Good catch. Additionally, one of the authors on this is just a student at UWisc, and the other author is also not a professional researcher but instead an author of popular books.
This is not an ad-hominum, but does put into question the statistical training backgrounds of both of these authors to accurate assess the data.
If not ad-hominum, what is it then? I mean, you did not provide any substantiated reason why would their research be false but you went straight to pin-point their experience, or lack thereof.
FWIW I find this research to align on my thoughts about the IQ - IQ is not a constant but a function of multiple variables, where one of the variables is most likely an education.
For instance, I am pretty sure that drilling through the abstract mathematical and hard engineering problems to some extent during the high-school but much more during and after the University, develops your brain in such a way that you become not only more knowledgeable in terms of memorizing things but develops your brain so that it can reason about and anticipate things that you couldn't possibly do before.
> but does put into question the statistical training backgrounds
This is true of virtually all university research. Statistics is far more nuanced than what a semester course can teach you. And the incentives to publish can cause bad actors to use poorly defined surveys or p hack or whatever.
> and the other author is also not a professional researcher but instead an author of popular books.
This makes the awkward wording even more confusing. I don't understand how a professional author who appears to speak English very well would write so poorly and not follow up with edits.
Anthropic has also been the biggest anti-China LLM in a long while, so it's possible they're using an opportunistic hack (potentially involving actual Chinese IP addresses) as another way to push their agenda.
Considering ever since the Vault 7 releases, we should be well aware of the fact that at least one government is able to make any attack look like any other nation state actor, any attribution to, especially convenient adversaries, is extremely suspicious on the face of it.
Honestly, I'm fine with Google doing it. If not them, then some regulatory arbitrage startup will do it with way more de-facto scam and fraud. Google is not some morale arbiter for the long arc of technology -- look at how they gatekept their LLM technology and got wrecked by the people who actually commericalized it: OpenAI.
I think when it comes to gatekeeping you are mixing up the organization that invented the basis for language models and gave it away for free with the one that does not release model weights because they’re too spooky
I was surprised to note at the end of the article it's written by Cade Metz, the same writer who doxxed Scott Alexander. I wonder if this turn to human interest pieces is a fallout from that scandal.
AI will change the world, but not in the way the OP (Thomas Hunter) thinks.
--
The first statement, AI will change the world, is low surprise and clearly true already.
The second statement, not in the way X thinks, is also low surprise, because most technologies have very unpredictable impacts, especially if it is "close to singularity" or the singularity.
Is this really an authoritarian regime survival guide or a not-too-hidden jab at the Trump presidency?
Like I don't see too many of the items applying to classically authoritarian regimes like China.
Let's apply the guide's own advice:
> Always think critically, fact-check and point out the truth, expose ignorance with facts.
The guide after all is written by Eastern / Europeans, the people is getting expropriated the most by Trump, in January 2017, right as Trump got elected and the democratic "resistance" movement was all the range. (Surprisingly, Trump 2 is even more extreme, and no more talk of resistance).
> Like I don't see too many of the items applying to classically authoritarian regimes like China.
The first (“Year 1 under an authoritarian regime”) is explicitly, and the rest also implicitly, about the transition from something loosely approximating a liberal democratic republic or Constutional monarchy to an authoritarian state; its not about surviving in an established authoritarian regime.
Perhaps because those things already happened at the beginning of the Chinese Revolution and we're just seeing a phase that's several generations on the future of the transition
The guide starts with the presumption they gained power through democratic elections. Neither China nor most other historic authoritarian regimes started this way.
(Nazi Germany and Putin's Russia being the classical examples of democracies going authoritarian).
Hungary, Turkey, India, Venezuela come to mind.
Poland, Brazil are also recent near misses. South Korea also had a recent oops.
So a well trodden path.
Why is it a bad thing to get more knowledge about authoritarianism and how it can sneak up on you? If it makes some people uncomfortable, that might should be an indicator that things niggling your mind often matter more than you think.
It's clearly a guide for regimes that are in transition from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, not regimes that are fully authoritarian. It looks like it's a jab to the current Trump presidency because it's following a well-worn path. Others have commented how it applies to Hungary too, and imagine there are plenty of others too. In 2017 these were more a threat than a reality, but this time most of them are already in place.
There are many flavours of authoritarianism, this is a guide how to act in the early phase of one of them (regimes that started from a democracy).
Maybe you are too US-centric (wouldn't be the first time that happened to someone from the US), but as someone from Central Europe I had to immediately think about Hungary — Trump is said to follow the Orban playbook, a mental line not only drawn by me, but also by the European Council for Foreign Relations: https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-orbanisation-of-america-hung...
Now China's regime is in power since 1949 and there was no democracy before. People who had the chance to enact the advice in the 50s are likely dead by now. So you literally criticized the article for not covering a thing they said in the introduction they are not covering.
Just a hint: critical thinking involves a step where you try to play the devils advocate and try to find all flaws with your own thinking. If you skip that step it means your goal isn't finding the truth, but finding a plausible counter-argument. This isn't critical thinking, it is contrarian thinking, so something that finds a point that could (to a non-critical audience) seem like a weakness of a thought, but doesn't hold water under close scrutiny. Good for use as an unfair rethorical tool, bad to establish good discourse.
Trump praises authoritarians, has said multiple things that showed he wanted to be one, uses authoritarian language and has done political things that square with being an authoritarian — he is a textbook authoritarian. No discussion needed at, all a spade is a spade. Whether it is still early authoritarianism is the interesting question.
Yeah, I mean the supreme court already knocked down Trump's whole USAID thing. The US is very far from authoritarianism, the institutions seem quite strong and thats something I believe Americans recognized when they voted for him, that it was just a bit of a risk but it was unlikely he would actually be successful in toppling the government.
There’s a dude that doesn’t hold any office telling everyone what to do, who to fire and what will be paid, including his own companies, and you feel like writing “American institutions are quite strong”, I must be living in a different planet.
I read that SCOTUS told the administration to pay for completed work. Considering USAID has been essentially dissolved, I wouldn't say they knocked down "the whole USAID thing". Unless I missed some news.
Amazingly, four of five justices said the President should be able to refuse to pay contractors for completed work from funds Congress had already allocated. WTF.
Or maybe it’s more amazing it wasn’t six of them saying that.
One really lovely part is how this would permanently make every government contract more expensive, if they got their way. Just great.
Right they won't even acknowledge that there was nothing unreasonable about those funds. Already allocated and promised. Why even say it's backed "by the reputation of the United States" if we won't even pay the bills we've already told we were going to pay. If they find fraud then sure cancel the deal. However they are using "abuse and inefficiency" as weasel words to get out of paying our debts and contracts that the current regime doesn't like.
SCOTUS said the money could not be frozen, but I don't think they put a deadline on when it had to be paid out. So it's not over.
The VP and Musk have both written recently about how the judiciary can't tell the executive branch what to do. I think Vance called it illegal. Regardless, law is meaningless if no one will enforce it.
> Americans recognized when they voted for him, that it was just a bit of a risk but it was unlikely he would actually be successful in toppling the government
Americans voted in someone that risked their whole 200+ years of democratic history knowingly? That would make it all even more absurd than it already is, risking a whole system of government, trust from international partners, respect from adversaries, the trade-off would never make any sense.
> The US is very far from authoritarianism, the institutions seem quite strong
Do they? They haven't even be put to test yet, the Congress is definitely not strong (there's no pushback from any voice of reason from the president's own party), the Supreme Court is voting 5-4 on matters that are almost blatantly unconstitutional. I'll agree that institutions are strong when enforcement of a decision completely adversarial to the current administration's goals is put to test and prevail. At this exact moment there's no sign that American institutions are anywhere near as strong as it was once thought.
MD-5 died the same way. We had to scare people into investing into upgrading to SHA-1 by showing them the slope of hardware and the variability in new breakthroughs and ask if they'd rather have an emergency that lasted for over a month or work it into the schedule among the other requirements now?
Yes, people can upgrade but nobody fucking will until you impress upon them how stupid they're being by gambling the entire company on carrying that debt for another year.
Only those who can change. In work in embedded systems - we still have to talk to machines that were built with exportable encryption in the 90's (read if it isn't broken that is only because nobody who has a clue has bothered to try). They can't be upgraded anymore so I have to keep those algorithms building just in case someone wants to mix new with old. (fortunately the old machines are never internet connected so vulnerability requires local access - but the vulnerability is in safety critical functions so I don't rest too easy)
I use the SHA-1 example in part because that was the newest hash that a bunch of smart cards someone wanted to try to use with our system supported.
Of course the max RSA key lengths on the card weren't up to it anyway (kids: if you by crypto hardware and don't use it immediately, don't warehouse it looking for a problem for your solution), but at least I got to put my foot down and we only shipped with SHA-1 and SHA-2 support
