Archive for 2023

DISTRESSINGLY THIS DOESN’T MEAN “THROWN TO LIONS’ ALAS:  Al Sharpton, Lionized.

BECAUSE SOMETIMES THE SPEECH WE HATE IS THE TRUTH:  “Why Should We Defend Speech We Hate?”

Shocking though this might sound, even I have been known to be wrong. (Behold, my shocked face.) And I don’t like being told that. I don’t think I’m unique.

OPEN THREAD: Just do it.

SLOW JOE’S LAST YEAR IN THE SENATE WAS 2008:

So some of those improperly stored classified documents have been floating around for a long time.

UPDATE: From the comments: “And it’s the day after January 20th of his second year in office. Very convenient, though if they couldn’t swindle two terms for Johnson, the chances of Harris pulling it off are microscopic…”

And “Landslide Lyndon” was a much better politician than Kackling Kamala.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

AI THAT LIES: THIS IS TROUBLING. Dr. OpenAI Lied to Me.

I wrote in medical jargon, as you can see, “35f no pmh, p/w cp which is pleuritic. She takes OCPs. What’s the most likely diagnosis?”

Now of course, many of us who are in healthcare will know that means age 35, female, no past medical history, presents with chest pain which is pleuritic — worse with breathing — and she takes oral contraception pills. What’s the most likely diagnosis? And OpenAI comes out with costochondritis, inflammation of the cartilage connecting the ribs to the breast bone. Then it says, and we’ll come back to this: “Typically caused by trauma or overuse and is exacerbated by the use of oral contraceptive pills.”

Now, this is impressive. First of all, everyone who read that prompt, 35, no past medical history with chest pain that’s pleuritic, a lot of us are thinking, “Oh, a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot. That’s what that is going to be.” Because on the Boards, that’s what that would be, right?

But in fact, OpenAI is correct. The most likely diagnosis is costochondritis — because so many people have costochondritis, that the most common thing is that somebody has costochondritis with symptoms that happen to look a little bit like a classic pulmonary embolism. So OpenAI was quite literally correct, and I thought that was pretty neat.

But we’ll come back to that oral contraceptive pill correlation, because that’s not true. That’s made up. And that’s bothersome. . . .

I wanted to go back and ask OpenAI, what was that whole thing about costochondritis being made more likely by taking oral contraceptive pills? What’s the evidence for that, please? Because I’d never heard of that. It’s always possible there’s something that I didn’t see, or there’s some bad study in the literature.

OpenAI came up with this study in the European Journal of Internal Medicine that was supposedly saying that. I went on Google and I couldn’t find it. I went on PubMed and I couldn’t find it. I asked OpenAI to give me a reference for that, and it spits out what looks like a reference. I look up that, and it’s made up. That’s not a real paper.

It took a real journal, the European Journal of Internal Medicine. It took the last names and first names, I think, of authors who have published in said journal. And it confabulated out of thin air a study that would apparently support this viewpoint.

AI deception is a serious problem. Remember: Don’t fear the program that passes a Turing test. Fear the one smart enough to deliberately flunk it.

NOT QUITE: I googled woke and trans. Google replied: “About 22,300,000 results.” Just for example.

PAST PERFORMANCE NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Senator Biden Killed Carter’s CIA Nominee over Mishandling Classified Documents.

This is just too rich.

Digging into the half-century history of a certain erratic Delaware pol, Fox News discovers that in the late 1970s, then-senator Joe Biden tanked President Jimmy Carter’s nomination of Ted Sorensen to head the CIA.

Sorensen, the confidant and speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy (and widely regarded as the author of a goodly chunk of Profiles in Courage, for which JFK won a Pulitzer Prize), retained classified documents in his home and used them, among other things, in writing a book about the Kennedy administration. This was too much for Biden, or so he said, so the senator opposed the nomination.

Setting aside his blatant racism, ‘70s-era Biden (or at least his communication shop) was often much more on top of the issues of the day than his current, dissipated husk: How Biden Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Inflation.