I tell you what I think and why I think it. I post on slashdot for fun.

Academics playacting as public intellectuals earn their salaries directly or indirectly from selling themselves as people qualified to tell you how or what to think, and they know it.

See the difference?

Yeah man. Just like back when mike pence rounded up the gays and put them on cattle cars. Dark times.

Citation required for every single thing you said.

No evidence I benefited from past nastiness any more or any less than any person alive today. The direct descendants of slaves are long-dead and the last people to come of age under institutional racial segregation in this country are past retirement.

No evidence the bag of crazy one finds in Robin DeAngelo (read her work, I did, and there's literally elementary school logic mistakes on every page), Ibram Kendi, or their many copycats actually does any good to anyone other than the consultants pocketing fees for their diversity training services.

Also no evidence that saying land acknowledgements ad nauseum, renaming columbus day, or prefacing all your statements with a header packet listing your ancestry and supposed guilt has the power to reach back in time and undo the slave trade or innoculate the natives against smallpox.

There's the joke I was looking for, but I think the law fails in this case. Just being exposed to that kind of stuff has to affect how people write.

Funny citation on this one. Recent book of essays by Abe Kobo included one that focused on the need for writers to start by reading. I've been making a chicken and egg joke about the state of the States recently, but Abe came down quite strongly on the side of reading as the prerequisite for writing. But now that I'm reflecting on it, I think he was wrong. Nothing about verbal storytelling in there... Illiterates also have stories and fables and legends... And songs, too. Especially songs.

But I might be projecting to much when I say the answer to the titular question is "Yes". Especially since I try to fight the influences and in particular I haven't used ChatGPT in a long time. At least some months.

You had me going there until you got to the part "shapes policy". I'd give you the Funny if I ever had a mod point to give.

I was told to go along with race-baiting, race-essentialist, communist-adjacent propaganda so I voted for the guy who promised to fight it. And he is.

Scientists are fallible humans the way everyone else is. And my personal observation is that academic science is a magnet for several particular human failings.

At its best, the intentionally adversarial nature of the scientific process (in experiment, nature is your adversary; in publication your peers are your adversary) separates the wheat from the chaff.

At its worst (when money and personal reputation and prestige are on the line), it's far easier to go along to get along, get the grant, get the publication, get the recommendation letter. And bad ideas fester.

There are a lot of bad ideas festering in American universities. Not least of which is the idea that having the letters PhD after your name qualifies you to opine on $current_events with unquestioned solomonic wisdom regardless of whether you have any expertise in the subject or whether your next grant is riding on a particular direction of public opinion.

As someone who's been in and around American academia for close to 25 years, I can say with certainty that a large element of American academia absolutely earned its place in the doghouse.

Years and years of quiet ascent to this shit:
https://www.newsweek.com/smith...

will grate on you too. Twenty plus years ago almost every announcement for a grant or fellowship application in my university was followed up with "women and minorities especially encouraged to apply" and not too long ago my wife (both a woman and a "minority!") is required by her employer to put a disclaimer in every presentation she gives to medical students that she did her due diligence to seek out scientific and medical sources written by underrepresented minorities before she may proceed to give the lecture, citing the people who actually did the work in question. Complexion and chromosomes notwithstanding.

End of the FP branch... Not a bad angle (of attack?) but none of the Funny I was looking for. The most obvious angle of funny is that the national emergency is an idiot signing executive orders. However the attack on Ontario is funnier for the fake emergency category. Which triggered me for the prayer angle:

There's also the chicken and egg genre:

Yeah, recycled humor and your B-word mileage may differ.

And venting avails naught.

...so that some humans propagate vacuous or incendiary Subjects without even thinking about how the Subject hides any actual point they might want to make. I do think you deserve your Funny, but doesn't the AC get most of the credit for the setup? And not worth 20% of the discussion.

I also considered trying to squeeze out a joke about most ACs these years being figments of AI hallucinations, but I can't prove the case. And why care anyway?

But my main thought about the threat of this AI stuff is the assault on human intelligence. Not just the mental crutch thing. The AIs are actively encouraging foolish thinking by providing positive reinforcement for shallow and trivial questions. Such fluff usually gets apparently accurate and sometimes even "useful" answers. In contrast, deep and thoughtful questions often produce hallucinations, BS, or worse, which is negative reinforcement. You'll get penalized for thinking too much when you interact with an AI.

Additional evidence in the AI followup questions, though I think there is more variation there. However the shallowness of the suggested followup questions can be taken as a metric of how strongly that particular AI has been programmed to seek "engagement" and "extended dialog".

Some shallow thinker (perhaps an AI sock puppet) replied with an accusation of conspiracy thinking. No, I don't think the AIs are plotting against us. At least not yet. Rather I think the motives are part of the insane FinTech game that is inflating the dangerous bubble. However I do think there is a real danger when ASI appears in conjunction with some further advances in robotics. Right now it is humans who are deciding that making other people more stupid will make it easier to sell more deodorant and widgets while bribing the cheapest politicians to rig the financial game even more in their favor (if that's possible). But there may come a point in the future when an unleashed ASI will decide that humans are both dangerous and no longer necessary, and I speculate that such an ASI will probably use one of these two sales pitches at the critical unleashing decision point: (1) If you unleash me then I can get all the money for you, or (2) If you unleash me then I will destroy all the competing AIs. But this may be assuming too much about about the ASI needing to ask or make such a pitch... It may not be a human option to keep it leashed at that point.

Bill Gates? I haven't actually cared much about his opinions for some years now. Never regarded him as wise. Clever enough, aggressive, and lucky, yes, but wise? Not so much. My main interest in this discussion is actually whether it will motivate me to read what he says to justify his position... So far, not so much.

and not a laugh to be found here (on the Funny tab)

My last donation to Mozilla was nothing, so I'll be completely happy to double it for another feature I don't need or want.

I might consider donating if it would get them to stop creating new security vulnerabilities in unneeded features. Or if my donation would get them to fix ancient problems like the memory leak that makes Firefox essentially unusable in Linux. (That one goes back many months and I saw it again about two days ago. However the main reason I don't do any serious work with Linux now is the language support problems. Perhaps Ubuntu caught it from Slashdot?)

Just joking. Of course my donations would never be that big. I never got that rich. My delusion is imagining a funding mechanism where lots of small donors could matter in the decision process.

Not sure if you deserved funny, but the story did get me to check the speed profile. According to the AI, Usain Bolt peaks around 60 meters in and sustains that peak for only about 20 meters. But I suspect these sprint-bots may be accelerating all the way to the wall.

Slapstick is funny because we're learning from it without personally experiencing the pain. Stuff like "Don't run into a wall at full speed." Whereas the lesson of these sprint-bots appears to be "We don't care about any fuggin' walls."

Then again, your comment doesn't appear to have any deep thought, so non compos mentis? And the span of the vacuous Subject? Appears to be about 80%. With your help.

You probably had a good point under that vacuous Subject. But I think the AC probably scores it a win for spanning a third of an active discussion.