Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291953

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

In this respect it depends on how AI is used. In this case, I didn't envision it doing this in the "deep research" sense or otherwise making its own conclusions from data, I meant more in the vein of a well scaffolded agent loop iterating through, for example, census tract-level data, cross referencing that with other data sources to find the relevant, granular-but-requires-intelligent-judgment details to piece together countless small datasets to assemble a large pictured. Grunt work that is repetitive but just variable enough you can't do something like download/scrape and assemble at scale because each block or tract or zip code needs one small bit of human judgement.

None of that is my work though, just where I think things might usefully go. For my part I'm trying to jump industries into AI more directly, it aligns well with my background, but that fact combined with zero industry connections (save Claude Code's recommendation & endorsement, that I had to tell it not to email on my behalf to Anthropic) hasn't broken down that wall yet, and in the meantime I try to build useful things that might help in that direction. So I'm aware of AI's blind spots on some things, and its significant capabilities still need significant shepherding.

My hope is that agentic analysis that does this tedious methodical chipping away, comparative cross referencing of seemingly disparate datasets, will help shift society the tiniest bit away from law & policy making via hot takes that make even the well intentioned fall on their face with poor reasoning and the more cynical wield ambiguity a cudgel of control by any emotion they can incite, usually not the good ones.

This is the step that otherwise smart people fail at.

"We were afraid of danger X so we did Y to prevent it and turns out it was a waste because not only did X not get worse, it got better! To heck with Y!"

And don't consider, maybe, things got better for that reason?

This is "only sick people take medicine" logic.

If you're tempted down this line of thinking you need to consider: If nothing had changed or they got worse, would that have been the expected results? What then would be the expected outcome?

Comparative analysis at a minimum, not just to other societies with different norms but attempting at least to find pockets that didn't change as much or as quickly, what happened there and in other sub populations where factors varied.

Otherwise you're just someone complaining how things used to be different, better in any way that fits a narrative that makes you feel comfortable or righteous or whatever.

Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.

Yes, I suppose, but without elaborating further that doesn't explain why you're taking it to be circular, because I could have given some other description of what trends & goes viral on TikTok and you still could have said "Anything can be can be turned into that."

If we take it in the more formal logic direction you're going though it's all very simple and straightforward, here's the p & q -> r of things:

Algorithms of this sort work a particular way in directing next-video selection towards options with some characteristics similar to what the user has engaged with before. I'll stipulate there are lots of ways that can be done, time horizons and methods of weighting different factors but that's the broad strokes. Take this as premise P.

There are certain things that trend more frequently than others and they share some common traits, it really doesn't even matter what those specific things are, we can take this as an axiom without it being controversial.

Therefore, if anti-democrat content is disproportionate to pro democrat or anti or pro GOP, it isn't automatically thumb-on-scale, it can simply be that anti-democratic content has more similarities to what typically trends than those others.

This isn't circular. It's trending content is similar, anti-democratic content trends more often, therefore anti-democratic content can simply have been more similar to other trending things.

You're correct of course about Occam, but then your bring up that aspect of things was merely expanding on what I explicitly stated in my original comment when I said it didn't mean TikTok didn't tip the scales, only that such a thing isn't the only possibility. In short, it was clearly not stated as an "IIF/if-and-only-if" argument.

Going on to your For "arguably the opposite" final statement:

I think that too needs more little explanation. As-is, it sounds as though you're saying essentially "the fact that simpler explanations can be wrong is potential evidence for deliberate interference". That's a line of thinking when, offered without expansion, steps somewhere just adjacent of conspiracy thinking of the "the evidence is in the lack of evidence", and I doubt that's your intent, but I'm not sure either where that's heading otherwise.

In short, anti democratic content was, on average, more entertaining or emotion provoking.

That doesn't have to hold a deeper meaning on the value of any particular political viewpoint, or require tiktok's thumb on the scales of the algorithm to explain things. I'm not even saying TikTok didn't/doesn't do such things, but that type of interference isn't required to explain this trend.

Wittgenstein termed precisely this sort of practice a “language game”.

With the rest of his work (Philosophical Investigations in particular) it is a hugely useful lens through which to view and significantly better understand the use and function of language in all its forms.

Given that language is becoming a ubiquitous UI and UX and glue for just about everything, I highly recommend it, and as a work of philosophy it is much more accessible to laypeople not of the field than some other important works in the area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

I even share his concern about struggling to keep pace with the rate of change lately, and agree that my working in a frontier lab or any other such environment would certainly help with that!

I have a weird background mix of analytic philosophy, linguistics/NLP, propaganda research, and long-term institutional data science/strategy work, which unfortunately does not make ATS systems especially low-friction as I try to jump industries.

So I keep busy the best I can: lately building tooling around runtime observability, intent legibility, and intervention in LLM systems.

Some small public artifacts finally going up: https://huggingface.co/spaces/anotheruserishere/Cartogemma

Eh. Worth a shot!

I've seen him comment on it a few times over the years, though I wouldn't take my vague memories on them as canonical: He's mainly pissed off that many avid fans of some of his books and Accelerando in particular show a few patterns of thinking: 1) They miss his intent to show future for humanity that was much more of a "Warning! Do Not Enter!" than as any sort of advocacy/enthusiasm for it 2) Really pissed off that a subset of the that are ultra ultra wealthy either miss the signpost or dont care and seem to take it & other hard-takeoff singularity stories as potential maps & guidebooks on the path 3) He's annoyed (maybe not the right word) that a significant portion of people that cheer on the idea of a singularity do so in part for the hope of something like immortality, biological or uploads, specifically in a way that reinvents quite a bit of the trappings and mythos and other cultural baggage embodied in a lot of western Christianity, most notably a lot of the TESCREAL hodge podge of groups.

Again, all of this is my own dodgy recollections and paraphrases.

Put another way, search out the great vowel shift. That happened over more time but then again the contact with different speakers wasn’t as constant as every day on the internet. It’s just what happens, how things spread. No different and maybe to a further degree than typical memes.

They’ll just start cherry picking their patients, finding ways to squeeze out the people just that little bit lower on the prognosis curve. Or at least that will be the risk in a setup like that.

>"Root Cause: A dog named Kubernets ate a Yubikey

Ah, yes, irresponsible to get taken in by one of the well-known classic exploits. The 'ol "distract someone with a lottery windfall & make a dongle irresistibly tasty to another person's pet". When will people learn.

Especially when this particular thing is just one in a very long line of metaphors humans make to our own minds’ operations every time a new major technology comes to play a pervasive role in society. Computers, steam engines, even aqueducts were not immune to comparisons of thought flowing like water, funneled by deliberate intent, etc. And for some, a certain amount of hand wringing worry or even moral panic about “what it’s doing to us”, eg taking away critical thinking because “OMG calculators!”

j/k totally gambling