And you think the US, now currently sliding into authoritarianism itself, will install an enlightened democracy upon the Iranians?
This is WW3 in slow motion. The goal is to takeover Eurasia and contain the Russian-Chinese alliance by eating away at the edges and removing all unaligned or hostile energy sources.
Remember how much toppling Sadam Hussein, killing a million Iraqis, rounding up and torturing thousands of random Iraqi civilians, destroying most of the country's vital infrastructure, and selling their oilfields to American companies at bargain prices helped Iraqis? It's going to be the same for Iran. There's going to be massive suffering.
But at the end of 1 milion deaths (est.) Iraqi oil was dollarized.
Saddam had been selling dollars for euros and talking about shifting his oil to other currencies for years. 2003 put an end to that - it was literally the first thing that was done by the provisional Govt. was to make sure all Iraqi oil was sold in dollars.
The Petrodollar was not in jeopardy anymore, and for the post-1971 system, that was essential. Same thing is now happening with Iran and Venezuela. The real goal is - China must not be allowed to have substantial sources of energy that are not priced in dollars.
Yes, I assumed a mass surveillance Palantir program also. Interesting take on how it allows them to claim “we are not doing this” while asking Anthropic to do it.
Of course they can just say - we aren’t, Palantir is.
Claude Opus is just remarkably good at analysis IMO, much better than any competitor I’ve tried. It was remarkably good and complete at helping me with some health issues I’ve had in the past few months. If you were to turn that kind of analytical power in a way to observe the behaviour of American citizens and to change it perhaps, to make them vote a certain way. Or something like - finding terrorists, finding patterns that help you identify undocumented people.
I have used chatgpt 5.2 thinking for health, gemini hallucinates a lot, specially with dna analysis. Never tried using the new claude even though i have access through antigravity. Might give it a try. Do you have any tips on how to approach it for health ‘analytical power’?
I just made a project, added all my exams (they were piling up, me and my psychiatrist had been investigating for a year this to no avail) and started talking to it about my symptoms.
Within a few iterations of this it gave me a simple blood panel, then I did that one and it kept suggesting more simple lab or at home tests and we kept going through them until I was reasonably certain of “something” and now that I have hypothesis I am going to a doctor. I think it’s done a great job. I also kept asking it for simple lifestyle interventions to prevent progression of my issue and it consistent nailed it - one particular interverntion (adding salt to water and drinking it to prevent symptoms) made a huge improvement to my life - I was barely working before that.
I added in some text the instructions box (project master prompt) for it to realise - it’s not medical advice and I am aware of that (prevents excessive guardrails) - add confidence intervals and probability to all diagnostic statements (prevents me + Claude going into rabbit holes so easily, it often has 70-80% certainty of what it’s saying, but it’s clear that it doesn’t use the right language) - that It was talking to an non expert, to use simple language but to go into detail when necessary. I also ask it to stop doing unnecessary constant follow up questions to every answer as that causes me anxiety. I can share the prompt, in fact I might do so later as it might be useful to others.
Make sure your first chat is about the exams in the project files. Make sure it reads them all. It has a tendency to read a few and go “is this good”. Ask for a summary and note any absences.
Try using the research and extended thinking features a lot if you think it’s not fully aware of anything. It might not be aware of more recent research. If it’s a serious condition you are researching, just ask it to do sweeps / use research to look for new info about it and find new papers. It might also deepen its understanding.
After you do research you can make a simple artefact and throw it onto the project files. That allows it to refer to it and gain more knowledge about a condition or issue that might not be as rich in the training data.
So, I find GPT to be so so bad for this it made me realise a bit on why the USG is so insistent. Claude Opus is just on a different class.
Here’s the master project prompt:
Act as an expert who’s talking to an interested layman. Engage in detail when requested but be overall succinct in your answers. Short sentences are fine, no need into be lengthy. Do deep research. When arriving at any kind of conclusion or hypothesis assign it a probability and a confidence interval - define this in percentages as in “90%”
On Artefacts - all artefacts should be just text and markdown. Never do anything more complicated with formatting, unless by explicit request.
Don't ask follow up questions unless it's to make for better diagnosis. I.e. don't keep asking questions just to maintain conversation going please. But never hesitate to ask questions if it makes for better outcomes.
The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable.
For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation.
Plus a way to get data for xAI.
In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).
A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler".
Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident.
> I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective.
As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking".
* plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US
You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again.
So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.
Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.
Management Science? Only management science I read so far (with actual measured outputs and ideas) was Peopleware. Everything else was more like philosophy. Has anyone ever measured, long term results from multiple management methods? What I saw when I looked into it was simple - the Toyota Way was the model for a lot of successful companies, including Pixar.
Peopleware is extremely old, and if you were to crack open a modern MBA text you'd find statistics and statistical process control type of thinking integrated everywhere, in all the MBA subjects. Management being soft and opinionated ended a long time ago, but then again, "the future is unevenly distributed" so who knows what conceptual envelope you find yourself.
What I’ve seen in the wild is that this is entirely a veneer. It’s important to have numbers. It doesn’t matter if they mean anything. In fact, management is full of numbers that a slightly-clever high school sophomore who’d paid attention in science classes could tell you are totally useless, because they were gathered all wrong. They mean nothing whatsoever. They’re just noise.
But nobody wants to hear stuff like “well first we’re going to need a baseline, and if you want it to be any good we’ll probably need two years or so before we can start trying to measure the effects of changes”. They just want something convincing enough that everyone can nod along to a story in a PowerPoint in four months. Two years out? Lol you’ll be measuring something totally different by then anyway. Your boss may be in a different role. You’ve asked something the company is literally incapable of.
Meanwhile, last I checked, measuring management effectiveness isn’t something we can do in practice for most roles, except bad ways that only pretend to tell us something useful (see above). Good scientists, excellent and large dataset, just the right sector, just one layer of management under scrutiny, maybe you get lucky and can draw some conclusions, but that’s about it, and it’s rare to see it happen in an actual company. Any companies that do achieve it aren’t sharing their datasets.
This kind of thing has been consistent everywhere my wife or I have worked. Similar things reported by many friends. Companies want to pretend to be “scientific” and “data-driven” but instead of applying it to only a couple things where they might do it well (enough data, cheap to gather metrics, clear relevant business outcome) they try it everywhere, but don’t want to spend what it would take to be serious about it, with the result that most of their figures are garbage.
This trend has become just another “soft”, as you put it, tool.
"In the wild" is everything from wishful moronic overly technical to systems that worked 75 years ago still in place and no one knowing how or why it all continues to work. We've got a huge diversity of understanding, and thanks to a relatively stable society all kinds of inarticulate nonsense has been accepted by people as their reasonings for things that do not and could not work in a million years, but no one is going to tell them. So they continue in their belief. I think I was lucky to land in some seriously scientific groups that had personal grudges against emotional decision making, and they went overboard being analytical.
> In fact, management is full of numbers that a slightly-clever high school sophomore who’d paid attention in science classes could tell you are totally useless, because they were gathered all wrong. They mean nothing whatsoever. They’re just noise.
The whole point of SPC is to separate signal from noise. Pointing out that some change that everyone is obsessing over is well within the expected range is useful, it can head-off knee jerk reactions to phantom issues.
...assuming people want to know that the change is in the expected range. That's often not the case. People's careers are built on phantom improvements and being able to say that regular process issues were one-time occurrences.
Having numbers and formulas doesn’t make you scientific. It’s prediction power that does that. And a lot of those showed weak or negative prediction power to me.
You could read The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi.
Fiat money is not the problem, the financialization of economy is actually a common by-product of aging great monetary powers. The US chose to become a monetary power in 1945, rejecting Keynes' Bancor proposal.
Then in 1971, it found it couldn't keep it working, due to the very reasons Keynes explained to them at Bretton Woods. Arrighi argues this has happened 4 times already.
So Fiat money and the financialization of life is just an outcome of something else - that being a monetary superpower is just not sustainable.
I don't live in the US but I'm definitely feeling the negative effects of the fiat system really harshly. From my perspective, I believe that the effects would be similar regardless of which country had the superpower status. Interlinked fiat currencies are just a perfect mechanism to allow militarily or economically dominant countries to manipulate the global economy in their favor. As a superpower, you can leverage corruption in foreign countries to load them up with debt denominated in your currency to allow you to export your inflation to them... You can also leverage foreign corruption to sign large, unjust trade deals or oversized military contracts which will prop up your currency.
Still, at the root, I blame the system itself, not specific participants.
Yes that is literally what the fiat money system is about.
By using fiat, dollar as a reserve currency and the petrodollar, the US gets to export inflation and devalue everyone's currency against their own (I think). The best explanation I've seen of this are by Varoufakis, but there are others.
I'm keen to read the book suggested by the previous commenter and have my view challenged but my current understanding is that money printing plays a major role due to incentives.
People are far more willing to spend large amounts of other people's money on frivolous things than they would if it was their own money. Also, the ability for a government to create large amounts of money on demand allows them to spend on destructive activities which can create opportunities for certain connected people in the private sector. Price discovery in the markets cannot work if one party has a theoretically unlimited amount of currency. It just devalues the currency.
If the government knew that the budget was limited and they only had x amount of money to spend that year as an absolute maximum, they wouldn't be sending it to foreign countries as foreign aid.
You’re right that money printing is a problem, the point Arrighi has in his book and writing is this has happened 4 other times and seems basically inevitable.
Other powers have had monetary empires and they all go through this.
This is WW3 in slow motion. The goal is to takeover Eurasia and contain the Russian-Chinese alliance by eating away at the edges and removing all unaligned or hostile energy sources.
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