Not just data but transparency of actions. Open source governance is interesting with some examples through git contributions for code and transparency of contributions to wikipedia, and things like Kanban boards and other lessons from project management. What if required government actions and requests are done with transparency - and so is the spending ledger. Public comments can be public too. It doesn’t replace human judgement but it provides direct feedback and clear sight into things that are normally hidden and deliberately obfuscated.
I’ve been thinking about what objective harnesses can be put around governance for companies and governments as well. Transparency dashboards, clearer real-time feedback mechanisms. What do you suggest especially for governments (local, or even larger). Keep thinking AI might actually help improve our feedback mechanisms given all the noise.
1. The article itself seems like an LLM summary of a conversation.
2. No US educational institution should ever grade on a curve. Your job is not to compare students but to educate them. Grade curves hide the performance of the educators and process of education in actually improving the skills of students.
3. Both AI and the cognitive and emotional overload from social media taking away brain space may be to blame. Idea: let students report screen time statistics at the beginning of each semester and weekly or at the end. See if and how it correlates with academics.
It always has to do with leverage. When the seas were much bigger than empires, too big for a country to conquer, but the tech caught up to venture them, Elizabeth I commissioned pirates to go and pillage on behalf of the crown. Labor was needed and pirates had leverage to get an equal share of the pillage. Once the gold and spoils dried out, Pirates became criminals again so they took their spoils and settled in the new world. Democracy is handy when you need people to conquer territory. But once you people saturating the land, the teeth come out and those with any leverage start carving whatever is valuable among themselves (land, real estate, rail lines, energy supply, compute). Even with AI, as the tech came out everyone is allowed to play in the sandbox to surface all the valuable use cases. When cornucopia era starts leveling off, you will see the AI firms with leverage grab the lucrative corners of the industry and shove everyone else off. Thus a government that wants to not be taken over by oligarchs needs to enforce antitrust to keep competition from being artificially reduced. Compute is already trying to play the Energy playbook and look like a utility to get government subsidies and become a monopoly that can then dictate everything.
That’s the premise - the same tool can enable both slop and more humanity. The poem hopefully sticks emotionally onto humans who could be doing more of the latter and less of the former. It’s a choice. It’s an etiquette. It’s kind of a hygiene.
The point is that that an “impurity” for some is a tool that lets many more others speak up and show their humanity. AI abused as a sales tactic becomes slop. For others may be a tool they use to finally build things they would have never ever been able to build before due to lack of access to skilled people that would help them. The poem hopefully sticks in that people who could express themselves should do it instead of outsourcing to AI. Thus the emotion it triggers will hopefully mitigate some of the disrespectful slop.
The poem is absolutely on point. Nobody wants to consume AI content, especially on the parts that should be all-human.
At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).
It has to do with the priorities of the company and its leadership. Either they lack the basic awareness to know that training on your business customers data will likely leak their sensitive information to their competitors, or they just intend to sell that data. We are not paying to have our data stolen.
What a great reminder to build my own analytics and self host. PostHog just lost a customer. They could easily send a email to each customer asking if we want this. The assumption means they have no product intuition about their own customers, let alone the customers of their customers. Bye.
You are going to see the same thing that happened with newspapers. Those who want to train the AI with their content (advertisers, PR) will push out more content for AI in the open. Those who have quality content that gives you an advantage will try to lock out AI or get pricy subscription APIs for humans and even pricier for AI.
Imagine an alien with extreme tech capabilities is pointing a heater at the earth. Now react appropriately:
- model and build temperature resistant crops.
- harvest energy from the heat
- create resilience in social governance to enable safer movement of people with education to enable quick adaptation.
- build energy resilience everywhere - including in and especially in desert areas.
- more constructive ideas.
Don’t:
- guilt your children into not having children to “protect the planet” from themselves.
- use your megaphones to racketeer the people making your food into paying you “indulgences” for producing useful stuff for you and other humans (thus making stuff needed by humans more expensive)
- use the problem to gather around with rich friends on fuel-hogging private jets while making others eat less to reduce emissions.
I has gone down recently (or they switched to other sites), but it was coming from EU VPN addresses at first before they got lazy and used mostly Russian IPs.
Weddings are also a social commitment exercise to the couple. Imagine if you had break a promise you made in front of everyone both of you know, after spending a whole lot of money. It’s loss aversion and social shame that possibly made a lot of couples stick together. Even so, posing with your best clothes, food, locations, entertainment and donning all of your jewelry (all of your wealth in gold in some country) does likely play the Envy string too.
Envy is worth talking about. It seems to pull a lot of people, like one of the strings in string theory. They want to be envied so they live an exhibitionist life, or they were surpassed by someone they thought was their equal and now they hate the gap. Is it possible people who feel envy then decide to be more exhibitionist, so they can be envied in the future?
I wonder what value envy provided to evolution? Did it motivate primates to do more than they are already doing? Is it a by-product of social status behaviors?
Russia’s kleptocracy has impoverished the country so much that it now needs attrition in its male population to keep people from rising up against the current leadership. War is how you keep poor citizens from rebelling against you. When the war is over, historically the returning soldiers (especially in Russia) overturn the leadership. So there is never an incentive to stop a war. Especially a losing one.