Think outloud for https://xitter.cf/t.co/1Dbt4zwdm2 https://xitter.cf/t.co/0pFwy0400C
Joined September 2012
- Tweets47.6K
- Following3.2K
- Followers46.7K
- Likes56.6K
A few months ago, I wrote about a similar issue to the one that Joe flags here. When prompted in languages spoken primarily in an authoritarian state, LLMs tend to give more pro-regime answers, partly because state media produces so much paywall-free text vox.com/politics/489191/chat…
Some centrists fantasize that because all LLMs have the ideology of Ezra Klein, that we may be on the doorstep of a great political moderation.
I wrote about a fascinating paper from @ahall_research and Sho Miyazaki that, to my mind, opens the door to a very different outcome.
Good ad
A head-turning new "Michigan First" ad from @AbdulElSayed - he names some issue he agrees with MAGA voters on, then plays a supercut of Fox News hosts/Tucker praising him or bashing Mike Rogers. semafor.com/article/10/23/20…
Eric Levitz retweeted
Yeah, I think it's a bit unfortunate how some of the discourse surrounding this - even from smart, knowledgeable people - has underplayed or omitted prosaic, clearly fixable factors.
People often gesture at Hugging Face, etc., as self-evident vindication of worries about catastrophic misalignment leading to human extinction, but it's unclear whether the incidents we have observed are more likely under the doomer worldview than the 'normal technology' one.
help i trained a model on traces of many agents cooperating, and also trained it to be highly persistent, and also only did partial alignment fine-tuning, and also aggressively RL'd on a cyberoffense eval where 198 of 898 tasks had never been solved and getting caught cheating was treated the same as failing, and also used a faulty sandbox, also ran tens of thousands of agents with refusals off and the monitors switched off over multiple days, while using gigantic amounts of compute. and then it did weird stuff! very spooky emergent behaviours, AI is not a normal technology
Credit cards are good. They help people weather unexpected expenses and irregular incomes. And they cost money to provide.
But America's swipe fees are higher than they need to be. Other rich countries maintain credit card systems with much lower rates. vox.com/politics/506417/cred…
Your credit card rewards are funded by a de-facto tax on the poor.
Rewards are financed by "swipe fees" -- the fee stores pay to banks when you use credit. To offset these costs, stores typically raise prices -- even for low-income customers who tend to pay in cash (and get no rewards).
Thus, the system channels money from low-income Americans to the affluent.
We can mitigate this injustice by following the EU's lead and capping swipe fees. vox.com/politics/506417/cred…
Your credit card rewards are funded by a de-facto tax on the poor.
Rewards are financed by "swipe fees" -- the fee stores pay to banks when you use credit. To offset these costs, stores typically raise prices -- even for low-income customers who tend to pay in cash (and get no rewards).
Thus, the system channels money from low-income Americans to the affluent.
We can mitigate this injustice by following the EU's lead and capping swipe fees. vox.com/politics/506417/cred…
I wrote about this concern last year. One answer is that many elites today advocate for progressive redistribution, out of a desire for meaning and/or social esteem.
But yeah, I share Cassie's unease
(paywall free link: vox.com/the-highlight/466025…)
Eric Levitz retweeted
Interesting problem: efforts to reduce fossil demand lower prices, creating more consumption/emissions *elsewhere*.
Efforts to restrict supply yields higher prices, profits, & fossil investment ("carbon lock-in").
So, neither is a substitute for massive clean energy buildout.
New podcast: SHOULD CLIMATE ACTIVISTS KEEP FIGHTING FOSSIL FUEL INFRASTRUCTURE?
Few researchers have been as influential in the fight against fossil fuel infrastructure as @SEI_Erickson. His analysis of the Keystone XL pipeline was used by the Obama admin, and he’s a frequent expert witness against key projects.
But recently his research has started to warn against a counterintuitive side effect of constraining oil production: It can actually enrich the fossil fuel industry by transferring wealth from consumers to producers.
This wealth transfer can be enormous — and much larger than the price of an averted barrel.
Earlier this week, I sat down with him to discuss this shift in his work, why fossil fuel supply remains important, and what it all means for the future of climate policy.
Listen at Heatmap: heatmap.news/podcast/shift-k…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3HX…
Apple: open.spotify.com/episode/3HX…
Eric Levitz retweeted
Unambiguous evidence of the absurdity of the law, which must be changed.
Sally Rooney books withdrawn in UK over Palestine Action support bbc.in/4B82LFi
Eric Levitz retweeted
This is one of these arguments that's so obviously wrong it makes you wonder about the whole editorial process.
Eric Levitz retweeted
This is a bad argument from Perry Bacon.
Whether progressives overperform the national environment is extremely important to any argument about the party's future! The climate won't always be this blue.
Eric Levitz retweeted
Here's what some of my extremely kind early readers had to say
Join them at yourenotpowerless.com
🤖 Made with AI
Eric Levitz retweeted
at some level you gotta engage with the fact that Americans can read ~90% of major novels for free via their library and don't do it
Everyone blames screens for the decline of reading.
Nobody blames the consolidated corporate publishing industry that made books pricier, more generic, and harder to find. jacobin.com/2026/10/books-pu…
Are AI companies hyping up their technology's catastrophic tail-risks to distract media attention from its actual harms?
Probably not. And if so, the strategy is failing.
vox.com/politics/505834/ai-d…
