Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, December 17, 2022
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56 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The answer to your question about why Americans have lost trust in our institutions is pretty straightforward. Liberals see conservatives in positions of power, like scotus, or even the just revealed shite show of the last administration and it’s influencers with the Mark Meadows texts, as being wholly corrupt and believing in the batshit crazy, like true believers, and we’re like, “Jesus, these people are nuts, how can I trust them at all.” Whereas conservatives believe liberal theories and institutions, like legacy media and a Biden or Obama, are somehow evil, hate America and want to destroy it based on previously noted nutjobbery. So one base is crazy which us reality based people don’t trust, and one base is actually sane and real which the crazies can’t abide by. Combined, the whole thing falls apart. But it’s really because 35% of the country are just nuts.
Something interesting for the professors on this board.
He goes on to explain how he figured out that it was AI, but doesn’t give away key red flags like how the AI consistently structures pieces.
I thought that’s what they were already doing, putting the customer first in jail, then in court, then…
Now that’s what I call first class customer treatment. What I wonder is why? Where’s the money?
$168 million is no where near enough. They should have gotten the Alex Jones treatment. This at the end caught my eye:
Same as it ever was.
I got my MRI yesterday (6:15 AM, first in, first out!). When we finally finished up (25 mins in the machine, with all that noise)(and a fan blowing cool air thru it! a nice touch that, first time I ever got it) the tech asked me if I wanted the pictures.
Huh? Nobody ever offered me that before (the analyses of my last 2 colonoscopies came with full color pictures tho). So I said, “Sure.” full in the knowledge that I would never be able to interpret them. I have no idea what a tear looks like but it would be kind of cool to see my shoulder that way.
And it was. It was interesting to see the insides of my shoulder in layers. A couple things I saw might be tears, or just as well might not. The sawbones will give me the lowdown on Monday.
@Jen:
I’m glad I’m out of it. Messrs. Joyner and Taylor, however…
My colleagues and I spent a lot of time thinking up non-plagiarizable term paper topics.
@OzarkHillbilly:
This has been a story on the aviation and travel blogs for years.
If this happened once or twice, it would be a minor issue (though not for those arrested). As is, it happens a lot, and only with one car rental agency. At the minimum, Hertz is awfully negligent. For all we know, something even worse is happening.
The law offers plenty of interventions when it comes to money and solvency. There should be something similar, akin to receivership, to straighten out morally bankrupt who harm their customers habitually.
Has Beth disappeared? Didn’t see her yesterday.
@Michael Reynolds:
Nope, she checked in; the catheter was removed. She says she’s feeling much better, though still experiencing some discomfort.
@CSK:
I must have missed her.
In the latest instalment of the Musk saga (the ArsTechnica devotees have been keeping up a good analysis), ol’ Elon is now supposedly trying to raise money by selling stock at Twitter for the same price he was finally forced to buy it at.
This is so crazy I can’t help but think that this is a hoax. No one is that stupid….right? (Aside from the finances of the idea, someone at ArsTechnica also pointed out it would be a private stock being sold, which limits a helluva lot of the people you can sell to unless you want to get the SEC really mad at you. But am pretty sure Elon doesn’t care about blue-sky laws.)
@Michael Reynolds:
She says she’s “emotionally euphoric.”
What the hell?????
http://www.newsweek.com/roe-wade-abortion-contraception-trump-judge-1767714
This is really disturbing.
@CSK:
I told you a long time ago to get fitted for the red dress and white bonnet. Avoid the rush. 🙂
@grumpy realist:
The answer to this question will, now and forever, be “Trump trading card NFTs”
@grumpy realist:
And everyone knows a social network loses half its value as soon as you drive it off the lot 😀
@CSK:
The argument is ipso facto false, as contraceptives are not required for sex.
Ban them, and teens barred by their parents from having sex at all will only wind up pregnant at higher rates.
@Kathy:
I think a young daughter being pregnant out-of-wedlock would be a source of malicious satisfaction to these kinds of parents. Serves the little slut right! Force her to drop out of school and bear the child! Then after she’s suffered the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, maybe she’ll learn to be a decent, God-fearing Christian!
@CSK:
The point isn’t to keep teens from having sex (it’s not possible), but to catch them afterwards.
What should happen next? Deanda should have his parental rights terminated, his legal team should be disbarred and his daughter should get counseling to ameliorate and reverse the intense cult grooming she has been subjected to.
@Kathy:
Yes, of course. That’s why I said it would make these kinds of parents happy.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Forget it, Jake. It’s Texas.
@Michael Reynolds:
Awwww you miss me. I’m here and feeling a lot better today. I had my first follow up appointment and made things awkward for the dr. Looks like everything is healing properly and it looks like I’m going to have a full range of sensation and function. I started dilating last night. That’s, um, intense. Very intense. Physically and emotionally.
Now that the catheter is gone, the biggest issue seems to be that all my graft sites and wounds are all tight, swollen and itchy. It feels like my whole crotch region is made out of cheap hard plastic.
Oh, and I’ve now switched from medical gauze to pads. Everywhere I walk (well, waddle) I feel like I’m riding a bicycle made of diapers.
@Kathy:
Their argument is worse than that. They are building it out on the LGBT rights cases too. Their basic premise is that if the existence of something violates their religion (LGBT people existing, getting married, having sex, or say contraceptives), then anything that allows that thing to exist is a per se constitutional violation.
For example, the fact the government, any government, allows gay people to be married, and being gay violates their religious beliefs, the government has therefore violated the constitution by allowing gay marriage.
It’s basically a religious veto over everything. The U.S. will simply stop functioning as a country as this takes hold.
@Beth:
Jews and Muslims ought to agitate for an end to the sale of pork, shrimp, and shellfish and Jainists and others against the sale of all meat.
We could found a Church of Zero Population Growth and outlaw all marriage and pregnancy as well.
It’s an odd situation. Their arguments begins with the absurdum and skips the reductio altogether.
On local and personal news, evidence that King Manuel Andres is not the moron Benito is, government just passed an amendment to the federal labor law increasing the number of paid vacation days.
Long story short, I should get 26 days next year, instead of 18. That’s not nearly a month off, it’s more than that. Only business days count as vacation. So if I leave on the first of a month and come back the 15th, I took ten days, not fourteen, as four of those days were non-business day weekends. For 26 days, assuming no holidays, it works out to five weeks and one day 🙂
We have yet to hear from corporate, but odds are they won’t want us to take it all. But if we don’t, then we should still be paid for the time off we’re not taking. currently those who don’t use up all their vacation days can roll them over for the following year. But if you have 26 and are told to take 20, then you should get paid double for six random days of the year.
I’ll still try to take them all. Though sometimes (often) work gets so heavy we come on weekends and stay alte, now and then there are stretches of up to a month were we do so little we spend most of the time browsing the web.
We’ll see.
@Jen: Color me skeptical on the game changer issue re GPTChat. Any teachers who are asking for essays about the dominant themes in Moby Dick or the causes of the Ukrainian war in situations other than bluebook or other similar in-room essay tests after grade nine are bonkers to begin with. But the give away is his comment that the sample reads well but shows low knowledge. For me, if the student is providing the data that the answer contains, I’m not sure I care how it got written. Lots of us teach plug-in scaffolding techniques that are not so different from using an AI. They only work to the extent that the student has something to say. That’s what I was measuring.
@Beth:
Maybe you should have splurged for the upgrade and gotten rich Corinthian leather?
@CSK: Hey, the judge asked. If she didn’t want to know she should have kept her yap shut.
@Kathy: The Pastafarians would insist that everyone eat noodles at every meal. I’m not sure what the Satanic Templetons would want.
@Jen:
I can’t be the first person to have had the idea to train a neural net classifier to distinguish between human-generated and AI-generated text. The only question is whether it’s still just an academic result or you can download the app today. (I suppose it could also be the case that they’re still building the labeled training set you would need to train that model…)
@Kathy:
[…sigh…] Nailed it. 🙁
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I am playing with ChatGPT
So far, I am more impressed with ChatGPT than a significant chunk of America.
I had a thought: what if Benito is off these days and not making a trump of himself in the usual manner, because he is suffering the effects of long COVID?
@Kathy:
Well, he still manages to play golf daily.
@Gustopher: As a former freshman comp teacher, I’d like to have seen more development in the paragraphs. They’re a little perfunctory. I actually had the same problem with the GPTChat sample opening paragraph from the Atlantic article I read; I was wondering what the paper that followed was going to be about and what the writer’s thesis was. Even so, GPTChat writes, at the mechanical level at least, better than some of my students did, and the quality of thought was no more lacking than theirs either.
@DrDaveT:
Then an AI to fool that AI that can detect an AI.
And iterate…
“I for one welcome our new overlords.”
versus
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
@Gustopher: @Just nutha ignint cracker: As an additional thought, I used to teach my students a scaffold based on research that asserted that a well written essay paragraph will answer 4 questions:
1) What is true and important (to the subject topic)?
2) How, why, or under what circumstances is it true and important?
3) How will the writer show that it is true and important?
4) Why will the reader care?
I would note that in your sample, each of the paragraphs provided answer only questions one and two (or maybe four, it’s difficult to know without more detail), so it’s unlikely that a student would find using GPTChat a game changer in my classes. Still, the samples provided are significantly better than some students I tutored over the years produced, even after my best efforts to help them. Maybe those students SHOULD use GPTChat, if only to get out of the class with a barely passing grade rather than subjecting another teacher to their…
???
@Kathy: @Just nutha ignint cracker: Nah. It’s to make those sluts pay for it.
@CSK: And I still manage to wipe my ass every day. So?
@OzarkHillbilly:
Exactly.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Golfing might be a tad more strenuous than wiping.
All in the same paragraph??? Boy you are tough. All this time I thought one should dedicate a full paragraph to each aspect of the subject. 😉
@CSK: I know, I was being facetious. Did you know that Sarcasm is my first language? It is, and sometimes it just bleeds over into all my other languages. Both of them.
@CSK: From what I hear, not the way trump does it.
@Kathy:
On the subject of religion and absurdism…
@OzarkHillbilly:
That reminds me of something my grandfather used to say: “I speak two languages: English and Profanity.”
@CSK:
LOL. Parallel lives
An acquaintance of my father, former RAF Flight Sergeant :
@OzarkHillbilly:
Believe it or not, in lower than 101 courses, the next lesson after the paragraph one was how to write a 5-paragraph essay using your opening paragraph. The lesson? Use each sentence, in order, to start the next paragraph as your “what is true and important.” So, yeah, you dedicate a full paragraph to each aspect of the
subjectopening paragraph. (I usually suggested that writers need to show two different examples of something being true and important, so paragraphs were usually 5 sentences long.)@JohnSF:
Love it.
So Trump is predicting Doomsday if McCarthy doesn’t get to be Speaker.
Doomsday for Republicans? Bring it on!
(Isn’t speaking of oneself in the third person a symptom of poor mental health?)
@CSK: @JohnSF: Profanity is my 2nd language. I was a union carpenter for a long long time.
I once had to explain to somebody on the internet that it was just the way I speak. That it wasn’t intended to intimidate them, or insult them, or anything else. It was just the way I had been speaking for the past 35 years or so. If they found it all that insulting or scary, they should just pie me and we could go our separate ways. We (happily) had a meeting of the minds soon after that.
People are funny.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Yeah, that’s what I remember. Not sure where it came from, but it must have been one of my english profs. (all 2 or 3 of them)
@Mister Bluster:
Well, it’s something that two-year-olds, professional athletes, and lunatics do, so yes.
@Mister Bluster: Speaking of trump in any way other than ridiculing is a symptom of poor mental health.
So now twice in the last 10 minutes when I click on Saturdays Forum the mystery screen that appeared yesterday presents itself. This time long enough for me to read that it is something called “CleanTalk”. I can Google Cleantalk and there are several links. When I click on the link cleantalk(dot)org I get a message that the server is not responding.
Apparently it is some sort of anti spam plug-in and is somehow associated with WordPress.
I know that I have not installed any plug-ins. I have no idea what this is all about.
Mister Bluster is confused…
@OzarkHillbilly:
In England, the term was “industrial language”.
Factory and construction workers with a rich vocabulary of obscenity.
But heaven help you if you spoke like that in company of wives and mothers and sisters.
Funny thing is, the one person I ever met who could out-swear uncle Geoff was an aunt of a country gentry girl.
She’d casually come out with language that’d make a docker blush.
The British aristocracy are notoriously potty-mouthed in private.
The real trick is to combine utter obscenity and classical allusion. 😉
@JohnSF:
“You couldn’t find your woman’s Clytemnestra with a map and a guide, you felching smeggy prat.”