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togetheragainor

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The cultural shift is secondary to the demographic shift. Young Americans have been squeezed at one end by mass immigration from countries with lower educational performance and literacy rates, higher crime rates, higher gang participation rates, etc., which accelerated to such an extreme that native English speakers are now a minority in our local school district. And they’re squeezed at the other end, forced to compete for college admissions, jobs, and housing against a hungry and ambitious global population vying for H-1Bs and student visas. We sold out the younger generation, our own children and grandchildren, and it wasn’t at all driven by political and corporate machinations. No, it was for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.

That person didn't address the current climate in academia at all. Their examples of "contrarians" are all long-dead professors whose papers were published many decades ago in a different academic climate. That doesn't refute that academia in America has suffered ideological capture since, and questioning the "scientific consensus" on certain politically-charged topics is career suicide.

Also their Japan example seems poor. Japan remains a short a country relative to their prosperity. They're several centimeters shorter than a country with a similar GDP per capita, like Czech Republic. They're about the same average height as Somalians, despite having significantly better food security and a GDP per capita that's over 50 times higher.

Is this the consensus because it’s true, or because anybody who suggests otherwise is pilloried and driven out of academia?

The handwringing over an LLM creator shaping a narrative is somewhat absurd compared to the alternatives we had prior to Grok: LLMs that literally erased white people from history to align with their creators far-left progressive politics.

The difference here is many techies are more comfortable with LLMs censoring, or even rewriting history, as they align with their politics and prejudices.

Musk has attempted to provide a more balanced view I don’t consider just censorship. If he’s restricting the LLMs from including mainstream media viewpoints, I would consider that to be censorship, but I haven’t seen evidence of that.

Some people think it’s a feature that when you prompt a computer system to do something, it does that thing, rather than censoring the result or giving you a lecture.

Perhaps you feel that other people shouldn’t be trusted with that much freedom, but as a user, why would you want to shackle yourself to a censored language model?

Why would you claim that existing citizenship would be revoked? Ex post facto laws are incredibly rare in the US, and the executive order explicitly said it “shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order.”

Also, why are you implying that the US Constitution is immutable? Birthright citizenship was enacted by the 14th amendment, which as the name implies, was a change to our “enshrined US Constitution.” The founding fathers themselves passed amendments. They recognized that no constitution could possibly anticipate every future circumstance or challenge that a nation might face. They viewed this as a feature, not a bug.

It’s not actually that hard to verify whether someone is a U.S. citizen.

Despite what they’d like you to believe, it does not require months of detention, or release into the country on blind faith that you’ll show up for a court hearing in a year.

It’s interesting because many Europeans would be safer from fascist government overreach in the U.S. than they presently are in Europe, despite what you saw on MSNBC.

Perhaps you’re not American and unfamiliar with the situation here, but Trump’s election was largely a reaction against the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the rule of law.

This played out at the local level, with progressive district attorneys and progressive judges refusing to prosecute or sentence criminals. And at the national level with the Biden administration failing to enforce a sensible border policy, against the wishes of the majority of Americans.

Is Trump going too far in the opposite direction? Maybe, but the prior administration did far more to destroy the perception of the rule of law than Trump has so far.

Europeans are getting interrogated in US airport detention rooms over liking tweets critical of Trump

Oh no, they’re being asked about tweets? Is that worse than the UK arresting its citizens in the middle of the night over their tweets? Or threatening to extradite Americans over their tweets? Thank god America has Europe to look to as a bastion of liberal democracy.

[Murati] and the rest of the executive team gave the board a 30-minute deadline to explain why they fired Altman or resign—or else the executive team would quit en masse.

The board felt they couldn’t divulge that it had been Murati who had given them some of the most detailed evidence of Altman’s management failings.

Unclear whether she wanted it released internally or publicly, but this sounds like a demand to me.

I’m even more confused now than before I read the article:

- Sutskever and Murati compile evidence of Altman’s lies and manipulation to oust him.

- Sutskever emails the evidence to the board and suggests they act on it.

- The board fires Altman but refuses to explain why.

- Murati demands the board explain why.

- The board refuses, and Murati and Sutskever rebel against the board and petition with other employees to reinstate Altman.

It all makes no sense. And why wouldn’t the board just explain their decision if Murati herself was imploring them to do so?

I don’t think this is entirely wrong, but we’re coming off a long period of intolerant liberal groupthink, where if you strayed too far from the progressive Democrat orthodoxy, you risked excommunication from your liberal friends and family, getting fired from your job, etc. Where you’d be labeled evil or a fascist for daring to question progressive policies, which may have been well-intentioned but often had terrible second-order effects. Where the administration strictly restricted what could be said by news media and on social networks under threat of political and legal retribution. So this isn’t a new phenomenon, or a conservative phenomenon, and it hasn’t nearly reached the levels we’ve been living under from the left. The liberal tech cohort was just unbothered by these issues when it aligned with their ideology.

If you believe the system is fundamentally broken, and has become an instrument graft to funnel taxpayer dollars to DC bureaucrats, NGOs, special interests, political allies, propagandistic media, etc., that would be a much less effective way to fix it.

I realize many people don’t believe this, and believe instead that government corruption and waste in the US is non-existent or acceptably low, and we shouldn’t rock the boat.

But if they don’t believe that, their actions make sense.