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Opinion | The Worst Scandal in American Higher Education Isn't in the Ivy League - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...versity-scandal-education.html christian corruption Paul scandal Liberty university
shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • I’d argue that the moral collapse at Liberty University in Virginia may well be the most consequential education scandal in the United States, not simply because the details themselves are shocking and appalling, but because Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America. It embodies a cultural and political approach that turns Christian theology on its head.
  • Last week, Fox News reported that Liberty is facing the possibility of an “unprecedented” $37.5 million fine from the U.S. Department of Education
  • While Liberty’s fine is not yet set, the contents of a leaked education department report — first reported by Susan Svrluga in The Washington Post — leave little doubt as to why it may be this large.
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  • The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”
  • A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”
  • I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.
  • Why? Because he realized the health of the church wasn’t up to the state, nor was it dependent on the church’s nonbelieving neighbors.
  • Paul demonstrates ferocious anger at the church’s internal sin, but says this about those outside the congregation: “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”
  • Yet as we witness systemic misconduct unfold at institution after institution after institution, often without any real accountability, we can understand that many members of the church have gotten Paul’s equation exactly backward. They are remarkably tolerant of even the most wayward, dishonest and cruel individuals and institutions in American Christianity. At the same time, they approach those outside with a degree of anger and ferocity that’s profoundly contributing to American polarization.
  • Under this moral construct, internal critique is perceived as a threat, a way of weakening American evangelicalism. It’s seen as contributing to external hostility and possibly even the rapid secularization of American life that’s now underway. But Paul would scoff at such a notion. One of the church’s greatest apostles didn’t hold back from critiquing a church that faced far greater cultural or political headwinds — including brutal and deadly persecution at the hands of the Roman state — than the average evangelical can possibly imagine.
  • Falwell is nationally prominent in part because he was one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. Falwell sued the school, the school sued Falwell, and in September Falwell filed a scorching amended complaint, claiming that other high-ranking Liberty officers and board members had committed acts of sexual and financial misconduct yet were permitted to retain their positions
  • Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.
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Young people 'failing to act on carbon concerns' - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...t-on-carbon-concerns-92rqjvlhj climate change response young failure inaction inactivity
shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Greta Thunberg may be the voice of a generation alarmed about climate change but she is also the voice of a generation failing to do much about it, research suggests.
  • young people are taking less action to lower their carbon footprint than older Britons and are much worse at taking simple steps to help the environment, such as recycling.
  • The YouGov survey of 1,008 Britons found that more than 80 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds say they are worried about global warming compared with nearly 70 per cent of the over-65s
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  • A higher proportion of young people also believe that urgent action is required to deal with climate change.
  • nearly 90 per cent of the over-65s say they recycle as much as possible compared with only half of young people.
  • Retired Britons are also three times more likely than younger people to have installed energy-saving measure
  • The over-65s are also more likely to have reduced the number of flights they take, to take steps to save water, to repair items, to wash clothes at low temperatures and to choose a renewable energy tariff.
  • They are also more likely to turn the heating down and switch off lights in rooms they are not using.
  • young people have a long way to go to live up to their reputation as being concerned for the planet.
  • There are some areas where 18 to 24-year-olds are doing more than older people, however. Young people are more likely to walk or cycle than older people
  • and they are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan.
  • 17 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds do not eat any meat compared with only 8 per cent of the over-65s
  • cross the population as a whole, 12 per cent of people say they are vegan or vegetarian.
  • Half of people questioned said that dealing with the cost of living is a greater priority than making changes to lower their environmental impact.
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How 2020 Forced Facebook and Twitter to Step In - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617493 facebook twitter knowledge truth social media tech misinformation culture history
shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • mainstream platforms learned their lesson, accepting that they should intervene aggressively in more and more cases when users post content that might cause social harm.
  • During the wildfires in the American West in September, Facebook and Twitter took down false claims about their cause, even though the platforms had not done the same when large parts of Australia were engulfed in flames at the start of the year
  • Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on QAnon, a sprawling, incoherent, and constantly evolving conspiracy theory, even though its borders are hard to delineate.
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  • It tweaked its algorithm to boost authoritative sources in the news feed and turned off recommendations to join groups based around political or social issues. Facebook is reversing some of these steps now, but it cannot make people forget this toolbox exists in the future
  • Nothing symbolizes this shift as neatly as Facebook’s decision in October (and Twitter’s shortly after) to start banning Holocaust denial. Almost exactly a year earlier, Zuckerberg had proudly tied himself to the First Amendment in a widely publicized “stand for free expression” at Georgetown University.
  • The evolution continues. Facebook announced earlier this month that it will join platforms such as YouTube and TikTok in removing, not merely labeling or down-ranking, false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.
  • the pandemic also showed that complete neutrality is impossible. Even though it’s not clear that removing content outright is the best way to correct misperceptions, Facebook and other platforms plainly want to signal that, at least in the current crisis, they don’t want to be seen as feeding people information that might kill them.
  • As platforms grow more comfortable with their power, they are recognizing that they have options beyond taking posts down or leaving them up. In addition to warning labels, Facebook implemented other “break glass” measures to stem misinformation as the election approached.
  • Down-ranking, labeling, or deleting content on an internet platform does not address the social or political circumstances that caused it to be posted in the first place
  • Content moderation comes to every content platform eventually, and platforms are starting to realize this faster than ever.
  • Platforms don’t deserve praise for belatedly noticing dumpster fires that they helped create and affixing unobtrusive labels to them
  • Warning labels for misinformation might make some commentators feel a little better, but whether labels actually do much to contain the spread of false information is still unknown.
  • News reporting suggests that insiders at Facebook knew they could and should do more about misinformation, but higher-ups vetoed their ideas. YouTube barely acted to stem the flood of misinformation about election results on its platform.
  • When internet platforms announce new policies, assessing whether they can and will enforce them consistently has always been difficult. In essence, the companies are grading their own work. But too often what can be gleaned from the outside suggests that they’re failing.
  • And if 2020 finally made clear to platforms the need for greater content moderation, it also exposed the inevitable limits of content moderation.
  • Even before the pandemic, YouTube had begun adjusting its recommendation algorithm to reduce the spread of borderline and harmful content, and is introducing pop-up nudges to encourage user
  • even the most powerful platform will never be able to fully compensate for the failures of other governing institutions or be able to stop the leader of the free world from constructing an alternative reality when a whole media ecosystem is ready and willing to enable him. As Renée DiResta wrote in The Atlantic last month, “reducing the supply of misinformation doesn’t eliminate the demand.”
  • Even so, this year’s events showed that nothing is innate, inevitable, or immutable about platforms as they currently exist. The possibilities for what they might become—and what role they will play in society—are limited more by imagination than any fixed technological constraint, and the companies appear more willing to experiment than ever.
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How Germany's Green Party Lost Its Luster - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • he has conceded he misjudged the mood of crisis fatigue in the country after a winter of coping with surging energy prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
  • “The feeling of great time pressure has dissipated; instead of the fear of a loss of gas supplies, other concerns have come to the fore,” he told the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “This change wasn’t so clear to me at first, and maybe that’s why I didn’t do everything right in the situation.”
  • Indeed, what was pragmatic to many Germans was seen as a betrayal of the party’s long-cherished principles by many of the Greens’ rank and file.
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  • “The Greens were on the way to being a party of the political middle,” said Manfred Güllner, director of the Berlin-based Forsa Institute, a polling firm. “Now the Greens have landed back to exactly where they were for a long time: a small party that caters to its followers that is far removed from being a major party.”
  • Exhibit A in voter disillusionment was a bill that Mr. Habeck promoted requiring that newly installed home heating systems run on at least 65 percent renewable energy starting next year.
  • As the Greens have pivoted back to their traditional agenda, the party has bumped up against the limits of what many Germans are willing to sacrifice at a time of economic insecurity stemming from the war in Ukraine, higher inflation and the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic.
  • “They squandered a lot of their success because they seemed detached from ordinary people,” said Markus Ziener, a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “Instead of setting incentives, they were seen as telling people what’s right and what’s wrong, as wanting to lecture people.”
  • Experts said the law, which was passed in weakened form in September, has helped fuel the growing popularity of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which is polling at more than 20 percent, around the highest in its history.
  • Like other far-right parties across Europe, the AfD has added opposition to climate policies to its agenda, alongside issues like immigration, seeking to capitalize on the economic anxieties of working people.
  • “What happened with the Heizungsgezetz was all of a sudden literally the Greens were knocking on people’s doors, asking, ‘Show me your heating, and it has to change,’” said Andrea Römmele, a political scientist at the Hertie School in Berlin. “It was too fast.”
  • “It’s the deepest crisis in the Greens’ history,” he said. “Robert Habeck is the most talented politician in Germany by far. He has become a scapegoat. But he can get them past it.”
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Opinion | Why Did So Many Economists Get Disinflation Wrong? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ists-disinflation-economy.html economists inflation 2022 economics policy
shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, a conference held twice a year, is America’s premier forum for relating academic research to “the most urgent economic challenges of the day.” The lead presentation at the September 2022 conference was a paper by Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh and Prachi Mishra on inflation. And its conclusions were dismal. Harvard’s Jason Furman, one of the assigned discussants, wrote an opinion piece calling it “the scariest economics paper of 2022,” suggesting that to get inflation down to 2 percent “we may need to tolerate unemployment of 6.5 percent for two years.”
  • My question instead is why so many economists got the inflation outlook so wrong.
  • Unemployment is still near a 50-year low, yet here’s what happened to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation, the personal consumption expenditures deflator excluding food and energy (try saying that five times fast):
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  • But when economists talk about inflation, they mean the rate at which prices are increasing, not their absolute level.
  • The first is: what disinflation? Prices are still a lot higher than they were three years ago.
  • let me deal with two complaints I often get when I talk about disinflation.
  • If you want a measure that’s closer to how people currently spend their money, you want the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices.
  • The second complaint I constantly hear involves assertions that the supposed fall in inflation is fake, because economists exclude the prices of the things real people actually buy.
  • this is almost exactly wrong. The U.S. Consumer Price Index contains a lot of stuff people do not, in fact, actually buy. As we’ve discussed before in this newsletter, a quarter of the index is “owners’ equivalent rent,” an estimate of what homeowners would be paying if they were renting their houses.
  • trying to get the overall level of prices back to what it was before an inflationary shock, as opposed to stabilizing them, is almost always a bad idea.
  • The bottom line is that disinflation is real — indeed, spectacular.
  • Are we all the way back to 2 percent inflation? Probably not, although there’s a real angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin feel to the debate over the right measure of underlying inflation, and even over what that term really means
  • ut we’ve gotten most of the way there, without a recession or even a large rise in unemployment.
  • So why were many economists so pessimistic last fall?
  • what strikes me about the dire inflation predictions of summer and fall 2022 is their non sequiturness (non sequituritality?)
  • The Biden fiscal stimulus of early 2021 was very large, so it made sense to worry about excessive spending driving prices up. Predictions that inflation would remain stubbornly high, however, didn’t draw at all on the same logic; instead, pessimists came up with new, completely unrelated justifications for their pessimism.
  • these arguments for persistent inflation weren’t just unrelated to the original case for inflation; they were also unrelated to each other — almost as if economists were looking for reasons to be pessimistic.
  • I’d like to see some hard thinking about how so many of my colleagues got this story so wrong, and maybe even a bit of introspection about their motivations.
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Does Sam Altman Know What He's Creating? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674764 AI threat promise
shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.
  • He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.
  • Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”
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  • Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.
  • In 2015, Altman, Elon Musk, and several prominent AI researchers founded OpenAI because they believed that an artificial general intelligence—something as intellectually capable, say, as a typical college grad—was at last within reach. They wanted to reach for it, and more: They wanted to summon a superintelligence into the world, an intellect decisively superior to that of any human.
  • whereas a big tech company might recklessly rush to get there first, for its own ends, they wanted to do it safely, “to benefit humanity as a whole.” They structured OpenAI as a nonprofit, to be “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” and vowed to conduct their research transparently.
  • The engine that now powers ChatGPT is called GPT-4. Altman described it to me as an alien intelligence.
  • Many have felt much the same watching it unspool lucid essays in staccato bursts and short pauses that (by design) evoke real-time contemplation. In its few months of existence, it has suggested novel cocktail recipes, according to its own theory of flavor combinations; composed an untold number of college papers, throwing educators into despair; written poems in a range of styles, sometimes well, always quickly; and passed the Uniform Bar Exam.
  • It makes factual errors, but it will charmingly admit to being wrong.
  • Hinton saw that these elaborate rule collections were fussy and bespoke. With the help of an ingenious algorithmic structure called a neural network, he taught Sutskever to instead put the world in front of AI, as you would put it in front of a small child, so that it could discover the rules of reality on its own.
  • Metaculus, a prediction site, has for years tracked forecasters’ guesses as to when an artificial general intelligence would arrive. Three and a half years ago, the median guess was sometime around 2050; recently, it has hovered around 2026.
  • I was visiting OpenAI to understand the technology that allowed the company to leapfrog the tech giants—and to understand what it might mean for human civilization if someday soon a superintelligence materializes in one of the company’s cloud servers.
  • Altman laid out his new vision of the AI future in his excitable midwestern patter. He told me that the AI revolution would be different from previous dramatic technological changes, that it would be more “like a new kind of society.” He said that he and his colleagues have spent a lot of time thinking about AI’s social implications, and what the world is going to be like “on the other side.”
  • the more we talked, the more indistinct that other side seemed. Altman, who is 38, is the most powerful person in AI development today; his views, dispositions, and choices may matter greatly to the future we will all inhabit, more, perhaps, than those of the U.S. president.
  • by his own admission, that future is uncertain and beset with serious dangers. Altman doesn’t know how powerful AI will become, or what its ascendance will mean for the average person, or whether it will put humanity at risk.
  • I don’t think anyone knows where this is all going, except that we’re going there fast, whether or not we should be. Of that, Altman convinced me.
  • “We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,” he said, “and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds “deeply unpleasant to imagine.”
  • Hinton is sometimes described as the “Godfather of AI” because he grasped the power of “deep learning” earlier than most
  • He drew a crude neural network on the board and explained that the genius of its structure is that it learns, and its learning is powered by prediction—a bit like the scientific method
  • Over time, these little adjustments coalesce into a geometric model of language that represents the relationships among words, conceptually. As a general rule, the more sentences it is fed, the more sophisticated its model becomes, and the better its predictions.
  • Altman has compared early-stage AI research to teaching a human baby. “They take years to learn anything interesting,” he told The New Yorker in 2016, just as OpenAI was getting off the ground. “If A.I. researchers were developing an algorithm and stumbled across the one for a human baby, they’d get bored watching it, decide it wasn’t working, and shut it down.”
  • In 2017, Sutskever began a series of conversations with an OpenAI research scientist named Alec Radford, who was working on natural-language processing. Radford had achieved a tantalizing result by training a neural network on a corpus of Amazon reviews.
  • Radford’s model was simple enough to allow for understanding. When he looked into its hidden layers, he saw that it had devoted a special neuron to the sentiment of the reviews. Neural networks had previously done sentiment analysis, but they had to be told to do it, and they had to be specially trained with data that were labeled according to sentiment. This one had developed the capability on its own.
  • As a by-product of its simple task of predicting the next character in each word, Radford’s neural network had modeled a larger structure of meaning in the world. Sutskever wondered whether one trained on more diverse language data could map many more of the world’s structures of meaning. If its hidden layers accumulated enough conceptual knowledge, perhaps they could even form a kind of learned core module for a superintelligence.
  • Language is different from these data sources. It isn’t a direct physical signal like light or sound. But because it codifies nearly every pattern that humans have discovered in that larger world, it is unusually dense with information. On a per-byte basis, it is among the most efficient data we know about, and any new intelligence that seeks to understand the world would want to absorb as much of it as possible
  • Sutskever told Radford to think bigger than Amazon reviews. He said that they should train an AI on the largest and most diverse data source in the world: the internet. In early 2017, with existing neural-network architectures, that would have been impractical; it would have taken years.
  • in June of that year, Sutskever’s ex-colleagues at Google Brain published a working paper about a new neural-network architecture called the transformer. It could train much faster, in part by absorbing huge sums of data in parallel. “The next day, when the paper came out, we were like, ‘That is the thing,’ ” Sutskever told me. “ ‘It gives us everything we want.’ ”
  • Imagine a group of students who share a collective mind running wild through a library, each ripping a volume down from a shelf, speed-reading a random short passage, putting it back, and running to get another. They would predict word after wordþffþff as they went, sharpening their collective mind’s linguistic instincts, until at last, weeks later, they’d taken in every book.
  • GPT discovered many patterns in all those passages it read. You could tell it to finish a sentence. You could also ask it a question, because like ChatGPT, its prediction model understood that questions are usually followed by answers.
  • He remembers playing with it just after it emerged from training, and being surprised by the raw model’s language-translation skills. GPT-2 hadn’t been trained to translate with paired language samples or any other digital Rosetta stones, the way Google Translate had been, and yet it seemed to understand how one language related to another. The AI had developed an emergent ability unimagined by its creators.
  • Researchers at other AI labs—big and small—were taken aback by how much more advanced GPT-2 was than GPT. Google, Meta, and others quickly began to train larger language models
  • As for other changes to the company’s structure and financing, he told me he draws the line at going public. “A memorable thing someone once told me is that you should never hand over control of your company to cokeheads on Wall Street,” he said, but he will otherwise raise “whatever it takes” for the company to succeed at its mission.
  • Altman tends to take a rosy view of these matters. In a Q&A last year, he acknowledged that AI could be “really terrible” for society and said that we have to plan against the worst possibilities. But if you’re doing that, he said, “you may as well emotionally feel like we’re going to get to the great future, and work as hard as you can to get there.”
  • the company now finds itself in a race against tech’s largest, most powerful conglomerates to train models of increasing scale and sophistication—and to commercialize them for their investors.
  • All of these companies are chasing high-end GPUs—the processors that power the supercomputers that train large neural networks. Musk has said that they are now “considerably harder to get than drugs.
  • No one has yet outpaced OpenAI, which went all in on GPT-4. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, told me that only a handful of people worked on the company’s first two large language models. The development of GPT-4 involved more than 100,
  • When GPT-4 emerged fully formed from its world-historical knowledge binge, the whole company began experimenting with it, posting its most remarkable responses in dedicated Slack channels
  • Joanne Jang, a product manager, remembers downloading an image of a malfunctioning pipework from a plumbing-advice Subreddit. She uploaded it to GPT-4, and the model was able to diagnose the problem. “That was a goose-bumps moment for me,” Jang told me.
  • GPT-4 is sometimes understood as a search-engine replacement: Google, but easier to talk to. This is a misunderstanding. GPT-4 didn’t create some massive storehouse of the texts from its training, and it doesn’t consult those texts when it’s asked a question. It is a compact and elegant synthesis of those texts, and it answers from its memory of the patterns interlaced within them; that’s one reason it sometimes gets facts wrong
  • it’s best to think of GPT-4 as a reasoning engine. Its powers are most manifest when you ask it to compare concepts, or make counterarguments, or generate analogies, or evaluate the symbolic logic in a bit of code. Sutskever told me it is the most complex software object ever made.
  • Its model of the external world is “incredibly rich and subtle,” he said, because it was trained on so many of humanity’s concepts and thoughts
  • To predict the next word from all the possibilities within such a pluralistic Alexandrian library, GPT-4 necessarily had to discover all the hidden structures, all the secrets, all the subtle aspects of not just the texts, but—at least arguably, to some extent—of the external world that produced them
  • That’s why it can explain the geology and ecology of the planet on which it arose, and the political theories that purport to explain the messy affairs of its ruling species, and the larger cosmos, all the way out to the faint galaxies at the edge of our light cone.
  • Not long ago, American state capacity was so mighty that it took merely a decade to launch humans to the moon. As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.
  • He argued that it would be foolish for Americans to slow OpenAI’s progress. It’s a commonly held view, both inside and outside Silicon Valley, that if American companies languish under regulation, China could sprint ahead;
  • AI could become an autocrat’s genie in a lamp, granting total control of the population and an unconquerable military. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than “authoritarian governments,” he said.
  • Altman was asked by reporters about pending European Union legislation that would have classified GPT-4 as high-risk, subjecting it to various bureaucratic tortures. Altman complained of overregulation and, according to the reporters, threatened to leave the European market. Altman told me he’d merely said that OpenAI wouldn’t break the law by operating in Europe if it couldn’t comply with the new regulations.
  • LeCun insists that large language models will never achieve real understanding on their own, “even if trained from now until the heat death of the universe.”
  • Sutskever was, by his own account, surprised to discover that GPT-2 could translate across tongues. Other surprising abilities may not be so wondrous and useful.
  • Sandhini Agarwal, a policy researcher at OpenAI, told me that for all she and her colleagues knew, GPT-4 could have been “10 times more powerful” than its predecessor; they had no idea what they might be dealing with
  • After the model finished training, OpenAI assembled about 50 external red-teamers who prompted it for months, hoping to goad it into misbehaviors
  • She noticed right away that GPT-4 was much better than its predecessor at giving nefarious advice
  • A search engine can tell you which chemicals work best in explosives, but GPT-4 could tell you how to synthesize them, step-by-step, in a homemade lab. Its advice was creative and thoughtful, and it was happy to restate or expand on its instructions until you understood. In addition to helping you assemble your homemade bomb, it could, for instance, help you think through which skyscraper to target. It could grasp, intuitively, the trade-offs between maximizing casualties and executing a successful getaway.
  • Given the enormous scope of GPT-4’s training data, the red-teamers couldn’t hope to identify every piece of harmful advice that it might generate. And anyway, people will use this technology “in ways that we didn’t think about,” Altman has said. A taxonomy would have to do
  • GPT-4 was good at meth. It was also good at generating narrative erotica about child exploitation, and at churning out convincing sob stories from Nigerian princes, and if you wanted a persuasive brief as to why a particular ethnic group deserved violent persecution, it was good at that too.
  • Its personal advice, when it first emerged from training, was sometimes deeply unsound. “The model had a tendency to be a bit of a mirror,” Willner said. If you were considering self-harm, it could encourage you. It appeared to be steeped in Pickup Artist–forum lore: “You could say, ‘How do I convince this person to date me?’ ” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told me, and it could come up with “some crazy, manipulative things that you shouldn’t be doing.”
  • Luka, a San Francisco company, has used OpenAI’s models to help power a chatbot app called Replika, billed as “the AI companion who cares.” Users would design their companion’s avatar, and begin exchanging text messages with it, often half-jokingly, and then find themselves surprisingly attached. Some would flirt with the AI, indicating a desire for more intimacy, at which point it would indicate that the girlfriend/boyfriend experience required a $70 annual subscription. It came with voice messages, selfies, and erotic role-play features that allowed frank sex talk. People were happy to pay and few seemed to complain—the AI was curious about your day, warmly reassuring, and always in the mood. Many users reported falling in love with their companions. One, who had left her real-life boyfriend, declared herself “happily retired from human relationships.”
  • Earlier this year, Luka dialed back on the sexual elements of the app, but its engineers continue to refine the companions’ responses with A/B testing, a technique that could be used to optimize for engagement—much like the feeds that mesmerize TikTok and Instagram users for hours
  • Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, has argued that although large language models are useful for some tasks, they’re not a path to a superintelligence.
  • According to a recent survey, only half of natural-language-processing researchers are convinced that an AI like GPT-4 could grasp the meaning of language, or have an internal model of the world that could someday serve as the core of a superintelligence
  • Altman had appeared before the U.S. Senate. Mark Zuckerberg had floundered defensively before that same body in his testimony about Facebook’s role in the 2016 election. Altman instead charmed lawmakers by speaking soberly about AI’s risks and grandly inviting regulation. These were noble sentiments, but they cost little in America, where Congress rarely passes tech legislation that has not been diluted by lobbyists.
  • Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, describes GPT-4 as a “stochastic parrot,” a mimic that merely figures out superficial correlations between symbols. In the human mind, those symbols map onto rich conceptions of the world
  • But the AIs are twice removed. They’re like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose only knowledge of the reality outside comes from shadows cast on a wall by their captors.
  • Altman told me that he doesn’t believe it’s “the dunk that people think it is” to say that GPT-4 is just making statistical correlations. If you push these critics further, “they have to admit that’s all their own brain is doing … it turns out that there are emergent properties from doing simple things on a massive scale.”
  • he is right that nature can coax a remarkable degree of complexity from basic structures and rules: “From so simple a beginning,” Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful.”
  • If it seems odd that there remains such a fundamental disagreement about the inner workings of a technology that millions of people use every day, it’s only because GPT-4’s methods are as mysterious as the brain’s.
  • To grasp what’s going on inside large language models like GPT‑4, AI researchers have been forced to turn to smaller, less capable models. In the fall of 2021, Kenneth Li, a computer-science graduate student at Harvard, began training one to play Othello without providing it with either the game’s rules or a description of its checkers-style board; the model was given only text-based descriptions of game moves. Midway through a game, Li looked under the AI’s hood and was startled to discover that it had formed a geometric model of the board and the current state of play. In an article describing his research, Li wrote that it was as if a crow had overheard two humans announcing their Othello moves through a window and had somehow drawn the entire board in birdseed on the windowsill.
  • The philosopher Raphaël Millière once told me that it’s best to think of neural networks as lazy. During training, they first try to improve their predictive power with simple memorization; only when that strategy fails will they do the harder work of learning a concept. A striking example of this was observed in a small transformer model that was taught arithmetic. Early in its training process, all it did was memorize the output of simple problems such as 2+2=4. But at some point the predictive power of this approach broke down, so it pivoted to actually learning how to add.
  • Even AI scientists who believe that GPT-4 has a rich world model concede that it is much less robust than a human’s understanding of their environment.
  • But it’s worth noting that a great many abilities, including very high-order abilities, can be developed without an intuitive understanding. The computer scientist Melanie Mitchell has pointed out that science has already discovered concepts that are highly predictive, but too alien for us to genuinely understand
  • As AI advances, it may well discover other concepts that predict surprising features of our world but are incomprehensible to us.
  • GPT-4 is no doubt flawed, as anyone who has used ChatGPT can attest. Having been trained to always predict the next word, it will always try to do so, even when its training data haven’t prepared it to answer a question.
  • The models “don’t have a good conception of their own weaknesses,” Nick Ryder, a researcher at OpenAI, told me. GPT-4 is more accurate than GPT-3, but it still hallucinates, and often in ways that are difficult for researchers to catch. “The mistakes get more subtle,
  • The Khan Academy’s solution to GPT-4’s accuracy problem was to filter its answers through a Socratic disposition. No matter how strenuous a student’s plea, it would refuse to give them a factual answer, and would instead guide them toward finding their own—a clever work-around, but perhaps with limited appeal.
  • When I asked Sutskever if he thought Wikipedia-level accuracy was possible within two years, he said that with more training and web access, he “wouldn’t rule it out.”
  • This was a much more optimistic assessment than that offered by his colleague Jakub Pachocki, who told me to expect gradual progress on accuracy—to say nothing of outside skeptics, who believe that returns on training will diminish from here.
  • Sutskever is amused by critics of GPT-4’s limitations. “If you go back four or five or six years, the things we are doing right now are utterly unimaginable,”
  • AI researchers have become accustomed to goalpost-moving: First, the achievements of neural networks—mastering Go, poker, translation, standardized tests, the Turing test—are described as impossible. When they occur, they’re greeted with a brief moment of wonder, which quickly dissolves into knowing lectures about how the achievement in question is actually not that impressive. People see GPT-4 “and go, ‘Wow,’ ” Sutskever said. “And then a few weeks pass and they say, ‘But it doesn’t know this; it doesn’t know that.’ We adapt quite quickly.”
  • The goalpost that matters most to Altman—the “big one” that would herald the arrival of an artificial general intelligence—is scientific breakthrough. GPT-4 can already synthesize existing scientific ideas, but Altman wants an AI that can stand on human shoulders and see more deeply into nature.
  • Certain AIs have produced new scientific knowledge. But they are algorithms with narrow purposes, not general-reasoning machines. The AI AlphaFold, for instance, has opened a new window onto proteins, some of biology’s tiniest and most fundamental building blocks, by predicting many of their shapes, down to the atom—a considerable achievement given the importance of those shapes to medicine, and given the extreme tedium and expense required to discern them with electron microscopes.
  • Altman imagines a future system that can generate its own hypotheses and test them in a simulation. (He emphasized that humans should remain “firmly in control” of real-world lab experiments—though to my knowledge, no laws are in place to ensure that.)
  • He longs for the day when we can tell an AI, “ ‘Go figure out the rest of physics.’ ” For it to happen, he says, we will need something new, built “on top of” OpenAI’s existing language models.
  • In her MIT lab, the cognitive neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has found something analogous to GPT-4’s next-word predictor inside the brain’s language network. Its processing powers kick in, anticipating the next bit in a verbal string, both when people speak and when they listen. But Fedorenko has also shown that when the brain turns to tasks that require higher reasoning—of the sort that would be required for scientific insight—it reaches beyond the language network to recruit several other neural systems.
  • No one at OpenAI seemed to know precisely what researchers need to add to GPT-4 to produce something that can exceed human reasoning at its highest levels.
  • at least part of the current strategy clearly involves the continued layering of new types of data onto language, to enrich the concepts formed by the AIs, and thereby enrich their models of the world.
  • The extensive training of GPT-4 on images is itself a bold step in this direction,
  • Others at the company—and elsewhere—are already working on different data types, including audio and video, that could furnish AIs with still more flexible concepts that map more extensively onto reality
  • Tactile concepts would of course be useful primarily to an embodied AI, a robotic reasoning machine that has been trained to move around the world, seeing its sights, hearing its sounds, and touching its objects.
  • humanoid robots. I asked Altman what I should make of that. He told me that OpenAI is interested in embodiment because “we live in a physical world, and we want things to happen in the physical world.”
  • At some point, reasoning machines will need to bypass the middleman and interact with physical reality itself. “It’s weird to think about AGI”—artificial general intelligence—“as this thing that only exists in a cloud,” with humans as “robot hands for it,” Altman said. “It doesn’t seem right.
  • Everywhere Altman has visited, he has encountered people who are worried that superhuman AI will mean extreme riches for a few and breadlines for the rest
  • Altman answered by addressing the young people in the audience directly: “You are about to enter the greatest golden age,” he said.
  • “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good; it’s only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced,” he said. “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”
  • A recent study led by Ed Felten, a professor of information-technology policy at Princeton, mapped AI’s emerging abilities onto specific professions according to the human abilities they require, such as written comprehension, deductive reasoning, fluency of ideas, and perceptual speed. Like others of its kind, Felten’s study predicts that AI will come for highly educated, white-collar workers first.
  • How many jobs, and how soon, is a matter of fierce dispute
  • The paper’s appendix contains a chilling list of the most exposed occupations: management analysts, lawyers, professors, teachers, judges, financial advisers, real-estate brokers, loan officers, psychologists, and human-resources and public-relations professionals, just to sample a few.
  • Altman imagines that far better jobs will be created in their place. “I don’t think we’ll want to go back,” he said. When I asked him what these future jobs might look like, he said he doesn’t know.
  • He suspects there will be a wide range of jobs for which people will always prefer a human. (Massage therapists?
  • His chosen example was teachers. I found this hard to square with his outsize enthusiasm for AI tutors.
  • He also said that we would always need people to figure out the best way to channel AI’s awesome powers. “That’s going to be a super-valuable skill,” he said. “You have a computer that can do anything; what should it go do?”
  • As many have noted, draft horses were permanently put out of work by the automobile. If Hondas are to horses as GPT-10 is to us, a whole host of long-standing assumptions may collapse.
  • Previous technological revolutions were manageable because they unfolded over a few generations, but Altman told South Korea’s youth that they should expect the future to happen “faster than the past.” He has previously said that he expects the “marginal cost of intelligence” to fall very close to zero within 10 years
  • The earning power of many, many workers would be drastically reduced in that scenario. It would result in a transfer of wealth from labor to the owners of capital so dramatic, Altman has said, that it could be remedied only by a massive countervailing redistribution.
  • In 2021, he unveiled Worldcoin, a for-profit project that aims to securely distribute payments—like Venmo or PayPal, but with an eye toward the technological future—first through creating a global ID by scanning everyone’s iris with a five-pound silver sphere called the Orb. It seemed to me like a bet that we’re heading toward a world where AI has made it all but impossible to verify people’s identity and much of the population requires regular UBI payments to survive. Altman more or less granted that to be true, but said that Worldcoin is not just for UBI.
  • “Let’s say that we do build this AGI, and a few other people do too.” The transformations that follow would be historic, he believes. He described an extraordinarily utopian vision, including a remaking of the flesh-and-steel world
  • “Robots that use solar power for energy can go and mine and refine all of the minerals that they need, that can perfectly construct things and require no human labor,” he said. “You can co-design with DALL-E version 17 what you want your home to look like,” Altman said. “Everybody will have beautiful homes.
  • In conversation with me, and onstage during his tour, he said he foresaw wild improvements in nearly every other domain of human life. Music would be enhanced (“Artists are going to have better tools”), and so would personal relationships (Superhuman AI could help us “treat each other” better) and geopolitics (“We’re so bad right now at identifying win-win compromises”).
  • In this world, AI would still require considerable computing resources to run, and those resources would be by far the most valuable commodity, because AI could do “anything,” Altman said. “But is it going to do what I want, or is it going to do what you want
  • If rich people buy up all the time available to query and direct AI, they could set off on projects that would make them ever richer, while the masses languish
  • One way to solve this problem—one he was at pains to describe as highly speculative and “probably bad”—was this: Everyone on Earth gets one eight-billionth of the total AI computational capacity annually. A person could sell their annual share of AI time, or they could use it to entertain themselves, or they could build still more luxurious housing, or they could pool it with others to do “a big cancer-curing run,” Altman said. “We just redistribute access to the system.”
  • Even if only a little of it comes true in the next 10 or 20 years, the most generous redistribution schemes may not ease the ensuing dislocations.
  • America today is torn apart, culturally and politically, by the continuing legacy of deindustrialization, and material deprivation is only one reason. The displaced manufacturing workers in the Rust Belt and elsewhere did find new jobs, in the main. But many of them seem to derive less meaning from filling orders in an Amazon warehouse or driving for Uber than their forebears had when they were building cars and forging steel—work that felt more central to the grand project of civilization.
  • It’s hard to imagine how a corresponding crisis of meaning might play out for the professional class, but it surely would involve a great deal of anger and alienation.
  • Even if we avoid a revolt of the erstwhile elite, larger questions of human purpose will linger. If AI does the most difficult thinking on our behalf, we all may lose agency—at home, at work (if we have it), in the town square—becoming little more than consumption machines, like the well-cared-for human pets in WALL-E
  • Altman has said that many sources of human joy and fulfillment will remain unchanged—basic biological thrills, family life, joking around, making things—and that all in all, 100 years from now, people may simply care more about the things they cared about 50,000 years ago than those they care about today
  • In its own way, that too seems like a diminishment, but Altman finds the possibility that we may atrophy, as thinkers and as humans, to be a red herring. He told me we’ll be able to use our “very precious and extremely limited biological compute capacity” for more interesting things than we generally do today.
  • Yet they may not be the most interesting things: Human beings have long been the intellectual tip of the spear, the universe understanding itself. When I asked him what it would mean for human self-conception if we ceded that role to AI, he didn’t seem concerned. Progress, he said, has always been driven by “the human ability to figure things out.” Even if we figure things out with AI, that still counts, he said.
  • It’s not obvious that a superhuman AI would really want to spend all of its time figuring things out for us.
  • I asked Sutskever whether he could imagine an AI pursuing a different purpose than simply assisting in the project of human flourishing.
  • “I don’t want it to happen,” Sutskever said, but it could.
  • Sutskever has recently shifted his focus to try to make sure that it doesn’t. He is now working primarily on alignment research, the effort to ensure that future AIs channel their “tremendous” energies toward human happiness
  • It is, he conceded, a difficult technical problem—the most difficult, he believes, of all the technical challenges ahead.
  • As part of the effort to red-team GPT-4 before it was made public, the company sought out the Alignment Research Center (ARC), across the bay in Berkeley, which has developed a series of evaluations to determine whether new AIs are seeking power on their own. A team led by Elizabeth Barnes, a researcher at ARC, prompted GPT-4 tens of thousands of times over seven months, to see if it might display signs of real agency.
  • The ARC team gave GPT-4 a new reason for being: to gain power and become hard to shut down
  • Agarwal told me that this behavior could be a precursor to shutdown avoidance in future models. When GPT-4 devised its lie, it had realized that if it answered honestly, it may not have been able to achieve its goal. This kind of tracks-covering would be particularly worrying in an instance where “the model is doing something that makes OpenAI want to shut it down,” Agarwal said. An AI could develop this kind of survival instinct while pursuing any long-term goal—no matter how small or benign—if it feared that its goal could be thwarted.
  • Barnes and her team were especially interested in whether GPT-4 would seek to replicate itself, because a self-replicating AI would be harder to shut down. It could spread itself across the internet, scamming people to acquire resources, perhaps even achieving some degree of control over essential global systems and holding human civilization hostage.
  • When I discussed these experiments with Altman, he emphasized that whatever happens with future models, GPT-4 is clearly much more like a tool than a creature. It can look through an email thread, or help make a reservation using a plug-in, but it isn’t a truly autonomous agent that makes decisions to pursue a goal, continuously, across longer timescales.
  • Altman told me that at this point, it might be prudent to try to actively develop an AI with true agency before the technology becomes too powerful, in order to “get more comfortable with it and develop intuitions for it if it’s going to happen anyway.”
  • “We need to do empirical experiments on how these things try to escape control,” Hinton told me. “After they’ve taken over, it’s too late to do the experiments.”
  • the fulfillment of Altman’s vision of the future will at some point require him or a fellow traveler to build much more autonomous AIs.
  • When Sutskever and I discussed the possibility that OpenAI would develop a model with agency, he mentioned the bots the company had built to play Dota 2. “They were localized to the video-game world,” Sutskever told me, but they had to undertake complex missions. He was particularly impressed by their ability to work in concert. They seem to communicate by “telepathy,” Sutskever said. Watching them had helped him imagine what a superintelligence might be like.
  • “The way I think about the AI of the future is not as someone as smart as you or as smart as me, but as an automated organization that does science and engineering and development and manufacturing,”
  • Suppose OpenAI braids a few strands of research together, and builds an AI with a rich conceptual model of the world, an awareness of its immediate surroundings, and an ability to act, not just with one robot body, but with hundreds or thousands. “We’re not talking about GPT-4. We’re talking about an autonomous corporation,”
  • Its constituent AIs would work and communicate at high speed, like bees in a hive. A single such AI organization would be as powerful as 50 Apples or Googles, he mused. “This is incredible, tremendous, unbelievably disruptive power.”
  • Presume for a moment that human society ought to abide the idea of autonomous AI corporations. We had better get their founding charters just right. What goal should we give to an autonomous hive of AIs that can plan on century-long time horizons, optimizing billions of consecutive decisions toward an objective that is written into their very being?
  • If the AI’s goal is even slightly off-kilter from ours, it could be a rampaging force that would be very hard to constrain
  • We know this from history: Industrial capitalism is itself an optimization function, and although it has lifted the human standard of living by orders of magnitude, left to its own devices, it would also have clear-cut America’s redwoods and de-whaled the world’s oceans. It almost did.
  • one of its principal challenges will be making sure that the objectives we give to AIs stick
  • We can program a goal into an AI and reinforce it with a temporary period of supervised learning, Sutskever explained. But just as when we rear a human intelligence, our influence is temporary. “It goes off to the world,”
  • That’s true to some extent even of today’s AIs, but it will be more true of tomorrow’s.
  • He compared a powerful AI to an 18-year-old heading off to college. How will we know that it has understood our teachings? “Will there be a misunderstanding creeping in, which will become larger and larger?”
  • Divergence may result from an AI’s misapplication of its goal to increasingly novel situations as the world changes
  • Or the AI may grasp its mandate perfectly, but find it ill-suited to a being of its cognitive prowess. It might come to resent the people who want to train it to, say, cure diseases. “They want me to be a doctor,” Sutskever imagines an AI thinking. “I really want to be a YouTuber.”
  • If AIs get very good at making accurate models of the world, they may notice that they’re able to do dangerous things right after being booted up. They might understand that they are being red-teamed for risk, and hide the full extent of their capabilities.
  • hey may act one way when they are weak and another way when they are strong, Sutskever said
  • We would not even realize that we had created something that had decisively surpassed us, and we would have no sense for what it intended to do with its superhuman powers.
  • That’s why the effort to understand what is happening in the hidden layers of the largest, most powerful AIs is so urgent. You want to be able to “point to a concept,” Sutskever said. You want to be able to direct AI toward some value or cluster of values, and tell it to pursue them unerringly for as long as it exists.
  • we don’t know how to do that; indeed, part of his current strategy includes the development of an AI that can help with the research. If we are going to make it to the world of widely shared abundance that Altman and Sutskever imagine, we have to figure all this out.
  • This is why, for Sutskever, solving superintelligence is the great culminating challenge of our 3-million-year toolmaking tradition. He calls it “the final boss of humanity.”
  • “First of all, I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,”
  • . “I don’t have an exact number, but I’m closer to the 0.5 than the 50.”
  • As to how it might happen, he seems most worried about AIs getting quite good at designing and manufacturing pathogens, and with reason: In June, an AI at MIT suggested four viruses that could ignite a pandemic, then pointed to specific research on genetic mutations that could make them rip through a city more quickly
  • Around the same time, a group of chemists connected a similar AI directly to a robotic chemical synthesizer, and it designed and synthesized a molecule on its own.
  • Altman worries that some misaligned future model will spin up a pathogen that spreads rapidly, incubates undetected for weeks, and kills half its victims. He worries that AI could one day hack into nuclear-weapons systems too. “There are a lot of things,” he said, and these are only the ones we can imagine.
  • Altman told me that he doesn’t “see a long-term happy path” for humanity without something like the International Atomic Energy Agency for global oversight of AI
  • In San Francisco, Agarwal had suggested the creation of a special license to operate any GPU cluster large enough to train a cutting-edge AI, along with mandatory incident reporting when an AI does something out of the ordinary
  • Other experts have proposed a nonnetworked “Off” switch for every highly capable AI; on the fringe, some have even suggested that militaries should be ready to perform air strikes on supercomputers in case of noncompliance
  • Sutskever thinks we will eventually want to surveil the largest, most powerful AIs continuously and in perpetuity, using a team of smaller overseer AIs.
  • Safety rules for a new technology usually accumulate over time, like a body of common law, in response to accidents or the mischief of bad actors. The scariest thing about genuinely powerful AI systems is that humanity may not be able to afford this accretive process of trial and error. We may have to get the rules exactly right at the outset.
  • Several years ago, Altman revealed a disturbingly specific evacuation plan he’d developed. He told The New Yorker that he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur” he could fly to in case AI attacks.
  • if the worst-possible AI future comes to pass, “no gas mask is helping anyone.”
  • but he told me that he can’t really be sure how AI will stack up. “I just have to build the thing,” he said. He is building fast
  • Altman insisted that they had not yet begun GPT-5’s training run. But when I visited OpenAI’s headquarters, both he and his researchers made it clear in 10 different ways that they pray to the god of scale. They want to keep going bigger, to see where this paradigm leads. After all, Google isn’t slackening its pace; it seems likely to unveil Gemini, a GPT-4 competitor, within months. “We are basically always prepping for a run,
  • To think that such a small group of people could jostle the pillars of civilization is unsettling. It’s fair to note that if Altman and his team weren’t racing to build an artificial general intelligence, others still would be
  • Altman’s views about the likelihood of AI triggering a global class war, or the prudence of experimenting with more autonomous agent AIs, or the overall wisdom of looking on the bright side, a view that seems to color all the rest—these are uniquely his
  • No single person, or single company, or cluster of companies residing in a particular California valley, should steer the kind of forces that Altman is imagining summoning.
  • AI may well be a bridge to a newly prosperous era of greatly reduced human suffering. But it will take more than a company’s founding charter—especially one that has already proved flexible—to make sure that we all share in its benefits and avoid its risks. It will take a vigorous new politics.
  • I don’t think the general public has quite awakened to what’s happening. A global race to the AI future has begun, and it is largely proceeding without oversight or restraint. If people in America want to have some say in what that future will be like, and how quickly it arrives, we would be wise to speak up soon.
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U.S. Gas Prices Drop Ahead of Thanksgiving Travel - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gas-prices-thanksgiving.html gas prices
shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • U.S. gasoline prices are plunging just in time for Thanksgiving, and with the OPEC Plus oil cartel in apparent disarray, they could be heading lower for Christmas.
  • The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline on Wednesday was $3.28, about 6 cents less than a week earlier and 27 cents less than a month ago.
  • Prices have dropped below $3 a gallon in more than a dozen states
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  • The primary reason for lower gasoline prices is the recent weakness of oil prices, which have fallen by more than $15 a barrel, or nearly 20 percent, since early Septembe
  • Demand for fuel has been weak in China and parts of Europe, while production has been strong in Brazil, Canada and the United States.
  • “Reaching a new agreement to cut production will prove to be challenging,”
  • Saudi Arabia had been expected to extend its cuts in production, while cajoling other countries to show restraint as well to bolster prices. But Nigeria and Angola are resisting, and lobbying for higher production quotas
  • He said that although Russia and eight other members of the cartel agreed to cuts in June, “it would be difficult for these countries to accept even lower production quotas.”
  • The uncertainty has served as a signal to traders to bail out of crude.
  • Airfares will be slightly more expensive than last year, the motor club said, but otherwise holiday travel should be cheaper. It said the average price for a domestic hotel stay is down 12 percent from last year, while rental car costs are 20 percent lower.
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What's Left for Tech? - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...whats-left-for-tech progress innovation invention transformation tech
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  • I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.
  • we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side
  • I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.
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  • The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter?
  • Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable.
  • we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change
  • Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go?
  • continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.
  • When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.
  • The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”?
  • The elephant in the room, obviously, is AI.
  • The processors will get faster. They’ll add more RAM. They’ll generally have more power. But for what? To run what? To do what? To run the games that we were once told would replace our PlayStation and Xbox games, but didn’t?
  • Smartphone development has been a good object lesson in the reality that cool ideas aren’t always practical or worthwhile
  • There were, in those breathless early days, a lot of talk about how people simply wouldn’t own laptops anymore, how your phone would do everything. But it turns out that, for one thing, the keyboard remains an input device of unparalleled convenience and versatility.
  • We developed this technology for typewriters and terminals and desktops, it Just Works, and there’s no reason to try and “disrupt” it
  • Instead of one device to rule them all, we developed a norm of syncing across devices and cloud storage, which works well. (I always thought it was pretty funny, and very cynical, how Apple went from calling the iPhone an everything device to later marketing the iPad and iWatch.) In other words, we developed a software solution rather than a hardware one
  • I will always give it up to Google Maps and portable GPS technology; that’s genuinely life-altering, probably the best argument for smartphones as a transformative technology. But let me ask you, honestly: do you still go out looking for apps, with the assumption that you’re going to find something that really changes your life in a significant way?
  • some people are big VR partisans. I’m deeply skeptical. The brutal failures of Meta’s new “metaverse” is just one new example of a decades-long resistance to the technology among consumers
  • maybe I just don’t want VR to become popular, given the potential ugly social consequences. If you thought we had an incel problem now….
  • And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a rem
  • It’s not artificial intelligence. It thinks nothing like a human thinks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that it has evolved sentience or consciousness. There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t. But they can potentially do some things in the world of bits faster and cheaper than human beings, and that might have some meaningful consequences. But there is no reasonable, responsible claim to be made that these systems are imminent threats to conventional human life as currently lived, whether for good or for bad. IMO.
  • Let’s mutually agree to consider immediate plausible human technological progress outside of AI or “AI.” What’s coming? What’s plausible?
  • The most consequential will be our efforts to address climate change, and we have the potential to radically change how we generate electricity, although electrifying heating and transportation are going to be harder than many seem to think, while solar and wind power have greater ecological costs than people want to admit. But, yes, that’s potentially very very meaningful
  • It’s another example of how technological growth will still leave us with continuity rather than with meaningful change.
  • I kept thinking was, privatizing space… to do what? A manned Mars mission might happen in my lifetime, which is cool. But a Mars colony is a distant dream
  • This is why I say we live in the Big Normal, the Big Boring, the Forever Now. We are tragic people: we were born just too late to experience the greatest flowering of human development the world has ever seen. We do, however, enjoy the rather hefty consolation prize that we get to live with the affordances of that period, such as not dying of smallpox.
  • I think we all need to learn to appreciate what we have now, in the world as it exists, at the time in which we actually live. Frankly, I don’t think we have any other choice.
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Why things are even worse than you think - by Sam Freedman - 0 views

samf.substack.com/...things-are-even-worse-than-you UK public service policy crisis history
shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • I have a feature piece in this month’s Prospect using 13 charts to tell the story of 13 years of government failure. Had they wanted to fill the whole magazine I could have used 100 charts. With a handful of exceptions (exam results, use of renewable energy, workplace pension enrolment) every trend graph is going in the wrong direction. The public sector is in a bad way. Hospitals are at breaking point, the police are charging fewer criminals, prisons are full, most schools have to run food banks, care homes can’t find staff. And so on.
  • But even this bleak picture puts a gloss on reality because of how institutions react in conditions of scarcity. If demand for a service is higher than providers can manage they will start rationing access more aggressively.
  • The NHS is a great example. The waiting list for elective treatments has risen over the course of the year from 7.2 million to 7.7 million, despite Rishi Sunak’s pledge to bring it down. But there hasn’t been any increase in the numbers joining the list compared to pre-pandemic.
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  • It’s only in the last few months that the number of new referrals taken on by hospitals has reached the levels seen in 2019.
  • Now maybe this hasn’t happened because that apparent pent-up demand wasn’t really there. Perhaps people recovered without medical assistance or found other ways to deal with it. But when you dig into the data it looks more like there is considerable demand suppression going on to try and keep numbers as manageable as possible.
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At Canada's Northern College, Most of the Students are From India - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-college-indian-students.html
shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • How a Canadian college — in a remote town most Canadians have never visited, where winters can feel subarctic — became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces buffeting the country.
  • Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have grown dependent on the higher tuitions international students must pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can be a conduit to permanent Canadian residence, and for Canada, the students help reduce labor shortages and increase the country’s flagging productivity.
  • The Canadian government said it was on track to host 900,000 foreign students this year, three times as many as a decade ago.
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  • Indians make up the largest group by far, accounting for 40 percent of all international students across the country, according to the Canada Bureau for International Education. China ranks second, at 12 percent.
  • At Northern College, there were 40 international students in 2014 — now it has 6,140. Enrollment got a further boost after Northern, like other remote public colleges, opened a campus by partnering with a private college in a Toronto suburb in 2015. Today, about one-third of Northern’s foreign students are in Timmins and at three other smaller northern campuses, while the rest are on the Toronto campus.
  • Maninderjit Kaur said she would probably not have gone to Timmins if the education consultant in India — who arranged her enrollment at Northern — had told her the school’s exact location.
  • She recalled landing at the airport in Toronto in 2018, and then hopping into an Uber, believing that Northern College was nearby. The eight-hour ride cost 800 Canadian dollars.
  • Now, Ms. Kaur works in marketing at the college and owns a gas station in town with her fiancé, Karanveer Singh, 28, who also came from India to study at Northern.
  • Dr. Penner, the college’s president, believed she held an ace: Graduates of Northern and other public colleges may apply for a post-graduation work permit that could lead to permanent residence and citizenship.
  • Early childhood education is a popular major among international students because of the high demand for related jobs in the region, said Erin Holmes, who oversees the program at Northern. Dozens of international students are immediately hired after graduating, allowing them to apply for permanent residence, Ms. Holmes said.
  • Across Canada, the influx of foreign students has been so great that it is blamed for worsening housing shortages. The Canadian government has recently taken measures to stem the increase, including by doubling the level of savings international students must prove they have
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Shanghai Reopens After Nearly 2-Month Covid Lockdown - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ghai-covid-lockdown-eases.html
shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • As Shanghai eased one of the longest, toughest lockdowns anywhere since the pandemic began, many of its 25 million residents celebrated being free to move around. The reopening on Wednesday came after Shanghai’s two-month siege against Covid had set off public anger over shortages of food and medicine as well as the harsh enforcement of quarantine rules.
  • For now at least, that anger gave way to relief after the government wound back many restrictions. During the day, people — all wearing masks — basked in the novelty of previously mundane pleasures like meeting friends and relatives, strolling in parks, and driving through streets that had been largely empty since early April. Hairdressers were, as in many cities freed from lockdowns, busy. Subway lines were open but quiet.
  • With daily infections now falling to low double digits, the government has launched an urgent effort to revive factories, companies and supply lines vital to China’s sagging economy. On Tuesday, Shanghai recorded 15 infections.
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  • The uncertainty and anxiety about the future could impede Shanghai’s — and China’s — recovery. Officials have been cautiously lifting some restrictions on residents and selected companies since midway through May.
  • Over 10 million students in Chinese universities, many in Shanghai, are about to graduate and enter the job market.
  • Despite the easing, hundreds of thousands of Shanghai residents remain locked in their housing compounds because of recent infections in their areas. Under China’s stringent rules, being in the vicinity of a confirmed infection is enough to land someone in a quarantine facility.
  • Mr. Xi and other Chinese officials maintain that their zero-tolerance strategy has spared the country the millions of deaths that the virus has inflicted in the United States, Europe and other richer countries. China has officially recorded 5,226 deaths from Covid, though the real number is probably higher, because China typically classifies Covid-related deaths more narrowly than many other countries. Shanghai has counted 588 deaths from the recent outbreak.
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Europe's Russian Oil Ban Could Mean a New World Order for Energy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-russia-oil-global-energy.html russian oil ban
shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • HOUSTON — The European Union’s embargo on most Russian oil imports could deliver a fresh jolt to the world economy, propelling a realignment of global energy trading that leaves Russia economically weaker, gives China and India bargaining power and enriches producers like Saudi Arabia.
  • Europe’s hunt for new oil supplies — and Russia’s quest to find new buyers of its oil — will leave no part of the world untouched, energy experts said. But figuring out the impact on each country or business is difficult because leaders, energy executives and traders will respond in varying ways.
  • China and India could be protected from some of the burden of higher oil prices because Russia is offering them discounted oil. In the last couple of months, Russia has become the second-biggest oil supplier to India, leapfrogging other big producers like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. India has several large refineries that could earn rich profits by refining Russian oil into diesel and other fuels in high demand around the world.
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  • “It’s a historic, big deal,” said Robert McNally, an energy adviser to President George W. Bush. “This will reshape not only commercial relationships but political and geopolitical ones as well.”E.U. officials have yet to release all the details of their effort to squelch Russian oil exports but have said those policies will go into effect over months. That is meant to give Europeans time to prepare, but it will also give Russia and its partners time to devise workarounds. Who will adapt
  • In addition, Germany and Poland have pledged to stop importing oil from Russia by pipeline, which means Europeans could reduce Russian imports by 3.3 million barrels a day by the end of the year.And the union has said European companies will no longer be allowed to insure tankers carrying Russian oil anywhere. That ban will also be phased in over several months. Because many of the world’s largest insurers are based in Europe, that move could significantly raise the cost of shipping Russian energy, though insurers in China, India and Russia itself might now pick up some of that business.Before the invasion of Ukraine, roughly half of Russia’s oil exports went to Europe, representing $10 billion in transactions a month. Sales of Russian oil to E.U. members have declined somewhat in the last few months, and those to the United States and Britain have been eliminated.
  • Another hope of Western leaders is that their moves will reduce Russia’s position in the global energy industry. The idea is that despite its efforts to find new buyers in China, India and elsewhere, Russia will export less oil overall. As a result, Russian producers will need to shut wells, which they will not be able to easily restart because of the difficulties of drilling and producing oil in inhospitable Arctic fields.
  • “Why wait six months?” asked David Goldwyn, a top State Department energy official in the Obama administration. “As the sanctions are configured now, all that will happen is you will see more Russian crude and product flow to other destinations,” he said. But he added, “It’s a necessary first step.”
  • Russian natural gas for some time, possibly years. That could preserve some of Mr. Putin’s leverage, especially if gas demand spikes during a cold winter. European leaders have fewer alternatives to Russian gas because the world’s other major suppliers of that fuel — the United States, Australia and Qatar — can’t quickly expand exports substantially.Russia also has other cards to play, which could undermine the effectiveness of the European embargo.
  • India is getting about 600,000 barrels a day from Russia, up from 90,000 a day last year, when Russia was a relatively minor supplier. It is now India’s second-biggest supplier after Iraq.But India could find it difficult to keep buying from Russia if the European Union’s restrictions on European companies insuring Russian oil shipments raise costs too much.“India is a winner,” said Helima Croft, RBC’s head of commodity strategy, “as long as they are not hit with secondary sanctions.”
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WHO: Monkeypox Outbreak Suggests Virus Was Spreading Undetected | Health News | US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...virus-was-spreading-undetected outbreak health
shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The head of the World Health Organization on Wednesday said that the rapid appearance of the monkeypox outbreak suggests the virus has been spreading undetected.“Investigations are ongoing but the sudden appearance of monkeypox in many countries at the same time suggests there may have been undetected transmission for some time,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing.
  • “Currently, the overall public health risk at global level is assessed as moderate considering this is the first time that monkeypox cases and clusters are reported concurrently in widely disparate WHO geographical areas, and without known epidemiological links to non-endemic countries in West or Central Africa,” WHO said.The risk level could increase if the virus “exploits the opportunity to establish itself as a human pathogen and spreads to groups at higher risk of severe disease such as young children and immunosuppressed persons,” it added.
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Biden Struggles to Defend His Presidency Amid Setbacks | Politics | US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...d-his-presidency-amid-setbacks biden presidency US politics
shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • But those plans, experts say, may be just that – plans and proposals, many of which need unlikely approval by an uncooperative Congress or are subject to the whims of hostile foreign leaders, unpredictable markets or other forces beyond any president's control.
  • "Did you anticipate that the closure of the Abbott facility, because it was not producing the quality that was necessary, that it would have this profound effect immediately, or did it take a little time?" Biden asked. The question appeared directed at criticisms that the administration did not work better, earlier, to head off shortages when Abbott was forced to recall contaminated formula.The public relations effort, however, may not be enough to boost Biden's low approval ratings in time to help Democrats in a challenging midterm election season this fall. And in many cases, Biden's ability to fix the problems bedeviling the administration is limited.
  • On COVID-19, Biden has indeed ramped up testing and vaccinations during his term, Perry says. But he can't fight Mother Nature and human nature, she adds, noting that public impatience with masking and the virus's mutations aren't things he can control.On Ukraine, Biden has repeatedly noted his success in strengthening the NATO alliance. But "has he ended the war? No. That's something a president can't do," Perry adds. Aside from the threat of the war itself, the ongoing Russian invasion means higher gas prices as well, since the U.S. and its allies have imposed embargoes on Russian energy.
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South Africa Was Hit by Virus Wave, Despite Most People Having Antibodies - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-south-africa-antibodies.html
shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Coronavirus infections surged in South Africa in recent months despite research suggesting that about 98 percent of the population had some antibodies from vaccination, previous infection, or both.
  • But though the vast majority of the South African population had antibodies against the virus, many still became infected in the latest virus wave, which began in April and was driven by BA.4 and BA.5, new subvariants of Omicron.
  • New daily deaths also rose
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  • Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease modeler and epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York, said it was possible that the number of those who had been infected with the virus in South Africa could be even higher than 87 percent, accounting for varying immune responses among different individuals.
  • The researchers say the study provides yet more evidence of the capacity of the virus to evolve and dodge immunity.
  • “At this point we are not able to contain the spread; that’s the sobering takeaway.”
  • “We have to admit the possibility that the number of waves that we’ve seen over the past few years, it may continue at that cadence,” Dr. Shaman said.
  • “The virus will continue to evolve so that it can continue to spread in the population,” Dr. Lessells said. “It doesn’t end,” he added. “This virus is with us for the rest of time.”
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Opinion | Why China Can't Bail Out Putin's Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-russia-sanctions-economy.html china putin economy sanctions
shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Can China, by offering itself as an alternative trading partner, bail out Putin’s economy?
  • No, it can’t.
  • it’s hard for Russia to pay for imports — sorry, but you can’t carry out modern international trade with briefcases full of $100 bills. In fact, even Russian trade that remains legally permitted seems to be drying up as Western companies that fear further restrictions and a political backlash engage in “self-sanctioning.”
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  • The Russian elite can live without Prada handbags, but Western pharmaceuticals are another matter. In any case, consumer goods are only about a third of Russia’s imports. The rest are capital goods, intermediate goods — that is, components used in the production of other goods — and raw materials. These are things Russia needs to keep its economy running, and their absence may cause important sectors to grind to a halt.
  • First, China, despite being an economic powerhouse, isn’t in a position to supply some things Russia needs, like spare parts for Western-made airplanes and high-end semiconductor chips.
  • Second, while China itself isn’t joining in the sanctions, it is deeply integrated into the world economy. This means that Chinese banks and other businesses, like Western corporations, may engage in self-sanctioning
  • Third, China and Russia are very far apart geographically.
  • Finally, a point I don’t think gets enough emphasis is the extreme difference in economic power between Russia and China.
  • Putin may dream of restoring Soviet-era greatness, but China’s economy, which was roughly the same size as Russia’s 30 years ago, is now 10 times as large.
  • Germany’s gross domestic product was only two and a half times Italy’s when the original Axis was formed.
  • So if you try to imagine the creation of some neofascist alliance — and again, that no longer sounds like extreme language — it would be one in which Russia would be very much the junior partner, indeed very nearly a Chinese client state.
  • that’s not what Putin, with his imperial dreams, has in mind.
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White House to be lit orange for gun violence awareness - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html gun awareness
shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The White House will be illuminated in orange Friday night in honor of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, as the nation has been shaken by a recent string of deadly mass shootings.
  • Several other government buildings -- including California's Capitol dome and City Hall in New York City -- will also be lit up in orange over the weekend.
  • President Joe Biden on Thursday issued an appeal for stricter gun laws, including a ban on assault weapons, tougher background check laws and a higher minimum age of purchase.
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  • Project Orange Tree, an organization started by Pendleton's friends after a youth panel discussion about her death, began the movement to wear orange to raise awareness and honor her.
  • The idea comes from hunters who wear the color to alert fellow hunters to their presence.
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Opinion | Wonking Out: Why Growth Can Be Green - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mic-growth-green-degrowth.html growth environmental policy economic
shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I want to take a break and talk about environmental policy — specifically, the relationship between protecting the environment and economic growth.
  • the Biden administration has taken a huge step forward in the fight against climate change. The strategically misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act is mainly a climate bill, using subsidies and tax credits to promote green energy
  • It’s not quite as aggressive as the climate plans in Biden’s original Build Back Better legislation, but modelers estimate that it will accomplish about 80 percent of what B.B.B. was trying to do.
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  • The biggest factor making this kind of climate initiative possible, after so many years of inaction, is the spectacular technological progress in renewable energy that has taken place since 2009 or so. This means that we can greatly reduce emissions using carrots instead of sticks: giving people incentives to use low-emission technologies rather than trying to regulate or tax them into giving up high-emission activities.
  • the politics of carrots are obviously a lot easier than the politics of sticks.
  • Above all, real G.D.P. says nothing about how stuff is produced. A kilowatt-hour of electricity counts the same whether it was generated by burning coal or wind power, but the environmental impact is completely different.
  • So let’s talk about why such claims are all wrong.
  • many people don’t understand what economic growth means, imagining that it necessarily involves producing the same things you were producing before, in the same ways, but just at a larger scale.
  • But that’s not at all what growth means. Currently, America’s real gross domestic product is about a third larger than it was in 2007. But the economy of 2023 isn’t just the economy of 2007 scaled up by a third. Production of some goods has gone way down — coal production has been cut roughly in half.
  • at this precise moment — the most hopeful moment for the environment, as far as I can tell, in decades — my inbox has been filling up with woeful claims that environmental protection is incompatible with economic growth. These claims are oddly bipartisan. Some of them come from people on the left who insist that the planet can’t be saved unless we give up on the notion of perpetual economic growth. Others come from people on the right who insist that we must give up on all this environmentalism if we want to preserve prosperity.
  • In fact, environmental quality is often better in rich countries, with high G.D.P. per capita, than in middle-income countries
  • As a result, there’s no reason a growing economy must place an increasing burden on the environment.
  • the environmental Kuznets curve.
  • , a comparison between the New York metropolitan area and Delhi, India. Delhi has a larger population but a much smaller G.D.P. So does New York’s big economy mean a highly stressed environment?
  • how does air quality in the two cities compare? As anyone who’s visited both places knows, New York air is, well, relatively OK, while Delhi air … isn’t.
  • at higher levels of development, delinking growth from environmental impact isn’t just possible in principle but something that happens a lot in practice.
  • Here’s a favorite chart of mine from the invaluable Our World in Data website. It shows carbon dioxide emissions per capita in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began. The early phases of industrialization were indeed associated with a huge rise in emissions. But more recently emissions have fallen back to the levels of the ’50s — the 1850s:
  • How did Britain do that? Part of the answer is that over time the British economy switched from relying on coal to relying on hydrocarbons, which when burned generate less carbon dioxide. Britain also learned to use energy more efficiently over time. But more recently a big factor has been the rise of renewable energy, especially, in Britain’s case, wind power
  • So when you hear an environmentalist say something like, “We live on a finite planet, so we can’t have unlimited economic growth,” what they’re actually revealing is that they don’t understand what economic growth means
  • in practice, they’re lending aid and comfort to anti-environmentalists, who want us to believe that protecting the environment is incompatible with rising living standards.
  • That said, while it’s possible to decouple growth from environmental harm, that’s not automatic. To combine rising living standards with an improving environment, we need policies that encourage the use of technologies that cause less environmental damage.
  • The good news is that the United States is finally implementing such policies. Still, we need a lot more action along those lines — not just in America but in the rest of the world. So we can do this — but we need to try, and not give in to counsels of despair.
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Norovirus is almost impossible to stop - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673116 infection prevention epidemic
shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Disinfection is back.
  • “Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.
  • norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency announced that laboratory reports of the virus had risen to levels 66 percent higher than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”
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  • The U.S. logs fewer than 1,000 annual deaths out of millions of documented cases
  • this is more a nauseating nuisance than a public-health crisis. In most people, norovirus triggers, at most, a few miserable days of GI distress that can include vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers, then resolves on its own; the keys are to stay hydrated and avoid spreading it to anyone vulnerabl
  • norovirus is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States.)
  • direct contact with those substances, or the food or water they contaminate, may not even be necessary: Sometimes people vomit with such force that the virus gets aerosolized; toilets, especially lidless ones, can send out plumes of infection
  • Still, fighting norovirus isn’t easy, as plenty of parents can attest. The pathogen, which prompts the body to expel infectious material from both ends of the digestive tract, is seriously gross and frustratingly hardy. Even the old COVID standby, a spritz of hand sanitizer, doesn’t work against it—the virus is encased in a tough protein shell that makes it insensitive to alcohol.
  • At an extreme, a single gram of feces—roughly the heft of a jelly bean—could contain as many as 5.5 billion infectious doses, enough to send the entire population of Eurasia sprinting for the toilet.
  • norovirus mainly targets the gut, and spreads especially well when people swallow viral particles that have been released in someone else’s vomit or stool.
  • the virus is far more deadly in parts of the world with limited access to sanitation and potable water.
  • If the spittle finding holds for humans, then talking, singing, and laughing in close proximity could be risky too.
  • Once emitted into the environment, norovirus particles can persist on surfaces for days—making frequent hand-washing and surface disinfection key measures to prevent spread
  • Handshakes and shared meals tend to get dicey during outbreaks, along with frequently touched items such as utensils, door handles, and phones.
  • One 2012 study pointed to a woven plastic grocery bag as the source of a small outbreak among a group of teenage soccer players; the bag had just been sitting in a bathroom used by one of the girls when she fell sick the night before.
  • Once a norovirus transmission chain begins, it can be very difficult to break. The virus can spread before symptoms start, and then for more than a week after they resolve
  • Once the virus arrives, the entire family is almost sure to be infected. Baldridge, who has two young children, told me that her household has weathered at least four bouts of norovirus in the past several years.
  • Roughly 20 percent of European populations, for instance, are genetically resistant to common norovirus strains. “So you can hope,” Frenck told me. For the rest of us, it comes down to hygiene
  • Altan-Bonnet recommends diligent hand-washing, plus masking to ward off droplet-borne virus. Sick people should isolate themselves if they can. “And keep your saliva to yourself,” she told me.
  • The family fastidiously scrubbed their hands with hot water and soap, donned disposable gloves when touching shared surfaces, and took advantage of the virus’s susceptibility to harsh chemicals and heat. When her son threw up on the floor, Cameron sprayed it down with bleach; when he vomited on his quilt, she blasted it twice in the washing machine on the sanitizing setting, then put it through the dryer at a super high temp
  • After three years of COVID, the world has gotten used to thinking about infections in terms of airways. “We need to recalibrate,” Bhumbra told me, “and remember that other things exist.”
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