Favorites December 8th 2021

Dec 09, 2021

As an outsider, I really appreciated this discussion of surprising & ongoing consilience in AI:

The ongoing consolidation in AI is incredible. Thread: ➡️ When I started ~decade ago vision, speech, natural language, reinforcement learning, etc. were completely separate; You couldn't read papers across areas - the approaches were completely different, often not even ML based.

I was not aware of this, maybe this indicates that I'm not really working on the bleeding edge. Check out the full thread for more details.

ethan winter @EthanBWinter

Another item I wouldn't have thought of otherwise is that school shutdowns "also further undermined confidence in the country’s public-school system".

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

This sounds about right to me. As long as China had stable transitions of power and leaders who were focused on giving the people what they wanted, they could get away with no democracy. Now they've got Emperor Xi and his social engineering schemes, they're in more trouble.

Lee💉💉 @pommylee

@Noahpinion The secret weapon China had for years was term limits, i don't agree with them in democracy's but in a one party state its one way to preven Brezhnevism and now it seems they have ditched that with the worst possible leader, not just evil but increasing it appears, not very smart

Term limits as a protection against tyrants only works when the tyrants don't overturn the term limits. If power doesn't pass back and forth, it's not a democracy.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

It’s really hard to find commentary that tries to explain the Russian nationalist view of the past 30 years of US-Russia relations without tipping all the way over into endorsing it, but I do think it’s important to try to actually understand how it looks from Moscow.

This is a really good point, he gets into it a bit more in the thread:

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Now I think if you’re an American, you could tell her the idea that all of US politics revolves around sticking it to Moscow is borderline absurd.

Including this part, which uses my favorite Mad Men gif to explain how much the American public thinks about Russia. The Russian public, perhaps understandably, see themselves as the center of US foreign policy.