Wow, they're on a roll over there. Just two days ago they permanently banned the cofounder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger.
Per his tweet: "Well, that’s that—I’ve been blocked by Wikipedia “indefinitely” for unstated reasons, by the “consensus” of a mob. There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law. All my judges were self-selected and hated me."
off-wiki canvassing for his proposal. its in the title of the issue and the summary is right at the top of the page.
"There is clear consensus for a community ban of User:Larry Sanger. There is general agreement among participants that he has engaged in off-wiki canvassing and is not here to constructively build the encyclopedia. There is also a significant concern shared by many editors that his actions constitute calls for outing."
you don’t really need to know the ins and outs of the culture.
the discussion for his ban was public and he actively participated in it. the reasons for the ban are clearly stated in that discussion. he knows the reasons because he argued against them. so, saying they were “unstated reasons” is a lie.
the issue is linked by the sibling comment if you want more context and links to definitions of canvassing, bludgeoning, etc
The charge against him is specifically "Stealth canvassing", which, beyond the use of the word "Stealth", is clarified several times as:
"""Stealth canvassing: Contacting users off-wiki (by e-mail, IRC, or Discord, for example) to persuade them to join in discussions (unless there is a specific reason not to use talk pages)"""
Between calling it "stealth" and specifically calling out email/IRC/Discord, it makes it pretty clear that it is not referring to public platforms.
Iterpreting it as a ban on any public discussion of Wikipedia by Wikipedia editors, anywhere on the public internet, is a very dishonest move by the people involved in that thread, and you can tell the real reason for it by reading the many comments simply lobbing politically charged accusations against him.
Seeing folks over there policing violations of taboos that are enforced by a very small minority of the English speaking world (around 15-25% of the US for the combined equity-progressives and further left groups) makes me worry about this wonderful site, which has taught me so much over the years :(
i don’t really care to get into litigating the issue itself (i have not made up my mind). my only point is that the reasons were stated and discussed publicly, so saying they were “unstated” is a lie
While the merits of Sanger's banning are worth debating, Sanger is dishonestly representing the process here. The reasons, rather than being 'unstated', were stated repeatedly and were not unreasonable. [0]
It was even directly linked to in the post on his talk page, that he took a screenshot of. Hardly unstated.
To be fair, there's a lot of text in that thread, but that is pretty unavoidable if the accusations have any sort of merit. He also actively participated in it, so he's probably actually read the majority of it.
Then he should justify that. When I read through the discussion though it seems that the stated reasons were arguably sufficient to justify the action taken.
Sanger has been given a lot more leeway over the years, because of his status as a co-founder, than anyone else would have been given.
That seems completely irrelevant to the post. Plus, isn't that the guy who hasn't been involved in the project since 2002? If it's been 2 decades, maybe it's time to find something else
The anti-AI stance seems like a fashionable contrarianism, not sure what will end up changing it
What's really interesting to me is seeing people who are pro-technology but anti-AI, like... if you're anti-tech, you become something like the Amish. If you're pro-tech, AI is the logical next development along that path of technology - whatever tech you preciously enjoyed, was part of the package deal of building this AI that we now see.
So I guess I am curious to see if more anti-AI people become something like the Amish or if they come to terms with their championing of technology being equivalent to embracing AI.
It's important to factor in just how many US adults are basically illiterate nowadays.
As of 2023, 27% of American working-age adults were at a PIAAC Literacy Level of 1 or below, out of a total of 5 levels. This has gotten drastically worse in the past 10 years as, in 2013, Level 1 and below was only 17%.
Full scores for 2023 are:
% Level 1 or below: 27%
Level 2: 29%
Level 3: 31%
Level 4/5: 13%
For reference, Level 1 means someone can't really handle a full page of text, and can sort of handle simple 1-page web pages. Level 2 is the point where someone can start to handle a few pages of straightforward text, but still nothing particularly complicated.
(Both of those descriptions undersell just how bad it really is, but I'll leave it at that, for the sake of brevity.)
People that aren't using AI at all often aren't using it because they effectively can't. On a fundamental level.
I'm curious as to how I would score, I would definitely count myself as "literate" but I wonder how well I'd do on the level 4/5 tasks and if they cross over into more general memory, intelligence, and study habit metrics that even a normally "literate" person would not do well at.
Though given those descriptions I can't help thinking those would be great tests for AI. I'd love to see the proficiency scores for various models.
EDIT: Ok I just needed to scroll further, they have sample items in the last section up to level 4 and even at level 4 the question seemed trivial.
The most wordy one is the Q Drum article (which by the way Q drum is a real thing, kinda neat idea) and there's literally only two basic criticisms (flat land and expense) and if you had any idea what the life straw is you can probably construe what the similar criticism in the email is going to be without even looking.
Based on the scores and the proficiency description I assumed they were actually targeting some sort of normal distribution and levels 4/5 would be genuinely difficult explaining the scores. I'm now much more sad that the scores are so low.
At least I got a laugh at how they refer to each test item as "the stimulus" which has such a sterile/clinical flavor to it.
I don’t think that’s it. AI mobile apps support voice conversations. And low literacy is rather a motivation for using AI to generate and summarize text.
Just getting to the point of using a voice mode is a challenge at that level. Like, we're talking about "has trouble formulating a question to ask in the first place".
There's a whole level of ignorance out there that is honestly dumbfounding to even comprehend. The numbers for numeracy and problem solving are even more horrifying.
(It's for this reason that the most popular apps in the US are algorithmically generated feeds of photos, and often-non-verbal videos shorter than a TV advertisement.)
I thought not needing words was because people often watch them on their phone in public without sound. Who are these people that can't enjoy listening to spoken words because of illiteracy or ignorance?
I mean... Tiktok's hallmark trend has always been people doing "TikTok dances", which involve audio, so...
But, besides that, TikTok became the titan it is today during the pandemic. When everyone was indoors (not outside).
Per Google's quick answer, when searching "When did TikTok get really popular?": "TikTok's global popularity surged in 2020 due to pandemic lockdowns, with consistent growth since 2016, surpassing competitors in downloads by 2018."
I think we will have to develop some kind of framework for the difference between consuming AI-generated content and using AI as a tool as those use-cases will likely increasingly diverge. It's very easy to have a conversation with AI, as it will mimic your style, but I'd consider actually using AI to be something more like developing and orchestrating agents, developing frameworks for tasks and understanding, generating ideas for types of work AI can do and how the tasks can be properly split by training needed. Even though AI itself can do a lot of these tasks, people who can understand what AI can do for them and why will always have an advantage, and thinking in theses types of ways requires a high degree of literacy.
I lurk on the teachers subreddit and get shown videos by teachers on TikTok and the impression I get from that algorithmic bubble is that the kids can't read any more - reading comprehension in particular is terrible. Lots of anecdotes of kids who can't read a few paragraphs and then answer questions about what was in them.
My impression of that sub is that it's a lot of people who went through honors classes in a "good" school district, and are now teaching non-honors, potentially in a "bad" school district and are discovering how the other half lives.
Hasan Piker's political project polls extremely high (universal healthcare, abortion access, and more), so actually you could understand American voter politics by reading Hasan's comments amusingly enough.
"Response rates for this data collection were relatively low, both for the United States and for several other participating countries. There is evidence that procedures implemented to reduce bias associated with nonresponse have done so, and that the data are representative of the population. However, readers should be aware of the potential for bias and use caution when interpreting PIAAC results."
These stats don't pass the smell test. About a third of people in the US have a bachelor's degree, but only 13% can pass level 4/5 literacy challenge? If you dig into the sample questions, they are not hard. A level 4 task has the person read a short article and pull out the criticisms of some products.
I know not everyone with a bachelor's degree is 'smart' but it's hard to believe 2/3rds couldn't pass level 4/5.
Also 13% have a master's degree, does that mean those 13% are the only people passing level 4/5?
> About a third of people in the US have a bachelor's degree, but only 13% can pass level 4/5 literacy challenge?
Yes, that's how bad the problem is.
I've worked with people with master's degrees who can't comprehend text more complex than a Slack message. I've watched them try and fail.
I think it is difficult for a highly-literate person to wrap their head around this. It's very possible to get through a bachelor's program with low literacy. It's even possible to do quite well. And at a reasonably good school.
There are some pretty successful businesses out there whose target market are essentially professionals with low literacy. They use more flattering descriptions in their marketing.
This is just how it is out there. Ask teachers what students are like these days. Think about designing for users. Or cross-reference with other info on this topic.
And, in regard to colleges... you have to keep in mind just how many colleges there are, how much the quality differs, the relative workloads of different degrees. There are a lot of people graduating with a GPA quite close to 2.0 at that full range too.
Also, think of how many college graduates never finish a book again after graduating college. Those numbers judge 18 to 65. And the age stats show that the older cohorts drag the scores down significantly.
The only upside to all of this is that it at least makes the chaos out there in the world make a bit more sense.
It seems pretty obvious at this point that Anthropic intentionally developed a malicious cyberweapon AI simply to scare people.
Like, they even apparently recreated that old news-headline bug where the LLM starts speaking in symbols and secret language, and are pretending like it isn't just a bug that is a sign of them screwing up.
It's really frustrating that they're trying to get people to take them seriously with all of this. Like, they even went and named Mythos after an HP Lovecraft monster. It's shameless.
The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work.
The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted by AI" projects that the list-making activists are maintaining over on Codeberg. Software is not "divided", it is simply being occupied by angry protesters.
Hacker news skews significantly older and whiter, and the blogs and such that circulate come primarily from the "established" English-speaking old-guard "white people" software days. Opposition to AI is highly concentrated among the white, first world, left-wing, established engineers.
This group punches far their weight in terms of the volume of their activism compared to the actual percentages of humans on earth.
That's all it is. Anti-AI hatred is just a noisy echo-chamber of those who are privileged enough to not need to modernize their skills.
I'd push back a bit on the assumptions here, partly because (as I just spent a rabbit hole's worth of time describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800), such perceptions are strongly conditioned by one's pre-existing feelings, but more because (to my view at least) HN obviously is divided on AI. That is, HN gets plenty of comments criticizing AI for various reasons, and plenty of comments expressing positive views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 has almost 1000 comments now, and by far most are positive.
You make a good point about the asymmetry in content: the negative ones are mostly just critical, and often denunciatory, while the positive ones are less likely to be generic, and more likely to be about specific work people are doing. That's not a new dynamic, though, and long pre-dates what today is called AI.
Right, of course it's those who had the most time to accumulate wealth in the wealthier nations and professions who are most opposed to one of the most expensive subscriptions in history taking over more and more professions.
I think the right choice is pretty clear...
reply