Category: current events

This is How I Expected Republicans to Act, Part 2

I had an earlier thread on this topic, focusing on the Lincoln Project folks and other Never Trumpers. Recently, several prominent Republicans (besides Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) and former Trump officials have publicly criticized Trump in a way that would be earth-shattering, prior to 2016. Some of these individuals deserve opprobrium for their actions in the Trump administration (e.g., Bill Barr), others enabled, at least tacitly, also deserve strong criticism (e.g., Chris Christie, and even Liz Cheney)–but their public comments now are really important for the country.

Perhaps some believe their comments are a too late and likely won’t have impact. I disagree. While the comments likely won’t change the minds of hardcore Trump supporters, I think it could significantly impact casual news consumers. If former, high-ranking Trump administration officials and prominent Republicans criticize Trump and call out his lies, that undermines narratives that erode the trust in our elections and the DOJ, FBI, and the mainstream press. I believe this will be sway these casual news consumers and inattentive voters–groups that I believe are a large majority of the voters.

In this thread, I’m going to try and post videos, articles, and statements by these Republicans speaking out against Trump.

Trump Indictment Thread

There is news that the Manhattan District Attorney may indict Trump next week for paying hush money to a porn star (who I assume is Stormy Daniels). Trump could be indicated and prosecuted for several other crimes–crimes related to election interference (in Georgia) and refusing to return classified information. And there may be more. This is a thread track all of this.

One recommendation: when following these stories, to decide if an indictment is political, ask yourself the following questions: If any president behaves in the similar way, what would and should the reaction be?

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What is the Debt Ceiling and Why You Should Care About It.

That’s the title of this ABC News report. I don’t know a lot about this topic, so I sought out some information. Here’s what I learned:

The debt ceiling is a cap on the amount of money the U.S. government can borrow to pay its debts.

Every year, Congress passes a budget that includes government spending on infrastructure, programs such as Social Security and salaries for federal workers. Congress also taxes people to pay for all that spending. But for years, the government has been spending more than it takes in from taxes and other revenue, increasing the federal deficit.

The government needs to borrow money to continue paying out what Congress has already OK’d. The debt ceiling puts a limit on how much money the U.S. government can borrow to pay its bills.

That seems fairly clear, but I’m confused about on the following point:

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Advice for Those Frustrated by Congressional Dysfunction

“I don’t care which party you vote for, but please stop voting for people who have no desire or intention to govern.” That’s a tweet I saw today, and wholeheartedly agree with. I assume the tweet primarily refers to the GOP members of Congress who oppose Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House. I would actually broaden this out to any politicians that enabled this group, as well as politicians preferred nothing to making any compromise or those who preferred nothing, rather than giving any political victory to the other side.

These politicians are the problem and primary source of the dysfunction. Here’s a message to those who have a low opinion of Congress because of gridlock:

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ChatGPT Thread

“ChatGPT is a development on par with the printing press, electricity and even the wheel and fire.”

That’s according to Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration. I had heard about ChatGPT before, but I knew nothing about it. (Actually, when I listened to Summers, it sounds like he’s referring more broadly to the ability of AI to think and express itself like humans.)

Here’s what I learned from an NYT article.

“In ChatGPT’s case, it read a lot. And, with some guidance from its creators, it learned how to write coherently — or, at least, statistically predict what good writing should look like.”

Some benefits:

“It can help research and write essays and articles. ChatGPT can also help code programs, automating challenges that can normally take hours for people. Another example comes from a different program, Consensus. This bot combs through up to millions of scientific papers to find the most relevant for a given search and share their major findings. A task that would take a journalist like me days or weeks is done in a couple minutes.”

The benefits here are obvious, but, off the top of my head, here are some drawbacks:

  • For humans, the ability to comb through lots of information and find the most relevant information could deteriorate.
  • My sense is that different people make different judgments about what is relevant; the ability to do this, which includes making connections with other information, including seemingly unrelated information, can differ significantly from person to person. Will this capability become more uniform if done by an AI?
  • My sense is that this process can lead to important insights. How will AI impact that?

In a survey, a group of scientists who work on machine learning had even more dire response:

Nearly half said there was a 10 percent or greater chance that the outcome would be “extremely bad (e.g., human extinction).” These are people saying that their life’s work could destroy humanity.

This seems like a big problem, one that that seems blatantly foolish:

“The problem, as A.I. researchers acknowledge, is that no one fully understands how this technology works, making it difficult to control for all possible behaviors and risks. Yet it is already available for public use.”

To go ahead with something that we don’t fully understand, but could pose an existential threat to humanity (albeit a relatively small probability) seems foolish. And how can we accurately assess the risk if we don’t fully understand how the technology works?