Longtime institutional data scientist/analyst with a background that accidentally wandered through analytic philosophy, linguistics, NLP, propaganda/persuasion research, and ML. Most of my career has involved translating noisy, ambiguous systems into decision-relevant structure for leadership in & out of regulated environments.
Lately focused on runtime observability, model intent legibility, conversational dynamics, and evaluation/intervention tooling for probabilistic systems and LLMs. Interested in where civilization increasingly becomes coordination infrastructure between partially-understanding agents.
Trying very hard not to build parts of cathedrals before tiny useful artifacts.
> While in theory building rapport and loyalty sounds nice, what you actually end up doing is spending a lot of time on the people who ask the most of you, but their subscription dollars aren’t worth more, and they’re rarely satisfied. You end up feeling taken advantage of.
This seems an incorrect assumption, or at least a conclusion built on incomplete information and consideration of additional factors. The first one that comes to mind is that these customers will on average be the heaviest users. That doesn’t make them less valuable, that makes them the exact ones most like to be willing to refer others to your product and the most able to do so with specifics on their recommendations and, hopefully, a positive endorsement of the service received, not just the product features.
This implies another aspect as well: even if good support weren’t to get you wider positive awareness, poor customer service and even average service that nonetheless has more negative recommendations to other can lose you business, and that too can have a compounding effect.
In general there’s also no getting around the fact that a smaller number of people will (or should) have disproportionate support requests, unless you’ve got a very homogeneous user base with homogenized use patterns. Or your products &/or documentation are of poor quality.
It’s probably not a bad idea also to take most support requests that aren’t inherently specific to a customer and require intervention as an opportunity & need to review your documentation, perhaps auto surface the most relevant bits it when a person submits a request with a an option “if this answered your question click here and we’ll mark your message as resolved, otherwise we have it, and will be in contact with”.
There’s no getting around the need to provide support and it’s possible for some businesses there could be an ideal global min/max that provides least effort & service cost for then elasticity of price & quality and customer tolerance, but I think if you find yourself in the mindset of “what’s the worst I can get away with” instead of “most I can afford to optimize long term contentment and good will referrals, you could be looking at things wrong. I’m not sure what “relationship” should mean in any case, if not something like what I’ve described.
Is it that all or nothing? Are you sure you're not overthinking it into two extreme choices of total life disruption and just putting it all online or something?
How do you keep robustly pro active without data? Of course megabytes of data isn't a direct measure of health. That also isn't what medjourney is proposing be the metric. They didn't say "doctors will review the storage requirements of your available data and be able to tell you...". It's a straw man. Comprehensive imaging isn't a full insight into health. Neither are many questions in a medical history. But accurate and easy to obtain medical imaging is certainly a strong addition. Neither are complete, both are extremely useful and important. It's defense in depth. Included in an annual physical, imaging from even existing methods would have saved the lives of more than one family member who died of cancer gone undetected despite following existing best practices for preventative health. It's also impractical and expensive, though cheaper than years before. Faster cheaper and more accurate seem better still when it will be an additional channel of information.
I used the phrasing the article author was objecting to for cars. It anthropomorphized to the same extent as what the author is complaining about. So, I suppose you could collapse the thing either way- bullets are often anthropomorphized just as much as cars, or your direction which I'd agree with- there isn't much anthropomorphizing to begin with in either of them.
If everyone continues to agree it's worth what it says then not very much. Of course the whole thing can collapse for a number of reasons, not much different from other mediums of exchange that don't have an intrinsic utility, the utility is a sufficient number of people willing to cooperate. Which is pretty much everything except bartering goods.
The premise is false. Headlines or descriptions of events like *"Three innocent bystanders were hit when a spray of bullets burst through the door, killing 1 and injuring the other 2".
fake stops being an applicable term as soon as people start agreeing to accept it, which the article says happened. Then it's as legitimate as anything like Bitcoin.
>AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.
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.
Precisely this! Too many confounding variables to look at such a surface level, a few high-level population wide stats. Nothing is that simple, nothing is clean in this sort of thing. Messy, interrelated factors, and you can chip away at the question bit by bit to reveal things but that is what it takes, not this do-it-with-vibes approach that's been around long before agents started taking prompts to code.
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.
>Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s.... The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.
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.
There is a certain mindset that looks at any series of a problem that didn't get worse as evidence that any reaction to it was unwarranted, without considering if it was the why behind the lack of catastrophe. The opposite failure modes are things like security theatre and reasoning from any remotely plausible hypothetical to any desired response, and it's continually frustrating to see people who see neither modes or have a pet peeve against one of them and so jump in the other direction rather than reflect a second on some middle path.
A scan of headlines doesn't show any "scream of apocalypse", not across multiple news aggregators, incognito mode, etc. Out of dozens I noticed maybe one or two that might have seemed a bit much.
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.
I'm not sure of your reasoning on "anything can be...".
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.
Algorithms like these typically have some foundation in the same type of vector embedding used elsewhere in AI, eg semantic and other qualities that map to overlapping or nearby latent space will drive suggested content. So, what typically trends on TikTok, goes viral, etc? Entertainment, emotional hooks.
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.
I wonder if we gathered all of the "don't quote the ai" people and all of the lmgtfy people in the same place, would they cancel out? Like matter/anti-matter annihilation?
>In this person's communication culture, they are saying
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.
This is unfair to those of us who’ve been writing walls of text to simple questions all our lives. I demand AI be the ones who start writing shorter things. Then I can go back to people ignoring my accidental wall building— accident because lots of times you’re a page in still going on things you see as relevant and— well, you see how things can get away from a person. But I want people to ignore me for what I write, not for thinking i don’t have anything worth ignoring in the first place.
Good for him, his public work these last ~1-2 years has been influential for me, as I'm sure it has for others.
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.
Lately focused on runtime observability, model intent legibility, conversational dynamics, and evaluation/intervention tooling for probabilistic systems and LLMs. Interested in where civilization increasingly becomes coordination infrastructure between partially-understanding agents.
Trying very hard not to build parts of cathedrals before tiny useful artifacts.
https://huggingface.co/anotheruserishere
https://huggingface.co/spaces/anotheruserishere/Cartogemma