Which works approximately all the time against Western powers? Influencing / manipulating public support is the strongest weapon the non-Western adversaries have right now.
People seem to be struggling to hold two, not-even-conflicting thoughts at the same time: the school bombing, even though clearly accidental, is reprehensible from our moral perspective and is a direct product of callous way the intervention has been conducted AND the Iranian leadership would happily sacrifice thousands of "their own" children to get an edge in this conflict by reducing the political support for the further escalation. We are talking about the regime which killed tens of thousand of "their own" citizens just a couple months prior.
I think the word you were looking for was 'negligent'. As in the bombing was 'clearly negligent'. It wasn't something that just happened, it was something that high ranking officials purposefully did and they did it negligently.
Or, you know, the US just bombed a fucking school. I don't even think this was accidental.
And accident would imply they didn't want to bomb a school but this happened due to an honest mistake (already a tall order when you are dropping bombs in an area with civilian infrastructure).
In truth it was probably that the US didn't care about the collateral damage of bombing targets regardless of what is there.
Let's not pretend the US has much issues killing civilians in other countries. Your president just gave a speech at the UN talking about "annihilating Iran" and "driving them into hell".
Even after that people still contort their thoughts in the illusion that the US would never bomb a school. Imagine if Iran's president gave a speech talking the same way about Israel or the US, would you give Iran the same benefit of doubt?
1. Iran’s strongest weapon is keeping Hormuz closed.
2. Those who want to blow up Iran also influence public support (and government support too, I’d add)
3. The military “excursion” is already incredibly unpopular but that hasn’t stopped Trump or other racist POS Hegseth or even all the GOP and even some dems from keeping it going.
Absolutely the Iranian government murdered protesters but it’s a stretch to also say they’d “happily” somehow get the US the bomb a school.
It’s a dumb strategy anyway. We’re still blowing up kids in Gaza and calling them future terrorists and crisis actors and saying “what about their pre-existing health conditions” about kids who died of starvation.
What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".
Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.
These patterns aren't somehow alien to human speech. It's the quantity. In ChatGPT (and I think it must be ChatGPT specifically) the default writing voice tries for dramatic and profound by dramatically overusing these figures of speech, chaining them together one after another. But they're things most writers use occasionally, one paragraph in ten or twenty. If you're giving a TED Talk or some other elaborate, melodramatic persuasive public speaking role, you might use them one paragraph in four. ChatGPT uses them every other paragraph at least, sometimes multiple times in the same paragraph, so something like a negation comparator or a triplet is present in sentence after fatiguing sentence.
It's trained on the speech of online commenters like us; That's where it's getting these. I'm not gonna change just because Timmy the Zoomer has been with his LLM girlfriend for the past three years and occasionally I remind him of her. I'm not going to deliberately code switch into somebody who doesn't open a new tab to Google things as he talks about them. And you can take my bullet point lists from my cold, dead hands.
I mean I think were agreeing, in a body of text this size I'd expect to see the dramatic short sentences and standalone dramatic sentence maybe one or twice. This article they are constant. They're great devices were used appropriately, but when the whole body of text reads like it it's awful.
Not asking anyone to stop using those writing devices, just begging for any work to not be exclusively dramatic devices. And when you read a piece of work like that its generally a child or AI lol.
I thought the piece sounded like AI as well, so I ran it through Pangram, which reports it as 100% AI. Considering Pangram's extremely low false positive rate, I'm inclined to believe this was AI written.
Didn't have the same feel about the piece. But based on the parent comment, decided to also test it, using Pangram free "credits". For me it reported that only sections of it (30%) have been "touched" by an LLM. There is 60% of human written text.
Pangram does not report this as 100% LLM generated. Why do I use the word "touched" - because there are some specific details that must have come from some existing text and are not elsewhere.
How did I do the check? Please do check my results! I copied just the authored prose from the page, carefully removing any comments and site text that got mixed in. I did not have it analyze the "URL".
In looking at the details, a large part of the story is flagged as all human generated.
I've personally used LLMs when I've been very upset. I used it to rewrite / edit my rant into something with a more balanced tone. The modified text got what I wanted, my original rant would almost certainly not have.
So I do think this was a thought out piece that was largely written by a human who used an LLM as an "editor" to polish the writing. Someone took time to think about this and write it.
B&W was weird. It took its key game mechanic (training up your creature) and denied it to you in one of the (only 5) levels making it just another RTS type thing. Wait, what?
Peter Molyneux did some amazing stuff but overpromised and underdelivered a lot. [1]
But some stuff was amazing, PowerMonger was pretty impressive too, but didn't have the succinctness Populous had.
And experiences come from the bulliest of bull markets. Where most people who bet on large sector are winners. Past performance is most likely future performance if things go south...
> And experiences come from the bulliest of bull markets.
That is very true and a trap that is important to be aware of. Anyone who started investing after ~2010 has only ever experience a bull market, so expect severe pain at some point. It doesn't go up forever.
I'm old enough that my investing history inclused the dot.com implosion that wiped out nearly all of everything, and also the financial crisis of 2008. It remains true that investing in the winning companies is by far the best return by orders of magnitude.
> And experiences come from the bulliest of bull markets.
As someone who has hung out in Reddit's personal finance areas for many years now, the paniced posts of March 2020 and in 2022 were very real. Lots of climbing people down from the ledge during those time periods.
Many folks realized that they may be more risk adverse than they thought. (And those were relatively short bursts: if the things had headed down for months (or longer) there would be much more sleepless nights for many people.)
"we show that the observed Flynn effect, its turning point, and subsequent decline can all be fully recovered from within-family variation. The analysis controls for all factors shared by siblings and finds no evidence for prominent causal hypotheses of the decline implicating genes and environmental factors that vary between, but not within, families."
"Stupid people have more kids" is exactly such a prominent causal hypothesis.
As far as I understand it, it's saying that IF the upbringing is the problem, then on the level of the society, not on the level of individual families. I.e. there doesn't seem to be any evidence that some families bring up their children better than the others (on average, all thing being equal yada yada).
The basic fact is that the world is by virtually any objective measure of human well-being in the best place since the start of the recorded history. And still there are people (even in this thread) who see the sky falling and the world ending tomorrow if not today. Somehow it became a mark of an ostensibly grounded and serious person to be cynical and pessimistic about the world's affairs. The only thing that Pinker tries to show, is that this cynicism is not backed by the facts.
Interestingly, the very people the "social justice warriors" claim to fight for reaped the most benefits of the social and economic progress. Well-deserved, of course, since they started way behind. But it makes you wonder, why the SJWs are as unhappy about the state of our society as they ever were? A cynic would say, they are afraid of losing their metaphorical jobs. I'd rather believe that they just lack the insight into just how much worse the life was not so long ago.
Isn't well-being subjective? It's for me to decide if I'm happy (although some people like to tell others how they should feel).
I've heard from friends with mental health problems that one of the hardest things to deal with can be other people telling them that objectively their life is good ("you have family, friends, success in work - what have you got to be unhappy about?")... so on top of feeling depressed they're also emoting wrongly.
Surely if a person feels that the sky is falling that would be a measure of low well-being. In which case the 'objective measures of human well-being' are badly chosen or (more realistically, and something that will cause massive cognitive dissonance in lots of readers here): not everything can be measured objectively. Experience happens subjectively, behind the eyes, and can never be usefully measured. Which is why when someone tells you they're unhappy you have to decide whether to believe them, or just tell them that they're wrong.
Personally I think trying to objectively measure how good life is now compared to other times is embarrassingly futile. Your internal philosophy makes a huge difference to how you handle life, it's perfectly possible for a person to have a non-miserable life in a society with high infant mortality rates and a life expectancy of 40, with hostile tribes nearby who might need to be fought at any time. Expectations (norms) along with cultural and psychological frameworks would make the experience for someone native to that time and place very different than it would be for somebody who was dropped from the modern Western world into a similar situation. Of course the same example native person might also live unhappily. But to presume that their subjective life experience should be ruled by abstract measurements is... unimaginative.
I can never find any reference to it online but years ago I remember Gordon Brown (UK PM at the time I think) talking on TV about quality of life, saying "one thing we've found is that people report being happier when they hear birds singing... so we're looking into using recordings of birdsong to increase happiness levels". LOL it's like, dude... you're really not getting it are you?
The growth of the blockchains will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law' - which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants-becomes apparent: most people have nothing to sign for each other! By 2020 or so, it will become clear that the blockchains' impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
This is slippery slope fallacy. The argument against mandatory donations is exactly that - it's makes donations mandatory, while opt-out gives you choice and just changes the default.
If you seriously fear for your life as a registered donor, it should be not too much work to check one box.
