When people say "fake news" it means different things to different people. "Hunter Biden's laptop is a Russian plant" was considered the truth and anything to the contrary "fake news". It wasn't just a mistake, it was a hard lie.
Having any single entity determine what is "fake" and what is "real" is incredibly dangerous. We can't even agree if 72F degrees is the correct room temperature - let alone complex things like abortion or if fat is bad for you.
To have any authority say one side is correct fails to understand how the structures of scientific revolution work. Much more likely they do understand and are using "Science(TM)" to force ideological agendas.
Yes, I think this is a proxy for "how much do you watch your usual news source". The Covington stuff wouldn't have made people think twice about regular news had the video of what happened leaked out on YouTube.
The real money quote from that article: "David Rawson, the US ambassador, said that its euphemisms were open to interpretation. The US, he said, believed in freedom of speech."
I don't want to be overly cynical and say it was intentional, but the term was watered down to become meaningless, but when it first came into use, it had a pretty clear and unambiguous meaning that I don't think any reasonable person would argue with. The Washington Post published an expose early in 2016 about two men in Orange County who had the brilliant idea of exploiting pre-election hysteria by registering hundreds of domains with names like patriotdailynews.com, giving it all the veneer of a real news page, writer bylines and bios, but all of it was completely made up. It was just the two guys in their apartment living room brainstorming the most outrageous sounding headlines they could come up that they thought people might believe, then making up fake writers and fake sources. That is "fake news."
When it started being used to mean any published account of purported facts that is wrong because inference is imperfect, evidence can be misleading, and publishers have some inescapable level of bias, then yes, it became a useless term. But it is not useless to distinguish between largely good faith attempts by real organizations with investigators who are at least trying to discover, verify, and publish facts, but some of the time fail, and outright fraud committed by people making up the entire endeavor wholesale.
There is no reason at all we should believe authorities cannot accomplish the latter.
A democracy with the government in control of speech is not a democracy. If you control what people can see, you control what they think. That's why it's the very first most important amendment. Without the free distribution of information we're all useless idiots to the people in control of the distribution. We've already seen censorship be used to sway elections, do you think that's OK?
Crazy how the money printers stop working when it comes to SS. I'm sure as hell if Boeing or Raytheon needed cash the money printers would magically start working again. Sorry gramps, no quantitative easing for you!
Yes, but keep in mind that both are funded with specific taxes. We aren't just taking money from the general fund and choosing to support retirees. It's meant to be a "pay while working" "receive in retirement" kind of system. You can argue about the merits of that vs. a 401k or whatever, but comparing these programs to the DoD budget is apples and oranges.
>funded with specific taxes. We aren't just taking money from the general fund
I just learned recently that in fact Medicare (Part B at least) does in fact receive significant amounts from the general fund, not just the Medicare HI fund which holds payroll tax money.
One Social Security runs out of money the first option on the table will probably be to top it up from the general fund though. And once that's been turned on it will never be turned off. (MMT but only for old people.)
Old people vote, no politician wants to be voted (or revolutionized) out of office, the money will come...
When Covid lockdowns started, both sides quickly agreed to print money to bailout the whole population (or as the deranged called it, to induce inflation and transfer money to corporations and the wealthy).
Who is going to go to revolution over social security? A lot has happened including serious "unrest" on both the left and the right and the respective movements have not seen any of their asks implemented despite the spectacles. If you think they were you live in a bubble.
A lot of people are intellectually devoted to this idea in the same way Ptolemaic devotees believed in geocentrism, it will be hard to get anything but emotional reactions. We know for a fact that more than 50% of science is wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis), but at the same time the people who downvote you are sure as a Christian in Christ that this science about climate change is _always_ flawless. When science turns political it dies.
What part do you consider to be critical enough in the act of making you call it “made here”? Virtually nothing is wholly made in any one place. Even poetry relies on the paper and pencil industry.
Just when you thought spelunking couldn't get any more terrifying you see this. You're stuck, wedged between two rocks, AND acid is eating away at your body.
> But our A.I. systems are still largely inscrutable black boxes, which makes herding them difficult. What we get out of them broadly reflects what we have put in, but no one can predict exactly how. So we observe the results, tinker and try again.
What an absurd thing to say. You don't get an abomination like Gemini without extreme and intentional tampering with the model. IIRC this was demonstrated in the HN thread where it was reported. Someone got Gemini to cough up its special instructions. Real 2001 HAL stuff.
I don't think the existence of Gemini disproves the author's statement. The model is clearly broken, not only within the definitions of what you or I would consider acceptable but also within the definition set by the prudes on-high. The wildly diverse output seems especially emblematic of a hackjob finetune not dissimilar to what OpenAI does with their instruction-tuning.
The quoted comment seems to align with how Google saw the situation. They wanted a specific desired outcome (neutered AI output), they applied a documented strategy, and got a torrential wave of "observed results" from the audience.
The reputation of scientific researchers has been greatly harmed by the current system. Please, help find a way to fix it, or at the very least don't hinder people trying to fix it. Thanks to the way we do things now a coin flip is _better_ than peer review. Public trust in science is at an all time low. I really hope you don't think "this is fine".
> Thanks to the way we do things now a coin flip is _better_ than peer review. Public trust in science is at an all time low. I really hope you don't think "this is fine".
I don't think you read my post? I'm advocating we get rid of the "peer review" [sic] system entirely.
The sibling post is right though that this problem is with bad journalism (and bad institutions), not bad science. People think that "peer review" is actually some sort of scientific hurdle that strengthens the paper. It is not, it was never meant tho fill that role, and has been totally morphed by journalists into something it has no business being.
IMO 'public trust in science is at an all time low' is because of bad journalism more than bad papers.
Papers are written by academy-type individuals for academy-type individuals, not for consumption by non experts. An academic is usually pretty fast to determine if a paper is to be trusted.
So interpreting and extrapolating to the extreme the results of a minor paper in an obscure journal is more bad journalism than bad science.
Having any single entity determine what is "fake" and what is "real" is incredibly dangerous. We can't even agree if 72F degrees is the correct room temperature - let alone complex things like abortion or if fat is bad for you.
To have any authority say one side is correct fails to understand how the structures of scientific revolution work. Much more likely they do understand and are using "Science(TM)" to force ideological agendas.
Full disclosure: I have never used Facebook.
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