I’ve been thinking about this and wondering what happens if he dies from natural causes in office. The GOP infighting would be tremendous and without the cult of personality to hold the administration together, I’m not sure what would happen. Vance doesn’t have what it takes, but with Peter Thiel backing him, it would essentially be a wackadoo billionaire being the power behind the throne.

I’d say yes, but he’s so much of a narcissist and so self-obsessed, I doubt it would’ve occurred to him. Especially as back then he was 90% tech bro and 10% weird idea guy. Those values, of course, have since fully flipped.

I think that’s sort of the point - if 2016 was our last “normal” election and early voting wasn’t prognosticative of election results then, there’s no hope it would be anything other than more variable and chaotic now.

The point wasn’t about a “return to normal” or else he would be saying it was an indicator.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. There’s no way to reconcile what he’s saying with the video evidence.

Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.

That would be “ornithological” :)

Weirdly antagonistic tone and not sure when Silver pissed in your Wheaties, but you obviously have a hang up about him. No desire to go tit for tat, other than to say he’s been more reliably accurate over time than anyone else when it comes to politics. It’s like baseball - if you lifetime hit for .300, everyone is going to know your name.

Also, the whole point of the article is that early voting patterns are not indicative of final results. That’s not polling analysis or data modeling, that’s just historical fact. I don’t think Silver is perfect, and he’s got problematic issues, but on this point he’s just pointing out the thing the media ignores because it gives them headlines galore for the last two weeks before the election.

2008

Silver’s final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, missing only the prediction for Indiana.

2010

His 2010 congressional mid-term predictions were not as accurate as those made in 2008, but were still within the reported confidence interval. Silver predicted a Republican pickup of 54 seats in the House of Representatives; the GOP won 63 seats. Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of 36.[71]

2012

At the conclusion of that day, when Mitt Romney had conceded to Barack Obama, Silver’s model had correctly predicted the winner of every one of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.[79][80] Silver, along with at least three[81] academic-based analysts—Drew Linzer,[82] Simon Jackman,[83] and Josh Putnam[84]—who also aggregated pollsfrom multiple pollsters—thus was not only broadly correct about the election outcome, but also specifically predicted the outcomes for the nine swing states.[85]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver

I’d list others but I doubt you’d read it anyway

He literally talks about that at several points. 2020 is a horrible baseline for looking at anything analytically because it was such an outlier because of COVID. Too many other variables in 2020 for it to be applicable for anything

What an odd take, and so orthogonal to what the article was about.

What the hell is this shit? Well, I guess rather than trying to link to Fox News, linking to where they get their bullshit talking points from is a choice.

I probably didn’t explain well enough. Consuming media (books, TV, film, online content, and video games) is predominantly a passive experience. Obviously video games less so, but all in all, they only “adapt” within the guardrails of gameplay. These AI chatbots however are different in their very formlessness - they’re only programmed to maintain engagement and rely on the LLM training to maintain an illusion of “realness”. And because they were trained on all sorts of human interactions, they’re very good at that.

Humans are unique in how we continually anthropomorphize tons of not only inert, lifeless things (think of someone alternating between swearing at and pleading to a car that won’t start) but abstract ideals (even scientists often speak of evolution “choosing” specific traits). Given all of that, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be worried about a teen with a still developing prefrontal cortex and who is in the midst of working on understanding social dynamics and peer relationships to embue an AI chatbot with far more “humanity” than is warranted. Humans seem to have an anthropomorphic bias in how we relate to the world - we are the primary yardstick we use to measure and relate everything around us, and things like AI chatbots exploit that to maximum effect. Hell, the whole reason the site mentioned in the article exists is that this approach is extraordinarily effective.

So while I understand that on a cursory look, someone objecting to it comes across as a sad example of yet another moral panic, I truly believe this is different. For one, we’ve never had access to such a lively psychological mirror before and it’s untested waters; and two, this isn’t some objection on some imagined slight against a “moral authority” but based in the scientific understanding of specifically teen brains and their demonstrated fragility in certain areas while still under development.

Thanks! I’m not sure how much is patience and how much is just being resigned to the mods making the wrong decision on this one. I think the rule change is just punishing the community for their own past failings, but I don’t really see anyone being able to change their minds on this one. And being a mod - especially on /politics - is by definition a thankless and difficult job, so I do understand where they’re coming from in part. Unfortunately they seem to have learned all the wrong lessons.

Yeah, thanks! I saw it but unfortunately buried in work this week and last, so haven’t been very active lately. But I did just reply in that thread to counter some revisionist history from the mods. :)

That is simply not true. Initially the replies to him were not antagonistic - he started taking that tone when the community asked him about the disparity between his professed beliefs and what he was posting and asking why he was supposedly voting third party. He then ran the table on the mods by engaging in a constant stream of spammy, low effort comments and you all did nothing. And the more you did nothing, the more frustrated and angry everyone became about him.

The mods should at least be able to recognize your hand in how UM played out, instead of blaming it only on the users engaging in “slap fights”. The mods chose to moderate per post/comment instead of also considering an account’s overall pattern of behavior.

The rules - as written - seem to indicate a level of judgement and assessment that has not been taking place, and user frustration is evident as many of us see how a pattern of behavior of trolling was allowed to continue for much too long because the user in question almost never went too far in any individual message but was quite clearly outside the rules when looked at as a whole.

I admire your stance on not doing a fast-and-loose approach to bans to protect individual voices, but your job as mods also involves protecting these communities from intentional and purposeful bad actors

<fistbump>

I do have to admit to feeling at least a little validated for having called him out way more for his pattern of behavior when it came to interactions with other users as opposed to his posts. His posts were bad but the way he engaged with anyone and everyone was downright toxic. /politics is a better place with him banned, and now Lemmy will be a better place for him being gone. I’m sure he’s still out there on some platform playing the poor victim, as I doubt this was a “teachable moment”, but I sincerely hope he gets help somewhere. It’s cliché, but that dude had issues.

Yes, and it’s clear that they wouldn’t have done an outright temp ban for the length of time they did if you didn’t already have the history you did. Quit painting this as “They couldn’t handle me voicing my opinions” when it was entirely “This guy just won’t stop trolling”. No one really cares about your opinions, they cared about you trolling the community. You trying to make a martyr of yourself is ridiculous.

I got a two-week ban in a community (for posting duplicate article from different sources)

Dude, you got it for that AND a history of trolling, even just after coming off a previous temp ban for trolling. Quit lying.

I understand what you mean about the comparison between AI chatbots and video games (or whatever the moral panic du jour is), but I think they’re very much not the same. To a young teen, no matter how “immersive” the game is, it’s still just a game. They may rage against other players, they may become obsessed with playing, but as I said they’re still going to see it as a game.

An AI chatbot who is a troubled teen’s “best friend” is different and no matter how many warnings are slapped on the interface, it’s going to feel much more “real” to that kid than any game. They’re going to unload every ounce of angst into that thing, and by defaulting to “keep them engaged”, that chatbot is either going to ignore stuff it shouldn’t or encourage them in ways that it shouldn’t. It’s obvious there’s no real guardrails in this instance, as if he was talking about being suicidal, some red flags should’ve popped up.

Yes the parents shouldn’t have allowed him such unfettered access, yes they shouldn’t have had a loaded gun that he had access to, but a simple “This is all for funsies” warning on the interface isn’t enough to stop this from happening again. Some really troubled adults are using these things as defacto therapists and that’s bad too. But I’d be happier if lawmakers were much more worried about kids having access to this stuff than accessing “adult sites”.

There’s also advantages to the DC metro area being a “company town” in that it attracts interested public servants with particular skill sets. The DC metro area has a huge number of folks not from here, so it’s not like there’s a “DC mindset” at the individual level. And the feds have been pretty good on telework (fed contractors, not so much)