimants should receive benefits."

If we're talking about relying on large language models, this is a simply terrible idea

They say a human will review each recommendation, but the push for speed/efficiency/cost always erodes that

https://gizmodo.com/googles-ai-will-help-decide-whether-unemployed-workers-get-benefits-2000496215

(via @david)

Is there a video game where you just climb a tree

that goes on infinitely

no goals

no powerups

it's not trivially *easy* to climb; you have to think a bit about each move, but it's also not a twitch game, it's chill

the tree gets subtly weirder the higher you go

like just

weirder

The suburbs considered as ...

... the Backrooms: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/13/american-suburbs-are-a-horror-movie-and-were-the-protagonists

A terrific essay in which the author -- who lives in the Austin suburbs -- considers why she feels creeped-out and uncertain when walking through her suburb at night to a grocery store a few miles away ...

... and realizes it's because it feels precisely like one of the "liminal spaces" people share online

@Gergovie @thomasfuchs @acjay

though to be fair “bacon topped ice cream“ is something McDonald’s probably should in reality have on the menu

@acjay @thomasfuchs @Gergovie

I think over and underestimating is a good way of putting it

I’m not as confident as you that the statistical approach that underpins LLMs produces anything like what we could reasonably call understanding, though

It may well be a *component* of understanding — making associations is key — but it’s not all clear that it can produce other elements of reasoning: logic, math, semantics, etc

@Gergovie @acjay @thomasfuchs

It can definitely be useful in a bunch of areas for sure

I do wonder what’ll happen in a year or so from now — the enormous expense of training and inferencing on the foundation models doesn’t seem likely to produce profits anywhere close to recouping, to say nothing of 10xing

I suspect there’ll be some hard conversations

@thomasfuchs @acjay @Gergovie

Yeah, that’s it

@thomasfuchs

Yeah they really are not trustworthy in this regard

It was one of the things I actually hope they would do well!

But I haven’t had much luck with it and research metrics like this haven’t either

BTW that post I boosted from @emilymbender https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/112762528828824513 ?

the tl;dr is wild:

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change had a report predicting "more than 40 percent" of gov't tasks could be partly automated with AI

How did they generate this prediction?

They asked ChatGPT

"Making a prediction based on interviews with experts would be too hard," as @404mediaco reported: https://www.404media.co/ai-finds-that-ai-is-great-in-new-garbage-research-from-tony-blair-institute/

The Tony Blair Institute had a *$16 million surplus* in 2022: https://www.institute.global/financial-statements

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent is a powerful and clear description of the horrific problems created by the immunity decision ...

... so it's worth reading in full; @heidilifeldman put it online here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ryZF_jO-DKeeCSnxxpXANt8PJVmpgVmV/view

Among the many grim effects, one that struck me was the point that -- since the majority didn't offer any way to know what constitutes a president's "core" activities -- the Supreme Court gets even more power: *It* will have that say

A real nightmare

Navy SEALs have disproportionately been dying by suicide …

.. with a similar pattern: Each seemed healthy until their early 40s, when — abruptly — a host of severe mental health issues arose

One wife suspected brain damage, and had her husband’s brain quickly frozen

She unlocked it all

it’s a new form of damage caused by repeated exposure to small blasts

You can read about her story in this superb investigation by Dave Phillips in the New York Times;
gift link here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy-seals-brain-damage-suicide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3k0.DGwe.i3OzX90az7c6&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb