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Javier E

Carole Hooven On Harvard's Existential Crisis - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...hooven-on-harvards-existential

harvard crisis university education culture politics woke DEI excellence

shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • The most salutary aspect of this whole affair is that it has really helped expose the core disagreement in our current culture war. One side believes, as I do, that individual merit exists, and should be the core criterion for admission to a great university, regardless of an individual’s racial or sexual identity, and so on. The other side believes that merit doesn’t exist at all outside the oppressive paradigm of racial and sexual identity, and that membership in a designated “marginalized” group should therefore be the core criterion for advancement in academia.
  • so they discriminate against individuals on the grounds of their race before they consider merit.
  • For example: If you are black and in the fourth lowest decile of SATs and GPAs among Harvard applicants, you have a higher chance of getting into Harvard (12.8 percent admitted) than an Asian-American in the very top decile (12.7 admitted). It’s rigged, which is why it was shut down by SCOTUS.
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  • there is no debate. There’s a trade-off. But once you make identity a core qualification, you’re opening up a whole world of racist anti-racism.
  • Most Americans believe in individual merit, and advancement regardless of identity. Harvard and our new elite believe that our society is so structured as an enduring “white supremacy” that merit can only be considered after you have accounted for the effects of “intersectional oppression.”
  • each moment of truth puts a crack in the stifling, authoritarian edifice of DEI. We can bring this corruption to light. We can hold them to account. I’m certainly more hopeful about the future of liberal society now than I was a month ago.
  • the only way to cover it all up, of course, is to abolish testing students entirely (which is what so many elite colleges and universities are now doing) or to give all students an A or an A-, making any distinctions of excellence irrelevant.
  • When push comes to shove, when there is a finite number of places available, you’re in a zero-sum predicament. You have to pick between a smarter student of the wrong race and a weaker student of the right race. In the end at Harvard, being in the right race — not merit — determines your chances.
  • The more people see this for the systemic racism it is, the sooner we can throw this neo-Marxist cuckoo out of the liberal nest, and return to the airing of all ideas, regardless of the subject matter or the identity of the students
  • That’s how you can claim, as Gay does, that “diversity” and “excellence” go hand in hand, when obviously, at some point they can and do conflict.
  • The response to all this from the CRT crowd has been to insist — ever more strongly — that Gay is simply and only a victim of racism, or, in woke terminology, a victim of misogynoir. The fact that a white female university president at those same hearings lost her job before Gay did — and without any plagiarism questions — doesn’t count.
  • In the Congressional hearings, moreover, she showed little gravitas, grace, or ability to think on her feet. She has largely hidden from public view since the plagiarism revelations — not a good instinct for a leader of a huge, public-facing institution like Harvard. She is, quite obviously, a run-of-the-mill woke academic, who was promoted at breakneck speed because of her race and sex, and found herself quickly out of her depth.
  • When you look instead at what she has done as an administrator, which is where she has been focused more recently, you see it has almost all been about hiring on the basis of sex and race, persecuting heretical members of racial minorities, and removing paintings of dead white dudes. She is, at least, consistent.
  • And let’s be honest: we can all see with our own eyes that subordinating merit to race and sex is how Gay got her position. Her work, beyond the sloppy dime-store plagiarism, would be underwhelming for an average member of any faculty in the country. But for a Harvard president, it’s astonishingly mid
ethanshilling

Why 'Cursed' Olympics in Tokyo Are Pressing Ahead Amid Covid - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-olympics.html

world olympics pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • From the moment that Japan pitched to host the 2020 Olympic Games, its organizers have framed it as a symbol of recovery: from a decades-long economic slump, from a devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster and, after a year’s postponement, from a crippling pandemic.
  • A series of health, economic and political challenges have besieged the Games. Even as the organizers decided last week to bar international spectators, epidemiologists warn that the Olympics could become a superspreader event.
  • The financial hazards are also significant — the Olympic budget has swollen to a record $15.4 billion, increasing nearly $3 billion in the past year alone and adding to longstanding doubts about whether Olympic Games pay off for host nations.
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  • “I don’t know any reason for why you would go out to watch these Olympic Games,” said Hyoung Min Yoo, 29, who works in finance in Tokyo.
  • The president of the Tokyo organizing committee, Seiko Hashimoto, recently cited the “significant challenges” facing the world and the responsibility of the Olympics “to build a legacy for the future society.”
  • In an effort to give itself breathing space, the I.O.C. broke with tradition in 2017 by simultaneously announcing the hosts of the next two Summer Olympics — Paris in 2024 and Los Angeles four years later.
  • The seemingly unstoppable push toward the Olympics this time also reflects an often rigid Japanese bureaucracy, with some even drawing parallels to World War II, when the Japanese public did not want the conflict but no leader dared halt it.
  • “When they say ‘the five rings,’ or if they show up with an Olympic symbol, they think they can command or demand anything,” said Satoko Itani, an associate professor of sports, gender and sexuality at Kansai University. “But people are increasingly saying ‘no.’”
  • The organizers scrapped their first logo after plagiarism accusations. The president of Japan’s Olympic Committee was indicted on corruption charges related to the bidding process.
  • The organizers say that their focus is primarily on safety, and that they have earmarked $900 million in spending on measures to combat the virus.
  • The organizers say vaccination will not be mandatory, however, and many athletes, delegates and others will be coming from places where vaccines are unlikely to be fully available.
  • With more contagious and perhaps deadlier variants circulating around the globe, epidemiologists warn that the Tokyo Olympics have the potential to turbocharge the virus’s spread.
  • Nobuo Sato, 63, who owns a vegetable shop in Tokyo, said he feared that if the Olympics resulted in another coronavirus wave, it would further damage his business, which has suffered over the past year as orders from restaurants have declined sharply.
  • “I just don’t think they should risk the coronavirus spreading in any sense,” he said.
  • But if the Games do not go on, he said he did not regret the $50 million Airweave had invested in its new mattress design or the $9 million the company had reportedly contributed toward the Olympic budget each year since it signed on as a sponsor in 2016.
Javier E

Opinion | The Question of Joe Biden - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...joe-biden-trump-election.html

biden evaluation Democratic party politics crisis history

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • The more I covered Biden, the more I came to feel affection and respect for him. Then, as now, he could be a tough boss, occasionally angry and hard on his staff. But throughout his life, Biden has usually been on the side of the underdog. I’ve rarely met a politician so rooted in the unpretentious middle-class ethos of the neighborhood he grew up in. He has a seemingly instinctive ability to bond with those who are hurting.
  • He has his faults — the tendency to talk too much, the chip on his shoulder about those who think they are smarter than he is, the gaffes, that episode of plagiarism and the moments of confusion — but I’ve always thought: Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon. Give me a leader whose moral compass generally sends him in the right direction.
  • But I’ve also come to fear and loathe Donald Trump. I cannot fathom what damage that increasingly deranged man might do to this country if given a second term. And the fact is that as the polls and the mood of the electorate stand today, Trump has a decent chance of beating Biden in November of next year and regaining power in 2025.
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  • Biden’s approval ratings are stubbornly low. In a recent ABC poll, only 30 percent of voters approve of his handling of the economy and only 23 percent approve of his handling of immigration at the southern border. Roughly three-quarters of American voters say that Biden, at 80, is too old to seek a second term. There have been a string of polls showing that large majorities in his own party don’t want him to run again. In one survey from 2022, an astounding 94 percent of Democrats under 30 said they wanted a different nominee.
  • I thought Biden’s favorability ratings would climb as economic growth has remained relatively strong and as inflation has come down. But it just hasn’t happened.
  • don’t find this passive fatalism compelling. The party’s elected officials are basically urging rank-and-file Democrats not to be anxious about a situation that is genuinely anxiety-inducing. Last month Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey told The Times, “This is only a matter of time until the broad party, and broadly speaking, Americans, converge with the opinions of folks like myself.” Really? Surely if there’s a lesson we should have learned from the last decade, it’s that we should all be listening harder to what the electorate is trying to say.
  • The Republicans who portray him as a doddering old man based on highly selective YouTube clips are wrong. In my interviews with him, he’s like a pitcher who used to throw 94 miles an hour who now throws 87. He is clearly still an effective pitcher.
  • People who work with him allow that he does tire more easily, but they say that he is very much the dynamic force driving this administration
  • In fact, I’ve noticed some improvements in his communication style as he’s aged. He used to try to cram every fact in the known universe into every answer; now he’s more disciplined. When he’s describing some national problem, he is more crisp and focused than he used to be, clearer on what is the essential point here — more confidence-inspiring, not less.
  • What about four or five years from now, at the end of a second term? Will he still be competent enough to lead? Biden is fit, does not smoke or drink alcohol, exercises frequently and has no serious health conditions, according to the White House
  • A study in The Journal on Active Aging of Biden’s and Trump’s health records from before the 2020 elections found that both men could qualify as “super-agers” — the demographic that maintains physical and mental functioning beyond age 80.
  • if the president I see in interviews and at speeches is out campaigning next year against an overweight man roughly his own age, then my guess is that public anxieties on this front will diminish.
  • To me, age isn’t Biden’s key weakness. Inflation is. I agree with what Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic: Biden’s domestic legislative accomplishments are as impressive as any other president’s in my adult life. Exactly as he should have, he has directed huge amounts of resources to the people and the places that have been left behind by the global economy. By one Treasury Department estimate, more than 80 percent of the investments sparked by the Inflation Reduction Act are going to counties with below-average college graduation rates and nearly 90 percent are being made in counties with below-average wages. That was the medicine a riven country needed.
  • it is also true that Biden’s team overlearned the lessons of the Obama years. If Barack Obama didn’t stimulate the economy enough during the Great Recession, Biden stimulated it too much, contributing to inflation and the sticker shock people are feeling.
  • Anger about inflation is ripping across the world, and has no doubt helped lower the approval ratings of leaders left, right and center. Biden’s 40 percent approval rating may look bad, but in Canada, Justin Trudeau’s approval rating is 36; in Germany Olaf Scholz is at 29; in Britain Rishi Sunak is at 28; in France Emmanuel Macron is at 23; and in Japan Fumio Kishida is also at 23. This is a global phenomenon
  • “Inflation is the reason Biden could not deliver on his core promise to return the country to normal and the main reason his poll numbers are bad.”
  • voters are looking back and retroactively elevating their opinion of Trump’s presidency. When he left office only 38 percent of Americans approved of his performance as president. Today, 48 percent do, his high-water mark.
  • Bitterness, cynicism and distrust pervade the body politic. People perceive reality through negative lenses, seeing everything as much worse than it is. At 3.8 percent, America’s unemployment rate is objectively low, but 57 percent of voters say that the unemployment rate is “not so good” or “poor.”
  • The nation’s bitter state of mind is a self-perpetuating negativity machine. Younger people feel dismissed; the older generations are hogging power. Faith in major institutions is nearing record lows. The country is hungry for some kind of change but is unclear about what that might look like. As the incumbent, Biden will be tasked with trying to tell a good news story of American revival, which is just a tough story to sell in this environment. And Biden is not out there selling it convincingly.
  • The bracing reality is that Trump’s cynicism and fury match the national mood more than Biden’s faithful optimism.
  • “They seem hell bent on nominating the one Democrat who would lose to Donald Trump,” Karl Rove told me recently. “They’ve got a lot of talent on their side, let’s not kid ourselves,” he continued, pointing to younger Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer, Mitch Landrieu, Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker.
  • A lot of the dump-Biden conversations are based on a false premise: that the Democratic Party brand and agenda are somehow strong and popular enough that any number of younger candidates could win the White House in 2024, and that if Biden were just to retire, all sorts of obstacles and troubles would go with him.
  • But Biden is not the sole or even primary problem here. To the extent that these things are separable, it’s the Democratic Party as a whole that’s ailing. The generic congressional ballot is a broad measure of the strength of the congressional party. Democrats are now behind. According to a Morning Consult poll, Americans rate the Democratic Party as a whole as the more ideologically extreme party by a nine-point margin.
  • When pollsters ask which party is best positioned to address your concerns, here too, Democrats are trailing. In a recent Gallup poll 53 percent of Americans say Republicans will do a better job of keeping America prosperous over the short term while only 39 percent thought that of the Democrats.
  • Fifty-seven percent of Americans said that the Republicans would do a better job keeping America safe, while only 35 percent favor the Democrats. These are historically high Republican advantages.
  • Here are the hard, unpleasant facts: The Republicans have a likely nominee who is facing 91 charges. The Republicans in Congress are so controlled by a group of performative narcissists, the whole House has been reduced to chaos. And yet they are still leading the Democrats in these sorts of polling measures
  • There is no other potential nominee who is so credibly steeped in knowing what life is like for working- and middle-class people, just as there was no other potential nominee in 2020. After watching him for a quarter-century, I think he is genuinely most comfortable when he is hanging around the kinds of people he grew up with. He doesn’t send out any off-putting faculty lounge vibes. On cultural matters he is most defined by what he doesn’t do — needlessly offend people with overly academic verbiage and virtue signaling. That is why I worry when he talks too stridently about people on the right, when he name-calls and denounces wide swaths of people as MAGA.
  • Over the last half-century, the Democrats have become increasingly the party of the well-educated metropolitan class.
  • This is about something deeper than Joe Biden’s age. More and more people are telling pollsters that the Republicans, not the Democrats, care about people like me.
  • But Democrats are losing something arguably more important than a reliable base of supporters. The party is in danger of letting go of an ethos, a heritage, a tradition. The working-class heart and soul the Democrats cultivated through the Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy years rooted Democratic progressivism in a set of values that emphasized hard work, neighborhood, faith, family and flag. Being connected to Americans’ everyday experiences kept the party pinioned to the mainstream.
  • . It grew prone to taking flights of fancy in policy and rhetoric, be it Medicare for All or “defund the police,” going to places where middle-of-the-road voters would not follow. It became more vulnerable to the insular outlooks of its most privileged and educated members.
  • And that is the fact I keep returning to. Biden is not what ails the party. As things stand, he is the Democrats’ best shot at curing what ails the party.
  • today, the party is bleeding working-class voters of all varieties. As John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira point out in their forthcoming book, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” Democrats have been losing ground among Hispanics for the last few years. In 2012, Barack Obama carried nonwhite voters without a college degree by a 67-point margin. In 2020, Biden carried this group with a 48-point margin. Today, the Democratic ticket leads among this group by a paltry 16 points
  • These cultural and spiritual roots give him not just a style but a governing agenda. He has used the presidency to direct resources to those who live in the parts of the country where wages are lower, where education levels are lower, where opportunities are skimpier. Biden’s ethos harks back to the ethos of the New Deal Democratic Party, but it also harks forward to something — to a form of center-left politics that is culturally moderate and economically aggressive
  • Something almost spiritual is at play here, not just about whether the Democrats can win in 2024, but who the Democrats are.
  • I also find myself arriving foursquare at the conclusion that rejecting the president now would be, in the first place, a mistake. He offers the most plausible route toward winning the working- and middle-class groups the Democrats need, the most plausible route toward building a broad-based majority party
  • But it would be worse than a mistake. It would be a renunciation of the living stream of people, ideas and values that flow at the living depths of the party, a stream that propelled its past glories and still points toward future ones.
Javier E

The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...125329

plagiarism ethics cheating education highered scholar

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst. I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents.
  • First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling. I haven't been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don't know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there's Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I've taken hundreds of crash courses this way. After I've gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph. I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.
Javier E

U.N.C. Investigation Reveals 'Shadow Curriculum' to Help Athletes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rriculum-to-help-athletes.html

sports university corruption

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • for nearly two decades two employees in the African and Afro-American Studies department ran a “shadow curriculum” of hundreds of fake classes that never met but for which students, many of them Tar Heels athletes, routinely received A’s and B’s.
  • Nearly half the students in the classes were athletes, the report found, often deliberately steered there by academic counselors to bolster their worrisomely low grade-point averages and to allow them to continue playing on North Carolina’s teams. The existence of the classes — though not necessarily how blatantly nonexistent they were — was common knowledge among the academic counselors, and in some cases among coaches of the university’s sports teams
  • Until now, the university has been at pains to emphasize that the scandal was a purely academic one; on Wednesday, for the first time, it acknowledged that it was also an athletic one, with athletes being steered specifically into and benefiting disproportionately from the fraudulent classes.
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  • Though the report found no evidence that high-level university officials knew about the fake classes, it faulted the university for missing numerous warning signs about what was going on and said it had “failed to conduct any meaningful oversight” over the increasingly out-of-control African studies department.
  • Ms. Crowder required that students turn in only a single paper, but the papers were often largely plagiarized or padded out with “fluff” like page after page of quotations, the report said. She generally gave the papers A’s or B’s after a cursory glance. The classes were widely known as “paper classes” because of the one requirement for completion.
  • In the meeting, two members of the football counseling staff explained to the assembled coaches that the classes “had played a large role in keeping underprepared and/or unmotivated players eligible to play.” To emphasize this point, they presented a PowerPoint demonstration in which one of the slides asked and then answered the question, “What was part of the solution in the past?”“We put them in classes that met degree requirements in which … they didn’t go to class … they didn’t have to take notes, have to stay awake … they didn’t have to meet with professors … they didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material,” the slide said. “THESE NO LONGER EXIST!”
  • Indeed, the report said, “the fall 2009 semester — the first in over a decade without Ms. Crowder and her paper classes — resulted in the lowest football team G.P.A. in 10 years, 2.121.” Forty-eight players, it went on, earned semester G.P.A.'s of less than 2.0.
Javier E

Biden's Climate Plan: A Mini Green New Deal - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...591046

plan GND politics US policy

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • It’s remarkable: A number of polls suggest that Democratic voters now consider climate change to be a top-tier issue, as important as health care
  • That revolution’s main objective: achieving a “100% clean energy economy” in the United States by the year 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, both more stringent and longer-sighted than what the previous Democratic White House—which Biden unfailingly calls the “Obama-Biden administration”—pledged under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
  • Today Inslee debuted a plan to reenter the Paris Agreement and enshrine climate at the center of U.S. diplomacy. It runs more than 50 pages single-spaced.
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  • To meet its old Paris target, the United States had to cut its annual carbon emissions by 1.3 percentage points every year from 2016 to 2025. To meet the 2050 goal, it must cut at more than double that rate—2.9 percentage points—for each of the next 31 years.
  • Inslee earlier outlined his aim to decarbonize some parts of the U.S. economy by the 2030s, and he has endorsed some aspects of the Green New Deal. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Green New Deal’s champion, told a reporter yesterday that Inslee’s plan is the “golden standard.” (Inslee’s plan is also untainted by plagiarism accusations.)
  • Warren calls this issue “economic patriotism.” Under its banner, the senator from Massachusetts and presidential candidate proposes a huge new program of climate-friendly manufacturing investment, meant to turn the United States back into a major industrial exporter.
  • This program would go hand in hand with her also just debuted “Green Manufacturing Plan,” which promises to allocate $1.5 trillion in federal spending for climate-friendly technology. She would also use federal power to encourage other countries to purchase this new American gear.
  • Essentially, Warren wants to bring Germany or South Korea’s mixed-economy model to the United States and then point it at the challenge of climate change.
  • they show how the window of political possibility has already moved significantly, such that Biden’s $1.5 trillion in climate-focused federal spending can start to seem moderate to right-wing observers.
  • In the Washington Examiner yesterday, the conservative writer Tiana Lowe paid relatively high praise to Biden’s plan. Unlike the Green New Deal, she said, Biden’s proposal is “not insane,” but a “legitimate, big-boy climate change plan” in its own right.
  • “If nothing were executed into action here except for the international aspect, nuclear research and development, and the infrastructure developments that [Biden] details, it would do more to decrease greenhouse gas emissions in real life than any $93 trillion Green New Deal,” Lowe wrote.
  • actual supporters of a Green New Deal, who know a victory when they see one. In the opinion of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, Biden’s plan is far better than the “middle ground” proposal he was considering last month. “We forced [Biden] to backtrack and today, he put out a comprehensive climate plan that praises the Green New Deal,” it tweeted yesterday
Javier E

Bernie Sanders's Biggest Challenges - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...605500

candidates 2020 Democratic party politics

shared by Javier E on 29 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The Sanders campaign is a bet that the 2020 race can be won by mobilizing the Americans least committed to the political process while alienating and even offending the Americans most committed to it. It’s a hell of a gamble, and for what? To elect to the presidency a person with a proven record of accomplishing little for the causes he espouses, despite almost 32 years in the House and Senate?
  • The latest CNN poll showed Sanders erasing Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters—perhaps in spite of Sanders’s indifference to identity politics, or maybe, just maybe, because of that indifference.
  • But the constellation of issues that predominates among highly online and very well-informed anti-Trump voters matters a lot less to millions of other people who could potentially decide the 2020 election
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  • That observation applies to a lot of issues that are authentically important. The integrity of democracy matters. Enforcing the law against power holders matters. Defeating corruption matters.
  • Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden speak to Americans for whom the fat-envelope/thin-envelope decision means little, if it means anything at all. It’s not accident or name recognition that explains why they lead the field. They are both being carried by something big and real. The challenge for the person who will succeed in beating Trump in 2020 is not merely to ride that force, but to guide it.
  • But it’s easier to concentrate on those issues when you have good health insurance and a job that provides a stable middle-class livelihood—including the possibility of a college education for your children. And too many Americans lack those things.
  • He has delivered lavish benefits to rich cronies, while breaking faith on his promise to build new roads, bridges, and airports.Now Trump seems to be plotting cuts to Medicare and Social Security if reelected.  Those are the points of vulnerability. Listing them is easy. Pressing them is hard—because to press them successfully, candidates must first establish an emotional connection with the voters they hope to sway
  • If the Oval Office is to be cleansed of Donald Trump, it will not suffice to defeat Sanders’s candidacy. The ultimate winner will have to plagiarize from his campaign, copying not Sanders’s literal ideas, but his themes: the practical over the theoretical, the universal over the particular.
  • The same CNN poll that showed Sanders tied with Biden among Democrats showed that Biden still leads Sanders 45–24 on electability. That seems a shrewd intuition.
  • Possibly the CNN poll is an outlier. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday found Biden holding steady, with a narrow lead over a surging Sanders, largely due to his 51–15 percent lead among black voters
Javier E

China Is a Paper Dragon - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618778

china gdp rivalry US competition trade market repression history crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 May 21 - No Cached
  • “We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.
  • aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”
  • As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”
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  • Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students. Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school.
  • The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics.
  • The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes.
  • China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then
  • many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”
  • in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression.
  • Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories.
  • Chinese firms’ total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue stalled at levels four times below the average for American firms. … Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization: on average Chinese enterprises have just nineteen robots per ten thousand employees; U.S. firms, by contrast, use an average of 176 robots per ten thousand employees.
  • But isn’t China sprinting to overtake the United States? Yes, but it’s stumbling badly in that pursuit. China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud; one-third of Chinese scientists have admitted to plagiarizing or falsifying results (versus 2 percent of U.S. scientists); and two-thirds of China’s R&D spending has been lost to corruption.
  • Beckley’s clarifying theoretical insight: Repression is expensive
  • The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats.
  • The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state.
  • this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.
  • Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting.
  • A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,”
  • Beckley seeks to highlight the immense defects of gross GDP as a measure of national strength—factoring in the costs of repression—and the strategic predicament of China’s location, barred from the open ocean by a ring of potential enemies on its eastern front, extending from Russia, through Korea, past Japan, to the Philippines, and then to Vietnam.
  • He said that he had become more alarmed by China’s aggressive and repressive intentions, but remained as dubious as ever about Chinese capacities.
  • Sanders lost the nomination, but he won the debate within the Democratic Party over trade policy. In his address, Biden committed to extending and enlarging “Buy American” favoritism in government procurement. His administration is maintaining Trump’s anti-China tariffs and is “reviewing”—not yet removing—tariffs against the European Union and other trade partners. Biden economic advisers warned during his campaign that trade expansion would rank low on their list of priorities, and so it is proving.
  • The Trump administration raised the defense budget by more than $100 billion a year, and the spending increases have continued even after the campaign against ISIS came to an end. More and more of the money is being directed to preparations for a conflict with China.
  • China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true.
  • as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.
  • two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.
  • As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises
  • What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?
  • China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places
  • China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital
  • More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.
  • U.S. policy makers should look to the future with a little more confidence and a lot more trust in trade, markets, and the superior potential of a free people under an elected government.
saberal

Opinion | My Joe Biden Story - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...joe-biden-politics.html

US history Politics

shared by saberal on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • I met then-Senator Biden in the mid-1980s, when he was a member of the Judiciary Committee and I was covering the occasional judicial confirmation. By 1987, he was chairman of the committee, after the Democrats retook the Senate in the 1986 midterms. That summer, President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
  • Mr. Biden, then 44 years old, was generally viewed — and by “generally,” I mean to include the capital’s newsrooms — as an amiable lightweight, a showboat in love with the sound of his own voice.
  • In concert with some liberal groups, but against the advice of some on his staff, he decided to focus the hearings on the constitutional right to privacy.
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  • Mr. Biden thought that if he could sell privacy to the general public as a concept under threat from a Justice Bork, he wouldn’t need to turn the hearing into a referendum on abortion. With six Republican senators joining all but two Democrats in opposition, the nomination was defeated by a vote of 42 to 58.
  • We talked for a long time. He said he knew exactly what the doubters had thought of him and that people raised three questions: “Can Biden be fair? Can Biden control himself? And is there any substance there, any depth to Biden?” He continued, “The expectations of me were so low that I could have done almost anything except punch Bork and people would have said, ‘He’s not as bad as I thought.’”
  • Mr. Biden told me as we ended the interview that he had telephoned Judge Bork, impelled to reach out to a fellow human being whose dream had just died — as, in a way, his own had at roughly the same time. “It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels,” he told me. “I don’t know how he feels. But I empathize intellectually and emotionally. It once looked so certain for him. He was so up. I know how that feels.”
  • I had forgotten receiving it, and only after reading it over did I get the gentle self-mockery in the “as someone said,” from a onetime presidential candidate whose campaign had foundered on a ridiculous accusation of plagiarism.I evidently never replied to the letter, so I’ll do it now. Thanks, Joe Biden. We needed you.
xaviermcelderry

Dishonesty Has Defined the Trump Presidency. The Consequences Could Be Lasting. - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-presidency-dishonesty.html

election Trump Biden

shared by xaviermcelderry on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • During his final weekend of campaign rallies, Mr. Trump continued to sow doubt about the validity of the election, making clear that he would deem any outcome other than victory for him to be corrupt. At a rally in Philadelphia, which has a sizable Black population, he asserted that the city would falsify the results. “Are they going to mysteriously find more ballots” after polls close, he asked. “Strange things have been known to happen, especially in Philadelphia.”
  • “And I think that’s going to be Trump’s legacy. I think there’s going to be lingering damage to the processes by which we vet truths for decades. People are going to be saying, ‘Oh, that’s fake news.’ The confusion between skepticism and denialism, the idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have to believe it — that’s really damaging, and that’s going to last.”
  • The lasting impact may be most evident in terms of the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 230,000 in the United States. Even as the outbreak surges to new peaks, Mr. Trump has been falsely insisting that it is “rounding the corner” to an end, telling Americans not to worry rather than urging them to take precautions.
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  • Mr. Biden, now the Democratic presidential nominee, has had his own misadventures with misstatements, caught on several occasions during his career in politics puffing up his own record. His first presidential campaign blew up in 1987 after he lifted lines from another politician’s speech without credit, overstated his academic accomplishments and was revealed to have been accused of plagiarism in law school. Mr. Biden, unlike Mr. Trump, admitted the errors, while calling them innocent mistakes. Still, he has been prone to exaggeration since then as well.
Javier E

Masks and school dress codes: If you can punish a teenage girl for spaghetti straps, yo... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b205-ff838e15a9a6_story.html

school dress code pandemic mask requirement culture abortion choice

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • For government officials:Legislate the “personal choice” of mask noncompliance the way you have for decades tried to legislate women over their own deeply personal decisions.
  • After refusing to wear a mask or to instruct his staff to work remotely, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) tested positive for the coronavirus. He then tweeted that he would be taking hydroxychloroquine, despite top infectious-disease specialists, including Anthony S. Fauci, noting that the anti-malarial drug has not been proved an effective treatment. “It is what was decided as the best course of action between my doctor and me — not by government bureaucrats,” Gohmert wrote.
  • Was he plagiarizing Busy Philipps? Because last year at a hearing on abortion, the actor and activist told Gohmert, “I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman. It’s a choice between a woman and her doctor.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Gohmert, who is antiabortion, was not persuaded then. He has repeatedly shown he feels it is exactly his business, as a government bureaucrat, to regulate individuals’ conversations with their doctors. At a House hearing he once said women should carry a brain-dead fetus to term.
  • In a funhouse-mirror situation, the de facto slogan of the anti-mask crowd has become “My body, my choice,” the chant originally created by women in the abortion rights movement. In that context, the goal was to argue that a woman’s decisions about her health, her family, her morals and her soul were up to her, possibly in consultation with her doctor, her partner or her pastor.
  • You might believe that abortion is murder, but you cannot say that it is contagious and airborne, something you can catch or transmit unknowingly to others. You cannot argue that, upon choosing to have an abortion, a pregnant person walks into a grocery store and infects 50 other innocent shoppers with abortion.
  • public health concerns are completely different from individual medical procedures.
  • But if that’s the comparison that anti-mask folks want to make — fine. Prepare to be judged and harangued the way women are for seeking abortions. And prepare to deserve it, because unlike what goes on inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, public health actually is the business of the public.
  • I don’t think this is about the ability to enforce mandates. Schools, legislators and workplaces have all found ways to enforce mandates on women’s bodies, or gender nonconforming bodies, for years. This is about a sickness that is far more pervasive than the coronavirus: the belief that one’s comfort is more important than someone else’s life.
  • The stubborn resistance to science for reasons that often boil down to, “I don’t wanna.”
  • The refusal to acknowledge that living in a functioning society sometimes means sacrificing a tiny smidgen of personal liberty for the well-being of the group
  • — and that there are circumstances exceeding the boundaries of taste and discretion, where those sacrifices should be mandated: The presence of a deadly virus in the halls of a school is a better reason to enforce a dress code than the presence of bare shoulders.
kennyn-77

Why China Is the World's Last 'Zero Covid' Holdout - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-zero-covid-virus.html

china pandemic policy covid lockdown

shared by kennyn-77 on 28 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Since then, China has locked down a city of 4 million, as well as several smaller cities and parts of Beijing, to contain a fresh outbreak that has infected more than 240 people in at least 11 provinces and regions. The authorities have shuttered schools and tourist sites. Government websites have detailed every movement of the unlucky couple and their sprawling web of contacts, including what time they checked into hotels and on which floors of restaurants they sat.
  • China has reported fewer than 5,000 deaths since the pandemic began
  • Its thriving exports have helped to keep the economy afloat. The ruling Communist Party’s tight grip on power enables lockdowns and testing to be carried out with astonishing efficiency. Beijing is set to host the Winter Olympics in February.
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  • But the policy has also, increasingly, made China an outlier. The rest of the world is reopening, including New Zealand and Australia, which also once embraced zero tolerance. China is now the only country still chasing full eradication of the virus.
  • Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has repeatedly pointed to the country’s success in containment as proof of the superiority of its governance model
  • China may find itself increasingly isolated, diplomatically and economically, at a time when global public opinion is hardening against it.
  • the Chinese Communist Party’s very hold on power seemed to hinge on its ability to control the virus. Its initial attempts to cover up the outbreak in Wuhan gave rise to a stunning outpouring of public anger. Images of overwhelmed hospitals and patients begging for help flooded the Chinese internet.
  • China’s strict lockdowns and mass testing campaigns, once criticized as heavy handed, became models for other countries.
  • When Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert from Shanghai, suggested this summer that China learn to live with the virus, he was attacked viciously online as a lackey of foreigners. A former Chinese health minister called such a mindset reckless.
  • Australia, which was home to the world’s longest lockdown, is scrapping quarantine requirements for vaccinated residents returning from overseas. New Zealand formally abandoned its quest for zero this month. Singapore is offering quarantine-free travel to vaccinated tourists from Germany, the United States, France and several other countries
  • There are also more practical reasons for China’s hesitation. Medical resources are highly concentrated in big cities, and more remote areas could quickly be overwhelmed by an uptick in cases, said Zhang Jun, an urban studies scholar at the City University of Hong Kong.
  • In addition, though China has achieved a relatively high full inoculation rate, at 75 percent of its population, questions have emerged about the efficacy of its homegrown vaccines.
  • And, at least for now, the elimination strategy appears to enjoy public support. While residents in locked-down areas have complained about seemingly arbitrary or overly harsh restrictions on social media, travel is relatively unconstrained in areas without cases. Wealthy consumers have poured money into luxury goods and fancy cars since they’re not spending on trips abroad.
Javier E

AI 'Cheating' Is More Bewildering Than Professors Imagined - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674073

ai learning teaching education crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 21 May 23 - No Cached
  • The problem breaks down into more problems: whether it’s possible to know for certain that a student used AI, what it even means to “use” AI for writing papers, and when that use amounts to cheating.
  • This is college life at the close of ChatGPT’s first academic year: a moil of incrimination and confusion
  • Reports from on campus hint that legitimate uses of AI in education may be indistinguishable from unscrupulous ones, and that identifying cheaters—let alone holding them to account—is more or less impossible.
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  • Now it’s possible for students to purchase answers for assignments from a “tutoring” service such as Chegg—a practice that the kids call “chegging.”
  • when the AI chatbots were unleashed last fall, all these cheating methods of the past seemed obsolete. “We now believe [ChatGPT is] having an impact on our new-customer growth rate,” Chegg’s CEO admitted on an earnings call this month. The company has since lost roughly $1 billion in market value.
  • By 2018, Turnitin was already taking more than $100 million in yearly revenue to help professors sniff out impropriety. Its software, embedded in the courseware that students use to turn in work, compares their submissions with a database of existing material (including other student papers that Turnitin has previously consumed), and flags material that might have been copied. The company, which has claimed to serve 15,000 educational institutions across the world, was acquired for $1.75 billion in 2019. Last month, it rolled out an AI-detection add-in (with no way for teachers to opt out). AI-chatbot countermeasures, like the chatbots themselves, are taking over.
  • as the first chatbot spring comes to a close, Turnitin’s new software is delivering a deluge of positive identifications: This paper was “18% AI”; that one, “100% AI.” But what do any of those numbers really mean? Surprisingly—outrageously—it’s very hard to say for sure.
  • according to the company, that designation does indeed suggest that 100 percent of an essay—as in, every one of its sentences—was computer generated, and, further, that this judgment has been made with 98 percent certainty.
  • A Turnitin spokesperson acknowledged via email that “text created by another tool that uses algorithms or other computer-enabled systems,” including grammar checkers and automated translators, could lead to a false positive, and that some “genuine” writing can be similar to AI-generated writing. “Some people simply write very predictably,” she told me
  • Perhaps it doesn’t matter, because Turnitin disclaims drawing any conclusions about misconduct from its results. “This is only a number intended to help the educator determine if additional review or a discussion with the student is warranted,” the spokesperson said. “Teaching is a human endeavor.”
  • In other words, the student in my program whose work was flagged for being “100% AI” might have used a little AI, or a lot of AI, or maybe something in between. As for any deeper questions—exactly how he used AI, and whether he was wrong to do so—teachers like me are, as ever, on our own.
  • Rethinking assignments in light of AI might be warranted, just like it was in light of online learning. But doing so will also be exhausting for both faculty and students. Nobody will be able to keep up, and yet everyone will have no choice but to do so
  • Somewhere in the cracks between all these tectonic shifts and their urgent responses, perhaps teachers will still find a way to teach, and students to learn.
Javier E

AI is already writing books, websites and online recipes - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ai-spam-websites-books-chatgpt

ai books writing industry publishing crisis culture economics

shared by Javier E on 06 May 23 - No Cached
  • Experts say those books are likely just the tip of a fast-growing iceberg of AI-written content spreading across the web as new language software allows anyone to rapidly generate reams of prose on almost any topic. From product reviews to recipes to blog posts and press releases, human authorship of online material is on track to become the exception rather than the norm.
  • Semrush, a leading digital marketing firm, recently surveyed its customers about their use of automated tools. Of the 894 who responded, 761 said they’ve at least experimented with some form of generative AI to produce online content, while 370 said they now use it to help generate most if not all of their new content, according to Semrush Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin.
  • What that may mean for consumers is more hyper-specific and personalized articles — but also more misinformation and more manipulation, about politics, products they may want to buy and much more.
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  • As AI writes more and more of what we read, vast, unvetted pools of online data may not be grounded in reality, warns Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI start-up Hugging Face
  • “The main issue is losing track of what truth is,” she said. “Without grounding, the system can make stuff up. And if it’s that same made-up thing all over the world, how do you trace it back to what reality is?”
  • a raft of online publishers have been using automated writing tools based on ChatGPT’s predecessors, GPT-2 and GPT-3, for years. That experience shows that a world in which AI creations mingle freely and sometimes imperceptibly with human work isn’t speculative; it’s flourishing in plain sight on Amazon product pages and in Google search results.
  • “If you have a connection to the internet, you have consumed AI-generated content,” said Jonathan Greenglass, a New York-based tech investor focused on e-commerce. “It’s already here.
  • “In the last two years, we’ve seen this go from being a novelty to being pretty much an essential part of the workflow,”
  • the news credibility rating company NewsGuard identified 49 news websites across seven languages that appeared to be mostly or entirely AI-generated.
  • The sites sport names like Biz Breaking News, Market News Reports, and bestbudgetUSA.com; some employ fake author profiles and publish hundreds of articles a day, the company said. Some of the news stories are fabricated, but many are simply AI-crafted summaries of real stories trending on other outlets.
  • Ingenio, the San Francisco-based online publisher behind sites such as horoscope.com and astrology.com, is among those embracing automated content. While its flagship horoscopes are still human-written, the company has used OpenAI’s GPT language models to launch new sites such as sunsigns.com, which focuses on celebrities’ birth signs, and dreamdiary.com, which interprets highly specific dreams.
  • Ingenio used to pay humans to write birth sign articles on a handful of highly searched celebrities like Michael Jordan and Ariana Grande, said Josh Jaffe, president of its media division. But delegating the writing to AI allows sunsigns.com to cheaply crank out countless articles on not-exactly-A-listers
  • In the past, Jaffe said, “We published a celebrity profile a month. Now we can do 10,000 a month.”
  • It isn’t just text. Google users have recently posted examples of the search engine surfacing AI-generated images. For instance, a search for the American artist Edward Hopper turned up an AI image in the style of Hopper, rather than his actual art, as the first result.
  • Jaffe said he isn’t particularly worried that AI content will overwhelm the web. “It takes time for this content to rank well” on Google, he said — meaning that it appears on the first page of search results for a given query, which is critical to attracting readers. And it works best when it appears on established websites that already have a sizable audience: “Just publishing this content doesn’t mean you have a viable business.”
  • Google clarified in February that it allows AI-generated content in search results, as long as the AI isn’t being used to manipulate a site’s search rankings. The company said its algorithms focus on “the quality of content, rather than how content is produced.”
  • Reputations are at risk if the use of AI backfires. CNET, a popular tech news site, took flack in January when fellow tech site Futurism reported that CNET had been using AI to create articles or add to existing ones without clear disclosures. CNET subsequently investigated and found that many of its 77 AI-drafted stories contained errors.
  • Jaffe said his company discloses its use of AI to readers, and he promoted the strategy at a recent conference for the publishing industry. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “We’re actually doing people a favor by leveraging generative AI tools” to create niche content that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
  • BuzzFeed, which pioneered a media model built around reaching readers directly on social platforms like Facebook, announced in January it planned to make “AI inspired content” part of its “core business,” such as using AI to craft quizzes that tailor themselves to each reader. BuzzFeed announced last month that it is laying off 15 percent of its staff and shutting down its news division, BuzzFeed News.
  • it’s finding traction in the murkier worlds of online clickbait and affiliate marketing, where success is less about reputation and more about gaming the big tech platforms’ algorithms.
  • That business is driven by a simple equation: how much it costs to create an article vs. how much revenue it can bring in. The main goal is to attract as many clicks as possible, then serve the readers ads worth just fractions of a cent on each visit — the classic form of clickbait
  • In the past, such sites often outsourced their writing to businesses known as “content mills,” which harness freelancers to generate passable copy for minimal pay. Now, some are bypassing content mills and opting for AI instead.
  • “Previously it would cost you, let’s say, $250 to write a decent review of five grills,” Semrush’s Levin said. “Now it can all be done by AI, so the cost went down from $250 to $10.”
  • The problem, Levin said, is that the wide availability of tools like ChatGPT means more people are producing similarly cheap content, and they’re all competing for the same slots in Google search results or Amazon’s on-site product reviews
  • So they all have to crank out more and more article pages, each tuned to rank highly for specific search queries, in hopes that a fraction will break through. The result is a deluge of AI-written websites, many of which are never seen by human eyes.
  • But CNET’s parent company, Red Ventures, is forging ahead with plans for more AI-generated content, which has also been spotted on Bankrate.com, its popular hub for financial advice. Meanwhile, CNET in March laid off a number of employees, a move it said was unrelated to its growing use of AI.
  • The rise of AI is already hurting the business of Textbroker, a leading content platform based in Germany and Las Vegas, said Jochen Mebus, the company’s chief revenue officer. While Textbroker prides itself on supplying credible, human-written copy on a huge range of topics, “People are trying automated content right now, and so that has slowed down our growth,”
  • Mebus said the company is prepared to lose some clients who are just looking to make a “fast dollar” on generic AI-written content. But it’s hoping to retain those who want the assurance of a human touch, while it also trains some of its writers to become more productive by employing AI tools themselves.
  • He said a recent survey of the company’s customers found that 30 to 40 percent still want exclusively “manual” content, while a similar-size chunk is looking for content that might be AI-generated but human-edited to check for tone, errors and plagiarism.
  • Levin said Semrush’s clients have also generally found that AI is better used as a writing assistant than a sole author. “We’ve seen people who even try to fully automate the content creation process,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve had really good results with that. At this stage, you need to have a human in the loop.”
  • For Cowell, whose book title appears to have inspired an AI-written copycat, the experience has dampened his enthusiasm for writing.“My concern is less that I’m losing sales to fake books, and more that this low-quality, low-priced, low-effort writing is going to have a chilling effect on humans considering writing niche technical books in the future,”
  • It doesn’t help, he added, knowing that “any text I write will inevitably be fed into an AI system that will generate even more competition.”
  • Amazon removed the impostor book, along with numerous others by the same publisher, after The Post contacted the company for comment.
  • AI-written books aren’t against Amazon’s rules, per se, and some authors have been open about using ChatGPT to write books sold on the site.
  • “Amazon is constantly evaluating emerging technologies and innovating to provide a trustworthy shopping experience for our customers,”
Javier E

The New Luddites Aren't Backing Down - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...677327

technology luddite crisis

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • “Anyone who is critical of the tech industry always has someone yell at them ‘Luddite! Luddite!’ and I was no exception,” she told me. It was meant as an insult, but Crabapple embraced the term. Like many others, she came to self-identify as part of a new generation of Luddites. “Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.”
  • on some key fronts, the Luddites are winning.
  • The government mobilized what was then the largest-ever domestic military occupation of England to crush the uprising—the Luddites had won the approval of the working class, and were celebrated in popular songs and poems—and then passed a law that made machine-breaking a capital offense. They painted Luddites as “deluded” and backward.
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  • ver since, Luddite has been a derogatory word—shorthand for one who blindly hates or doesn’t understand technology.
  • Now, with nearly half of Americans worried about how AI will affect jobs, Luddism has blossomed. The new Luddites—a growing contingent of workers, critics, academics, organizers, and writers—say that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of the tech titans, that tech is too often used to help corporations slash pay and squeeze workers, and that certain technologies must not merely be criticized but resisted outright.
  • what I’ve seen over the past 10 years—the rise of gig-app companies that have left workers precarious and even impoverished; the punishing, gamified productivity regimes put in place by giants such as Amazon; the conquering of public life by private tech platforms and the explosion of screen addiction; and the new epidemic of AI plagiarism—has left me sympathizing with tech’s discontents.
  • I consider myself a Luddite not because I want to halt progress or reject technology itself. But I believe, as the original Luddites argued in a particularly influential letter threatening the industrialists, that we must consider whether a technology is “hurtful to commonality”—whether it causes many to suffer for the benefit of a few—and oppose it when necessary.
  • “It’s not a primitivism: We don’t reject all technology, but we reject the technology that is foisted on us,” Jathan Sadowski, a social scientist at Monash University, in Australia, told me. He’s a co-host, with the journalist Ed Ongweso Jr., of This Machine Kills, an explicitly pro-Luddite podcast.
  • The science-fiction author Cory Doctorow has declared all of sci-fi a Luddite literature, writing that “Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.
  • The New York Times has profiled a hip cadre of self-proclaimed “‘Luddite’ teens.” As the headline explained, they “don’t want your likes.”
  • By drawing a red line against letting studios control AI, the WGA essentially waged the first proxy battle between human workers and AI. It drew attention to the fight, resonated with the public, and, after a 148-day strike, helped the guild attain a contract that banned studios from dictating the use of AI.
Javier E

Opinion | A.I. Is Endangering Our History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...istory-deepfake-watermark.html

history AI threat watermark

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • Fortunately, there are numerous reasons for optimism about society’s ability to identify fake media and maintain a shared understanding of current events
  • While we have reason to believe the future may be safe, we worry that the past is not.
  • History can be a powerful tool for manipulation and malfeasance. The same generative A.I. that can fake current events can also fake past ones
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.
  • countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.
  • There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them — and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed
  • Slovenia, upon becoming an independent country in 1992, “erased” over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions, and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
  • The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921, as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant.
  • In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election.
  • As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation, and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history, or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.
  • Decades later Operation Infektion — a Soviet disinformation campaign — used forged documents to spread the idea that the United States had invented H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, as a biological weapon.
  • Fortunately, a path forward has been laid by the same companies that created the risk.
  • In indexing a large share of the world’s digital media to train their models, the A.I. companies have effectively created systems and databases that will soon contain all of humankind’s digitally recorded content, or at least a meaningful approximation of it.
  • They could start work today to record watermarked versions of these primary documents, which include newspaper archives and a wide range of other sources, so that subsequent forgeries are instantly detectable.
  • many of the intellectual property concerns around providing a searchable online archive do not apply to creating watermarked and time-stamped versions of documents, because those versions need not be made publicly available to serve their purpose. One can compare a claimed document to the recorded archive by using a mathematical transformation of the document known as a “hash,” the same technique the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, uses to help companies screen for known terrorist content.
  • creating verified records of historical documents can be valuable for the large A.I. companies. New research suggests that when A.I. models are trained on A.I.-generated data, their performance quickly degrades. Thus separating what is actually part of the historical record from newly created “facts” may be critical.
  • Preserving the past will also mean preserving the training data, the associated tools that operate on it and even the environment that the tools were run in.
  • Such a vellum will be a powerful tool. It can help companies to build better models, by enabling them to analyze what data to include to get the best content, and help regulators to audit bias and harmful content in the models
Javier E

Opinion | H​ow Long Will A.I.'s 'Slop' Era Last? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ai-annoying-future.html

AI evaluation progress 2024

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Sequoia Capital, calculated that investments in A.I. were running short of projected profits by a margin of at least several hundred billion dollars annually. (He called this “A.I.’s $600 billion question” and warned of “investment incineration.”)
  • In a similarly bearish Goldman Sachs report, the firm’s head of global equity research estimated that the cost of A.I. infrastructure build-out over the next several years would reach $1 trillion. “Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed,” he noted. “The crucial question is: What $1 trillion problem will A.I. solve?”
  • that trillion-dollar A.I. expenditure, more than the United States spends annually on its military, and think: What exactly is that money going toward?
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • What is A.I. even for?
  • “A.I. slop”: often uncanny, frequently misleading material, now flooding web browsers and social-media platforms like spam in old inboxes. Years deep into national hysteria over the threat of internet misinformation pushed on us by bad actors, we’ve sleepwalked into a new internet in which meaningless, nonfactual slop is casually mass-produced and force-fed to us by A.I.
  • It has already helped drive down the cost and drive up the performance of next-gen batteries and solar photovoltaic cells, whose performance can also be improved, even after the panels have been manufactured and installed on your roof, by as much as 25 percent
  • while the internet was never perfectly trustworthy, one epoch-defining breakthrough of Google was that it got us pretty close. Now the company’s chief executive acknowledges that hallucinations are “inherent” to the technology it has celebrated as a kind of successor for ranked-order search results, which are now often found far below not just the A.I. summary but a whole stack of “sponsored” results as well.
  • This month, KoBold Metals announced the largest discovery of new copper deposits in a decade — a green-energy gold mine, so to speak, delivered with the help of its own proprietary A.I., which integrated information about subatomic particles detected underground with century-old mining reports and radar imagery to make predictions about where minerals critical for the green transition might be found.
  • Machine learning may help make our electricity grid as much as 40 percent more efficient at delivering power as it is today, when many of its routing decisions are made by individual humans on the basis of experience and intuition
  • Where not long ago we used to find the very best results for Google searches, we can now find instead potentially plagiarized and often inaccurate paragraph summaries of answers to our queries
  • .I. is designing new proteins, rapidly accelerating drug discovery and speeding up clinical trials testing new medicines and therapies.
  • perhaps that a more optimistic perspective can be drawn by analogy to what economists call the “environmental Kuznets curve,” which suggests that, as nations develop, they tend to first pollute a lot more and then, over time, as they grow richer, they ultimately pollute less.
  • Even in describing regular old pollution, this framework has its shortcomings, especially because it treats as automatic eventual progress that has always required tooth-and-nail fights against some very stubborn bad actors
  • A.I. is generating an awful lot of genuine pollution, too — both Google and Microsoft, which each pledged in 2019 to reach zero emissions by 2030, have instead expanded their carbon footprints by nearly 50 percent in the interim.
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