"Are unions net benefit for the general public" and "whether reforming or abolishing the unions is the best course of action for the general public" are two separate questions. The unions could be beneficial (and still a reform could improve this benefit) or they could be harmful (but a reform could make them beneficial without abolishing them). The original claim was they are beneficial right now, in heir current form, but no actual proof had been provided.
> This is a great example of how unions can really work for their members.
I think this is way different claim than "unions work for the society". Surely, there are a lot of organizations that work very well for their members. Not all of them are beneficial for the society though (criminal gangs aren't, for example). In your third link, there is a power struggle between two sets of people - movie studios and writers. One of them has achieved transferring some money from the other, using the power of unions. But how is it good for the rest of the public? Unclear.
The case in Vox starts with "I liked the union" (the same claim as above) and doesn't get more convincing as it goes. The best the author can do is "When you stack up all the research and look at the broader picture, though, the net effect of unions — bad examples included — is good for the typical worker.". But that, again, is not the question we started with - I am not arguing that the union can be good for those who get more money from the deal. I want to see proof it's also good for those who don't. And the best is something like "reduces income inequality" - which frankly is a very weak evidence, since obviously absolute inequality is bad, and absolute equality is bad, but there are a lot of gray in the middle, and how do we know whether a particular union makes us closer to the good side than to the bad side?
Do you think Vox has ever written about how transit unions increase costs by mandating redundant workers and work against technology that could automate trains?
Do you think Box has ever written about how Detroit unions fought EVs and AVs and automation that could result in cheaper cars?
2021 was the apotheosis of 2011. I'm sure hundreds of examples on this site chronicle how wild and not quite calm nor collected it was, but I liked No Exit by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. (The original WIRED article is paywalled, so here's a specific sub-thread started by tptacek from its discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7644161)
Whatever you want to say the current market is, it's nothing like the early 2010s.
The current market absolutely is much more like 2011 than 2021. If you were working in tech back then, it was easy to raise money for specific types of startup (social was the thing back then like AI is today) but it was nothing like 2021. You could raise money for a ham sandwich in 2021.
The ZIRPmania of 2021 was certainly dependent upon what came before it but it wasn’t a natural outcome, it needed the economic chaos of the pandemic, it would not have happened without the pandemic.
That's been YC's modus operandi since long before 2014. Reddit, from the first YC batch, came about because Paul said (paraphrasing) "I like you kids but your idea sucks, forget about it and you can join YC". Nothing to do with ZIRP.
That one, about a member of Congress, has a sex scene in a hot tub. It had movie potential.
The Roy Krock movie worked because audiences understand McDonalds. Trying to explain the relationship between R&D policy and defense spending is much tougher. Although see Heinlein's "Destination Moon".
I don't deny that a lot of the examples given are either of people behind relatable everyday products and brands, or world-shaping historical events that every laymen has some inkling of. Or that in Congressman Wilson's case, a colorful and flamboyant personality beyond the potential 9/11 connection.
Certainly when it comes to WWII era technocratic bureaucrat-administrator types I'd be more interested in, say, a film about the National Recovery Administration's first Director Hugh S. Johnson, who was a bit of a crank and flame-out and perhaps had extremist views of modern day political salience. (I don't think he had anything to do with the alleged Business Plot, but a movie can easily evoke it and hey, Smedley Butler appearance as a character.)
But yeah, a movie about an administrator who was simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy does seem somewhat difficult to turn into a full-fledged biopic. Maybe a PBS mini-series?
> simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy
Seems easy enough to add in some personal drama and controversy and some science details about the system they're in charge of in order to make it a fully-fleged biopic. Writers have been embellishing stories since before there's been television.
True, given that he was a wartime administrator maybe they can just throw in a few battle scenes and military engagements to show the fruits of his labor. Start it framed as a WWII epic centered on a civilian, like The King's Speech, Darkest Hour, etc. Then it turns into Cold War intrigue. Maybe throw in some auto nostalgia for GM classic vehicles of the era.
I've thought that a lot of present LLM-speak is a distant descendant of the heyday of the "Now See This", Buzzfeed, et al clickbait that was en vogue about a decade or dozen years ago. A sort of chirpy contrarian provocation to drive reader engagement. "You won't believe how this X" begets "this isn't just Y -- it's Z." So it will be a style that eventually leaves as new models are trained on other writing.
Perhaps the end state is going to be from the last Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book, Mostly Harmless:
> Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it with the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (the MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).
> A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Where upon the robot thought to itself, Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.
> It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, Ah! A herring sandwich...etc., and repeated the same action over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.
> The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they had actually discovered was “boredom”, or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like “irritability”, “depression”, “reluctance”, “ickiness” and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as “relief”, “joy”, “friskiness”, “appetite”, “satisfaction”, and most important of all, the desire for “happiness”. This was the biggest breakthrough of all.
> Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.
I love that book, that said, the point is more subtle than that. Current LLM attention models are limited in their feedback. Adding a form of 'shame' feedback (result is technically correct but morally bad or some such) would help here but I doubt the folks building theses things would choose to do so.
From a certain and quite valid point of view, they have no mechanism for feedback at all. Every time you start a conversation you're starting in the same state, modulo the random numbers. At most you have this very, very vague loop in that the conversations for LLM 1.0 will be fed in to the training set for LLM 2.0.
Even "shame" would only apply to the current session and disappear in the next one, or eventually be compacted away.
According to ChatGPT, researchers are working on models that remember personal directives across sessions. IE - an actual personal assistant that gets to know you and your proclivities. So it's definitely on their radar. No idea how far along they are.
Unless that's something more than the already-common practice called "memories" that are text files held off to the side, that doesn't change what I meant. You can do all sorts of interesting things within the context window, but there's no feedback beyond that.
Even if an frontier-LLM-sized neural net could do something that would somehow change its net on a pervasive level in response to things that happen to it, nobody could possibly serve that in a cost-effective manner.
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