Approval rating collapsing after the election? Is that the modern version of the “closing the barn door after the horse got out” saying?

I doubt that Trump has ever read Shakespeare.

I think it’s important to note that America’s permissive immigration policy during the 18th and 19th centuries was accompanied by the lack of a government-provided “safety net” for those immigrants.

No, the Republican fantasy is doing that and having the benefit cuts pay for the tax cuts. This is the Republican reality where the tax cuts still require borrowing an enormous amount of money.

Edit: Society is always making a trade-off between helping the poor and using that money for other purposes and if, with the support of working class Americans, a candidate is elected who decides that society will help the poor less, then that’s a reasonable outcome in a democracy even if it isn’t one that I personally support. However, running the debt up like this is an extremely reckless and selfish decision to buy lower taxes in the present day at the expense of America’s future. It’s so short-sighted that I think it isn’t a reasonable choice for any ideology except perhaps nihilistic disregard for anything beyond the next election cycle…

Obama: Your campaign is a mess!

Biden: Who are you? Where am I?

Heck, are there dating sites that work at all anymore? Over a decade ago I had some success with OkCupid but my impression is that ever since swipe apps became a thing, online dating went from bad to terrible for everyone except gay men looking for hookups. Now I might have to go low-tech and ask my grandma to introduce me to her friends’ single granddaughters…

More than every single democrat voting against it?

He’s the man the voters chose - if they didn’t trust his judgement, they could have chosen someone else. His moral character represents American moral character.

I think that then we actually agree.

I haven’t noticed this behavior coming from scientists particularly frequently - the ones I’ve talked to generally accept that consciousness is somehow the product of the human brain, the human brain is performing computation and obeys physical law, and therefore every aspect of the human brain, including the currently unknown mechanism that creates consciousness, can in principle be modeled arbitrarily accurately using a computer. They see this as fairly straightforward, but they have no desire to convince the public of it.

This does lead to some counterintuitive results. If you have a digital AI, does a stored copy of it have subjective experience despite the fact that its state is not changing over time? If not, does a series of stored copies representing, losslessly, a series of consecutive states of that AI? If not, does a computer currently in one of those states and awaiting an instruction to either compute the next state or load it from the series of stored copies? If not (or if the answer depends on whether it computes the state or loads it) then is the presence or absence of subjective experience determined by factors outside the simulation, e.g. something supernatural from the perspective of the AI? I don’t think such speculation is useful except as entertainment - we simply don’t know enough yet to even ask the right questions, let alone answer them.

This isn’t the Cthulhu universe. There isn’t some horrible truth ChatGPT can reveal to you which will literally drive you insane. Some people use ChatGPT a lot, some people have psychotic episodes, and there’s going to be enough overlap to write sensationalist stories even if there’s no causative relationship.

I suppose ChatGPT might be harmful to someone who is already delusional by (after pressure) expressing agreement, but I’m not sure about that because as far as I know, you can’t talk a person into or out of psychosis.

Yes, the first step to determining that AI has no capability for cognition is apparently to admit that neither you nor anyone else has any real understanding of what cognition* is or how it can possibly arise from purely mechanistic computation (either with carbon or with silicon).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”

Given? Given by what? Fiction in which robots can’t comprehend the human concept called “love”?

*Or “sentience” or whatever other term is used to describe the same concept.

I thought I could see piles of debris at the bottoms of some slopes in the after pictures which weren’t there in the before pictures, but now that I’m looking at them again, I’m no longer sure that what I’m seeing isn’t just a difference in the shadows. (Presumably the pictures were taken at different times of the day.) I’m going to edit my original statement.

The landslides at Fordow look extensive. The whole mountain must have shaken.

Edit: Maybe what I’m seeing is just shadows rather than new debris at the bottoms of some slopes.

The idea that Trump can start wars as he sees fit is a frightening one, but I’m not sure that in practice Congress is capable of making these decisions (especially with regard to unconventional military actions as opposed to traditional wars). It is simply too dysfunctional an institution, although I suppose institutional paralysis would lead to the outcome that isolationists and pacifists want.

Israel is an ally of the USA but Iran is violently hostile to the USA.

I interpret this as a way for Trump to position himself as the “good cop” rather than as a factual description of something that actually happened, or else I would be concerned about how such sensitive secret information is apparently being casually given away to news agencies.

I think many people learned the wrong lesson from GWB’s Iraq War. It was presented as (among other things) a way to stop an enemy of the USA from obtaining nuclear weapons and it was a mistake, so they conclude that using force to stop enemies of the USA from obtaining nuclear weapons is a mistake. However, using force (if necessary) to stop enemies of the USA from obtaining nuclear weapons is a prudent idea and the problem with that Iraq War was that it was not actually fought for that purpose. GWB was the boy who cried wolf but real wolves still exist.

I’m not sure what’s novel here. No one thought that modern AI could solve arbitrarily complex logic problems, or even that modern AI was particularly good at formal reasoning. I would call myself an AI optimist but I would have been surprised if the article found any result other than the one it did. (Where exactly the models fail is interesting, but the fact that they do at all isn’t.) Furthermore, the distinction between reasoning and memorizing patterns in the title of this post is artificial - reasoning itself involves a great deal of pattern recognition.

How can the war realistically end?

1. A return to the pre-war status quo. The withdrawal of Israeli troops, presumably in return for the hostages, with either Hamas or another group equally hostile to Israel in control of Gaza. This is the worst-case scenario for Israel, because it represents a total failure to eliminate the source of more potential October 7 attacks. I suspect it’s the worst-case scenario for Gaza too, since future attacks on Israel would lead to future destruction in Gaza.

2. The destruction of Hamas and the establishment of a Gazan government friendly towards Israel, perhaps by the Palestinian authority or a coalition of Arab states. Very difficult and failure-prone, but a pathway to peace in the long term. I had hoped that this would be the outcome when the war started but it isn’t what Netanyahu is trying to accomplish and by now I’m not sure there’s enough goodwill left for it to still be possible.

3. Permanent Israeli occupation. I don’t think Israel can maintain such an occupation - it would be extremely expensive in money, lives, and international goodwill. Netanyahu and his supporters seem to think that Israel can, but many of them seem to make plans reliant on divine intervention.

4. Expulsion of the population of Gaza. Egypt wouldn’t accept that without a war. Maybe Trump thinks he can find another country that would, but even if he did (unlikely) then the logistics of moving two million people would be extremely challenging. I think this outcome is effectively impossible - another one of the “divine intervention required” plans. However, it would be a best-case scenario for Israel. The gain in territory means little, but no longer having Gazans as neighbors immediately ends the conflict for good, which no other outcome does.

If (2) isn’t going to happen then (4) may be the best case scenario for everyone. Even the people being expelled and their descendants would probably be better off than they would be if they remain in Gaza for for many more decades of conflict. However, I very much doubt that it can happen.