That was the claimed goal, yes. It didn't actually work out that way. Which is an example of the problem I described.

Sure. But that doesn't mean that "suspicion" always has to lead to the same behavior. "Suspicion" doesn't exist in a vacuum. You have to look at all the factors involved.

> The question is, what explained the difference in behavior of the two groups with regard to Luria's questions?

And the answer is, there were multiple factors involved, and trying to pin it down to just one is a fool's errand.

> Are you claiming that they knew the answer to the question yet refused to say it?

No, I'm saying that Luria's claim that the only reason they gave the response to the question was a cognitive difference between them and the collective farm workers who had been taught to read, is way too simplistic. And more generally, that Luria only looking at that one aspect of the situation--the possible cognitive effects of illiterate vs. literate--and ignoring all other salient differences between the two groups--like the fact that the villagers hadn't yet been forced into collective farm work by the Soviet government, while the farm workers had--is way too simplistic.

What feudal lords? From the article's description it seems like they were basically on their own before the Soviet Union came in.

> Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.

And you think the communists taught the peasants to read for the benefit of the peasants? It is to laugh.

> This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs

I'm not ignoring them at all. Where did I say that it was perfectly okay for tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs to kill people?

Indeed, if you look at how societies under tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs are run, they basically have the same problem I described: one person, or a small elite, at the top thinks they know enough to run an entire society. But they don't. And their attempts to do it cause massive human suffering and death.

Because they hadn't had the same experience--yet.

> you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person

Not fearful, suspicious.

> that's the crucial question!

You don't think it's possible for both things to be true? That literacy caused significant cognitive changes, and that the psychological dynamic I described was in play? I don't see how those two things are mutually exclusive.

They were--they just hadn't been yet when Luria ran his experiments.

> Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?

They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive.

Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.

More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.

That kind of intellectually dominated "democracy" killed well over a hundred million people in the 20th century. And the people who promoted the horribly oppressive governments that did it--the Soviet Union, Mao's People's Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, etc.--were among the most intellectually sophisticated and literate people on the planet.

None of this is to say that illiteracy and ignorance are good things. They're not. I'm much better off in my personal life being literate and knowledgeable. But literacy and knowledge have limits, and the people who want to dictate how entire societies should be organized and run based on their literacy and knowledge are in over their heads. Basic human instincts and intuitions, like the ones those villagers had that Luria completely missed, contain valuable information too.

I have no idea what you mean by this.

> It should be SO EASY for you to prove me wrong!

As I said, I've already explained upthread the limitations of the "source" you gave. Not sure what else you're looking for.

Not being an astronaut (or being a test pilot, for that matter). That's the context in which he was speaking.

Makes it look what way?

Watch the NASA video carefully. It's clear that, even before the "loop" begins, Artemis is slowed down and is soon going to reverse direction relative to Earth. Which of course it would anyway, as you say--because, as the video you linked to points out, it doesn't have Earth escape velocity. The TLI burn gave it just enough velocity to reach the Moon's orbit with a little extra speed left over to get it about 4000 miles further.

But what would not happen without the Moon there is the "backwards" part of the loop--the part that took Artemis around the far side of the Moon. The Moon's gravity is what did that. In the Moon-centered frame in the video, yes, it looks like just a slight deflection--because that frame is moving with the Moon, whereas Artemis was moving backwards--in the opposite direction from the Moon in the Earth-centered frame.

Without the Moon there, Artemis would never have moved backwards, relative to the Moon's orbit, at all. Its trajectory in the Earth centered frame would have been a simple ellipse, with a maximum altitude from Earth a little higher than what it actually achieved (since the Moon's gravity did pull it back a little bit).

No, it's not. You aren't responding to what I actually said. See below.

> the “free return” would have happened if they launched entirely in the wrong direction.

But it would not have been a free return that let them see the far side of the moon, which is what I said. The Moon's gravity is what made that possible. And that was very significant.

No, it had a very significant effect: it's what made possible the free return trajectory while observing the far side of the moon.

Yes.

> that points towards him being untrustworthy.

That points towards the article itself raising a question--which means the article should argue for an answer one way or the other. To ask the question in the title and then not argue for an answer in the article is a cop-out. It's trying to have it both ways.

An article that was simply going to report what was found factually, with no editorialization, would be better done with a title something like "Sam Altman: A look at the career of a key person in AI".

Evidently we disagree. I responded about that to another commenter downthread.

I get that this is the claimed ideal of journalism, at least for straight reporting. The problem is that it's impossible.

There isn't time or space to present all the information; the journalist has to filter. And filtering is never unbiased. Even the attempt to be "balanced" is a bias--see next item.

"Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side". But what if the two sides really are unbalanced? What if there's a huge pile of information pointing one way, and a few items that might point the other way if you believe them--and then the journalist insists on only showing you a few items from the first pile, so that the presentation is "balanced"? You never actually get a real picture of the facts.

There's a story that I first encountered in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books, about two kids fighting over a piece of cake: Kid A wants all of it for himself, Kid B wants to split it equally. An adult comes along and says, "Why don't you compromise? Kid A gets three-quarters and Kid B gets one-quarter." To me, the author of this article comes off like that adult.

In any case, all that assumes that this article is supposed to be just straight reporting, no opinion. For which, see the next item.

> It can be debated whether the title should be such a question.

Yes, it certainly can. If this article is just supposed to be straight reporting--no editorializing--then that title is definitely out of place. That title is an editorial--and the article either needs to own that and state the conclusion it's trying to argue for, or it shouldn't have had that title in the first place.

It's quite possible that this attributes too much intentional strategy to MS, and also treats them as a single entity with a single strategy more than they deserve. The MS internal teams that were bending over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility were not the same as the teams that were churning out new APIs, building Azure, etc., and quite likely had very different incentives.