pdorman.bsky.social
I'm a political economist and writer on economics, politics, climate change, statistics, and lots more. I've written four books, stacks of articles and reports, blogs and am working on book #5. Watch out for really bad puns.
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Hearings are not for data gathering; they establish and amplify political narratives. I would pound on the attacks against expertise, the sifting process of science, the role of journals like JAMA, the huge long run benefits to health. MAHA? Med knowledge *if used* makes us more healthy than before.
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The sad truth is that lying without scruple is the MO for the hard right. They know they're making it up, and they don't care if you know. Pointing out that they're lying doesn't change anything. We need a new playbook....
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(3) they counted on their Fox and other media friends to obscure or finesse any difficulties, (4) in their circles AI is now used routinely for such tasks, and no one worries any more about the errors. Take your pick.
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As for the second, we are on shakier ground. Some possibilities: (1), they are not bright or well-informed enough to know how typical such AI hallucinations are, (2) the report is simply a box to check with no particular intended value,
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Moreover, the handful of MAHAists with their political agenda to pursue was spread too thin, and they could hardly trust normal, real scientists to do it. Hence the outsourcing to AI.
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What's interesting is why the MAHA people didn't want to do the work themselves, and why they thought they could get away with it.
For the first, my hunch is that, having laid off a large swath of their technical workforce, the department was simply understaffed.
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Interesting: this parallels the finding for conditionality in LDC's. Personally, I think conditionality is OK in this context. It's a form of reciprocity, and it expresses the social interest in healthy, well educated children. And easier politics.
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It's the new normal, what you expect when you let an AI agent write stuff for you. People who want to offload their work this way, and there are plenty of them, will just shrug their shoulders and say, so what?
AI is a vector of enshittification, not an antidote.
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The main job creators are consumers. What limits employment is only slightly shortfalls in supply; mostly it's shortfalls in demand. And demand is most vulnerable among the non-rich. Support higher wages (unions) and generous social programs.
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The medium is still the message. Incoherence doesn't register on video if the delivery is forceful. Biden was visibly weak and foggy. If you *read* Trump's speeches his decline is unmistakable.
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(5) And the Dems will be a hobbled resistance so long as they depend on significant support from that upper tier. So far they show no signs of being able to cut that cord.
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(4b) At the least, the capitalist class, if we can call it that, has to step aside. In this sense, the authoritarian drift is linked to a drift within the top tier as well as its increasing power relative to the rest of the class structure.
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(4a) Trump's authoritarianism would not be feasible without substantial support from the ultra-wealthy; his first term showed how limited he was when that support wasn't there.
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(3) We think too much about *how* elections might be rigged and not enough about the incentives to rig them. The current flood of illegality, including naked corruption, creates an enormous incentive to prevent the Dems from exercising control over the Justice Dept -- one way or another.
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(2) But the US is much more federal than, say, Hungary. State govt's remain potent sources of resistance.
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A lot of stuff is missing from this colloquy. (1) European legal systems are different from ours; they are more integrated with enforcement. We can have lots of adverse court judgments against Trump but with little follow-up.
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But bear in mind that this gives the whole Trump crew a strong incentive to prevent a future election that would give Dems control over the Justice Dept.
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If this article is right, the modern version is a whole lot scarier. In any case, people are comparing the AI craze to the story they've heard about the tulip mania.
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Yes, and there's even a number, or a pair of them. 4% drawdown of carbon emissions per year for the planet, higher than that for wealthy countries like the US. For convenience, I peg the US at 6%, but most theories of justice would put it higher.
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Take away the ugly-looking cheese and you have a tomato pie, like what I used to eat in Utica.
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Yes. I remember often taking buses to trailheads in Switzerland. This is part of the support they give for mountain recreation. And it's nice to not have to drive after an energetic ascent/descent. (And there's often a bistro right at the bottom of the trail....)
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Like: the resistance to action comes primarily from fossil fuel companies, or it's about capitalism's addiction to growth. I won't say mine is the last word -- I'm sure others can go further -- but please start with (1) climate science, esp remaining carbon budgets and (2) actual political economy.
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Yes, the editor is an important part of the audience and hasn't necessarily read the submission (closely). And you want to place your pos and neg comments in the context of the overall point of the piece. My summary usually has markers for this I come back to later.
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The problem with Graeber's project is that he didn't give serious thought to what makes a job, or part of a job, meaningful. That's the starting point for transforming work.
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Incidentally, while I have you on the line, why a meta-analysis of multiple model runs trained on the same data? Why not simply a systematic review? Have you written on your motivation for employing that approach?
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You missed the point. Rebutting in print is fine. "Reminding" critics, journals and research institutions they are liable for libel is not fine.
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To make it clear: just publish the damn refutation and move on. If it's open and shut, people will figure it out.
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Frank isn't around to rebut any of this, and I didn't work with him on it (we touched base on other stuff), so I'll pass. But claims that critics erred are properly handled through normal academic channels. I've been falsely attacked, and I just go on. No threats or "reminders".
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These short posts aren't good for discussing serious issues. I've spent 40 years examining different aspects of CBA, and of course the SCC is the B part of that for climate. Even without looking under the hood at FUND there's a lot to say.
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Of course, I know the diff between a research paper and a meta-analysis. (I taught M-A for years.) To be blunt, I was responding to snark with snark. When someone writes "know who you're talking to" it's hard not to point out their negative reputation.