After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...
This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.
After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...
This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.
Yes, except for this part:
> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale
This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.
Yes, it was a straight genocide, of the kind so common in territories that were subject to crown control.
I disagree strongly that this abhorrent and preventable tragedy should be categorised as genocide. The rich, protestant English looked down on the catholic Irish peasants as an inferior race, they blamed the Irish for their own suffering, supposedly due to fecklessness, stupidity, laziness etc, and they were happy to sit back and allow the poor farmers to starve. But that’s not the same thing at all as actively wishing for the outright destruction of a whole people. The system relied on having peasant workers to work the farms of the landholders - it was not in the British interest, either economically or ideologically, to eliminate them completely in the same way that Nazi Germany wished for the Jewish people.
It’s true that the British perpetrated many other awful atrocities in their pursuit of Empire - as did all the other Empire-building nations at the time - but I’d like to see you come up with a list of the ones you can convincingly describe as genocide.
The Irish Famine was genocide. The potato blight destroyed one crop, but the British state chose to export grain and livestock under armed guard while over a million starved. That is deliberate destruction of a people, not an accident.
This pattern runs deep: Cromwell’s massacres and forced transplantation, the plantation system, the suppression of Irish language and culture, and the burning-out of Catholic families in Belfast are all part of the same logic of demographic control. Each episode targeted the Irish as an ethnic and cultural group for elimination in part, which is exactly what the Genocide Convention defines. Across centuries, British policy toward Ireland was consistently genocidal.
The third footnote in that article, in its entirety:
> Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%.
Is this what passes for a reference now?
The text that the footnote is attached to is:
"Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF." I infer 'IMPish' as meaning 'like Instant Mashed Potato'.
I read that footnote as a somewhat oblique criticism of two LLMs, rather than on the statistic itself - which may indeed have just been fabricated by the LLM as opposed to an actual statistic somehow dredged from its training data, or pulled from a web search.
Really depressing to think that people trust statistics from these models and soon the models will be ingesting statistics they themselves made up as training data.
I was enjoying reading that until I hit this line:
> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process
Whatever the potatoes were swimming in, it wasn't gluten.
By the way, the discussion of mashed potatoes reminds me of the excellent old "Smash" adverts on UK TV that featured martians/robots and a tagline of "For mash get Smash": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBRCZLzn5pM
(Smash was surprisingly popular in the 1970s but then UK convenience food was abysmal back then)