spats1990

if LLMs can generate higher quality comments more consistently than humans

Do you believe this?

When you encounter these comments/sentiment, pretend that LLM = Loweffort Long Mumbling. In other words, poor writing.

Detection of "LLM" is a red herring. Quality is what matters. Always has been. Assess comment quality holistically, and you'll be fine.

There's also this recent-ish piece regarding the USDA's response to bird flu in cows thus far.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/inside-the-bungled-bir...

Toyota is not blindly pursuing hydrogen fuel cells in anywhere near the way you suggest. https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-battery-bev-hev-solid...

They may have been dragging their feet in the last few years but they are still Toyota. Not to be underestimated.

See my edits in the comment above.

I will further note that understanding the royal society vs university distinction here is pretty important, but it seems that you've already made up your mind.

I won't be responding again here, thanks.

and use the issue because it fits his hobby horse.

I was talking about the columnist from the Spectator, not the scientist.

I mean really, what did the guy that was so bad that the university decided it needed to take disciplinary action?

The university didn't take action (apart from the email from the VC, the full content of which we don't have to hand). It was the Royal Society of New Zealand that set up the panel. Totally different. I think your question here is answered by the text I quoted in my earlier post:

"To respond as fearfully as these seven professors, from the top science university in the country, to a single sentence that suggests taking a critical look at the involvement of science in colonisation of Māori, does the public face of science no favours at all. This failure in terms of academic standards explains the strong criticism of the letter that was expressed by the Royal Society as well as many leading scientists and academics."

edit: >Is he being investigated for taking someone out of context? I see what you are getting at, but I think the issue is more that the letter publicly misrepresented something in a way that was in itself not scientific.

I'll have to think about it, but I'm leaning toward thinking the Spectator columnist, at least, is badly misrepresenting what has happened.

Beyond that I actually don't really have strong feelings about this yet because it's honestly the first I've heard of it, even though I live in NZ.

And a response from one of the authors of the government working group material (see my other post ITT): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2021.1...

edit: the user above has made significant changes to their post since I replied initially; at first, the post above only contained a single link to the letter...

New Zealander here, not that it really matters.*

It appears that "...a proposal by a government working group that schools should give the same weight to Maori mythology as they do to science in the classroom" is a misrepresentation. The author of this article has taken up this issue because it appears to fit a political hobby horse of his.

One might read this article and conclude that The Woke Have Done It Again, they have Defied Science and Suggested that Mythology is Just As Important As Darwin.

However, one of the authors of the government working group material has also commented publicly about this and her take casts things in a slightly different light:

"The sentence quoted in the Listener letter as proof of the need to ‘defend’ science was from a section I largely wrote about the strand of the Pūtaiao curriculum that did not have a direct equivalent in the NZC Science learning area, on the history and philosophy of science. The sentence quoted was part of a description of the possible scope of studies of socioscientific issues, from a Māori perspective, by senior secondary students of Pūtaiao. To respond as fearfully as these seven professors, from the top science university in the country, to a single sentence that suggests taking a critical look at the involvement of science in colonisation of Māori, does the public face of science no favours at all. This failure in terms of academic standards explains the strong criticism of the letter that was expressed by the Royal Society as well as many leading scientists and academics (May, 2021)."[1]

Are those crazy (left-wing, out of touch, 'woke') government working groups really Denying Science?

Or did some scientists take something out of context and misunderstand it, then scream that they were being cancelled when other academics expressed disagreement with their ideas?

[1]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2021.1...

* (Edit: actually, I thought about it, and I decided that it does matter: I'm not really comfortable with our politics, which are quite different from UK/US politics, being used for grist in northern culture-war mills.)

Coca-Cola produces valuable goods, if you choose to take an action that results in the bottle floating out to sea, it's your fault, you don't get to blame Coca-Cola. That is what I mean by personal responsibility.

So in your ideal world it is 100% personal responsibility and 0% corporate responsibility, right?

"Phillip Morris produces valuable goods, if you choose to take an action that leads to your body growing a tumour, it's your fault, you don't get to blame Phillip Morris."

Corporations like Coca-Cola have successfully pushed the negative externalities of their product into the world we all have to live in, while keeping the profits.

The franchises follow policy set by Coca-Cola headquarters, right? You're splitting hairs here.

As you say in your OP, plastic trash should be a moral issue, but where we appear to disagree is in where the moral responsibility should lie.

I think it should lie at least half with manufacturers who provide their product in plastic bottles that can costlessly be thrown away, into the sea, by consumers.

There is no penalty to the individual for doing so.

Gasoline used to have lead in it. Now it doesn't, because people realised it's bad for us and the world we live in.

When supermarkets used to give plastic bags away for free, it would be common to see them blowing around, floating down rivers in urban areas like jellyfish, etc. Now, in places where supermarkets have either been forced to charge for them (or eliminate them) etc, you rarely see plastic bags as a form of roaming trash.

Somebody took a 1% hit to their profits, maybe. But the world didn't end.

I think each country should take responsibility for their own waste,

Only one country is home to the Coca-Cola Company, the world's largest producer of plastic waste.

Two specious arguments.

1. A 30c-$1 increase in the price of Coke relative to its current baseline will not break the bank.

2. Tens/hundreds of millions of slowly degrading plastic bottles in the ocean certainly do have an environmental impact.

If you read my link, it's not even about "trash handling facilities", but about the profitability of single-use bottles vs refillable ones for manufacturers.

There are lots of things in what we call civilised society that act as gentle guidance mechanisms to encourage compliance toward some end that is desirable for everybody.

Without some incentive to transport single use items to an appropriate receptacle some people will always just throw them on the ground, as it costs them nothing to do so.

The makers of single use drink bottles have thus privatised profit and socialised the negative externalities of their product. The money goes in their pockets, and the bottles go in the ocean.

Maybe you could have / should have mentioned in the OP that the book is a novel.

It's in no way clear from your post alone that the book you're talking about is fiction.

The U.S. isn't even in the top 10 producers of plastic waste in oceans (it's something like >30th on the list).

Coca-Cola and Pepsi are consistently the biggest offenders in plastic waste.

The United States should be the shining global role model we are so often told it is, and legislate to force better corporate behaviour around these issues.

At this point the consumer-blaming logic regarding single use plastic bottles is like "Well, we just make cigarettes, we can't help it if people smoke them and get sick."

Not good enough.

littering

Coca Cola and others are largely responsible for the notion that it is the individual's responsibility not to "litter" single-use products that are extremely profitable for corporations: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-li...

Yeah I literally can't think of a stronger "condemnation" than that, which is why I was asking.

To your link, evidence, Adrian Zenz, etc, are things I would prefer not to discuss on this site. :)

What kind of sanctions do you have in mind?

Like what? Regime change? Genuinely asking.

genocide is a significant label, whether China's mistreatment qualifies as that is probably to be determined,

That's what both my post and the US state department lawyers said. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-...

Who in the world has genuinely condemned the Uighyur atrocities that China continues to this day?

Parliaments, heads of state, etc have referred to this as "genocide" despite insufficient evidence (the view of US state department lawyers). I don't know what further condemnation you're looking for there.

What's interesting about this stuff is that it seems to support interpretation through multiple cognitive frameworks. There could be a mystical/esoteric explanation for why those people became so attached to the characters or fictions. Or it could be that they were already vulnerable to schizophrenic or depersonalization/derealization-type disorders.

It's like how you'll sometimes hear/read people say that tantra/mediation stuff like Kundalini can be dangerous because it results in an energy imbalance that could potentially be irreparable and/or lead to lasting damage.

i think in the last 5-6 years we've seen in western/anglosphere culture a growing surge of interest in both occult stuff, like you say, or occultish New Age stuff (astrology) as well as renewed interest in the old organised religions among younger people. at the very least there is a willingness to hold a "live and let live" attitude toward the spiritual beliefs of others.

of course this is just a hunch and other people's anecdata might say otherwise, but i tend to think it could be a swing of the pendulum or "backlash" from New Atheist influence in the discourse in the 2000s and early 2010s.

Or editing wikipedia, and arguing on talk pages.

CMD is in the fish! it's in the fish! we're all gonna die horribly

On the first point, a ~recent (2020) poll suggests most Latino people don't even know that "Latinx" is a word. Your post contradicts itself somewhat there. It says "the media are going crazy" over "woke stuff", but seems to make the assumption that "Latinx" is being actively pushed on Latino people, which seems like it isn't true--since if it were, far more of them would actually know it was a word. I suspect the prevalence of "Latinx" in the media is largely due to its being held up so frequently as an example of the putative derangements of wokeness (there are several examples of this in this thread). https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-08-11/...

On the second point, I simply don't know enough about the specifics of that debate, and I can't read German.

I remain convinced that corporations specifically show token support for social-progressive issues because they see some benefit to it; that is, they see some amount of broad support for these ideas in society.

How about the row after row of suburban homes in Livermore with BLM signs? Those are all median income neighborhoods, but I'm guessing you'd call them "elite"?

If your interlocutor is an advanced-level mental gymnast, they will tell you that the people in these suburban homes are simply aping the customs of the so-called "elites", acting as their servants. So yes, "elite" in the post you're replying to really is being used to mean "people you imagine who you don't agree with".

Yeah, I tend to think "woke" as a sneer word is just the new "PC/politically correct" as a sneer word.

Corporations wouldn't be engaging in this kind of token support for progressive issues if they did not believe such issues were broadly popular. Such organizations rarely do anything for free. The token support is a reflection of something in the culture.

Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public. So it gets framed as some sort of virus, or as an orgy of cynical virtue signalling. But in order to virtue signal, you need somebody who understands (and ideally even shares) the virtue that is being signalled.

Your entirely reasonable comment being flagged currently is an example of this cognitive dissonance at work.

There are many valid critiques of so-called "wokeness" but most of them come from angles that reactionaries generally dislike.

Censorship vs countries you are in war with is basic self-defense.

You think that people in Seoul, eating their 삼겹살, will look at some North Korean site and suddenly decide that what they really want is to go eat grass in the north during the next famine? As I'm sure you're aware, censorship of northern stuff in the ROK isn't just for NK ip addresses, it's for information in libraries. Where's the basic self-defence in denying historians access to primary sources?

You do believe in censorship, just for ideas that you disagree with.

edit: I recognise your username from the old days on /r/korea now actually... One of the mods on there must have finally had enough. You've been single-issue posting for like four years now, bro.

Have a good one.