Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.
That would only be true if what people had to spend their money on stayed the same, and the author goes through great detail showing that the individual components of what people have to spend their money on to “exist” (i.e. a minimum cost of economic participation) have changed drastically in 60 years. Not only that, some of those pieces (child care, health care, higher education) have increased in cost breathtakingly faster than inflation. Sure, you could reduce that to a statement that “therefore the inflation metric is wrong,” but the author goes on to show what a better, more representative metric would look like and tell us about the economy, and that’s a good discussion mostly orthogonal to whether the inflation calculation is correct.
This is an amazing breakdown of how catastrophically bad the definition of the federal poverty line is in the modern economy. They use sound logic and data to calculate that the value should not be around $31,000, but in fact closer to $140,000.
With this foundation, they revisit common graphs that economists trot out to “prove” life has objectively improved for the majority of Americans in the last 60 years, and show that they actually show the opposite. Those graphs are built on top of the poverty line, and that calculation is bunk, so the whole argument crumbles.
The obvious next step would be to calculate the improved poverty line at key points in America’s last 6 decades and generate corrected graphs, but that seems like a monumental effort. I feel like someone could make that into a dissertation.
It always bothered me in class that they said the magnetic field of light was just too weak to have any significant effect compared to the electric field, but I just accepted it because I was still learning. Good to know my intuition wasn’t too far off.
My hypothesis on that is people responding to others’ body language to get the same snap-out-of-dissociation effect. The people closest to Batman would see him and then look around at others more to gauge their responses. Others further away wouldn’t see Batman, but would notice the more-attentive-than-usual other passengers and be similarly more attentive to try to find out what’s going on. They then would notice seemingly unrelated things, like the pregnant woman, and respond more than usual. The paper also says Batman entered from a different door, so a ripple effect of attentiveness could explain this effect without needing responders to directly see Batman.
Well the snake oil salesmen have taken over the health department. It was only a matter of time.
TL;DR: While governments are putting out assurances AI won’t make the final decision to launch nuclear weapons, they are tight-lipped about whether they are putting AI in the information gathering and processing components that advise world leaders making the decision to launch nuclear weapons. In risk assessment, there’s little difference between wrong AI making the launch decision and a human informed by wrong AI making the launch decision.
The problem is that some small but non-zero fraction of these bugs may be exploitable security flaws with the software, and these bug reports are on the open internet. So if they just ignore them all, they risk overlooking a genuine vulnerability that a bad actor can then more easily find and use. Then the FOSS project gets the blame, because the bug report was there, they should have fixed it!
I didn’t say benefits were not cut off. I’m challenging the assertion that the mere fact that the government is shutdown is the cause of funding being cut off, like the phrase I quoted implicitly assets. The shutdown alone is not the reason funds for SNAP were cut off, and my proof of my assertion is the fact that funding has never been cut off in previous shutdowns.
This means someone must have chosen to execute this shutdown differently on purpose. Republicans are in charge of all branches of government, so they are the most likely culprit.
federal food benefits were cut off due to the government shutdown.
No, they were not cut off due to the shutdown. Payments had not been stopped in any prior shutdown and didn’t have to be stopped in this one. Trump and Republicans specifically chose for this to happen to put more pressure on Democrats. They don’t care if Americans starve to death, while Democrats do. They are starving Americans because Democrats are trying to stop Americans from losing healthcare.
I was really hoping that the AI they would be talking about would be the specialized algorithms known to have real, beneficial effects, like the one that basically solved protein folding. But no, they are talking about LLMs making policy, which sounds genuinely horrifying at this stage.
Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is “in 10 years we’ll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently.” In their roadmap, there won’t be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.
What’s most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.
“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”