> We really need a change in mindset around what success means.
How?
Wealth and power is all that society obsesses about and there's an endless list of suckers for people that appear to be wealthy or powerful. Hell, even this board is filled with rat races spamming how to climb the pyramid in companies I vomit just thinking about "oh, this is how I got promoted to L17 from L16" or bs like that.
Nobody's getting interviewed and hailed for saving the most lives in an Indian hospital or risking its life reporting in Gaza under constant Israeli bombs and shooting.
But sure there's endless content of how this or that startupper created yet another unicorn with some pointless B2B saas.
People want to hear and reflect and empathize with winners who have all, not with the "real" heroes impacting the world positively through sacrifice and pain.
This is only true in America. American culture has become one where your worth as a person is based on money. If someone has alot of money, they must be better, smarter, etc, than everyone else who has less.
I dont think this holds as strongly in other countries. Other countries do not have the religious like worship of money that is the usa. Having a Phd is seen as higher status than making millions on legal scamming.
My Indian coworkers talk more about people in their country helping other than who is richest in India where the us folks talk about nothing but stonks and what car they will buy next.
It doesn't need need to be tied to some mystical god, "music is my religion" is a phrase that has been used and is understood easily, and you can replace music with many other nouns, games, science, family, dog grooming, whatever.
You can kind of see this in the rise of weird internet cults around celebrities and obviously many IRL cults over the years, and I don't know if the frequency of weird cults has increased in the last 3 decades but I would take wild guess and say it has.
"Make religions cool again" is a bit of a hard sell considering worldwide events but unless we can come up with a better word for a shared value system where people sacrifice things they can gain, for the good of the group, I don't think there is a stronger word.
Because when investors allocate resources based on the ability of those resources to generate a profitable return you end up with an increasing volume of resources being used in the service of fulfilling the needs of a decreasing number of people.
The only time I ever used AirBnB the host cancelled on me 2 days before my trip while I was scrambling to find a replacement. Absolutely awful user experience that truly offers nothing to people in their moments of extreme need.
Data promised to improve lifes, it has done so in many aspects, but also has made countless things worse.
From physical and digital products squeezing the last cent instead of improving user's experience, algorithms getting every single second of your attention, from deciding the kind of music and tv shows getting produced, to the kind of dull ever repeating style of everything really on every corner of the planet from hotels to restaurant and menus it's all a data-driven conversion to the mean in boring-and-safe or money-squeezing fashion.
Data has entered sports and transformed them from the times of money ball. Basket, soccer, football, are all much less enjoyable and creative because again, it's all about applying data.
And yes, data has entered politics at a level it could not before computing power and data collection and our understanding of human manipulation didn't reach those levels.
It has understood you only need 50%+1 of the votes and efforts to get 50%+2 are a waste and less efficient.
So politicians, especially in weaker democracies characterized by winner-takes-all mechanics, are incentivized to be divisive, not representing the majority of the citizens.
Again, you only want 50%+1 of the votes, if you trying to get a single more you're dispersing your efforts and decreasing the chances to win.
The problem with "data" as discussed here it is that powerful organizations and people own it and common people don't. It's an instrument of power for the already powerful.
> And yes, data has entered politics at a level it could not before computing power and data collection and our understanding of human manipulation didn't reach those levels. It has understood you only need 50%+1 of the votes and efforts to get 50%+2 are a waste and less efficient.
>
> So politicians, especially in weaker democracies characterized by winner-takes-all mechanics, are incentivized to be divisive, not representing the majority of the citizens.
This happens to some extent, particularly in the US's electoral system. But I'd argue the incentive for divisive politics is coming mostly from the fleeting nature of our communication media (plus legitimate grievances that mainstream politicians were out of touch with for a long time).
Twitter was already a politically destabilizing force even before data analysis and manipulation caught up to it. The medium itself punishes constructive interactions and ideas.
An equally cynical but opposite take is that data is what you turn to when you want to dispel with the mythology, hand-waving, and general bullshit that self-described “creatives” wrap themselves in in order to avoid admitting that they may not actually understand why something works or doesn’t work (and by extension, that their success may be dumb luck rather than talent).
I don’t think truth aligns with either extreme. Both are approaches that have their place. But if it was an “uncreative” with no ideas that simply took the time to look and discovered that the three point shot was absurdly more efficient than basically any other shot in basketball, what does that say about all the “creative” coaching geniuses who failed to discover it in half a century? And if basketball is now “less creative” because of it, that’s an indictment of the fact that the league refuses to address the underlying issue.
I think it’s telling that no one bemoans the fact that we design our medicine using data driven methods. I’m sure it would spice up our lives if the pharma companies dropped the boring data analysis and statistical methods and just slapped some compounds together through free-flowing creative passion!
It is often not the beginning of processes but the end of them. This is the problem with a lot of AI, i.e. it takes data and mixes it up instead of doing things afresh.
The response is where creativity lives. Everything falls apart if you don’t have the juice to capitalize on the insights you got from the data.
Trump’s team knew exactly where to focus their efforts for 2016. That was half of it
The other half was all the rallies and stops where he literally workshopped all of his slogans in front of an audience. That’s where “lock her up” and a dozen other creative insults and slogans were tested. Like a comedian on tour, he had to work on his material.
You can say a lot about him, but he is charismatic and none of that is data driven. He has instinct on how to hurt people. He has always been a salesman and con artist. These are creative skills
The data gave him the audience but the human angle got him those votes.
I never wrote the government made the specific request that led to the leak. I explain that the government make such requests.
So when a company is requested to hand over sensitive data, they do. For sure when the origin of the request is the government itself (pawned email in this case)
1. Mythos wasn't released in February. Let's stick to only public-facing models.
2. For public-facing models, the differences are really minor with some occasional model (like Fable or Astra) showing some better performance in specific benchmarks for the span of some weeks or few months before open ones catch it.
3. Being bleeding edge is overblown anyway in the real world, besides the occasional "very latest fresh model did this task which previous one couldn't", and the number of those tasks is increasingly small and far from mundane corporate needs.
For running errands maybe.
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